The Republicans Shot Themselves In The Head -- Twice

The consequences of these twin self-inflicted injuries look to be extremely severe for everyone in the nation and as I've repeatedly noted all the way back to the start of The Market Ticker if the results are close in an election you blew it whether you win or lose.  Simply put while there will always be opposition your goal is to convince a strong majority, not 50%+1.

Nevada appears to have gone down on the Senate side, which means the game's over in terms of real obstruction of Biden's agenda, particularly when it comes to judges.  That could be quite important although those who are at least somewhat-likely to leave the USSC in the next two years aren't in the group that would produce a shift.  That's the only good news, however.

As I write this the House remains undecided with a real possibility that Pelosi remains speaker!  So much for a red wave; as I said a couple of days ago it's more like blood-tinged piss at this point.

It is looking increasingly-likely that the FTX story is going to be both pivotal and wildly illegal, reaching not just into financial crimes but actual control of the government via monetary kickback from foreigners, specifically Ukraine.  It is already known as factual that FTX donated very heavily to Democrats,  including Biden's 2020 election and affiliated races.  This standing alone is not illegal because we have made "Super PACs" and other similar games a legal exercise, but what is now known is that FTX didn't actually have the money on an "earned" basis and, it appears, stole from their customers, which is definitely not legal and since you must first have funds to spend them on political campaigns as that stands they stole funds and involuntarily, from the standpoint of their customers, funded Democrat races with that money.  It is illegal to do that.

The worse part is that it is alleged a very material amount of the cash that went over to Ukraine from the US Government was recycled by the Ukraine Government and officials through FTX and then into those Democrat campaigns.  This is wild-eyed illegal in that foreign entities are absolutely forbidden from giving anything of value to any political campaign in the United States no matter how it is done.  It is just as illegal for a foreign entity to donate to a SuperPAC as it is to donate directly to a candidate; it does not matter how you funnel it into the United States, its illegal.

If this occurred -- and again, right now the Ukraine angle is an allegation but that FTX was Biden's second-largest donor in 2020 is fact, along with the donations this cycle -- then we have a true Constitutional question as to whether the House and Senate are in fact legitimate at all or whether Ukraine effectively bought them, in which case neither body of Congress has any legitimacy as a US legislative fixture whatsoever and it might be the case that such extends back to the 2020 elections as well.

The risks here cannot be overstated.  It would be entirely rational for all of the GOP-led states and areas to declare Congress and all of its acts, and those of Joe Biden over the next two years void if in fact control of the House and Senate can plausibly be tied to funds that flowed through Ukraine, into FTX and then back into US election campaigns.

Let's hope this is bullshit because if its not it would be hard to argue against the "Red" states deciding to form a compact and do exactly that in response.  I remind you of the political color that is in control of basically all food and energy production in the United States.  If you think these GOP areas do not hold the "nuts" hand in such a circumstance, should they decide to act in concert, you're dead wrong.

Leaving that ball of string aside, however, there are two other issues that the GOP refuses to face and these are of their own making.  The GOP's "leaders" are all throwing shade at someone else with exactly nobody in the GOP taking ownership of their own head-shooting and yes, it was a literal gun-in-own-mouth circumstance across the board.

The first is the jabs and the catastrophic outcome on-balance, much of which is yet to be suffered.  Trump pushed them hard along with the original lockdowns.  While the latter were eventually dropped those who dropped them first are still lying in that they have not repudiated what they did nor done anything to prevent a second occurrence and the jab advocacy remains an unapologetic "feature" of every single Republican Governor, Senator and House Candidate.  Exactly none have smacked Trump over the head with a 2x6 for pushing that crap and ignoring the protocols for safety that were put into US law for good cause after either close calls or outright disasters, Thalidomide being one of them.

Now we have this -- even the "mainstream" media is unable to ignore the safety signal of myocarditis caused by the jabs.  Historically speaking a diagnosis of myocarditis has carried upwards of a twenty percent heart failure rate within the next five years necessitating a transplant and, if there isn't one available, you die.  And despite the short term appearance of everything being ok it frequently isn't.

Equally, the evolution of myocarditis largely varies: albeit short-term prognosis is usually good, with complete or partial recovery, dilated cardiomyopathy with chronic heart failure is the major long-term consequence of myocarditis, developing often several years after the acute onset. 

What's much worse is that only some of these cases get identified; when you see systemic injury indications in a population that all undergoes some act the curve makes clear you're only seeing the immediate impact.  In this case since it is known and has been for a long time that the potential for serious harms including death often occurs several years down the road after what appears to be a complete recovery we have no idea if this time will be typical or if, being induced by the Covid jabs, it is different.

Never mind that we now have conclusive scientific data on myocarditis related to Covid itself.  The virus doesn't cause it; the rate of people who have not been vaccinated but have had Covid getting myocarditis is statistically identical to the historical background average.  In other words the claims of those that "well it might be the virus, not the vaccine" are now scientifically disproved; Covid does not, statistically-speaking, impact your risk at all.  It is now known, in other words, that the myocarditis risk is entirely the result of the jabs and not the disease itself.

If this risk proves up to be typical with historical averages for this condition tens of thousands of young people are going to die as a direct result of these jabs and only a few of those who are going to die are in those who we have already seen fall over from "suddenly."  This will not be over for years and the feedstock for it won't stop until the use of these jabs does and every time I go into a grocery store I am assaulted with advertising to "go get another one."

For a virus that has a less than 0.1% risk of killing you in the first place taking this risk and shoving it on the population was and remains stupid, and to do so unapologetically is criminally stupid and nobody -- whether in health care of the political side of things should get away with that crap.  I warned of exactly this sort of risk but the exact character of it at the time was unknown -- and in fact unknowable, which is why for other than those at very highly-elevated risk from Covid itself there never was an argument for these jabs on the risk:reward merits since it was known prior to their introduction that they never intended to, and did not, perform trials to determine if they were sterilizing.  They not only have proved not to be sterilizing but worse their effectiveness, whatever it might be, is fleeting and in fact the data says it becomes negative within weeks; that is, you're more-likely rather than less to get the virus a few weeks after you get jabbed.

It was especially stupid to "recommend" (say much less require) these jabs for anyone healthy before roughly the age of 50.  That was easy to determine from the NY corner's data within a couple of months of Covid starting, and I pointed it out -- unless you had one or more of a specific set of morbid factors you were nuts to consider it.  Indeed of those 80+ you literally could count the people who didn't have one or more of those factors yet were killed by Covid on your fingers.  In such a case any risk from a jab in such a person is terminally-stupid to accept unless it is proved that the shot interrupts acquiring and transmitting the disease.

However in many areas of the nation the vast majority of the population took the jabs -- while in others, such as this county, roughly half of all eligible have refused.  Some took them willingly and enthusiastically despite knowing the risks were a black box but others were either coerced or conned with statements that were knowingly false and spread all over the media, both ordinary and social, including by "influencers".  Whether they knew they were talking crap is unknown but that doesn't matter; the people who originated the falsehoods knew they were lying and deliberately spread it.  Trump and the other GOP members, along with the Democrats all spread those lies and none have admitted they were full of crap despite every one of them claiming to be either an expert or informed by expert opinion.

Not one has owned up to any of it.

What do you say to the parents of the dead teen who died of suddenly after you said the jab was both safe and effective?  How many tens of thousands either have or will die as a consequence?  You can't take any of this back and yet nobody is taking responsibility for any of what happened -- or what may be yet to come.

"Vote for me -- after I talked you into killing your son?"  Go fuck a goat, asshole, even though not one parent in a hundred who did this to their kid will admit the truth of it openly.

I'd point out inflation but here the Republican attempt to pin that on Biden fails because in point of fact it was Trump that initiated all of the programs that led to the problem and while Biden piled on in point of fact he never would have gotten anywhere without all of Trump's wild money-printing spree in 2020.  You can ignore this if you like but the fiscal year ended September 30th 2020 so nearly all of 2021 was in fact running on Trump's budget and spending as Biden's first fiscal hadn't started yet.  Since that's a 100% bipartisan-caused issue while both sides would love to throw it on the other its a dead-letter election wise, I suspect most of the nation saw it that way and thus it swayed fewer votes than you'd think because there was no faith the Republicans would fix it if elected after they in large part caused it in the first place.

Then there's the demographic shift.  The GOP utterly failed to account for this and that was stupid.  It has long been talked about people from NY or California who move to Florida and then try to impose their left-leaning ideas on where they move to.  That happens when the moves are entirely economic, and frequently they have been -- until 2020.  This was different: The Republican voter was much more likely to abandon Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, New York or California than the Democrat because they disagreed with the lockdowns, masks and other policy decisions while the Democrat voters were more-likely to agree and thus stay rather than pick up and move to a "dangerous" place.  The problem with this from a federal election standpoint is that every vote beyond 50%+1 that moves into an already-Red jurisdiction can harm the GOP's chances in the place where the person moved FROM but has NO benefit in the place they move TO.

Republicans moving from California to Florida doesn't add to Florida's already strong GOP majority at the federal level but it might well cost the GOP a red seat in the House in California's delegation.  Worse, in places like Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania it might have cost the GOP Senate seats.  Rather than take out the trash in those states the common GOP chestnut "pick up and move" further balkanizes the nation and adds to the risk of a hard schism down the road, but in the immediate term it helps the Democrats.

That brings me to what I believe was the salient issue that I wrote on the other day:  Abortion.

Oh, I know, "that wasn't the real deal" so say many of you.

Bullshit, especially at the Federal and Governor levels.

Lindsey Graham tried to codify a federal abortion ban post the USSC tossing of Roe.  He knew damn well it had zero chance of passage, of course, with a Democrat House and 50/50 Senate but he introduced it anyway.  Time and circumstance guaranteed that the Dobbs decision at the USSC would produce at least one stupid outcome before the election and it did when Louisiana's "trigger law", which banned basically all abortions, came into play with a woman carrying a fetus discovered to have no functional cerebral development.  Said fetus had no chance of anything other than, if forced to be born, a nasty and extremely short life guaranteed to both lead to death and the impoverishment of the parents via the costs of medical care during that time.  It wasn't anyone's "fault" that this fetal abnormality occurred and this is exactly the sort of corner case that turns what sounds a like "reasonable" bill into a draconian monster that keeps women, in particular, up at night.  Its agonizing enough for a couple to face the fact that their conceived child (assuming they wanted and intended same) will die and there's nothing they can do about it.  Its even worse to then insist on top of that the parents' financial and personal destruction along with the loss of their kid.

Anyone trying to mandate that deserves the absolute worst things that can be done to them and yet this is exactly what the idiotic legislatures of several states have tried to force on people smug in the knowledge that there was no immediate blowback possible because Roe blocked the imposition of the trigger law.  Then Roe goes away and.... oops.  The Democrats and their sycophants in the media amplified this sort of situation with good cause; it is perfectly legitimate to capitalize on your opponent's stupidity.

What the Republicans at a national level could have immediately said when Dobbs surfaced, neutering their argument, was something like this:

We stand for the sanctity of life.  However, we also recognize that there are rare circumstances that do arise in which there are no good choices, only ones that are bad and worse than bad.  We also recognize that it is for this very reason that the Constitution delegates nearly all questions to the States. We are long beyond the point where we, claiming to be the party of personal responsibility and freedom, must move in that direction rather than the opposite.  The more possible resolutions exist within the 50 states when such circumstances arise the more-likely the better options for the inevitable corner cases will filter up to the top over time and the poor options will be discarded.  In this case the woman in question used exactly that process and pointed to a distinct but fixable flaw in the Louisiana Law while avoiding the personal destruction of both her and her family; she traveled to New York.

We, as Federal lawmakers, recognize that it is absolutely unacceptable for us to attempt to tell a woman, or couple, that finds themselves in this situation they have no choice but to take upon themselves both personal and financial destruction along with the inevitable death of their child.  We vow that we not only shall not do so, we will take all necessary acts to prevent a lunatic fringe from enacting such a requirement, even if said action comes at the cost of our lives.  Indeed our nation exists, and has continued to exist, precisely because the Founders recognized that one size does not fit everyone.  No man or woman, despite their intelligence, can foresee all circumstances and yet law, when passed, must be construed against whatever circumstance may arise in the future.

We trust that in the coming years the States will tune their own legal codes in response to these circumstances, and that those who find themselves on the wrong side of same through no fault of their own will still have a means of avoiding that personal disaster and remain able to bring appropriate pressure on said State Legislatures.

This is in fact how a Federal Republic is supposed to work since we are all imperfect in our design and execution of the law within the United States.  In the final analysis federalism worked and protected the rights of all involved in a difficult situation neither foreseen or addressed in the original legislation.  We recognize what happened here, our responsibility for part of it, and will enhance, rather than try to destroy or damage, that process going forward.

In short we trust the wisdom of the Founders who devised many state laboratories against which to test that which governments claim to know over the process of time, filtering through the democratic process of elections that which works and that which does not.  We declare as Republicans that we will not tamper with this at the Federal level and we additionally vow to prevent anyone else, irrespective of their political party, from doing so -- so help us God.

Of course they didn't.  None of them did.

I challenge you to find one Republican running who said anything approaching the above.  You can't and yet it only would take one or two Senators to lock up the Senate on all abortion-related legislation for the next two years.  That is if just one or two of the Republican candidates had said exactly this and convinced voters they meant it in the close states they would have won since you only had to persuade a few thousand people, and out of a few million that's easy.

I'm willing to bet that there was not one race with a less than 5% margin that wasn't winnable on this statement alone.

That's all it took.  In Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Georgia.  More than enough to have the majority and in the House such a statement would have produced a blowout to the GOP side.

We got neither, and none of the so-called "Standard Bearers" on the GOP side, whether it be DeSantis or Trump said anything like this.  Add to that the backdrop of one of the sitting Senators, Graham, introducing a bill aimed directly at the wrong side of this issue and if you think that didn't wind up moving a lot of votes, especially unmarried women or those not intending children irrespective of their marital status yet of child-bearing age you're nuts.  Exit polling said abortion was indeed #2 behind the economy on most voter's minds which means it was almost-certainly good for at least a 5% swing in the vote outcome in virtually every contest.

Now go down the list of races and show me which ones were lost to the Democrats by 5% or less.  Other than in places where the Democrat could run against God himself and win (the same districts, of course, exist on the other side) every one of those races was intentionally forfeit as a result of the GOP's failure to do this.

It is the leadership of the party that owns this -- McConnell, McCarthy, DeSantis and Trump, to name four, along with Graham who is of course one of the "party elders."  They knew damn well that it would produce this sort of shift in the vote and believed they didn't need it or even worse that it wasn't the right thing to do.

That was both wrong and stupid so now the decision, if you don't like Biden, is whether you're going to allow the existing GOP to be the minority party or you will force them ALL out here and now without fear or favor, putting into the GOP the clear responsibility to take a rational position on a national basis, to ensconce it in the platform and make it a pass:fail test that admits no exceptions for anyone running for national office under that banner under pain of being primaried, recalled, personally and politically buried and destroyed.

If you don't the GOP is finished as a party that can hold either house of Congress or the Presidency in the future as this point of attack is both true and will be relentlessly used to shift votes to the Democrats from here forward.  It worked, it was stupid for the GOP to allow this to happen and unless the GOP changes here and now as a national force they're finished as like it or not women are half the voting population and they will NOT vote for their own personal and financial destruction.

Neither Trump nor DeSantis can win in 2024, never mind anyone else, without addressing this point. (read more)