Yeah…I know a little less than half the country is unhappy…and in a bit I’ll give you our synopsis of why she lost…but first…

Truthfully…I’m quite sure that millions of voters weren’t actually voting For either of the candidates…they were mostly voting Against one of the candidates…choosing the least bad between two alternatives. Neil still thinks that his idea for elections is the best answer…None of the Above should be on the ballot and if None wins then there must be a new election and nobody on the previous ballot is eligible to run. Unfortunately that would take a constitutional amendment to happen as well as revision of a lot of the relevant election laws…but it would prevent us from being stuck with the least bad of a bunch of crappy candidates.

What in the heck are people that supported her thinking.

Staring into the abyss

He will never leave office

I’m leaving the country

If you assholes voted for him unfollow me on social media

I will drink Drano now

This is the end of democracy

He won because the US is racist and misogynistic

It doesn’t make sense

White women cost us the election

Black men cost us the election

Biden cost us the election

Each and every one of those was a headline in the last 3 days…and each and every one of them is wrong.

As I’ve said before in these postings…bears don’t have political opinions…but their humans do…and while they’re right of center they both consider themselves pretty much in the middle and actually think that some of the things that Democrats who aren’t far left progressives make sense. But the trouble is the politics has changed drastically in the past 50 years they’ve been voting and the changes have been for the worse. Used to be…both sides would compromise and work out a bill or solution or program that gave something to both sides. Nowadays…the only things that are important are demonization of the other side, name calling, and absolute refusal to entertain either the idea of compromise or that some of the other side’s ideas might have merit. Nope…strict party line BS is what we have these days…and that’s a damn shame.

Ok…why did Ms. Harris lose.

She was Biden only worse. 

As a member of the current administration…there’s no way she was going to be able to dodge responsibility for conditions in the country today. Granted…the inflation we’ve had recently isn’t entirely this administration’s fault…the previous one contributed to it as well…but in the middle of the pandemic rapid development of a vaccine and getting it out to people was important and worth spending a lot of money on. Presidents get far too much credit when the economy is good and far too much blame when it isn’t…and while their policies can contribute to things…economics goes up and down in ways that are to a large extent unpredictable. She couldn’t run against the administration’s policies without throwing the President under the bus. People are concerned about inflation and prices and they’re concerned about the border/immigration disaster…and again both this administration and the ones before all have their share of that blame. The bottom line…she said that she would have done nothing differently than the President did…and the people were really into a “throw the bums out” mode this election cycle.

She was a terrible candidate.

You can’t run an election campaign based on telling everyone that your opponent is a bad guy…you have to run on the issues and say what you will do and Ms. Harris simply refused to do this. From refusal to take any hard questions at interviews to refusal to take Joe Rogan up on his offer for a 3 hour podcast of questions…she simply refused to do anything but take softball questions and anything slightly difficult she went off into one of her canned statements that answered nothing. She continued to act like the elite progressive she has always been and her run to the center for the election was patently a lie to anyone who’s heard her talk or read her positions for her entire career. Add in the media being in the tank for her from day 1 and refusing to report about any of her negatives and it’s no wonder nobody trusts the media these days.

The Democratic Party completely screwed the pooch on this one.

This is far and away the biggest reason for her loss. The President ran in 2020 on a transition to a younger generation platform…but then decided he liked the job and wanted to keep it. Anyone with 2 working brain cells has seen his cognitive decline since 2020 and even before then…but consistent denials by the White House, Democratic elites in the party, and the media that Joe was “sharp as a tack”…was and is obviously just so much BS.It was absolutely zero surprise to anyone when the great debate debacle happened…but then it got even worse. The party elites…and I’m talking to President Obama, his wife, Ms. Pelosi, and Oprah Winfrey…stabbed the man in the back and basically forced him to withdraw. And if that wasn’t bad enough…she was anointed as the nominee sans any voting. The party should have recognized a year ago that the President was not going to win reelection and convinced him to step down at that point in favor of an actual primary season that would reveal things about the various candidates and result in a better candidate. I don’t know who would have won in the primaries if he wasn’t running…but I’m pretty darned sure that Ms. Harris would not have been the nominee. The party passed up the option of having an open convention and went for the coronation instead…and it backfired spectacularly.

Then there were speeches in the past couple of weeks by President Obama, his wife, and Ms. Winfrey…all of which basically told women and blacks that if they didn’t vote the way those three told them to then the women and blacks were enemies, not true men, and assorted similar slurs. Even Steven A. Smith disagreed with them after the election and wondered what in the heck they were thinking…and both Connie and Neil found it funny that it was the first time they ever agreed with Mr. Smith about anything.

In all likelihood the President would have lost the election anyway based on the dissatisfaction with his policies…but she only made the problem worse. All she did…and the media and her party…was focus on convicted felon and fascist and insurrectionist and let’s not forget rapist.

Elections should be about policies and not about personalities. We’re not fans of Mr. Trump around here at all…but his policies (at least the ones that weren’t stupid or illegal and got cancelled as they should have by the courts) were better than the current administration’s policies have been…and that’s shy he won and she lost.

Let’s not worry that this is the end of democracy…the country has survived every president we have had believe it or not. And he’s not going to really deport 12 or 20 million or however many it is illegal immigrants for a couple of reasons. First off…the government can’t find them all. Second and more importantly…the government simply doesn’t have the ability to round up that many people, house them until the deportation hearing, and send them home. Third…a country can only deport people if their original country agrees to accept them and that’s unlikely at best. What we do need is to keep illegals from coming across the border and that will require spending a bunch of money. We also need to beef up the immigration system to process asylum seekers claims in a more reasonable amount of time…catch and release isn’t cutting it as most of them never show up for their hearing in 2 years anyway. We personally think we need more legal immigration than we currently allow…but criminals should not be allowed in and economic refugees which is what most of them are need to wait in line until their turn comes. I can’t fault…not one bit…the wishes of parents in impoverished countries to our south wanting a better life for them and their kids…but they need to do it legally. The left likes to call them “undocumented persons”…but that’s just whitewashing the fact that they are here illegally and that makes them criminals.

Down here in Florida…both the abortion amendment and the marijuana amendments failed…and again they failed due to lack of compromise. While we personally believe that abortion is wrong based on our religion…we don’t get to impose our judgement on everyone else and our personal opinions and legal opinions on both of those are different. I’m quite sure that a reasonable compromise on the abortion amendment would have resulted in something more than the current 6 week limit in the state and requiring parental permission for underage women…and heck maybe the father of the pregnancy should have a vote as well…but no, the amendment was written as broadly as the progressives that wrote it could do so…providing zero limits on the practice because that’s what progressives want. Religious fundamentalists want no abortion ever for any reason…and both of those positions are completely out of step with legal reality or common sense. Same with the drug one…written far too broadly to be acceptable. Maybe they’ll learn and try a more reasonable approach next time.

Interesting things found on the net.

Everything you need in one place…aisle 11.

Out in Ranier, Oregon…
there was this 71 year old cyclist riding his bicycle in town…at least there was until an ambulance from Columbia River Fire and Rescue made a right turn into him and destroyed his bicycle and injured him. Being an ambulance…the driver loaded the man up and took him to the hospital for treatment…and then sent him a bill for $1,862 for the ambulance ride to the hospital.

Cyas.