Month: March 2020

The Return of the Biden

The Portly Politico5 Comments

It was another big night for Joe “You’re Full of Sh*t” Biden swept through another round of primaries, with aging “democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders only winning North Dakota.  In short, it was another big night for Biden.

It’s interesting to me how even when a candidate “wins” a State, his opponent can garner delegates, unlike the “winner-take-all” approach of the Electoral College (with the exceptions of Maine and Nebraska, where candidates can win electoral votes for winning majorities in individual congressional districts, even if they don’t win the majority of votes in the State).  That helps the second-place finisher stay in the race, but the reporting—“Biden wins Michigan!“—plant the suggestion that Bernie is toast.

Well, perception is—or tends to be—reality, and the media is all-in for Biden.  Since his blowout victories in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday, I’m increasingly convinced that Biden will win the nomination outright.  The prospects of a brokered Democratic National Convention—They Will be Done!—seems increasingly remote.

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Post-Trump America

The Portly Politico7 Comments

Well, the craziness of yesterday has subsided, and I’m almost finished with report cards.  Student-musicians apparently did quite well at their Music Festival, and life is (hopefully) about to calm down a bit before getting insane all over again in about five or six weeks.

All that said, I’m still pretty worn-out today.  Fortunately, my good blogger buddy photog, proprietor of Orion’s Cold Fire, wrote a post yesterday, “Building on Trump’s Revolt,” which raises some interesting questions.  Foremost at the back of every Trumpist’s mind:  who takes over after Trump?

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Memorable Monday II: Monday Steakhouse Blues

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Almost exactly a year ago today, I wrote a brief post from my cellphone at a Western Sizzlin’ in Florence, South Carolina.  At the time, I was incredibly stressed out, due to a combination of factors:  the end-of-quarter dash to grade papers, the looming Music Festival, and a home without Internet.

Here it is a year later and the seventy posts of a year ago seem minuscule.  I also find myself in a similar state of frantic scrambling.  This year, my Internet is working—thank goodness!—but we’re in the midst of our once-every-five-years reaccreditation visit.  It’s the culmination of eighteen-months of work, and the administration is hyper-vigilant (and extremely on edge) about us presenting the best, most Potemkin Village-esque version of the school.

I’m also preparing kids for the aforementioned Music Festival—which should now be done—and working on buying curtains for our stage.  Yikes!  And, in an object lesson of how we never learn our lessons, I’m struggling under a mountain of papers for third quarter report cards.  Ay caramba!

As such, today’s post is a reblog, a look back at one year ago.  I probably won’t eat steak tonight, but I did eat a fourteen-ounce, $35 blackened ribeye on the school’s dime last night, so that’s something.

Here is 2019’s “Monday Steakhouse Blues“:

I’m writing today’s post on my phone at one of the few surviving Western Sizzlin’ steakhouses in America. Yep, it’s been that kind of day.

Yesterday’s post marked the 70th consecutive daily post on this blog. That means I’ve posted at least one post a day for ten weeks.

I don’t have much to say today. I’m taking a group of roughly forty student-musicians to a “Solo and Ensemble”-style music festival tomorrow, and today report card grades were due. Without Internet at the house, everything had to get done today in a compressed time.

As such, the only interesting thing I’ve had a chance to hear about today was Tucker Carlson saying a bunch of controversial, awesome stuff on a radio show a decade ago—and, instead of kowtowing to the Left, he invited folks to debate him on his show: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/03/11/tucker-carlson-refuses-to-apologize-over-media-matters-compilation-of-shock-jock-call-ins/

More to come tomorrow and Wednesday. I couldn’t blow a 70-day streak.

Happy Monday!

–TPP

Lazy Sunday LII: Democratic Candidates, Part I

The Portly Politico18 Comments

The last week saw some major momentum for Joe Biden, as he smashed through big chunks of the Super Tuesday primaries.  Then his most logical competitors, one by one, dropped out, no doubt after receiving some threatening phone calls from the DNC.  That’s narrowed the field, essentially, to Biden and Bernie, with Congressbabe Tulsi Gabbard out there with some Somoan delegates and a dream of a debate appearance.

What seemed so unlikely even ten days ago—but was the conventional wisdom last summer—now seems plausible:  Biden, possibly struggling with dementia, is on track to become the Democratic nominee for the presidency.  There’s still a chance for a brokered convention, which would no-doubt devolve into chaos as angry Bernie Bros watched their doddering hero stripped of any chance at the nomination, but the safe bet at this point seems to be a narrow Biden win.

It’s a good reminder that these primaries can be incredibly unpredictable, but also that the establishment choice usually wins.  I remember the 2012 Republican primaries, in which, week after week, one of the second-tier candidates would take the lead, only to fall behind or get knocked out of the race.  Romney was the presumed front-runner, even though he was second in most of the polls, but none of the other candidates could stay out in the lead for long.  It finally came down to Rick Santorum to offer some kind of alternative to Romney, and he, too, fell.

It’s why so many of us were dismayed when the media was trumpeting JEB! Bush as the Republican front-runner in early 2015.  I was Trump-skeptical in those days (how wrong I was), but the thought of another Bush, even a capable one (JEB! was a great governor in Florida), getting the nomination was disheartening.  Fortunately, Trump upended everything like a bull in a gold-plated hotel china shop.

Trump’s nomination now seems like an historical aberration—one for which I am extremely thankful.  I’m hoping it’s the start of a new trend of populist firebrands (at least on the Republican side), but the circling of the DNC wagons around Biden suggests that the elites are still running the show, at least on that side of the political spectrum.  Republicans do seem to listen to their base a bit more—sometimes.

Regardless, I thought it would be interesting to look back at some posts regarding the Democratic primaries to see some of the figures that rose and fell during the process.  I’ll continue this review of recent history next Sunday.

  • “Box Wine Aunties for Williamson” – a social media savvy, New Age-y guru, Marianne Williamson was all the talk in the early days of the Democratic debates.  That was during the point when the party, chastened by claims of a rigged primary season in 2016, was letting everyone and their brother get on television if they had enough small-ball donations.  Thus, Williamson became an Internet sensation.  In reading back through that post, my analysis relies a great deal on symbolism, which is increasingly important in an age in which memes and images convey complex meanings.  Buuuuut the moon-bat dropped out.
  • “The Collapse of the Obama Coalition?” – The identity-politics-obsessed Left now bemoans the fact that the Democratic primaries are down to two old white dudes.  It turns out there are many Democrats that don’t care about identity politics, but in 2019 the candidate I most feared was Senator Kamala Harris, the concubine-turned-prosecutor-turned-pandering-politico who seemed to check off all the intersectional boxes.  She was a woman, black(ish), exotic—like Obama.  If anyone could revive the frayed Obama coalition of the “marginalized,” it would be her.  Of course, her inauthentic pandering to blacks was so transparent, they rejected her out-of-hand.  Turns out black folks don’t like a half-Jamaican prosecutor who pretends to know about African-American culture and who spent her career locking them up.
  • “Iowa Caucuses: Disaster on the Prairie” – The Democrats love to sell themselves as do-gooding technocrats who “know how to get things done” (I’m pretty sure Elizabeth Warren has said that, with all the earnestness of every girl who cried over making a 98 on a quiz, constantly over the past year).  Yet they botched the much-watched Iowa caucuses in spectacular fashion, using suspect technology with close ties to some of the candidates to calculate the results.  Sometimes good old pencil and paper really are the way to go.  Of course, that muddying of the waters screwed up the momentum for both the Bernie and the Buttigieg camps, and may have had downstream effects on both campaigns.

That’s it for this (unintentionally long) Lazy Sunday.  Part II of this retrospective will be next week.

Happy Sunday!

—TPP

Other Lazy Sunday Installments:

SubscribeStar Saturday: Coronavirus Prepping

The Portly Politico8 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Yesterday’s Phone it in Friday discussed the coronavirus.  I mentioned some of the steps I’ve been taking to prepare (God forbid) a lengthy quarantine.

To be clear, I don’t think it will come to that.  The virus is dangerous, to be sure, but it seems like a deadlier version of the flu.  The United States enjoys the best medical system in the world, and I suspect the fallout won’t be nearly as devastating.

Nevertheless, it’s prudent to stock up, especially given our over-reliance on China for supplies.  If anything, that’s my biggest concern:  a shortage of medical supplies.  So here are some small steps I’m taking to prepare for the worst, even though I think the worst is unlikely.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Phone it in Friday VIII: Coronavirus Conundrum

The Portly Politico7 Comments

It’s been another crazy week here in the world of yours portly.  The quarter is coming to a close, and I’ve got a mountain of ungraded quizzes and tests to slog through to appease the gods of higher education admittance.

Ergo, it’s time for a very special coronavirus (or “COVID19,” for your cool kids) edition of Phone it in Friday!

  • Tomorrow’s SubscribeStar Saturday will be a detailed rundown of what I’ve been doing to prepare for the extremely remote possibility that we all get quarantined in our homes and have to practice social distancing to avoid spreading the bug any further.  Here’s the short preview:  I bought a bunch of rice, beans, and spaghetti.
    • On that note, I’m yet again flummoxed by fears of everyday hunger in America.  Ten pounds of rice came to about $7; same with the spaghetti.  Twenty cans of beans cost around $12.  You can eat—maybe not well, but enough to survive and function—for a month for extremely cheaply.  Whining about “hunger” in the United States is a farcical outlier.
    • I am thankful to live in the United States, a country with the best medical system in the world, and the means to treat most diseases.  I’m optimistic that the virus will pass through quickly
  • Was it bat soup, or a Wuhan biological weapon?  Either way, I think we’ve seen the wisdom of the trade war with China, even though we weren’t anticipating something like a Chinese-created pandemic.  The coronavirus exposes the weaknesses and contradictions at the heart of China, and puts lie to the notion that this is a “Chinese century.”  I’ll be glad to be done with such rubbish.  The Chinese have come far, yes, but it turns out a totalitarian regime built on a culture of death and lying (“saving face”) can only snooker people for so long.
    • That doesn’t mean that China will no longer pose a threat.  Indeed, I believe China to be our biggest geopolitical competitor.  All the more reason to relocate industries back to the United States, or at least to friendlier countries like Vietnam, rather than deal with the Chinese.
    • For the best treatment of this subject, read blogger Didact’s essay “Corona-chan Comes for You.”  He spells out the economic threat of the coronavirus, and how the whole thing is likely the result of Chinese incompetence and the insane cultural concept of “face,” in which it’s better to lie (in the Chinese mind) than to risk bringing shame to your family.  Concepts like that make me glad to live in the United States.

My hope is that after all is done, China will be a pariah, no longer vaunted as a power on the rise, but maligned as a malicious, mendacious regime.

That’s it for this brief Phone it in Friday.  Wash your hands, stock up on dry goods, and stay healthy!

—TPP

TBT: The Human Toll of Globalization

The Portly Politico6 Comments

One of the more interesting developments in conservatism since Trump’s rise in 2015-2016 has been a reevaluation of our basic economic policy.  Much of the ideas debated originated, in our modern political era, with Pat Buchanan.  For decades, the assumption among conservatism was that economic efficiency was the highest good, as it lowered costs and eliminated or reduced government overreach.

That was a reasonable set of assumptions when our nation shared a common culture, and when the United States dominated global markets hegemonically.  But the goal of reducing the size of government morphed pathologically into the mad worship of Efficiency above all else.  We sold out social capital—stable families, cohesive communities, robust civil society—for quick cash.

That’s the gist of Z-Man’s post today, “Middle-Man Conservatism.”  Tucker Carlson has similarly touched upon the woeful consequences of worshiping Efficiency-for-its-own-sake.  Sure, Americans possess a pioneering spirit—we’ll move to the oil fields in North Dakota if we have to do so—but we’re still motivated by the same things other humans are:  family, community, belonging.  Gutting our communities to save fifty bucks on a washing machine is a ludicrous trade-off.

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Super Tuesday Results

The Portly Politico2 Comments

Whoa!  The Super Tuesday results are (mostly) in, and it looks like my prediction was right:  Biden gobbled up the South, including Virginia, while Sanders held strong on the Left Coast, including Colorado (and, most significantly, California).  Politico has a nifty rundown of the results.

Biden is being propped up by the establishment wing of the Democratic Party.  Amy “The Teacher’s Pet” Klobuchar and “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg both suspended their campaigns after Biden’s big win in South Carolina.  Based on his performance in South Carolina, I figured that black voters were behind him thanks to his role as Obama’s VP.  Sanders has struggled with black voters (who, in addition to not liking homosexuals, also don’t seem to care for elderly Jewish socialists).

Now Bloomberg has dropped out, too, and thrown his support to Biden.  I called this one right as well:  he was a red herring all along.  Elizabeth Warren, who seems to reevaluating her pledge to “take it to the convention,” effectively destroyed him in the Nevada debates.  It also puts to bed the notion that the presidency can be bought (at least at this point).  Maybe if Biden had stumbled in SC (and Bloomberg had stayed out of the Nevada debate), Bloomy could have filled the vacuum of the Democratic “center,” but I doubt it.

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(Belated) SubscribeStar Saturday: Universal Studios Trip

The Portly Politico3 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Today is Super Tuesday, and the Democrats are circling the wagons around Biden in an attempt to stymie Sanders.  Tonight will tell us a great deal:  will Bernie prevail, as polling suggests, over Biden?  Will—as I predict—Biden hang tough, scooping up the black vote and, by extension, the Southern States?  Will Bloomberg’s untested strategy of just focusing on these fifteen jurisdictions pay off, or (as I also predict) he flame out spectacularly, effectively blowing those ad dollars (a la my good friend Tom Steyer)?

We’ll know more tonight.  In the meantime, here is my account of my recent trip to the happiest place on Earth, Universal Studios.

To read the rest of this post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

Biden Blowout in South Carolina

The Portly Politico7 Comments

A note to SubscribeStar subscribers:  I will post an account of my recent trip to Universal Studios tomorrow, to make up for Saturday’s missed post.  I will try to have Sunday Doodles posted for $5 subscribers later today, probably this evening.  Thank you for your patience, and your support.  —TPP

The Democratic primaries continue to get more interesting.  First, Buttigieg surprised analysts with a near-victory in Iowa (in fact, I’m still unclear who actually “won” the caucuses there).  Elizabeth Warren took down Bloomberg on the eve of the Nevada caucuses, herself going down in flames in South Carolina.

There’s an echo there of former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie taking down a robotic Marco Rubio in the debate just before the 2016 New Hampshire primaries.  Christie had no chance of winning after New Hampshire, but he took Rubio down with him, exposing the would-be poster boy of the Republican Party as an overly-polished puppet.  Similarly, Warren’s aggressive attacks on Bloomberg was the screeching harpies way of clawing Bloomberg down with her.

Of course, unlike Rubio, Bloomberg has billions of dollars at his disposal, and has pledged to keep spending big.  That adds an interesting wrinkle, but I’ve held that Bloomberg is a very flashy red herring, and I’m not convinced he can buy primary victories.  Super Tuesday will tell us a great deal, but I think the only winner from Bloomberg’s campaign will be television networks and social media outlets making a bundle from ad sales.  I would love to get the commission on a Bloomberg ad buy.

Now, former Vice President Joe Biden has come back with a yuge win in South Carolina.  Like every armchair commentator with even a passing knowledge of the South and black people, I knew that Buttigieg would struggle here.  Black voters dominate the Democratic primaries in Southern States, and black people do not like gays.  But I didn’t expect that ButtiBoy would drop out after SC.

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