To all my friends, admirers, critics and everyone else.
As of today I am closing down this website and will do all my blogging on my gun guy site. The site, if you don’t know it, is: http://www.mikethegunguy.social/.
I am making this move simply for convenience and also because many of the blogs I post about guns are also about politics and vice-versa.
I look forward to your comments and continued interest in what Mike The Gun Guy has to say.
Want the good news? Yesterday while Trump was telling his minions in North Carolina that he had done more for them than any living or dead person had ever done for them since Jesus Christ, the national aggregate polls notched up slightly for Joe and so did the state-level polls in the Tar Heel state. The polls have also widened in the three states – MI, PA, WI – whose electoral votes combined with the Communist/Fascist/Socialist/ I-don’t-know-what-ist states give Joe what he needs.
That’s the good news. Now here’s the not-so-good news. The Democrats need to flip 4 Senate seats and not lose any states in order to control the Upper House. They don’t seem to be losing any of their current seats, but all of a sudden their ability to grab 4 GOP seats may be in doubt.
Here’ how it looks today:
We still have a strong lead in Arizona, Colorado, and North Carolina but Montana, which was trending slightly blue when we last checked the polls back on August 24th, is now trending slightly red. And Iowa, incidentally, was always going to be very tight.
When it comes to voting for President, Montana has been a typical Western (i.e., GOP) state. On the other hand, in 5 of the last 6 contests for Senate, the Democratic candidate has finished on top. The only election since 2002 where a Montana Senate seat was up for grabs and won by the GOP was in 2014, when the incumbent, Steve Daines, won his first election and now is trying to hold onto his seat.
Bullock has been a stalwart Trump supporter in a state that didn’t register many Covid-19 cases until mid-July. But every day the Montana media is now reporting 100 or more cases statewide, in a state with just slightly over 1 million residents, which makes the pandemic big and scary news. If the virus continues to increase to increase in Montana the way it is beginning to spread in other Western states, the Senate race in Montana might become a plebiscite on how Trump has handled the disease. If not, perhaps not.
I happen to think that regaining the Senate majority is more important for the blue team than getting someone to move into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue next year. When your party controls both Houses of Congress you can impeach the President whenever you want. And even though the latest news about how the Postmaster General appears to be nothing more than yet another crook who has latched onto Trump, there’s something to be said about the authority of the legislative branch when all the leaves on the tree are colored blue.
This week we get Michael Cohen’s book and next week we get Bob Woodward’s account. The early excerpts from Woodward’s book are out there and of course what he tells us is what we already know, namely that we have a President who conduct is false and destructive in every respect.
But are these books going to be read by enough residents in Montana to swing the election back to the blue team? Are these books going to change the mind of one, single individual who has decided that for better or worse, he or she is sticking with Trump?
I’m not sure if I could give a correct response to either question. All I know is that every day I put my money where my mouth is so here’s where I just spent a little time and left some cash behind: https://stevebullock.com/.
Okay guys, the Summer’s over on Tuesday and the election gets down to brass tacks. So here’s where things now stand.
As of today, Joe is leading in the aggregate national poll by 50.4% to 43%, numbers for both candidates that have been basically unchanged for the last week. On this same date in 2016, Hillary was at 41.3%, Trump at 39.2%. Not only was the aggregate poll much closer in 2016 than today, but the all-important Sedaris dog-shit number was 19.5%. Right now the national undecided number is 6.6%. If Trump picks up every, single dog-shit voter between now and November 3rd, he would still lose the popular vote.
There’s only one little problem. Trump lost the popular vote by 3% of total votes cast in 2016 and we’ve still been cursed with him for the last 4 years. So let’s drill down and look at the state-level voting, because once again the election will be decided by turnout and voter decisions in a handful of states.
How small is that handful? Try three – Michigan, Wisconsin and most important, PA. Here’s how the numbers work out. Joe has 21 states in his pocket which together count for 227 electoral votes. These are the states that voted for Hillary in 2016, and with the exception of Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Nevada, Hillary had a double-digit advantage in each of those states. Right now in the three states that went single-digit blue in 2016, Minnesota and Nevada are showing 6+ gaps in favor of Joe, in New Hampshire it’s 8.2%. Only in Nevada is Joe running under 50%.
The three states whose outcomes will determine whether or not we have Trump around for another four years count 46 electoral votes. Which gets Joe to 273 EV’s. That’s the end of that. Right now, Joe’s ahead in all 3 states – 6.6% in Michigan, 7.2% in Wisconsin and 4.5% in PA. There’s only one little problem with these numbers, however. At this point in 2016, Hillary was ahead in those three same states. In Michigan, Hillary was up by 5%, in Wisconsin, the gap was 5%, the gap was 9% in PA.
Right now Joe is leading in those three states by the same margin, more or less, that Hillary enjoyed following Labor Day in 2016. So how did Trump manage to pull it out?
I posted a column back on August 30 which showed that Trump pulled his last-minute surge because Libertarians who had declared themselves for Johnson, decided at the last minute not to waste their vote and switched to Trump. In this year’s pre-election polls, the Libertarian candidate, Jo Jorgensen, is only getting 2%-3%, which doesn’t give Trump any kind of boost even if every, single Libertarian goes into the booth and votes GOP.
In 2012, Obama got 7,175,828 votes in Michigan, Wisconsin and PA, the total for Hillary in 2016 was 6,577,816. Wow! Blue votes decreased by 8%. If Hillary had received the same number of votes in 2016 that Obama got in 2012, Trump would have spent the last 4 years tweeting to himself.
Look what happened in PA. Obama got 2,990,274 votes in 2012, HRC got 2,926,441 votes in 2016. How many votes did Trump get in 2016? Try 2,970,733. If Hillary had received the exact same number of votes in 2016 that Obama pulled out in 2012, she would have won PA by 82,000 votes. In Michigan, if she had garnered Obama’s 2,564,569 total, she would have swamped Trump instead of losing those all-important 16 EV’s by a pathetic 10,000 votes.
Trump has lost on re-opening schools; he’s lost the mail-in vote issue as well. We now have a new scandal involving what he said or didn’t say when he went to Europe in 2018. What’s left? Race. And I guarantee he will run the most disgusting, racist campaign of all time.
Joe was absolutely spot on when he said that you’re not Black if you voted for Trump. Let’s make sure he can say the same thing after November 3rd about voters who are White.
GET THE F#CK OUT THERE AND VOTE!!!
Since it has now become fashionable to show your support of Donald Trump by waving a gun in the air, or maybe to show up at one of those Communist/Socialist/Anarchist demonstrations and pull the trigger a few times, I wanted to draw your attention to a recent incident in San Diego where a gun nut really showed us how much fun you can have playing around with guns.
I am referring to an event which took place several weeks ago, where a member of a private Facebook group, Loaded Guns Pointed At B[?]enis, actually pulled the trigger of his 45-caliber pistol and shot himself right through the balls. The next day he reported that he was ‘fine’ and actually reported for work.
You should know, incidentally, that this group has 1,800 members, and apparently they play a version of Russian Roulette by loading a gun, pointing the gun at their crotch and then see how close they can actually get to pulling the trigger all the way through without the gun actually going off. I suspect that the person who comes closest to shooting himself but actually releases the trigger just before the hammer drops, is awarded with a MAGA hat.
Although the spent round from the pistol luckily only grazed his nuts, it did go through his mattress and his box spring before lodging in the floor. No doubt he will now charge admission for anyone who wants to come into his bedroom and view the hole in the carpet underneath his bed.
The guy who runs this Facebook page was, of course, quite supportive in talking about the event. In particular, he made it clear that the poor schmuck who ended up in the local hospital getting his balls sewn back on really didn’t need to be criticized for what he had done. After all, according to the group leader, “he’s learned his lesson without the entire world calling him an idiot.”
Exactly what lesson do you think this guy learned? Oh, he learned not to point a loaded gun at his nuts. He needed to learn that lesson? Is the group leader serious? No, he’s not serious. He’s as dumb as the guy who shot himself, okay?
I’m thinking about that two dummies, the man and wife, who stood in front of their St. Louis home and waved guns at a group of BLM/Communists/Socialists/Anarchists who went marching by. They got indicted for this remarkable demonstration of stupidity, but they also got their minute of fame as a featured act at last week’s RNC.
Come to think of it, I’m surprised that the guy who shot his balls off hasn’t yet been invited to the White House to give the President and his staff a demonstration of one of the really funny and interesting things you can do with a gun. Maybe the crowd should also include some of those bikers who wandered around Sturgis without masks and now have contracted Covid-19.
We won’t know until a week from today whether anyone who attended Trump’s airport rally in New Hampshire will come down with the Chinese flu. We also won’t know for another week who gets sick from coming to the airport at Latrobe. What Trump is doing, and it’s a very clever strategy, is creating and promoting a virtual reality which basically says that the worst is behind us and the best is yet to come.
So why not have the guy from San Diego visit the White House and demonstrate how you can shoot your balls off and still go back to work the next day? After all, if everyone starts walking around with a gun to protect themselves and everyone else from those marauding thugs, sooner or later a few more guys will accidentally shoot themselves with their guns.
To quote Walter Mosley: “If you walk around with a gun, it will go off sooner or later.” What’s so bad about that?
So now that the conventions are finished, we can begin to figure out which candidate, if either, got a ‘bump’ from their shindig last month. And it looks like Trump pulled himself slightly closer to Joe in the aggregate national polls, but we should put the emphasis on the word ‘slightly.’
As of the morning of August 17th, which was the day the Democrats opened their big deal, Joe was at 51.2% and Trump at 42.8%, a gap of 8,4. As of this morning, Joe was at 50.3% and Trump at 43.2%, a gap of 7.1. So Joe is still at the magic 50 mark, although he’s dropped one point; Trump has moved up by 3/10ths of 1 percent. Big deal.
Now let’s look at the ‘battleground’ states. As of yesterday, the numbers run like this:
How much have these numbers changed since August 17? Joe’s average for all 12 swing states was 48.41 back then, now it’s 48.15. Trump was at 44.82 on August 17, now he’s at 45.08. Basically the same. Joe continues to hold the lead in 7 states, in none of those states has his lead changed to any real degree. And by the way, in Wisconsin, where Trump spent some time yesterday making sure that everyone knows he’s strongly pro-cop, with all the looting, the crime, the violence, the this and the that, Joe’s number went from 49.1 to 49.9.
Now here’s the second most important piece of news. In the 12 swing states, today’s Sedaris dogshit vote is exactly what it was on August 17th, namely, 6.8% of everyone polled still can’t make up their mind as to how they are going to vote. Incidentally, the ‘hidden’ vote is still not showing up in a large numbers of Libertarian voters who will, at the last minute, switch from Jorgenson to Trump, the way more than half of them switched from Johnson to Trump in 2016. In Wisconsin, the latest poll gives Jorgenson 3%, and even if all of them moved from Jorgenson to Trump, he still wouldn’t win the Wisconsin vote.
Now here’s the most important piece of news. Ready? Joe raised $300 million in August – Trump raised $90 million. In total fundraising, Biden has now pulled ahead of Trump by more than $100 million bucks. That’s not chopped liver folks – that’s serious dough. What it means is that Joe can basically spend whatever he wants to spend in critical media markets. And in a campaign that will be primarily fought via the media thanks to Covid-19, having that kind of money in the piggy bank is something else again.
As of yesterday, Trump’s campaign was sitting on $120,515,990, Joe had $98,801,880 lying around. When the FEC website gets updated tomorrow or the next day, Trump will have about $200 million to spend minus what he spent this month, Joe will have twice that amount. Twice. All year long I kept hearing about the tremendous cash advantage that Trump had over all the Democrats because he had spent so much time raising money over the last four years. Gone baby, gone.
If Fox News wasn’t the White House media operation, right now Trump would have no campaign at all. You don’t motivate voters by sitting in a room with bunch of cops in Kenosha or some FEMA workers in Louisiana. Know how much money Trump is going to spend on ads this week? Try $1.6 million. Joe has bought more than $18 million on ads for the same period of time.
Next week we get Michael Cohen’s book, the following week the tell-all book by Bob Woodward appears. I’m ready to take the short odds right now that Joe will plaster Trump in their September 29 debate. Even a completely demented guy, which he isn’t, by the way, can be trained to sit there and repeat “one thousand deaths every day.”
Many of my readers may not be old enough to remember the urban riots that occurred in Newark, Detroit, and many other cities during the summer months of 1967. But I remember them very well because I spent that summer driving across the country to enroll in graduate school, and it seemed that just about every city I drove through was experiencing some degree of civil unrest.
What was the reaction to those riots? The Right said that law and order had broken down and needed to be restored. The Left said that the violence, burnings, and lootings were a response to police brutality, poverty, and other ways in which African-Americans were getting screwed. The federal government appointed a commission to study the problem, various community leaders, religious and otherwise, called for calm.
Here we are, more than fifty years later, and the same scenario is playing out again. The cops shoot some unarmed guy or stomp someone to death, the video goes viral, the crowds go into the streets, Trump calls for the police to crack down on the lawbreakers, Joe says that what happened is ‘too bad.’
If you don’t mind, I’d like to give you a little historical perspective on all this.
In 1936, a civil war broke out in Spain which resulted in the appearance of a brutal, Fascist regime. Headed by Francisco Franco, the dictatorship lasted until 1975.
The 1936-39 civil war unleashed a level of violence and death that touched just about everyone living in Spain. Franco kept the country from any further unrest by cracking down on anyone who said or did anything that evoked feelings on either side. It was said that ‘ni palabra ni pio’ was allowed, which meant not a word, not a sound.
When Franco died, everyone believed that the violence would break out again. After all, many of the people who were killed, tortured, or expelled from the country had relatives and close friends who were still alive.
Know what happened? In short order Spain went from being the most,repressive political regime to what is the most progressive, liberated and openly free society in Europe today. And it happened without so much as a peep. Not one shot was fired, not one old score was settled with violence, things moved on.
Now let’s look at what happened in Yugoslavia, during and after World War II. The country was invaded by the Nazis but a strong, left-wing resistance led by Joseph Broz Tito pushed the Wehrmacht out of the country by the end of 1944 with Tito then taking power and running the country for the next 36 years.
During and after the war, all kinds of personal and political scores were settled, the estimates of deaths run into the several millions, nobody knows how many were killed. What we do know is that Tito installed the same kind of repressive government from the Left that Franco installed from the Right. If you wanted to say anything which might be considered a challenge to the Tito regime, you better say it outside the country, not within.
It took 11 years for things to unravel after Tito’s demise, but in 1991 a series of violent conflicts broke out which ultimately resulted in the disappearance of Yugoslavia, the emergence of six separate nation-states, and the loss of as many as 200,000 lives. As late as 2010, there are still more than 10,000 people who disappeared and have never been seen again.
How is it that a repressive regime goes away in one country without so much as the slightest violence at all, and in another country, the same shift from dictatorship to democracy causes thousands of lives to be destroyed? I’ll give you an answer right out of the corporate playbook: WTFK (Who The F### Knows.)
I have been listening to the Right and the Left ‘explain’ urban violence in America to me for what is now more than 50 years and at some point, I go back to what happened in Yugoslavia and Spain. The only thing I can say about what happened in those two countries and what is happening in Kenosha, Portland and other American cities right now is WTFK.
But I’m still going to vote for Joe and Kammie and you better vote for them too.
In 1953, the Supreme Court ruled that ‘separate wasn’t equal,’ and that Blacks were second-class citizens, notwithstanding the 13th Amendment passed in 1865. Two years later, a seamstress working in a department store in Montgomery, AL named Rosa Parks, refused a driver’s order to sit in the back of the bus, and the modern, civil rights campaign began. The campaign culminated in August, 1963 when Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech before more than a quarter of a million gathered in Washington, D.C.
Two years later, thanks to the arm-twisting by a Southern liberal named Lyndon Johnson, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were passed. Three years later, Richard Nixon promised political leaders from the Confederate states that he would ‘go slow’ on enforcing federal civil rights laws, a clever strategy that completely remade the political alignment of the United States.
What used to be the ‘solid South’ for Democrats is now even more solid for the GOP. And to keep this alignment intact so that populous, liberal states like New York and California don’t dominate the Electoral College map, the GOP finds it both convenient and sometimes necessary to fashion their national campaigns around the issue of race.
Remember Ronald Reagan’s ‘welfare queen?’ Sure, Reagan peppered every stump speech with various one-liners designed to back up his argument that government social programs were no good. But did he have to use such a blatant racist appeal to drive home the idea that welfare was bad? He didn’t, but he did.
Then in 1988, George Bush was behind in all the polls until he ran his Willie Horton ad which showed a Black guy who was given a furlough from jail and immediately went out and committed some terrible crimes. You mean the Massachusetts penal system hadn’t given an early release to some White guy who then committed the same crimes or worse? Of course it had.
Race happens to be the only domestic issue over which the two political parties take a fundamentally different approach. But you’ll say – hey, wait a minute, what about taxes? Republicans always cut taxes while Democrats love to spend. So guess who was responsible for signing a bill that has contributed the most personal income to the U.S. Treasury of all time. The great tax-cutter Ronald Reagan, who doubled the payroll tax rate in 1983.
Racial issues took a back seat in the Presidential campaigns of George W. Bush, and to his credit, John McCain went out of his way to stamp out racial references during his campaign. Romney had enough problems defending himself as a hard-hearted plutocrat in 2012 and, after all, it wasn’t polite to throw racial epithets at the President of the United States.
Those reservations on the part of the GOP have become completely undone by a Republican President who goes out of his way to stoke racial resentments every chance he gets. You think his description of Mexican immigrants as ‘rapists’ isn’t an appeal to racist fears? You think when Trump laughed and said, “Where’s my African-America?” at a California campaign stop that he wasn’t invoking the worst, most insidious form of race-baiting that there ever was? Yea, big joke.
This is a time when people are scared. This is a time when people are afraid. What happens when people get scared? They take out their fears and worries by looking for someone or something to blame.
When the corona virus first appeared, Trump blamed the World Health Organization and the Chinese. The only problem is that after he got done telling everyone that it was someone else’s fault, the virus continued to spread.
We are at the point that this pandemic may actually result in adding more than 10 percent to the number of Americans who die in 2020 compared to the number who normally die every year. So the fear will continue to grow, which means that Trump needs to find another target, and what better-proven target is out there than the idea that a bunch of Black thugs are running around burning down the place?
Think Trump wants to go to Kenosha to sit down with the family of Jacob Blake?
Please get a flu shot. Please.
I am astonished at how the mainstream (read: liberal) media continues to promote a totally incorrect narrative about the outcome of the 2016 election and has now produced one of their champion big-mouth spielers, Michael Moore, to promote the same nonsense again.
Yesterday the government agency which has to approve any medicine that will be used to treat the Covid-19 virus took a big step forward to begin acting like a scientific organization rather than like a PR company promoting Donald Trump. The Food and Drug Administration, known as the FDA, fired their head of public relations, Emily Miller, who had been on the job exactly 11 days.
She was fired because the FDA began promoting a totally unproven idea about the benefits of plasma treatments which Trump then began touting as having saved thousands of lives. In fact, the plasma treatment experiment didn’t necessarily save anyone’s life, and even the researchers who worked on this study didn’t know who had ever said that the plasma represented any kind of life-saving therapy at all.
So for once, science has actually managed to rear its ugly head and push back against Trump’s continued effort to lie, distort, and fabricate anything and everything having to do with Covid-19.
What caught my attention most of all about this episode was the name of the ousted PR lady, Emily Miller, because I actually wrote a review of a gun book she published back in 2013, when she was a reporter for The Washington Times and later did a TV gig for Fox News. She also appeared frequently at pro-gun rallies and was interviewed and promoted by the NRA.
According to Emily, she decided to apply for a pistol license in D.C. after having been the victim of a home invasion when she came back from walking her dog and found a guy inside the house robbing the place. In a re-enactment of the scene for NRA-TV, the event allegedly took place at night, which made the invasion all the more dangerous and scary for dear Emily.
Emily’s book is basically a long kvetch about how she tried again and again to get the DC Police to approve her application to become an armed citizen, along with anecdotes about how this brave, gun-toting person and that brave, gun-toting person saved themselves and others because they had access to guns. The book represents a piece of investigative journalism about as much as my local pizza take-out menu represents a 5-star restaurant in the Michelin guide.
I wish I could find the link but you’ll just have to take my word for what I’m about to say. Which is that when Emily’s book came out, they had a publishing party at a hotel in DC and one of the invitees at the party who not only showed up but said something positive about the book was none other than Donald Trump. I recall reading about the party and actually wondering why Trump was cozying up to all those pro-gun types. Now I know.
Obviously, Emily Miller was put into her job at the FDA as part of Trump’s strategy to pretend that the pandemic is under control. But in her case, we not only have someone who is responding to a directive from the White House; her hiring was also a directive from – God! Think I’m being overly sarcastic about Emily’s direction and goals? Here’s what she put on her Facebook page after getting the White House call: “In May, the White House called me ask asked if I would consider a high level communication role at the FDA. I knew God was directing my path, and I had to come back to DC to work.”
And how did Emily describe her approach to her new job? Try this from the same Facebook page: “For as long as I’m in this role, I will work nonstop to get information on COVID-19 treatments and the vaccine process communicated to people as accurately and quickly as possible.”
One small victory for science, one small defeat for Trump. Sooner or later, the playing-field will always tilt back to the way it should.
Last week the Trump campaign announced they were going to conclude the convention with a fireworks display that would be entertainment for the large gathering of pro-Trump supporters who would hold a rally in front of the White House. In fact, the only gathering outside the White House yesterday was a BLM group getting ready for a rally that is expected to draw more than 50,000 people today. And believe me, nobody at today’s rally will be there to support Trump.
Today, the 538 national aggregate poll has Joe with a 9-point lead. It’s still too early to see whether Trump will get a ‘bump’ from the convention, but if Nielsen ratings are any guide, don’t expect the RNC event to result in any change at all. The third night’s viewership number was pegged at 15 million, a drop of some 2 million from the night before. The third night of the DNC drew some 22 million viewers, but as my sister remarked, how could you compare Kamala Harris to Mike Pence?
At some point around mid-September, the fatality rate from Covid-19 will hit 200,000. And of all the mind-numbing statements that Trump made last night about the virus, here’s the one that really caught my eye: “To save as many lives as possible, we are focusing on the science, the facts and the data.”
To believe that statement, you have to be blind, stupid, and dumb. But I don’t actually blame Trump for saying what he said because what’s he going to do? Run for re-election as the guy whose continued inaction about the pandemic is still giving us more than 1,000 fatalities every day?
What do I mean by ‘inaction?’ I mean the fact that the crowd sitting in front of Trump last night weren’t wearing masks and they weren’t six feet apart. Neither was the crowd earing masks who provided a small audience the previous night for Mike Pence. Every scientist that I know of insists that we should all be eating masks the moment we step outdoors. But Trump still insists that neither he nor any of his followers need to wear masks.
Tonight Trump is going to show up at a small hangar across the street from the Manchester Airport in New Hampshire to re-do the campaign rally that was cancelled last month. The State of New Hampshire requires masks for everyone who enters a room in which there are 100 people or more. The rally organizers claim they will give out masks and enforce the state law. Think that Trump will be wearing a mask? Yea, right.
Yesterday health officials in New Hampshire confirmed that at least six state residents who attended the Harley booze-and-chili festival in Sturgis, SD earlier this month. This week there’s a big motorcycle meet at Laconia, NH which happens to be less than 20 miles up the road from where Trump is scheduled to speak. Think that any of the bike-riders who come down from Laconia to the Manchester Airport will be wearing masks?
I’m at the point where I really hope the November election becomes a plebiscite not on Trump’s dismal performance as President, but on whether or not we should wear masks and keep at least six feet apart. After all, if we listen to the scientists whose advice Trump claims he respects, we don’t need to wear no stinkin’ masks and we can all sit side-by-side.
Whenever I read anything attributed to Trump, the words from Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities rings through my head: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”
In less than 70 days we’ll find out 50% plus one of the voters in four swing states agree with Trump that it’s the best of times.
Love The Deep State 