Animus on the left; Trump fatigue on the right

The New Neo Posted on by

One thing today’s Democrats are best at is truly vicious hatred. And many are not the least bit reluctant to express it while simultaneously cloaking themselves in the idea that theirs is a righteous anger.

To take one rather odd example, we have Dolly Parton’s sister wishing death to Elon Musk.

The PJ article just linked also contains this observation, which I think is correct:

A big victory won’t make the Democrats even a little bit happier. They have a sick gift for finding reasons to be aggrieved under any circumstances. Republicans will always top that list of reasons.

A deeper analysis of the mindset of so many of today’s Democrats can be found here, by Lionel Shriver. It’s long, but worth reading. An excerpt:

Progressives require an enemy (and, to an extent, maybe most of us do; witness this lecture). No word features more prominently in today’s left-wing lexicon than “hate.” The villains of the blm era—racists, climate deniers, and trans-homo-xeno-Islamo-phobes—have lately given way to a single be-all Beelzebub, Israel. To which nearly all these people have never been and about whose history nearly all these people know nothing, ignorance being a plus. Facts are thorny and obstinate; uninformed passion is infinitely adaptable, impervious to reason, and unfalsifiable.

But what of the following? I think it might be the case with some Democrat voters, but I do not think it describes the true believers or those who run for office on the Democrat ticket. I think they very much want to attain power, and when they attain it they will not hesitate to use it if they can. They feel that they themselves are isolated and protected from the effects of their policies – or they actually believe their policies will usher in something good:

So here, finally, is my thesis: I believe that what progressives want most of all is to fail. They are most comfortable being against things. They are most comfortable campaigning for purposes that will never come to fruition. They are so dependent on the perpetuation of social ills like racism that in a pinch they will invent “microaggressions” undetectable to the naked eye; starved of racism, they will make the racism up. For progressives, a proper utopia, with nothing and no one left to denounce, would be hell.

More, the last thing they want is to be put in positions of authority that test the viability of their dumb ideas. They can most persuasively promote these dumb ideas in opposition. Once in charge, they’re obliged to put their inane policies into practice.

As for the right, why does it appear that a great many people are turning on Trump? After all, much of what he’s done in his second term has been effective, and the Democrats seem so very very much worse.

Some of it is objection to certain policies like the Iran war (in which very very few Americans have been killed or hurt), and of course the problem with “affordability.” But I believe a fair amount of it is from what I’ll call Trump fatigue. What was once fresh and new is neither anymore.

Think about it – Trump first was elected ten years ago, and if all goes well there are two more years to go. That’s twelve years. Yes, Biden was president for four years in between. But Trump was nevertheless a huge presence and even an obsession during those four years. The pause has actually lengthened the amount of time Trump has dominated the scene. People are fickle.

Getting rid of someone else’s stuff

The New Neo Posted on by

As you might imagine, I’m still engaged in the task of closing down my ex’s place and most days I’m spending many hours at it. I’ve hired someone to help with the hauling and distribution, but that person can’t really make the decisions. My brother and sister-in-law came up for two days and they helped me too, although again I’m the one who has to make the decisions.

This is extra hard because my ex and I didn’t live together, and because he was very much a saver. He never wanted anyone else to throw out any of his things, including me, so it feels like I’m going against his wishes. But of course it must be done. And he really, really, wanted to do it; he just ran out of steam the last few years.

And so it is left to me. It’s an extraordinarily large task, and I can’t postpone it because I have very very little storage space where I live.

What am I finding? Tons and tons of things, many of which have a deep and touching emotional resonance for me. And just being in his place without him being there too is jarring and sad.

A hundred or more maps, conjuring up the pre-GPS times when road trips meant me sitting in the passenger seat trying to decipher a map and give directions.

Cards and cards and cards, some from my mother to me (none of which I remember). They are touching, but I read them once and then toss them.

One undeposited check from his father, from decades ago.

An indescribable number of bills and bank statements and credit cards and driver’s licenses and passports going back nearly fifty years. Many are mine; I had no idea he saved them.

My 50th high school reunion name tag. I didn’t save it; he did.

Playbills and tickets. Notes from old girlfriends, some very emotional. Notes I left for him, completely practical and pedestrian such as, “I think I forgot to pick up the dry cleaning.”

Letters he wrote to his parents in the mid-60s when he spent many months in Europe. The one I read complained about the French food (!), but he was living at a student hostel where dinner cost thirty cents. It was mostly potatoes.

User manuals for cameras and projectors that go back a half century. The cameras and projectors that go with them.

Clever things he wrote: song lyrics, and an invite to our dog’s 15th birthday party that was very amusing.

I saved a few things – for example, the dog party letter. But the rest go in the dumpster or the recycle bin. Tossing them feels a little like tossing the very young man I first knew, the medium-young man of our marriage, the older man he became as his handwriting dimmed due to Parkinson’s. I have to steel myself to just do it because there’s no saving most of these things. He couldn’t stop time and neither can I.

[NOTE: I didn’t have to do any of this when Gerard died. His younger brother stayed in his apartment for about two months, taking on the task. All I did was walk in for about an hour and take a couple of mementos. Gerard had lost virtually everything in the Paradise fire, but a little over four years had passed and he’d amassed a fair amount of stuff, although nothing even remotely approaching the lifetime collection of my ex. And yet it still took his brother about two months to accomplish closing the place down.]

And now it’s the background of my passport photo that’s the problem

The New Neo Posted on by

I need to renew my passport, which has expired. That requires a photo that follows all the rules.

Rather than try to do it myself, I went to CVS, which purports to have a service that takes a person’s photo in a government-compliant way. Although the ensuing photo was far from flattering, it seemed to pass muster. And their computer said so, as well.

But alas, when I tried to renew online the government website rejected the photo. Why? The background was too dark, it said. And yet the background was white. Quite white. Was it very, very, very white? Not exactly, I suppose.

So now it’s back to square one. Where do I go now? Walgreen’s or the UPS store? The post office no longer offers this handy dandy service. Where have you had success? Or are you do-it-yourselfers?

News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) I think Troy Jackson may be in trouble in Maine (I certainly hope so). Not only was he rude to Susan Collins in their debate, but he didn’t backtrack during a later interview.

But that’s not really what I’m basing my opinion on. Granted, I’ve got a sample of exactly one, but I was talking to a Maine resident friend of mine the other day and she – a very strong Democrat and TDS sufferer – said she had reservations about Jackson and was having trouble imagining voting for him.

(2) Neil Bush says he voted for Talarico in Texas.

Because of course he did.

“My vote was motivated by two things: deep concern about Ken Paxton’s record and genuine admiration for the character and principles I see in James Talarico,” Bush wrote in a Facebook post. …

In his post, Neil Bush wrote that he is “deeply troubled by Paxton’s conduct as Texas Attorney General, particularly his decision to challenge the results of the 2020 presidential election in other states in an effort to help Donald Trump remain in power.”

January 6th and its aftermath – the gift that keeps on giving.

(3) This is a fascinating article in Tablet magazine that discusses why Israel is a fertility outlier among Westernized nations, with average birth rates considerably higher than the rest of the group.

(4) The DOJ has charged 28 non-citizens found on California voter rolls. Also, the DOJ is suing California about its reluctance to cooperate with determining the citizenship of its voters:

The Department of Justice on Thursday sued California for alleged “state-facilitated voter fraud,” seeking to block 20,000 people on the voter rolls suspected of being noncitizens. …

The DOJ specifically asked that the court bar California from tabulating mail-in ballots from likely noncitizens until the effective determination of that voters’ citizenship status.

But Los Angeles – where most of these people live – is saying it lacks a way to verify citizenship.

(5) On Russia and Ukraine:

Don’t bet much on word that Russia is “ready in principle” to resume three-way peace talks with Ukraine and the United States next month; after all, thugocrat Vladimir Putin has been ready to end the war since the day he started it . . . as long as his victim surrenders.

Maybe, just maybe, Moscow is signaling something positive, since that statement emerged after presidential envoy Steve Witkoff briefed Putin on the latest US ceasefire proposals, which he’d already cleared with Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and other allies at an Oslo sitdown the day before.

Indeed, Zelensky announced he’ll accept a cease-fire that freezes current lines in place, allowing Russia to continue occupying vast swathes of his nation.

On the other hand, Putin’s made plenty of ready-to-talk noises before, only to then demand unilateral concessions before any actual sitdown.

I have no expectation that any change will come of this.

Fake polls

The New Neo Posted on by

Not just sort-of-skewed or distorted polls. These polls were utterly fake:

A national polling organization revealed on Tuesday that the vast majority of its data had been fabricated, saying it was an “experimental project to demonstrate the vulnerabilities” of the modern political polling industry.

Wedgewood Polling, whose polls had been cited by national news outlets, released the statement after FiftyPlusOne, a polling and election analysis site, questioned the veracity of its results.

“We wanted to test a simple hypothesis: How easy is it for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction, be taken seriously, and expose how little scrutinization exists in media and public commentary?” Wedgewood Polling said on X. “The short answer: Far too easy.”

And these completely fake polls, from a company that wasn’t very forthcoming about its history, ended up influencing at least one primary (was this the actual aim; to put its finger on the scale?):

Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic state senator in Michigan, suspended her campaign to become a U.S. senator in July, about a month before the state’s primary that progressive Abdul El-Sayed won.

In an X post on Tuesday, McMorrow detailed what she described as the impact of Wedgewood’s “experiment.”

McMorrow wrote that a Wedgewood poll in June showed her “plummeting into single digits (which was at odds with our internals).” As a result, she said “donations dried up” and “volunteers were devastated.”

You may recall that polls in that primary were uniformly inaccurate. Most predicted a much bigger victory for El-Sayed than occurred. However, he did score a victory, although considerably narrower than predicted.

And this is about what you’d expect as a result of the removal of the fake polls:

Nate Silver’s midterm elections forecast shifted slightly toward Republicans after he removed a series of fake polls that he said had been roughly 1 point more favorable to Democrats than the broader consensus.

The famed polling analyst said the biggest change came in Michigan, where Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s lead fell from 3.6 points to 3. Silver noted that the movement also reflected the addition of a Marist poll to the model that showed El-Sayed 2 points ahead of Republican former Representative Mike Rogers.

Well, Silver still has the abominable El-Sayed winning. However, when I go to Silver’s page, I see three things. The first is that El-Sayed is under 50% in the majority of the polls cited, usually 47% to 48%. The second is that most of the polls seem to be within the margin of error. The third is that, among the more recent polls, there are two that favor Rogers by small margins.

What’s it all about, Alfie? Your guess is as good as mine. But as I’ve said before, I have come to trust polls less and less and less.

Uncovering fraud pays

The New Neo Posted on by

Trump is instituting a new program:

President Donald Trump announced monetary awards for any American who offers tips that lead to successful fraud convictions or significant action.

The program is called the Fraud Whistleblower Incentive Program (WHIP).

The website America.gov/fraud said a tipster can earn up to $30,000.

However, Trump said the person could receive 1% of the amount of fraud they report …

Nick Shirley has already gotten $10K; he’s the guy who exposed a great deal of fraud in Minnesota.

Will the Powerline guys get a reward if Ilhan Omar is convicted of fraud? Just wondering. They would deserve it, IMHO.

How do you know it’s a political prosecution (lawfare)?

The New Neo Posted on by

Elissa Slotkin responds:

“And all I said was that if you’ve done something illegal, if you’ve used the government inappropriately and against the law, you should be held accountable,” she said in response to Trump’s criticism, according to Robinson.

But Slotkin’s original remarks weren’t simply about prosecuting identifiable crimes. They were about sending a warning to young people considering employment in the Trump administration.

They were about intimidation – political “lawfare” of a type quite common with Democrats.

For another excellent example, please see the Dershowitz quotes in this post about The 65 Project, a group promoting lawfare designed to intimidate lawyers who might work for Trump. From Dershowitz:

There is a nefarious group that calls itself The 65 Project that has as its goal to intimidate lawyers into not representing Trump or anyone associated with him. They have threatened to file bar charges against any such lawyers. When these threats first emerged, I wrote an op-ed offering to defend pro bono any lawyers that The 65 Project goes after. So The 65 Project immediately went after me, and contrived a charge based on a case in which I was a constitutional consultant, but designed to send a message to potential Trump lawyers: if you defend Trump or anyone associated with him, we will target you and find something to charge you with. The lawyers to whom I spoke are fully aware of this threat — and they are taking it seriously.

As usual with lawfare, The 65 Project describes itself as defending democracy and the rule of law. Orwellian.

How can one tell the difference between a bona fide prosecution and lawfare? For many people, it’s simple: if my party does it, it’s a bona fide prosecution. If the other party does it, it’s nefarious lawfare. But of course, that’s an obviously partisan test.

The real test goes like this:

(1) Is the evidence solid?
(2) Is the violation one that isn’t suddenly made up, nor is the statute stretched beyond recognition?
(3) Were the defendant’s rights violated in building the case?
(4) Are known felons the only people ready to testify against the defendant?

There’s probably more, but you get the idea.

They seem to have Ilhan Omar’s DNA

The New Neo Posted on by

Anyone who reads Powerline regularly probably concluded a long time ago that Ilhan Omar likely married her brother in an attempt to commit immigration fraud.

But can it be proven? And is this report true?:

People familiar with the years-long criminal probe said the feds have made use of whistleblowers, government records and now obtained DNA in an effort to substantiate decade-old allegations that Omar — and possibly members of her family like her father — defrauded immigration authorities.

One source said the DNA evidence was critical to proving an allegation that Omar married her brother when she wed Ahmed Nur Said Elmi in 2009 because she was trying to help him get a green card — which never came to fruition.

It’s unclear whether the DNA was taken before or after Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) searched the congresswoman’s home in Washington, DC, last Monday, when federal agents were seen exiting the bungalow with boxes marked “Seized Property Evidence.”

Interesting.