RIP Betty White!

 

This is just sad...

Sorry, but this woman has no clue...

Kamala’s response to questions about inflation really highlights that constant complaint from her staffers that she “refuses to wade into briefing materials.” pic.twitter.com/EE8sGMBqYG

— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) December 30, 2021

College Football playoffs today

Will we have an all SEC final? 

If I am being honest, the Cincinnati Bearcats are probably in over their head. I have seen them play a couple of times this year and I am not sure that they would be contenders in either the SEC or Big Ten. Make no mistake, they beat Houston, Notre Dame, and Navy. Three pretty good teams, but much of their season was playing second rate teams. Will they be ready to play Alabama? 

The Michigan Wolverines are another anomaly. They went into the season unranked and lost to Michigan State (which was the first ranked team they played). They obviously ran out the end of the season strong, beating Ohio State and Iowa, scoring over 80 points in those two games. They have the sort of speed that Big Ten teams (other than the Ohio State) generally do not have. But it seems a little like they stumbled into the playoffs.

Meanwhile the SEC has struggled in the bowl season, winning one and losing four. I know these are their second tier teams, but you don't expect them all to lose. Perhaps that suggests that the SEC might be down and too much credit was given to the big dogs for beating up on the rest of the SEC. On the flipside the Big Ten is 5-0 with impressive victories in several games. Even Bowl substitute 5-7 Rutgers (who only won 2 big team games) is holding their own right now against Wake Forest (who went 7-1 in the ACC). They did have four teams that at one time or another was in the top five in the rankings. 

All that being said, Alabama and Georgia are both favored to win. Cincinnati would be huge upset and as a Big Ten fan, I would still be more comfortable with Ohio State than Michigan playing in the spotlight. It feels like Alabama Georgia, but who knows what is possible. I will probably be rooting for Cincinnati and as much as it pains me to say it, I will root for Michigan. 

Brandon has a new sponser !

 Unhappy Liberals (because there are almost no happy ones) lose their shit!

BREAKING: Let’s Go Brandon Coin (@LGBcoin_io) is now the LEAD sponsor for Nascar driver @brandonbrown_68 in the 2022 season.

🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸#LetsGoBrandon #LetsGoAmerica pic.twitter.com/1rJ1VvNn5Q

— Essential Fleccas 🇺🇸 (@fleccas) December 30, 2021

Liberals are now calling Brandon Brown all sorts of names, saying that they hope he crashes, they demand that they will never buy GM products, and they will stop watching Nascar. Interestingly Brandon Brown had really nothing to do with the chant. He just won a race. But because of it his normal sponsors dropped him (apparently caving into the unhappy liberal cancel culture) and he ended up with a new bitcoin sponsor that shares the chant. 

So apparently according to certain liberals, it was Brandon Brown's moral responsibility to apparently stop racing, not accept any sponsorship, and live the rest of his life ashamed of the fact that his name is associated with a negative Biden chant. 

Go figure! 

January 6th is becoming the new Russian collusion....

One thing is for sure; the left cannot let go of Donald Trump

So Nancy Pelosi has now suggested that their political investigation into the January 6th riots will continue after the first of the year, including planned "public hearings" as well as a big report that nobody will read to be released sometime this summer (which will likely be delayed till right before the Midterms in a vain and doomed attempt to influence the results).

I want to stress that both the Capital Police and the FBI have investigated and neither found any evidence of a conspiracy to overthrow the Government, or any even much coordination at all. All that is left is a convoluted investigation by politicians trying to piece together some sort of top down conspiracy, even as the actual rioters have not been found to have been involved in any such conspiracy. This involves the idea that Donald Trump was practicing mind control or that members of Congress were pulling the strings of the actual protesters that were unaware that they were being controlled or were simply puppets of politicians. 

This was very similar to the concept that after the FBI failed to uncover any real evidence of collusion or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russian agents, that investigations continued in Congress, and eventually gave way to a partisan Special Counsel full of Democratic operatives who also came up entirely short of finding anything.

So what exactly are the Democrats expecting to find (evidence or not) in all of this? Other than the obvious idea of keeping this "in the news" well beyond what most of the country sees as old and redundant news? I think they are hoping to make a claim that Trump 'incited" the riot not due to any actual words (he literally requested that the march be peaceful and then later requested that the rioting stop)... but rather by implying that he should have done more to prevent it. 

They are also attempting to imply that there was some conspiracy to set this whole "riot" up between members of the Trump Administration and Republican members of Congress. They won't have any evidence that there was any conspiracy to stage a coup or a riot, but they will substitute legal coordination of other things. In other words,  Pelosi and gang will work hard to blur the lines between legal planning of the rally, legal planning the legal attempts to challenge election results, and somehow try to imply that these were part of a "coup" attempt. 

Btw.... the rally or march had close to 60,000 people, 99% of them not arrested for anything. So it was, by definition a peaceful rally.

At the end of the day, this is all similar to the logic used by politicians to try to claim Trump was conspiring with Putin, even though there was no actual evidence. They used things like Trump saying nice things about Putin or Putin saying nice things about Trump as "evidence" in plain sight of an election conspiracy. Likewise, they can make a big deal out of things basically unrelated to a coup or insurrection and pretend that they are one and the same.

Because when you cannot prove what you claim, prove something different and then work to confuse the two.

Latest Poll

Paranoia the destroyer!

Does Roger have a new sexy girlfriend 1/3 his age?

Yep, and he looks at her pictures every night

Yep, Roger is a stud

Nope, Roger only believes he has a girlfriend

Nope, Roger is just flat out lying

 

pollcode.com free polls

Ouch! Pennsylvania reports over 300 deaths in one day!

In other Covid news:

• Joe Biden passes 417K dead from Covid under his plan to stop it in its tracks. 
• According to John Hopkins, the United States reported over 500,000 cases in a single day.
• CDC warns tells us that Covid sits in your system for up to 12 weeks, making certain testing unreliable.
• CDC reiterates that Delta (not Omicron) has been the dominant strain through the week before Christmas. Omicron is still ramping up.
• CDC shortens mandatory isolation time in half, due to concerns that essential services could be affected by too many workers out too long. I guess that is what passes for science? 

Well all of that is a double ouch, or perhaps a triple, quadruple, quintuple, or even a sextuple ouch. Either way, President fool proof plan has now ducked his responsibility, deflecting responsibility and blame from Federal to State and Local Governments, pretty much admitting that his entire campaign was based on a dog faced pony soldier style lie. 

Senator Harry Reid passes at age 82

At the end of the day, his lasting legacy will be the current makeup of the USSC

 

Just a quick bit of math...

Purple Pennsylvania county by county covid death toll

I chose Pennsylvania because quite frankly it was the easiest state to gather the statistics and because as a purple state that voted fairly closely to the overall country as a whole. So it made sense that it could provide a pretty good indication of the country as a whole, given the 50-50 nature of both the state and the country. To be honest, I don't have the time to go through all 50 states. 

So what I found is this:

Joe Biden won 13 counties in Pennsylvania versus 54 counties won by Trump. This is not an unusual statistic as Democrats dominate the larger urban counties, while Republicans tend to do better in the suburban and rural counties. Obviously Biden had to win those 13 counties by a much bigger margin than Trump won those 54 counties on average... or he would not have gotten more votes. 

But in spite of only winning 13 counties, those Biden counties accounted for approximately 17,500 deaths. The total number of deaths in the 54 Trump counties accounted for approximately 18,700 deaths. So there were  1346 deaths per Biden county versus 344 deaths per Trump county.  By argument sake, in the state of Pennsylvania, Trump counties accounted for about 1.06 times the number of deaths from Biden counties. 

According to numbers you see repeated by Daily Kos, Politicalwire, Slate, and other liberal propaganda organizations, the vast majority of deaths are occuring in "Trump counties". Like the tale that grows taller  that number seems to increase exponentially. It started out with a reasonable almost believable number (perhaps something like what we see here).  But the last time I saw it repeated, it stated that Trump counties have accounted for something like five to six times the amount of deaths as the Biden counties. 

Certainly if this was true nationally, it would be true in Pennsylvania. 

Just for kicks, I checked New Jersey because they also have easy to find numbers and limited counties. Biden counties made up 12,667 deaths versus Trump counties making up 2441 deaths. So that actually is Biden counties having over five times as many dead as Trump counties (in spite of Biden only winning the state by 16%).  So this 5-1 ratio does exist, just not as people are suggesting. 

Perhaps it is just me... but I am skeptical of these county statistics. 

Consider that police are not allowed to arrest a shoplifter who steals less than $950 or arrest minorities without calling first for backup...

But how many cops are at this Burger King to arrest a family who were not carrying a vaccination passport? I guess when you are not allowed to arrest actual criminals, apparently they have nothing better to do than scare little children?

What a lovely new world we are living in when you go out for a meal and a squad of police barge in, persecute a little boy then demand to see everyone else’s papers. This is the vax passport world so many are begging for. #NotAboutAVirus #NOVAXPASSPORTS pic.twitter.com/ZQFnybs4ly

— Cyn Clagar (@cynclagar) December 27, 2021

About that time again?

Do we have some reader suggestions for winners and losers of 2021?

Winner                                         Loser   

We now have several states over 800 cases per 100,000

These numbers are from the CDC

State/Territory	7-Day Case Rate per 100,000
New York City*	1,717.2
New York (Level/Comm)*	1,219.9
District of Columbia	1,182.6
Puerto Rico	1,128.3
New Jersey	1,105.6
Northern Mariana Islands	908.4
New York*	842
Rhode Island	800

And here I thought DC with the most liberal population on the planet would be at near zero considering how awesome they must be with all of their Covid protocols! 

Joe passes blame to the "States" as to why Covid is still rampant?

President "the buck stops over there" manages to point more fingers...

BIDEN, TODAY: “There is no federal solution” to COVID.

BIDEN, 2020: “I’m going to shut down the virus.” pic.twitter.com/3d1RaHRcyX

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) December 27, 2021

Seriously folks... does Joe Biden believe he is responsible for ANYTHING? Everything that goes wrong is someone elses fault and he has no concept as to how to take responsibility or even promise responsibility. 

Not that anyone actually "wants" Joe Biden trying to solve anything. As President Obama once said, don't underestimate Joe Biden's ability to fuck things up. So maybe the best thing is for Biden to admit his entire campaign promise was a lie and to just move forward with looking forward to the end of his failed Presidency. 

Democracy is the biggest threat to Democrats, not America

Kamala Harris says ‘democracy’ is biggest national security threat in CBS interview

During the interview on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” host Margaret Brennan asked her about the one national security threat that keeps her up at night worrying. ​ “​Frankly, one of them is our democracy. There is,​ I think, no question in the minds of people who are foreign policy experts that the year 2021 is not the year 2000​,” she said.

Approximately 75% of our country is in favor of voter ID laws. By a 2-1 margin people prefer our new election laws to focus on security, rather than ease of voting. By nature, in a Democracy our leaders are obligated to listen to the people and pass laws that follow these priorities. 

However, our elected Democrats seem to live in a world of their own creation. One where voter ID should be banned, where security should be replaced with making our elections more like a television singing competition vote, and where the actual concerns of Americans would be increased rather than mitigated.

So all of this Democracy thing, such as one person one vote and making sure that elections are trusted is a big threat. It's not a national one, Kamala, but rather a partisan one.  

Didja get anything good for Christmas?

Always wanted a Rado. I have a Movado and several other watches in my collection. But something about Rado has always appealed to me. 

Rado Coupole Classic Automatic 

As I got older, the idea of the classic silver with white face really started to resonate as most of my other watches are more multi-colored bracelet, gold bracelet, or traditional leather band. I had an old Citizen in a similar bracelet, but it was two toned and I gave it to one of my sons.  

Funny thing is that we both agreed that this was not the year to splurge on expensive gifts and then we both surprised each other with unexpected gifts. I got my wife some really cool drop down diamond and Tahitian pearl earrings, something she has had her eye on for some time. She got me this!

 

All and all a good Christmas for our first living together! But, of course, I missed seeing my kids! 

Sunday Funnies

Getting ready for company and x-mas dinner!

On a Happy Xmas note!

POLL: 88% of college students say it’s NOT offensive to wish ‘Merry Christmas’ to a stranger

Who knew that this was turning around with the rank and file. Of course college administrators and student politicians will still do everything in their power to punish displays of Christmas or any references to religious holidays, but it appears that they are now the ones out of touch. 

That pendulum is swinging folks...

Merry Xmas and a Happy New Year Recession

Larry Summers warns of looming recession over surging inflation

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers on Thursday warned the U.S. economy could slide into a recession as the Federal Reserve takes what he described as long-delayed action to cool the hottest inflation in nearly four decades. Summers, during an interview on a Bloomberg Economics podcast, said the U.S. central bank has been late to spot the dangers of inflation, and that steps it takes now to mitigate soaring prices risk tipping the economy into a slump.

We are already seeing a bit of an economic slump and the Feds are looking at as many as three rate increased next year to help curb inflation. Generally you raise interest rates to control an out of control growth spurt, but in this case we are looking at a fairly sluggish economy with a need to raise rates due to the unprecedented record-setting inflation. 

So Summers here is echoing what others have been saying, in spite of being a former Clinton and Obama guy. The former Treasury Secretary is someone who one might expect to cheerlead an economy that is being run entirely by a Democratic Administration and Democratic controlled Congress. But rather Summers has been a bit critical of the lack of seriousness given to the current inflation situation. Unfortunately for everyone, the Administration has been long on rhetoric (trying to tell us that inflation was transitory or even good for the economy) and short on any action.  

So now the Fed is going to be stepping up and providing rate increases starting in early 2022. Rate increases always slow down economies. The question is to what degree our economy can afford to be slowed. 

Oh yeah! Merry Christmas everyone!

Merry Xmas!