Category Archives: Democrats

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Let them eat cake!

This site noted, two days after the election, that the college-educated elites who supported Kamala Harris Emhoff just couldn’t understand how a majority of Americans didn’t just love her to death and cast the vast majority of their votes for her. We pointed out on Friday that working class voters along the Mexican border in Texas were casting their votes for Donald Trump because the economy that the Democrats told us was so very great wasn’t so great for them.

The following article from The Philadelphia Inquirer wasn’t about the election at all, but it seems to me that it says a lot about it:

$500 hair appointments are becoming the norm as the cost of cuts and colors rise

The increased costs of color and other products, as well as the greater complexity of trending hairstyles, have led many salon owners to raise their prices over the past five years.

by Erin McCarthy | Monday, November 4, 2024 | 5:00 AM EST

Erica Kovelman pays about $2,000 a year to maintain her honey blond locks and keep her naturally brunette roots at bay.

“I definitely am hitting a point where I’m like ‘this is very expensive,’” said the 30-year-old Center City resident. But she keeps paying to maintain professional appearances.

Kovelman has felt the financial sting more as the bill for each color-and-cut appointment has increased to between $400 and $500, plus a 20% tip, she said. A few years ago, it was closer to $300.

She’s far from alone: The cost of personal-care services — which also include dental, shaving, and other grooming — have jumped 27% nationwide since 2019, according to the Consumer Price Index.

I will admit to some surprise that dental care is part of personal-care services, rather than health care. But I have to ask the obvious question: can a 30-year-old not “maintain professional appearances” as a brunette? Zillow tells us that the median rent in the City of Brotherly Love is $1,600 a month, so Miss Kovelman is paying, with the specified 20% tip, $600 a month, or more than a third of an average month’s rent. It might be two weeks worth of groceries, or all of her utilities for two months. To me, a guy whose barber charges a whopping $12 for a haircut — I normally just hand him a $20 bill — the bills that reporter Erin McCarthy wrote about are just plain insane.

Miss Kovelman’s hair care bills are, of course, her personal choice, and if she’s spending “about $2,000 a year”, that’s on her. I would guess that the ladies living in Kensington or Strawberry Mansion probably spend less.

According to statista.com, Donald Trump won the votes of those making $30,000 to $99,000 a year, but Mrs Emhoff did far better among those earning $100,000 a year and above. Thus, while we don’t know Miss Kovelman’s vote individually, I infer that many of the customers of these “high-end salons” voted Democratic last Tuesday.

Is it any surprise that these well-to-do ladies just can’t get a grasp on why the Latinas in south Texas voted for Mr Trump? If they are spending, if they are able to spend, $500 or even more on hair coloring and a professional cut, is it any surprise that the well-paid talking heads on CNN and MSNBC, on The Washington Post’s Editorial Board and cabal of columnists just never got it? Let them eat cake!

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The Washington Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s investigation of President Nixon and Watergate, bringing down a Republican president, chose to protect a Democrat.

“Democracy Dies in Darkness”, huh?

The Washington Post added that tagline to its masthead in February of 2017, claiming that it wasn’t an attack on newly inaugurated President Donald Trump, deciding “to come up with a slogan nearly a year ago, long before Trump was the Republican presidential nominee,” though nobody in particular believed that. I question the timing, as Robert Stacy McCain would say.

The paper’s owner, Amazon.com founder Jeffrey P. Bezos, used the phrase in an interview with The Post’s executive editor, Martin Baron, at a tech forum at The Post last May. “I think a lot of us believe this, that democracy dies in darkness, that certain institutions have a very important role in making sure that there is light,” he said at the time, speaking of his reasons for buying the paper.

I am glad that my favorite reporter, Heather Long, stepped back from the newspaper’s Editorial Board a couple of months ago, so that she can’t be blamed for this drivel.

Trying to protect Biden, Democrats sacrificed their credibility

Democrats’ coverup of the president’s decline hurt their claim of being the party of truth.

by the Editorial Board |Friday, November 8, 2024 | 7:19 PM EST

Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t just call special counsel Robert K. Hur’s report “gratuitous, inaccurate and inappropriate” when it came out in February. She claimed he was “clearly politically motivated” and impugned his integrity. Mr. Hur, appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland to investigate Joe Biden’s mishandling of classified material, recommended that the 81-year-old president not face charges, partly because a jury could reasonably conclude that he’s “a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” That assessment was based on Mr. Biden’s frequent forgetfulness and hazy answers during five hours of interviews with prosecutors. Speaking to reporters, Ms. Harris reacted furiously: “The way that the president’s demeanor in that report was characterized could not be more wrong.”

Mr. Hur has been repeatedly vindicated during the intervening nine months. The interview transcripts, when they came out, bolstered his conclusions. If anything, the truth was worse than what Mr. Hur described.

And the third paragraph has the money line:

It’s now acknowledged almost universally that Mr. Biden should not have sought a second term, but the Democratic establishment denied the obvious and propped him up politically, even as evidence of his decline mounted. Prominent Democratic politicians changed their tune only after a disastrous debate performance in June made it impossible to conceal Mr. Biden’s frailty from the public any longer — and forced them to confront the possibility of electoral disaster in November.

I’m laughing out loud. “(T)he Democratic establishment denied the obvious and propped him up politically, even as evidence of his decline mounted”? How about the credentialed media, including Washington Post reporters?

Independent blogs saw this all along. William Teach of The Pirate’s Cove noted several times how Mr Biden and his staff were capping off his days during the 2020 campaign, yet did anyone on the Post try to investigate that? Conservatives on Twitter — I refuse to call it 𝕏 — have been pointing out his stumbles, physical and mental, for years now, but somehow, some way, the journolists at CNN, MSNBC, The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC, CBS, NBC, and seemingly everyone else in the media, never noticed and never knew?

Democrats tried to make fidelity to science, facts and truth their distinguishing characteristic as a party. The White House’s aggressive coverup of Mr. Biden’s decline undermined that claim. Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minnesota) was the only lawmaker willing to challenge Mr. Biden for the Democratic presidential nomination. He was ostracized and lost his spot in House leadership. Mr. Biden’s allies concocted terms such as “cheap fakes” to dismiss embarrassing video clips in which Mr. Biden appeared dazed, confused, tired and inaudible. Allies of the president frequently labeled content they didn’t approve of as “disinformation,” cheapening the term. When a few journalists reported accurately on Mr. Biden’s decline, the White House fed critical talking points about their stories to others in the media.

That last link, when a “few journalists reported accurately on Mr. Biden’s decline,” wasn’t from the Post, but The Wall Street Journal. Apparently, the Editorial Board were unable to come up with such a link to their own newspaper.

This article is based on interviews with more than 45 people over several months. The interviews were with Republicans and Democrats who either participated in meetings with Biden or were briefed on them contemporaneously, including administration officials and other Democrats who found no fault in the president’s handling of the meetings. Most of those who said Biden performed poorly were Republicans, but some Democrats said that he showed his age in several of the exchanges.

The White House kept close tabs on some of The Wall Street Journal’s interviews with Democratic lawmakers. After the offices of several Democrats shared with the White House either a recording of an interview or details about what was asked, some of those lawmakers spoke to the Journal a second time and once again emphasized Biden’s strengths.

“They just, you know, said that I should give you a call back,” said Rep. Gregory Meeks, a New York Democrat, referring to the White House.

There’s a lot more at the original, but the obvious question is: if Journal reporters Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes could investigate this, why couldn’t the reporters at the Post?

This wasn’t the only Wall Street Journal article noting that Mr Biden’s physical and mental condition had deteriorated, though this one appeared after the debate.

Minutes into Thursday night’s presidential debate, the concerns began gushing into the open.

Yet they had already become increasingly apparent in Washington’s corridors of power and across the world for months. In interviews, top officials abroad and Democrats said they have witnessed other moments when Biden’s behavior concerned them. Some were quickly relieved when Biden appeared to regain his footing. Others were left shaken by the experiences.

European officials had already been expressing worries in private about Biden’s focus and stamina before Thursday’s debate, with some senior diplomats saying they had tracked a noticeable deterioration in the president’s faculties in meetings since last summer. There were real doubts about how Biden could successfully manage a second term, but one senior European diplomat said U.S. administration officials in private discussions denied there was any problem.

The journolists knew; they all knew. In a climate where no secret other than Ghislaine Maxwell’s client list can be kept, and with 434 Representatives and 100 Senators running around, gossiping among themselves, does anyone seriously believe that the reporters didn’t know? Republicans had already been telling us that, and the non-credentialed media were touting the story, but somehow, some way, the reporters with the legacy media either never investigated the story themselves, or had the reports quashed by their editors if they did. The Post, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s investigation of President Nixon and Watergate, bringing down a Republican president, chose to protect a Democrat.

It’s pretty obvious that when the Editorial Board wrote, “(T)he Democratic establishment denied the obvious and propped him up politically, even as evidence of his decline mounted,” they were including themselves in “the Democratic establishment”.

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Yet another liberal blames Democrats’ loss on Freedom of Speech

I saw Michael Tomasky’s whining article in The New Republic on Friday, and mused about commenting on it, but Robert Stacy McCain beat me to it. It’s a good article, and I recommend it.

Mr Tomasky blames Kamala Harris Emhoff’s defeat on those poor, ignorant, unedumacated saps who don’t get their information exclusively from the mostly liberal credentialed media, The New York Times, The Washington Post — which lost over 250,000 subscribers when owner Jeff Bezos cancelled the upcoming endorsement of Mrs Emhoff — ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and the other approved credentialed media outlets. I’m guessing that he wouldn’t have included the much more conservative New York Post!

I’ve had a lot of conversations since Tuesday revolving around the question of why Donald Trump won. The economy and inflation. Kamala Harris didn’t do this or that. Sexism and racism. The border. That trans-inmate ad that ran a jillion times. And so on.

These conversations have usually proceeded along lines where people ask incredulously how a majority of voters could have believed this or that. Weren’t they bothered that Trump is a convicted felon? An adjudicated rapist? Didn’t his invocation of violence against Liz Cheney, or 50 other examples of his disgusting imprecations, obviously disqualify him? And couldn’t they see that Harris, whatever her shortcomings, was a fundamentally smart, honest, well-meaning person who would show basic respect for the Constitution and wouldn’t do anything weird as president?

The answer is obviously no—not enough people were able to see any of those things. At which point people throw up their hands and say, “I give up.”

But this line of analysis requires that we ask one more question. And it’s the crucial one: Why didn’t a majority of voters see these things? And understanding the answer to that question is how we start to dig out of this tragic mess.

The answer is the right-wing media. Today, the right-wing media — Fox News (and the entire News Corp.), Newsmax, One America News Network, the Sinclair network of radio and TV stations and newspapers, iHeart Media (formerly Clear Channel), the Bott Radio Network (Christian radio), Elon Musk’s X, the huge podcasts like Joe Rogan’s, and much more — sets the news agenda in this country. And they fed their audiences a diet of slanted and distorted information that made it possible for Trump to win.

There’s a lot to say on all of that, but I’m going to (mostly) limit this to Twitter. We noted previously, before being bought out by Elon Musk, Twitter had already taken sides on the issue of ‘transgenderism,’ and bans ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering,’[1]‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a … Continue reading as though the issue is settled, no dissent can be tolerated, and dissention could result in the suspension of your Twitter account. Mr McCain has lost his old @rsmccain account, which had something like 10,000 followers, and his newer The Patriarch Tree account has only 2,522, because he said politically incorrect things.

The New York Times has published articles claiming that Free Speech is killing us. Noxious language online is causing real-world violence, and that Twitter’s bans on ‘deadnaming’ and ‘misgendering’ actually promotes freedom of speech. The Times told us how wonderful it was that Jeff Bezos was able to deplatform Parler, but lamented that some of those who lost their speech on Parler migrated to Gab and Rumble.

The left were predictably aghast when Mr Musk did buy Twitter and imposed a much broader freedom of speech regime. When it comes to the American left, and how the Biden Administration tried to create a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board under the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, and that very liberal hater of free speech, Nina Jankowicz.

On April 25, 2022, Miss Jankowicz told us exactly how she felt about our Freedom of Speech[2]You may not be able to verify my reference; Miss Jankowicz now limits who can see her tweets.:

I shudder to think about if free speech absolutists were taking control over more platforms, what that would look like for the marginalized communities .  .  . which are already shouldering .  .  . disproportionate amounts of this abuse.

Prior to its purchase by Mr Musk, Twitter did protect such “marginalized people”. One way was to prohibit “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.” Simply put, if someone wanted to tweet something about William Thomas, the male swimmer who claims to be female and was on the University of Pennsylvania’s women’s swim team using the name “Lia,” that person would have to concede to Mr Thomas’ claim that he is a woman by using the feminine pronouns and his assumed name, not his real one.

Now, the popular social media site allows conservative speech, which thoroughly annoys Mr Tomasky. But in allowing conservatives to yse Twitter, Mr Musk and his staff still allow the left to use Twitter. I follow a few, the operative word being “few,” liberals on Twitter, but not that many. Nevertheless, my Twitter feed has been full of posts by Democrats and the left, telling me what a horrible person our past and future President is, how Senator and now incoming Vice President J D Vance is even worse than Mr Trump, full of continual anti-Semitism by the defenders of the ‘Palestinians’ and Hamas and Hezbollah, full of the liberal rage concerning Mr Bezos cancellation of the Post’s planned endorsement, full of people telling me just how boneheadedly stupid I am for having voted for Mr Trump, and that I support “genocide” for supporting Israel. I get pro-Democrat tweets from Brian Krassenstein and, less frequently, his brother Ed Krassenstein, neither of whom I follow, and who were subject to a civil forfieture for publishing wire fraud schemes by others. I even sometimes see the tweets by the repugnant BrooklynDad_Defiant!

Yet, according to Mr Tomasky, Twitter is “right-wing media.” I guess he means that freedom of speech and of the press itself is “right-wing.”

Well, I’d accept that, because today, freedom of speech and of the press are conservative values; it hasn’t been the right which has been trying to stifle people’s public expressions.

References

References
↑1 ‘Deadnaming’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by his given name at birth, rather than the name he has taken to match the sex he claims to be; ‘misgendering’ means referring to a ‘transgender’ person by sex-specific terms referring to his biological sex rather than the sex he claims to be.
↑2 You may not be able to verify my reference; Miss Jankowicz now limits who can see her tweets.