Are they serious about these Democrat candidates for 2028?

The New Neo Posted on by

I increasingly find that the vast majority of political analyses I come across are just plain stupid, and transparently so. And yes, that’s been the case since I began blogging twenty (!) years ago. But still, it’s gotten significantly worse.

It’s not just that news has become almost entirely propaganda, although that’s true. It’s that the propaganda is unconvincing on the face of it, ignoring the obvious. I once read that Soviet propaganda was like that – not meant to convince, but rather meant to tease and insult because the public knew it wasn’t true but it was an assertion of power: “See? We lie to you all the time and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

As I think I’ve said before, analyses of Kamala Harris’ loss skip her all-too-obvious failings for the most part. And why? Is it just that her identity groups – female, person of color – make her untouchable on a personal level?

Which brings us to this article at The Hill, listing possible Democrat presidential candidates in 2028. Who leads the way? Why, Kamala Harris, that’s who:

… Harris showed that she could run an impressive campaign even in the short time she was in the race, according those pining for another run.

The vice president’s political instincts have also grown, and she now has the understanding and experience of someone who has run a $1 billion campaign.

Well, it sure impressed me – with how inarticulate and inauthentic she is. And that one billion – well, totally squandered in payments to stars and Oprah’s company and people like Sharpton, and who knows what else. Granted, the article does mention that, but much later on, and in a tangential way:

Harris also led a billion-dollar campaign that lost. And her campaign was far from perfect.

It’s not just that she lost; it’s that the money was totally mishandled and used for grift, and there seems to be no accountability. Is that so hard to say? Apparently it would ruffle too many feathers.

Other suggested candidates listed in order of appearance: Newsom, Whitmer, Shapiro, Buttigeg, Pritzker, and AOC. Quite a crew. And as part of the discussion of Whitmer, there’s no mention of her behavior during the COVID lockdowns, which I believe makes her exceedingly vulnerable, and a “Democratic strategist” named Christy Setzer says the following re Whitmer:

I think Harris ran a much better race than anyone could’ve asked for, [but] the obvious takeaway is going to be that we shouldn’t run a woman of color or a woman at all. Sucks, but I don’t see people having a different analysis.

With strategists like that, who needs … Then again, maybe Setzer is well aware that a person could have asked for a better race than the abominable and almost ludicrous one run by Kamala Harris, but it’s just not cricket to say so. And maybe Setzer is also well aware that it wasn’t the fact that Harris was a woman that caused her loss.

Oh, and the article manages to analyze Josh Shapiro’s chances in 2028 without even mentioning that the current Democrat Party would never run a Jewish person who supports Israel.

Nevertheless, people get paid to write this garbage.

[NOTE: And here it is – the tag “Election 2028.”]

Thanksgiving greetings from our president-elect

The New Neo Posted on by

The master troller trolls the left:

Happy Thanksgiving to all, including to the Radical Left Lunatics who have worked so hard to destroy our Country, but who have miserably failed, and will always fail, because their ideas and policies are so hopelessly bad that the great people of our Nation just gave a landslide victory to those who want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! Don’t worry, our Country will soon be respected, productive, fair, and strong, and you will be, more than ever before, proud to be an American!

It occurs to me that this is the sort of thing for which many people hate him, and not just the left but also the NeverTrumpers on the right (or who used to be on the right). It’s not dignified – but it’s justified. What they tried to do to him deserves intense condemnation and in some cases punishment (disbarment, for example, for the lawyers of the 65 Project, as Alan Dershowitz has advocated).

Trump intends to make them squirm, at the very least.

Apparently, the Harris campaign always knew she would lose

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s one of those “now it can be told” things. Then again, perhaps it’s a lie. But the current scuttlebutt is that the campaign’s internal polling never showed Harris in the lead.

We often hear that internal polls are different than the polls we peons get to see. Apparently, this is a case of such a discrepancy, and another reason to see public polling as more of an attempt to shape voting behavior than to describe or predict it.

This report also seems to go along with statements about how Biden’s awful record was what doomed Harris rather than her own sorry failure to make a case for herself. But what has long puzzled me is not why she lost, but why so many people voted for her when she was unable to speak coherently on most of the topics of the day, or to answer questions asked of her. I’ve seen a lot of presidential campaigns, but I’ve never seen anything remotely like hers in terms of incompetence. In fact, I’ve never seen any politician so poor at expressing himself or herself, or so oddly disconnected.

Well, perhaps we won’t have Kamala Harris to kick around anymore. Perhaps she’ll segue into some professorship or become head of something like Planned Parenthood; I saw that latter suggestion somewhere and it seemed as though that is something for which she might feel a calling. But, looking at some recent YouTube videos of Harris just now, I see that plenty of people think she’s just great and would like her to run in 2028.

Or maybe they’re bots; that’s possible too.

To see what I”m referring to, just take a look at the comments to this video featuring Walz and Harris thanking their campaign workers, and you’ll see plenty of sentiments like this:

You were both perfect. I’m grieving what could have been. Kamala is the President of my heart.

And these:

So proud of you and Kamala! You’ll always be my President and vice! Trump for JAIL.

Anyone else crying…..so poignant…so tender…she’s speaking to us. It’s devastatingly lovely. How can we give up with such beautiful examples of hope. Thank you Kamala. Thank you Tim.

Jay Bhattacharya: once thwarted, now nominated for NIH director

The New Neo Posted on by

Jay Bhattacharya has been up, then down, and now up again. His academic pedigree has always been stellar: it’s Stanford all the way, from undergrad to medical degree to PhD in economics. Then work at RAND, teaching at UCLA, then the Hoover Institution and back to a Stanford professorship.

A star.

That is, until he gave commonsense suggestions regarding COVID masking and lockdowns – suggestions that ran against the official line.:

He is a co-author of the Great Barrington Declaration, a proposal arguing for an alternative public health approach to dealing with COVID-19, through “focused protection” of the people most at risk. In it, Bhattacharya and the two other researchers called on governments to overturn their coronavirus strategies and to allow young and healthy people to return to normal life while protecting the most vulnerable. This would let the virus spread in low-risk groups, with the aim of achieving “herd immunity”, which would result in enough of the population becoming resistant to the virus to quell the pandemic. The authors conceded that it was hard to protect older people in the community, but suggested individuals could shield themselves and that efforts to keep infections low “merely dragged matters out”.

It seems reasonable now – and it seemed reasonable then. But it was heavily criticized.

Then, in March of 2021, he wrote that the lockdowns were the “biggest public health mistake we’ve ever made.” I wrote this post at the time about what he’d said. An excerpt:

In the US – the country I know best – I believe that initially it really was a public health decision, borne of fear, the unknown, and the desire to be as safe as possible and buy time to prepare. But not long after, the lockdown took on another life and was propelled by much more than the public health considerations, as people in charge saw the crisis as a golden opportunity to accomplish a host of things they might otherwise have difficulty achieving.

First and foremost was to harm Donald Trump’s presidency and chances of re-election. Mission accomplished. Next was the sheer exercise of power over the little people. That can be very intoxicating, particularly for the left, and they learned a lot from it. One of the things they learned is that fear can encourage Americans to part with a very significant amount of liberty. What useful information that is to the left! Not only is power intoxicating and even contagious for those in charge, but fear is apparently contagious to much of the public, and the habit of fear is hard to break.

Another possible motive in this country was to harm the non-elite and reward the elite. …

Voices of warning were drowned out almost from the start. I recall writing a post one year ago, almost to the day, that mentioned that the amount of fear seemed way out of proportion to the actual risk involved with COVID. I wasn’t the only one saying this, but we were in the minority.

Well, Bhattacharya was really in the minority, and as a result his voice was stifled:

According to a December 2022 release of the Twitter Files, Bhattacharya was placed on a Twitter “Trends blacklist” in August 2021 that prevented his tweets from showing up in trending topics searches. It appeared to coincide with his first tweet on the service, which advocated for the Great Barrington Declaration’s herd immunity proposal.

And yesterday, Trump named him as the prospective head of NIH. Seems like a really good pick to me. He’s got the credentials – including a specialization in the economics of health care. In my opinion, he’s earned the post.

Happy day-before-Thanksgiving to you!

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly-edited reprint of a previous post.]

I happen to like Thanksgiving. Always have. It’s a holiday for anyone and everyone in this country—except, of course, people who hate turkey. There are quite a few of those curmudgeonly folks, but I’m happy to report I’m not one of them. Even if the turkey ends up dry and overcooked, it’s nothing that a little gravy and cranberry sauce can’t fix. And although the turkey is the centerpiece, it’s the accompaniments that make the meal.

My theory on turkeys is that they’re like children: you coax them along and just do the best you can, but as long as you don’t utterly ruin or abuse them, they have their own innate characteristics that will manifest in the end. A dry and tough bird will be a dry and tough bird despite all that draping in fat-soaked cheesecloth; a tender and tasty one can withstand a certain amount of cooking incompetence.

One year long ago my brother and I were cooking at my parents’ house and somehow we set the oven on “broil,” an error that was only discovered an hour before the turkey was due to be finished cooking. But it was one of the best turkeys ever. Another time the turkey had turned deep bluish-purple hue on defrosting and was so hideous and dangerous-looking that it had to be abandoned. Another terrible time, one that has lived in infamy ever since, my mother decided turkey was passe and that we’d have steak on Thanksgiving.

Since I like to eat, I’m drawn to the fact that Thanksgiving is a food-oriented holiday with a basic obligatory theme (turkey plus seasonal autumnal food) and almost infinite variations on that theme. Sweet potatoes? Absolutely—but oh, the myriad ways to make them, some revolting, some sublime. Pie? Of course, but what kind? And what to put on it, ice cream, whipped cream, or both?

For me, there are three traditional requirements—besides the turkey, of course. There has to be at least one pecan pie, although eating it in all its sickening sweetness can put an already-sated person right over the top. The cranberry sauce has to be made from fresh cranberries (it’s easy: cranberries, water, and sugar to taste, simmered on top of the stove till mushy and a bright deep red), and lots of it (it’s good on turkey sandwiches the next day, too). The traditional stuffing in my family is non-traditional – and I already gave the recipe for it yesterday.

Thanksgiving is one of the few holidays that has a theme that is vaguely religious – giving thanks – but has no specific religious affiliation. So it’s a holiday that unites – although good luck on that. It’s one of the least commercial holidays as well, because it involves no presents. It’s a home-based holiday, which is good, too, except for those who don’t have relatives or friends to be with. One drawback is the terribly compressed travel time; I solve that by not usually traveling very far.

The main advantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over. The main disadvantage to hosting the day is having leftovers left over.

I wish you all a wonderful Thanksgiving Day, filled with friends and/or family of your choice, and just the right amount of leftovers.

Open thread 11/27/2024

The New Neo Posted on by

Last night I was about to go to the supermarket, but when I went to my car I saw that the windshield was covered by the thinnest ice layer I’ve ever seen, in a beautiful swirling design. I took this photo, which doesn’t begin to do it justice:

My family’s turkey stuffing recipe

The New Neo Posted on by

It’s different. It’s very very rich. I think it may originally have been for duck or goose.

Here it is. There are no measurements because the proportions are whatever you want:

Take a large quantity of cut-up Granny Smith or other tasty cooking apples and cook in a fair amount of sherry as well as a ton of butter till a bit soft. Then mix with dried prunes, almonds, and one Sara Lee poundcake reduced to small pieces by crushing with the hands. Stuff the turkey shortly before placing in oven. Or cook in a casserole as you would with any other stuffing cooked outside the turkey.

That’s it. Enjoy.

Roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) MSNBC says it was unaware of Kamala Harris’ campaign’s donation to Al Sharpton’s nonprofit. Were they also “unaware” of Al Sharpton’s history of bigotry and deception?

(2) DEI “anti-racism” training has been found to do more harm than good. Reading the material made “participants more likely to imagine racial bias where none was evident … [as well as] ready to punish the admissions officer for this imagined bias.”

No surprise at all – in fact, common sense would tell a person that. But common sense doesn’t seem to be all that common.

Oh, and media outlets suppressed news of the study.

(3) Can this really be Trump’s typical daily fare?:

Breakfast – nothing. Lunch – nothing. Dinner – a McDonald’s, KFC, pizza or a well-done steak. Twelve Diet Cokes a day, and snacking on Doritos.

Maybe on the campaign trail. I doubt that’s what he eats in the White House.

(4) Charges dropped in the J6 case against Trump.

(5) This is what is happening to Rudy Giuliani in the courtroom these days. Not good.

Trump’s tariffs

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday Trump announced that he plans to impose a 25% tariff on all goods from Mexico and Canada, and increase the tariff on goods from China 10%. Most of the coverage (including the article I just linked) assumes that it would raise prices here. That may indeed be a valid assumption. Most of the articles don’t emphasize the other part of the equation – which is that he says he will do it until the border countries do something to curtail the importation of fentanyl, and to stem the tide of illegal aliens crossing their respective borders.

Trump claimed:

This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country! …

I have had many talks with China about the massive amounts of drugs, in particular Fentanyl, being sent into the United States — But to no avail. Until such time as they stop, we will be charging China an additional 10% Tariff, above any additional Tariffs, on all of their many products coming into the United States of America.

So the way I see it is that this is Trump’s opening bid in a complex negotiation – let’s make a deal. Whether Trump will get what he wants from those countries, or whether this will be economically disastrous or at least difficult for US consumers, remains to be seen.

Will the costs be passed on to US buyers and cause inflation? Will companies absorb them? Will the costs be offset by other de-inflationary policies such as lowered energy costs or tax cuts? If we become more energy independent, will we not need to import much oil from Canada? And will Mexico and/or Canada and/or China blink and actually do something about fentanyl and/or about the border traffic?

The assumption by the left is that of course this will be inflationary and that Trump is a stupid dodohead Nazi whatever. But at this point I would’t underestimate Trump.

Why doesn’t Trump explain his strategy better, so that the American people can understand all the thinking behind this?

(1) Maybe he really is a stupid dodohead.
(2) Maybe he doesn’t want to tip his hand and reveal too much to the other sides in the negotiations.
(3) Maybe he will explain better later.
(4) Maybe he wants to make all his enemies and opponents predict something dire that doesn’t happen, and be wrong again.