Tag: politics

So not meeting the fake demands of the fake protest leaders didn’t resolve the situation?

Anticipating a fifth straight weekend of violent protests, Paris’ police chief said Friday that armored vehicles and thousands of officers will be deployed again in the French capital this weekend.

Michel Delpuech told RTL radio that security services intend to deploy the same numbers and strength as last weekend, with about 8,000 officers and 14 armored vehicles again in Paris. Delpuech said the biggest difference will be the deployment of more groups of patrol officers to catch vandals, who last weekend roamed streets around the Champs Elysees, causing damage and looting. Police arrested more than 1,000 people in Paris last weekend and 135 people were injured, including 17 police officers

A sixth “yellow vest” protester was killed this week, hit by a truck at a protest roadblock. Despite calls from authorities urging protesters — who wear the fluorescent safety vests that France requires drivers to keep in their cars — to stop the protests, the movement rocking the country has showed no signs of abating.

It will be informative to see who cracks first, the globalist government or the nationalist protesters. It’s pretty clear that the latter aren’t inclined to follow their government-appointed leadership.

French Interior minister Christophe Castaner urged protesters to express themselves peacefully in the wake of a two-day manhunt for a man suspected of killing three people in the eastern city of Strasbourg that mobilized hundreds of police.

I tend to doubt that a series of murders by a second-generation immigrant is going to reduce the intensity of the nationalist protests.

The Tories are holding a no-confidence vote in the traitorous Remainer Theresa May tonight:

Theresa May vowed to fight with ‘everything I’ve got’ today after a Tory no-confidence vote was dramatically triggered – and will be held within hours.

The PM said she would not give up after Eurosceptics secured the 48 letters from MPs needed to force a ballot that could end the PM’s time as leader.

In a defiant speech on the steps of Downing Street, she warned Brexit would need to be delayed beyond March 29 if she loses and Jeremy Corbyn might end up in power.

‘I have devoted myself unsparingly since I became Prime Minister… and I stand ready to finish the job,’ she said. ‘A change of leadership in the Conservative party now will put our country’s future at risk, and create uncertainty when we can least afford it.

‘The new leader wouldn’t have time to renegotiate a new Withdrawal Agreement and get the legislation through parliament by March 29, so one of their first acts would have to be extending or rescinding Article 50, delaying or even stopping Brexit when people want us to get on with it.’

Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the powerful 1922 committee, emerged this morning to announce the threshold of 48 letters had been ‘exceeded’ and Mrs May was eager to resolve the issue ‘rapidly’.

He said the PM’s reaction when he notified her last night had been ‘business like’ and she will deliver a make-or-break speech to MPs at 5pm before voting begins an hour later. The crucial result will be declared as soon as counting finishes.

More fake news. The best result is a no-confidence vote, a new Tory leader, and a no-deal Brexit. It’s shameful, but entirely predictable, that May refuses to resign. The woman has no honor; even David Cameron looks like a statesman in comparison.

No new Withdrawal Agreement is going to be agreed, nor is parliament going to vote for her terrible Brexit deal anyhow.

The God-Emperor is liberating men from their ill-considered marriages to angry, batshit-crazy women:

“Shortly after the election is when I became aware of it,” says Lois Brenner, a New York–based divorce attorney. “People were thinking about splitting up their marriages because of political differences.” She’d never encountered this before, but she’s since found herself litigating two such divorces. “After people got over their shock,” she says, “they started arguing.”

By now it’s a truism to point out that the election of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement have prompted a wholesale realignment of American politics. But it’s also sent shock waves through heterosexual romance.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party have plenty of female supporters, of course, especially among white women. But politically speaking, as evidenced by the recent midterms, there is an undeniable, and growing, gender divide in American politics: In 2018, almost 60 percent of female voters supported Democrats, compared to 47 percent of male voters — outpacing the gap in other recent elections. What can make matters unworkable for couples whose viewpoints aren’t aligned, says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family studies at Evergreen State College, is that Americans have become increasingly contemptuous of those who hold different positions on divisive political issues — and contempt is singularly destructive for long-term relationships. “Mary Matalin and James Carville,” says Coontz. “How the hell do they make it work?”       

Many people with divergent perspectives from their partners have not been able to make it work in the Trump era. A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed in early 2017 found that in the months following Trump’s election win, 13 percent of 6,426 participants had cut ties with a friend or family member over political differences. This past summer, another survey of 1,000 people found that a third declared the same. More generally, 29 percent of respondents to a May 2017 survey said their romantic relationship had been negatively affected by Trump’s presidency. And even people ostensibly on the same side of the issues as their partner have run into challenges, with the climate exacerbating or revealing new fault lines. Herewith, two couples, and four individual women — all except the final pair using pseudonyms — talk about how conflict over politics is testing, or even ending, their relationships.

This is what software engineers describe as “a feature, not a bug.” It’s also Exhibit 47,339 in Why Female Suffrage was a Cataclysmic Mistake.

In fairness, losing graciously is exactly what a good Republican is supposed to do:

Are you disgusted like I am that Martha McSally capitulated — smiling on her couch with her dog, conceding the election to a lying, cheating code-pink pinko who deceived the voters into thinking she was a moderate when, in fact, she is about as far to the left as Medea Benjamin?  McSally not only let down supporters who stuffed envelopes, volunteered for and made contributions to her during the campaign, but people like me who made a last minute tiny donation to help her fight the recount only to see that money swirl down the toilet two days later when she gave up the recount fight she didn’t even fight.

Meanwhile, we have rabid leftists in Florida and Georgia trying to wrest Republican victories from the jaws of defeat in their own technicolor moment.

Well, color me red — and not for conservatism and the GOP, but for seething anger.

I’d actually prefer to see a Democrat in the Senate than a Never-Trumper like McSally. This election was lost at the primary stage.

The question of Stealth Sessions vs Snoozy Sessions has, apparently, been settled:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned under pressure Wednesday after more than a year of public criticism from his boss, President Donald Trump.

Trump’s press secretary Sarah Sanders said the White House received a resignation letter from Sessions, 71, earlier Wednesday and Trump accepted it.

Sessions, a former senator from Alabama, departs after the president repeatedly hammered him about his decision last year to recuse himself from the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin.

Sessions’s public performance as Trump’s AG has been disappointing, especially given his early championing of the God-Emperor. Time will tell if there was anything to his performance out of the public eye or not, but his resignation now tends to indicate that there wasn’t much there.

This also casts some doubt on the veracity of Q. Trust Sessions… to do what? Resign?

So, I called the House for the Republicans at 8:43 PM Eastern time. CNN was nearly in tears, Nate Silver had lowered the odds of Republicans holding the House from 1 in 15 to 1 in 2, and there had been an eight-point turnaround from the pre-election polls favoring the Democratic candidate for Florida governor. Of the two key early House races involving vulnerable Republican incumbents, the one in Virginia went Democrat, the one in Kentucky held.

Game over. Right? It looked like my scenario of the Republicans losing a few seats, but not their House majority had proven correct. So, I called it and turned in.

Then I wake up this morning to reports of +34 Democrats in the House, +3 Republicans in the Senate.

WHAT. THE. HELL?

Now, I don’t mind being wrong, which I obviously was, but I do like to know why. And this combination of being correct about a few things while getting the larger element wrong is puzzling. How could most of the early metrics I’d chosen as indicators favor the Republicans and still produce end results like this? My first stab at explaining the dichotomy:

1. Trump turned the most dangerous areas with his campaigning. Where did he campaign the most heavily? Indiana and Florida. Where did Republicans seriously outperform the polls from the day before, by as much as eight percent in the case of the Florida governer’s race? Indiana and Florida. I should have known to discount the Trump effect elsewhere.
2. The non-incumbency factor. 40 Republican incumbents retired and Democrats took 34 seats. Due to the nature of American politics, it’s always easier for an incumbent to hold his seat than for a newcomer to claim it, even in a favorable district. The numbers don’t match up perfectly, as some of the flipped seats were weakly held where new incumbents swept in on Trump’s 2016 coattails, but I doubt that synchronicity is entirely coincidental.

Discuss amongst yourselves, and feel free to report significant developments as they come in.

The Kentucky 6th District and the Virginia 10th District are supposed to be the first indicators.

I’m watching CNN because I have a cruel streak. Is it just me or are the anchors starting to look just a little perturbed only 29 minutes after the first polls have closed?

DRUDGE: EXIT POLLS SHOW DEM WAVE BUILDING

I suspect he’s just screwing with them, to be honest.

I’ll be starting a Darkstream a few minutes after 7 PM Eastern to discuss the midterm results as they come in.

8:43 PM Eastern: I call KY-06 for Barr. This means Republicans have held the House! All hail the God-Emperor! As anticipated, the much-ballyhooed Blue Wave talked up by the mainstream media did not appear.

“There will be no ‘blue wave’”
– Vox Day, May 31, 2017

They both cannot be correct:

The blue wave is going to hit with a vengeance in Tuesday’s midterm elections, according to pollsters who say Democrats should easily capture the 23 seats they need to regain control of the House. But an upbeat President Trump predicted victory in the Senate — where pollsters say the GOP has a good chance to maintain or widen its majority — and even the House.

“There is a great electricity in the air like we haven’t seen, in my opinion, since the ’16 election,” Trump told reporters before leaving for a rally in Cleveland.

“So, something’s happening . . . I think we’re going to do very well in the House. I have never seen the energy that we have, the energy that this whole party has now, it’s really incredible.”

Whatever the outcome, Trump made it clear these midterm elections are about him.

“In a sense, I am on the ticket,” he said at the rally.

Earlier, in a telephone town hall, the president urged supporters to get out and vote because “the press is very much considering it a referendum on me and us as a movement.”

Every major poll said Trump is wrong about the Republicans maintaining control of the House.

The political website ­FiveThirtyEight calculated that Democrats had an 87.5 percent chance of winning it back.

Similarly, The Cook Political Report said Republicans had a tougher road to maintaining their majority. “We rate 75 races as competitive, including 70 GOP-held seats and just five held by Democrats. A ‘Red Exodus’ is contributing to the potential ‘Blue Wave.’ Of Republicans’ 41 open seats, 15 are rated as toss-ups or worse, and another five only lean Republican,” according to the website.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball, a website run by University of Virginia Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato, predicted that Democrats would easily pick up the necessary 23 seats. But it also cautioned that anything was possible with the country so deeply divided and memories of Trump’s upset win in 2016 still fresh in mind.

Most polls predicted similar results, with a CNN generic ballot survey showing Democrats ahead of Republicans by 55 percent to 42 percent, and the RealClearPolitics average of generic polls showing Democrats leading with 49.7 percent compared with 42.4 percent for Republicans.

If, as I anticipate, Republicans remain in control of the House, this election is going to destroy the rest of the mainstream media’s remaining credibility.

Nate Silver is desperately attempting to remain credible. It’s not working:

FiveThirtyEight’s election forecaster Nate Silver said Sunday that the House could end up in Democratic or Republican hands in Tuesday’s election, though polling predicts that Democrats will flip the chamber.

“So in the House we have Democrats with about a 4 in 5 chance of winning,” Silver told ABC’s “This Week.”

However, he noted that “polls aren’t always right.”

“The range of outcomes in the House is really wide,” he explained. “Our range, which covers 80 percent of outcomes goes from, on the low end, about 15 Democratic pickups, all the way to low to mid 50s, 52 or 53. Most of those are under 23, which is how many seats they would need to win to take the House,” he said.”

“But no one should be surprised if they only win 19 seats and no one should be surprised if they win 51 seats,” Silver added. “Those are both extremely possible, based on how accurate polls are in the real world.”

The low end is 15+ Democrat. Duly noted.

Haunted by memories of 2016, liberals around the country are riven with anxiety in the campaign’s homestretch. They’re suspicious of favorable polls and making election night contingency plans in case their worst fears come true. Some report literal nightmares about a Democratic wipeout.

“We’re kind of just in the bed-wetting phase now,” said Democratic pollster John Anzalone, a Hillary Clinton campaign alumnus who spent election night 2016 in Clinton’s Manhattan war room.

Two years later, even thinking about the prospect of a repeat of that night’s letdown is still too much for many Democrats to bear.

This should be amusing.

Rasmussen Reports is noticing a pattern concerning how Republican voters don’t tend to show their hand:

Just as in 2016, Democrats are more outspoken about how they’re going to vote in the upcoming elections than Republicans and unaffiliated voters are.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 60{01f02ff5c3cf9d4a85478ebd476d665649f9a1508a833d70ddca2c7e9b315fd2} of Likely Democratic Voters say they are more likely to let others know how they intend to vote this year compared to previous congressional elections. This compares to 49{01f02ff5c3cf9d4a85478ebd476d665649f9a1508a833d70ddca2c7e9b315fd2} of Republicans and 40{01f02ff5c3cf9d4a85478ebd476d665649f9a1508a833d70ddca2c7e9b315fd2} of voters not affiliated with either major political party.

In August 2016, 52{01f02ff5c3cf9d4a85478ebd476d665649f9a1508a833d70ddca2c7e9b315fd2} of Democrats were more likely to let others know how they intended to vote in the upcoming presidential election, compared to 46{01f02ff5c3cf9d4a85478ebd476d665649f9a1508a833d70ddca2c7e9b315fd2} of Republicans and 34{01f02ff5c3cf9d4a85478ebd476d665649f9a1508a833d70ddca2c7e9b315fd2} of unaffiliated voters. Some analysts before and after Donald Trump’s upset victory suggested that most pollsters missed his hidden support among voters fearful of criticism who were unwilling to say where they stood.

Similarly when asked now about family, friends and co-workers, 60{01f02ff5c3cf9d4a85478ebd476d665649f9a1508a833d70ddca2c7e9b315fd2} of Democrats say they are also more likely to tell others how they intend to vote, but only 46{01f02ff5c3cf9d4a85478ebd476d665649f9a1508a833d70ddca2c7e9b315fd2} of Republicans and 45{01f02ff5c3cf9d4a85478ebd476d665649f9a1508a833d70ddca2c7e9b315fd2} of unaffiliated voters agree.

Of course Democrats are talk more. They can’t distinguish the narrative from reality. They are magical thinkers who believe that casting a narrative spell creates the reality. In any event, it’s interesting to see how the pollsters are in quiet retreat from their previous narrative now that the actual voting is imminent.

NBC News reported that more people showed up to early voting, outpacing the 2014 midterms by leaps and bounds with a whopping 24,024,621 million ballots having already been counted. For comparison, 2014 only had 12,938,596 counted by this time, putting 2018 at nearly double.