Category Archives: Elections

‘What If Democrats Win Enough Seats In Congress To Override A Presidential Veto’?

Democrats, Elections, Federalism, Government, Labor, Welfare

The Conor Lamb victory in Pennsylvania raises the fear that, “When the mid-terms roll round, [Democrats] would win enough seats in Congress to override a presidential veto.”

Democrats far from the seats of power and from Nancy Pelosi’s orbit are looking to appeal to regular Americans, namely the Trump constituency.

* Duly, Lamb is “a former marine and federal prosecutor.” (Used to be the armed fores were squarely in the conservative camp.)

* Mr Lamb campaigned at rallies with unions, such as the steelworkers, the coalminers at a United Mine Workers.

* “Mr Lamb promised to protect pensions of union members as well as Social Security and Medicare benefits for all.”

* “Lamb was ‘a God-fearing, union-supporting, gun-owning, job-protecting, pension-defending, Social-Security-believing … sending-drug-dealers-to-jail Democrat,’ enthused Cecil Roberts, the union boss. The Democrats need more like him.”

MORE: “Conor Lamb has shown Democrats how to win in places they usually lose.”

Beware, City Slicker Republicans; The Democrats Are Running ‘Prairie Populists’ In The Dakotas

Democrats, Donald Trump, Elections, Republicans, States' Rights

The Economist: “The Democratic brand is often toxic in rural America, where it is seen as a party of coastal elites. But Western voters seem willing to pull the lever for the right kind of Democratic candidate.”

In South Dakota, where “Republicans hold overwhelming majorities in both of the state legislative chambers; and Donald Trump won nearly twice as many votes as Hillary Clinton in 2016,” the Democrats are running “country politician” and former rodeo champion Billie Sutton for governor.

Sutton, who was “was paralysed from the waist down” in a rodeo accident, identifies “The main divide in South Dakota politics” as “not between Democrats and Republicans but between urban and rural regions.”

In the general election Mr Sutton will probably face either Kristi Noem—who has spent the last seven years in Washington as the state’s sole House of Representatives member—or Marty Jackley, who has spent nearly a decade as the state’s attorney general.

For obvious reasons, these are Sutton’s “dream opponents.”

Mr Sutton is a pro-life, pro-gun, church-going Democrat, just as Heidi Heitkamp—a Democratic senator from North Dakota—supports fracking and the Keystone oil pipeline. They are less prairie populists than prairie pragmatists, focused on kitchen-table issues and connecting to individual voters rather than joining the partisan vanguard.

Source: “A Democrat With A Chance In South Dakota.”

Russian Response to Robert Mueller’s Ludicrous Indictment Of The Famous 13 Spy Bots Sounds About Right

America, Conspiracy, Donald Trump, Elections, Reason, Russia

Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Maria Zakharova:

“Turns out, there’ve been 13 people, in the opinion of the US Justice Department. 13 people interfered in the US elections? 13 against billions budgets of special agencies? Against intelligence and counterespionage, against the newest technologies? Absurd? The indictment, however, is the “modern American political reality.”

Russian businessman Evgeny Prigozhin:

“The Americans are very emotional people, they see what they want to see. I have great respect for them. I am not at all upset that I am on this list. If they want to see the devil, let them.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov:

“It’s a pity that under Donald Trump, for more than a year of his presidency, our relations have not improved compared to the period of the Democratic administration. Even worsened to a certain extent,” Lavrov told Euronews.

Indeed. Deplorable were promised peace and cooperation; instead we are getting agitation based on idiocy. To say that Americans are merely emotional is very charitable indeed.

And my own analysis in “Making Sense of The Russia Monomania.

UPDATE (2/18): With respect to my “Making Sense of The Russia Monomania,” most people don’t get the column and reduce it to the kind of non-issues of simple paralleled. It is about, however, the anatomy of, 1. The US creating its own reality. 2. The US forcing the world into that parallel universe. 3. The US having the power to do all that and more.

Bill Meyer was the only individual who got it.

How Foolish Is The FBI? Check The Quality Of The Following FBI “Intelligence”

Conspiracy, Elections, Intelligence, Russia

Exclaimed an anti-Kremlin, pro-American, liberal, Russian journalist:

… the investigation of Russian intervention is not just a disgrace, it’s a collective eclipse of reason, it’s lunacy.

Via The Economist (to which I recently subscribed because it’s fabulously written and reports—imagine!—REAL NEWS FROM ACROSS THE WORLD:

BUZZFEED recently broke an explosive story about Russia’s meddling in America’s elections. On August 3rd 2016, it reported, just as the presidential race was entering its final phase, the Russian foreign ministry wired nearly $30,000 through a Kremlin-backed bank to its embassy in Washington, DC, with a remarkable description attached: “To finance election campaign of 2016”. Worse still, this was only one of 60 transfers that were being scrutinised by the FBI. Similar transfers were made to other countries. The story created a buzz, but not of the kind its authors hoped for. “Idiots. The Russian election of 2016, not the US one, you exceptionalist morons,” tweeted a prominent Russian journalist, pointing out that Russia too held parliamentary elections in 2016 and that the money was most probably sent to the embassies to organise the polling for expatriates. This was confirmed by the Russian foreign ministry. BuzzFeed updated its story, but did not take it down.

The author of that tweet was not a Kremlin agent but Leonid Bershidsky, a sharp-tongued writer for Bloomberg News and co-founder of Vedomosti, Russia’s leading business newspaper. “The Trump-Russia story is becoming surreal,” he wrote in a follow-up column while also offering a disclaimer: “I grew up and lived most of my life in Moscow. My perspective is that of a guy from Russia, who hates the current government there but loves the country itself.” For Russian liberals, the spectacle of American commentators imitating the Kremlin, which has long blamed every problem on America, is dispiriting.

Such people have no illusions about the Kremlin, and most of them have been on the receiving end of its disinformation and repression. Leonid Volkov, the campaign manager for Russia’s foremost opposition politician, Alexei Navalny, who—like his boss—has been in jail more than once, wrote recently, only half in jest: “I can’t be silent any longer…I understand that American society and the liberal media, stuck somewhere between denial and anger, still cannot reflect upon and accept Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the election a year ago. But the investigation of Russian intervention is not just a disgrace, it’s a collective eclipse of reason, it’s lunacy.” …

… MORE. “Red Mist: How the Russia investigation looks from Moscow.”