Author Archives: eehines

“Gatekeepers of Political Discourse”

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That’s how even The Wall Street Journal terms the press. This, as it notices the decreasing control influence the press has on what us average Americans are allowed to know about the political doings of our politicians.

A new media landscape has emerged. The traditional gatekeepers of political discourse—TV networks and newspapers—are shrinking in influence as Americans turn to many more outlets for information.

This comes especially in the wake of the last eight-ish years of naked bias by the press, a period wherein The New York Times has openly announced that there can no longer be objectivity in news reporting, newspapers must take sides, and a major broadcast news anchor announced that there are not two sides to every story; there can be only one side to many. In furtherance of those decisions, the press actively proselytizes on its news pages for its chosen candidates and party while actively suppressing stories that provide different information or that show their denigrated party and candidates in a good light. The press also suppresses stories that cast its chosen party/candidate in a negative light.

Beyond politics, the press actively spikes writing that contradicts its settlement of climate “science,” with the Los Angeles Times saying that it would no longer publish letters to the editor that disputed the LAT‘s determination of the proper discussion.

It’s no wonder that us average Americans no longer take the press seriously and are moving away from it toward other sources—including straight from the horse’s mouth in the podcasts that are becoming ubiquitous, and on some social media outlets like X, Truth Social, even the dangerous TikTok. If we can’t entirely trust these alternative outlets, we can at least hear what the candidates—and other guests—are saying, without the gatekeepers’ censorship filter.

Veteran’s Day

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I first posted this in 2011; I added to it in 2014.

Thank you for all who have, and are, serving. And because I couldn’t have said it better, I’ll let Mike Royko, late of the Chicago Tribune, via Coastal Courier, say it from his 1993 column.

I just phoned six friends and asked them what they will be doing on Monday.
They all said the same thing: working.
Me, too.
There is something else we share. We are all military veterans.
And there is a third thing we have in common. We are not employees of the federal government, state government, county government, municipal government, the Postal Service, the courts, banks, or S & Ls, and we don’t teach school.
If we did, we would be among the many millions of people who will spend Monday goofing off.
Which is why it is about time Congress revised the ridiculous terms of Veterans Day as a national holiday.
The purpose of Veterans Day is to honor all veterans.
So how does this country honor them?…
…By letting the veterans, the majority of whom work in the private sector, spend the day at their jobs so they can pay taxes that permit millions of non-veterans to get paid for doing nothing.
As my friend Harry put it:
“First I went through basic training. Then infantry school. Then I got on a crowded, stinking troop ship that took 23 days to get from San Francisco to Japan. We went through a storm that had 90 percent of the guys on the ship throwing up for a week.
“Then I rode a beat-up transport plane from Japan to Korea, and it almost went down in the drink. I think the pilot was drunk.
“When I got to Korea, I was lucky. The war ended seven months after I got there, and I didn’t kill anybody and nobody killed me.
“But it was still a miserable experience. Then when my tour was over, I got on another troop ship and it took 21 stinking days to cross the Pacific.
“When I got home on leave, one of the older guys at the neighborhood bar — he was a World War II vet — told me I was a —-head because we didn’t win, we only got a tie.
“So now on Veterans Day I get up in the morning and go down to the office and work.
“You know what my nephew does? He sleeps in. That’s because he works for the state.
“And do you know what he did during the Vietnam War? He ducked the draft by getting a job teaching at an inner-city school.
“Now, is that a raw deal or what?”
Of course that’s a raw deal. So I propose that the members of Congress revise Veterans Day to provide the following:
– All veterans — and only veterans — should have the day off from work. It doesn’t matter if they were combat heroes or stateside clerk-typists.
Anybody who went through basic training and was awakened before dawn by a red-neck drill sergeant who bellowed: “Drop your whatsis and grab your socks and fall out on the road,” is entitled.
– Those veterans who wish to march in parades, make speeches or listen to speeches can do so. But for those who don’t, all local gambling laws should be suspended for the day to permit vets to gather in taverns, pull a couple of tables together and spend the day playing poker, blackjack, craps, drinking and telling lewd lies about lewd experiences with lewd women. All bar prices should be rolled back to enlisted men’s club prices, Officers can pay the going rate, the stiffs.
– All anti-smoking laws will be suspended for Veterans Day. The same hold for all misdemeanor laws pertaining to disorderly conduct, non-felonious brawling, leering, gawking and any other gross and disgusting public behavior that does not harm another individual.
– It will be a treasonable offense for any spouse or live-in girlfriend (or boyfriend, if it applies) to utter the dreaded words: “What time will you be home tonight?”
– Anyone caught posing as a veteran will be required to eat a triple portion of chipped beef on toast, with Spam on the side, and spend the day watching a chaplain present a color-slide presentation on the horrors of VD.
– Regardless of how high his office, no politician who had the opportunity to serve in the military, but didn’t, will be allowed to make a patriotic speech, appear on TV, or poke his nose out of his office for the entire day.
Any politician who defies this ban will be required to spend 12 hours wearing headphones and listening to tapes of President Clinton explaining his deferments.
Now, deal the cards and pass the tequila.
– Mike Royko

Next, because this is a day of remembrance and of honoring our surviving veterans, take another moment to visit here and take in Mark Toomey’s piece.

And follow his advice at the end.

“Firsts”

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Earlier, it was Barack Obama becoming the US’ first black President and Michelle Obama becoming the first black First Lady. Then it was Melania Trump becoming the first immigrant/naturalized American First Lady (when the Left and the press were willing to take notice of her at all). Then it was Kamala Harris becoming the first black and woman Vice President. Then it was Harris with the potential to become the first black woman President. Now it’s Usha Vance who will become America’s first Indian-American and first Hindu First Lady.

All of that is manufactured by our press and by the Left’s and Progressive-Democratic Party politicians’ fixation on identity politics.

It’s time for the Left and for Party to leave off from their sexist and racist othering of our people through their intrinsically segregationist identity politics sewage. The only time race and sex will cease to matter is when all of us stop artificially making it matter.

The only thing to say about the Obamas, Trump, Harris, and Vance in this regard is that they are Americans assuming, or having had the potential of assuming, those positions and responsibilities. And we’ve had only Americans in those positions since our inception.

Full stop.

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[.]
…
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.