Being the continuation of InstaPunk and InstaPunk Rules
Landmarks in Voting
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Can’t you smell that smell?
The news imagineers at CNN are trying to peddle the idea that Trump’s victory was not a landslide, not even as monumental as Clinton’s win over the dangerous Bob Dole in 1996. Here’s the gist of their argument, as reprinted by the Stella’s Yahoo newsfeed:
FTA: < A version of this story appeared in CNN’s What Matters newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here.
► It’s a comeback for the ages for a president to go from a pariah after trying to overturn one election to president-elect after the next.
► A rightward shift in election results gives him a mandate to start trying to remake the US governmentlike he promised he would.
► If Republicans win control of the US House of Representatives, he’ll have control of the entire US government to help him enact change.
What Trump cannot claim is a landslide victory, although that’s how he will describe it.
As of Saturday, Trump is winning the popular votewith a little more than 74.5 million votes, although millions of votes have yet to be counted in California, Washington and Utah, among others. The final 2024 popular vote tally likely won’t be known until December.
When he lost convincingly in 2020, Trump got a little more than 74 million votes. So while it’s true that much of the country moved to the right in this election, it’s also true that there was some voter apathy if, at the end of the day, turnout is down from 2020.
That doesn’t mean this will end up being a low turnout election. The University of Florida Election Lab estimates as of Friday that turnout in 2024 will be about 62.3% of the voting-eligible population, down from the high-water mark of the modern era of more than 66.4% in 2020 but still above other recent elections. Turnout in 1996 and 2000 was not much over 50% of the voting-eligible population.
In terms of the Electoral College, Trump won 312 electoral votes. It’s a solid win, but in the lower half of US presidential elections.
It was a better showing than either his or Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes in 2016 and 2020, respectively. It also outperformed both of George W. Bush’s electoral victories in 2000 and 2004. But it was far short of Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012.
Bill Clinton never reached 50% in the popular vote because both of his presidential elections featured a strong third-party candidate in Ross Perot. But Clinton did run away with the Electoral College vote, winning 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996.>>
Two huge issues with all this. First, the preoccupation of the diehard lefties with refuting the Trump claims of a landslide victory are ironic, given the lay-of-the-land glimpse of the election provided by the map of how the counties voted on November 5:
Red is Trump, blue is Harris.
Kill the Electoral College and a handful of coastal cities run everything.
Now can we talk about that word “landslide”? It’s the land grows the food and raises the cattle, produces the lumber and minerals and fossil fuels that enable us to build the cities who care nothing for the people who make it all go, except to resent the fact that because they represent the land that makes wealth rather than the people who people who exploit that wealth for paper gain, the residents of all those counties in flyover America count just a little bit more in the vote count than the city dwellers.
In the context, there’s no way the 2024 election wasn’t a landslide. All that land voted for Trump the builder, and all that parasitic paper money voted for Harris the user.
That’s the first of the big issues we have with the dismissive CNN take on the election. Now for the second issue. The truth about the election turnouts in 2020 and 2024. Which was and remains a huge lie being perpetrated by all the keepers of the numbers I have been able to find. They are calculating voter turnout by dividing the number of votes cast not by registered voters but by Voter-eligible adults.
Not even the pollsters talk to voter-eligible adults. Only registered voters can used in calculations of voter turnout. The eligible who did not register are not voters and can’t be counted in election measurements.
CNN is quoting turnout numbers of 62.3 percent in 2024 and 66.4 percent in 2020, while conceding that both of these are substantially higher than the 50 percent back in the pre-Obama days of Bush and Clinton. No shit, Sherlock. So what were the real turnout figures in 2020 and 2024?
How many registered voters in 2020 and 2024? Here you go.
How many votes were cast in the 2020 and 2024 elections?
And…
Here are the real calculations which must be performed.
In 2020, it’s 158.4/168.3=0.941
In 2024, it’s 155.2/161.4=0.962
94 and 96 percent turnout. These are impossible numbers. Why the vote tabulators have all been using vote-eligible adults in their calculations.
Think about it. Even the MSM has been reporting on all the voting bloc shifts toward Trump. He gained over his 2020 vote in every state, even in deep blue NY and CA, and he made significant percentage gains in the black, Hispanic, female, and Jewish vote. Yet somehow he only beat Kamala by 1 1/2 points in the popular vote? Who was voting for her? Not voters but the still intractable embedded Democrat machine.
Votes are still being manufactured out there by the millions, probably with the help of the drop boxes, mail-in votes being “counted” by precinct functionaries in Dem-controlled urban locations, the illegal votes induced to the polls in “No ID required” blue states, the dead and nursing home vote, the prisoner vote, and the omnipresent voting machines with their doubtful security provisions and provably film-flammable software algorithms.
The map is telling us what the liars won’t. Kamala lost by a huge fucking number of legal votes. Why they were still feverishly “counting” to the last seconds in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Wisconsin, while they are still “counting” —a month and a half after the election — for Kamala in California, Oregon, and Washington. Why they are still so damn determined to kill the Electoral College. And will fight to the last breath to keep their crooked machines.
The land voted for Trump across the board. He wanted it too big to rig. He got it. Why it was a landslide both literally and figuratively.
We still have a long, long way to guarantee honest, fair, and efficient elections in this country. Nobody can breathe a sigh of relief over the bullet we just dodged.
And I do entreat the powers that be in the smug upper reaches of the RNC to accept that the turnout figures, properly calculated, are all anyone needs to understand at once that 2020 was stolen and 2024 might very well have been. Time for them to quit gloating and get down to work. 2026 is only 20-some months away.
It strikes me now and again. Can’t help it. Just try to control it… I’ve only done one thing: That’s all. I swear. Okay. Couldn’t help it. But’s that’s all. Really. I was working on my long postponed post about the best movies in the first 25 years of the 21st Century when this overpowering sense of ennui overcame me, and dissing the movies suddenly struck me as more important than debunking the big lies mass media tells about itself. Working my way through it… P.S. An old friend just checked in with an enhancement of my comic cover that blows mine out of the water. Couldn’t resist sharing it with you all. ________________________ Below the Fold What I had of the new/old post I was trying to finish: Keeping My Promise about the Best 21st Century Movies It’s that time of the year when movies are back in the news more than usual. The recent Oscars broadcast was chiefly notable for its record-low viewership, inane political rhetoric from the podium, and a crop of...
We, of course, were as offended as anyone by the President’s evident pleasure in being depicted as Creator of the Universe. His later insistence that it was just a plate of food that happened to have blond hair was disingenuous to say the least. There. That’s out of the way. Putting aside all the bluster about blasphemy by secular observers whose relation to religion is probably a checkbox item, I believe there is a real story lurking in all the feigned outrage. a neon flash of double standards. It’s a media story, probably meaningless to those who aren’t ancient enough to have witnessed Obama’s first year in office. He was kind of everywhere, on every news interview program, every newspaper headline, and every magazine cover. (For the youngsters in the audience, there used to be things called magazines with words and pictures in them. It was a big deal to be featured on their covers.) If you weren’t a big Obama fan — and maybe even if you were — this got to be kind of sickening a...
I first heard of Meidas Touch shortly after I joined ‘X’ in the wake of Musk’s takeover of the poisonous lefty site called Twitter. The lefties continue to be a dominating presence there, and even when freeloader Citizen Free Press links a decent post there, the first one or two replies at least are screeds by the kind of crayon-armed haters who want all Republicans assassinated. CFP loves to indicate that outrageous lefty posts are ‘buried’ or ‘destroyed’ by MAGA derision, but this is usually an overstatement. Why I was occasionally moved to reply to the worst of them. The Meidas Touch editor Filipkowski was one of the first to tempt me to. After a quick review of the MT site, I told him it was the most egregious pile of vile libel made up completely out of whole cloth I had ever seen. (A permanent sidebar there declared that there are over 20,000 pending lawsuits against Trump for a variety of sex crimes.) I told him he was a disgusting cancer on the corpse of journalism that was sti...
Lewis Hamilton wins Seventh World Championship at Formula 1 Grand Prix in Turkey: A stunning drive from Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton in the Turkish Grand Prix gave him his 10th victory of the season – and, more crucially, saw him claim the seventh drivers’ title of his career, to equal the record of Michael Schumacher, as Racing Point’s Sergio Perez and Ferrari’s Sebastian Vettel completed the podium after a thrilling race in Istanbul. Hamilton had started the race in sixth, risen to third midway through the first lap and then dropped back to sixth by the end of Lap 1 after an error at Turn 9. But a decision to change his intermediate tyres just once saw Hamilton drive a masterful race to claim victory by over 25 seconds from Perez. The win alone was enough to claim championship #7, but it was even more assured after a disastrous race for Valtteri Bottas - the only man who could have stopped Hamilton winning the title today - who spun six times en route to a P14 finish.
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*I’ve* never even had one of these. I’ll leave this one for one of you guys. Plenty of time to get this before Christmas. Here’s the EBay proffer for what’s called the ‘Pinback Button.’ The cute graphic treatment even includes the pin side. It you actually want to read a physical book that you can hold in your hands, put on your shelf, or give to some friend or family member who’d like to understand what happened to the Great American Experiment you can find a copy quite easily, still in time for Christmas, via the following retailers and others. Just search the ‘Shopping’ tab at Google for “The Boomer Bible” and you’ll find it. (If you’re viewing this on a tablet, you can read this graphic more easily by clicking on the pic and turning your device 90 deg counterclockwise.) I don’t make any money from your purchases obviously, but I feel like I’m doing a public service in showing you what’s out there. For example, here’s something that’s out there I hadn’t actually found till yesterday...
A good catch by my wife is what started all this. As is our usual habit, we were watching something on TV older than the foul-mouthed, stunt-casted contemporary dreck when it rolled over into another older show called Grimm . I had heard of the series, maybe even seen some of it when it ran originally, and so we gave it a go. In the opening sequence our protagonist sees a young blonde on the sidewalk and as he watches her pretty face changes momentarily into a twisted monster version of her. Then it disappears and she goes to her car and drives away. That’s the premise of a show that ran for six years starting in 2011. The man who sees the transformation is, unbeknownst to him, a descendant of the famous Brothers Grimm who hunted down the monsters found in fairy tales. Here’s the scene I was able to capture later: Clumsy screen grab. Sorry. Don’t tell anybody. When the blonde woman did her quick change and vanishing act, my wife laughed and said, “Who knew that Pam Bondi started ...
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Is that a bullet hole? Or a black hole? It’s complicated. We don’t like complicated. If you can’t say it in a tweet or a 30 second sound bite on teevee, don’t waste our time. I remember some decades ago when it was a great joke one year that USA Today had just won a Pulitzer Prize for “Best Investigative Paragraph.’ These days any argument that requires research, in-depth analysis, and careful piecing together of the people and partisan positions involved is easily dismissible as conspiracy theory, most likely by right wing fascist liars. Why don’t we like complicated? That’s simple enough. We don’t like complicated because we can’t do it anymore. By the time we get to school we’re already too dumb to acquire the kind of critical thinking skills needed to navigate ‘complicated,’ and the philosophy of education now in place has adapted by ceasing any attempt to teach critical thinking skills or provide the base of historical information and learning that used to make investigative repo...
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