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I appeared on Silvio Canto Jr's talk show from Dallas.  It's here: 

NOVEMBER 8,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT:

MORE GRIMNESS FOR DEMS – FROM POWERLINE:   My friend who reads the New York Times alerted me to this article about rural America’s continued movement away from the Democratic party. I’m glad he did. The article is well worth reading.  The most noteworthy thing about the Times’s piece is the numbers it presents from Virginia:  "In 2008, there were only four small Virginia counties where Republicans won 70% or more of the vote in that year’s presidential race. Nowhere was the party above 75%. This year, Youngkin was above 70% in 45 counties — and he surpassed 80% in 15 of them."  Virginia has 95 counties. The Times doesn’t say how many of them are rural, but judging from the breakdown in this map it looks like Youngkin was above 70 percent in just about all of them.  The Times notes that Youngkin “was outpacing former President Donald Trump’s 2020 showing in even the reddest counties.”   It may be only this week that the full extent of the Democratic disaster is starting to be felt.  The Democratic Party is on political life support, with no apparent way of getting off it.

November 8, 2021       Permalink

SOMETIMES THE NEWS IS GOOD, SOMETIMES VERY GOOD; THIS IS VERY GOOD – OVERNIGHT:  It is a pleasure to read of the founding of a new university in the United States, one based on the traditional values that once made American universities great.  The names associated with the venture are solid.  I have high hopes.  From City Journal: 

A few years ago, I’m told, the president of Dartmouth College remarked to a professor that “we have to get out of the knowledge game.” Mission accomplished. The self-destruction of the American academy—its repudiation of education, the core business of universities since their inception a millennium ago—is well under way. But American higher education got some rare good news today, with the establishment of the University of Austin (UATX).

Pano Kanelos, who formerly headed St. John’s College in Annapolis, will be the university’s president. Kanelos maintains that all education is either liberal or illiberal; if it is illiberal, it isn’t even education. Plato’s Republic makes this clear. Before we are educated, Plato famously teaches, we resemble prisoners chained to the bottom of a cave, watching shadows play across a wall. We trust the shadows and the stories they tell because they are the only things we know. We have no idea that they are cast by unseen puppeteers competing for power and wealth, much less that higher realms of truth and existence lie above and beyond us.

Education—from the Latin educare, to lead out or bring up—liberates us from the shackles of ignorance and leads us into the light and warmth of reality. It makes us capable, as St. John Henry Newman wrote in The Idea of a University, of forming an “instinctive just estimate of things as they pass before us.” But today’s universities are hell-bent on leading students down, not up. Everything is domination and servitude, power and oppression: the cave is all that exists. In the dim and pervasive light of critical theory and intersectionality, everything appears small and flat and gray. Heroism is toxic masculinity; mathematics and English are instruments of racial oppression. Interpretive charity and intellectual humility, once cardinal academic virtues, are now as dispensable as Greek and Latin are for classics majors at Princeton, or Shakespeare and Chaucer for English majors at Yale.

Enter UATX. As our elite universities sink into the muck of activism, demand increases for genuine teaching and learning—and the supply is growing of good professors who have left or been pushed out of dying institutions. Many, including me, have argued that the time is ripe to start a new university. The master plan for UATX describes it as “committed to open inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse” and “fiercely independent—financially, intellectually, and politically.” It draws inspiration from Yale’s 1974 Woodward Report, with its defense of “the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”

Talk is cheap, but Kanelos’s plan is serious. UATX is backed by distinguished and independent minds. Kanelos’s founding team includes historian Niall Ferguson, journalist Bari Weiss, evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, and investor Joe Lonsdale. The advisory board includes Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Arthur Brooks, Steven Pinker, Nadine Strossen, Glenn Loury, Jonathan Haidt, David Mamet, Wilfred McClay, and Leon Kass, among other big names. Ten founding faculty fellows “will actively participate in curricular and institutional planning and design,” the first three—Hirsi Ali and philosophers Peter Boghossian and Kathleen Stock—having already been named. This group is long on courage: Hirsi Ali lives under threat of death from Islamists, while Weiss, Heying, Boghossian, and Stock resigned from positions at the New York Times, Evergreen State College, Portland State University, and the University of Sussex, respectively, after weathering sustained and vicious attacks by their colleagues and students.

COMMENT:  Wonderful, wonderful.  Of course, be prepared for incoming fire from the political left, declaring that the above names are merely front operators for fascism, or, even worse, democracy. 

The college that Pano Kanelos headed, St. John's of Annapolis, is one of the last remaining true liberal arts schools in the country, centered on the Great Books and great ideas.  It is out of favor with the educational establishment, which is a compliment to it. 

We welcome the University of Austin.  We know how tough the climb will be.  But these are people of excellence, and we have to believe that they will succeed.

November 8, 2021       Permalink

NOVEMBER 7,  2021

SHORT TAKES ON THE DRIFTING WRECKAGE – OVERNIGHT: 

THE AFTERMATH – FROM THE HILL:  Democrats are bracing for the possibility of a coming wave of retirements as the party comes to grips with a series of ominous electoral losses in Virginia and other states that portend trouble in the 2022 midterms.  Fourteen House Democrats have already announced that they will not seek reelection in 2022. But the painful string of defeats in Tuesday’s off-year elections is stirring speculation that more of the party’s incumbents may be eyeing the exits ahead of the midterms in hopes of avoiding brutal reelection campaigns or being relegated once again to the minority.  Republicans, emboldened by their recent victories, are already firing warning shots at House Democrats. In an interview with The Washington Post on Wednesday, Rep. Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), gave vulnerable Democratic incumbents an ultimatum: “Retire or lose.”  It's a solid strategy.  Incumbents have certain built-in advantages, like name recognition.  The more newcomers the Democrats have to run because of retirements, the easier it will be for Republicans. 

November 7, 2021       Permalink

OH THOSE NUMBERS – OVERNIGHT:  Well, you've got a choice.  You could either be Joe Biden or the captain of the Titanic.  What'll it be?  From RedState: 

Republicans probably wish the midterms were tomorrow, with the results of the elections this week, and now with the results of a latest poll on Joe Biden.

It’s not looking good for old Joe and the Democrats.

According to a USA Today/Suffolk University poll, taken Wednesday through Friday, many of the 1,000 registered voters contacted by pollsters delivered a very bad message to them — following up on the rebuke they got on Tuesday in the elections.

Biden has the worst approval rating of anyone at this point in his term, 38 to 59 percent, except for President Donald Trump who was constantly being assailed by the leftist media, while Biden has been largely praised.

Nearly half of those surveyed, 46%, say Biden has done a worse job as president than they expected, including 16% of those who voted for him. Independents, by 7-1 (44%-6%), say he’s done worse, not better, than they expected.

Nearly two-thirds of Americans, 64%, say they don’t want Biden to run for a second term in 2024.

That includes 28% of Democrats.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ approval rating is 28% – even worse than Biden’s. The poll shows that 51% disapprove of the job she’s doing. One in 5, 21%, are undecided.

Sixty-six percent say the country is going in the wrong direction.

While many in the poll supported the infrastructure bill, only one in four believe that Build Back Better would be helpful for them; more believed it would hurt then help their families, 30-26 percent. We saw in a prior poll that Americans were not enamored of Biden’s bills, despite what Biden claims.

But beyond the indictment of Biden, here’s the money shot: If the election were held today, they would vote for the Republican candidate over the Democratic by 46 percent to 38 percent.

COMMENT:  Kamala Harris is at 28%?  That's what you get when you put someone on a national ticket who had to drop out of presidential nomination contention before the first vote was cast because she was doing so poorly.

Look, things can change in the year before the midterm elections.  But it's hard to see how a Democratic Party run by the loony left would be willing to change in a way to attract more support.  The people who control the party today are fanatics, the American political equivalent of kamikazes. 

Republicans have golden opportunities.  If they seize them, America can start to recover from this ridiculous age of wokeness.

November 7,  2021     Permalink