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Apologies for being a tad late today, but thankfully the whole gang is back in action! Today we’ve got Susan Ferrechio, chief congressional correspondent for the Washington Examiner. She takes on all comers: from Democrats playing election projection, to the bored and tired people in charge, to talk of a (collective gasp!) Clinton comeback. Susan has thoughts on all of it. Follow her on Twitter @susanferrechio.
The fellas also chat about Biden’s utterly indecent speech in Georgia; also the tragic passing of Terry Teachout and they ponder a viral thread on the worst drives in America.
Stuck on a boring roadtrip this weekend? Be sure to pass the time with us!
Music from this week’s podcast: Baby, I Love You by The Ronettes
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Just to be extra super clear, when Susan says the Democrat party is worried about “losing access to voters” due to needed improvements in voting security, I think a better way to say that is, they want more and more ballot harvesting and cheating.
When you learn about it and think it through, ballot harvesting is a really disgusting thing. They want three months to get ballots from people that have no interest or motivation to vote. Then it gets worse from there. This is no way to run a country. If you don’t think about it enough, I think most people have it in their head that it’s just aggressive get out the vote activity. And then the big problem is, the left always has more funds and people for this type of crap. What little I know about California and how the California GOP stuck it to the Democrats on this stuff is very interesting.
In the same week the Democrat justices were babbling about public policy and getting all of their facts wrong instead of talking about the constitution, my hard-core liberal brother-in-law announced that he doesn’t know anything about public policy and he’s never talking about it again.
Total PhD in a hard subject. Excellent schools. Everybody in his family is high IQ. They believe in collectivist belonging and collectivist action. The Democrat party can’t exist without making more and more non-public goods, central planning and social problems. So they throw spaghetti at the wall and do whatever it takes to create social strife. Your basic Democrat loves it or falls for it. Then you have Republicans that think they can reincarnate Scoop Jackson somehow.
Worst drive?
3. Interstate 70, anywhere. Nonstop trucks.
2. Interstate 80, across Nebraska. The plain plain state.
1. Interstate 90, across South Dakota. Concrete block, sounds like a cat scan on wheels, sheer torture.
Everybody hates Interstate 80 in Nebraska. I’ve never minded it until you get to Colorado and that is incredibly tedious to me. I’m not sure why. I think the Nebraska part doesn’t look like a total moonscape and they have decent services at decent intervals. It’s not like that in Colorado. I’ve always thought far western Nebraska or far western South Dakota would be a good place to live if you had everything set up right.
I’m glad James had the same thought I did about former Vice President Biden’s speech. When I heard the list, I too thought, do you want to be the Republican or Democrat, Democrat or Democrat, and Republican or Democrat. Biden’s handler made you want to be the Republican.
Driven I-90 from WI to Rapid City twice in the last 18 months. The SD section isn’t that bad. The stretch across southern MN is endless.
Obligatory.
Excellent song.
I looked it up. I like the four hours between Lincoln and the Colorado border. The three hours from the Colorado border to Denver make me want to kill myself. I have been on the Wyoming route on 80 and I just can’t remember what it was like.
The exhaustion Rob describes in republican circles is confined to the nevertrump and neocon remnants. I’m looking forward to the 2022 election.
All the Republicans have to say this year is “Where did the money go?”
I’m glad to hear it. Have they changed from concrete to asphalt?
On this triumphalism over the number of votes recorded in the 2020 national election.
The democrats suspect this number of votes will not be equalled for a decade or more. They are preparing their explanation for this, voter suppression.
There is another explanation possible, and as soon as institutional republicans process their complicity we can address it.
This is excellent analysis.
If elections were done with blockchain, the Democrats might evaporate.
At the 17:30 mark, Rob goes off on a very good rant on Justice Sotomayor, but then steps on the rake and it hits him in the face at 18:20.
Here is what @roblong said (not in full, but these are his words):
“She said something so phenomenally stupid, something so dumb, that she should recuse herself for her stupidity. She’s as dumb as people going to drink Ivermectin from the veterinary supply store.”
Wow. Thanks Rob. You have given us some incredible analysis on Ivermectin. Made even more credible coming from one who had Covid and then took the experimental jabs. That plan of action makes no sense to me – in fact I find it phenomenally stupid and dumb,
I’m a rancher in East Texas and am one of those phenomenally stupid and dumb ones who takes Ivermectin as prophylaxis.
And finally, I find your insult phenomenally stupid and dumb.
Remember, Rob Long still gets most of his information from the liberal media and, probably, the fake Never Trump conservatives. The liberal media simply don’t bother to mention the unimportant detail that ivermectin won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2015. And it wasn’t because the Nobel committee loves horses.
Rob is far enough to the right to guarantee that none of his TV projects ever get off the ground. If he were any farther to the right, a Soros DA would probably indict him.
A liberal will, of course, not admit he was wrong.
But I’ve seen this behavior myself. When he realizes his arguments make him sound like a fool, he backs away from political arguments altogether.
Down the road, the next stage might be that he recites your arguments back to you, as if he figured them out himself, forgetting you’re the one who told him those things in the first place.
The Democrats’ behavior suddenly falls into place if we posit that the inner-city vote has always been partially fraudulent. A lot of the people who live there, after all, are of a character that is unlikely to put civic duty ahead of convenience: drug addicts, petty criminals, the mentally ill, etc.
For this reason, Democrat inner-city machines have always engaged in what might be called “proxy voting”. They think it’s the only right and just thing to do.
In the old days, for example, a party worker might go to twenty different polling places using twenty different identities. With mail ballots, a single party worker with a photocopier can now cast a thousand ballots.
He gets really emotional every single time like this actually adds value. Usually it’s like intimidation and talking over you which doesn’t do a damn thing for me. lol
He was trying to tell me that the Russia gate investigation had merit. We went round and round and round with me doing the Socratic method with him. It took like five minutes and he finally stopped when I made him say that Cambridge Analytica got consideration from somewhere and they were introduced to the Russians by Trumps son-in-law. $40 million and dozens of hours of testimony and that’s what rules his brain. lol
It was the same thing with how I was telling him the flu shot was so much better than the COVID-19 shot. He really thinks public health keeps doing things after the flu R0 goes below 1. He keeps looking at me like I’m crazy and then I keep asking him what do they do and then he keeps insisting that they have to do something. He never told me what it was. I think this was a distraction because he doesn’t want to admit that the flu shot R0 reduction is obviously horrible. They just want to have collectivist policies that assume that more flu shots actually reduce transmission. lol
Then of course there was the time when I asked him to define assault weapon. lol
Has anyone bothered to respond to Biden’s rant by mentioning that George Wallace and Bull Connor were both Democrats?
Did Lileks actually say Minneapolis was sane? Does he mean the place were he can’t even walk into Andrea Pizza to pick up his slice to go without wearing his mask? And next week he will have to show Frank his vaccine passport. The only reason downtown is relatively safe these days, at least for the few people who actually go in to work, is because it’s too cold for most of the trouble makers. But you can still catch a few if you stroll over to the Target on Nicollet Mall. Yes, really sane.
Perhaps an old reflex, saying sane. I don’t think I’ll have to show a vaccine passport to get a take-out slice. (You know the place! Work nearby?)
And perhaps sane where I live, which is relatively quiet compared to a year ago, or even last summer.
Also, I try to stay positive, because the alternative is like dragging an anvil around.
The DC beltway . . .
Totally agree with #1 and #2 and I can only imagine #3 horror. I will nominate Hwy 50 from Carson City to Ely Nevada – dull scenery, so many hills with slow-moving trucks/cars, and – well – you end up in Ely.
Kidding on the last one, it’s like salvation to finally get there. One upside is halfway through the drive you can stop, wait about twenty minutes with the lights completely off. Then look up. Mind-blowing night sky. But you can’t enjoy that while driving so blah on this drive so much.
Agreed – this is the play. When @peterrobinson was wondering what the strategy is, this is it. It’s like that lawyer adage about pounding the table but for campaign strategy: When you have the truth on your side, campaign on the truth; when you have policy suggestions on your side (i.e. popular with public), campaign on the policy; and when you have neither, campaign on voter suppression (the other side cheating) – best to include race and gender whenever possible of course.
It does seem that spending all the time on the J. Lewis Vote Act. is strange considering it has been known not to pass for, well, forever. But the thing to remember is this is to shore up their faithful base for the upcoming electoral storm. Their best hopes is to weather this and with that brainwashed base build another push for electoral success. @rufusrjones family member is a good example of how well these narrative-implanting tactics can work for the Ds. I expect it will not go well for them, since the all-important 10% percent that decides elections does not seem to be falling for this at all.
I also thought that @roblong comments on the Goldwater/Reagan time was of interest. To me, since the actual fault for not “doing anything” about certain policies falls on the shoulders of the GOP legislators, not those wanting change. This shows the GOP post WWII party did a good job on pulling back business regulations, aiding in various other ways to the market, and kept up the pressure on the Soviets likely causing their collapse. Good things indeed, but when it comes to other issues – issues often used for campaigning like cultural, size-of-government, what-is-best-for-their-constituents – the post-WWII GOP was ineffective, if not actively working against those issues and constituents.
Which brings me to close on why the current realignment of the GOP and the hopeful changing of ideology and direction are such great things. The GOP, hopefully, will come out of this realigned and ready to push for National/Amer1st/Cultural Con policies; and the Ds will come out of this shattered, their working base eviscerated leaving them only with a brainwashed credentialed class, public service sector grifters, and the mega-rich global corporate class. If we build it, they will come. IF we build it. Thank goodness for this moment.
US 50 across Nevada is one of my favorite drives I’ve ever done.
If that’s the scenery you like – then I can imagine it is heaven! For myself, scrub brush high desert is meh. Then you add in driving behind slow trucks/vehicles going up hill after hill which cost me and my 4-speed manual our momentum, requiring a shift down to third, slugging up the hill, be unable to pass, repeat on next hill.
I don’t think I have ever heard Rob and Peter and angry as disgusted with Sotomayor and Biden respectively. When Rob was talking I wanted to jump up and cheer. When Obama placed Sotomayor on the court it was the act of a complete cynic who was completely uninterested in the Constitution of which he claimed to be a scholar.
I don’t understand how someone that dumb even got to a position where a SCOTUS nomination was considered credible.
The stories around this are bad or weird or something. They all got together and parked in there to help him start a political career. John Lott said he was the only guy on staff that would never engage in any kind of intellectual debate.
I am not that smart or informed but I was completely shocked when Sotomayor went into talking about policy. Same with justice Breyer. Then they get all their facts wrong. We are so doomed.
Merrick Garland is no gem, either. Thank God we dodged that bullet.