Why Democrats Are Losing: The narrative that the progressive left wing of the Democrat party has gone too far is starting to resonate across the country.
When folks ask why, I say:
– Soft on Crime & Defunding the Police are losing issues
– Weekly grocery bills & gas station fill ups are expensive, losing issues
– Labeling parents who dare to ask questions ‘domestic terrorists’ is a losing issue
– Open Borders & Illegal Immigration cost jobs, which are losing issues
– Pushing racism & Critical Race Theory are losing issues
– Biological men playing in girls’ sports & using their bathrooms are losing issues
– Denying parents basic information about what is being taught in school is a losing issue
– Rioting, looting, and burning our cities are losing issues
– Disastrous retreat & surrender in Afghanistan was a losing issue
– Politically weaponizing parts of the CIA, FBI, IRS, DOJ & others is a losing issue
– Killing the domestic energy market and their jobs is a losing issue
– Banning free speech and assembly because you don’t agree is a losing issue
– Forcing taxpayers to pay off ‘some’ student loans is a losing issue
– Government spending allowing US national debt to surpass $31 Trillion is a losing issue
– Letting the progressive, looney left of the Democrat party lead is a losing issue
Why the liberal, progressive Democrats seemed surprised with voters sending them a message come November and vote for change…seems obvious to me.
Doctors Go Woke: Oh my, The American Medical Association is asking Big Tech and the Department of Justice to censor, de-platform, investigate, and prosecute journalists who question the orthodoxy of radical gender surgeries for minors, arguing that public criticism is “disinformation.”
Western Civilization: “So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.”
“As we suffer self-inflicted mass looting, random street violence, hyperinflation, a nonexistent border, unaffordable fuel, and a collapsing military, Americans will come to appreciate just how thin is the veneer of their civilization.”
Read Victor Davis Hanson’s essay below…it really hits the spot.
Read more below and follow me on Twitter & GETTR – @sanuzis
–Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
60 Plus Weekly Video Rewind
This week it’s a triple threat of Federal debt, out of control crime, and sky-high gas prices! All brought to you by bad policy decisions.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/politics/americans-should-prepare-gas-prices-keep-rising-analysts-warn
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Medicare Costs to Go Down in 2023
Lower-than-expected spending on an expensive drug and other things means beneficiaries will pay less next year.
Medicare beneficiaries are getting a rare bit of good news as their Part B premiums and deductibles will tick down next year after the government health insurance plan spent less than projected in 2022. Unfortunately, the cost reductions beneficiaries will see next year are much smaller than the increases they shouldered this year. At the same time, deductibles for hospitalization costs under Part A will be going up. If you’re new to Medicare and wondering what these letters are all about, we’ll get to that – see Medicare Open Enrollment Presents Choices, below.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has announced the standard Medicare premiums for Part B beneficiaries will be $164.90 a month in 2023, down $5.20 from the $170.10 monthly charge in 2022, or about 3% less. The annual deductible for all Medicare Part B beneficiaries will be $226 in 2023, which is $7 less than the 2022 deductible of $233.
The reductions come after more significant increases in costs for 2022, compared to 2021. Then. the premium went up 14.5%, or $21.60. The annual Part B deductible increased $30 in 2022, compared to 2021.
CMS said the 2022 increases were attributed to rising health care costs and expected spending on the newly approved Alzheimer’s drug, Aduhelm. Aduhelm’s price tag was then put at $56,000 per person each year. However, drug maker Biogen later cut the annual price to $28,200. And Medicare decided to cover the drug only for people with diagnoses of mild cognitive impairment due to Alzheimer’s who are participating in clinical trials.
According to CMS, lower-than-planned “spending on both Aduhelm and other Part B items and services resulted in much larger reserves in the Part B account of the Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI) Trust Fund, which can be used to limit future Part B premium increases.”
Republicans edge past Democrats in survey of favorability
Republicans’ favorability rating clocked in 5 percentage points higher than Democrats’, according to a new Gallup poll, bucking a historical trend in which Democrats typically have the edge.
The survey found 44 percent of respondents now hold a favorable view of the Republican Party, compared to 39 percent for the Democratic Party.
The new poll is the third time Republicans have seen a higher favorability rating than Democrats in the past decade, a potential warning sign for Democrats as they hope to hold their razor-thin congressional majorities in the upcoming midterm elections, although Gallup notes that the measure has not been proven to be strongly tied to election results.
Democrats’ favorability in the new survey is the worst for the party since March 2015 and 12 percentage points lower than their historical average.
Except for brief stints, including Democrats in November 2012 and Republicans in January 2020, neither party’s favorability rating has reached a majority over the past decade.
Voters swing toward GOP in the race for Congress
Republicans are gaining momentum with voters in the battle for control of Congress, according to a new poll that showed a 10-point swing away from Democrats in the past month.
Republicans went from being down by 7 points in August to up by 3 in September, further buoying the GOP’s hopes it can secure a sizable House majority and possibly eke out a victory in the 50-50 split Senate, a Monmouth University poll released Monday found.
Democrats have been backed into a corner by a crime wave across the U.S., persistent inflation, high gasoline prices, rising interest rates and escalating fears that the economy is teetering on the edge of a recession.
“Because the congressional map favors the GOP, Democrats need to do more than ‘keep it close’ to hold onto their House majority. One roadblock for them is that the issue picture favors Republicans,” Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, said. “Democrats are all over the place when it comes to their key issues. This makes it difficult for the party to create a cohesive messaging strategy to motivate its base. Republicans, on the other hand, just have to hammer away at rising prices and ‘the wolf is at the door’ to get their voters riled up.”
The top three issues that voters considered “extremely or very important” were inflation (82%), crime (72%) and elections and voting (70%). The three issues that scored the lowest were climate change (49%), the COVID-19 pandemic (32%) and student loan debt (31%).
Will the GOP Win the Senate in the 2022 Midterms?
Republicans are defending more seats, but races are turning in their favor. Stay tuned.
Senate races are different from other midterm contests: Only a third of Senate seats are up every two years, so generally one party has more to defend than the other. There are 21 Republican seats and only 14 Democratic ones up this year.
Republicans benefit from Americans’ dissatisfaction with the status quo. Only 27% think the U.S. is headed in the right direction, while 66% think it’s on the wrong track, according to Wednesday’s RealClearPolitics average. It helps that the issues the GOP is good on—the economy, inflation and crime—are dominant. President Biden’s 43% approval rating gives them a boost. President Obama’s was at 46% in 2010 and 42% in November 2014. The Republicans gained Senate seats in both those midterms.
The power of incumbency helps Republicans in Wisconsin and Florida and Democrats in Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. But in this highly polarized environment, the party that carried the state in the last presidential election may matter more.
This complicates life for both parties. While Republicans are defending open seats in North Carolina and Ohio and Sen. Marco Rubio in Florida—states Mr. Trump carried—they’re also defending an open Pennsylvania seat and Sen. Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Mr. Biden won both, albeit by 1.17 and 0.63 percentage points, respectively.
While none of the Democratic seats up for election are in Trump states, three are in states Mr. Biden barely carried: Arizona (he won by 0.31%), Georgia (0.23%) and Nevada (2.39%). Even a modest swing from the presidential election would help Republicans hold their two at-risk seats and flip up to three Democratic ones.
In key battlegrounds, GOP onslaught of crime ads tightens Senate races
The strategy, while not new, appears to be resonating particularly in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, alarming some Wisconsin Democrats.
Republicans have unleashed a barrage of negative ads in the final weeks of the midterms that hammer Democrats on crime.
In at least two states, the strategy appears to be taking hold.
Recent polling suggests that after GOP Senate candidates zeroed in on crime in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the trajectory of the races shifted. In Wisconsin in particular, the negative ads have relentlessly targeted Democratic Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, who is challenging Sen. Ron Johnson.
“They’ve all got the same crib notes: Attack Democrats on crime,” said political science professor Charles Franklin, the director of the Marquette University Law School poll.
“It’s an effective issue here and elsewhere because, simply put, homicide rates are up in most urban centers,” he added, a trend that includes Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Although Republicans have long turned to a playbook of attacking Democrats for not being tough enough on crime, pollsters like Franklin and strategists interviewed by NBC News said the strategy seems particularly effective this year amid rising crime rates across the U.S. and elevated voter concerns about the issue. Some Democrats have argued that Republicans are deploying scare tactics and racist dog whistles on purpose to mislead voters about their rivals.
Will midterms reprise 1994 and 2010?
GOP must tie Biden’s horrific record around Democratic candidates’ necks.
In the 1994 midterm elections, with a liberal Democratic president in the White House and opposition to “Hillarycare” (the precursor to “Obamacare”) as their primary campaign weapon, Republicans picked up a whopping 54 seats in the House, eight in the Senate, and 10 governorships.
Sixteen years later, in the 2010 midterms, confronting another liberal Democratic president and fueled by strong opposition to Obamacare, Republicans netted a jaw-dropping 63 House seats, six in the Senate, and six governorships.
Will history repeat itself yet again in the 2022 midterms? We’ll find out on Nov. 8, but the electoral ground this cycle is arguably even more fertile for a massive Republican electoral wave than it was 12 or 28 years ago.
That’s because, while the policies of Presidents Bill Clinton and especially Barack Obama were far too liberal for our liking, their presidencies were not nearly the constant five-alarm flaming train wreck that we have now in Joe Biden’s White House.
Mr. Obama was more prescient than he knew when he reportedly said of his onetime vice president: “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to f*** things up.”
Mr. Biden has very much lived down to that prediction, giving us out-of-control tax-and-spend policies that have fueled inflation in excess of 8% year-over-year and food prices up 11.4% (the highest rates since the late 1970s) and a mindless war on fossil fuels that caused gasoline prices to spike to more than $5 a gallon. (The national average on Jan. 20, 2021, when Mr. Biden took office, was $2.39 for a gallon of regular unleaded, according to AAA).
Gas prices have since come down (though not to pre-Biden levels), but only because he has recklessly drained tens of millions of barrels of oil from the national Strategic Petroleum Reserve to replace the oil and natural gas we would be producing were it not for his radical anti-energy policies.
Then there was the precipitous and humiliating pullout from Afghanistan that left a still-unknown number of Americans behind enemy lines — and gifted the Taliban with $80 billion worth of military hardware.
There’s also Mr. Biden’s war on U.S. national sovereignty via a wide-open southern border that has seen 2 million or more illegal immigrants and thousands of pounds of deadly fentanyl and other illicit drugs flood into the country in the 20 months since he took office.
Democrats have earned their soft-on-crime reputation
Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman can’t run away from his soft-on-crime allies fast enough.
Once a proud supporter of Black Lives Matter, Fetterman scrubbed every mention of the police-defunding movement from his website, just as Republican Senate candidate Dr. Mehmet Oz was hammering Fetterman on crime.
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, however, doesn’t face the voters until next year. Despite the fact that over 1,000 people have been killed in Philadelphia over the past 20 months, Krasner insists that his decision not to prosecute most nonviolent crimes, including theft, is “working.” Exactly for whom is it working? When you see Krasner’s record, you realize he might be in earnest. His policy is “working” for the career criminals whom he views as victims of the justice system.
According to Gallup, 72% are dissatisfied with America’s current policies to reduce crime, and 80% say they worry about crime.
Voters know which party is to blame. According to a recent NBC News poll, Republicans enjoy a 23-percentage-point advantage over Democrats on the question of which party has better policies on crime. No amount of sophistry is going to change that.
Fight Crime: Vote Republican in 2022 and ’24
Democrats promised that defunding the police would yield utopia. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., predicted that America would look “like a suburb.”
She did not mention that this posh village would include hoodlums breaking into mansions, residents getting robbed beside white-picket fences, and neighbors seeing BMWs carjacked at gunpoint.
This horror show is the result of deliberate Democratic policies:
Defund the police
Demonize the police
Demoralize the police
Pro-criminal “prosecutors” who defend punks
Decriminalize shoplifting.
When Californians swipe less than $950 worth of goods per instance, this barely enforced misdemeanor becomes a 100 percent discount. Businesses cannot survive by donating their merchandise. Violent criminals watch this lawlessness and think: “Our time is now.”
• No cash bail.
Michael Palacios was arrested on Sept. 16 for terrorizing a Manhattan McDonald’s with an ax. Eighteen hours later, he was free without bail.
• Some judges wish to hold dangerous offenders but cannot. Others gleefully give culprits second, 43rd, and even 102nd chances.
Why Hispanic voters are rejecting the wokesters — and it’s a huge problem for the Dems
Democrats have relied on hispanic votes in the past but this election cycle may bring different results.
One of the most significant events in American politics is that Hispanics are, in effect, deciding that they are working-class voters rather than ethnic-grievance voters.
This is so momentous because it means that Democrats can’t rely on the monolithic Hispanic voting bloc they imagined would guarantee them an enduring electoral majority, and that the shift to the Republicans may be just beginning (the migration of working-class whites to the GOP has been happening over the course of a couple of generations).
A NBC News/Telemundo poll of Hispanics has Democrats ahead of Republicans in the battle for Congress 54-33 percent. That’s a healthy lead, but it’s down from prior polls. Democrats led among Latinos by 42 points in October 2012, 38 points in October 2016, and 26 points in October 2020. Detect a trend?
Republicans don’t have to win Hispanics outright to change the calculus of American politics, only eat into Democratic margins.
In specific places, they’re doing even better. A Sienna College poll shows Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Marco Rubio, both running for re-election in Florida, above 50% among Hispanics. A new poll for The Nevada Independent has Republican Adam Laxalt, challenging Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto, down by only 2 points among Hispanics.
It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. Progressives had Hispanics pegged as “non-white” voters, which meant they’d be animated by the same worldview as black Americans and become nearly as immovably Democratic. The arbiters of such things even cooked up a new term for Hispanics, “Latinx,” to signal their assimilation into the hothouse world of woke politics, with its kaleidoscope of genders and other bizarre priorities.
Judge Smacks Down Stacey Abrams’ Bogus Claims Of Voter Suppression In 2018 Election Loss
‘The challenged practices violate neither the constitution nor the [Voting Rights Act of 1965],’ wrote Judge Steve Jones.
federal judge ruled on Friday that Georgia’s election procedures during the 2018 midterms, which were challenged by an organization aligned with the state’s Democrat gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, do not violate the constitutional rights of Georgia voters.
Writing for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, Judge Steve Jones, an appointee of former President Barack Obama, ruled that while “Georgia’s election system is not perfect,” the “challenged practices violate neither the constitution nor the [Voting Rights Act of 1965].”
“In sum, this Court finds Plaintiffs have not met their burden under Section 2 of the [Voting Rights Act] to demonstrate that the Exact Match or citizenship verification processes renders Georgia’s elections not ‘equally open’ when considering the totality of the circumstances as required” by federal law, Jones wrote. “As a result, there has been no showing that the election system is not ‘equally open’ by Georgia’s compliance with federal law regarding matching processes.”
The lawsuit against the state was originally filed in November 2018 by the group known as Fair Fight Action, which serves as an affiliate of the Abrams-founded PAC Fair Fight. Among the allegations made by Fair Fight include “serious and unconstitutional flaws in Georgia’s elections process” relating to, as Breitbart summarized, “absentee ballots, voter registration, and voter list management.”
Glenn Youngkin-style parent-first movement wins 89% support
The pro-parent movement that became a national political battle after the recent defeat of former liberal Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe’s call to kick mothers and fathers out of schools has been overwhelmingly embraced by the nation, even liberals.
In an unusual survey about what goes on inside America’s schools, Rasmussen Reports said that 89% of voters believe that it is important for public schools to “fully inform parents” about what is being taught to their children in classrooms.
Republicans felt most passionately about keeping parents informed, with an unheard-of 97% calling it important. But Democrats also agreed with parental involvement, at 84%.
The survey, conducted with the Capitol Resource Institute, a parents’ rights organization, is the latest to show how the last two years of school board fights have affected the nation. What started as a clash over teaching critical race theory turned into a broader battle over parental involvement and decision-making during the Glenn Youngkin-McAuliffe gubernatorial campaign.
Near the end of that 2021 campaign, McAuliffe said in a debate that parents should not be determining what goes on in classrooms. He said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” He also said that he was “not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions.”
NYT Pretends To Debunk Poll Worker ‘Conspiracy.’ One Day Later, The ‘Election Deniers’ Were Vindicated
Once referred to as America’s “newspaper of record,” the regime-approved New York Times is back with its latest “pie in the face” moment, and boy is it a doozy.
On Monday, the left-wing outlet published a lengthy piece admonishing a group of “election deniers” and “conspiracy theorists” for expressing concerns last month that Konnech, a relatively small U.S. software company that handles poll worker data, “had secret ties to the Chinese Communist Party and had given the Chinese government backdoor access to personal data about two million poll workers in the United States.”
“In the ensuing weeks, the conspiracy theory grew as it shot around the internet,” wrote Times reporter Stuart Thompson. “To believers, the claims showed how China had gained near complete control of America’s elections.”
The notion of Konnech’s potential election security risks was first raised by an organization called True the Vote, whose members claimed at an August conference in Phoenix that “they investigated Konnech in early 2021” and “gained access to Konnech’s database by guessing the password,” resulting in their team purportedly downloading “personal information on about 1.8 million poll workers.”
Rather than attempt to verify the claims by doing actual investigative journalism, Thompson let his clear-as-day political biases drive his work and simply parroted Konnech, which asserted that “none of the accusations were true” and that “all the data for its American customers were stored on servers in the United States and that it had no ties to the Chinese government.”
Herschel Walker isn’t black enough for the New York Times
This is why liberal/progressive Democrats are such hypocrites and will eventually lose most voters.
When then-presidential candidate Joe Biden said black voters who didn’t support him “ain’t black,” he gave away that the liberal love for “diversity” and “inclusion” only matters if racial minorities are liberal.
While Biden eventually tried to walk that back, the New York Times has instead embraced it.
The outlet sent John Branch (who is white) down to Wrightsville, Georgia, where Herschel Walker was born and raised. Walker is running for the Senate as a Republican and, therefore, he “ain’t black,” as the New York Times helpfully reminds everyone. “Herschel’s not getting the black vote because Herschel forgot where he came from,” one resident said to Branch. “He’s not part of the black community.”
You see, Walker made the grave mistake of being an 18-year-old college football prodigy who “never got involved” in civil rights protests in 1980. According to the New York Times Magazine in 1981, “there were a few times after the Friday night football games when some of the protest leaders grabbed Walker, still in uniform and pads, and demanded he join them.” Because he did not, and because he went on to become a college football legend and professional football player, we are told that Walker isn’t really black after all.
The New York Times goes on to quote Andra Gillespie, a professor at Emory University who teaches African American politics. Because of Walker’s public gaffes and the fact that he is running as a Republican, his candidacy “smacks of what [black voters] view as tokenism.” The same scrutiny does not apply to Democratic gaffe machines (hello, Kamala Harris), but something sinister must be afoot with Walker’s campaign because he is a black Republican.
Declare Russia a terrorist state now
It’s time to declare Russia a state sponsor of terrorism and boot it out of the United Nations. This week, about 15 percent of Ukraine was illegally annexed by Moscow following fake referenda, gas pipelines to Europe were sabotaged and war crimes continued to mount, including genocide, nuclear blackmail, food blackmail and the forced removal of 2 million Ukrainian citizens, to Russia, according to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
How can a nation-state with a rap sheet that long be granted any standing geopolitically? Congress agrees and recently passed a resolution to designate the Russian Federation as a state sponsor of terrorism — as is the case for Iran, North Korea, Syria and Cuba.
However, the Biden White House, notably Secretary of State Antony Blinken, is holding out. He says this would require America to sanction U.S. allies doing business with Moscow and would prevent a diplomatic solution.
But why should anyone be doing business with this regime? Was diplomacy a priority when Hitler was murdering millions? And does anybody in the world really think that Russian President Vladimir Putin can be negotiated with?
After Sweden reported explosions near the Nord Stream pipeline, the European Union limply announced more sanctions. This signals, once again, a lapse in perception and vigilance against the reality that Putin weaponizes everything.
The Thinnest Veneer of Civilization
We are in a great experiment in which regressive progressivism discounts all the institutions and methodologies of the past that have guaranteed a safe, affluent, well-fed and sheltered America.
ivilization is fragile. It hinges on ensuring the stuff of life.
To be able to eat, to move about, to have shelter, to be free from state or tribal coercion, to be secure abroad, and safe at home—only that allows cultures to be freed from the daily drudgery of mere survival.
Civilization alone permits humans to pursue sophisticated scientific research, the arts, and the finer aspects of culture.
So, the great achievement of Western civilization—consensual government, individual freedom, rationalism in partnership with religious belief, free market economics, and constant self-critique and audit—was to liberate people from daily worry over state violence, random crime, famine, and an often-unforgiving nature.
But so often the resulting leisure and affluence instead deluded arrogant Western societies into thinking that modern man no longer needed to worry about the fruits of civilization he took to be his elemental birthright.
As a result, the once prosperous Greek city-state, Roman Empire, Renaissance republics, and European democracies of the 1930s imploded—as civilization went headlong in reverse.
We in the modern Western world are now facing just such a crisis.
