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Musings Politics

We Need Voting Reform

We need voting reform. Nationwide. I don’t know if we need a commission, or an amendment to the Constitution, or what, but this is embarrassing.

We all see the loopholes and trapdoors and flaws so big you can fly a 747 through them. We have people on video committing fraud and the secretary of state or the local DA (always from the party that would benefit) “looks into it” and pronounces it fine. The excellent 1940 film “The Great McGinty” opens with a vote-buying scheme that would still work today so long as you have a corrupt election judge who knows the names of eligible voters who won’t be voting. When Iraqis voted and dipped their fingers into purple ink to prevent their voting twice, I can’t be the only American who said, “And we don’t do that in America because………?????”

There are tons of good ideas, but let’s start with the very basics:

  • Photo ID. You are required to show a photo ID with the correct address, or along with proof of your recent move to a new address. There is no reason not to do this, and it’s an insult to Black people that Democrats keep openly saying that it will deny them the vote. Go watch the videos of black people being asked if they know anyone without a photo ID. Any such photo ID law will include the proviso that IDs will be provided at no cost to anyone who doesn’t have one. The effort that Democrats have made fighting this could have been put into finding IDs for anyone that needs them. Of course, the real reason Democrats fight this is that they have a lot of Democrat voters that shouldn’t be voting.
  • Purge the voter rolls every 4 years, right after the presidential election. By “purge” I mean keep the data, but deactivated. That way, no one’s retyping everything. Every voter will be required to re-register. Send out reminders six months before the next election to anyone on that list who hasn’t, and permanently purge any returned cards. Anyone who hasn’t re-registered gets permanently wiped from the rolls. No dead people voting, no people who moved voting absentee, The parties will help with re-registration efforts. (See next.)
  • Registration ends 30 days before the election. No registration on election day. Once this is established, there will be plenty of ado (incessant reminders from Facebook, for example) to get registered or you won’t be able to vote on Election Day. One nice thing about this is that anyone who couldn’t be bothered to register won’t be dragged to the polls on Election Day, and the parties won’t have to make such a “find every last voter” effort all the way to November.
  • Election Day is Election Day. It’s not Election Month. It should bother everybody that voting started before there was a single debate. Think that doesn’t affect anything? The TOP GOOGLE SEARCH after the last debate was “How do I change my vote?”
  • Absentee voting is only for absentees. A pandemic is one thing, but absentee votes are problematic. They are NOT ideal and they are NOT the way we should be going. There are numerous problems including untrustworthy mail carriers, but let’s start with the simple fact that you are voting insecurely. Just one cliched example: What if there’s some brow-beaten wife whose husband stands over her watching who she votes for? We are guaranteed a secret ballot. Absentee votes are necessary for military, election judges (like me), and plenty of other situations, but you need to have a reason and you need to request them. Mailing out requests for ballots willy-nilly this year may be the single easiest way to corrupt our election, and certainly could explain the high results. (Powerline pointed out step-by-step how easy it would be to cheat if you get mailed a request intended for someone else.)
  • Nursing Home Voting. While we’re on the subject, we need to do more to have mailed ballots in nursing homes witnessed by party observers. Nursing home workers are not sworn to any kind of fairness. They are not election judges.
  • Absentee ballots need to be in by the election, not dribbling in by a certain cutoff day. Yes, even for military working remotely, and we just need to make sure they have the time they need to mail them back. Some states will take them WEEKS after the election (looking at you, California) so long as they’re postmarked by election day. You’re telling me in this huge country no cheater can possibly get hold of a postal stamp?
  • Don’t worry about making voting easy. It’s easy enough. You make sure you’re registered, you show up, you vote. If toughening up the rules means someone who couldn’t be bothered shows up on election day complaining that no, they didn’t register, but they have a right to vote, tell them to register for the next one.
  • Anyone registering on election day will be registered for the next election. Those registrations will be first in line to be processed after the purge. Hey, I’m not a monster.

That “making voting easy” part is in direct opposition to the notions of the Democrats. Every idea they come up with for improving elections is aimed at making it easier. The sloppiest standards, the easiest requirements, let people have an entire month because being there a certain day is too hard, let them just mail it in, at least until we can just all vote by Internet. They want it to be easy because the lazy and the stupid are the most likely to vote Democrat.

Frankly, if not for the Democrats using Jim Crow chicanery to deny Blacks the vote for 100 years after Republicans secured their right to vote, I’d be for making it tougher. For everyone of every color. I’d have a brief little quiz you have to pass. Simple things, like the three branches of government, which branch controls the budget, what’s the name of the current vice president, etc. (Democrats may find it appealing that all the newly-naturalized immigrants would pass and the white kids going to public school would be baffled.) I watch all those videos of people on the street who can’t find the USA on a globe and don’t know the first POTUS’s name and I’m OK with not everyone voting. But, that’s a fantasy. A well-intentioned one, but I’m sure someone somewhere would twist it to their own ends. So no, no quizzes required to vote.

I watch the news every election year and I think I’d prefer strict to sloppy. As this Trump/Biden thing goes through legal challenges and we learn about the precincts with 125% turnout, you tell me if I’m wrong.

Categories
Musings Politics

First Female President?

If Biden is sworn in, I wish him better health than he appears to have.

But only because it will be a horrible thing if the first woman president is someone who only has a political career because she slept with a guy and then only got on the ticket from rank tokenism. (“It will be a minority woman. Oh, there’s only a couple to choose from? Okay, that one.”)

The first woman president should be elected as president.

I should make it clear: I’d love to have a woman president, but it must be a Republican woman. The big problem is, we don’t have too many charismatic conservative women to choose from, and the ones that we do have don’t necessarily have that presidential quality. Consider: we may have only elected white men so far, but out of thousands of possible white men, there are only a few who are presidential. Thus, we need to have many more female Republicans if we’re going to find that diamond in the rough who could be President.

Democrats pretend to be all about the identity politics, but then they keep voting out our women and minorities. I was really hoping that the magnificent Kim Klacik would be joining the slate of new G.O.P. Congresswomen this next year, but she lost her race. Mia Love was charming as well, but she lost her Utah seat in the 2018 “we hate Trump” landslide.

I liked Sarah Palin even before 2008. She was one of the party’s up and comers. Palin appeared on Craig Ferguson’s show granting him U.S. Citizenship (not really) and he commented on her “sexy librarian” allure. For a long time, I’d regarded John McCain’s selection of her as his running mate as the only good decision he’d made as a politician.

(That’s a pretty good conservative detector right there: When she made her speech at the convention, we fired-up conservatives were asking, “Now, how can we flip the ticket and make McCain the veep?” Meanwhile, the Peggy Noonan milquetoast Republican crowd said, “Ugh, well, this campaign is over.”)

Sarah Palin
The Super Candidate, Sarah Palin

However, I was wrong. Not about Palin, about McCain. Had he not grabbed her so late in the game, she’d have had time to prep. Palin was middle class and had a big family, so she didn’t have a lot of fancy clothes for campaigning. (That’s why we kept seeing the same dress initially. Campaigning in Alaska involves a lot of hats and gloves and coats; not so much in the warmer climes.) Her buying a bunch of clothes right away was immediately used against her. Notice that no word was mentioned about Hillary Clinton’s clothes, given that she had decades to acquire them, and a First Ladyship and a rich, famous husband. And then that stumbling interview (hardly the gentle tongue bath the media would give a woman veep if she were a Democrat) where she was grilled about what newspapers and magazines she reads. Surprise! She reads the Internet and doesn’t really pay attention to which web site she’s on, like the rest of us. Of course, that doesn’t sit well with news broadcasters of a certain age.

Had McCain not plucked Palin before she was ripe, had she stayed on as Alaska governor another term or two, she’d have emerged as a Presidential candidate at the time and place of her choosing. Instead, she was tied to John McCain’s inept candidacy and then returned home only to find that the Democrats weren’t going to leave her alone but instead filed lawsuits against her. She finally quit as governor when she realized she couldn’t give the governorship the full attention it deserved, at which point Democrats harassed her for being a quitter. Typical bullies. They pick on you until you cry, and then they pick on you for crying.

This year, we’ve elected over a dozen new Republican women to Congress, including Colorado’s gunslinging Lauren Boebert.

Lauren Boebert of Colorado.

That’s a start.

I know that the left thinks that Republicans don’t support female candidates. Ask ANY Republican if he’d rather have Joe Biden or an American-born Maggie Thatcher as our president.

FWIW: Kim Klacik should just run for President. Donald Trump proved you don’t need to be a lifelong politician (although he was a man of many accomplishments). Whatever she does, I sure hope she’s able to exploit her talents as a Republican somewhere, somehow. Breaks my heart that she isn’t representing Baltimore.

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Politics

Joe and Kamala are wearing masks because…

Proper Mask Etiquette
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Musings

Hey, Newsweek, What States Can We Cheat In?

I went looking for a list of the states that will collect ballots after the election. I found a Newsweek (I know) piece entitled “These states invalidate mail-in ballots after Election Day.”

A better title would be “Here Are The 16 States That Will Enable Rampant Fraud In The Upcoming Election.” (Plus Washington DC)

Aside from Alaska, where I can see a valid reason for accepting late mail, all of the others are giving from three days to HALF A MONTH (freakin’ California) for the ballots to be received and be counted, and the only thing stopping fraud is that they must be postmarked by Election Day.

Oh. Postmarked. HEY! Remember this New York Post article about that Democrat operative who talked about how many corrupt post office people they have on their side? You don’t imagine that, somewhere in the vastness of America, that dirty tricksters will be able to get their hands on a postmarking device? Naw, I’m sure those are harder to get than the key to Fort Knox, right? Because all you’d need is a postmarking device, and a huge pile of those ballots they’re mailing out to erroneous recipients, and the knowledge that day after the election of how many votes you need to tip it over to Biden in Iowa, Kansas, Florida, Maryland, North Dakota, Utah and West Virginia, and you just may have some dirty pool.

OH! Wait! I’m wrong. In the sixth paragraph, the “journalist” Alexandra Hutzler says that “President Donald Trump does not back voting by mail and falsely claims that it will lead to increased fraud.”

So…any worries of fraud are false. Glad we have the press to blindly assure us.

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Musings

It’s Not Always Your Court To Pack

Democrats are already offering up the idea that if Trump rushes through a replacement, Biden and a Democratic Congress will threaten to expand the Supreme Court with two more justices.

Question: Do Democrats never consider that they won’t always be in charge? Whether it’s getting rid of the filibuster, or the Electoral College, or packing an expanded court, these things are always discussed as though Republicans are an accounting error and Democrats should be ruling with massive majorities from now on. If the election goes the other way and Trump were to have a GOP House and Senate, would it be okay for THEM to expand the court to Eleven (prompting endless Nigel Tufnel quotes)? To be clear: I’m NOT in favor of doing that. I don’t know any Republicans who want that. But at some point it becomes uneven political warfare to not fight fire with fire. (That’s why the nuclear option on filibusters got turned around on people who first proposed it when they were in charge.)

I’ve been dreading this day just because Democrats are such utter hateful asshats when it comes to the Supreme Court. When a Democrat President nominates liberal activists to the Court, the Senate Republicans give token opposition but generally stick to the idea that the President gets to make his appointment and the Senate approves or disapproves. (After all, there are endless activists to offer in their place if that one is defeated. It’s not like if they ruin a Democrat’s life it will cause Obama to offer forth a conservative judge.) When a Republican nominates a strict constructionist, that person gets his life destroyed and pretty soon he’s accused of running rape gang parties. Thomas and Kavanaugh may have been vindicated but their names are still tarnished forever because the Democrats in our media hang on to the lies. (The main reason I will never rewatch “Jerry Maguire.”)

And yes, Kavanaugh was vindicated. Remember Christine Blasey Ford’s “hurt little girl” voice that sounds nothing like how she actually talks? (She forgot that, as a professor, there are recordings of the way she really sounds as a competent professional woman.) When your best friend says she wasn’t at that party at the house that doesn’t exist, you have no case. But as they say…where do you go to get your reputation back? I’m 90% certain the next nominee will be a woman just because Democrats may decide to keep their powder dry.

Categories
Musings Personal Life Politics

The Fine Line of Multiculturalism

I once had to do a mulitcultural appreciation session at a Fortune 500 company that you would recognize. (NOT my current employer.) This nice lady said that we needed to appreciate how many cultures are very different from ours.  What followed is, to this day, my favorite tale of the joys of multiculturalism.
“Does anyone have any examples of cultural differences that they have experienced?” she asked.
A woman stood up and said, “Our group went to Japan. Everyone smiles and bows and gives you little gifts when they meet you at the airport. Also, honor is big with them. Everything is about honor.”
The team leader quietly pointed to a different guy.
He said, “We spent a half a year in Germany. They are very strict and structured. The entire day is on a tight schedule and they are very organized, and they don’t ever joke or smile.”
Now a bit flustered, she quickly left that guy to point to another one.
“We spent a few months working with a programming group in Ireland.”
Oh dear.
“I think the big difference from here in America is that when it’s five o’clock the work day ends immediately, and then the entire town, just everybody, goes straight to the pubs… and I don’t mean for like one little after-work drink, they seriously spend the entire evening there! Everybody’s drinking, all evening, every day of the week, for hours and hours.”
She stopped asking for examples.
 
This session was very educational, as I learned that “multicultural appreciation” and “stereotypes exist for a reason” walk a very thin razor’s edge.

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Musings Politics

And this wonderful Tim Pawlenty could have been ours

Tim Pawlenty’s statements regarding his loss on Tuesday are a great insight into how terrible a candidate he was.
I already disliked him because he skipped the caucus and convention entirely.  Why did he do that? Because it would have been humiliating to lose there. He had a lot of powerful money men behind him but not enough actual support, so he figured he could just do a primary and bury the actual endorsed candidate in advertisements since he could easily outspend the guy.
This is already annoying. Primary elections cost money and drain the funds that are needed in the actual fall race.  One of you will be on the ballot in November, but sure, let’s spend months with political infighting, using up donations to run ads and send mailings telling us about how the other person is not really a member of the party at all, or to publicize numerous scandals.  Let’s just do the opposition party’s work for them before the November race.
 
Then, having lost anyway, Pawlenty says that he doesn’t recognize the party anymore and it’s gone too much towards Trump. Really? So, having been spurned, he tries to poison the party as much as possible in the eyes of the voters for the general election. It can’t be that they just don’t like him. He can’t just be a good sport, say the party has decided and that it has his full support…as many decent politicians have done for ages. No. Republicans must have changed into something too far away from where he stands. He’s sabotaging the party in the wake of his defeat.  He’s a decent Republican but there just aren’t many of those left anymore, it would seem.
Not a bad word to be said about Democrats, his actual opponents that he was supposed to defeat.  Not a bad word said about the Socialist direction of the Democrat Party.  Oh, if we’d picked him, he was going to fight the good fight.  But having lost, his only focus is on how the Republicans are going down the Trump toilet and isn’t that sad.  Apparently, all of his supporters don’t have a party anymore.
Gosh, what an awesome governor he would have made.
 
He’s like a guy who proposes to a woman because she’s just the most beautiful, most intelligent, most caring, most perfect lady in the world…and when she declines, he immediately shouts to the room what a horrid, worthless, diseased slut she is.
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Musings Politics

She’s a private citizen and not in office

It bugs me that Hillary keeps going on about the election and American politics while speaking overseas, but I remind myself that she’s a private citizen and not in office and thus free to say what she likes.

And I think of three things:

  1. Ms. Clinton cannot get over her gender and thinks opposition to a woman candidate is responsible, and not that she is a loathsome criminal lefty individual.  It would help female candidates who want to convince us that a female president will be just fine and no different if they acted no different from male candidates. When men fail to achieve the presidency, they say “The American people have spoken” and sulk privately. Judging by 100% of the female candidates to have tried for the office, if you don’t give it to them, they’re going to complain endlessly about how you were wrong.
  2. Her telling what she thinks about this issue and that issue just helps to remind us that she would not have gotten out of the Iran deal, our economy would not be coming back because she’d have done all the opposite moves, etc. Instead of having to ponder “what if,” she’s letting us know how her fantasy presidency would have played out.  That just gives those with remorse over their 2016 vote more ammo that they made the right choice.
  3. Reminding myself that Hillary Clinton is a private citizen and not in office also makes me reflect that she’s a private citizen and not in office.

She’s a private citizen and not in office.

A little mantra for when you’re having a bad day.

Categories
Musings Politics

Delivering a Severe Beating to Straw Men Everywhere

I don’t know the source, but this appears on a classroom wall:

Text on a classroom wall

Let’s take these 1 by 1…

  1. Dear Black Students: In this classroom, your life matters. (But only in the classroom, apparently. Huh. I would have said it matters everywhere.)
  2. Dear Muslim Students: You are not terrorists. (That is, unless this unknown wall is from the University of Dartmouth, Bunker Hill Community College , Chowan University or North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Virginia Tech or USUHS, Stanford University, Indian State College, California State University, UC-Merced, UT-Chattanooga, and on and on and on. Actually, this may be the stupidest statement up here because how can anyone categorically state it?)
  3. Dear LGBTQ+whatever: Your life is beautiful and allowed to expand past fake social rules. (Otherwise known as actual social rules, because nobody has to overcome fake rules. As for “your life is beautiful”, that’s the kind of meaningless uplifting pap one can say so long as you’re not actually picturing the hairy men in ass-less chaps at the parade.)
  4. Dear Female Students: Men cannot grab you. (They have hands. They can. Grammar aside, lots of women love being grabbed…especially by billionaires who are known to swap out wives for new hotties. I think this one needs a total rewrite to address the real issue of consent. And by the way…how LOW is the bar now that this is all you’re willing to say to the female students? So…rapes will NOT be happening on the pinball game during class time? Finally, a professor willing to take a stand on this troubling issue!)
  5. Dear Latino(a) Students: You are not rapists and drug dealers. (There absolutely are some of these of every race on any campus, so this one is even statistically more unwise than the terrorist one.)
  6. Dear Illegal Immigrant Students whose only difficulty is a lack of papers which happens when you break the law: In this classroom there are no walls. (Says the…sign. On a wall.)
Categories
Film Musings Politics

Hollywooooood On Strike!

So celebrities are trying to get a huge strike going, which will last until Trump steps down.

Really.

So, let me understand the “threat” here:

  • We won’t see Rosie O’Donnell, Ed Asner, or any of the other committed liberals who join the strike on our screens until the strike ends.
  • Republicans like Michael Bay will still make movies.
  • The movies, now “hurting” for stars, will employ the Republican actors who sometimes struggle due to their outspoken views. Dwight Schultz will play the spy chief giving out assignments to superspy Freddie Prinze Jr. as he battles arch-villain Clint Howard.
  • Since most of the gays in the industry will be protesting, the remaining working actors will look less metrosexual and more rugged because no one is doing their hair or make-up.
  • If successful, the movie industry will take a huge hit, crippling the economy of the biggest blue state, leaving thousands of liberals unemployed or struggling, and there will be less money to donate to Democrats.

Did ANYONE think this through?