How Is This Possible

Iran reported yesterday that over 10% of the members of the national parliament are infected with the corona virus.  Also the deputy health minister and the vice president have the disease.   How is this possible?

The virus originated in China at the very end of December.  When it first came to Iran about three weeks ago, it hit the city of Qom which is rather far from Teheran and the national government.  Iran now has the second largest group of reported cases after China and is either second or third in the number of deaths (Italy and Iran keep switching spots as the numbers get updated.)  Even so, as of this afternoon, Iran still has fewer than 3000 total cases in the country.  It seems rather bizarre that the virus moved from Qom to Teheran and hit 10% of the legislature that quickly.

Yesterday, the Ayatollah put the Iranian armed forces on alert due to the virus.  One has to wonder what the army will do to stop the outbreak.

Since things in Iran are often not what they seem, one has to wonder if any of these reports are accurate.  Is Iran trying to come up with a story that it can use to attack the USA?  Will we hear next from the Ayatollah that the CIA used the virus to attack the legislators?  Will Iran start claiming that the virus is an American biological weapon system?  Such a lie coming from Iran would not be surprising.

On the other hand, the idea of the virus moving from one city to another only to attack the legislators is crazy.  Possibly, the assistant health minister went to Qom to oversee dealing with the virus, came back to Teheran to report on progress and then infected everyone he met.  That would make the assistant health minister an incredibly idiotic person.  Surely, he took the necessary precautions to prevent getting the disease.

On other possibility is that none or little of what Iran is reporting is true.  Maybe the Ayatollah just wants to get rid of a batch of legislators.  Killing them while blaming the USA for the virus is a bonus.

Bloomberg Finally Gets Here and Then Goes

Yesterday was the big day for Mike Bloomberg.  For the first time, he competed in the primaries.  He won in American Samoa.  Now, after spending close to $700 million dollars, Bloomberg has dropped out.  That was quick.

There are a few things that we ought to point out about Mike Bloomberg.

1.  He's a former mayor of New York City.  Those folks never do well running for president in modern times.  Remember John Lindsay, Rudy Giuliani, and Bill DeBlasio?  They each ran and flopped big time.  Sure, DeBlasio did the worst, but none of them, including Bloomberg, did very well.

2.  In order to win a presidential election, a candidate has to have a personality.  The lack of one cost Mike Bloomberg a lot.

3.  Bloomberg had no real reason for his candidacy that most Americans cared about.  Guns and gun control don't win presidential elections.  Neither do lectures about global warming delivered by billionaires who constantly fly about on their private jets.  So what was left?  Big sugary drinks?

4.  Americans want a president with the courage to do the right thing.  They saw that harridan Elizabeth Warren attack Bloomberg for supposedly calling some women "horse-faced lesbians".  That was bad, but it was much worse to see that Mike couldn't defend himself against such a charge from the Wicked Witch of the North East.  Just imagine if Bloomberg had said, " You know that's not true, and yet you repeat it.  You have no power here.  Be gone before someone drops a house on you too!"  With that one line, Bloomberg would have destroyed Warren, showed he could defend himself  and won quite a lot of votes.  Sure, maybe he would also have alienated some, but they would be votes he wouldn't be likely to get anyway.

One last thing -- not really about Mike but more about the idea of Mike Bloomberg.  It is incredibly satisfying to see that despite spending all that cash, Bloomberg couldn't buy the election.  It's the continuation of a trend.  In 2016, Hillary outspent Trump by almost 4 to 1.  She lost.  This year, Bloomberg outspent all the other candidates combined by at least 2 to 1, he too lost.  Despite the BS that Bernie and Warren push, it's not the billionaires who control this country; it's the people.

What Does Super Tuesday Say About Voter Enthusiasm

There was quite a battle among Democrats yesterday in the Super Tuesday states.  There were four strong campaigns vying for support, and that contest generated a lot of news and contacts of individual voters by the campaigns.  So how enthused were the Democrats with their choices.

One way to answer is to look at the exit polls.  Voters were asked if they were satisfied with their choices or if they would prefer to have voted for someone else.  To me, that really doesn't tell us much.  The people who voted are either those who always vote or those who were satisfied with the choice.  Neither of those groups fall into the basket of people who frequently don't bother to vote unless a candidate really excites them.  A candidate who can get frequent non-voters to come to the polls is one who can win big.

I think a better way to look at this question is to consider the turnout.  How many people did the candidate actually draw to the polls.  Here are a few facts:

There are over 16 million registered voters in Texas.  Fewer than a quarter of them went to the polls to vote yesterday.  That's not a big wave of enthusiasm.

The total number of votes cast for the Democrat candidates was LESS than the number who voted for President Trump in the Republican primary.  Trump, of course, had no real opposition, so there was no reason to go to vote for him.  Think about that for a moment.  The votes for Trump were ceremonial at best.  Trump didn't run a real campaign in the Lone Star State.  The Democrats fought hard in the state, however.  Mike Bloomberg spent over $40 million dollars on TV ads in Texas alone.  Biden, Sanders and Warren all held rallies in the state.  And after all that, the four Democrat candidates together couldn't get more votes than the President got himself.

The Democrats did draw more voters than they did in 2016 when it was Hillary and Bernie alone.  That primary wasn't even close, however.  Also, unlike 2020, the 2016 primary campaign in Texas was mild.

The Republicans drew fewer voters than 4 years ago when Ted Cruz won.  Cruz, of course, is a senator from Texas, so he was a major draw of voters.  Also, in 2016, the Republican primary was contested, unlike 2020.

One last fact:  Texas is not the only state where Trump got more votes yesterday than all the Democrats combined.  The same was true in Alabama, Arkansas and Tennessee for example.

So what does this mean?  Right now, the enthusiasm is for Trump.  His supporters came out to vote in meaningless primaries just to show how much they support him.  There seems to be no counter swell of support for the Dems.  If Dem support for Joe Biden continues to be unenthusiastic moving forward, November should result in a total Trump victory.

Super Tuesday Results Are Surprising

I have to admit that I have been surprised by the results in yesterday's Democrat primaries.  I can't believe that so many ordinary Democrats actually voted for senile old Joe Biden.  I mean if you watched Biden's victory speech, he mixed up his wife and his sister during the remarks.  (Does he think he is Ilhan Omar?)  The polling data suggests that it was late deciding Dem voters who swung behind Biden.  I guess they realized that they had no other viable choice.  Bernie is an angry old socialist who would, they were told, lead the party over a cliff McGovern style.  Bloomberg is another old guy who happens to have limitless cash but not much else to recommend him.  He generates the excitement of a prune.  Elizabeth Warren is, well.....Elizabeth Warren.  She is very much an acquired taste for just a few true believers.  She was humiliated by coming in third in her own state of Massachusetts.  Of course, since Warren knows that she is God's gift to the USA (if she believes in God), she is not reassessing her campaign.  She's the John Kasich of 2020.  (I wonder if her father was a letter carrier.)

Anyway, back to Old Joe Biden.  He got the late deciders.  Those are people who decided in the last week.  But it was more than that.  Remember, in many of these states a majority of the vote came in the early voting.  That was prior to South Carolina, prior to the endorsements by other candidates and washed up former candidates like Beto O'Rourke (I had been hoping never to write that name again).  So, I guess one big takeaway is that this was a vote against Sanders, against a truly socialist agenda, and against the sale of the presidency to a modern day Scrooge McDuck.

The next question is how will this all play out.  We don't know the final delegate count following Super Tuesday.  It looks like Biden will have a small lead, but because of the complicated methods the Democrats use to allocate delegates, we won't know until a day or two from now what the delegate picture is.  By then, we will be on to next week's primaries.  Will Bloomberg stop throwing good money after bad?  Will someone tell Warren that it's time to go?  Will she listen?  How will the next states vote?

Biden's biggest strength seems to be in states with heavy black populations.  His problem is that there aren't too many of them left.  After Super Tuesday, it remains to be seen if Biden's success and the media hype that follows pushes non-black voters into the Biden camp.

One thing that I find extremely amazing.  All these voters seem to have forgotten just who Joe Biden is.  In the last week, there was little mention of how Biden used the power of the USA to protect his son's job with the Ukrainian gas company Burisma.  Trump won't overlook that.  Similarly, no one mentioned that Hunter got a billion and a half dollars from China, even though Joe Biden said again this past week that China isn't really a competitor to the USA.  Huh?  At some point, Biden will once again (or ten times again) slip up and say something or do something that reveals his advancing senility that renders him unfit to be president.  Biden can't beat Trump.  Oh, to be sure, Trump could beat himself.  The President could do something that loses the election; Biden just doesn't have it in himself to generate the support to win otherwise.  

Today's Prediction

It's finally Super Tuesday.  It's the day when all those Democrat candidates go before a large chunk of America to determine who the Dem nominee will be.  Oh wait.  There are only three and a half candidates left (Warren doesn't get a full count).  The rest have all dropped out on the basis of the votes in four small states that don't represent America.  Indeed, one of the drop outs won or tied in two of the four but still dropped out.  Why?  Because the media and the Democrat leaders in Washington and the contributors wanted it.  So today Democrats get to pick among three old, old guys with no personality and a harridan who ought to drop out but won't.

Here's my prediction for the day.

1.  Bernie wins the most delegates by far.  Don't look at how the media spins a Biden comeback.  Look at the delegate numbers when the votes are counted.  That's what matters.

2.  Biden will be second with Bloomberg third.   It's not worth analyzing who comes in second for sure.

3.  Warren will come in fourth.

For all the media talk, Biden's candidacy is still dead.  There are just too many people across the country who have heard that old fool talk or try to.  He can't win.  Further a big chunk of the voters cast their ballots before the whole "Biden's alive!" Frankenstein moment started being pushed by the media and Dem elites.

There's really only one question left for the Dems.  Will Bernie will the nomination outright for the first ballot at the convention or will he fall short only to have the party apparatchiks and the media steal the nomination away from him.  If the former takes place, the Dems will get crushed by Trump as many Dems stay home or even vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils.  If the latter is the case, then the Dems will get crushed by Trump as the Bernie Bros refuse to support the author of the theft of the nomination.

Just A Memory

I don't know if the license plates from Quebec still say "Je me souviens" or not.  They used to some years back.  I was told that the French phrase translates roughly into "I remember".

I mention this because of recent developments among Democrats.  The party elites seem to think that no one in America remembers anything.  As a result, Tom Steyer, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg have all dropped out of the presidential race and Amy and Pete are endorsing Joe Biden for president.  But here are just a few things that most Americans will remember:

1.  A corrupt Ukrainian billionaire with close ties to Vladimir Putin and the Russians had his natural gas company Burisma hire Joe Biden's son Hunter to sit on the board of directors.  Hunter had no experience with drilling for, buying or selling natural gas and he didn't even speak Ukrainian.  Nevertheless, Burisma gave Hunter Biden a director's salary more than twice as high as the directors' salaries paid by huge oil companies like Exxon Mobil.  Biden got over $1 million per year for a part time job that required him to do nothing.  And just coincidentally, within six weeks of Hunter getting this sweetheart job, his father Joe Biden threatened to cut off all aid to Ukraine unless it fired the prosecutor who was investigating Burisma for the Ukrainian government.  Old Joe Biden actually did employ a quid pro quo to force Ukraine to stop investigating his son's employer.

2.  While we're on the subject of Hunter Biden, remember that Old Joe took Hunter with him to China on Air Force two.  While there with his dad, Hunter managed to get an investment of 1.5 billion dollars for Hunter's investment firm directly from the Chinese government.  No other western firm of any sort got a similar investment.  Hunter had no particular expertise; the Chinese were just buying favor with Old Joe.

3.  Old Joe Biden has a history of making racist, sexist and other inappropriate comments.  Over the years he's said things like that Seven-Eleven only hires Indians.  He's told whoppers of all sorts; most recently he claimed to have been arrested with Nelson Mandela in South Africa.  That was just a blatant lie.

4.  Old Joe can't seem to remember where he is, who he is talking to, what his positions are on a particular issue, or even what day it is.  He speaks in half sentences, so his train of thought is nearly impossible to follow.  He should be the poster child for Alzheimer's disease.

5.  Old Joe is a typical Washington insider and an old white male to boot.  He's exactly the sort of person that the Democrats tell us they do not want to empower.  None of the Democrats have explained why he would make an appropriate president given that he seems to be the opposite of what "intersectionality" calls for.

6.  Biden is a terrible debaters.  Trump will destroy Biden in a debate.

Why are the Democrats forgetting all this?  Are they that afraid of Bernie Sanders?

Now Amy Drops Out - Klohuchar endorses Biden

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday with 14 primaries.  So what is Amy Klobuchar doing?  She's dropping out of the race and endorsing Joe Biden.  It's amazing.  Klobuchar campaigned for a year but on the day before the start of the biggest day in the race, she drops out.  And she endorses Old Joe.

It's all a bid to stop Bernie Sanders.  Klobuch, Steyer and Buttigieg all dropped out in the space of just two days.  All hope their votes go to Biden, although Amy is the only one to make her endorsement explicit.  Pete just did things like say that Sanders could never beat Trump.

According to recent polling, even the absence of these three musketeers make it unlikely that Biden will end Super Tuesday with more delegates than Sanders.  It may be closer, but Sanders should still be in the lead.

It remains to be seen what Mike Bloomberg gets for his billion dollars of ads.  He may surprise by exceeding the prospects that the media has assigned to him after the last two debates.

This whole sequence of events can only be called bizarre.  Remember, in many of the Super Tuesday states, half of the total vote is already in via early voting.  Those people can't change their votes now.  Something like a third of the votes will have been cast at a point at which the media still said Biden was washed up with no chance to win. 

It should be fun to see who wins these primaries.  I'm rooting for a surprise victory for "uncommitted".  Indeed, after watching this race, the only ones who need to be committed are the candidates.