Why Democrats Won and Republicans Lost on Tuesday

Democrats won big on Tuesday in New Jersey, New York City, Virginia, and Washington.  Republicans lost.  The sweep led to commentary declaring a new dawn for Democrats and the end of Republicans in 2018.  Meh.  That said, there is a lesson Republicans should learn.

First, the meh:

New Jersey's out-going Republican Governor, Chris Christie, has an approval rating about equal to herpes.  Though he did an admirable job of the impossible - trying to be fiscally responsible in a state with a solidly Democrat legislature, powerful Democrat unions, and a balance sheet that would make Enron blush - he failed miserably at the politician's job of mastering public opinion.

But NJ is a remarkably blue state regardless.  NJ has voted for the Democrat in the last seven presidential elections.  The last Republican Senator from NJ was first elected in 1954.  NJ occasionally elects GOP Governors, but only to clean-up after unpopular and scandal-ridden Democrats.

Comrade Bill de Blasio's win in New York City is not even worth mentioning.  He's a popular leftist in a leftist city riding a wave of responsible Republican and Independent management for the last two decades.  He was reelected simply because four years wasn't enough time for him to completely undo twenty years of competent governance despite his best efforts. 

Virginia was a blue standout in the 2016 election.  It was the only state that voted for Hillary Clinton with both a strict voter ID law AND which does not issue driver's licenses to illegals.  That's not to say voter fraud doesn't exist in Virginia, because it does.  According to a report by The Public Interest Legal Foundation, thousands of illegal votes were found in Virginia.  But it does indicate that Virginia at least discourages voter fraud more than any other blue state.

2106 Election Results Map

          States that Issue Driver's Licenses to Unauthorized

                                          Immigrants 

States and Voter ID 

Despite anti voter fraud measures, Virginia voted Democrat in the last three presidential elections and three of the last four Governors races. Virginia's last GOP Senator served about a decade ago. Virginia is just true blue. 

In another example of a blue state voting blue, Washington state's legislature flipped to Democrat control.  Nothing surprising here. 

The bottom line is, elections by all logic should default to Democrats.  We really don't have a two party system anymore.  It's a one party system where the majority of everything - voter registration, media, academia, and entertainment - all lean heavily Democrat, or as I call it totalitarian leftist. The remainder are a hodgepodge of those in opposition who are NOT totalitarian leftists.  "Republicans" are just a subset of that opposition hodgepodge.  Donald Trump, who donned the banner but never got the GOP apparatus behind him, is but another part.       

So it's an uphill battle for the GOP or anyone not a totalitarian leftist.  Still, there's a lesson to be learned from why these races went the way they did: opposition candidates across the board went back to the pre-Trump playbook of how to lose elections! 

For the last several decades Democrats have embraced a strategy for winning elections based on the teachings of Saul Alinsky, who laid out his "Rules for Radicals" in 1971. The strategy worked flawlessly against "gentelman" GOPers like Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bob Dole, and countless others at the state level.  These losers studiously ignored the Alinsky rules and failed to come up with an effective counter-strategy.

Then along came Donald "Art of the Deal" Trump and the Alinsky rules hit an impenetrable wall. If you read the two books and compare them, they are in many ways similar. One is about winning political power and the other is about winning business power, but they both represent radical approaches that eschew politeness for the sake of victory.

Opposition candidates who want to win, better start reading these books and learning the lessons therein. That's not to say they have to embrace Trumpian politics, but they better understand what the Democrats are up to and what works against it.

"Scooter" Manafort

The last Special Counsel, Patrick Fitzgerald, had one job - prosecute the person who leaked the name of  CIA employee Valerie Plame.   It was a pointless exercise in the first place because: a) Valerie Plame was not a covert CIA operative in any danger from having her identity revealed, and b) the "leaker" was a person named Richard Armitage who Fitzgerald knew to be the leaker from the start. But that didn't stop Patrick Fitzgerald from his real job, which was to take-out the Bush administration, a job assigned to him by none other than his close friend, acting Attorney General James Comey.  Yes, that James Comey, close friend of Robert Mueller and nemesis of Donald Trump.

After an extensive four year investigation that gave Democrats false hope that George W Bush or Dick Cheney would land in prison, Patrick Fitzgerald indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby for mistaking one moon faced TV commentator for another.  Though he had nothing to do with leaking Valerie Plame's name, Scooter Libby was criminally charged with perjury for confusing Tim Russert with Chris Matthews.  He was convicted and disbarred, though he won back his right to practice law nine  years later, in 2016.

Patrick Fitzgerald aimed for the King and shot a Pawn.

The indictments by Robert Mueller yesterday appear to be more of the same.

1) The charges appear to have nothing to do with Mueller's job, ostensibly investigating Russian interference in the election and possible collusion by Donald Trump. 
2) The charges appear to have nothing to do with even Donald Trump or Russia.
3) The charges appear to involve events preceding the Trump campaign by years.
4) The people indicted, with the exception of Paul Manafort, are minor players.  Even Manafort was only Trump's campaign chair for under three months.

Mueller's real job, like Fitzgerald's, is to go after the King.  Instead, it appears he got three Pawns.

But there is one BIG distinction between this investigation and the last one:  a Democrat named Podesta resigned from his eponymous lobbying firm yesterday as a result of the Mueller investigation.  Hmmm...Podesta...Podesta...where have I heard that name before?

Oh, I remember!  Tony's brother, John Podesta, ran Hillary Clinton's campaign, founded the left wing Center for American Progress,  was counselor to President Barack Obama,  is partners with his brother Tony, and is as embedded in Democrat politics as any man alive.

Of course it is impossible to know where this all leads, and Robert Mueller could be a thorn in Trump's side for the entirety of his Presidency, but so far this investigation has netted three Republican Pawns and one Democrat Rook.  For those of you keeping score at home, in chess terms that's -3R to -5D.

"What is the Alt-Right?" - Prager U

Yup, pretty much WLM.  (The white version of Black Lives Matter)

EXCLUSIVE - The Democrat's Dirty Law Firm [UPDATED- TWICE]

There are three big scandals percolating right now involving Obama, Clinton, the DNC, and Russia. And all three trace back to a single law firm, Perkins Coie.

The Washington Post reported on 10/24 that the infamous dossier which was the basis for the entire Trump/Russia/collusion meme, was in fact funded by Hillary Clinton and the DNC through payments made to Marc Elias, a lawyer at Perkins Coie.

Then on 10/25, Andrew McCarthy reported that another Perkins Coie lawyer, Michael Sussman, was the person who hired Crowdstrike, the private company on whose word the FBI and 16 other intel agencies relied to determine that Russia hacked the DNC email accounts.

Now, there is evidence that the Uranium One scandal also traces back to Perkins Coie.

Uranium One is a uranium mining company that the Russians now own along with about 20% of all uranium in the U.S. thanks to the efforts of Barack Obama and the Clintons. The reason this is a scandal is that, aside from giving Russia control of our strategic nuclear material, hundreds of millions of dollars went to the Clintons as kickbacks despite Barack Obama having evidence of all kinds of criminal activity on the part the Russians in this transaction. A massive coverup kept congress and the public from learning anything about the criminal activity lest it damage Hillary's presidential aspirations. Now the whole affair has come to light and a gag order has been lifted on a key witness.

And again, Perkins Coie is at the center. This is significant because Obama and the Clintons claim they had little to do with Uranium One, yet of all the thousands of law firms in the U.S., it was their go-to law firm that handled the deal.

As a private firm it is impossible to know the full extent of their involvement, but at a minimum Uranium One's trademark application was handled by Perkins Coie:

This is who is listed as "Correspondent" for the trademark:

PATCHEN M. HAGGERTY
PERKINS COIE LLP
1201 3RD AVE STE 4900
SEATTLE WA 98101-3099

What are the odds Perkins Coie handled the trademark and another firm did everything else?

Indeed, all roads lead to Perkins Coie when it comes to Clinton/Obama/Democrat/Russia scandals. It is often said, "Follow the money", and in this case all the money goes through Perkins Coie.

Maybe Jeff Sessions' DOJ should raid this law firm and get some hard answers about Obama and the Clintons colluding with the Russians and receiving millions of dollars in kickbacks. Attorney client privilege has limits when it comes to national security, abuse of power, and criminal activity.

[UPDATE] In September, John Podesta and Debbie Wasserman Schultz denied any involvement and knowledge of funding the Russian dossier in front of congressional investigators. We now know they were lying. And guess who was at their sides while they lied?

Sitting next to Podesta during the interview: his attorney Marc Elias, who worked for the law firm [Perkins Coie] that hired Fusion GPS to continue research on Trump on behalf of the Clinton campaign and DNC, multiple sources said. Elias was only there in his capacity as Podesta's attorney and not as a witness. (Source: CNN)

[2nd UPDATE] Barack Obama, through his tax-free political fund, also gave about a million dollars to Perkins Coie, starting exactly when Perkins Coie began funding the Russian dossier.

An Actual Conspiracy and Coup d'Etat

(At the risk of being repetitious, I had to repost this clip.)

Almost everything that has happened in the last two years to damage Donald Trump stemmed from the infamous "dossier".  You remember, the one that triggered the whole Trump/Russia/Collusion meme?  Now we know it was a Hillary Clinton / DNC concoction.  According to The Washington Post, Marc Elias, counsel to the Clinton's and the DNC, paid for the "dossier".  It was then used as the basis for the investigations of the Trump campaign and transition by Barack Obama and his entire intelligence apparatus.  Barack Obama, John Brennan, James Clapper, James Comey, Susan Rice, Samantha Power, et al all used a phony concocted dossier as their basis for wiretapping, unmasking, investigating, and sabotaging the Trump campaign and administration.

It was a conspiracy and a full-blown coup d'etat led by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.  Here's a partial list of the events that have stemmed from the dirty "dossier":

The whole Russia/Collusion/Trump meme
FISA warrants for Trump associates
Massive (illegal) unmasking of private citizens
Firing of Mike Flynn, Paul Manafort, and others
Recusal of Jeff Sessions
The firing of James Comey
Appointment of Independent Counsel Robert Mueller by Rod Rosenstein
Buy-in from Obama's entire Intelligence Community, CIA, NSA, FBI, etc.
Ongoing Senate and House investigations
Stalling of the Trump agenda in Congress
Calls for Trump's impeachment
Calls for war on Russia
Expelling of Russian diplomats
U.S. Troops deployed near Russia by Obama

The other part of all this, of course, was the assessment that the DNC and John Podesta email hacks were the work of the Russians and Vladimir Putin himself.  This assessment came from none other than the Obama FBI under James Comey.  But the FBI famously didn't do their own assessment because the DNC refused them access to their servers.  The assessment came instead from a private company called Crowdstrike.  Crowdstrike is a Google funded company, and Google parent chairman Eric Schmidt was a key player on the Hillary Clinton campaign

Andrew McCarthy at National Review notes that the same law firm that funded the dossier also retained Crowdstrike.  And all of it was conveniently done behind a wall of attorney client privilege.  What are the odds this same firm is involved in Uranium One? 

This all looks like corruption and abuse of power unprecedented in our lifetimes.  Not funny. 

[UPDATE]  As suspected, Perkins Coie, the law firm involved in the dossier and Crowdstrike, is also involved in Uranium One.  At a minimum, Uranium One's trademark was handled by Perkins Coie. 

This is who is listed as "Correspondent" for the trademark:
PATCHEN M. HAGGERTY 
PERKINS COIE LLP 
1201 3RD AVE STE 4900 
SEATTLE WA 98101-3099

Indeed, all roads lead to Perkins Coie when it comes to Clinton/Obama/Democrat/Russia collusion.     

Last Week's News, Animated

Why spend hours reading the news?  This is all you need!

Weinstein and the Clintons

In the wake of the deafening silence from the Clinton's now that their bestie Harvey Weinstein has been outed as a serial rapist and abuser of women, I thought it would be a good time to remind everyone who the Clinton's are.  (Also, a good reminder of who the NFL is too!)

    

Las Vegas Shooting - A Curious Unanswered Detail [UPDATED]

If you have been consuming news reports - print, online, broadcast, whatever - concerning the Las Vegas shooting, you've probably heard the "fact" that the shooter has been accumulating an arsenal over decades.  Here's a screen shot of a Google search for "arsenal & decades":

This timeline came from the Sheriff himself on Oct 4th:  “What we know is Stephen Paddock is a man who spent decades acquiring weapons and ammo and living a secret life. Much of which will never be fully understood”

There were, however, other reports that referred to the bulk of the arsenal having been accumulated "in the last year".  It's not unusual in the fog-of-war to have discrepancies like this, but what is unusual is the apparent lack of curiosity in the precise gun purchase timeline.

The ATF has said, in fact, that 33 of the shooters 47 guns were purchased in the 11 months from Oct 2016 to Sept 2017.  If they know this, then they also know the exact timeline and makeup of those purchases.  Were these purchases evenly spaced or did the pattern change at some point?  Was the entire makeup of those purchases consistent with what was used in the massacre?  Was there an inflection point in the shooters gun purchasing behavior over the last year?  If there was one, the ATF isn't saying.  

At some point, without a clear motive, we are inevitably drawn to Occam's razor.

[Update 10/11] According to this report (and really, with a timeline that changes daily, what can we really trust at this point?),  every single gun used in the massacre was purchased AFTER Nov 2016. The exact timing and makeup of the guns purchased and used is still a well kept secret.  Of note, ISIS claims conversion to Islam about six months ago.  Of course, there was also a big event in Nov 2016. And the LVMPD still will not discuss what medications the shooter was on, though they've hinted it was more than Valium.     

Bump-Stocks and The TSA

Immediately after 9/11, one of the very first things done was to nationalize airport security.  It was a slam dunk, right?  After all, those hijackers got through private airport security with box cutters and then used them to crash into buildings killing 3000.  We couldn't let that happen again. The bill creating the TSA passed nearly unanimously in the House and 100% unanimously in the Senate. 

There was only one problem: private airport security performed perfectly on 9/11.  You see, federal regulations PERMITTED box cutters on planes.  No one in airport security did anything wrong that day.  In other words, we unanimously nationalized airport security to solve a problem that didn't exist.   So why did we do it?  Ulterior motives aside, no politician could possibly stand athwart the emotional tide sweeping that bill into law.

In the wake of the worst mass shooting in our country's history, another emotional tide will likely sweep something into law.  An early favorite is a ban on bump-stocks, the devices used in Las Vegas that are apparently legal, but convert a semi-automatic rifle into essentially a fully automatic one.  This actually does seem like an obvious loophole if our intent was to ban automatic weapons all along.  

But there's only one problem:  bump-stocks may have ironically saved lives in Las Vegas.  You see, the shooter apparently had enough explosives in his car to create even more carnage than his shooting rampage.   Had he driven into a crowd and detonated his combination of Tannerite and ammonium nitrate, many more deaths could have resulted.  An ammonium nitrate bomb in Oklahoma City killed 168 people, and it wasn't even situated near a crowd, it just collapsed the entire building.  

Don't expect any politician to make this point and stand athwart the emotional tide.  The point is this: emotional legislation rarely does any good, and a determined and cunning psycho is gonna kill regardless of the law.     

Drug Reactions and Mass Murders

Here's yet another theory about the Las Vegas massacre:  It could have been drug related, as in SSRIs and other psychotropic drugs.  Add this to the other two plausible motivations:  jihad and politics.  (Of course it's also possible he was just a psychopath, but then the questions remain, why this country music concert, and why now?)

Author John Ringo's personal experience with psychotropic drug reactions is amazing.  He posted this on FB today.  Read the whole thing, but here is a taste:

Miriam [my wife] is a 'limited case pharmacological phenotype.' What does that mean? You know where on the warning label it says: 'in rare cases may cause you to grow two heads and fly to the moon'? Miriam is 'rare cases.' Every single time she tries a new prescription drug (fill in reason here) she is 'rare cases.' 

This involves the 'in rare cases' effect of a drug called Cymbalta. Notably, as Cymbalta NOW states 'in rare cases may cause homicidal or suicidal psychotic break. Should not be prescribed to teenagers.' (Because it turns out in MOST cases WILL cause psychotic break in teenagers.) 

We don't know at this time if the shooter was on any of these drugs, but if he was it would explain an awful lot.  Unfortunately, our HIPAA privacy laws make it impossible to obtain medical records and do accurate research on this subject, even after a shooter is dead!  This must change.      

Remember, there was a time in this country when everyone had a gun, and yet mass shootings were never a thing.  Only since the introduction of mass-marketed psychotropic drugs has this mass shooting phenomenon metastasized.

Here's an article from 2013 correlating SSRIs and other psychotropics with just about every mass shooting up to that point.

Here's the list from that article:

• Eric Harris age 17 (first on Zoloft then Luvox) and Dylan Klebold aged 18 (Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado), killed 12 students and 1 teacher, and wounded 23 others, before killing themselves. Klebold's medical records have never been made available to the public.
• Jeff Weise, age 16, had been prescribed 60 mg/day of Prozac (three times the average starting dose for adults!) when he shot his grandfather, his grandfather's girlfriend and many fellow students at Red Lake, Minnesota. He then shot himself. 10 dead, 12 wounded.
• Cory Baadsgaard, age 16, Wahluke (Washington state) High School, was on Paxil (which caused him to have hallucinations) when he took a rifle to his high school and held 23 classmates hostage. He has no memory of the event.
• Chris Fetters, age 13, killed his favorite aunt while taking Prozac.
• Christopher Pittman, age 12, murdered both his grandparents while taking Zoloft.
• Mathew Miller, age 13, hung himself in his bedroom closet after taking Zoloft for 6 days.
• Kip Kinkel, age 15, (on Prozac and Ritalin) shot his parents while they slept then went to school and opened fire killing 2 classmates and injuring 22 shortly after beginning Prozac treatment.
• Luke Woodham, age 16 (Prozac) killed his mother and then killed two students, wounding six others.
• A boy in Pocatello, ID (Zoloft) in 1998 had a Zoloft-induced seizure that caused an armed stand off at his school.
• Michael Carneal (Ritalin), age 14, opened fire on students at a high school prayer meeting in West Paducah, Kentucky. Three teenagers were killed, five others were wounded..
• A young man in Huntsville, Alabama (Ritalin) went psychotic chopping up his parents with an ax and also killing one sibling and almost murdering another.
• Andrew Golden, age 11, (Ritalin) and Mitchell Johnson, aged 14, (Ritalin) shot 15 people, killing four students, one teacher, and wounding 10 others.
• TJ Solomon, age 15, (Ritalin) high school student in Conyers, Georgia opened fire on and wounded six of his class mates.
• Rod Mathews, age 14, (Ritalin) beat a classmate to death with a bat.
• James Wilson, age 19, (various psychiatric drugs) from Breenwood, South Carolina, took a .22 caliber revolver into an elementary school killing two young girls, and wounding seven other children and two teachers.
• Elizabeth Bush, age 13, (Paxil) was responsible for a school shooting in Pennsylvania
• Jason Hoffman (Effexor and Celexa) – school shooting in El Cajon, California
• Jarred Viktor, age 15, (Paxil), after five days on Paxil he stabbed his grandmother 61 times.
• Chris Shanahan, age 15 (Paxil) in Rigby, ID who out of the blue killed a woman.
• Jeff Franklin (Prozac and Ritalin), Huntsville, AL, killed his parents as they came home from work using a sledge hammer, hatchet, butcher knife and mechanic's file, then attacked his younger brothers and sister.
• Neal Furrow (Prozac) in LA Jewish school shooting reported to have been court-ordered to be on Prozac along with several other medications.
• Kevin Rider, age 14, was withdrawing from Prozac when he died from a gunshot wound to his head. Initially it was ruled a suicide, but two years later, the investigation into his death was opened as a possible homicide. The prime suspect, also age 14, had been taking Zoloft and other SSRI antidepressants.
• Alex Kim, age 13, hung himself shortly after his Lexapro prescription had been doubled.
• Diane Routhier was prescribed Welbutrin for gallstone problems. Six days later, after suffering many adverse effects of the drug, she shot herself.
• Billy Willkomm, an accomplished wrestler and a University of Florida student, was prescribed Prozac at the age of 17. His family found him dead of suicide – hanging from a tall ladder at the family's Gulf Shore Boulevard home in July 2002.
• Kara Jaye Anne Fuller-Otter, age 12, was on Paxil when she hung herself from a hook in her closet. Kara's parents said “…. the damn doctor wouldn't take her off it and I asked him to when we went in on the second visit. I told him I thought she was having some sort of reaction to Paxil…”)
• Gareth Christian, Vancouver, age 18, was on Paxil when he committed suicide in 2002,
• (Gareth's father could not accept his son's death and killed himself.)
• Julie Woodward, age 17, was on Zoloft when she hung herself in her family's detached garage.
• Matthew Miller was 13 when he saw a psychiatrist because he was having difficulty at school. The psychiatrist gave him samples of Zoloft. Seven days later his mother found him dead, hanging by a belt from a laundry hook in his closet.
• Kurt Danysh, age 18, and on Prozac, killed his father with a shotgun. He is now behind prison bars, and writes letters, trying to warn the world that SSRI drugs can kill.
• Woody ____, age 37, committed suicide while in his 5th week of taking Zoloft. Shortly before his death his physician suggested doubling the dose of the drug. He had seen his physician only for insomnia. He had never been depressed, nor did he have any history of any mental illness symptoms.
• A boy from Houston, age 10, shot and killed his father after his Prozac dosage was increased.
• Hammad Memon, age 15, shot and killed a fellow middle school student. He had been diagnosed with ADHD and depression and was taking Zoloft and “other drugs for the conditions.”
• Matti Saari, a 22-year-old culinary student, shot and killed 9 students and a teacher, and wounded another student, before killing himself. Saari was taking an SSRI and a benzodiazapine.
• Steven Kazmierczak, age 27, shot and killed five people and wounded 21 others before killing himself in a Northern Illinois University auditorium. According to his girlfriend, he had recently been taking Prozac, Xanax and Ambien. Toxicology results showed that he still had trace amounts of Xanax in his system.
• Finnish gunman Pekka-Eric Auvinen, age 18, had been taking antidepressants before he killed eight people and wounded a dozen more at Jokela High School – then he committed suicide.
• Asa Coon from Cleveland, age 14, shot and wounded four before taking his own life. Court records show Coon was on Trazodone.
• Jon Romano, age 16, on medication for depression, fired a shotgun at a teacher in his New York high school.

Missing from list… 3 of 4 known to have taken these same meds….

• What drugs was Jared Lee Loughner on, age 21…… killed 6 people and injuring 14 others in Tuscon, Az
• What drugs was James Eagan Holmes on, age 24….. killed 12 people and injuring 59 others in Aurora Colorado
• What drugs was Jacob Tyler Roberts on, age 22, killed 2 injured 1, Clackamas Or
• What drugs was Adam Peter Lanza on, age 20, Killed 26 and wounded 2 in Newtown Ct