Screwing Kavanaugh mattered

© 2018 Jim Spence -  A few more musings on the 2018 mid-terms. There is a saying that all politics is local. Most often this statement is true, but in the U.S. Senate races all things in the battleground states were national.

Before explaining, let's just say that we don’t interact with socialists much. It sort of goes against the grain of who we are to mingle with people who define things like "compassion" and "generosity" by how willing they are to hand over our precious resources to wasteful bureaucrats. Accordingly, we do our best to politely stay away socialists. However, when we must interact with a socialist, we don’t bring up the subject of what constitutes intelligent public policy because well…..it is like bringing up the topic with a three-year-old. Like a three-year-old, socialists don't like to work much. And they tend to only care about what they want right now. They like to consume resources, but they have no idea how wealth, resources, and rising income streams are created. Not only do they not know, they don't want to know. Thinking is always subordinated to "feeling." We raised our kids already and we never tried to reason with them when they were toddlers.

One of the bell weather talking points of most Trump haters emerged during the Kavanaugh hearings. There was little doubt there was a central clearing house for bullet points that were damning of Kavanaugh. Over and over we heard from Democrats on television and elsewhere say that Kavanaugh did not have the proper “temperament” to be a Supreme Court justice. One had to wonder what sort of temperament should be required for someone to quietly accept the fact that hack politicians had fabricated rape accusations in the bizarre hope that absurd uncorroborated claims from decades ago, might somehow derail the Kavanaugh nomination. Who needs anyone who will sit calmly while political assassins empty a dump truck of excrement on his head?

The Kavanaugh episode was historic because reasonable people might have wanted to oppose Kavanaugh because they disagreed with his judicial philosophy. These types could have simply asked a few questions about opinions he wrote that they disagreed with, and then vote no based on his legal opinions. Of course this would be the classy way to vote no. On the other hand, with Democrats, engaging in shameless character assassination ruled the day. And when Democrats showed a vindictively evil side, many of the non-Trump hating public, who are also fair-minded, did not care for it. 

Here's the point. In the blue states it never matters what Democrats do, they win no matter what. However, in battleground states integrity and fairness matters. And particularly in red states, it turns out that Dianne Feinstein’s gutless charade against Kavanaugh created a political squeeze that helped destroy the political careers of Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Donnelly of Indiana, and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and also enhance the GOP majority in the Senate. Each of these three Democrats, was running for re-election in a battleground state. Each was forced to choose between the demands of New York socialist Chuck Schumer’s whims, and the overwhelming preferences of their local constituents. These three senators all decided they could get away with voting against the Supreme Court nominee of a president that carried their state by a wide margin. It seems they forgot Trump took their states in 2016 due mainly to the fact that voters wanted him to make the SCOTUS nomination. All three, under partisan pressure to screw over Kavanaugh, as the saying goes, CHOSE POORLY. Their decisions to screw Kavanaugh were not well-received. The lone Democrat senator from a battleground state who supported Kavanaugh, was Joe Manchin. Manchin was not so coincidentally re-elected. Had it not been for the Kavanaugh affair, the blue wave would have been bigger.

Another interesting development last night was the incredible speed and accuracy with which Fox News projected that the Democrats would re-take control of the House. Switching back and forth between all the networks last night was illuminating. After the pollsters so clearly failed all news media outlets in 2016, it was obvious that more scientific methods of forecasting election outcomes was needed. Just two days ago The Hill, a left leaning news site posted an opinion piece claiming the GOP was bracing for a massive wipe out in the governor races. Nationwide the Democrats wound up with one less governor than they began the night with.

Not every media outlet stood pat while clinging to obviously flawed systems for projecting election results. It seems that Fox was the only network that substantially improved its analytics. Early in the evening Fox went so far as to announce that it was projecting the Democrat takeover of the House. This must have stunned its audience. Switching to all the other networks for confirmation of Fox’s bold prediction proved fruitless. None was projecting any such thing. After returning to Fox, explanations were provided by the chief analytic guy who explained how Fox felt it knew so early on that the GOP was going to lose the House. We’ll spare you the jargon used in the explanation. Safe to say Fox understood much earlier and more than any other network, what was most relevant in the mountains of data everyone had the opportunity to gather. It was almost ironic that only the pro-GOP network in America was the first to tell America the GOP was going to lose the House. In the meantime CNN, the NBC, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, etc. were all engaged in nearly identical race-by-race vote count updates. None had a clue about the bigger picture like Fox. Grasping the big picture and paying for superior analytics just did not seem to be anywhere near the top of the agendas at all of those "news" outlets. No surprise there.

Screwing Kavanaugh mattered

"Pinche Gringo" says it all

© 2018 Jim Spence -  Some full disclosure seems appropriate regarding my personal biases. I am an economic policy wonk. For more than thirty-five years I have committed my time and energy to understanding what is working economically/financially. Because we get paid to know what works and what doesn’t for our investing clients and ourselves, good national and state economic/financial policies really matter to me. Anytime any investor pretends that something works when it doesn’t, it is costly to that investor in a VERY DIRECT way. With voters the direct connection is not made often enough. It seems that the goal of politics these days is to have no immediate consequences for abject stupidity.

We can learn plenty about America based on yesterday's election. Perhaps the most instructive story of the night was El Paso’s Robert Francis O’Rourke. O’Rourke wound up accomplishing what most Democrats would do under the similar circumstances. He gathered up more than $100 million dollars from progressive donors, including several Democrat billionaires, and squandered the money quickly. O'Rourke was trying to win Texas’s U.S. Senate seat held by Ted Cruz. The problem was it was a tricky identity politics coup attempt by O’Rourke. Like the NAACP’s Rachael Dolzeal and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, Robert Francis O’Rourke has always been able to talk a good game about "white privilege," especially to minority voters and those susceptible to white guilt in the Texas electorate. It was a great irony that he simultaneously engaged in classic cultural appropriation, which is the rage today. O'Rourke went by the very Hispanic sounding nickname of “Beto.” Yep, it seems that O’Rourke was oblivious to all the amazing benefits of "white privilege" when he tried to scrub the white from his DNA and make himself seem "brown." Still, O'Rourke got as close as anyone could with more than $100 million in contributions from left wing crony capitalists. He almost beat the real Hispanic in the race.....Ted Cruz. But in the end, the majority of Texas voters understood Robert Francis O’Rourke's true cultural identity. They realized that O’Rourke is just another, “pinche gringo.”

Let’s make some broad and general observations about the trends in America. New England, the Pacific Northwest, and California are hopeless. The electorates in these regions are sinking deeper into the financial death spiral of socialism. Politicians who live in these areas are running out of other people’s money. Just yesterday a municipal bond offering from the Portland (Oregon) area came across the desk. The politicians were raising money to get this……..fund extravagant pension promises they made years ago to retired and soon to be retiring government bureaucrats in the local education system. It seems that the politicians never made sure retirement investments were made over the years to meet their huge pension promises. When pensions are funded at the 12th hour with borrowed money, it is a tell tale sign the elected officials are running a thinly veiled government Ponzi scheme. This financial negligence signifies that local elected officials have been buying votes with pension promises that are put on the equivalent of taxpayer credit cards. Current taxpayers in these areas will be funding the previous generation’s retirement accounts instead of funding their own. Socialists always prefer to tax the young workers to fund the retirement lifestyles of retiring bureaucrats. Of course there is a limit to how much of this can be done......just ask the Greeks. Look for taxes in areas like Portland to keep soaring and many workers and businesses that know how to do simple math to exit that area just as they are doing from Connecticut and California where the pension death spiral is farther along.

Closer to home Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada voters are increasingly getting conned by socialists just as New Mexico voters have been for decades. These states seem destined in the years ahead to tip over and surrender full control to Democrats. As this happens, look for the tax burdens on workers and businesses in these states to more resemble those in California. Living standards are sure to stagnate or fall in Arizona, Colorado, and Nevada as gullible voters lap up promises made by socialists. Higher taxes and fewer jobs are virtually assured as costs soar out of control. It is a recipe for Europe-like economic and financial stagnation. Sadly, millions of poorly educated Americans with college degrees are falling for these financial shell games like rubes gambling at casinos.

On the national scene, Barack Obama’s endorsement power is still not worth a teaspoonful of sour owl dung. Obama decided to charge very late into the Georgia and Florida governor races to campaign for a couple of race-card playing Democrats who were both running for governor. Both of Obama’s endorsed candidates lost.

In the end, the abrupt arrival (with Trump) of rising wages, falling unemployment, and less government domination of every aspect of our lives, was on the ballot yesterday. So was the idea of secure borders. You would think that those very desirable results would have “sold” better than they did. Nope. Not after twenty-four months of every news media outlet except Fox working night and day to get Americans to believe Trump is the Anti-Christ. More opportunity to work and succeed is not as big a deal as it once was in an increasingly entitled America. One too many American generations has been indoctrinated by the cesspools known as public education, the woefully biased news media, and the hypocritical entertainment industry. The result is millions of entitled Americans take widespread prosperity as a birthright, not a function of sound public policies.

Look for the Democrat House to do everything in its power to torpedo the great economy, the news media to provide help to Democrats every single day, and the entire socialist movement in America to blame every financial setback on anyone who is not a socialist.

"Pinche Gringo" says it all

What's at stake?

What's at stake?

Friends and Enemies

© 2018 Jim Spence -  Here’s a good question for all Americans to answer on the eve of another American election. Is the media the enemy of the people?

All educated Americans want freedom of the press. But do we also want advocates instead of fact finders working at these jobs? How did journalism die?

It seems to have started with the advent of CNN and the twenty-four-hour news cycle. When we began to get "news" all day every day we moved from a press that was mostly fact finders to a profession that got crowded out by agenda driven advocates. There is simply not that much "news."

You could see it all unravel in slow motion with the transformation of people like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw. When Fox splashed on to the scene, we got a taste of something new. We saw agenda driven advocates pushing to the right instead of only to the left. There was room for Fox because the media had drifted so far left before Fox arrived, that drift left a gaping hole in the marketplace. Notice I said, "marketplace" not a "search for the truth."

Fox essentially took half of the “market” and the rest of the “news” media kept pushing even farther to the left to try to get what market share remained, from others who were also tailoring their narratives to leftists. Sadly, when you are in the advocacy business and you are pushing only a left wing agenda, it is a highly crowded space. There are literally dozens of morally outraged correspondents preening for the cameras all day every day.

But we have not answered the question. Is the media the enemy of the people? I would say NO. All of the left-wing media outlets have both friends and enemies and their friends are people. The same is true for Fox. Fox has friends and enemies.

What about those of us who don’t want to have someone with a narrative in mind to go searching for tidbits to support their narrative and call it “reporting.” It is important to realize how deeply advocacy has been embedded in the culture of the news media. Virtually every news media outlet in the U.S. (except Fox) and virtually every public school in the U.S. indoctrinates Americans in the hopes of assisting Democrats. The same is true with the entertainment industry. The goal of pop culture is to help Democrats. Their efforts work. You can see the effects in the ways that those being manipulated parrot the talking points. Kavanaugh doesn’t have the temperament. Nazi’s weren’t socialists. It is all about regaining a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and possibly the U.S. Senate now that the Supreme Court battles are over for the time being.

Many of us recall Johnny Carson and then Jay Leno. These top shelf talk show hosts made fun of every sitting president during my lifetime every single night. It all stopped with the arrival of Barack Obama. For some reason Obama was a hands-off guy at NBC. Suddenly pop culture had changed. For Obama’s eight years Americans could not find a late night comedian willing to crack jokes about our president.

My how things have changed. These days late night comics have not only resumed the joke cracking about the president, they have gone straight to crucifixion. It is all part of the shift leftward by pop culture. Scan the news and you will find countless headlines written by outraged columnists who blame Trump and the Republicans for everything including hurricanes. He is also blamed for the nut job who sent non-working bombs to Democrats earlier this month. Yet there was not a single peep from these same “fact finders” about the root cause of a deranged Democrat-supporter who actually shot at and hit Republican Members of Congress at a softball game in Virginia. You had to watch Fox to discover the shooter was a Bernie Sanders disciple.

Is the news media the enemy of the people? Of course not. No more than Bernie Sanders was responsible for the supporter who shot Steve Scalise. However, the vast majority of those working in the news media, public education, and entertainment industry, are the enemy of something even more precious, they are the enemies of the solemn duty to engage virtuously in a fundamental search for truth……not advocacy. Not sure about all of this? Just ask former CBS news correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.

Friends and Enemies