Playing right field

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a comment by “Rufus T. Firefly”:

“[Kamala Harris] seems like the kid playing right-field in baseball, who just stands out there daydreaming, hoping the ball doesn’t come her way.”

Also a great line.*

(*from a kid who played right field often)

That immediately brought up a song association for me. You might enjoy this:

Here’s an article about the guy who wrote it:

As a kid, Welch played right field, so he knows of what he sings.

Thirty-five years ago, Welch’s fortunes were altered when the folk group Peter, Paul & Mary recorded his song for their 1987 album “No Easy Walk to Freedom.”…

“My life actually changed radically,” Welch said from his home in South Egremont. Songwriting royalties allowed Welch “to quit my day job and to have a down payment on a house.” At the time, his day job involved “typing briefs and trying to write computer programs” for a law firm. …

Welch “wrote the song one afternoon in 1982 or ‘83.” He said he had no idea anyone would like it until he performed it at a New York City cafe in 1983. “I played it and the crowd went nuts,” he said; “You never know, really, it turns out.”

Ohio voting fraud

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a disturbing although unsurprising situation:

Election integrity issues involving employees of a leftist company [called Black Fork] committed to “Building Long-Term Progressive Power,” have been popping up all over Ohio.

Earlier this month, Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced he had had referred evidence of suspected election law violations to 20 county prosecutors “for review and possible criminal prosecution.” … LaRose is also asking the local prosecutors to investigate allegations of fraudulent voter registration forms like those submitted in Hamilton County.

Black Fork is also under a dark cloud in Cuyahoga County, home to Cleveland, where the local board of elections reported at least 18 suspicious voter registration cards. Cuyahoga County Board of Elections Director Anthony Perlatti told members at a June 21, 2023 meeting that “multiple counties have encountered issues with potential registration cards being submitted from deceased individuals,” according to minutes from a June 21, 2023 Cuyahoga County Board of Elections meeting.

Butler County Prosecuting Attorney Mike Gmoser this week told me that his office has received a referral from the secretary of state.

“It does involve a document with [suspect] signatures and we are seeking the verifications of all the signatures that were harvested and submitted to the Board of Elections,” he said in a phone interview.

Cuyahoga County elections officials asked LaRose’s Public Integrity Division to investigate the suspicious voter registration cards in July 2023. … Election integrity advocates have criticized LaRose for, in their estimation, moving too slowly on the complaints. …

The concerned citizen letter also asks LaRose to take immediate steps “to address the threat of noncitizen registration and voting in the 2024 elections.”

“Ohio’s election eligibility verification procedures permit third-party advocacy groups in the state to register thousands, if not tens of thousands, of ineligible individuals who then become eligible to vote in Ohio elections. The Biden Administration has exacerbated the problem by aiding and abetting the importation of untold numbers of noncitizens … ”

LaRose has taken issue with some of the changes election integrity advocates have sought, insisting that the legislature would have to pass laws to do so. …

“So to the extent that there’s any press watching, voter fraud is real, it does happen. It happens oftentimes in the form of phony registrations all in the same handwriting,” Triantafilou, the Hamilton County Board of Elections members said at the July meeting.

If the government of a state is red or purple, there’s some hope of restoring election integrity, although it depends on the officials and on the state. Otherwise, this stuff goes undetected and/or uncorrected. It’s all very similar to things we heard may have happened in many swing states in the 2020 election. But after that election, courts for the most part said the issue was moot or impossible to prove or disprove.

I think Harris is temperamentally unsuited to be president and she knows it

The New Neo Posted on by

That won’t necessarily stop her from being elected, of course. But I really wonder why she decided to become a politician. Among other things, although she lies and lies and lies, she – unlike most politicians – seems somewhat uncomfortable doing so. That discomfort gets transmitted in awkward body language and stress in her voice, as well as a lack of emotional match to the content of what she’s saying. That’s why the awkward forced laugh comes out sometimes; I think it’s nervous laughter.

And that is why Walz was part of her interview with CNN and why people joke that he’s her emotional support animal. And I don’t think Walz has any discomfort whatsoever with lying.

But this uneasiness of Harris’ is not her only difficulty when she’s playing the role of a politician (and on her it really does seem to be a role). Most politicians are verbally fluent. They may be lying through their teeth, but the listener has no trouble understanding what they’re actually saying. Kamala Harris, on the other hand, generates a lot of near-meaningless words in the process of trying to find her way to an answer that doesn’t implicate her. She is, to be blunt, BS-ing and stalling, and in the process leaves the listener scratching his or her head. Again, this is something most or all politicians do, but they ordinarily accomplish it with smoothness and finesse.

For some reason, Harris has trouble doing that.

I’ve seen pundits and commenters say that she did much better in her DNC speech than in her interview. Well, d-uuhh. Reading a speech off a teleprompter is a whole different activity than responding – even with canned answers – in an interview. In an interview, there’s always the chance of the unexpected. In a speech, the speaker is in control – especially when in front of a friendly audience lacking hecklers – and in an interview the control is partially ceded to the interviewer. In a speech, the task is simple: to read. In an interview, the person has to think on his or her feet (or while seated, as in Harris’ interview with Bash).

Many people describe Harris as stupid. I don’t think that’s it at all. She’s not brilliant by any means, but no one gets through law school being stupid. But most lawyers are far more verbally adept than Harris, I think that something else is going on with her. Yes, it’s possible she has some sort of problem with alcohol or other substances. But I think that deep down she lacks confidence and isn’t as good as most politicians at hiding that fact.

More interesting is why the Democrats have nominated two people in a row who aren’t good speakers and seem to have some challenges, whether cognitive or emotional or both. After all, it’s not as though the Democrats lack glib talkers. With Biden, who wasn’t doing well in the primaries in 2020 until everyone else was “encouraged” to drop out, he was chosen by the Democrat powers that be because he could be promoted as a moderate, a “nice” guy, and someone experienced. With Harris, as VP she was the obvious heir to Biden, and getting rid of a black woman would ruffle too many voters’ feathers. So, once Biden imploded, the Democrats were pretty much stuck with Harris and they are now deeply engaged in trying to make the best of it by pretending she’s something she’s not. But that only increases the emotional pressure on her, in my opinion.

The fact that polls indicate that Harris is basically tied in the race for the presidency reflects several things, the first being the strength of Trump Derangement Syndrome. For a great many people, all the Democrats need is a placeholder, and Harris or anyone else would do the trick. The second is the strength of identity politics: for many voters, the fact that she’s a black woman is enough to get their vote. The third is the role of the press and pundits in telling people that Harris is the best thing since sliced bread.

Once you look at the Harris interview, it’s more obvious than ever why she has been avoiding non-scripted events like interviews and press conferences, and probably will continue to do so for the most part. She’s trying to run out the clock.

Right now we don’t even seem to have a working president. Biden acts like he’s retired, and Harris is out campaigning. Someone or some group (I think the latter) is running the country, and already has been for quite some time. Biden did have some input, but for the most part he deferred to this group. Although Kamala is a lot younger than Biden, I think she’s okay with continuing the process if she’s elected, and with governing mostly as a figurehead who gives speeches now and then as the country continues on its present terrible trajectory.

Germany’s war on knives

The New Neo Posted on by

Germany is planning to curb the number of knife attacks in that country by a new law:

After laying a white rose at the site of the Diversity Festival slashing that left three dead and eight wounded, Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised rapid action would be taken against knives.

Right now, people in Germany can carry knives up to 4.7 inches long. The law will be modified so that they can only carry knives up to 2.4 inches long. No one appears to have considered the possibility that Muslim terrorists on the way to killing as many infidels as possible might violate the law and carry a concealed knife of 4 inches or longer. Such thoughts are unthinkable.

Knives are ubiquitous; they are not the problem. And of course a murderer won’t hesitate to carry such a knife, which will be easily obtainable. Then again, maybe the next step for the authorities is to give us all plastic utensils and make all knives contraband, like in prisons.

More:

The ISIS terrorist [who attacked people at the Diversity Festival] was one of over a million migrants who had invaded Germany while claiming to be “refugees”. The migrant was also one of the many scheduled to be deported, but was not.

All that the Muslim terrorist had to do to evade deportation was leave government housing when the authorities came looking for him. And then when the military-age Arab Muslim migrant came back, the deportation order had expired and he couldn’t be deported. Undeported Muslim refugees have been one of the largest sources of terrorism, crime and violence in Europe.

Some statistics:

The mostly Muslim migrants were responsible for over 1 in 10 sexual assaults in just one year. They have carried out around 7,000 sexual assaults since the beginning of the migrant crisis. Half of gang rapists are foreigners, and there are on average almost two gang rapes committed in Germany every single day.

In North Rhine-Westphalia, the state where the latest Muslim terrorist attack took place, 1 in 3 sex offenders, half of shoplifters and burglars, and 4 out of 5 pickpockets were foreigners.

Typical of this kind of violence was an altercation between two Arab Muslims, which ended with one of them stabbed in Magdeburg, migrants fighting with knives in a refugee center in Bavaria, and a litany of young foreign men confronting and stabbing each other all across Germany.

But locating the source of the problem is probably “not a very helpful insight,” [the quote is from a German criminologist] … In the UK, people sharing such insights are being locked up even as Islamic terrorists are being freed.

Free speech is dead in Britain.

NOTE: While writing this post, the phrase “long knives” came to me, because Germany is aiming to ban the carrying of long knives. That in turn brought to mind the famous Nazi “Night of the Long Knives,” which took place in 1934 and was a mechanism for Hitler’s consolidation of power by eliminating the group in his own party known as the Brownshirts, as well as many others he considered enemies or rivals and expendable. I doubt that knives were the mechanism by which they died; I’m almost certain everyone was summarily shot. So whence comes the name? When I did a Google search, the AI function initially said the people were killed by knives, which I strongly suspect is one of those things AI makes up because it sounds good. A second Google search for the same thing had the AI function saying they were primarily shot, and the name “Long Knives” was symbolic. Make up your non-mind, AI!

This site says the name was given by Hitler himself, and that it was a phrase from a popular Nazi song. He explained after the fact in a speech: “In this hour I was responsible for the fate of the German people, and thereby I become the supreme judge of the German people. I gave the order to shoot the ringleaders in this treason.”

California bans local governments from requiring IDs in local elections

The New Neo Posted on by

Voters in the city of Huntington Beach, California passed an amendment to the city charter that would require ID in order to vote in municipal elections. Also:

The measure is slated to take effect in 2026 and would also allow Huntington Beach officials to “provide more in-person voting locations” and “monitor ballot drop-boxes.”

We can’t have that, can we? Let’s hear it for DEMOCRACY!! – that is, for the Democrat Party. Those Huntington Beach voters need to get in line with the Democratic Party, which immediately began legal action to stop the law from taking effect and presented the now-familiar argument that it is a form of voter suppression. You’ve heard that claim before – it’s become a foundation of the Democrats’ efforts to suppress voting security and voting integrity.

And then, when so many voters begin to doubt the validity of voting results, Democrats accuse them of crazy conspiracy theories.

And now the state of California has passed its own state law forbidding municipalities from doing what Huntington Beach tried to do, even for local elections and not state elections. Democrats in California are so dominant in the state legislature that it passed overwhelmingly:

SB 1174 stipulates that local governments “shall not enact or enforce any charter provision, ordinance, or regulation requiring a person to present identification for the purpose of voting or submitting a ballot at any polling place, vote center, or other location where ballots are cast or submitted, unless required by state or federal law.” The measure cleared the State Assembly (57-16) on Tuesday and was previously passed by the state Senate (30-8) in May.

Now the question is whether Newsom will sign it into law.

The Harris and Walz interview was a lackluster and awkward affair

The New Neo Posted on by

In last night’s CNN interview with Dana Bash, Kamala Harris exhibited problems on two levels: content and process. Content is what a person says, and process is just about everything else, including tone of voice, facial expression, and posture.

It seems to me that, even objectively speaking, this interview wasn’t the sort of thing that would convince anyone not already a Harris voter to support her. Much of the content of the interview involved Harris trying to explain her past statements that are at variance with what she’s saying now, and her failure to do anything about so many of the country’s problems even though she’s been vice president for three and a half years. Although a very effective speaker might be able to give some sort of convincing explanations and/or excuses for those things despite the fact that it’s difficult to think of any, Kamala is not that speaker.

Which brings us to the second problem: process. Last night Kamala Harris transmitted a lackluster energy, a hesitancy, and a problem with what many pundits evaluating her performance called authenticity. Her words, and in particular her tone of voice and facial expressions, seemed manufactured and mismatched – not in the slick and practiced way of Hillary Clinton, for example, but in an awkward way that was unsettling to watch.

It didn’t help that Tim Walz was part of the equation, leading to the almost inevitable mockery of Harris as needing her Dad there for emotional support. The taunting boiled down to the idea that, if she’s such a strong woman, why would he be there at all for this interview? Good question, and to make things worse there was another problem: the seating and perspective. Harris was in the center of the three participants, but she looked somewhat shrunken not only because Walz is a much larger person, but also because she was further back from the camera than either Walz or Bash. Her position made it even more difficult to convey power, and only fed the perception of lack of force on her part. Here’s an article at RedState that gives many examples of people pointing that out.

As for the content of Harris’ message, here’s some fact-checking that shows that even CNN was at least somewhat critical:

When Bash again noted that Harris said in 2019 that she supported a ban on fracking, and asked Harris if she changed her mind during that campaign (which Harris ended in December 2019), Harris said, “In 2020, I made very clear where I stand. We are in 2024 and I’ve not changed that position, nor will I going forward.”

Facts First: This is misleading. Harris did not make her position on fracking clear during her only debate in 2020, the general election’s vice presidential debate against then-Vice President Mike Pence; Harris never explicitly stated a personal position on fracking during that debate. Rather, she said that Joe Biden, the head of the Democratic ticket at the time, would not ban fracking if he was elected president.

Harris has another built-in content problem when asked about her support of Joe Biden. She was a loyal VP who pooh-poohed any talk of him being cognitively challenged, and now she’s the current nominee because everyone saw how seriously cognitively challenged he actually is. But to turn on him now would be to exhibit disloyalty, as well as implicating her in the obvious coverup. Threading that needle is beyond her, and what she did in the Dana Bash interview was to reiterate her support of Biden – the person whose record has also been one from which she desperately wants to distance herself.

The Trump War Room quickly made use of a clip of that moment:

I had originally thought that Harris’ and Walz’s decision to appear together for this interview was an attempt to spark a perception in the viewer of a genial Mom and Dad taking care of America and Americans. They may have thought that the whole would be greater than the sum of its parts, but I don’t think they succeeded.

Or maybe they just wanted to get it over with. How many interviews will Harris give in the next two months? Or will she try to continue to convey a lukewarm version of Obama’s “hope and change” in 2008 while simultaneously hiding out like Joe Biden in 2020?