Roundup
Here we go again with a roundup.
(1) The DOJ is targeting Elon Musk in a suit that makes little sense on any level except as political retaliation. Then again, that’s what the DOJ specializes in these days.
(2) And speaking of the DOJ – which we were – apparently Weiss and the DOJ may have colluded to keep information from Congressional investigators.
(3) Ukrainian prosecutor Shokin, fired by a bragging Biden, has given an interview:
I have said repeatedly in my previous interviews that Poroshenko fired me at the insistence of the then-Vice President Biden because I was investigating Burisma.
[Poroshenko] understood and so did Vice President Biden, that had I continued to oversee the Burisma investigation, we would have found the facts about the corrupt activities that they were engaging in. That included both Hunter Biden and Devon Archer and others.
I do not want to deal in unproven facts, but my firm personal conviction is that, yes, this was the case. They were being bribed. And the fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?
The White House responds by saying these claims have been “debunked” over and over. No, they haven’t, but the White House counts on the MSM to keep saying it, and for people to keep ignoring the charges.
(4) A majority of NY registered voters don’t like the direction in which the state’s been going. Shouldn’t they blame themselves, though? In what way has Governor Hochul been a surprise? As far as I can see, she’s governed exactly as expected, and the same is true of the legislature.
(5) RIP, “Joe the Plumber,” dead at 49 from pancreatic cancer.
The DOJ lawsuit isn’t really about refugees and asylum seekers. This is more reminiscent of what the DOJ supposedly did to Microsoft back in the 90s. Bill Gates naively thought he could make his mediocre software and enjoy the money he was making from it. Then the DOJ came along and in essence said “nice little quasi monopoly youse got there. Be shame if something happened to it.” Not long after that Microsoft opened an office in DC and began making political donations. That’s all the Spacex business is about. Musk says things that the people in charge find unpleasant, so he must be brought to heel and harassing his business is how they do that.
As for Joe the Plumber, sad. An old boss of mine went to the doctor to make sure he had all his immunizations before going on a trip abroad, and found out he had pancreatic cancer. Six weeks later he was dead.
I’m so cynical I figure they mean it was debunked in the same way that the laptop was “debunked” as russian propaganda. (IE they took Joe’s word for it.)
And they will keep voting the same way yet be surprised by the results. I could bring up the futsal story involving my niece to give an example of someone trying the same thing over and over with similar results.
So sad to hear about Joe, the plumber. A friend was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and he was dead within 6 months.
Re: Joe the plumber, pancreatic cancer
Earlier I mentioned Dr. Feelgood, as in the “vitamin shot”. So I decided to look up Wilko Johnson, my man, the guitarist, from the 70s Dr. Feelgood band.
In 2013 Wilko was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer — only ten months to live. In response Wilko said he felt “vividly alive.” He threw himself into a farewell rock tour, while continuing treatment. To everyone’s surprise and delight Wilko beat the odds and revived his career with the borrowed time. Including an acting role on “Game of Thrones.”
Ten years later the news is not so good, though not devastating. Wilko has died at the age of 75 of unexplained causes. Still, he made it to 75.
To Wilko — an epic performance:
–Dr. Feelgood, “She Does It Right” (1975)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHm7uIC84YM
(4) A majority of NY registered voters don’t like the direction in which the state’s been going. Shouldn’t they blame themselves, though? In what way has Governor Hochul been a surprise? As far as I can see, she’s governed exactly as expected, and the same is true of the legislature.
==
New Yorker born and bred, lived there 45 years. This sort of stupidity is bog standard and you see it all over the state.
“A majority of NY registered voters don’t like the direction in which the state’s been going. Shouldn’t they blame themselves, though?” neo
Never.
Joe the Plumber was an early warning of what Obama was about. He smelled the truth underlying Obama’s pose as a moderate Democrat.
Obama’s statement, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money,” was so fake. Look at Obama now. A multimillionaire and still working to rake in more.
Many blame Biden for the trouble our country’s in. Obama set us up for it, and Joe the Plumber saw right through him.
Condolences to Joe’s family and friends. He was a decent man who did his best for his family, friends, and country. RIP
Neo “As far as I can see, she’s governed exactly as expected, and the same is true of the legislature.”
@ Big D & Art Deco: did Mencken live in New York?
“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”
? H.L. Mencken, A Little Book In C Major
A few more topical quotes for good measure, and there are plenty more (372 to be precise):
https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7805.H_L_Mencken
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
? H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe*
“The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable…”
? H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series
“Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance. No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.”
? H.L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy: A New Edition
“Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking.”
? H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
“A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar.”
? H.L. Mencken
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
? H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women
“All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them.”
? H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy
“The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic.”
? H.L. Mencken, Minority Report
“The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.”
“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.”
(no citations for the last two, but I have no doubt they are pure Mencken)
* (reference to the origin of the word “bunk”)
https://www.etymonline.com/word/bunk
(the ? are long dashes in the original post; I have no idea why they aren’t properly rendered)
@ J.J. “Joe the Plumber was an early warning of what Obama was about. He smelled the truth underlying Obama’s pose as a moderate Democrat….Many blame Biden for the trouble our country’s in. Obama set us up for it”
I had doubts about Obama’s character early on (in fact, that’s what precipitated my addiction to blogs about political subjects that ran outside the main media outlets, such as Beldar, Powerline, and the early Hot Air).
His campaign’s persecution of Joe cemented my opinion, and was a forerunner of the Democrat Party’s operations since then, because they were never called out on the unfairness by their own base.
Many conservatives seem to think that there was some ideal conservative candidate who could have won if that candidate had been nominated instead of McCain or Romney. Something similar goes on with Democrats when blue states are poorly run. They aren’t going to vote for the Republicans, so they’ll scratch their heads and try to think who they could have nominated instead of the governor who is messing things up.
I suppose it’s possibly that a state less dominated by Democrats could elect a competent Democrat governor who would be responsible and responsive to people’s real needs, but in the Deep Blue states, anybody who can get the Democratic nomination is likely to mess things up as badly as Hochul has. Mario Cuomo could at least paint a pretty picture of America for his followers. Fast forward to his son, Andrew “We were never great” Cuomo.
________
It was a sign that things were going terribly wrong that the media did more digging into Joe the Plumber’s background than into Barack Obama’s.
All cancer is terrifying but pancreatic (in my opinion) is the absolute nightmare.
@Abraxas
Well said and I completely agree with you. In some states and cities voting for a Republican (no matter how badly the Democratic incumbents have screwed things up, is the proverbial “Bridge Too Far”. Sad.
Nobody could have beaten Obama in 2008 (thank you George W. Bush) but a better candidate than McCain could have saved seats in the House and Senate.
Art Deco, almost all of geographic NY is conservative, only NYC, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo are Democrat. And for the three latter, Onadaga, Monroe and Erie counties are reliably Republican; only the cities aren’t. But numbers are numbers. A state that looks like a big red shape with a few blue zits on a map is really a big blue state with a couple of blue turds for US Senators.
BrooklynBoy, agree. Better Republican presidential candidates would have shifted the balances in congress. I believe.