Sometimes a threesome just sucks
Welp. Primary Election Day is now behind us. Thank God.
Yesterday’s bright moment was Andrew Lewis running and winning against a large part of the GOP establishment in the 105th State House District.
It lies around out through Harrisburg’s eastern suburbs and could easily swing “RINO,” but yesterday it did not. Proving the power of staying positive and of doing door-to-door, Lewis impressed so many voters that many of them eagerly relayed to us volunteer poll workers their happy experiences meeting him at their home’s front door.
That said, much of yesterday’s political outcomes were unfortunate, for those of us who trust and hope in We, The People and who have learned not to trust the GOP establishment.
Woody Allen once quipped “I believe in relationships. Love between two people is a beautiful thing. Between three, it’s fantastic.”
Well, sometimes that truism just doesn’t hold water, and nowhere was this observation more evident than the results from yesterday’s political threesomes in Pennsylvania.
As we political watchers and participants have seen repeatedly, and as I myself have experienced as a candidate for office, three-way races can and often do allow liberal Republicans to prevail. And in fact, it now seems that the threesome approach is a significant strategy for GOPe candidates.
Yesterday, Dan Meuser won the PA 9th congressional district election (he lives in the 8th District) through the benefit of the two grass roots candidates (Halcovage and Uehlinger) each siphoning off sufficient votes to allow the establishment candidate to get the plurality. There is some question out there about whether Uehlinger was, in fact, a conservative, or even a Republican; despite getting in the race first, his campaign seemed the least organized. Halcovage was not terribly organized, either, and did not respond to important questionnaires from interest groups. Firearms Owners Against Crime advised voters to select only Meuser of the three candidates.
Actually, Meuser may have obtained more than 50% of the vote, which is an indication that he might have won on his own merits (e.g. he was the only candidate deemed acceptable on Second Amendment rights to FOAC). All his negatives notwithstanding.
One lesson for sure comes out of that particular three-way race: If you cannot present yourself as an organized, credible candidate, then please spare everyone the drama and do not run.
People who wake up on some Thursday morning and say “What the heck, I am gonna run for office” have every right to do so, but recognize that there are consequences to this. Better to have a one-on-one clear choice for the voters. We will almost always have an establishment candidate, so pick the one best grass roots candidate as The People’s champion, and chase off the rest.
In the PA governor’s race, liberal dark horse Laura Ellsworth knew she had no chance of winning. I mean, with liberal policy positions like hers, she should run as a Democrat (she said she would not accept money from the NRA). But run she did, and though she obtained less than 20% of the vote, she siphoned off sufficient votes (especially in Western PA) from true conservative and US Army veteran Paul Mango to get Scott Wagner the plurality.
Mango is from western PA and would have otherwise obtained most of Ellsworth’s votes.
Yesterday I was a volunteer poll worker from 7:00 AM until 7:35PM in the Harrisburg area.
What I heard from GOP voters (and mostly from women over 50 years old) at several different polls was that they were angry at both Mango and Wagner for all the negative ads. They knew Ellsworth was liberal, but they were voting for her as an alternative to the two boys engaged in distasteful roughhousing.
Wasn’t this a variable we were picking up from women voters weeks ago? Yes.
Did someone pay Ellsworth to run? One asks, because she knew her chances were very low to nil, that her liberal ideas and policy positions are way out of synch with the vast majority of Republican voters.
Ellsworth the Spoiler has now burned her bridges with about 40% of the state’s Republican super voters, which even the most obtuse political nerds would expect as a logical outcome.
So why else was she in it? One cannot help but wonder if she was paid to play the spoiler. It was done in the last race I ran in….by someone involved in the race she ran in…so…
When we look at Idaho’s primary yesterday, a similar scene unfolded. The unlikely liberal GOPe candidate beat the conservative, by way of siphoning of votes by a third candidate who himself had no hope of winning.
Folks, the only way these third candidates can run is if they are independently wealthy and just yee-haw running for office; or, they are willing to sacrifice their name in one race by trying to build it up for a future run at some other office; or, most likely, they have “other” sources of income or promises made to reward them for playing the spoiler in the current race.
So, as we move into a more experienced and savvy grass roots political landscape, begun just ten years ago as the “tea party,” we are learning that our own strength can be used against us judo-like by the same corrupt political establishment we are trying to defeat.
Threesome races may look democratic, and it is true that every American has the right to run for office. But sometimes appearances can be deceiving. Sometimes those threesomes are designed to undermine the conservative grass roots candidate, and to help the plain vanilla milquetoast establishment candidate win.
Sometimes political threesomes just plain suck. And not in a good way. They can be designed to exploit the big-hearted nature of so many grass roots activists, so that their enemy, the GOPe, can win.
Lesson learned.
Movie review: “White Tiger”
When we think of Russia today and now, our mind might wander off into brutal poisonings of ex-spies across international borders, brutal assassinations of journalists inside Russia, brutal repressions of Chechen independence movements, brutal invasions of South Ossetia, Ukraine, and Georgia (THAT Georgia, not our Georgia), poorly chosen relationships with Iran and Syria, and the current czar riding around bare-chested on a horse with a rifle slung over his back.
Perhaps it was always thus. But if we think and search back a hundred years or more, we will stumble upon buried treasure in the farthest reaches of Russia.
Yes, it is true, Russia was not always just a military force to be reckoned with, it was also a significant cultural center of the very highest magnitude, the very highest achievement. World class music, literature, arts and crafts, poetry, ballet, and so on all were major hallmarks of the Russians.
Not of the oppressed Soviet satellite states, but the actual Russian people themselves.
Rachmaninoff, Dostoyesky, Faberge, and so on, so many great minds contributing in a singularly unique way, native to Russian culture.
Russians had this knack for art that you would not necessarily see if you looked at the simple surface of their culture or landscape. Behind the eightball on technology, Russian writers and poets and musicians bedazzled Westerners with their brilliance and inspiration.
That all started to die in fits and starts after the violent 1917 revolution led by the Democrat Party of that day and place, but nonetheless art persisted until the 1950s, when Soviet socialist control firmly held every thing and every person in its crushing grasp.
To dissent from all that big government with a pink pussy hat or with a snarky hashtag was unthinkable. Not that people wouldn’t try to do it, but the Soviet thought police, much the same as our own politically correct thought police in America today, would catch the thought crime even before it had taken physical form, and, as our own thought police openly wish they could do, WHOOSH, off to a starvation diet in Siberia went that ‘evil’ free thinker.
I am not sure that the Soviets used the words “sexist,” “racist,” homophobe,” “Islamophobe,” and other overdone American generalities meant to crush dialogue and debate, but if they could have used these terms, they would have. Different words then, but the same anti-democracy process then and now.
So for the past seventy years Russia has had an especially harsh Russian winter, art-wise, because of the Soviets and then their control freak successors, whatever Mr. Putin’s political party is named.
To be an artist in that Russian cultural winter was to walk around every day muzzled, daring not to say much less think your own creative thoughts. Too much was at stake.
But somewhere, somehow, that beautiful old Russian voice began to quietly break through the repressive walls. Finding acceptable subjects and means to convey them became a new form of creativity in and of itself.
Nationalism, patriotism, history are all legitimate subjects of artistic creativity, and so Russian artists have adapted. Very, very well. Albeit with throwback Soviet-style imagery, which is lamentable. Gosh, if the Russians could only be our friends…the things we could achieve together.
And so here we now have a truly artistic Russian movie we can all be proud of, in the mould of the old-time Russian artistic capacity. It is called White Tiger and debuted about 18 months ago. I have been wanting to write about it since watching it back then, but as we know, the past 18 months in America have been pretty intense. Every time I thought I could breathe again, some new issue would pop up. There was more compelling competition for writing space and creativity of my own.
At least this is how I have experienced the past 18 months.
If you are afflicted with a love of liberty, as I am, then you have shared my somewhat anxious condition as the American “deep state,” or Obama holdovers, or career bureaucrats, or whatever you want to call them, have attempted to reverse the outcome of a presidential election they thought they would win and still cannot stomach the thought of losing, by any means necessary. Which means illegal, unethical, immoral, un-American, anti-democratic means.
That all seems to be unwinding now.
And so now, for this moment, I get to bask in the glow of art, thanks to the Russians. And I really mean it, thank you. Seeing this movie took me way back in time to when my own mind was creative and artistic.
Dear Russians, I lift my glass to you: Tvoye zdorovye!
White Tiger is on its face a war movie set in World War Two. It is about Russians versus Germans, good guys versus bad guys, the Eastern European version of cowboys versus Indians. It is also about tanks and heavy armor, about technological superiority versus the grass roots spirit to survive, and history. Lots of history. And lots of action.
At its core, this movie is mythological and Darwinian, with a lot of symbolism, not the least of which is the theme music, an artfully done refrain of Wagner’s pilgrim’s chorus.
If you care to pay careful attention, and walk a mile in a Russian tank tread, you will end up being impressed by this low-budget, high-performance film.
Briefly summed up with no spoilers, the unlikely (and yet so likely…there’s that symbolism thing) Russian hero is reborn, a plausible enough biological fluke consistent with species adapting.
He goes on to learn his enemy’s ways, to anticipate his next moves, and in the end, he goes on a ghostly chase into both past and future, bound up in one of Russia’s most enduring identities: Not German!
And speaking of German, Germany, and World War Two, no better representation of Adolf Hitler has been captured in cinema than the movie’s very last few minutes, where Satan’s boots on the ground has a heartfelt confession with his sponsor, who sits patiently listening in the shadow.
And as an aperitif, try this Russian music to settle your soul before bed time.
Laura Ellsworth for Governor?
Attorney Laura Ellsworth is running for governor of Pennsylvania.
I have heard her speak at length, and heard her debate, and she is impressive. She is the kind of person I would want representing me as a lawyer: Articulate, earnest, knowledgeable.
She would also make an interesting college professor, or a policy think tank analyst.
But is she right for governor of Pennsylvania? As a Republican?
Polls by everyone – Democrats, Republicans, independent research firms, including your aunt and your auto mechanic, show Ellsworth getting somewhere between five hundred votes and five percent of the primary vote on May 15th.
Not nearly enough to win by any way possible. Mango is barely trailing Wagner by a percent or two, statistically tied.
Laura Ellsworth is as liberal policy-wise as her choice for US president in 2016, John Kasich, who she joyfully announced she wrote in on her November 2016 ballot (i.e. she did not vote for Trump).
She is big on gun confiscation from law-abiding citizens, one of those big government elitist feel-good actions that has zero relationship to crime reduction and lots of conflict with the constitution.
She has the foolish America-is-too-big-to-fail attitude toward illegal immigration, which she does not oppose.
She is in lock-step with the teacher’s unions on a variety of policies, not the least of which is continuing Pennsylvania’s broken and punitive property tax system that leaves about ten thousand elderly grandmas kicked out of their own homes every year to pay some teacher’s gold-plated pension.
None of these are conservative policy positions.
And Ellsworth refuses to talk substantively about the bigger political and cultural context, the larger world surrounding Pennsylvania. Such as the criminalization of policy differences through phony investigations as the Democrat Party’s new approach to losing elections (which is what the Communists successfully did in Europe). Such as the implications of the illegal, unconstitutional Mueller witch hunt. It is as if Ellsworth lives in a Western Pennsylvania bubble full of cool ideas.
This is hardly the stuff a worthy, sturdy governor is made of.
Then again, she has now been endorsed by former governor Tom Corbett, one of the modern era’s most failed, incompetent, though ethical, governors.
Because of his grossly negligent political incompetence and 40-grit sandpaper communication style, Corbett was soundly rejected by his own Republican voters in his quest for a second term in 2014. So accepting his blessing to run for governor is like lighting yourself on fire and then hoping someone nearby has a fire extinguisher.
By the obvious measure of the Republican electorate’s mood, Ellsworth is willfully tilting at windmills here. She is not a serious candidate.
Yesterday I had an illuminating conversation about this governor’s race with a long-time woman friend. She is a lawyer and a lobbyist, smart as hell, articulate, principled and tough. She was a Paul Mango supporter.
She said that watching Paul Mango and Scott Wagner duke it out with negative ads was like watching two school boys fighting at recess, with all the other students standing around yelling, and she doesn’t like it.
So she is going to vote for Ellsworth, as a protest.
When I pointed out that voting for Ellsworth is literally throwing away your vote, and most likely helping Scott Wagner get elected, she sighed deeply.
“I know. I feel like I can’t win here.”
I don’t think my friend is alone. Most older women do not like conflict, especially this kind of warfare going on between Mango and Wagner.
With about 40% of the likely Republican voters still uncommitted to any candidate here, there might be a lot more women voters like my friend than we expect.
Tell you what, as a conservative Republican voter for a long, long time, I have never been in this position before. It is a bittersweet feeling.
Never before have I seen a situation where the third candidate made it likely that the most explosive, confrontational, wrecking-ball candidate would get elected. But that is what is likely happening here.
If enough people like my friend vote for Ellsworth, then Ellsworth will end up taking away just enough votes from Mango to help Wagner win.
While I am supporting Mango, the fact is that Scott Wagner will be better on most policies than current governor Tom Wolf. And a lot, lot more destructive of the political establishment than Mango will ever be. Usually, it is the other way around in three-way elections, where the most liberal establishment candidate gets elected due to the presence of the third candidate.
So once again, politics makes strange bedfellows and it is full of irony. Laura Ellsworth is such a liberal candidate that her candidacy will cause the most confrontational, anti-liberal, anti-establishment candidate to get elected to governor. You could not write a political thriller more complicated and unlikely than this.
People we miss, a lot: Paul Lyskava, Tom Hardisky
As I get older, more and more people I know are either widowed or divorced, develop cancer and succeed or fail at beating it back, or drop dead while gardening, walking, biking, or hiking.
It seems to me that there is little correlation between body type or apparent fitness and these unexpected deaths.
And worse, there seems to be little correlation between how good these people are in life, and how premature their death is.
“Only the good die young,” is the famous quip made more famous by Billy Joel.
There is some truth to this quip, as much as I dislike it. It does make me wonder aloud about God’s plan, because there are a lot of really bad people who seem to thrive, while perfectly good people leave us way too soon, leaving behind grieving loved ones and friends alike.
Here are two fantastic people who left us way too soon. One of whom I knew well, and one of whom I did not know well. I miss them both very much.
The first one up is Paul Lyskava, former government affairs director for the Pennsylvania Forest Products Association.
Paul was probably the best person I ever worked with in the Pennsylvania capitol. He was the most level-headed, ethical, hard working, honest, good natured person there. Paul and I met in 1998, and maintained a friendship until he died eleven months ago, from a brain tumor. The painful truth is that I lost track of Paul in his last year, because he kind of fell off my radar screen and I was not assertive enough to follow up with him and ask what was up.
The truth that I eventually learned late was that he was dying. Not one to complain, Paul passed quietly.
I miss the hell out of Paul. I miss Paul a lot. I could cry all over again thinking about him being gone from us. His obituary hangs on the frig at our hunting cabin. The picture in it is of him with his young son. I look at it every time I go to the frig, and I almost always say “Oh, Paul, we miss you so so much. Why are you gone?”
The other great person who has left us is Tom Hardisky, who surprisingly died from a heart attack while gardening last Saturday. Tom and I met only a couple of times, and spoke on the phone and by email a few times.
Tom was the PA Game Commission’s furbearer biologist, which in Pennsylvania is a big job. We have more licensed trappers here than all of the states around us combined.
Tom was the kind of public servant who is a genuine servant. He lived what he did, and was an avid outdoorsman like those he served.
Desperate to get an official answer from him about some furs I was bringing in from Canada’s Northwest Territories at the Arctic Circle, I called Tom on a Sunday afternoon, at home. These are great furs coming in, running a gantlet of super and unnecessarily complicated Canadian paperwork and bureaucratic process.
“Sorry, Josh, please pardon the noise. I am making dinner for the family and some guests.”
And sure enough that friendly official answer he gave was accompanied by a cacophony of clanging pots and pans, frying food sounds, and banging dinner plates.
That is the kind of guy Tom was: Totally devoted to his constituents, even on Sunday, even while he is working in the kitchen for his family. And friendly. He loved this stuff and the people involved in it.
And now he, too, is gone, sadly.
Hello, God, can you help me figure this out?
Krazee K
There once was neighbor named Kathy,
Whose life was so desperately unhappy,
She said with a yawn,
As she pounced on her lawn,
Volunteering is for those who are crappy…
******************
Folks, volunteering is service to our fellow humans.
Volunteering is the price we pay for being alive.
Volunteering is a cornerstone of American life. Soup kitchens, homeless and battered women’s shelters, halfway houses, non-profit groups, and public health clinics are all places in need of functioning adults to make them run well.
Bethesda Mission is always advertising for volunteers. They make a huge impact on Harrisburg.
A couple hours a day or a week of your time at one of these places can greatly improve someone else’s life. If you have a specific skill, say as a carpenter, or better, a nurse, then you are doubly needed in these places. And if you are retired, and also physically functional, but you are not only not volunteering, but instead obsessively devoting yourself to every twig and leaf on your lawn, and invading your neighbors’ lives and properties, then you have bad values, you are missing the purpose of being alive, and you are leading a selfish, shallow life. Because hyper lawn care is meaningless, perhaps even a waste of time, and taking it to the extreme where it creates conflict with neighbors is nuts, frankly. It is a luxury that brings little value to the world, but much conflict.
And for the record, yes, I volunteer, a lot, serving on a bunch of non-profit boards, local, regional and state-wide, and I help maintain some elderly people’s properties when I can. My volunteer work gives me a great sense of achievement and satisfaction. If you do not volunteer, try it. You will like it. Especially if you are retired.
White House Correspondents Dinner Proves It
If anyone really had been or still is under the illusion that America’s media are somehow professional truth-seekers, Saturday’s bizarre annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner ended that.
If you have not yet watched it, you should watch some, just for the educational experience. It will help you understand why and how conservatives and regular Americans are so skeptical about the American media.
When you hear the accusation “fake news” leveled against the mainstream media, this event illuminates the why and how.
An impressively responsive audience lived and breathed public white-hot hatred and cruel mockery Saturday night. Hatred of President Trump, hatred of regular Americans, hatred for American patriots and patriotism, cruel mockery of conservative women’s appearances, their bodies, their clothes, their hair, their faces.
This is repulsive behavior, but the liberal audience ate it up openly, nonetheless.
The audience’s open contempt and disdain for average Americans tells a lot about the media’s disconnect from real people.
That the liberal audience was made up of the Washington, DC, elite “expert” and “professional” reporters says it all. These are not reporters of news and facts. Rather, they are elitists, partisan political activists using the First Amendment’s protection of the media as a fig leaf over their political and cultural activism.
The dinner’s motto should be “All The Fake News We Can Print.”
Democrat Party goes after escaped ‘slave’ Kanye West
Just like the slave-owning Democrat Party of old, the modern-day white liberal slavers have sent out a search-and-destroy party after black singer Kanye West, who has escaped from the Democrat ‘plantation’.
Last week, Kanye West voiced support for ideas and people outside clearly defined politically correct boundaries established by the white liberals running the Democrat Party.
These political boundaries are the equivalent of a fifty-foot-high brick wall with razor wire at the top and shoot-to-kill snipers posted all around to prevent escapees from getting over it or too far past it. You are told that everyone on the outside of the plantation is evil and bad and will hurt you, and that you must never step outside.
Neither whites nor blacks, and especially blacks, are permitted to step outside that wall, because their role, your role, according to white liberals, is to stay inside the wall and work on the plantation. You must work, and work, and work, and vote Democrat, and vote Democrat, and vote Democrat, and though you may never see improvement in your condition for all of your work and votes, you must still stay on that plantation and work and vote for the white liberals and their Uncle Toms.
Stepping off the plantation is a big no-no, because the Democrat Party cannot survive without all its ‘slaves’.
But what if some of the ‘slaves’ begin to discover that what they have been told about life off the plantation is a big lie? What happens when the ‘slaves’ discover that the big lie white liberals have told them actually keeps them in bondage to a political party that, in fact, never, ever delivers on its promises?
And then what happens when the ‘slaves’ discover that not only have the promises not been delivered, but that their own conditions have severely degraded ever since they entered the plantation?
This is precisely what is happening now. The smell of freedom is in the air.
Black celebrities Chris Rock and Kanye West, and down-home mamas “Diamond and Silk,” and others, are beginning to openly voice their skepticism for all of the empty promises and bad results made by the Democrat Party. They are beginning to point out to others that while being virtual slaves to the Democrat Party over the past fifty years, conditions in almost all Black communities have severely declined.
Everything that white liberals are against — God, God in school, religion in school, capitalism, traditional families, self-defense, self-improvement, equal opportunity and equal reward opportunity, accountability — are in fact damaging the black community far worse than what life was like off the Democrat plantation back fifty years.
You know, when American blacks were poor but worked for themselves, and worked hard for their families, and their kids wore white shirts, dark pants, skirts, and clean shoes. Because they had actual pride in themselves. You know, the many black inventors, and lawyers, and doctors who advanced America significantly. When they were off that Democrat plantation.
Not to say it was all rosy then, it was not. There was racism and discrimination, but not a whole lot more than what many waves of European immigrants had faced when arriving in America. The challenges for most blacks then were real, but not insurmountable. In fact, much was succcessfully advanced from people off the plantation – Martin Luther King, Jr, even Malcolm X.
If there is one thing white liberals cannot stand, it is being challenged. They melt down, get angry, gett violent. And if there is one thing that Kanye West and Chris Rock and others are doing, it is openly questioning and even challenging white liberals. White liberals are being challenged by the underling ‘slaves’ they require in order to retain political power.
So Kanye West must be destroyed by white liberals before his message of freedom and opportunity gets out to too many black people, and too many begin to climb the wall and get off the Democrat plantation. And so the white liberal Democrat Party of Hollywood is doing just that: They are chasing down and not trying to capture Kanye, the modern-day run-away slave. They are trying to destroy him, to kill his personhood. They are doing everything they can to destroy Kanye’s career, his message, his personal life, his relationship with his fans, his public standing.
But you know what, Democrat Party? Black people are not stupid, though you white liberals may treat them as if they are. Black people are actually very smart, and they are beginning to realize that they have been tricked by you, and that they have been used by you, and that they have actually been hurt by being such devoted zombies to your one political party. And that message is getting out to more and more American blacks.
That big politically correct wall that white liberals built around the American black world is beginning to get holes in it. Sunlight is streaming through those chinks, and the people in the plantation can see that sunlight, and they can smell the freedom that awaits them on the other side. They know that there are good people waiting to welcome them on the other side, and that it is a new world there. And though that outside world might seem a little scary, perhaps, what have they got to lose? After all, life on the Democrat plantation is as bad as it can get…incredible poverty, incredible violence and murder rates, teen pregnancy, suicide rates, lack of education. By every single measure, life for blacks on the white liberal Democrat plantation is a complete disaster.
My only advice to black people is this: Make no overall commitments to ANY political party. There is no single political party in America or anywhere else that can represent all of your interests. Register to vote as political independents, as non-affiliated voters, where you can (in states that have open primaries).
Question everyone who makes you promises or who dangles a couple skinny carrots in front of your nose and says “here, follow these carrots onto this plantation, you will be happy here, we will take care of you here.” Those skinny carrots start to get old, and people start to fight over the scraps.
And be aware that your old enemy, the white liberal, will accuse everyone who is helping you of actually being a racist, including Kanye West, Chris Rock, Diamond and Silk, Thomas Sowell, Clarence Thomas, and many, many others who have escaped their plantation. White liberals and their Uncle Toms will do everything to coerce and shame and frighten you into staying on their plantation. And when you actually make a run for it and try to get beyond their wall, the white liberals will try to gun you down.
And so my other advice to American blacks, my fellow citizens and brothers and sisters in freedom, is RUN! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE! CLIMB THE WALL AND RUN!
We on the other side are waiting for you with open arms.
