I was down in the Boston area attending my high school reunion.
I didn’t have my laptop with me, hence no post. I didn’t get back to The Gulch until just before midnight and all I wanted to do was go to bed. I didn’t even get arlound to cleaning the feline contingent’s litter box until this morning. (Yes, I know that makes me a bad cat dad.)
One thing I noticed during my trip to the reunion was the very heavy northbound traffic as leaf peepers were heading into New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont to catch the brilliant fall foliage. Even southbound traffic was affected as a trip that would have taken me about two hours to the reunion venue took almost three hours, the traffic hangups taking place at highway junctions. At least on my way home there wasn’t much in the way of traffic to slow things down.
This morning I noticed the higher than normal traffic when I was making my usual pre-church Walmart run. A lot of the ‘extra’ traffic had out-of-state license plates, meaning they were likely leaf peepers getting an early start (a little past 7 this morning) and hitting some of the diners for breakfast.
We are pretty close to peak colors here in the Lakes Region so this might be the peak leaf peeper traffic we’ll be seeing...until next year.
Oh, and the Official Weekend Pundit Lake Winnipesaukee Runabout is being pulled from the water today. My boating season is over.
==++++==
So much for ‘spontaneous’ support of Kamala in Philadelphia.
==++++==
Matt Margolis is asking the question “Is Kamala’s campaign collapsing?”
Seeing the recent shift in campaign tactics, I’d have to say the answer to Matt’s question is “Yes”.
The one that sticks out the most is her questioning Trump’s health and ability to do media appearances. That’s laughable considering Kamala (or her handlers) worked to avoid open media events.
This shift was inevitable. Kamala is a terrible campaigner who thought she could get away with not doing any interviews for weeks, and she still hasn’t done a single press conference. Yet she's trying to accuse Trump of being too "exhausted" to do media appearances. She spent weeks avoiding unscripted media appearances, and when she finally started doing them, they were with friendly networks with interviewers who openly support her. She's trying to hit Trump on his age and stamina now because, frankly, the issues aren't working for her.Her entire campaign has been about attacking Trump, period. You don’t win a campaign by focusing all your efforts on trying to paint your opponent as a “poopy head”, particularly if you put zero efforts into promoting reasons for people to vote for you.
The reason why Kamala changed her media blackout strategy to a media blitz strategy is that the polls were telling her that the voters wanted to know more about her and her vision. Voters know Donald Trump and have already made up their minds about him. Yet, she hasn't figured that out yet. She won't get anywhere trying to give people reasons to vote against Trump, she needs to give voters a reason to support her, and she's proving once again she has no idea how to do that.
==++++==
And the hits keep on coming.
You know it’s bad for Kamala if even a cultural icon like Lizzo is saying outright that if Kamala becomes president, the country will be like Detroit. It so happens that I agree with Lizzo even if she didn’t realize she’d just thrown Kamala under the bus.
Lizzo claimed if Harris wins next month the country will look like Detroit, which is honestly not a good thing.Talk about being absolutely clueless and disconnected from society. One would think a “cultural icon” like Lizzo would know better. Instead we get someone who knows very little about how things actually work making statements that has done more to damage Kamala’s campaign than help it.
The singer brought up supposed voter suppression, too. She claimed people discourage youngsters from voting.
Ugh, Lizzo also reminded us that Harris has spent her entire career in the public sector. Yeah, another career politician.
How can Harris possibly understand the economy when she has no experience in the private sector?
==++++==
Has Michigan been taking lessons from the city of Chicago about how to fix elections? It appears so considering the state has a lot more people on its voter rolls than there are eligible voters in the entire state.
One has to ask this question: Just how many of the dead will be voting Democrat in the upcoming election?
It’s being reported now that Michigan has way more people on their voter rolls than there are voting-age residents in the entire state and that’s a huge concern given that it’s a battleground state.I have to agree that it looks like the perfect setup to commit election fraud, particularly since it the state won’t purge the voter rolls until the year before the 2028 presidential elections. But by then the damage could be done and the Michigan state government won’t care. But the rest of the nation could be paying the price...and become Detroit.
According to the report their voter rolls have nearly half a million more voters on the list than the 8 million voters in the state.
Around 8.4 million people are registered to vote in Michigan, but that’s nearly 500,000 more people than the total number of voting-age residents in the state.How in the hell does it take until 2027 to get inactive voters removed from the state’s voter rolls??? That right there is how you know Michigan officials want cheating to occur because it should only take months to do this, not multiple years.
The inflated voter rolls in Michigan, a vital battleground state in the 2024 election, are one of the largest imbalances in the country, Bridge Michigan reported. The Republican National Committee sued Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson over the inflated voter rolls earlier this year, along with filing lawsuits over other election-related issues in the state, but Benson’s office dismissed the concerns on Wednesday, arguing that the lawsuits “lay the groundwork to overturn the results of the election if they don’t like them.”
--snip--
Secretary of State spokeswoman Angela Benander told Bridge Michigan that the GOP’s legal challenges “are an attempt to cause people to question the process.” The spokeswoman added that Michigan is expected to clear 606,800 inactive voters from the rolls, but that won’t be completed until 2027. Federal law requires voters to be removed from the rolls by state or local officials if the state is notified that they moved to a different state or if election mail sent to their home is returned as undeliverable. Voters are also removed if they do not vote in two consecutive federal elections.
==++++==
That this is just now coming to the forefront is disturbing to no end, “this” being the Left’s war on straight, white masculine men.
This is something that has been discussed in the so-called ‘Manosphere’ for years now, but it’s gotten to the point where it is difficult for even the most brain-dead person to ignore.
The Left has been waging war on straight, white masculine men for quite a while now. According to liberals, we’re the one group it’s okay to discriminate against, the one group where no one should have a voice, and the one group we need to replace in America. In fact, simply speaking out AGAINST DISCRIMINATION aimed at straight, white, masculine men makes liberals angry.When they’ll start placing sanctions on straight, white masculine men, some twisted version of the Jim Crow laws that discriminated against our black citizens back in the Bad Old Days? Will there be restricted seating on buses, on airplanes which relegates straight, white masculine men to the proverbial ‘back of the bus’? Will they be restricted to dining in certain sections of restaurants, or banned outright from eating with people who aren’t straight, white masculine men?
--snip--
In fact, name ANY GROUP that Democrats care less about than dudes that just want to be dudes. Particularly straight white dudes who want to be dudes. They care more about the Palestinians. More about Ukrainians. They care more about illegal aliens.
Just how bad will it get?
==++++==
How long will it take for the “tax the rich into oblivion” Democrats to realize their plans to tax the bejeezus out of everyone, not just the rich, will collect less revenue than they believe will be collected?
I doubt they will ever be able to be convinced of that truth despite mountains of evidence showing that belief is wrong.
Earlier today I came across a claim from Rep. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), who said that Donald Trump's tax cuts brought in a record amount of revenue.Do the Democrats really want to boost revenues, or do they want to use confiscatory taxes to impoverish the wealthy who aren’t Democrats while also destroying the middle class? I am inclined to think it is more the latter than the former. If they are truly interested in boosting revenues, maybe they should look at the evidence and check out the Laffer Curve.
An old House GOP Ways and Means Committee post from April 2022 backed that claim by suggesting, "Total federal tax collections, including payroll and other taxes, are on track to reach $5.04 trillion in FY22, or 21.0 percent of GDP. This would be a new all-time high in both cases."
To your liberal friend or relative, such a number does not make sense. How does reducing taxes make more money for the government?
It's quite simple. Just ask: "Would you rather collect 20% of $100,000 in taxes or 20% of $1,000,000 in taxes?"
If they say 20% from one million, say that you, as the government, should incentivize people and businesses to make that million dollars as easily as possible. And thus, to do that, you should not tax them as heavily.
As a result, because everybody is making more money, the amount of money they pay in taxes is greater, even if they are all paying at the same rate, which also makes a flat tax more sensible than a progressive one.
==++++==
And that’s the news from Lake Winnipesaukee, where the trees look like they are on fire, the leaf peepers are here looking at them, and where I am still feeling the afterglow from my high school reunion.