Birth(day), Death, and Taxes

3 January 20203 January 2020 The Portly Politico7 Comments

“Nothing in life is certain except death and taxes,” the old saying goes. But we are also born, those of us fortunate enough not to fall prey to the abortion industry. Today marks my thirty-fifth birthday. I celebrated by paying $162.57 in vehicle property taxes to Darlington County, South Carolina.

Yesterday, I purchased a new vehicle, my first new car in thirteen-and-a-half years, and only the third I’ve ever owned. It’s a 2017 Nissan Versa Note SV. The other two were a 1988 Buick Park Avenue Electra, which I bought from my older brother for $800, after my grandparents gave it to him one year, and a 2006 Dodge Caravan, which those same grandparents gave to me as a college graduation gift (after the Buick was totaled when a lady ran a yield sign and smashed into me).

The Buick is long gone, but I kept the Dodge. I figure it’s worth more to me as stuff-hauler than I would have gotten in trade-in value. Of course, that means maintaining insurance on both vehicles, and paying taxes on each.

Well, I awoke today to the news that our military assassinated Iranian General Qassem Soleiman last night. When I first read that Soleiman was “assassinated,” I was picturing a fate similar to the death of the “austere religious scholar,” the ISIS guy, al-Baghdadi: covert operatives swooping in under cover of darkness, swiftly and surely relieving the general of his life.

Dawn of a Decade

1 January 20201 January 2020 The Portly Politico9 Comments

Happy New Year! It’s 2020! Wags will quip that “it’s not really a new decade—that doesn’t start until next year, in 2021.” It’s a case where the wags are correct on the facts, but don’t appreciate how appealing that nice, round “0” at the end looks. Everyone was excited for 2000 AD; 2001 was greeted with shrugs.

Regardless, it’s an exciting time to be alive, in every sense of the word “exciting.” 2020 is a presidential election year, with a contentious, cartoonish Democratic primary season to endure. The impeachment trial is (allegedly) coming up soon, if Speaker Nancy Pelosi decides to rummage through her purse and take them to the Senate.

America is enjoying an economic boom, with a long bull market and the lowest unemployment rate since 1969. President Trump’s administration is restoring some sense of sanity and reason to the absurdity of 21st-century governance. He at least expects the government to work for the American people, not actively against them.

New Years’ Day is when bloggers both look back to the year recently passed, and look ahead to the coming year. Prediction posts are popular and fun, so long as you don’t take them too seriously.

God Bless Us, Every One: The Gift of the Trump Economy

27 December 201926 December 2019 The Portly Politico1 Comment

Christmas Week is always full of blessings. Thanks to the good folks at pro-MAGA news aggregator Whatfinger News (and a helpful tip from photog of Orion’s Cold Fire on how to submit links to them), The Portly Politico has seen its best week in terms of traffic all year. Two pieces, “Napoleonic Christmas” and “Christmas and its Symbols” made the main page, leading both to surpass my previous top post for the year, “Milo on Romantic Music.” Apparently, people still get riled up about Napoleon.

It’s also been a wonderful opportunity to spend time with family and to overeat lots of delicious, rich foods. If you’ve never heard of the Appalachian delicacy “chocolate butter,” do yourself a favor and look it up. Yes, it’s even better than the name suggests.

Of course, all of that good cheer requires a solid financial foundation. And in his three years in office, President Trump has shattered records for unemployment, wage increases, and economic growth. Economics isn’t everything, but the Trump economy is something for which we should give thanks.

Napoleonic Christmas

23 December 201923 December 2019 The Portly Politico16 Comments

It’s Christmas Week! And what a glorious week it is. It’s been raining persistently in South Carolina since Sunday morning, but I’m enjoying the coziness of the hygge—warm coffee and lazy reading.

PragerU had a little video up this morning from historian Andrew Roberts about Napoleon. It’s an interesting take on the not-so-short French emperor—an apologia, really (for those that prefer reading—as I often do—to watching videos, here is a PDF transcript).

Roberts argues that Napoleon was not the necessary precursor to Hitler, et. al.; rather, Napoloen was “sui generis“—a man unto himself. While I believe the ideas of the French Revolution did unleash the totalitarian forces of Hitlerism, Stalinism, Maoism, and all the rest—a murderous, bloody Pandora’s Box—I’ve never considered Napoleon among their ranks.

A Little Derb’ll Do Ya: Haydn’s “Derbyshire Marches”

16 December 201915 December 2019 The Portly Politico7 Comments

My Saturday morning ritual involves “sleeping in” until about 8:30 AM, brewing some coffee, and listening to Radio Derb, John Derbyshire’s weekly podcast for VDare.com. Derb goes back for years—he used to write for National Review, before they kicked him out for writing “The Talk: Nonblack Version” for Taki’s Magazine.

I first found out about him and his controversial essay from NR, back when I was a devout print subscriber, amid the heady days when campus protests were novel enough to be terrifying. NR ran a little blurb about Williams College cancelling a scheduled talk from Derb, and I’ve been listening to his podcast—an entertaining mix of news, science, political and cultural commentary, and updates on the president of Turkmenistan—ever since.

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Tedium of (Teaching) Slavery

7 December 20197 December 2019 The Portly Politico1 Comment

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.

A major part of American history was, of course, slavery. As I typed that sentence, I nearly wrote “the unfortunate legacy of slavery,” though we’re still living that, just not in the way the race-baiters and social justice warriors claim.

But phrases like “the unfortunate legacy of slavery” have become incredibly cliched. It and similar phrases (“slavery is our great national sin”) act as magic talismans, incantations that, when invoked, protect the speaker (presumably) from the ultimate curse, the label of “racist.”

Of course, slavery was wrong, and slavery is immoral. It was our great national sin (paid for, as Lincoln pointed out in his Second Inaugural Address, with the blood “drawn by the sword” in the American Civil War). It continues to have an “unfortunate legacy,” in that race-baiting charlatans continue to blame it for virtually every pathology in black American culture.

Dang it… I screwed up the incantation with that last bit. I’d better kiss my job goodbye right now.

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

The Collapse of the Obama Coalition?

4 December 20194 December 2019 The Portly Politico9 Comments

Yesterday, would-be authoritarian and multiracial presidential candidate Senator Kamala Harris dropped out of the Democratic primaries. That’s shocking news, but good for the future of republic.

Early on, I (as well as Z Man) thought that Senator Harris posed a major threat. With the Left’s supposed desire for a charismatic, exotic-but-not-too-different, intersectional candidate, Harris fit the bill. She is basically a female Obama: the unusual ethnic background (Jamaican and East Indian), the meteoric rise, the stentorian rhetoric, the Third World penchant for strong-man (or -woman) rule. As a woman, she could pick up the angry professional woman vote, and as a nominal black she could pick up black Americans.

Boy, was I wrong—thank goodness! The black vote is hewing pretty closely to former Vice President Joe Biden, apparently because of his association with the Obama administration, which black Americans remember fondly. The box wine auntie vote is going to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. All of the suburban soccer moms, urban young professionals, and Episcopalians are going for Pete Buttigieg.

Giving Thanks (and a Sales Pitch)

27 November 201926 November 2019 The Portly Politico42 Comments

Thanksgiving Break starts today! For those of you that don’t work in education, here’s hoping you can enjoy some time off tomorrow and Friday.

I have some exciting, timely news: my SubscribeStar page hit five subscribers yesterday! That’s a huge deal, because SubscribeStar requires their “Stars” to have five subscribers before subscriptions automatically renew on a monthly basis. So, a BIG “Thank You” to my five plucky subscribers.

For those of you interested in subscribing, here’s my Thanksgiving pitch: each Saturday, I post a fresh post for $1/month and up subscribers. It’s an insanely good value—the price of a large specialty pizza per year—and I write some juicy stuff that I can’t put on the main site.

If you want to get generous and go for $5/month, I’ve recently launched “Sunday Doodles.” I throw up a couple of my wacky, absurd, grotesque doodles each Sunday, usually with a brief explanation about when/where I doodled them. Here’s a sample:

The SubscribeStar page includes around thirty-five posts at present, with probably thirty of those being essays. Like this blog, I use that page to write about all kinds of topics, including:

…and, of course, candy apples.

Also, every Fourth of July week is MAGAWeek, which is a week of exclusives only for subscribers.

Now that I’ve turned giving thanks into a lurid bid for your hard-earned cash, let me close by saying that I am, indeed, truly thankful to all of my readers. Blogging daily this past year has been a challenge at times, but it’s also been a blast. I’m incredibly thankful for those of you who read the site, and for the great new blogosphere buddies I’ve met along the way.

Thank you for your support, and have a Happy Thanksgiving!

—TPP

Thanksgiving Week!

25 November 201925 November 2019 The Portly Politico6 Comments

It’s Thanksgiving Week! November is flying by; Halloween Week (and Halloween!) seem like yesterday. Yesterday was a crisp, autumnal day, a brief respite of warmth before cold weather returned to South Carolina this morning.

As a teacher, one of my favorite “weeks” of the school year is this one. I put “weeks” in quotation marks because, from a teaching perspective, this isn’t truly a “week,” or even a “short week” (four days, such as the Labor Day holiday early in the academic year). Instead, it’s two days of either cramming in tests and material, or of laconically drifting into the glorious Thanksgiving Break.

Election Day 2019

5 November 20195 November 2019 The Portly Politico5 Comments

It’s Election Day 2019! I’m sure there are all sorts of interesting elections happening all over the country, but for me, the big election is right in my backyard, in little Lamar, South Carolina (which just got a website!).

Lamar is holding elections for two at-large Town Council seats. There are two incumbents and two challengers, and the election is non-partisan (for what it’s worth, I cast my two votes for the challengers, in the Jacksonian spirit of rotation in office).

I like to vote early (though not often—that’s a federal crime, and since I’m not a Democrat or an illegal alien, I’d get in trouble for doing so), because I never know if I’ll be home by the time polls close. Polling in South Carolina always runs from 7 AM to 7 PM, which is a pretty substantial window. So, I was there right at 7 AM, and was the fifth person from my precinct to cast a ballot.

What was really surprising were the new voting machines, about which I have mixed feelings.

The Portly Politico

One Southerner's unique, erudite, conservative perspective in a hectic world

Tag: politics