Monthly Archives: November 2024

Bigotry of the Progressive-Democratic Party

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Here’s Barack Obama in the end game runup to Election Day:

You’re coming up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, I’ve got a problem with that. Because part of it makes me think—and I’m speaking to men directly—part of it makes me think that, well, you just aren’t feeling the idea of having a woman as president, and you’re coming up with other alternatives and other reasons for that.

Here’s David Axelrod after the election, while denying that he was making this a big deal:

There were appeals to racism in this campaign, and there is racial bias in this country and there is sexism in this country, and anybody who thinks that that did not in any way impact on the outcome of this race is wrong[.]
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I am not saying that was the main reason that Kamala Harris lost and Donald Trump won….

Sure. Because it couldn’t possibly be that the average American, us American voters couldn’t possibly be more nuanced than a one-issue voter. We couldn’t possibly be dismayed with Kamala Harris’ avowed policies of open borders, price controls, additional regulations. We couldn’t possibly think Kamala Harris simply was a lousy candidate.

Some Thoughts on the Election

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Here, I’m riffing off some Wall Street Journal articles about the election outcome.

Vice President Kamala Harris lost her bid for the White House on Wednesday despite spending most of the funds on an expansive ground operation, staffing and a flood of ads. President-elect Donald Trump won a second term with half of what Harris’s campaign spent.

Maybe there’s something to a businessman’s understanding of expenses and budgeting. It’s also true that the performance of the administration of which Harris was such a vital part was a serious handicap that money had a hard time papering over.

The experts said the economy was doing great. Everyday Americans disagreed.

Everyday Americans, us average Americans, aren’t as dumb or ignorant as the Left, or the press, or the Progressive-Democratic Party insist that we are. And we got tired of their gaslighting and insults.

On Tuesday night, wealthy Democratic donors and operatives, who had been getting positive updates from the campaign throughout the day….

This is either the Progressive-Democrats lying to their own donors or a measure of their own incompetence in reading the voters and reading the incoming returns. Both of those are well within the performance bounds of Party. Party has, after all, been lying to us all about our economy for nearly four years.

In laying blame for Harris’s loss, Democrats were quick to point to Biden’s decision to run for re-election two years ago and the ensuing efforts to quash any dissent from those who thought it was a bad idea or sought to challenge him.

This, also, is typical of the Left and of Party: it’s always someone else’s fault. This part is sort of recognized, if broadly tangentially (yeah, yeah, math majors), by Chris Kofinis, former chief of staff to Senator Joe Manchin (D, WV):

The elites of this country alienated voters everywhere because they didn’t want to hear what working- and middle-class voters were screaming for four years—focus on us and our problems, not your agenda to destroy Trump[.]

Indeed. They’ve—all three: Party, Left in general, and press—have been solely focused on Trump is bad, not Trump policies are bad and Party’s are better. All three, further, ignore working- and middle-class voters because us average Americans are too ignorant and stupid to be worth listening to.

And one overall riff, this on the polls and the pollsters who make them. Once again, as has been the case for the last several election cycles, both Presidential and intermediate, the polls were widely off, especially on the size of the leads and of the victory margins, but also on who would win, though they did get one right. Take the just concluded election as a typical (I claim) example.

The contest was balanced on a knife’s edge, with a (very) slight advantage to Harris. The seven battle ground States each hung on a knife’s edge, also. That’s according to the polls. In the realization, Trump won a decisive victory, and he won solidly five of the battle grounds. The remaining two (as I write Thursday), Nevada and Arizona with 92% and 71% of the votes counted, respectively, have Trump leading by 4 percentage points and 5 percentage points, respectively. If the battle grounds truly were on a knife’s edge, it would be reasonable to expect anywhere between 3 and 5 of them to go to one candidate with the remaining going to the other. The likelihood of all 7 of them going to one candidate (assuming, for this simplified overview, that “knife’s edge” means a 50-50 chance) are a skosh under 0.8%—1 chance in 12,800. Even the likelihood of 5 States going one way (the upper bound of my middle range) is only 3%.

These errors, though, have been repeated over the last several cycles. The likelihood of accurately done polls being so consistently wrong in the same way is even smaller. That strongly suggests either (or both) of two things to me. One is that the pollsters creating these polls are utterly incompetent. They’ve had all these cycle with which to figure out what they’re getting wrong in their poll construction and execution, and they still haven’t succeeded.

Alternatively, the pollsters are dishonest and are focusing their efforts on getting a particular outcome to their surveys so as to construct a narrative favoring one candidate/party over the other rather than simply reporting a potential narrative as told by the pollees in their aggregate.

Either way, it’s become clear that no one with two neurons to bump together into a ganglion can take the pollsters’ products as anything more serious than mindless entertainment.

Republicans Should “Embrace Bipartisanship”

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That’s what current and outgoing Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, NY) insists Republicans should do once they take office next January.

My question to Schumer is this: will you have your Party Senators work with Republicans on bipartisan legislation, or will you and your Senate—and House—colleagues continue to insist that Republicans work with your Party?

Three guesses on Schumer’s answer (assuming he deigns answer at all), and the first two don’t count. Keep in mind, too, as you work out that third answer, that Schumer is the one who stood on the Supreme Court Building steps and threatened—by name—two Supreme Court Justices with severe consequences because those two didn’t “work with” his activist Justices on our Supreme Court.

A Victory

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Last Tuesday is shaping up to become a solid Republican electoral victory.

Former Republican President Donald Trump has won a solid Electoral College and popular vote win, and the Electoral College win may grow, with Arizona and Nevada still uncalled as I write Wednesday afternoon. If Trump gets them all, he’d have 312 Electoral College votes. His popular vote lead, 51% to 47.6%, or 4.8M votes, is unlikely to change much.

The Republicans have taken the majority in the Senate, with Senate races having been called for 52 Republicans. That margin could grow with 4 Senate races yet to be called. It’s unlikely to expand to 56 Republican Senators, though, as only 2 of the uncalled races currently have Republicans leading. Even so, the shift to the current solid majority is a major victory; a shift to 54 would be even more so.

The Republicans can still retain their House majority, given the number of uncalled races; however, it’ll remain a slim majority, which will allow the Republican Chaos Caucus to retain their outsized power. On the other hand, the Republicans are on the threshold of losing their majority to the Progressive-Democrats, which would render the Chaos Caucus irrelevant.

More importantly than a Republican victory, though, this is a victory for our nation. That’s not because the Republicans won or the Progressive-Democrats lost; rather it’s the solidity of the victory that creates the national victory. With that broad mandate—especially if the voters choose to keep the Republicans in the House majority—there now comes the possibility of putting the divisiveness of the last 16 years behind us. There now exists the possibility of our nation coming back together as a nation, and a culture, of Americans.

That possibility depends on how effectively the Republicans govern. It also depends on the Progressive-Democratic Party’s willingness to accept its defeat and work with Republicans on getting some things done and other things undone rather than being the knee-jerk obstructionist, anti anything Republican Party they have been (that the Republicans need to stop being similarly obstructionist is a part of their ability to govern objectively).

It also depends on the intrinsically mendacious press recognizing its own failures of the last several decades, made overtly manifest in the last couple of decades, and taking publicly and concretely measurable steps to rid itself of its dishonesty and return to its Fourth Estate role of objectively reporting all the news in its stories and all of the stories, while keeping its opinions out of that news reporting and in its opinion pages.

Gaslighting and Misapprehension

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The People’s Republic of China’s solar panel production industry is running into a glut problem that is seriously depressing prices, to the point that in the current shakeout, many of the PRC-domiciled companies may not survive.

One place where panel prices remain elevated is the United States (thank you, Federal regulations and continued dependence on overseas component supplies), and one PRC-domiciled company that’s likely to survive is LONGi Green Energy Technology Co, Ltd, headquartered in Xi’an, the provincial capital of Shaanxi. In an effort to get around US strictures on PRC companies, LONGi has become a 49% owner of the joint venture (with Invenergy, headquartered in Chicago) of Illuminate USA, and the venture has opened a factory in Pataskala, OH.

The good folks of Pataskala are concerned about LONGi’s connections with the Chinese Communist Party, and Congresswoman Carol Miller (R, WV) has proposed more general legislation that would seek to prevent PRC companies from getting clean-energy subsidies.

Naturally, Zhong Baoshen, LONGi’s Chairman, objects, and herein lies the gaslighting. He insists that LONGi is a private company, and he then tries to distract by pointing out that Illuminate USA is a private company.

That fact is, there is no such thing as a private company in the PRC. Under that nation’s 2017 National Intelligence law, all PRC-domiciled companies are at the beck of the government’s intelligence community to use all of a company’s resources to conduct espionage whenever and targeting whatever the intelligence community decides it wants.

That leads to the misapprehension: too many entities—private companies in the US, politicians at all of the several US governmental hierarchies—actually believe that blandishment that private PRC companies really are private and have no connection whatsoever with any arm of the PRC government.