Category Archives: Elections

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Poll: Most Trust Trump To Fix Inflation Over Biden

Considering the bang-up job Biden has done on inflation, they probably trust the intern who sends all Biden’s tweets over Biden

Inflation is weighing down Americans. Many trust Trump, more than Biden, to fix it

Linda Muñoz is scared about the economy. She dipped into her emergency savings this year. And she doesn’t believe President Joe Biden feels her pain.

The retired teacher from Channelview, Texas, worries about paying $4 for cereal and $3.38 for gasoline in her state.

“According to him, everything’s perfect,” said Muñoz, a Republican. “He just doesn’t live in reality.”

That is a constant refrain, like voters having doubt on Bidenomics.

As Biden tries to sell Americans on an economic rebound, most Americans aren’t buying it, according to an exclusive poll from the Suffolk University Sawyer Business School and USA TODAY that reveals major concerns about the state of the economy and little hope of people’s outlook improving. What’s worse for the incumbent president, Americans say they trust Donald Trump − not Biden − to fix it.

Groceries. Housing. Gas. All of these are pushing people further and further into debt, they say.

Nearly 70% of Americans said the economy is getting worse, according to the poll, while only 22% said the economy is improving. Eighty-four percent of Americans said their cost of living is rising, and nearly half of Americans, 49%, blamed food and grocery prices as the main driver. (snip)

Yet only 34% of Americans said they approve of Biden’s handling of the economy, compared with 59% who disapprove, according to the poll. (snip)

More Americans said they trust Trump, the 2024 Republican primary front-runner, than Biden to improve the economy by a 47%-36% margin. The spread is 46%-26% in Trump’s favor among independent voters.

Here’s the big question: will it make a difference in voting if the economy is still in the doldrums next year at this time? If prices, particularly food and gas, are high? I had an article sitting in my Pocket account till the other day about the 2024 election being about the economy and personal finances, but, will it? Or will it come down to something like “sure, Joe is old, incompetent, a buffoon, and his policies are hurting me, but, I despise Donald Trump, so, I’ll vote Biden or sit the election out” when it comes to Independents, moderate Dems, and the squishy Republicans? Because, if that’s the case, then Biden wins the White House, because Dems will come out in droves no matter what, no matter how bad Brandon is for their pocketbooks, and the GOP will have no shot in retaking the Senate, will lose the House, and may well lose lots of state elections.

But 74% of Americans described the economy negatively in one word − either “horrible/terrible,” “bad/poor,” “struggling” or “chaotic” − compared with 18% who said the economy is “excellent/good” or “growing/improving.” Another 4% said the economy is “fair/average.”

Can people set aside their Trump Derangement Syndrome for better policies? Do they enjoy driving by a gas station and seeing high gas prices? Do they like paying all that extra for food? Though, is it even possible to bring those food prices back down? How about housing costs? For all the caterwauling about Trump, the economy was doing well till the Chinese coronavirus hit. Unfortunately, he liked to battle with, well, everyone, instead of telling people that his policies were working.

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Will Bunch really, really, really hates Joe manchin!

Will Bunch is a hard-left columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, a newspaper which is located in, to no one’s surprise, Pennsylvania. Joe Manchin is the senior United States Senator representing West Virginia. Though the two states do share part of their borders, West Virginia is not Pennsylvania, and Pennsylvania is not West Virginia. The distinguished Mr Bunch, however, does not seem to understand that.

In the long hot summer of climate change, how can Joe Manchin justify his love for fossil fuels?

by Will Bunch | Tuesday, August 22, 2023

In 2012, the government website for the NASA space agency — on its climate change page — published an article with this simple, search-engine friendly headline: “Could a hurricane ever strike Southern California?” The answer was a barely qualified “no.”

“The interesting thing is that it really can’t happen, statistically speaking,” Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, said at the time. “The odds are infinitesimal — so small that everyone should just relax. Like 1 in 1,000. Of course, there’s always a chance.” Unlike the Atlantic and its warming Gulf Stream waters, California’s cold coastal currents are tropical-storm killers. At least they used to be.

There’s a long section here that follows — Mr Bunch angrily wrote — or at least I so judge him to have been angry, given all the internet screaming he did using boldfaced words, boldfaced words that I left in place — in which he attempts to persuade his readers that global warming climate change means that we’re doomed, we’re all doomed!

At any rate, I’ve deleted some of that, but you can read Mr Bunch’s writing in full if you follow the embedded link.

Then there is West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin — nominally a Democrat, arguably the most powerful player on Capitol Hill in the 2020s, and a profile in cowardice.

I’ve written a lot about Manchin in this space because he’s such a frustrating figure. A relic of the bygone era when West Virginia’s coal miners and rural poor were solidly Democratic, his party colleagues in Washington — especially the Biden administration — must bend over backwards to appease Manchin, since his seat would certainly go GOP if he weren’t around. But Manchin’s shtick — centered on his personal clout, as well as growing the coal-millionaire bank account that funds his Maserati and his yacht — is morally unjustifiable in a time of climate crisis.

LOL! I’m pretty sure that Mr Bunch would hate libertarian Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY4) even more, but Mr Massie’s home is off-the grid, using solar cells, and he drives a plug-in electric Tesla. 🙂 But Mr Bunch is just spittle-flecking mad that Senator Manchin drives a Maserati and has a yacht, though I haven’t heard much from him about former Senator and Secretary of State, and now President Biden’s ‘climate tsar’ John Kerry, who has private jets and owned a yacht which he berthed in Rhode Island rather than his home state of Massachusetts to avoid paying “roughly $500,000 in taxes,” though he later tried to sell it.

Manchin’s act is also a complicated one. This time last year, after rebuffing Biden on climate legislation for nearly two years, he surprised political observers by relenting and voting to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. The law includes $369 billion for efforts to curb greenhouse-gas pollution, promoting clean power plants and electric cars. Maybe Manchin understood that Biden and the Democrats needed a pre-election achievement in 2022 to keep a narrow hold on the Senate, which is the basis of the West Virginian’s clout. That mission accomplished, this dying-coal-state senator is doing everything within his power to undermine the bill he voted for, and climate action generally.

LOL! One would think that a writer with as long experience as Mr Bunch would realize that writing “this dying-coal-state senator” could, and should, be read as stating that the Senator was dying, not what he meant, that the “coal state” was dying. “This senator from a dying coal state” would have been much clearer.

Manchin has gone so far as to accuse the Biden administration of a “radical climate agenda” and suggested he could join with Republicans to undo the Inflation Reduction Act, or at least some of its key provisions. The devil is in the details, and according to an in-depth report last weekend from the Washington Post, Manchin is opposing a critical reappointment to the agency that regulates pipelines and threatening to block Biden appointees to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department.

For a whole lot of people, including a lot of West Virginians, President Biden’s climate agenda is radical. Senator Manchin is the only Democrat who has won a statewide race recently, and with his seat due up for election again in 2024, he has found himself well behind in the polls against the probable Republican nominee, current Governor Jim Justice, another ‘coal baron’. Now is definitely not the time for Mr Manchin to go against the beliefs of the majority in his home state.

Mr Bunch is right that the coal industry is dying, but it isn’t dead, and it is still important in the Mountain State. In 2018, Senator Manchin won re-election over Patrick Morrisey by 290,510 (49.57%) to 271,113 (46.26%), in a race in which Libertarian nominee Rusty Hollen took 24,411 votes, 4.17%, numbers greater than Mr Manchin’s margin of victory over Mr Morrisey.

In 2020, President Trump beat Joe Biden 545,382 (68.62%) to 235,984 (29.69%) in West Virginia, Mr Trump’s second strongest state in that election. Mr Manchin, I would remind Mr Bunch, represents West Virginia, not Pennsylvania.

More, if Mr Bunch’s position represents anyone other than himself, it represents the city of Philadelphia, not the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. In 2020, Joe Biden carried the Keystone State by 80,555 votes, 3,458,229 (50.01%) to 3,377674 (48.84%), but only because he carried Philadelphia 603,790 (81.44%) to 132,740 (17.90%), a margin of 471,050 votes. Without Philly, President Trump would have carried the Keystone State 3,244,935 (52.56%) to 2,854,439 (46.23%).

Manchin has spoken of passing his love of the outdoors to his 10 grandchildren, so why is he fighting to make it too hot to even go outside? Does a man whose ego seems to relish his frequent TV appearances care that he’ll be remembered for making the Earth uninhabitable for his grandkids, and ours? Because 100 years from now, the textbooks will portray Manchin and other men who enabled the fossil fuel industry as this millennium’s monsters of history.

This, in the end, is where Mr Bunch in particular, and the climate activists in general just don’t get it. West Virginia is, as Mr Bunch stated, a poor state, and the people of the Mountain State tend to be a bit more worried about putting food on the table tonight, and keeping a roof over their heads this month, than they are over what the climate will be 100 years from now.

Mr Bunch has a guesstimated net worth of a million bucks, nowhere close to the league of the billionaires against whom he rails, but certainly comfortable enough. If the Biden Administration mandates plug-in electric cars, Mr Bunch can afford one. If the government has to raise taxes to pay for some cockamamie scheme to build more solar and wind plants, Mr Bunch can afford it.

Living here in eastern Kentucky, I can see the things that Mr Bunch cannot. I can see the houses with no dedicated parking spot in which they could safely put an electric car charging station, and I can see the older homes which have older electric service, a 100-amphere breaker panel, which isn’t going to support both the home as it is and a 50-amp, 220-volt electric car charger.

And even that’s generous: our church recently, recently as in this spring, had to replace the electric service for the convent, which was powered by two 40-amp fuse boxes, because we had to replace the heating system, and the older service just wouldn’t support it.

Still, the Inquirer columnist ought to be able to see something of poverty. His newspaper bio states that he has “some strong opinions about what’s happening in America around social injustice, income inequality and the government.” Surely someone so interested in “social injustice (and) income inequality” ought to understand that his hometown is “the ‘poorest’ of the largest U.S. cities, with 23.3% of residents living in poverty, surpassing the next largest poor U.S. city, Houston, by 2.9%.” As the left, including his favored Mayoral candidate, Helen Gym Flaherty, wanted to get everyone changed over to electric heat pumps rather than the gas furnaces so prevalent in Philly’s poorer row home areas, he ought to understand that a whole bunch of city homeowners can’t afford the costs of such a changeover. Surely someone so concerned about “income inequality” ought to realize that in the city’s crowded rowhome neighborhoods, where tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of homes have nothing but on-street parking, that charging their cars is just not something easy and secure.

On May 11th of this year, Mr Bunch published a column entitled On CNN, lying Trump was a late-night comedian for an America I didn’t recognize, and while I care nothing about his column, the title was revelatory, because Mr Bunch told a truth he might not realize, that there is a lot of American that he just doesn’t recognize. Heck, outside of Philly, even including the collar counties, the majority of Pennsylvanians, 52.56%, voted for Donald Trump.

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Black Democrats in Alabama dump ‘LGBTQ+’ caucus

Thanks to a tweet from Kirby McCain, I found this story:

‘You be quiet, girl:’ Alabama Democrats’ board meeting made private after members protest

By Alander Rocha Alabama Reflector | Saturday, July 29, 2023 | 7:22 PM EDT

The leadership of the Alabama Democratic Party (ADP) Saturday kicked members of the public out of a meeting without starting it.

ADP Chair Randy Kelley said in an interview Saturday afternoon that they had to conduct the meeting in an executive session because members of the public were being disruptive.

“They weren’t on the committee,” he said. “They were a guest. And we didn’t know who those people were.”

The motion at the first meeting since the party leaders passed new bylaws and eliminated diversity caucuses in May, came amid a protest from about 15 members of the eliminated groups and supporters.

As a result of eliminating diversity caucuses, 53 members lost a seat on the party’s State Democratic Executive Committee (SDEC). The state Democratic Party faces an investigation by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) over the bylaw changes and elimination of caucuses.

There’s more at the original.

Being a numbers kind of guy, I asked myself, “Self, what percentage of the Alabama Democratic Party are black?” While it’s well-known that roughly 90% of black voters cast their ballots for Democrats, I found this from Pew Research:

In an August 2022 Pew Research Center survey, 70% of Black registered voters said they would vote for or were leaning to the Democratic U.S. House candidate in their district in the coming election. Another 24% were either unsure or said they would back another candidate. Just 6% of Black registered voters said they would back the Republican candidate in the race to represent their district in the House of Representatives.

According to the Census Bureau’s guesstimates, 68.9% are white, 64.7% and non-Hispanic white, and 26.8% of Alabama’s population are black. And in the 2022 United States Senate race, one in which there was no incumbent running, Republican Katie Britt received 942,154 votes (66.62%) to Will Boyd’s 436,746 (30.88%).The Democratic nominee was so insignificant that there is no Wikipedia page for him.

Mrs Britt carried six of Alabama’s seven congressional districts, the six represented by Republicans, while Mr Boyd won the 7th Congressional District, 61% to 37%. The 7th District, represented by Democrat Terri Sewell, is described in Miss Sewell’s Wikipedia page as:

includ(ing) most of the Black Belt, as well as most of the predominantly black portions of Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, and Montgomery.

I think it fair to say, at this point, that the Alabama Democratic Party is an overwhelmingly black party. Is anyone surprised that black Alabamians would dump “LGBTQ+” caucuses?

I am amused.

 

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Will Governor Andy Beshear break the law to try to steal a Senate seat?

Following Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-KY) freeze-up, there has been speculation that the 81-year-old lawmaker would be unable to serve out his full term, which expires on January 3, 2027. That begs the question: if Mr McConnell resigns or dies before his term is up, who would get the Senate seat?

In 2021, the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky passed KRS §63.200, specifying the procedures under which the seat would be filled:

  • (1) (a) The Governor shall fill vacancies in the office of United States Senator by appointment and the appointee shall serve until a successor has been elected and qualified under subsection (2), (3), (4), or (5) of this section.
  • (b) The appointee shall be selected from a list of three (3) names submitted by the state executive committee of the same political party as the Senator who held the vacant seat to be filled, shall have been continuously registered as a member of that political party since December 31 of the preceding year, and shall be named within twenty-one (21) days from the date of the list submission
  • (c) In the event the vacant seat was held by a person who was not a member of any political party as defined under KRS 118.015, the Governor shall appoint any qualified voter who is not a member of any political party as defined under KRS 118.015.
  • (d) Upon appointment, the Governor shall, under the seal of the Commonwealth, certify the appointment to the President of the Senate of the United States. The certificate of appointment shall be countersigned by the Secretary of State.

But now state Democrats are musing that Governor Andy Beshear (D-KY) might not follow the law! From what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal:

Ky. Dems predict challenge to Senate replacement law amid focus on McConnell’s health

by Austin Horn | Thursday, July 27, 2023 | 3:18 PM EDT | Updated: 10:35 PM EDT

Questions about Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s health were renewed following a widely publicized freeze up on camera Wednesday. The event also re-ignited discussion about the 2021 Kentucky state law he pushed for ensuring that, should he vacate his seat, it would remain in Republican hands.

But Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear may not follow that law.

Governor Beshear vetoed that bill after it passed, but the state legislature overrode the veto, 29-8 in the state Senate, and 70-24 in the state House of Representatives.

“I would imagine you would absolutely see a lawsuit on this,” Michael Abate, a Louisville attorney who’s worked for the Kentucky Democratic Party (KDP) in the past, said.

That law, passed by the GOP-led legislature in 2021’s Senate Bill 228, dictates that the governor select a replacement for any U.S. Senator vacating the office from a list of three provided by the state executive committee of the vacating senator’s party. Both of Kentucky’s U.S. senators are Republicans, including Rand Paul whose term is set to expire in 2028 and McConnell who’s term runs out in 2026.

Actually those are the election years for those seats; the terms actually expire on January 3rd of the following year. The reporter’s phraseology was sloppy.

Mitch McConnell’s election history, from Wikipedia. Click to enlarge.

While a bit slower than other Southern states, Kentucky has moved to become solidly Republican. Despite being outspent by Amy McGrath Henderson $90.1 million to just a hair under $60 million, Mr McConnell defeated Mrs Henderson by a landslide margin.

Kentucky’s other Senator, Rand Paul, has been elected by landslide margins in all three of his Senate campaigns, including in 2010, which was supposed to be a tight contest. It’s very clear: Kentucky’s voters have chosen Republicans, not Democrats, to represent them in the United States Congress. The Democrats simply want to undermine the will of the voters.

Abate said Beshear would likely push back against the law in one of two ways: ignore the law and appoint the replacement himself or sue against the law.

Either way would deny the Bluegrass State half of its representation in the United States Senate for some time. If Mr Beshear appointed someone not on that list, doubtlessly a Democrat, the Republican Party would immediately file a lawsuit; since the Secretary of State is required to countersign the certification, under KRS §63.200(1)(d), and Republican Michael Adams currently holds that office, Mr Adams could delay his signature long enough for the lawsuit to be filed. If Mr Beshear filed suit himself to challenge the law, he would not be able to appoint anyone to the seat while the lawsuit was in court, and if he tried, the appointment would be held up.

If he took the second option, he would doubtlessly file it in Franklin Circuit Court, for his toady judge, Phil Shepherd, a highly partisan Democrat. We have previously reported on Judge Shepherd’s partisanship.

KRS §63.200(2) specifies that, “If a vacancy occurs more than three (3) months before the election in any year in which any regular election is held in this state,” the seat will come up for a special election to fill it for the remainder of the term. Section 3 specifies that if such vacancy occurs less than three months before a regularly scheduled election, the Governor may appoint a Senator who would serve until the next regularly scheduled election.

President Trump carried every county except two, out of 120, in 2020, and Mr McConnell every county except three. Senator Paul carried every county except three, the same three — Jefferson, Fayette, and Franklin — in 2022. With the Democrats only real strength being in Louisville, five of the Commonwealth’s six congressmen are Republicans, and with the GOP having an 80-19, with one previously Democratic vacancy, margin in the state House, and 31-7 in the state Senate, there’s no question for whom Kentucky voters have chose. But Governor Beshear has never actually cared about the will of the people.

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Fear-mongering from The Nation, as they fear that The South Shall Rise Again!

The Nation is a biweekly ‘progressive’ political journal, whose positions have usually been on the far left end of the American political spectrum. The magazine used a fairly simple drawing to illustrate an article this morning, but I thought a drawing of Pickett’s Charge, from the Battle of Gettyburg, would be more appropriate, because they’re worrying that The South Shall Rise Again!

In the Attacks on Trans Rights, We’re Seeing the Rise of a New Confederacy

These legislative assaults constitute the spear tip of a nation within a nation, threatening the foundations of democracy.

by Nan D Hunter | Monday, June 26, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

A right-wing inquisition is singling out young transgender Americans, their parents, their teachers, and their doctors as targets in the battle over what kind of nation we are and want to be. Since 2021, roughly half the states have passed at least one law designed to eliminate medical or educational policies that recognize trans youth and protect them from abuse. According to the ACLU, 20 states enacted 72 new anti-trans laws in the first six months of 2023; more than 200 are in the pipeline.

Anti-trans campaigners seek to create a blanket of repression. Because the recent wave of anti-trans laws was not triggered by a landmark event like the rush of anti-abortion laws enacted in the wake of the Dobbs decision, this new reality has crept up on the country. Major media outlets have struggled to keep up with which laws have been passed in which states. With the exception, perhaps, of the trans people who find themselves in the cross hairs of these new laws, almost no one saw it coming.

The Nation allows non-subscribers three free articles, but you can read it here without going to the magazine’s website. As this article is approaching 2,900 words, you can read the rest below the fold. Continue reading →

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Crime, like any other cancer, left untreated, metastasizes Philadelphians have no one else to blame; they've done this to themselves

I have previously said that the greatest loss I have suffered in moving away from the Keystone State was the loss of freshly baked, hot Philadelphia pretzels. Coming in as a close second is the loss of Wawa coffee. Yes, you can buy Wawa coffee in K-cups, but even though we use filtered water in our Keurig, it just isn’t the same.

Wawa in Philly’s Headhouse Square to close

Neighborhood groups had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store.

by Mike Newall | Friday, June 16, 2023 | 11:15 AM EDT

The Headhouse Square Wawa will close July 16, a company official told The Inquirer. The move comes after neighborhood associations had complained to Wawa about aggressive panhandling, crime, and drug use at the store and outside on the sidewalk.

The site will become the sixth Center City Wawa to shutter since 2020.

“While closing a store is always a difficult decision to make, Wawa constantly conducts careful and extensive evaluations of business performance and operational challenges of all stores on an ongoing basis,” said Wawa spokesperson Lori Bruce in a statement Friday, confirming the pending closure of the Wawa at Second and Lombard. “We continue to invest in our home market of Philadelphia.”

Also see: Ben Mannes on Broad + Liberty: Can cities rebound from lawlessness to cultures of responsibility and compliance?

This isn’t exactly a poor neighborhood! A 585 ft² rear apartment is listed for $305,000, while a 4 bedroom, 5 bathroom, 2,516 ft² upscale row house, with basement parking, is listed for $1,270,000. Yet the area is suffering from street crime and junkies. Who wants to fork out well over a million bucks to be tripping over junkies laying out in the street?

Joe Dain, cofounder of the Delancey Square Town Watch, which was formed earlier this year, said his group and other neighborhood organizations had met with Wawa officials in April to discuss ongoing concerns at the Headhouse Square Wawa. By that time, the company, he said, had already taken measures to curb panhandlers and other public nuisance issues, including curtailing its hours, hiring private security and working with city police to provide patrols.

“There were certainly efforts being made,” Dain said. “What we were addressing was the fact that more needed to be done.”

Wawa notified the group that it would be instead closing the location, he said. The closure will be only the latest vacancy to hit the historic cobblestone district. A CVS across the street from the Wawa also closed its doors in recent years. The drugstore had been battling many of the same concerns, Dain said. In 2019, Giant Heirloom said it planned to open a supermarket at Abbotts Square at Second and South, around the corner, but that project has since fallen through. The property sits vacant.

Crime affects everybody, not just the immediate victims. Owners see the value of their properties decline, shoppers have fewer options, including the loss of Wawa coffee, and things just generally deteriorate. Trouble is, among the good Democrats of the 5th Ward, which includes Headhouse Square, sort-of progressive but not wild-eyed crazy Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff received 4,777, 47.1%, of the votes in the May primary, while police-hating, hard, hard left progressive Helen Gym Flaherty came in second at 2,908, 28.7%. Primary winner Cherelle Parker Mullin, who campaigned on fighting crime among other things, came in fourth, with 931 votes, 9.2%.

The adjacent 2nd, 8th, and 30th showed similar results.

Simply put, the liberal Democratic voters of the area voted for their own problems!

Wawa has been shrinking its Center City presence.

In October, when Wawa announced it was closing stores at 12th and Market Streets and 19th and Market Streets, the company cited “continued safety and security closures.

Then, even further down, we get to the part where the Inquirer amused me:

Dain, of the Delancey Square Town Watch, said the Headhouse Square store had become more of a problem for residents in recent years.

“We would have groups of kids coming in and ransacking the place at night,” he said. Some of the panhandlers that often congregated outside the store had become aggressive, he said. The store had also become a gathering spot for people in addiction, he said, who would then camp in the historic Shambles structure or by the Headhouse Square Fountain.

“(P)eople in addiction”? That isn’t listed as a direct quote, and I had to chuckle; is that the newspaper’s stylebook phrase for junkies?

This is what you get when you tolerate crime, even the ‘little’ crimes, in what have been mostly minority neighborhoods. Sure, junkies camping out on the streets at Kensington and Allegheny Avenues aren’t bothering anyone in Center City . . . until now, they do. Someone knocking over a bodega in North Philly doesn’t really concern the people in Headhouse Square, and doesn’t even make the news unless a Temple University student gets hurt, so they can safely vote for soft-on-crime, police hating politicians like Mrs Flaherty, or District Attorney Larry Krasner, but crime, like any other cancer left untreated, metastasizes.

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Lies, damned lies, and statistics The left use bogus numbers to try to make their case

Garbage in, garbage out: when you base your arguments on lies bad data, your arguments fall apart.

Mary Lou Marzian, former Kentucky House Representative for the previous District 34, and Honi Marleen Goldman, described as “a Kentucky activist,” and is, in fact, a pro-abortion agitator, were granted OpEd space in what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal, claiming that the General Assembly, Kentucky’s state legislature, is unfairly gerrymandered to harm the interests of the Commonwealth’s urban residents.

Fueled by dark money, Kentucky’s rural/urban divide hurts all of us | Opinion

by Mary Lou Marzian and Honi Goldman | Thursday, May 25, 2023 | 10:11 AM EDT | Updated: 12:23 PM EDT

Kentucky is comprised of 120 counties. In only two of those counties is there a major city, Louisville and Lexington (1.4 million and 517,000 respectively). Together these two key cities make up 44% of Kentucky’s population.

The citizens of Louisville and Lexington are diverse in race, religion, and ethnic origin. The population in Kentucky’s smaller towns and counties is primarily white and Christian.

The biggest concerns in the urban centers are crime, homelessness, and human rights. The rural areas focus on gun rights, “Family Values” and government overreach.

The issues for both sides are unique and fundamental to their respective populations.

Read more here.

One of the things about reading articles online is that the browser tabs can sometimes tell you more than the authors and editors want you to know. As originally saved, the article was entited “With misinformation, Ky’s urban/rural divide hurts us.” Someone, who would normally be the newspaper’s editor, changed the title, to blame “dark money”, and changed urban/rural to rural/urban. 🙂

The authors’ first paragraph gives us the “misinformation” with which the article was originally entitled. Louisville’s population is not 1.4 million and Lexington’s is not 517,000. According to the United States Census Bureau, the Louisville/Jefferson County’s population in the 2020 Census was 633,045, and the July 1, 2022 guesstimate is 624,444. The Census Bureau stated that Lexington/Fayette County’s population was 322,570 in the 2020 Census, and a guesstimated 320,347 as of July 1, 2022. The population of the entire state was given as 4,505,836 in the Census, and an estimated 4,512,310 last July.

Let’s do the math! 624,444 + 320,347 = 944,791. 944,791 ÷ 4,512,310 = 0.2094, or 20.94%.

So, no, those “two key cities” do not “make up 44% of Kentucky’s population.”

It has been suggested that Misses Marzian and Goldman were actually using the metropolitan statistical area concept for population numbers, and the Louisville metropolitan statistical area had a population of 1,395,855, close enough to the 1.4 million the authors claimed.

Also see: William Teach; Credentialed Media Is Losing Minds After Target Removes LGBT Material

But the metropolitan statistical area for Louisville includes Clark, Floyd, Harrison, and Washington counties in Indiana! Unintentionally or otherwise, Misses Marzian and Goldman were trying to include parts of Indiana in the Bluegrass State’s population, to reach their elevated count of 44%.

The Kentucky counties listed as part of the Louisville metropolitan statistical area are, along with Jefferson, Bullitt, Henry, Oldham, Shelby, Spencer, and Trimble. The authors contended that these were all urbanized counties, with urbanized interests: “crime, homelessness, and human rights.” But, in the 2020 presidential election, while Joe Biden carried Jefferson County 228,358 (59.06%) to 150,646 (38.96%) for President Trump, Mr Trump carried the other listed Kentucky counties, in the same order, by 73.12%, 72.05%, 59.65%, 63.93%, 76.42%, and 74.70%.

The counties listed as part of the Lexington/Fayette County metropolitan statistical area are Bourbon, Clark, Jessamine, Scott, and Woodford, and while Mr Biden carried Fayette County 90,600 (59.25%) to Mr Trump’s 58,860 (38.49%), President Trump carried the other listed counties, respectively, 64.16%, 65.11%, 65.05%, 61.33%, and 54.97%.

In the two United States Senate races, Mitch McConnell vs Amy McGrath Henderson in 2020, and Rand Paul vs Charles Booker in 2022, while the Democrat challenger carried Jefferson and Fayette counties, the Republican incumbent carried all of the others in their metropolitan statistical areas.

These are all statewide races; there are no gerrymandered districts.

Back to the original:

However, 75% of Kentucky State House Representatives, 77% State Senators, 83% of U.S. House Representatives and 100% of Kentucky’s U.S. Senators are making laws that affect nearly half of Kentucky’s population who are against what these legislators are voting for and what their campaigns are based on.

The authors couldn’t even get that right! The GOP controls 80%, not 75%, of the seats in the state House of Representatives; the 75% figure was from the previous House, from 2021-22, rather than the current one. With 30 seats in the state Senate, the GOP controls 79% — 78.94% to be more accurate — in that chamber. Can’t the authors do math?

But, while those numbers are pretty strong for Republicans, with the only two reliably Democratic counties in the state having just 20.94% of the Commonwealth’s population, they seem to fit the way Kentuckians vote!

Naturally, there are some Republicans in Jefferson and Fayette counties, just as there are Democrats in the rural areas, but the numbers have pretty much worked out.

While the authors gave at least a tip of the hat to more rural Kentuckians — “The rural areas focus on gun rights, ‘Family Values’ and government overreach. The issues for both sides are unique and fundamental to their respective populations” — it didn’t take them too long to list a litany of complaints blatantly tilted to the ‘progressive’ agenda. They continued:

The citizens of Kentucky are fighting for their very existence. Laws are being passed that claim to “protect” the rural population from concocted horrors, are in fact hurting and killing people in the urban population.

Killing people? What laws are being passed which kill people? We know, of course, that Miss Goldman fully supports prenatal infanticide, so it would seem that the laws she supports would actually kill people!

In very conservative Kentucky, the Lexington Herald-Leader has apparently taken a full-tilt transgender advocacy stand. Long-time Herald-Leader columnist Linda Blackford even told us it was coming:

Alex Acquisto has written a harrowing, intimate account of some of the families in our state who are simply trying to meet their children’s needs in the wake of Senate Bill 150, which bans gender-affirming healthcare. She opens with a scene of 13-year-old Henry Svec who sat in a Frankfort hearing room as “experts” defined him as unnatural, confused and disordered. Henry and his parents are actually pretty clear about who Henry is and what he needs. They’d like to provide it to him, but the GOP majority has decided that “parents rights” means politicians get to decide what’s best for Henry.

In Opinion, we will have some first person accounts from trans people on the front lines. Rebecca Blankenship, the first trans person elected to public office in Kentucky, and some of her colleagues talk about how the trans movement is used by both the left and right for their own purposes. Ysa Leon, the incoming SGA president at Transy, always believed they would live in Kentucky and work to make it a better place, but now believes they will have to leave[1]The author claims to be transgender and uses the plural pronouns. because politicians are ginning up so much hatred. Bill Adkins, a lawyer in Williamsburg, is not trans, but he does study history and explains how political scapegoating of minorities can lead to far more deadly consequences. Former Rep. Mary Lou Marzian explains how gerrymandering has given rural legislators too much power over urban areas, which further heightens these kinds of divides.

As we have previously noted, the newspaper has fallen completely out-of-touch with its readership. Newspapers are failing all over the country, but the newspaper, which was once the dominant paper in central and eastern Kentucky, is a shadow of its former self. Where, in junior high and early high school I used to deliver the old Lexington Herald and afternoon Lexington Leader in Mt Sterling, they closed up their printing plant in seven years ago, outsourcing the print edition to a plant outside of Louisville 1½ hours west of Lexington, and dropped a separate Saturday edition at the beginning of 2020.

You want home delivery outside of Lexington? Too bad, so sad, but it ain’t going to happen!

The truthful statistic? Kentuckians as a whole are pretty conservative, and while there are some liberals and even progressives in the Bluegrass State, they are a decided minority. I can remember, back in the dark age of quill pens on parchment, University of Kentucky political science professor Malcolm Jewell telling his students that the two major party candidates are practically guaranteed 40% of the vote, and the real battle is for the 20% that’s actually up for grabs. But in the three most recent statewide general election campaigns, Democrats Joe Biden, Amy McGrath Henderson, and Charles Booker couldn’t even get the 40% Dr Jewell told us they were guaranteed.

References

References
↑1 The author claims to be transgender and uses the plural pronouns.
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‘Progressivism’ is for the wealthy

The Democratic primary for the Philadelphia mayoral nomination is over, the ‘progressive’ — a term William Teach defines as ‘nice fascist’ — candidate lost, coming in third, and the #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading left are trying to spin it.

The Real Lesson for Progressives in Our Philadelphia Mayoral Defeat

by Nathan J Robinson | Wednesday, May 17, 2023

In Philadelphia’s Democratic mayoral primary, Cherelle Parker has decisively defeated her opponents. Those included progressive Helen Gym, who had the backing of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The triumph of Parker, a moderate, raises the usual question about whether today’s voters are more inclined toward centrism or progressivism and why; Politico, for example, called the primary nothing less than the “next battle for the soul of the Democratic Party,” serving as “a test of the strength of the national progressive movement.”

It’s easy to portray Parker’s victory as a message sent by voters in favor of “tough on crime” policies. During her campaign, Parker had promised to put more police officers on the streets and condemned the “lawlessness” of the city. The working class Black neighborhoods that have been hardest hit by gun violence tended to support Parker.

Mr Robinson, the Editor-in-Chief of Current Affairs magazine, a very much leftist publication, seems shocked, shocked!, to find out that the victims of crime want to be protected from crime.

But city politics are always complicated, and we should be careful about stories that emphasize a single issue.

Indeed, Parker isn’t quite the equivalent of a “tough on crime” Republican, and while she’s controversially advocated “stop-and-frisk” practices, she’s also spoken of the need for “restorative justice” and endorsed reformist District Attorney Larry Krasner when he first ran for his position in 2017. Tellingly, both the local Fraternal Order of Police and the National Black Police Association endorsed one of Parker’s opponents.

Parker is also a highly experienced politician with the backing of major local power players. She received major endorsements from local labor unions. If progressives are looking for a clear takeaway from this race, “progressive candidates can’t win if major local unions aren’t supporting the progressive candidate” is just as important as anything about the politics of crime and policing. After all, Chicago’s Brandon Johnson recently won the city’s mayoral election while openly rejecting “tough on crime” politics in a city plagued by gun violence. But Johnson was a union organizer with the powerful Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). In cities where organized labor is still strong, the key lesson here might be that a progressive candidate who wants to win cannot afford to have major unions endorsing their opponent.

Uhhh, how did Mr Robinson miss that Helen Gym Flaherty had the strong endorsement of the teachers’ union in Philadelphia?

There are still some important takeaways about crime and policing. First, clearly at least some voters who are alarmed by the city’s ongoing violence found reassurance in Parker’s promises to keep people safe. Parker offered a clear and detailed public safety plan. Those progressives who don’t think “more police” is the answer to gun violence (and I count myself among them) can’t afford to let pro-police candidates be the only ones with clear policies. The slogan “Defund the Police” was ill-conceived, not because reallocating police funding is a bad idea, but because it emphasized what the progressive movement was against (harsh policing) rather than emphasizing what it was for (good schools, good jobs, good housing, healthy communities).

Oh, so Mr Robinson does support defunding the police, but simply recognizes that the slogan was “ill-conceived.” He likes the idea, but doesn’t want to be too explicit in telling the truth about it.

Progressives who want to win in areas suffering from widespread violence need a strong pro-safety message, with an emphasis that more incarceration and more safety are not synonymous.

Here’s where Mr Robinson clearly gets lost in the weeds: like Mrs Flaherty — though she carefully avoided saying it in this campaign — he supports “reallocating police funding, and he is supporting the very things Mrs Flaherty claimed to be, but the candidate was very light on the details about how she was going to pay for all of her promises.

And, quite frankly, more incarceration and more safety are synonymous: the criminal who has already been locked up for past crimes isn’t out on the streets committing more, and District Attorney Let ’em Loose Larry Krasner’s decarceration ideas, very much supported by Mrs Flaherty, left criminals out on the streets to kill other people .  .  . and Philadelphians knew that.

That Ameen Hurst, accused of murdering four people in different rampages, had escaped from jail and was on the loose on election day probably didn’t help ‘progressives.’

The Philadelphia Inquirer tried to analyze Mrs Flaherty’s defeat as well, and actually got a lot of things right:

Progressive mayors have won elections in Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Here’s why Philadelphia’s race was different.

Although Helen Gym ran to help working people, her biggest appeal was to wealthier voters in Philadelphia.

by Julia Terruso and Anna Orso | Thursday, May 18, 2023 | 5:00 AM EDT

National progressives were looking for another big win in Philadelphia this week, but Cherelle Parker, a moderate Democrat born and raised in the city’s Northwest section, won the historic nomination.

Progressive political celebs had lined up behind Helen Gym, hoping she might continue a wave of mayoral victories in Boston, Los Angeles, and Chicago.

“We’re taking this movement from the West Coast to the East Coast!” U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez told an amped-up Gym crowd at a rally on Sunday.

Ultimately, with 94% of votes counted, Gym came in third place in the Democratic mayoral primary, trailing Parker and former Controller Rebecca Rhynhart and frustrating progressives who hoped to propel gains in recent years into the city’s biggest office.

Further down:

While Gym ran to help working people — she often said she was running to change the way people live — her biggest appeal wound up being with wealthier voters in the city.

Gym won 29% of the vote in precincts where people made an average of $100,000 and more and just 11% in precincts where the average income was less than $50,000 a year, an Inquirer analysis shows.

In wealthier districts, like Center City and affluent parts of the Northwest, Gym almost certainly split votes with Rhynhart, who ran an effective campaign as a budget wonk and problem solver.

Mr Robinson had noted that Cherelle Parker Mullins won the nomination with about a third of the total vote, because the city allows a plurality to win, without a runoff election between the two top vote getters to achieve a majority. Yet he somehow failed to mention that, if Philly did have a runoff system, Mrs Flaherty, who finished third, wouldn’t be in it! Brandon Johnson, the newly elected mayor of Chicago, won the runoff election, but finished second in the initial ballot; if Chicago allowed plurality winners to win, he wouldn’t be mayor.

But the bigger part — other than the fact that Mrs Mullins is black and Mrs Flaherty is of Korean descent, in a city that voted along racial lines — is that Mrs Flaherty’s ‘progressive’ campaign claimed to be for “working people,” but much of her support came from wealthier ones. Mr Robinson, himself a millionaire, like so many other white liberals with money, just don’t seem to realize that the things they advocate don’t actually make much sense to poorer and working class people. Mrs Flaherty’s strong support of policies to attack global warming climate change can only mean greater costs for the hundreds of thousands of Philadelphia row homes which use natural gas for heating in the city’s cold and snowy winters. Advocating policies to reduce warming eighty years from now is a program for those who don’t have to worry about money, not for those who are concerned with putting food on the table tonight, or being able to pay their rent or mortgage next month.

‘Progressive’ politics are for the wealthy, for the people who just don’t have to worry about money, for people whose lives are already mostly safe and secure . . . and Philadelphia is the poorest of our nation’s ten largest cities. While all of the Democratic candidates were on the liberal side, Mrs Flaherty, herself wealthy due to her husband, was the only true ‘progressive’ in the race, and two of the Democratic candidates finished ahead of her.

References

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↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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A major loss for ‘progressives’? Philly Democrats nominate a (supposedly) tough-on-crime mayoral candidate

Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.

Let me be clear here: I don’t live in Philadelphia, I don’t work in Philly, and, since July of 2017, I haven’t even lived in Pennsylvania. A victory by Helen Gym Flaherty in the Democratic primary for mayor in the city was never going to affect me personally. But a victory for ‘progressives,’ which William Teach has called ‘nice fascists,’ would have had repercussions nationwide, emboldening the dumbest people in our electorate, and that she lost makes me very, very happy.

What makes me unhappy is that the race was determined mostly by race! Former City Councilwoman Cherelle Parker Mullins won because she won the heavily black districts, and the heavily Hispanic ones, and she was the only black ‘major’ candidate; there was no serious Hispanic candidate in the race. Former City Controller Rebecca Rhynhart McDuff[1]It is interesting, and sad, that none of the major female candidates respected their husbands enough to have taken their names. won the majority white areas, but she wound up splitting that vote more evenly with Allan Domb and Mrs Flaherty. Mrs Flaherty, who is ethnically Korean, won one demographic group, which The Philadelphia Inquirer listed as “AAPI,” meaning Asian-American/Pacific Islander.

Even there, however, she took only a plurality, 41.1%, not a majority. But the notion that skin color is a determining factor doesn’t speak well for a ‘diverse’ city.

Chart from The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.

The Inquirer also worked out, though taking some assumptions based on precinct populations, larger political groups, and Mrs Flaherty won a plurality, 42.7%, among ‘younger white progressive voters,’ but even there, Mrs Mullins and Mrs McDuff together outpolled her, with 45.5% of the votes. Mrs McDuff, who had been endorsed by the Inquirer, carried both ‘working class white moderate voters’ and ‘wealthy white liberal voters.’

But what really sunk the progressives?

Areas that have seen the most gun violence supported Parker the most

Chart via The Philadelphia Inquirer. Click to enlarge.

A strong majority of residents rated crime as the top issue in pre-election polls, and the city remains in a years-long crisis of gun violence. But gun violence doesn’t affect residents equally: Some neighborhoods have far more shootings than others.The choice of those areas closest to gun violence is clear: They picked Parker.

Precincts that had seen more than 175 shooting victims within 2,000 feet of their boundaries since 2015 gave Parker half of their vote. By contrast, neighborhoods with the fewest shooting victims gave a disproportionately high share of their vote to other candidates.

Notably, Parker has espoused some tough-on-crime policies, including a willingness to revisit the policy of stop-and-frisk, citing a “crisis” of public safety.

It has been said before that a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged, and while calling Philly voters ‘conservatives’ would certainly be wrong, it seems that the ‘progressive’ candidate saw her share of the vote steadily decline as neighborhoods were exposed to more shootings.

There is, however, a major disconnect in the City of Brotherly Love when it comes to crime. While Mrs Mullins won at least in part based on her tough-on-crime campaign, wanting to put more police officers on the streets — Mrs Flaherty had previously supported ‘defund the police’ efforts, though she kept it out of her campaign this year — rather than deploy social workers and mental health professionals as Mrs Flaherty wanted, the city also re-elected the very much soft-on-crime, police-hating defense lawyer Larry Krasner as District Attorney in 2021, the year in which Philly set its all-time record for homicides. Mr Krasner actually is fairly tough on actual murderers; it’s just that he’s not just a marshmallow, but makes marshmallows look tough when it comes to ‘lesser’ crimes. The thugs and gang-bangers — and the Inky once told us that there were no actual gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” and the newspaper’s apparent, if unpublished, stylebook has substituted “street group” for gangs — mostly get a pass, or just a slap on the wrist for illegal gun possession from the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, right up until they up their crimes to rape and murder. The apparently odd notion of locking up the bad guys before they become worse guys is wholly outside the paradigm for Mr Krasner, and his voters as well. Mr Krasner being a separately elected official means that Mrs Mullins’ policy preferences don’t have any controlling authority over him.

Mr Krasner has been elected through the end of 2025, which means two full years in office after Mrs Mullins becomes mayor. Technically, she still has to win the general election against Republican David Oh, but in Philly, that’s almost a formality; the city hasn’t had a Republican mayor since Harry Truman was President! How much pushback he will give to Mrs Mullins remains to be seen, but I suspect it will be a lot.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw? Mrs Mullins said that she wasn’t going to take personnel decisions during the campaign, but, as Commissioner, Miss Outlaw has been unable to prevent a steady stream of retirements and resignations, coupled with smaller new recruit numbers, and case closure numbers have dropped. For Mrs Mullins to be tough on crime, she’ll need a Police Department that can actually do the job.

References

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↑1 It is interesting, and sad, that none of the major female candidates respected their husbands enough to have taken their names.