Interesting Items 11/20

Howdy all, a few Interesting Items for your information. Enjoy –

In this issue:

1. Roy Moore
2. Salem
3. McConnell
4. SB 54
5. Oberlin

1. Roy Moore. The Washington Post dropped a bomb in the middle of the Alabama senate special election to replace Jeff Sessions in the US Senate.  The story accused Republican candidate Roy Moore of skirt chasing and harassment of underage girls some 38 years ago.  A few days later, the ever reliable (for the left) Gloria Allred showed up with another woman who accused Moore of disrobing in front of her and an attempted rape.  Predictably, all Hell broke loose, with an easy 10% Moore win in the election turning into a 10% loss to the democrat.  Congressional RINOs in DC all trooped to the closest microphone, claimed to believe the women, and demanded Moore drop out of the race.  And the media did its level best to build this into the worst sexual scandal since Harvey Weinstein.  At this point, the stories of the two primary accusers do not hold up.  The first woman claimed Moore called her on a phone in her room.  Her Mother later said she had no phone in her room as a 14-year old.  The Allred woman claimed that Moore signed her High School yearbook, yet Allred will not allow anyone to examine that signature.  Dating the ink would be demonstrative of a fraud or accuracy of the claim.  Moore presided over her divorce in the 1990s and she seemed quite happy with the outcome and never brought up harassment earlier that would have taken place in the 1970s.  And if Allred is involved, I instantly assume she is lying.  So, what is actually going on here?  From a political standpoint, this is an attempt at a character assassination by unsubstantiated accusation 38 years after the fact.  Moore would have never gotten the Republican nomination if the election was not a special election.  In Alabama, there are about 70% of voters on the Republican side that despise Moore.  The rest of his supporters are evangelicals, 30% of the voting base on the Republican side, and they turn out.  In this case they turned out in sufficient numbers to pull Moore through the special election primary.  This accusation is the same sort of thing done to McCain, Romney, Trump and every other Republican in a high profile political race for over a decade.  What do I think actually happened?  I think Moore as a 30-something liked young women.  He dated them, not unlike a lot of guys in that part of the world in the 1970s.  He eventually married a women 14 years younger than him.  This is not illegal, immoral or fattening act, but in the current anything goes political climate, it is a crime worthy of death via character assassination.  The Washington Post apparently knew something about Moore liking young women as a 30-something (when he was a democrat – thanks, Rush), and sent a team to Alabama to dig up women.  And they found several.  Like the Trump Billy Bush “grab ‘em by the private parts” tape released by NBC a month before the 2016 election, I think the democrat dirty tricks team was forced to release this 3 weeks earlier than they wanted to by Moore being up so large in the polls and because absentee voting was under way.  Will it work?  Don’t know.  Hope it doesn’t though, for if it does, we will see this sort of thing used in every single election from now until it doesn’t any more.  https://www.business2community.com/government-politics/roy-moore-accuser-admitting-alabama-senate-candidate-didnt-ever-touch-fake-news-01961001

2. Salem. Victor Davis Hanson referred to the media-fanned flames of sexual harassment yet another example of our periodic American Salem moments.  At some level, it most certainly is.  We will see if there are enough non-hysterical Americans to fend off the hysteria or it simply redirect to the next target whatever it might be.  Hanson notes recent hysterias (all media-fueled) on collusion with the Russians, the NFL take a knee protests, the statue busting movement, sexual harassment accusations of Harvey Weinstein that morphed into accusations of everyone.  He points out that history is full of these frenzies.  The ancient Greeks claimed it was caused by the three daughters of Night, the Maniae, goddesses of insanity, madness and crazed frenzy. The mass panic defies any attempt to address it rationally or even reasonably, leaving us smartly in the land defined by Scott Adams where human beings are irrational beings, as rationality has no particular weight in survival of the species.  Thus, rational thought  is not at all that necessary.  We humans are not alone, as animals are also capable of mass panics as we see in stampedes of cattle and bison, mass suicides of lemmings, and panics of walrus in haulouts.  Perhaps the way to fight these is to fight them in the sphere of persuasion as suggested by Adams.  https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/13/from-one-frenzy-to-the-next/

3. McConnell. Congressional leadership who to the man (and woman) hates and despises Roy Moore and everything he and his supporters stand for, fell all over themselves running in front of the first microphone they could find with demands that he drop out of the race.  But a funny thing happened on their journey to sexual harassment nirvana, one of their own, Al Franken (D, MN) showed up in a photo with him leering at a camera onboard a C-17 flying back from a USO with his hands on the boobs of a sleeping woman.  And McConnell in his kneejerk protect the swamp at all costs reaction deplored Franken’s groping, calling for an investigation of Franken.  This gave Moore the opening he was waiting for, allowing him to score a great persuasion point noting that when he is charged of doing something is 38 years after the fact, he must capitulate, drop out of the race, and slink away into the night.  On the other hand, a Swamp Denizen, an insider, Franken, gets the assumption of reasonable doubt even with a photo on the front page of Drudge.  This persuasion-fu may be enough to get him elected.  Worse for McConnell and Ryan, Congress has paid over $15 million in taxpayer dollars to settle over 220 sexual harassment claims over the last 20 years.  This is an average of $68,000 per accuser.  Congressional rules and Non-Disclosure Agreements have allowed congress to keep names and details of these settlements secret.  They may not be secret for too much longer.  These payments come out of congressional funds rather than individual member salaries, making them doubly bad.  Better yet, the weakly flickering clue light is starting to dawn on the democrats and their media that it is going to be difficult to destroy Moore as long as they are turning a blind eye on everything that Bill Clinton, his enabling wife Hillary, and their Bimbo Eruptions Team have been doing to sexual harassment accusers for over 30 years.  This does not include “Slow Joe” Biden who apparently has never seen a woman or child he doesn’t want to lay hands upon.  We may be quickly approaching the point where the fire lit by the media and democrats on this is about to engulf a lot more than a conservative from Alabama.  Final point about McConnell, one of the things he and his Beltway supporters tossed out there was the notion of not seating Moore should he be elected.  The Constitution allows this, but doing so would really open up congress to a firestorm of their own making, as it is difficult to keep someone out of congress on a simple accusation while you are stonewalling sexual harassment settlements paid out to current and past members and allowing Franken (groping on camera) and Menendez (under age prostitutes in the Dominican Republic) to remain in office.  And I expect they are not the only ones with the ration 5:1 or worse against democrats.  The notion that McConnell and his majority would not seat Moore is a direct response to Steve Bannon’s threat to replace McConnell as Majority Leader.  The battle is joined and will be a lot of fun to watch.  One of the things that Bannon et all need to remember is that we tried the insurgency route multiple times since 2010 and have lost senate seat after senate seat because the candidate simply is not electable.  The names Joe Miller (AK), Sharon Angle (NV), Christine O’Donnell (MD), Todd Akin (MO), and Richard Mourdock (IN) must all be remembered as insurgent candidates that managed to lose imminently winnable elections, handing all but one of those seats to democrats (Lisa Murkowski was not a democrat).  Don’t so enamored with your insurgency that you forget the first goal is to not elect a democrat while the second is to get your guy in office.  http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/mitch-mcconnell-and-steve-bannon-fight-the-battle-of-roy-moore/article/2640865

4. SB 54. The Alaska legislature passed a comprehensive rewrite of our crime statutes in 2016.  The intention was to focus on treatment and rehabilitation rather than punishment.  Of course, the treatment and rehab pieces weren’t funded, so we here in Alaska were left with a spiking crime rate as perps were not even arrested for the more minor crimes.  That in turn led to a spike in crime here in Alaska with the subsequent public outcry to get the problem solved Right Now.  Most pointed the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate at SB 91, ignoring the ongoing recession in the state, loss of 10,000 jobs over the last couple years, growing opioid epidemic (which may very well be due to Governor Walker’s Medicaid expansion two years ago), and other factors.  So, the legislature went back to work in January to either fix the problems of SB 91 or an outright repeal.  The Republican majority in the Senate passed its fix, SB 54 with a 19 – 1 vote on April 7 and sent it to the democrat controlled House where it was assigned to three separate committees and died during the regular session.  Normally the more committees a bill is assigned to the less likely it is to be passed.  This is an intentional ploy to kill legislation and works nicely.  But the crime rate kept increasing and the public got increasingly irritated with the crime rate and demanded a response.  Governor Walker included a repeal / fix of the original legislation in his call for a Special Legislative Session October 30.  The house majority finally got off the dime and went to work, taking a mere two weeks to modify it a bit and send it back to the senate for concurrence.  The other topic for the Special Session was consideration of an income or sales tax statewide, something the senate majority adamantly opposed, and this is where it gets interesting, for the House majority modified the bill with obvious constitutional problems so that the senate would reject it, take the whole mess to conference where house conferees thought they could ram through an income tax as an amendment to the crime bill.  The senate saw through the game, smiled sweetly, and voted to pass the bill as received from the house.  Then they voted to adjourn and go home.  This infuriated the house majority who blasted away at the very piece of legislation they had all voted for a few days earlier.  Last week, the bill was awaiting transmittal to the governor’s desk.  Rather than vote to adjourn after the senate went home, house leadership decided to pad their per diem checks a bit by holding pro-forma sessions for the next week in some vain hope that the senate would come to their senses and return to discuss an income tax.  For their part, the senate refused to play.  Great, great strategy.  Next session and the campaign for legislature and governor elections are going to be most interesting.  http://www.akleg.gov/basis/Bill/Detail/30?Root=sb54

5. Oberlin. Oberlin College is in Oberlin, OH, south of Cleveland.  It is a liberal arts college with around 3,000 students.  As with most liberal arts schools these days, it gave itself up to the BLM mob.  About a year ago, a small bakery in Oberlin caught three students shoplifting, stealing wine.  When they stopped the student, and tried to photograph him, several other people who were with the thief attacked the employee.  The students claimed racial profiling and the college agreed with them, pressuring Gibson’s Bakery to institute a first offense free rule of engagement for students.  Subsequently all three students pled guilty to misdemeanors.  The Student Senate started handing out literature at protests accusing the bakery of racial profiling and demanding students boycott it.  The administration went along with the mob in an apparent attempt to pressure the bakery to adopt a more thief friendly stance.  Eventually Gibson’s got tired of the game and filed a lawsuit against the college and Dean of Students claiming slander, libel, interference with business relationships, interference with contracts (between Oberlin and Gibson’s), emotional distress, negligent hiring, and demands over $200,000 in damages.  Oberlin got themselves in trouble with the resident BLMs who were looking for something, anything as an excuse to protest and make demands, by firing a black professor.   The bakery appears to be a speedbump on the way to the administration prostrating themselves completely to the BLM goons.  It never pays for a small college to get itself crossways with the locals, especially on trumped up racial grounds.  https://legalinsurrection.com/2017/11/gibsons-bakery-sues-oberlin-college-over-racial-profiling-accusations-oberlin-cuts-business-ties/

More later –

– AG