By The Numbers - part the eighty first

Well... the MAGAnauts keep bleating about landslide and mandate and such. But we now know that Kim Don Jon polled under 50% of the popular vote, once again a minority dictator. He slithered in under the Blue Wall, which he did by a margin (as of 20 Nov) of 231,648 votes.

How did he do that? By the skin of his teeth. This is the number of precincts in the states.

PA    -  9,000 
MI    -  5,235 
WI    -  3,563 
total - 17,798

Simple arithmetic: just 13 votes/precinct made the difference.

Tough Love

Well... just about every day the Limp Wristed Lefties bleating that the sub-GED crowd is such a large part of the electorate (where's those jelly bean jar IQ tests that Confederate states used to use?) that they have to do something to carve them off from the MAGAnauts. How, exactly would that work? "Yeah, we're the reason you chuckleheads don't make $100,000 a year with no education and no skill set. It's all our fault, we know it. We'll order American Bidnezzmen to give you guys, and not those with education and skill sets, $100,000 a year." Not even The Utterly Unhinged^© is confident enough that he can bamboozle the sub-GED crowd with that one. Instead, he and the GOP going back to the Southern Strategy have sung the culture wars anthem.

What's amusing: going back forever the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnut crowd have preached laissez faire economics, which requires that individual workers 'negotiate' with employers for wages, and the final answer will be what the employer is willing to pay. Based on education and skill set; unless the employer is your Dad, of course. The Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts are fully aware that they're flummoxing these bird brains; cruelty is the whole point.

The Limp Wristed Lefties have habitually been concerned with Doing Good Works, and ignored the marketing. The Utterly Unhinged^© was smart enough to be devious enough to get his signature on those stimulus checks. One might mention that Sleepy Joe's covid stimulus got the blame, a tad, for the latter inflation, but not The Utterly Unhinged^©.

It's beyond fantasy to play the same tune as Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts to convince the sub-GED crowd. They're in thrall to the notion that their lot in life is due, solely, to some amorphous Highly Educated Elite out to make their lives as miserable as possible. They remain certain that the cause is not the Billionaire Boy's Club to which The Utterly Unhinged^© is a card-carrying member.

What to do? What to do?

Straight talk. Tell the sub-GED crowd that the cause of their lot is that they're dumb as a sack of hair, no president or administration, Left or Right, can force employers to pay the sub-GED crowd upper-middle class wages. Never going to happen. Remind them that the Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts have been the bloc that have consistently blocked increases in the minimum wage for instance; "bidnezzmen simply can't afford to pay these people!!"

Remind them that Evangelical Reactionary Radical Right Wingnuts have consistently blocked aid to higher education, including STEM in high school.

In the end, it's going to be a generational slog. Neither Commie Law and the Junk Yard Dog^© nor The Utterly Unhinged^© could take out a magic wand and turn a sub-GED knuckledragger, especially the bunch that want to be that way, into an MBA or chemist or linguist. What the Limp Wristed Lefties can do is offer an opportunity to climb out of ignorance, while the MAGAnauts want to keep them with a belief in persecution and retribution. Not against their real oppressors, but the imagined Highly Educated Elite.

For The Defense

A friend used to be a Federal Public Defender, aka criminal mouthpiece. With more talk of The Utterly Unhinged^© ordering Gaetz/etc. to prosecute anyone who said a discouraging word about The Utterly Unhinged^© or one of his minions, and most of the victims will turn out to be just GS-11 worker bees, the office will be flooded with victims. I guess he could come out of retirement and lend a hand. The Supremes said he can do this.

Life in Trumpistan - part the first

The world of fake news just got fakeier. This one's a beaut.

Project 2025 — the controversial blueprint for a newly reimagined federal government that Trump tried to distance himself from during the campaign despite numerous ties to its authors — called for NOAA to be "broken up and downsized" and said the agency was part of the "climate change alarm industry."

Lutnick, scientist du jour, will decree that global warming is a hoax and NOAA will never again use the term. I'll bet anything.

Here's a detailed review. We're not in Kansas anymore.

It would not be the first time The Utterly Unhinged^© tried to scrub science from the Damn Gummint.

"But this is what Americans can expect from Donald Trump, who as President abandoned the NSC's pandemic unit, suggested nuking hurricanes, lied about storms paths, said injecting Americans with bleach would kill sickness, and denied basic climate science," Singer added. "It's no surprise his allies' Project 2025 agenda builds on that extreme legacy."

Already the private sector, in the form of home insurance companies, is well on its way to clear out Florida. May be Gov. DeMented will end up in some storm shelter with a mass of Mexican illegals. Such a pretty sight.

Thought For The Day - 19 November 2024

C'mon Man!!! Are Joe and Mika so dumb as to think a visit now to The Utterly Unhinged^© will, in any way, stop him from siccing any and all departments of the Damn Gummint on them if they should utter one little word of criticism? Really?

[update]
Well... now that reporting is out that The Utterly Unhinged^© margin has slipped below the vaunted 50% landslide value (49.9%), how soon will the Gym Boy Jordan bloviate on Fox or Newsmax or News Nation that the Dems must have fiddled the total vote count. Must be those Jewish space lasers again. Very handy, those Jewish space lasers.

By The Numbers - part the eightieth

The wiki is a very useful reference, in that it aggregates data for you. At the moment (13:51 18 Nov), The Utterly Unhinged^© has a 2.6 million vote lead, and sits at 50% of the popular vote. So, enquiring minds want to know, how close is this 'win' for the corrupt? Turns out, kinda close.

If we limit ourselves to just the 50 state elections, Dubya and The Utterly Unhinged^© both had negative margins. And The Utterly Unhinged^© has the third smallest lead, by a bunch, when winning from ahead.

2024 - 1.72%
1968 - 0.70%
1960 - 0.17%

The next closest race: Carter at 2.06%.

Parsing through the table, the sore thumb sticking out is the wild gyrations in margins. Some in low single digits, others well above 20%. Harding, King of Corruption (died before he got caught) and Coolidge his deathbed successor, bested FDR's margins; all of them. More proof that Menken was right.

The Greatest Threat - part the fourth

David "I'm not as crazy as MAGA" French opines today that

Donald Trump is planting the seeds of his own political demise. The corrupt, incompetent and extremist men and women he's appointing to many of the most critical posts in his cabinet are direct threats to the well-being of the country, but they're also political threats to Trump and to his populist allies.

French's latest attempt to be the Compassionate Conservative. Baloney. As detailed in previous episodes, The Utterly Unhinged^© is singing

Where never is heard a discouraging word, and the sky is not clouded all day

There will be no government data which exposes the MAGA Kleptocracy. (Much, if not most, Federal data collection is done by Census, irregardless of the department publishing.) Shut down data collection at Census and the Fed. IOW, there's a small nexus, more or less, to strangle. Shutdown news media which tell the truth. You think I'm kidding?

So, French makes his case with

If he can't govern well, his populist partisan realignment will come apart before it can truly begin.

Which is Pollyanna on crack. As Bannon and the Project 2025 crew avow, the point is to not govern. The point is to create anarchy. And, as history and logic tell us, anarchy favors the rich. Which is the point of The Utterly Unhinged^© and The Musk Ox.

He closes with a view through scarlet glasses

Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas defended the Gaetz pick, saying, "Trump was elected to turn this place upside down." That's what Trump thinks. That's what MAGA thinks. But MAGA should beware. If Trump's cabinet picks help him usher in the chaos that is the water in which he swims, then the question won't be whether voters rebuke MAGA again, but rather how much damage it does before it fails once more.

The MAGAnauts, as The Utterly Unhinged^© promised:

Former President Donald Trump called on Christians to flood the polls in November, promising that if they vote him into office, they "won't have to vote again" in four years.

Of course he was serious, although clearly not Christian himself, and of course his zealots believed him. And, of course, these idiots still believe that their lives will be so much better with The Utterly Unhinged^© laying waste to governance. And his cabinet has stated plainly that the Trump Dynasty is just beginning. Ignore the law. Break the law. The Supremes will call this all "official duties" and therefore not actionable. Send the Army to quell demonstrations. Toss apostates into detention camps. Not actionable. All right out of the dictator's handbook.