HEY MAINSTREAM MEDIA, WHAT'S THE HURRY?

The Associated Press “called” the 2020 presidential election at 11:30 am Saturday for Joe Biden. Other media followed. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, the rest of the Democrat Party, and allied media behaved as if it were official. President Trump had not conceded. He had instead filed suit in Pennsylvania and Arizona alleging improprieties in vote counting, and is waiting for results of recounts in Georgia and Wisconsin.

Meanwhile, according to Reuters, Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said he will not congratulate a winner “until all the legal matters have been resolved. I can’t congratulate one candidate or the other. I want to wait until the electoral process is over.” Reuters then declared: “Democrat Joe Biden won the election on Saturday after a victory in the battleground state of Pennsylvania put him over the threshold of 270 Electoral College votes.” Reuters evidently believes our Constitution doesn’t have as much authority as media do in presidential elections. 

Others disagree. “Networks Don’t Get to Decide Elections, Courts Do,” said Trump lawyer and advisor Rudolph Giuliani.

Pennsylvania's Secretary of State hates Trump

So here we are at this writing on Tuesday, November 10th. I cannot help but wonder what will happen if recounts in Georgia and Arizona produce Trump victories, and then the Supreme Court rules that Pennsylvania must disregard ballots it got after election day, and that could give the state to Trump. That scenario looks unlikely at this point but it is still possible. If Biden loses Pennsylvania, his electoral count would be 270. Should any other state be taken out of the Biden column, he doesn’t win.

However, media called the election for Biden and will continue cementing that idea in America’s collective mind as strongly as they can. They’ll also continue depicting allegations of Democrat fraud as preposterous.

What if, after all the court cases and recounts, the Electoral College then declares that Trump has won a second term? Many expected explosions of rioting by groups like Antifa and BLM if Trump were to have won a second term last week. Imagine if those groups, assuaged at first by a perceived Biden victory, had it snatched away. It’s not unrealistic to visualize huge riots dwarfing those we saw all summer. Should that level of violence come to pass, we could justifiably blame media for inciting it.

When Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, networks thought him ridiculous, but they gave him enormous coverage because it pushed their ratings up. After he won the nomination coverage turned negative. After he was elected, coverage turned malevolent and continued at more than 90% negative for all four years of his administraton.

And then there’s this: before Trump’s inauguration mainstream media knew the Steele Dossier couldn’t be verified, but they longed to publish it anyway, so, they used a staged briefing on the dossier by since-fired FBI Director James Comey to then-President-elect Donald Trump as cover to publish the dodgy dossier. In turn, Comey’s FBI then used that very press coverage to “verify” the dossier before the FISA Court to obtain FISA warrants for spying on President Trump’s administration. Talk about circular reasoning!

As determined by the Mueller Investigation, there was never evidence of Trump collusion with Russia to win the 2016 election. Nonetheless, mainstream media pushed the story for more than two years.

Last Thursday night President Trump called a press conference to call attention to reports of election cheating last week by Democrat operative in various states. Major TV networks however, had become so arrogant in their Trump hatred they cut away from his remarks and boldly declared the president was lying! Whenever they mention Trump’s various lawsuits, they preface their remarks with phrases like: “Although they have no evidence of election tampering, Trump’s lawyers…”

There are legitimate questions about how the vote-counting was done in several states last week. Remember, after the 2000 election, Vice President Gore had conceded, but then took back his concession. Media didn’t scoff at Gore’s claims. Media didn’t presume to declare the winner. The country waited. It took weeks for courts to determine how to legally count votes. Only after 37 days, Florida, and ultimately the electoral college, determined who won. What is the rush this time?

Here, two decades later, mainstream media are solidly in control of how people perceive what happened on November 3rd, and there’s no question about who they want to win, and today they have almost everyone calling him “President-elect Biden.”

Democrats, the Deep State, and their mainstream media allies never accepted that Trump won in 2016. For four years, they spied on him, sicced a special prosecutor on him, impeached him, and conducted opinion polls predicting a blue wave to sweep him out of office that didn’t materialize. They’re not about to tolerate anybody questioning the legitimacy of last week’s purported result.

LEFT & RIGHT OCTOBER 28, 2020

 

In the left chair for this show sat John Burroughs, MD. He calls himself centrist, is politically independent, and “looks at every policy on its face.” As the show went on, I saw nothing that would contradict that self-assessment. The first cold question from our producer asked if we were concerned that, because newly-sworn Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett appeared with the president at the White House, she would be a pawn of the president. John said he wasn’t concerned. He said Barrett was certainly conservative, very much against abortion as a Catholic, and “Barrett’s primary loyalty is not to the president, but to the law.” He said nothing with which I would disagree. Interestingly he believes Barrett would not vote to overturn Roe V Wade, and suggested she might recuse herself as a Catholic because she had done that earlier as an appellate judge in a capital punishment case which the church opposes. Second question from the producer listed several right-wing groups and asked if we thought voters would be put in danger from those and some left-wing groups. I said that there are very few paramilitary right-wingers who might cause damage like the Oklahoma City bombing, but there are far more left-wing groups like BLM and Antifa who, though they would cause comparatively little damage to people with their tactics, they would cause far more overall damage to property. Right wing groups tend to be made up of former military people who have been trained to kill, and they’re more dangerous that way. BLM and Antifa will through Molotov cocktails at police cars and burn down buildings. John said both groups like creating chaos, unrest, and violence more than making political statements and that’s their commonality. They like imposing their views on the public at large because “they believe their personal values transcend the rule of law.” He says Donald Trump is dodging questions about whether he would incite violence through such groups should he lose the election. I asked him if he thought Democrats wink at violence by BLM and Antifa. He said both parties wink at extreme behavior by their respective radicals. As we discussed possible election outcomes, John mentioned the Safe Harbor Deadline, with which I was not familiar. The Electoral College sets a date by which states must report to the Electoral College the results of voting within their state. Our producer then printed some documents John read setting the date this year as December 8th. If there are challenges to the vote count they must be resolved within each state by that date. [SIDE NOTE: These procedures will now be playing out. This show was taped six days before the election, but now the results are being challenged in lawsuits by President Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Trump is demanding a recount in Wisconsin. Arizona may not have gone for Biden as reported and not all the votes are counted as of this writing the afternoon of November 5th.] Given that we didn’t disagree on topics we covered, and this wasn’t a pure Left & Right show, I decided to pick his brain about medical issues, asking why he believed masks are effective with the Covid virus. He said they inhibit spread but don’t prevent it entirely and cited examples. I then asked him about two organizations of doctors, one in the US called the “Frontline Doctors” and the other an international group who signed “The Great Barrington Declaration." Both disagree publicly with various policy recommendations by our NIH and CDC. And, both groups had been censored by Twitter and Facebook as a result. John had not heard of either, but it turns out he agreed with the Great Barrington Declaration, which states that economic and school shutdowns do far more harm than good and are unwarranted. About the Hunter Biden laptop, John believes it’s a hoax perpetrated by the Russians. I brought up Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe’s recent statement that there’s no intelligence to back that up. John, however believes more in a committee report by Senator Chuck Grassley supporting his assertion, which I had not read. At the end, he agreed to come onto future shows and explore other topics like Roe V Wade.

REMEMBERING NOVEMBER

Lovell in October

There’s a familiar feeling I get in the fall when the air is cool and the wind is blowing. Fond memories are triggered from over forty-three years ago when I moved my young family to rural Lovell, Maine from Massachusetts. We got to our new old house in August, 1977 and by early October we were settled in. I had a few weeks in my new job behind me and took my shotgun into the woods after school to hunt partridge.

Western Maine in October

It was only a short walk to the overgrown farmland down the street that was promising habitat, but I only had about ninety minutes before the sun set and I would have to walk home for supper. No one freaked out to see a young man carry a shotgun down the road. In the Massachusetts I had left, some might have called police but that wouldn’t happen in Lovell. My formerly-rural town twenty-five miles outside of Boston had turned into a suburb while I was growing up. It changed and I didn’t belong there anymore. Rural Maine became my home and I’ve been here ever since.

My house in Tewksbury now

As a boy in then-rural Tewksbury, Massachusetts, I would accompany pheasant hunters in the woods near my house. I don’t remember their names; I met them while in the woods with my homemade slingshot and pockets full of smooth stones of appropriate size and shape. I was a hunter too. They knew that when noticing my armament and demeanor. Memories of one guy are still vivid. I saw him before he realized I was there. I was waiting to get a shot at a squirrel when I heard him in the dry leaves.

He asked me where I’d seen pheasants and I directed him to an area along a stone wall. I walked along behind him looking to right for squirrels and was startled by a shotgun blast I wasn’t expecting, but turned my head around to the left quickly enough to see an explosion of feathers. The shotgun fascinated me and I would have loved to have one of my own. My father wasn’t a gun owner and my mother, despite my begging, would not let me have a BB gun; hence my slingshot. Over and over, I practiced enough so I could hit what I was aiming at. After that, no squirrel was safe.

Lovell in November

November in Lovell, Maine was wonderful. By the time I got home from school — I was a teacher — there was very little time for deer hunting after Daylight Savings Time kicked in. I had to be out of the woods when the sun went down, but Saturdays and Veteran’s Day I was out there sunrise to sunset. Sundays, the family and I worked on the woodpile. When my brothers moved to Maine a few years later, we hunted together and that was nice. After a while though, I preferred going out by myself. 

I liked the solitude. Seldom did I see a deer but I explored a lot of territory. Leaves were down and, while walking for miles up and down hills, I could see a long way. After supper I would re-study USGS maps of the area and commit them to memory. Though I saw no houses or people where I went, I did see cellar holes. Those wooded hills had once been cleared of trees and covered by farms. Stone walls snaked up and down the hills. Crops grew and animals grazed. The walls were still there. Strands of rusty barbed wire seemed to grow out from the middle of tree trunks like dead branches, but the hills were all wooded again. Farm families who lived and died there were long gone.

Eventually, though, I stopped hunting. Maybe it was because my daughters refused to eat venison. They could always taste it, even in meatballs spiced and cooked in spaghetti sauce. Maybe it was because my testosterone declined with age. I don’t know, but I just lost interest. I still like to shoot in the woods, but now it’s with a camera. I still shoot squirrels which can cause a lot of damage to my property and the other properties I look after. In a way, I’ve come full circle. I can still hit things with a slingshot, but it’s a store-bought one now. I use it to dissuade Canada geese from coming ashore on the lakefront property I manage — and I prefer a .22 for squirrels.

WILL IT HAPPEN AGAIN?

Regular readers of this column know where I’ll be putting my X on November 3rd. Four years ago, however, I was wasn’t thrilled about voting for Donald Trump. His personality was repulsive. His gratuitous insults were off-putting. It didn’t bother me, however, that he called his final opponent “Crooked Hillary,” because she was crooked. During one of their debates, Hillary said it was a good thing we didn’t have Donald Trump in charge of the law in our country.

“Because you’d be in jail,” said Trump. His timing was exquisite and I was thinking, “Who is this guy?” I could have kissed him.

It bothered me, however, that he had badly trashed his fellow Republican candidates in the primaries. Most of them were decent people and didn’t deserve it. During the ensuing campaign against Crooked Hillary, I agreed with nearly everything Trump said he would do, but doubted he would follow through. Politicians all make promises… you know the rest. Meanwhile, the Democrat media — and that’s just about all of it — gave him enormous attention. Trump charged up their viewership because no one who talked like he did had ever become the nominee of a major political party.

If mainstream media knew then how much they were helping his election chances with the exposure they gave him, they never would have done it. Against all odds, he won, making fools of media pundits. Hillary lost and “charitable” contributions to the Clinton Foundation dried up immediately. Liberals were in shock. They cried openly. Me? I found myself cheering, and that surprised me. I had to sit down and think about why I was so happy. Part of it was the shock on the faces of smug mainstream media pundits. They didn’t know what to say. They never saw it coming. Neither did I actually, but I liked it.

The day after Trump won, Democrats and their media allies began plotting to reverse the election and overthrow Trump, by hook or by crook and mostly the latter. Obama was still in office, so he and his lackeys in the intelligence agencies continued what Crooked Hillary was doing — working with Russians to smear Trump. They used the Steele Dossier which was bought and paid for by the Clinton Campaign and the Democrat National Committee and tried to convince us all that Trump was a Russian asset.

Trouble is, they had no evidence. Nothing in the Steele Dossier was true, but that didn’t stop them. Trump haters in the deep state conspired to appoint a special prosecutor to dig up evidence.  There was none to dig up, but it took Robert Meuller and his huge staff two years and over $30 million before he was forced to admit it. They lied; they spied, and Trump was still standing. After Democrats won control of the House in 2018, they impeached him for a phone call he made to Ukraine about Biden family shenanigans, but he was found not guilty in the Senate.

Then, ironically, Hunter Biden left a laptop with a computer repairman in Delaware and forgot to pick it up. On it are emails indicating that both Hunter Biden and his father, Joe, were indeed involved in shenanigans with Ukraine — and elsewhere. Also on it are videos allegedly showing Hunter Biden having sex with minors. A further irony is that, four years ago, Anthony Weiner’s laptop fell into the hands of the NYPD pursuant to their investigation into Weiner exposing himself to underage girls online. Also on it were over 30,000 of Hillary Clinton’s missing emails.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump remains in need of a personality transplant — but he has followed through on his campaign promises. I don’t have to like him, but I am going to vote for him without misgivings. Why? I’ll quote a nameless young lady whose video explaining that in less than a minute was posted on Gateway Pundit here. A partial transcript follows:

Here she is

“If you are liberal and can’t stand Trump and can’t possibly fathom why anyone would vote for him, let me fill you in.  We can’t stand you.  You’ve done everything in your power by trying to destroy this country by tearing down our police, our borders, our history, systematically destroying our schools and brainwashing our kids into thinking socialism is the answer to everything. Demonizing religion and faith and glorifying abortion, violence and thug culture.  And calling us racists… We are voting for Trump because of you!”

Maybe it sums up why you too vote for Donald Trump. If he’s reelected, I’ll enjoy watching mainstream media pundits go nuts again, but I’m afraid of what their followers will do in the streets. Meanwhile, those pundits are trying to blame Russia for the Hunter Biden laptop scandal they're trying desperately to contain. Will it work?

CURBING GOVERNMENT POWER

Has government exceeded its power with Covid shutdowns? Some have thought so from the beginning, but almost everyone cooperated for the first few weeks to “flatten the curve.” It seemed logical not to overload our hospitals and I heard no one object in my small circle, but that’s changing. 

The curve has been flattened for some time now but media hype continues unabated and, consequently, so does public fear. Mask-wearing is viewed as a public responsibility to some and an exercise in virtue-signaling for others to whom it has become a woke, fashion accessory.

Michigan Governor Whitmer

We’ve learned that not all of us are vulnerable to the virus — that only elderly persons with multiple co-morbidities need worry. We’ve also learned that the first dire predictions of millions dying in the the U.S. were way overblown. We’ve learned that the CDC has been over-counting Covid deaths by 94%. Studies are beginning to emerge indicating that shutdowns may not have curbed spread of the virus at all — but it’s becoming almost treasonous to suggest that.

Months ago, some Americans filed suit against blue-state governors for exceeding their constitutional authority and rulings on those suits are beginning to come down. In Pennsylvania, a federal judge ruled that Democrat Governor Wolf’s lockdown orders are unconstitutional. Plaintiffs include Republican state representatives, county officials, and Congressman Mike Kelly from the Pittsburgh area. The decision was issued in September and Wolf has appealed. A circuit court stay is in place and it will take more time to work this through to a final conclusion.

Meantime, in Michigan, the state supreme court ruled that Democrat Governor Whitmer exceeded her authority with Covid restrictions as well. The Michigan attorney general declared he would no longer enforce her edicts. It’s hard to determine how much her autocratic behavior around the virus contributed to the FBI-foiled plan by anarchists to kidnap her. Perhaps that will come out at trial, assuming the perpetrators don’t plea-bargain.

And what an odd bunch they are. Governor Whitmer immediately blamed President Trump for the kidnapping plot, but then a video came out of one potential plotter wearing earlobe-stretching disc earrings as he expressed his hatred for the president. Given leftist, anti-government riots perpetrated by BLM and Antifa on one hand and right-wing, anti-government actions by the likes of Terry McVeigh and Terry Nichols twenty-five years ago, it’s hard to position these plotters on the political spectrum.

WHO reverses itself on shutdowns

Just days ago, the World Health Organization reversed itself and advised world leaders to stop “using lockdowns as your primary control method” with the Coronavirus, and “Lockdowns just have one consequence that you must never ever belittle, and that is making poor people an awful lot poorer.” It wasn’t long ago that President Trump cancelled US support to the WHO for being in cahoots with the Chinese Communist Party. Now they’re on the same page.

It’s not just political groups rebelling against autocratic edicts by Democrat officials. In New York City, conservative Jews openly defied Democrat Mayor DiBlasios’ and Democrat Governor Cuomo’s ban on religious gatherings by dancing in the streets. Also in NYC, Brooklyn Roman Catholic Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio filed suit against the state of New York for violating his First Amendment guarantee of free exercise of religion. New York’s usually-timid Cardinal Timothy Dolan surprisingly backed DiMarzio’s suit.

After President Trump tested positive for the virus, mainstream media claim it’s because of his refusal to wear a mask. Some outlets imply that he got his just desserts for his reluctance. I do not believe they’re effective against spreading the virus and I resent the signs on entry doors telling me I cannot enter without a mask. Although they cost me $15 apiece, I purchased some face masks online which declare: “THIS MASK IS USELESS, AND SO IS YOURS.” Some shoppers just stare at me, while others tell me: “I love your mask.”

As I’m about to submit this column on Tuesday, I see a report by national security correspondent Jordan Schachtel that:

“[A]CDC study, which surveyed symptomatic COVID-19 patients, has found that 70.6% of respondents reported “always” wearing a mask, while an additional 14.4% say they “often” wear a mask. That means a whopping 85% of infected COVID-19 patients reported habitual mask wearing. Only 3.9% of those infected said they “never” wear a face covering.”

Last August, according to the Huffington Post, Joe Biden said: “Let’s institute a mask mandate, nationwide, starting immediately, and we will save lives.” A few days ago though, Biden said he’s not sure a president can do that, but he would mandate them on federal property. A glance at the map of federal land in the USA, you’ll see that half of California and nearly all of several western states.

SERIOUS COMIC BRILLIANCE

If I start reading a book and it doesn’t grab me twenty pages in, I put it down. I’m a slow reader and life is too short to justify finishing books that bore me. There are too many interesting ones out there and not enough time to read them.

Here in the 21st century, the same is true of YouTube videos. Just now I finished watching a 1959 interview of Ayn Rand by Mike Wallace that fascinated me. Twice I’ve tried to read one of Rand’s novels after strong recommendations by people I respect, but both times I put them down. The interview, however, was great. It grabbed me.

As with many intellectuals like Rand, I agree with some of her points and disagree with others, but she gets me thinking. I also love that YouTube provides a list of related video links in the margin. Nest to Ayn Rand were thinkers like Orson Wells, Milton Friedman, Aldous Huxley, and George Carlin. I watched a few and ran out of time while realizing there are so many fascinating YouTube videos that I won’t live long enough to watch even a small fraction of them.

I stumbled onto Ayn Rand after friend sent me an article by an anonymous thinker with the pseudonym “Sundance” whose blog is called "The Last Refuge," and sometimes the “Conservative Tree House.” At the bottom was the link to the Wallace/Rand interview. One interesting tidbit leads to another on today’s internet and I was grateful for whatever algorithm put the links there. The worldwide web analyzed my interests effectively and offered additional intellectual stimulation. That nebulous entity we was teaching me the way I tried to teach young minds for decades before the web existed.

It was most effective when I was able to take advantage of teachable moments whenever they emerged. A student would ask a penetrating question, for example, which, if I took sufficient time to answer it, might take the class on a tangent only marginally related to the curriculum I was responsible to deliver. I learned to recognize it when a critical mass of students became engaged by the question. If it intensified while I delivered the answer, and if that answer led to more earnest questions from other students waving their raised hands enthusiastically, I knew I had stumbled onto fertile ground.

At that point, my job was to exploit their curiosity by subtly steering discussion more deeply into the curriculum I was charged to teach — 20th century US History including economics, civics, the US Constitution, and current events. I miss my classroom and still think like a teacher. If a student asked a question about Ayn Rand — an intellectual who railed against government regulation — I imagined steering the conversation toward the dangers of regulatory government as identified by Ronald Reagan or Calvin Coolidge, depending on what period of 20th century history we might be covering.

In one of the paragraphs above, I classed comedian George Carlin with 20th century intellectuals though probably very few of you would think of Carlin that way. Did he belong there? I’m beginning to think so after finding so many links to his routines beneath a serious article. I’m sorry he’s not around anymore to demonstrate his intellectual prowess by making us laugh about significant topics. Unlike most comedians, he wrote his own material.

He thought of himself not so much as a comedian who wrote his own stuff, but as a writer who performed his own stuff. Repeatedly courtmartialed from the military and expelled from school, I bet he was a brilliant class clown. Watching him pace back and forth as an adult during his rapid-fire deliveries on YouTube, I realized he also was probably also ADHD — not unusual for a class clown. The ones I recall were usually quite smart.

To make people laugh the way Carlin did about a wide variety of topics, he had to know what things his audience seriously believed, and he needed a deep understanding of those things. Then he would have to think of new, unusual, and often irreverent ways to look at them. A powerful intellect is required to do that. Often I see links to one of his comedy routines on subjects I take seriously—  and he nearly always gets me laughing.

It’s only when he’s unnecessarily profane that he doesn’t. Rather than add to his comic brilliance, it detracts — and it exemplifies something I once read on a bathroom wall: “Profanity is an attempt by a weak mind to make a strong statement.” As I claimed above though, Carlin didn’t have a weak mind, but like many, he got lazy at times and let his powerful brain lapse into degeneracy. Although he’s been dead for twelve years, his comedy routines have withstood the test of time, which is, of course, further evidence of genius.