Category: Politics

“I talk to anybody. I always call it my

“I speak to the construction workers and the cabdrivers, and those are the people I get along with best anyway in many respects. I speak to everybody…. You’ve got to know your audience, and by the way, for some people, be a killer, for some people, be all candy. For some people, different. For some people, both.”

Said Donald Trump in 1989, talking to Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, in “A lost Trump interview comes back to life/The yet-to-be-president holds forth on strength, friendship, dealmaking, public service and building violations” (WaPo)(free-access link, so you can read it all and click on the recordings).

Woodward — who’s pushing his new book from which this is an excerpt — exclaims “What a remarkable time capsule, a full psychological study of a man, then a 42-year-old Manhattan real estate king.”
I think Trump comes across very positively, so thanks to The Washington Post for making this available.
Here’s one more Trump quote, short and sweet: “I believe in having great friends and great enemies.”
Great enemies. That’s so funny — makes me think of Batman, James Bond — and Trump does have great enemies. Putin. Pelosi. Who else? The big categories: establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats. But who are the individuals? Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris really aren’t that great, as enemies… or even opponents. He needs someone he can really go big with.
Putin is big, and yet he can’t go big with Putin. He has to be trickier, tricky enough that people would say Putin is his great friend, not his great enemy. But there’s the idea: “for some people, be a killer, for some people, be all candy…. For some people, both.”
Here’s the commission-earned link for Woodward’s book: “War.”

I said that Joe would quit campaigning for reelection over Jill’s dead body.
I think she, as much or more than Joe, is behind this back stabbing

Are we witnessing President Biden’s revenge tour?
A Kamala loss would mark the ultimate “I told you so” moment.

Hell hath no fury like a corrupt politician scorned.

You can’t help but notice that “Dark Brandon” isn’t exactly falling in line these days.

President Joe Biden finds himself a victim of the Democrat establishment mutineers, stripped of an opportunity at two-term greatness, and with quite a few interesting incentives coming into the November election.

More and more polling points to the possibility that Kamala Harris may lose by a significant margin in November. Donald Trump’s momentum keeps building, with nothing but tailwinds at his back. The Biden family is keenly aware of all of this, and they seem to be positioning the president for the ultimate “I told you so” moment for his legacy. Should Kamala Harris fall in defeat, President Biden becomes a man both wronged by a political establishment and righteous for being the one man who could defeat the GOP nominee.

We need not rehash the bizarre events of July 21, but it’s worth recalling that Biden was seemingly forced out of the running for his second term, and Democratic Party power brokers (Obama, Soros, Pelosi, Schumer, etc) hastily selected VP Kamala Harris as the nominee. Furthermore, they filled the lame-duck months on Biden’s schedule with instructions to stay quiet and soak up the sun in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware.

Since that fateful week in Delaware, Biden’s tone has changed dramatically.

In his rare public appearances, the president is attempting to transition into political retirement as an elder statesman, and he’s almost always doing so far removed from the instructions of his teleprompter. His newfound rhetoric is far removed from his infamous verbal dumpster diving of the Biden-Trump debate (and the vast majority of his presidency). He’s now linking arms with supporters of the one-time “threat to democracy,” reframing his legacy as Scranton Joe, the bipartisan blue-collar president. He never once engaged in such deliberate bipartisan appeals, on or off script, for his entire presidency.

Continue reading “”

Oops: MSNBC said the quiet part out loud.

 Kamala Must Lie about Being a Liberal and Pretend to Be a Moderate, Just Like Tim Walz Did.

Hayes Brown, an MSNBC writer and editor, wrote a new column today, entitled “What to make of Kamala Harris’ move to the center.” It’s an eye-opening observation and/or admission from the Democratic Party’s base. As you likely suspect, the Radical Left views the 2024 presidential election differently than Team MAGA: It’s not about making America great again, but tricking Americans into voting for a candidate who’s out of step with the voters’ ethos, goals, fears, and priorities.

And the role model for Kamala Harris’s trickery? None other than Tim Walz.

“[Kamala’s] attention is now fully on barnstorming the purple areas of swing states,” Brown wrote, “focused less on appeasing the progressive base of the party than on winning over whichever voters are still making up their minds about how to vote in November — or if at all. The result has been a campaign that’s burning through the fuel the base provided when she became the nominee.”

Alas, the only way to attract the middle, it seems, is to forego the wackier, more controversial positions of the Radical Left. In Brown’s mind, it’s a risky tradeoff.

“The goal is to convert that [progressive] energy into enough moderate votes to eke out a win against former President Donald Trump,” Brown noted. “In the process, she has steadily shed the stances she took when vying against 19 other candidates to court the progressive left in 2019.”

In a kind, nonjudgmental way, Brown pointed out that Harris has switched positions more often than an OnlyFans model.

If it were a Republican who abandoned key policy positions overnight, then to MSNBC, this would surely be emblematic of a dishonest, Machiavellian, racist politician who’ll say and do anything to get elected, of course. But since it’s a Democrat, well, it’s just par for the course. Just another day at the office!

When in Rome, ya know.

Continue reading “”

Here’s How We Really Know Kamala’s CNN Interview Wasn’t Good for Her

There are plenty of reasons why Kamala Harris’s first interview since she took Joe Biden’s place at the top of the ticket was underwhelming at best — or a train wreck at worst — for her. I thought it was really bad. Kamala got a lot of softball questions that she couldn’t answer, and Tim Walz didn’t help much either.

But how do we know that the interview was a bust for Kamala? Let me explain.

As you know, Kamala has been under significant pressure to stop hiding behind scripted campaign events and speak to the media in interviews and press conferences. When her interview with CNN was announced, there was little reason to believe that it would satisfy her critics — between choosing a friendly network with an anchor who was gonna give her the softest of softball questions, the deck was going to be stacked in Kamala’s favor to come out looking pretty good after the interview.

She didn’t, and that’s not because I said so. Kamala’s performance Thursday evening didn’t exactly floor CNN pundits.

Former Obama advisor David Axelrod said he thought Kamala did well, but “It wasn’t a huge — I don’t think she moved the ball that much forward.”

Ashley Allison, a former Obama White House staffer, similarly tried to paint the interview in a positive light, by falsely claiming that Kamala “answered every question” but added, “Now, you might not like the way she answered them. But she answered them as a capable, qualified leader. And I do think she — I think she moved the ball forward a little bit. Maybe she didn’t score a touchdown, tonight. But she definitely moved down the field.”

One goal that Kamala wants to achieve in the campaign is putting distance between her and the Biden-Harris administration. CNN political analyst Astead Herndon clearly doesn’t think she succeeded.

“I don’t think there’s a policy separation that they’ve created with Biden. Obviously, she gave a kind of personal defense of him. But they’re also very clearly trying to position her as a change candidate,” he said.

Another devastating blow for Kamala is that even CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale admitted that she was being dishonest about her flip-flopping on fracking.

Remember, this is CNN. This network wants Harris to win, yet its attempts to put lipstick on the pig that was this so-called “interview” let enough truth come through to make it clear that nobody really thought she did that great of a job.

The Left’s Swift Shift After RFK Jr.’s Trump Endorsement

Kennedy’s indictment of his former party, along with his endorsement of Donald Trump, has sent shock waves through the chambers of the self-appointed elite who would rule us.

The thing I admire about contemporary deep-state Democrats is their nimbleness.

This nimbleness was on ostentatious view in the regime response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s announcement Friday that he was 1) suspending his campaign (at least in battleground states) and 2) throwing his support behind Donald Trump.

The acrid scent of panic might have been expected among the limp-wristed, totalitarian faithful. And, in fact,  beneath the amusing cologne of anti-Trump bluster, the panic was indeed discernible.

But there was also that trademark smooth-as-a-suppository (as Saul Bellow put it) suaveness, exemplified, for instance, by former Obama strategist David Axelrod.

“Robert F. Kennedy Sr.,” Axelrod posted shortly after the deed was done, “would have been appalled to see his son cut a deal to drop out for [t]he race and endorse Trump.”

Imagine: someone agrees to drop out of a race at the last minute and support a rival candidate!  As the commentator Ned Ryan put it in response to Axelrod’s snippy post: “You suddenly seem offended by someone cutting a deal to drop out of the race and endorse someone else.”

Cast your mind back, David, to July 21 of this year.  That’s when Joe Biden, having been made an offer he couldn’t refuse by the secret committee running the country, suddenly announced that he was dropping out of the race. This was, remember, after Biden repeatedly insisted that he was staying in the race and was looking forward to the next debate against Trump. Yes, the first was a disaster, but he would show ’em!

Biden’s missive, posted to his personal—not his official POTUS—account, bore all the earmarks of haste not to say coercion.  Had someone actually dictated the text to him? We don’t know. But it was widely remarked that he neglected to endorse Kamala Harris. That came a few moments later in a separate post.

Continue reading “”

Kamala Harris And Tim Walz Really Don’t Like The Second Amendment

The first ten amendments to our Constitution are known as the “Bill of Rights” for a reason — within it are denoted numerous “rights” that belong to individuals and which are guaranteed as such against government limitation. Any American elected official who fails to grasp this foundational principle, or who understands it but refuses to accept it, is undeserving of holding public office. Take, for example, Kamala Harris.

Our current vice president, the Democrat Party nominee for president, is on record positing that one of those fundamental individual liberties expressly guaranteed against government intrusion, does not actually protect an individual right after all. So much for the clear language and history underpinning the Bill of Rights.

Not surprising, the context in which Harris has taken such a posture openly antithetical to the very principle on which the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791 is the Second Amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear arms. She proudly lent her name as the then-district attorney for San Francisco, to a legal brief opposing what turned out to be the seminal 2008 Heller decision that declared expressly that the Second Amendment does in fact protect an individual right to possess a firearm.

Harris’ stance set forth in that legal brief tells us all we need to know about her disdain for the Second Amendment.

In the years since Heller, Harris has continued to support all manner of government restrictions on possession of firearms by law-abiding citizens, including among other measures, confiscatory bans on the country’s most popular rifle the AR-15, lauding Australia’s draconian gun confiscation program and most recently, criticizing the Supreme Court’s Cargill decision in June that stopped the ATF from arbitrarily declaring “bump stocks” to be “machine guns” under federal law.

The choice of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate is further hard evidence of where the current vice president stands with regard to the rights supposed to be guaranteed under the Second Amendment.

As governor of the North Star State, Walz has supported and signed legislation expanding so-called “red flag” laws and background checks for gun purchases that go beyond those already mandated under federal law. It was a quite different story during Walz’s tenure in the U. S. House of Representatives from 2007 to 2019, however, when he needed and avidly sought the support of the NRA.

In the language du jure for what previously was known quite accurately as “flip-flopping,” Walz now declares his views have “evolved” such that he criticizes the NRA by name, and declares he is proud to be the recipient of an “F” rating from the Association that supported him previously. He has made a show of donating to charity a sum of money equal to that which he happily received from the NRA while a congressman.

And oh, how his positions have “evolved.” For example, that most popular rifle in the country among law-abiding citizens – the AR-15 — now is considered by Walz a “weapon of war” that must be banned.

As with many latecomers to the gun control movement, Walz considers his anti-Second Amendment views appropriately constitutional because, well, they help “keep our kids safe.” Lost in his probably cursory study of the historical underpinnings of the Second Amendment, and even as reflected in recent Supreme Court decisions (most notably the 2022 Bruen decision), is the fact that “keeping kids safe” is nowhere to be found even impliedly in any writings by our Founders justifying the Second Amendment (or elsewhere in the Bill of Rights for that matter).

To Walz, as to his gun control colleagues in Washington, including Kamala Harris, “common sense” equates seamlessly to “constitutional.”

It will be interesting to see how Harris’ and Walz’s extreme anti-Second Amendment views will resonate nationally with voters who do not live in the states they have represented in public office (California and Minnesota), particularly considering that private ownership of handguns for self-defense continues to rise across the country, especially among women and Black Americans. Hopefully a majority of votes tallied after the polls close Nov. 5th will reject the views of the Democrat Party’s national ticket that the Bill of Rights can be casually discarded based on their vague notion of “common sense.”

Bob Barr currently is President of the NRA.

Note to NRA: This Isn’t How You Get That ‘Homecoming’ You Want

A couple of weeks ago, the NRA’s Doug Hamlin called for a “homecoming.” He wanted gun rights advocates to return to the new and improved NRA. Wayne LaPierre is out and things are returning to normal there.

I get where he’s coming from and while I believe that if the NRA disappeared tomorrow, someone would step in to fill the void, the truth of the matter is that it’ll take longer for that to happen than I’d like and during that time, our right to keep and bear arms could be severely damaged. So we need something that void now and rebuilding the NRA is probably much faster than hoping someone else steps in quickly.

I want Hamlin to get that homecoming.

However, if that’s the goal, this isn’t exactly a winning strategy.

We love our guns here in the Great Land. Alaska is in the top five states with the highest per-capita gun ownership; as I’m fond of pointing out, up here in the valley, even the hippies have guns, and know how to use them. Most of us aren’t overly concerned about human predators, although that can happen; most Alaskans keep guns to put food on the table and to occasionally fend off a big hairy beast.

But we also know that the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting or fending off big toothy critters. Therefore it comes as something of a surprise to see the National Rifle Association endorsing Alaska’s Democrat at-large Representative Mary Peltola for reelection. (Full disclosure: My wife and I are both Life Members of the NRA and have been since the mid-90s.)

Peltola is Alaska’s sole representative and an advocate for the Second Amendment. On her campaign website, she said she owns 176 long guns and dares “someone to tread on Alaskan freedoms.”

In a statement to The Hill, she said she campaigned in 2022 on a “pro-freedom platform” and continues that to this day.

“Guns are an integral part of Alaska’s culture and our subsistence lifestyles,” Peltola said. “Alaskan gun [owners] are the strongest proponents for responsible gun ownership. We pass down our knowledge and skills to our children.”

Peltola argued that the endorsement may help the country understand Alaskan culture and see “the importance of the Second Amendment in communities.”

Except, that’s not what Mary said only a couple of years ago. From the Great Land, Must Read Alaska’s Suzanne Downing had this to say:

Just two years ago, the NRA rated Peltola with a “D.” Now, an endorsement? What has changed? Even the Gun Owners of America has rated Peltola with an “F.”
Peltola wants gun control measures, such as universal background checks, waiting periods, and gun storage laws.

According to The Washington Post in 2022, “During her campaign, Peltola said she wants a national law protecting abortion rights and favors some gun-control measures, such as universal background checks.” (Azi Paybarah, “Who Is Mary Peltola, The First Alaska Native In Congress?”)

On a questionnaire for the Anchorage Daily News, Peltola supported universal background checks and waiting periods for gun purchases.

Well, this is awkward.

Had the NRA not graded her a “D” just a couple of years earlier, it would be easy to say they were unaware of her anti-gun tendencies. Instead, they clearly knew she wasn’t exactly a champion of the right to keep and bear arms. Someone at the organization did, and one would assume that if nothing else, records were kept.

And yet, here we are.

Continue reading “”

There’s One Lesson We’d Do Well to Learn from Gun Grabbers

The gun control crowd isn’t exactly filled with my favorite people.

And on so many things, they’re completely and totally wrong.

But there’s a saying about blind squirrels and nuts. It’s not that different from the one about the accuracy of dysfunctioning wall-mounted timepieces, really. The gist is that even the most unlikely people do something right. At least, for values of “right.”

So to have the gun control crowd done something we’d do well to emulate.

Propelled by and fed up with what they see as a lack of progress when it comes to addressing America’s epidemic of gun violence, many activists like Brooks, who have felt the effects of gun violence first hand, are embracing a new tactic: running for elected office. For political organizers, this group represents a promising new cohort, whose members, if elected, may finally move the needle on gun reform.

“There is a new wave of activists-turned-candidates, particularly among women and mothers, who are no longer willing to stand by,” Brooks said. “How can we not think about our kids?”

Pinpointing the moments that led them to run for office comes easily to these candidates.

For Emily Busch, who is running for a US congressional seat in Michigan, it was the November 2021 mass shooting at Oxford high school, where her son was a freshman, that propelled her to action. The event left four dead and seven injured. “My son ran for his life with 1,700 other kids,” Busch said. “It’s something that you never ever want to experience, which is why I’m running.” …

“I think we’re going to be more passionate because we’ve experienced it,” she said, emphasizing the growing need for “leaders who understand this issue on a personal level and who can bring authentic, passionate advocacy to the legislative process”.

That same vision is driving progressive groups to find more candidates who are willing to run for office on gun violence platforms. Last February, nearly 50 new candidates gathered in Las Vegas with Demand a Seat, an initiative to train gun safety advocates to run for office and work on campaigns offered by advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety.

At the four-day boot camp, participants received mentorship from veteran politicians, training in the fundamentals of campaign building and guidance in how to effectively elevate a gun safety platform.

The program capitalizes on a trend that gun safety advocates have been witnessing for several years. “Gun safety is actually good politics now, it’s not just good policy,” said Moms Demand Action’s executive director, Angela Ferrell-Zabala. “Folks [are] choosing to run and win on gun safety.”

Here’s the thing. These aren’t just people who favor gun control. We can beat those folks easily.

What’s working for them is that these are people who have personal stories about violence committed with a firearm. It’s about how they or their families have been touched by this violence. That’s a lot harder to counter. People love stories and they respond to them. They respond to emotion, too, and these people’s stories are disturbing to think about happening to your family.

Yet there’s a counter to this and it’s not that difficult to understand.

We need people who have used guns to defend themselves to run as gun rights supporters. We need those who have been touched by violence and who remain supportive of gun rights because of how things went with their experiences. In short, we need to be able to counter with stories and emotions of our own.

Yes, the mothers of kids who were present at mass shootings is powerful, but so is the mother who defended her kids with a loaded Glock 19.

It’s easy to say we shouldn’t be basing this sort of thing on emotion. It’s not even wrong to say it. It’s just irrelevant because most people aren’t really interested in listening. They’ve been taught that their feelings are what matters, so that’s what they “think” with.

We can and should try to change that, but in the meantime, why not recruit those who have their own pro-gun stories to tell to run for office so we can put this whole thing in check?

We can learn something from the gun grabbers. We can learn how to beat them.

New Hampshire: Critical Pro-Gun Privacy Bill Signed Into Law

On Friday, July 12th, Governor Chris Sununu (R-New Hampshire) signed HB 1186, “an act relative to firearm purchaser’s privacy,” into law. Thanks to the tireless work of leading New Hampshire gun rights advocate Rep. Jason Janvrin (R-Rockingham District 40) and the strong support of NRA members, New Hampshire becomes the seventeenth state to protect the privacy of law-abiding gun buyers by prohibiting financial institutions from collecting and misusing their personal information.

The NRA and its members thank Governor Chris Sununu, Rep. Jason Janvrin, and pro-gun New Hampshire lawmakers for supporting Granite Staters’ Second Amendment rights.

In the Fall of 2022, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) approved a Merchant Category Code (MCC) for firearm retailers. MCCs are used by payment processors (like Visa and Mastercard) and other financial services companies to categorize transactions. MCCs enable payment processors and banks to identify, monitor, and collect data on certain types of transactions. Before the ISO decision, firearm retailers fell under the MCC for sporting goods stores or miscellaneous retail.

Collecting firearm retailer financial transaction data amounts to surveillance and registration of law-abiding gun owners. Those promoting this scheme are in favor of firearm and gun owner registrations. Therefore, it should be assumed that the goal of this program is to share all collected firearm retailer MCC data with government authorities and potentially private third parties that may include gun control organizations and anti-gun researchers.

HB 1186 prohibits the assigning of a specific merchant category code to the sale of firearms, ammunition, or firearm accessories and provides a civil penalty for violations.

This critical legislation protects gun-owners privacy and ensures that bad actors cannot use credit and debit card transactions to create a gun-registry or block cardholders from making gun-related purchases.

Republicans at RNC Don’t Budge In Face of Latest Anti-Gun Onslaught

We’ve spilled a lot of digital ink on all the people pushing for gun control in the wake of the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump. We’ve seen it from celebrities and athletes, to say nothing of politicians, even Biden who only calls for assault weapon bans on days that end in the letter “y.”

A lot of people are shocked that Republicans aren’t tripping over themselves to back gun control.

And let’s be real, if that was going to happen, it would happen at the Republican National Convention. Kicking off just a couple of days after the attempt on Trump’s life, you’d imagine emotions would be high and if they were ever going to do it, it would be here and now.

Only, as the Washington Times notes, it ain’t happening.

Republicans at their party convention said their commitment to gun rights and expanding concealed carry wasn’t diminished by the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump.

The party, according to delegates and lawmakers at the Republican National Convention, remained steadfastly opposed to sweeping gun control laws such as a ban on so-called assault weapons such as the AR-15-style rifle used by Mr. Trump’s would-be assassin.

Addressing a gathering of Second Amendment activists at the convention, Rep. Wesley Hunt of Texas said the attack Saturday on Mr. Trump only proves that firearms in the hands of law-abiding individuals are necessary.

“There are 400 million guns currently in circulation. Guns aren’t going anywhere,” Mr. Hunt said. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, and that guy is now dead because a good guy with a gun shot him.”

He added, “Imagine how many moral lives were spared because that sniper acted and took him out immediately.”

I just want to jump in here and point something out for all those anti-gun voices that laugh at the “good guy with a gun” thing: Law enforcement are good guys, too.

Many times, the good guy with a gun is a cop of some stripe, but the issue with counting on that is that cops aren’t always present and able to protect you. Trump had an entire detail charged with protecting him and we see how that went.

Moving on…

Rep. Kat Cammack of Florida assured gun-rights activists at the gathering, which was sponsored by U.S. Concealed Carry, that the platform’s drive-by treatment of the Second Amendment did not mean Republicans were less concerned about the issue.

“Everyone has always and will forever associate the conservative movement as right in line with the principle of 2A — ’shall not be infringed,’” she said. “Just because we don’t explicitly talk about it in a political platform for a single cycle doesn’t mean that we are not absolutely adherent to the belief that Americans have the right to defend themselves.”

Ms. Cammack said Republicans in Congress are working on passing national reciprocity legislation that would enable legal gun owners to carry concealed firearms across state lines, similar to how a driver’s license works.

That’s great.

Of course, it should have passed nearly eight years ago when Republicans controlled every branch of government, but better late than never, I suppose.

Regardless, it seems Republicans at the RNC aren’t remotely interested in buckling to the anti-gun agenda, especially in the wake of the attempt on Trump’s life. No one is taking it lightly or think it’s not a big deal, either. We just all seem to understand that nothing we said before Saturday’s attack has fundamentally changed. Gun control wouldn’t have prevented that attack and claiming otherwise is ridiculous.

That hasn’t stopped the usual suspects, mind you, but they’re so fanatical about pushing an anti-gun agenda, rationality isn’t really in their wheelhouse.

I’m just heartened to see gun rights remain respected at the RNC under the current circumstances.

Trump Dodges Another Bullet: Jack Smith

Everything really is going Donald Trump’s way in the six weeks since his conviction on May 30. Trump pulled in a vast fundraising haul after the conviction, jumping ahead for the first time in the campaign cash race while his conviction barely dented his standing in the polls. The intermediate appeals court in Georgia issued a stay order halting Fani Willis’s prosecution of Trump.

\The Supreme Court took two big bites out of Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump in D.C., with an immunity ruling and a decision on the obstruction-of-a-proceeding statute that will both require further, time-consuming litigation to see how they have narrowed the case. Acting Justice Juan Merchan delayed Trump’s state-court sentencing in New York from mid July to mid September in order to consider whether Trump’s conviction violated his immunity from having evidence of official acts introduced at his trial. His opponent melted down so badly in their first debate that Joe Biden is still fending off calls to drop out of the race, and has reportedly seen his fundraising dry to a trickle with big donors.

Then, Trump survived an assassination attempt and emerged looking vigorous and defiant. He will probably raise another mountain of cash after the shooting in Butler, Pa., which left a flustered Biden scrambling to pause his attack ads and reconsider the vitriol of his attacks on Trump. MSNBC even sidelined Morning Joe for the day out of fear of going overboard against Trump. And now, rolling into today’s curtain-opening of the Republican convention and announcement of Trump’s running mate, Judge Aileen Cannon has thrown out what once seemed the strongest of the cases against the former president: the retention of boxes of classified and sensitive documents at Mar-a-Lago after Trump left office.

Continue reading “”