Notes from Chairman Walz: “One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness”
Not really, Tim; one is involuntary and the other is voluntary.
This was the context in which Walz said it:
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz … made these comments last week on the “White Dudes For Harris” fundraising call.
“Don’t ever shy away from our progressive values. One person’s socialism is another person’s neighborliness,” Walz said.
Another quote from Nice Guy Walz on the same occasion:
Here’s the great news: how often in 100 days do you get to change the trajectory of the world? How often in 100 days do you get to do something that’s going to impact generations to come? And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterward and know that a Black woman kicked his ass and sent him on the road?
And you know that’s something that guy’s going to have to live with for the rest of his life.
Grandiose much? “Trajectory of the world” and “generations to come” – forget four years. And of course, “that bastard” is Trump and Harris is the black woman kicking his ass.
Re socialism, I guess Walz has never read Kundera. Or maybe he has, and thinks these prospects would be great (both quotes are from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting):
… human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of harmony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.
Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise– the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us all and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.
Here’s a quote not by Walz but to him:
Tim Walz is an alum of the third-rate Chadron State College. I can guarantee you he is not well-educated or well-read.
I’m just glad he didn’t go to Creighton. He might have been in my sister’s classes.
So far Walz has proven to be pretty awful. Whether or not it will matter much at this point is hard to say. Maybe it won’t, but it seems like at minimum it certainly hasn’t actually helped the Harris campaign at all. We’re in such a weird place in this election season that even a word salad spewing, opportunistic ninny with a bad record and who was selected unchallenged and whose running mate is a Marxist who committed stolen valor still has an even chance of winning the presidency due to a combination of chicanery, media gaslighting, and fraud, as well as having an opponent who repulses as many people as he attracts.
In the last sentence of your Kundera quotation, it looks like “even” is a typo for “ever”.
I worry mostly about the fraud. In 2022 we had an election like this in AZ. Democrat refused debates. Did not campaign much but she was Secretary of State and controlled the election. She is now Governor.
Strong men bring good times; good times bring weak men; weak men bring bad times; bad times bring strong men.
Cornhead
That depends. Usually, but not always. My parents were both STEM graduates of teachers’ colleges, of schools like Chadron State. They met at grad school, at a Big Ten school. Well-read and well-educated enough to succeed at a Big Ten grad school? Indeed. Though what follows is an implicit judgment on the quality of education at a teacher’s college. When I asked my mother why she did not pursue a doctorate, her reply was that she stopped at a master’s degree because she would have had to take so many makeup courses she didn’t take as an undergrad. She had had enough of grad school by that time, and did not want to jump through any more hoops.
That being said, Tim Walz is a graduate of the teacher training that Ed Schools dish out. Tim Walz graduated from the unquestioning acceptance of the Ed School theories de jour (which are not the same as the theories of yesterday or tomorrow) to unquestioning acceptance of the Woke/progressive narratives of today.
My fear is that Obama will, as a result of all the negative reaction to Tim Walz, find another VP candidate.
Karmi, your skeptical of “fraud”, which as Neo has repeatedly said is hard to prove– given the short timeframe between the election and certification and the courts reluctance to interfere in the “political” process.
One of the reason Dems/leftists want to extend the counting process is that even shortens the time frame to contest an election.
The easiest way to commit fraud is in the mail-in ballot system– which more states are going to. The only integrity in the mail-in ballot system is the signature verification between the envelope the ballot is sent in with and a signature on record.
The second way is for people voting in person that are not who they say they are. The best defense to maintain integrity is picture ID.
The third way is for the election officials to sneak in ballots into the counting process.
The fourth way is for people not eligible to vote voting anyway because of our motor voter laws which automatically register people to vote when they get a drivers license.
One very easy way to prove there is not enough fraud/malfeasance to affect an election is to allow an independent audit of the signatures on the ballot envelopes to the signature on file. The Dem/leftists at this point have manage to block any legal attempts for that process to take place. Why, if there is not fraud– have the Dem/leftists gone to such lengths to defeat any effort for that to happen? What do they have to hide?
Brian E – either you are in the wrong thread – or you are Trolling humble me…
@Brian E:The easiest way to commit fraud is in the mail-in ballot system– which more states are going to.
58% of Biden’s votes were mailed in.
@Karmi, Brian E:Karmi, your skeptical of “fraud”, which as Neo has repeatedly said is hard to prove– given the short timeframe between the election and certification and the courts reluctance to interfere in the “political” process.
When the rules are changed to remove the possibility of being able to prove fraud then yes, it becomes very hard to prove.
Imagine a grocery store where the tills are left unlocked, there are no cameras, and they are only counted once a month. How would you prove anyone stole anything?
Now suppose a grocery store where there are valid security procedures and occasionally something small slips through. And then a new manager says that since theft is so small and rare, let’s start leaving the tills unlocked, we’ll turn off the cameras, and only count them once a month instead of before and after every shift. What would you expect to see happen with theft? And when the new manager challenges you to prove that any employee stole anything, how can you do it with the new rules he put in place? Wouldn’t you expect that new manager to be either in on the theft, or utterly unqualified to be in charge?
Walz is a Marxist, if he could be sent back to Russia 1920 he could fight out his views, and probably end up with a bullet in back of his head.
Been on a Bolshevik reading binge last couple years. Biography of Lenin now.
“And how often in the world do you make that bastard wake up afterward and know that a Black woman kicked his ass and sent him on the road?”
That’s assuming that “black woman” gets the chance. I am genuinely concerned that the next guy who takes a shot at Trump isn’t going to miss. And rhetoric like referring to your political rival as “that bastard” isn’t helping to keep the pot from boiling over.
Not really, Tim; one is involuntary and the other is voluntary.
That makes me smile and laugh even, at its simplicity and accuracy.
Many people think, or maybe it was just the old me, that big political ideas like socialism are complex. We should always ask ourselves, as we are presented with new ideas, or recycled old ones; is there a crux to the topic that is simple?
Democratic Socialists or Dezis: Diversity, wicked solution, political congruence, redistributive change, single/central/monopolistic coordination (e.g. fascism), Mengele dreams, Green deals, ethnic Springs without borders, etc.
Progress is unqualified, monotonic change: one step forward, two steps backward
@Brian E:The easiest way to commit fraud is in the mail-in ballot system– which more states are going to.
I think the mail-in ballot system enables fraud that is almost impossible to prove. But it’s not the easiest. The easiest are these damn Dominion voting computers. They are an “erector set” kit for enabling fraud. Dominion doesn’t do the fraud, they provide the tools for it. One of the problems is that if the execution of the fraud involves rewriting code and installing it, there is always the possibility that someone could capture a copy of that code and correctly analyze it.
But we’ve heard very little about Dominion machines in the recent couple years. Because Dominion corp. has been relatively successful in suing the crap out anyone who complains about it.
I’ve thought that one limitation, and maybe it’s not much of a limitation, is that it costs a lot of money and worker bees to pull off a large scale mail-in ballot fraud operation.
The easiest way to commit fraud is in the mail-in ballot system– which more states are going to. — BrianE
I think the mail-in ballot system enables fraud that is almost impossible to prove. But it’s not the easiest. The easiest are these damn Dominion voting computers. They are an “erector set” kit for enabling fraud. Dominion doesn’t do the fraud, they provide the tools for it. One of the problems is that if the execution of the fraud involves rewriting code and installing it, there is always the possibility that someone could capture a copy of that code and correctly analyze it.
But we’ve heard very little about Dominion machines in the recent couple years. Because Dominion corp. has been relatively successful in suing the crap out anyone who complains about it.
I’ve thought that one limitation, and maybe it’s not much of a limitation, is that it costs a lot of money and worker bees to pull off a large scale mail-in ballot fraud operation.
Well as pointed out there was the kabuki trial that newscorp surrendered on and the real fact finding exercise conducted by judge totenberg
Tienanmen tim teminds of blumenthal but hes been lying under 20 years
Miguel- I ask you to pass your incoherent thoughts before an American English speaker before posting.
If there is no chain of custody on ballots theres no genuine election same with voter id
The fake Dominion trial which was about third hand opinions not about the actual functioning and flaws of the machines
Im not speaking in sanskrit here
Now you want to give up on the country because of this razzle dazzle weve seen in the last two weeks
Tommy Jay I agree with you on Dominion, first book on 2020 election was about electronic fraud as I saw negative numbers in vote totals, no one gets a negative vote, it should always go up, never subtract thousands and a saw it did and numerous times in the Pa voting precinct totals.
Back on to socialism, the Left in this country doesn’t really deliver that so much as crony capitalism, increases in regulation, and more welfare spending.
What you can certainly expect to see is shrinking economic opportunity as the public-private “partnership” increases, and less personal liberty. The big corporations get in bed with the government when they can so they can be declared “too big to fail” and they’ll do for the government what the government is on paper forbidden to do itself, we saw plenty of that in the last Presidential election.
Brian E at 3:00 pm:
Amazing that Democrats can set up such a foolproof method of cheating in Federal Elections—nation wide. What’s more “Amazing”? That it can be kept as a TOTAL Secret in America!?!?!
Rule of Law? Crimes? Law Enforcement left helpless? Criminals will have a field day once they get their hands on the Democrats new method/s.
This foolproof method of cheating bypasses all those norms of evidence discovery, i.e., Voting Crimes & Voting Fraud basically don’t even exist – since they ‘Can’t be Proven’!?!
Something like that anyway – humble poor reader me still hasn’t figured out what is being said on that subject…well, other than it sounds like the old ‘Fake but Accurate‘ ploy.
Welfare spending =Democratic vote buying.
Well I can’t prove fraud, but I can share the following anecdotal story from my state of Illinois. My brother is a registered Democrat, his wife a registered Republican. In 2020 she received her mail-in ballot from Republican Party headquarters. Shortly thereafter my brother received his from Democratic Party headquarters. Then he got another and then another. This continued until he had seven mail-in ballots. Having never voted by mail, I have no idea if there are any safeguards that would have prevented him from voting seven times, but why did he receive seven? His wife only received the one.
@Karmi:Amazing that Democrats can set up such a foolproof method of cheating in Federal Elections—nation wide.
It’s not secret, they brag about it.
Replacing Walz after having just kicked Biden to the curb would look really awful. On the other hand, continuing to run with Walz also looks really awful.
Amazing that Democrats can set up such a foolproof method of cheating in Federal Elections—nation wide.– Karmi
It doesn’t need to be nationwide. It only needs to be in states where the voting is close enough that a few thousand or tens of thousand votes out of many millions can affect the outcome.
The Dem/leftists could put the whole issue to rest if they let the process prove there was no fraud/malfeasance. Why have Dem/leftists fought any signature audit?
I’d be willing to bet a tidy sum Walz has never read or heard of Kundera. He has always struck me as pretty superficial and vapid; back to his first election to congress when I still followed Minnesota politics closely (and was still a liberal).
I’m trying to be as objective as I can in my assessment here, but both Harris and Walz seem like midwits. I’d put their IQs each at just over 100. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, in itself. But, (A) One would hope both parties would nominate higher IQ people for national office, and (B) These two in particular seem to be living examples of Dunning-Krueger. They don’t know how much they don’t know, which makes them especially dangerous.
But that also is well representative of today’s Democrat Party and contemporary progressivism. How many of us have had to listen to some family member, friend or co worker, prattle on about political/economic/social issues, regurgitating lefty talking points but clearly having little depth of understanding beyond the talking points? I have, more times than I can count.
I lived for 25 years in a deep-blue neighborhood in St Paul. You could put all the neighborliness there in the navel of a flea and still have room for three caraway seeds and a DFLer’s heart. Apologies to Fred Allen.
I lived in a very blue berg for 15 years in south florida
“It doesn’t need to be nationwide. It only needs to be in states where the voting is close enough that a few thousand or tens of thousand votes out of many millions can affect the outcome.”
It doesn’t need to even be state wide. There was a number of contests where it hinged on a few individual counties.
It doesn’t need to even be state wide. There was a number of contests where it hinged on a few individual counties. – LordAzrael
YES.
Correction – This foolproof method of cheating in Federal Elections is really really Amazing! If any county in the Nation needs to produce ‘Cheating‘ votes for a Democratic candidate to win – ‘Abracadabra‘ and the needed votes appear…then – ‘POOF‘ all evidence of any Voter or Election Fraud mysteriously self-destructs (sorta like in Mission Impossible).
What about the poll workers involved in this foolproof method of cheating in Federal Elections?! How come, no poll worker has never blown the whistle on such a crime—in AMERICA?!!!? Oh, of course, all involved poll workers get the Neuralyzer treatment…
One person’s Governor Walz is another person’s Tampon Tim.
…all schools “must provide students with access to menstrual products at no charge” for grades 4 to 12 and they “must be available to all menstruating students.”
Minnesota lawmakers rejected an amendment to include the word “female” in the language of the bill.
Potayto, potahto; tomayto, tomahto…
I’d put their IQs each at just over 100.
==
KH passed the California bar exam and was a working prosecutor for a number of years. For someone in a verbal occupation, she’s a lousy public speaker, of course. She’s a person of above average intelligence. You may be more accurate vis a vis Walz.
==
Intelligence is helpful, but it does not substitute for integrity or seriousness of mind. No doubt Anthony Blinken and Pete Booty-gag would score well on psychometric tests. Blinken utters inanities like ‘two-state solution’ and Booty-gag keeps getting caught in situations which suggest he’s a hollow man.
==
Looking at characters like Joseph and Hunter Biden, not to mention various other hobgoblins in the Democratic Party like Nancy Pelosi, I’m reminded of something my sister told me when she was working as a special ed teacher. What she said was that intelligence and cunning are distinct properties, and she dealt every day with youths who had little of the former but a considerable quantum of the latter.
Might have been Shapiro instead. Did dumping—or scaring off–Shapiro do enough to catch the attention of non-observant Jews?
Shapiro’s observant. But does “No Jews Need Apply” get the attention of the ethnic-only Jews?
Mike Plaiss @ 6:33 PM:
One can not register by party, to vote in Illinois. Any registered voter can request a Republican or Democrat ballot when he votes in a primary election. That being said, your comment seems to illustrate the corruption of the IL Democrat Party. Thank you.
This is what the other side is fighting for. Waltz is just a convenient tool.
https://x.com/EYakoby/status/1821374941909942650
If you are in a situation where fraud is possible or even likely, and that fraud is largely undetectable after the fact, then, running a candidate with a hard ceiling of support a little under 50% is an unbelievably bad idea.
The type of election where fraud matters is one where the candidates are close. If the D wins battleground states by 5+ points, fraud isn’t needed and, therefore, doesn’t matter. If the R wins battleground states by 5+ points, you’re talking about vote margins of 150k or more in most swing states. That’s a very difficult margin to make up with undetectable fraud. On the other hand, if your candidate’s best chance of winning is to eek out battleground states by 1% or less, then you are absolutely going to be vulnerable to fraud.
Solution – run a candidate who has a reasonable chance of winning battleground states by 5 points or so.
Or, alternatively, you can run a candidate who has an established history of winning or losing battleground states by less than 1 point and hope for the best. Then you lose. Then the D team changes the law to make the fraud even easier and even harder to detect.
Then what? It’s an important question because we’re in scenario #2 right now.
Those candidates lost in the primaries.
Thanks Bauxite, we’ll remember that in 2028.
Trump is likely to win. Events will overcome politics, if the fed follows their mandate to control inflation close to 2% and not succumb to pressure from wall st. to lower interest rates.
Everyone on fixed incomes is still being harmed by inflation, that while being measured at 3% is actually higher– depending on the sector. The greed on wall st. is palpable and the pressure continues everyday on the fed to lower interest rates.
Until Congress gets their act together and starts showing some fiscal discipline inflation will remain a potential threat.
Bauxite,
I wanted DeSantis this year, but we have Trump. The train has left and there’s no point in keep despairing over what you see as a mistake. You may get your “I told you so” moment, but wouldn’t it be better to help go with what we have???
@Bauxite: You’ve never named these magic candidates who can get such commanding leads in the battleground states, because you can’t, we all know that, you’ve claimed that Trump makes it impossible for you to know who they might be. Pretty convenient to give yourself a license to never produce evidence.
But I’ve come to see that it’s not really Trump you can’t stand: it’s the Republican base. Unless I’m much mistaken, you want the Republican base to be the kind of people who wouldn’t want someone like Trump.
Trump is not the wave, he’s the surfboard. It’s the wave itself you’re against. But there’s no wave of your own for the kind of people you prefer. The base tried them for fifty years, and got forever wars, the surveillance state, and bloated budgets. You might be content to keep trying to kick Lucy’s football, but the rest of us aren’t.
It’s not about Trump. It’s about the base wanting something different from the same old GOP mush that promised and promised and didn’t deliver anything but excuses, except for a brief moment around 1994, and that shanked the Contract with America, the Tea Party, and later Trump every chance it got.
The GOP needs to serve the people, not itself. Trump is a lesson: find politicians who will serve the people or the people will make you take folks like Trump until you learn the lesson or go extinct.
No matter what the situation, for CC™, The Geat Orange Whale is always the irresolvable problem.
Niketas Choniates – “[I]t’s not really Trump you can’t stand: it’s the Republican base.”
False. I can’t stand Trump the individual because of things about him that have almost nothing to do with his positions on the issues or his positioning vis-a-vis the “GOPe.” For example, I like JD Vance a lot. I am no fan of Jeb! I am still stunned that George W. Bush had so much support from the party, especially in 2000 primaries.
And when you speak of “the people,” you’re actually referring to a portion of the GOP base that is loyal to Trump personally. It may be a majority of the GOP, but it is not a majority of the country, not even close. A majority of the country rejects Trump. (https://elections2024.thehill.com/national/trump-favorability-rating/) Frankly, I don’t believe that it is because of the issues. I believe that Trump’s issues are more popular than progressive issues and could win majority support. And yet it is the GOP that is in danger of going extinct almost entirely because of the weakness of its messenger.
Brian E asks who else could have won. Haley, for one. DeSantis, for another (he was my preference). Haley and DeSantis are both disciplined enough to actually prosecute the case against Harris and Walz. (Vance can do it too, and does.) I think that the hardcore Trumpers who profess to hate Haley would have come home after the prospect of a Harris/Walz administration focused their minds. DeSantis probably would have had more challenges than Haley, but the man has a unique gift for cutting through the crap, explaining right-of-center policies, and explaining the problem with progressive policies in a way that is easy to understand. That’s pretty much exactly what is needed against Harris/Walz now, and it is also one of Donald Trump’s weakest points as a candidate.
And as to “they would have done it to any Repubulican” crowd. Well, the did “it” to Vance too. They . . . wait for it . . . made fun of his make up, called him weird, and made up a lie about unnatural relations with a couch. If you think that the “people” view that the same as exploiting the candidate’s alleged affair with a porn star or open attempts to reverse an election result, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
Frankly, my concern is about what happens after the election. If Trump loses, which I think is a distinct possibility, I’m afraid that the GOP base is going to descend into another round of conspiracy theories about voter fraud instead of facing the cold, hard fact that voters outside that chunk of the GOP base just don’t want Donald Trump.
@Bauxite:Haley, for one. DeSantis, for another
How do they win without Republicans? They didn’t win among Republicans.
You have this fantasy that someone can lose the primaries and win the general election…
when you speak of “the people,” you’re actually referring to a portion of the GOP base that is loyal to Trump personally.
Right there you admit it: you have a problem with the base.
Trump does not have Jedi mind tricks. There is a reason they are picking Trump. The GOP needs to listen to the people willing to vote for it or go extinct.
And you yourself are not willing to listen. You have not listened to people when they tell you why. You have chosen to ignore what they tell you and make up your own reason, which is that they are just chumps for Trump. And that’s why people like you are not a getting a hearing and not seeing your preferred candidates advance.
Niketas Choniates – The deal that you (and Trumpers) seem to offer other right-of-center people is this: “Follow our pied piper off the cliff again, or you hate us.”
That’s just emotional blackmail. I don’t hate them (or you). Not at all. But I’ve had more than enough of their pied piper and more than enough of walking off a cliff.
Bauxite, I continued to support President Trump for a couple of reasons. One is loyalty. Given the campaign to destroy him, I thought I would return the opportunity to him if he wanted it. So did a lot of other Americans.
I knew there was a risk of the Dems dumping Biden some time ago, as I suspect many of you here did as well, but there is no reason for alarm. The job is a little harder as it’s easier for the media to hide Kamala’s catastrophic/dangerous/unpopular positions than to hide Joe’s mental decline.
Once the Trump-Vance campaign breaks through the media wall exposing the Harris-Walz candidates for the marxist/socialist/woke frauds they are, Trump will win.
Well we walked off the McCain then Romney cliff. So we agree on something. Tired of walking off cliffs.
DeSantis, Vivek, Vance and Haley can duke it out in 2028.
The deal that you (and Trumpers) seem to offer other right-of-center people is this: “Follow our pied piper off the cliff again, or you hate us.”
Bauxite:
I’m not sure who you are talking about, but I hope you would notice that many here could most accurately be called Reluctant Trump Supporters.
CC™ thinks Haley could have won. Funny that didn’t show itself in the primaries.
Alternative reality reigns supreme in CC™ world.
Is it accumulated Traumatic Brain Injury from walking off all those cliffs, CC™?
@huxley:I’m not sure who you are talking about, but I hope you would notice that many here could most accurately be called Reluctant Trump Supporters.
Definitely fits me. Trump is a very flawed instrument, but there is at the moment no other. The circumstances that brought Trump to the top of the Republican ticket took many years to manifest and were not of his making. Had the Butler rally turned out differently the placeholder Republican would now be the new Hitler-in-waiting. The media just slots them into ready-made narratives and is not ashamed to retail complete fiction. (DeSantis has already been depicted, by name, as a gay rapist by Paramount.)
But Bauxite is not interested in your reasons or mine, he’s decided we’re under a spell and nothing we say could possibly be relevant. He keeps telling me I’m wrong about what he says, and then in the next sentence or two he says again the things I describe him as saying.
Re: Tim Walz
There is never a shortage of people that wish to impose their world view upon the citizenry.
Then again, he represents the mainstream thinking of today’s demokrat party.
JFK would not be welcome today in the democrat party.
Haley could have won? I don’t see her carrying the three big swing states. She has more appeal with upscale suburbanites than Trump does, but that group will still give the Democrats more votes, and I don’t see Haley picking up enough voters from other groups to make up for that. She might have had hopes to beat Biden, but with Harris as the nominee the “break the glass ceiling” ladies would be voting for Harris. Of course, if Trump does lose, the mythology will be that Haley could have won.
I see Walz as a teacher who liked faculty meetings and teachers’ union meetings and party precinct meetings so much that he thinks a whole society can be enjoyably run by committee, perhaps because it would be a society run by people like him. Oscar Wilde, who liked socialism (if he wasn’t being tongue in cheek), said that the final objection to it is that it would take up too many evenings. That’s apparently not a problem for Tim Walz. Harris is the sorority girl who likes the giggly office girls club, but she actually has a hard time getting along with staffers from what I understand.