My First Appearance in the Denver Post…

… Never Happened.

 

The Denver Post is the local major metro daily newspaper for the region, and reminds me of nothing so much as the Los Angeles Times. That’s not a compliment. Though not as blatant as the Times in refusing to publish opinion pieces that oppose leftism, they definitely favor guest columns and letters that support their own staunchly leftist editorial stance.

Here in Colorado Proposition 113 is on the November ballot, and on 5 September the Post published an editorial urging voters to support and enact that initiative. The following, in italics, is the text of a response I submitted to the Post for publication as a Letter to the Editor (LTE), refuting their position. The response explains the purpose of Prop 113 and why it fails to meet constitutional standards.

The Editorial Board’s (EB) endorsement of Prop 113, which would allow Colorado to join an interstate “compact” to cast its votes in the Electoral College (EC) based on the outcome of the national popular vote and “to walk away from the antiquated electoral college system”, was disappointing, to say the least.

The Founders purposely created the EC to avoid direct democracy in presidential elections, considering it – correctly – as little more than mob rule. The end result would be elections utterly dominated by a few coastal high-population urbanized states, with smaller states completely marginalized to the point of irrelevancy.

It’s not “democracy”; it’s a mobocracy.

Though the EB correctly points out that “…  the founders of this nation empowered states to decide how they would allocate their electoral votes”, they overlook the fact that the US Constitution also requires that each state provide a republican form of government to its citizens, and allowing the residents of other states, through the “compact”, to determine the outcome of an election within the borders of its own state does not comport with that mandate.

Further, the US Constitution, Article 1, Section 10 states: “No State shall, without the Consent of Congress,… enter into any Agreement or Compact with another State…”

That’s about as straightforward as it gets.

I have little doubt this nutty “compact” idea won’t stand up to judicial scrutiny at SCOTUS if an attempt is ever made to use it to determine an election outcome.

If you wish to read the original editorial you can do so here. As is SOP for leftists, they’re either completely ignorant of the actual constitutional issues that are involved – a common problem with leftists, who seem to have never even heard of that invaluable parchment – or they simply don’t care about it, the only other explanation, one which is entirely unacceptable.

Ultimately the Post published seven LTEs, three supporting their position and four opposed. None of those LTEs were mine. Before I say why I think that’s so, let me establish my bona fides.

I’ve been submitting material for publication for over three decades, and have a success rate of over 90% of my material being published. It’s been in The Signal of Santa Clarita, the LA Daily News, the Los Angeles Times, and national publications such as USA Today, Wild West Magazine and the Mensa Bulletin. So I have a pretty good idea of whether or not something I’ve submitted is likely to be published. In this case, though I felt my LTE was pretty well-written and didn’t violate any “style” guidelines, I also felt pretty certain it wouldn’t see the light of day.

“Why’s that, Brian?”, you ask.

Here’s why. Of the LTEs that were published in the Post, particularly those opposed to the idea of this interstate compact, NOT ONE raised the most important point at issue: the specific ban in the Constitution against interstate agreements or compacts.

Imagine the dilemma of the Opinion editor at the Post being confronted by the very specific and irrefutable obstacle to the editorial position they’d publicly taken on this issue. Do they publish that LTE, and if so do they have to also acknowledge they’re supporting a proposal that clearly flies in the face of constitutional proscriptions? Do they have to print a retraction? Probably much better all around if they simply pretend they never saw it, so they simply spike it.

Thus I wasn’t at all surprised when my LTE simply vanished into the ether, probably along with anything written by anybody else who’s actually taken the time to read the Constitution.

As I said in my opening paragraph, the Post reminds me very much of the LA Times… and that’s definitely NOT a compliment.

 

 

 

©Brian Baker 2020

Write It On Ice

 

 

In my last couple of columns I’ve been discussing how the American Left has blown its collective mind over the election of Trump, and their hair-on-fire antics in trying to turn the tides of time back to pre-November 8, when their queen bee in waiting, Miss Pantsuit, was still just a stone’s throw away from her coronation.

As I’m writing this (who knows what they’ll come up with tomorrow?) the Next Big Thing is that Russia hacked the DNC computers because “they wanted Trump to win”. It’s splashed all over the place in the leftist media. Big headlines; op-ed topic du jour.

But let’s examine this for a moment. Left unexplained is why the Russians would want Trump over Clinton. Are the Dems trying to imply that he’s a Russian agent or something? A Manchurian Candidate? It certainly can’t be that the Russians were afraid of Clinton. After all, as Secretary of State she was an abysmal failure, and all of her policies led to disastrous consequences, from the Arab Spring meltdown, to Benghazi, to China’s resurgent aggression in the South China Sea, to Russia’s own newly energized militarism in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. So no, that can’t be it.

Another aspect of this issue the Left doesn’t seem to raise, and in fact wants to distract people away from thinking about, is really basic: if there was nothing in those hacked emails to hide, what’s the big deal anyway? This is the modern computer era. Everybody gets hacked. That’s a given. There’s even a phrase for it: “The internet is forever”. Never write, post, publish, or email anything you don’t want to see splashed all over the web. Even kids know this. So what was in those “hacked” emails that supposedly brought Clinton down?

Truth. The simple truth.

Those emails, whether hacked by the Russians or someone else, revealed the depths of the corruption of the Clinton cabal in their maneuvering to win office, from the manipulations of Debra Wasserman Schultz and Donna Brazile in stealing the primary from Bernie Sanders, to the complicity of the Clinton team in her illegal email rig, to the cooperation of the allegedly “independent and unbiased” press, right on down.

But there’s also a further reality. Those hacked emails didn’t actually reveal anything people didn’t already know about Clinton. All they really did was confirm what people already knew: that Clinton is cynical and corrupt to her core, and surrounds herself with like-minded people. Nothing new here, move along.

Thus the net impact of those hacked emails, in reality, was pretty much a big, fat zero.

Let’s face it. This latest burst of sanctimonious outrage is nothing more than another effort to deny the reality of the election outcome, and a lame attempt to besmirch and delegitimize the guy who won the election fair and square: Donald Trump.

My Armenian mother told me there’s an old-country maxim that goes: “Write it on ice”. In other words, if you write something down that you might not want people to see later, it will disappear forever when the ice melts, but you never know about anything written on paper – or nowadays in emails.

So the lesson for the Dems is this: next time, don’t document your corruption in emails. Better yet, why not consider abandoning that corruption altogether?

 

©Brian Baker 2016

(Also published today in my local newspaper, The Signal)

The Fat Lady Ain’t Sung Yet

In my circle I’m regarded as kinda the “go-to guy” on political issues, and I have a pretty good record on predictions of trends and outcomes. Everybody’s come to me and asked me to analyze this race and predict who’s going to win. As I tell them, I just don’t know. I’ve never, ever seen anything like this in my life.

The aspects that make prediction so hard are these. This is the first time I’ve seen an election in which neither candidate has a strong base of support. Look at the numbers on their personal qualities. Both are regarded as pretty repulsive candidates. The result is that the voters going to the polls aren’t voting FOR anyone. For the most part they’re going there to cast votes AGAINST someone else. I have no idea how to factor such a phenomenon into a quantitative assessment, and I don’t think anyone else does, either.

Polls are dependent on people answering pollsters honestly. But what happens when a large number of people are embarrassed about their actual opinion, and lie? It skews things, and again we have the uniqueness of an election in which both major candidates are an embarrassment for a lot of people to admit to supporting.

Polling results can be “pushed” by the phrasing of questions asked. There’s absolutely NO doubt that the MSM, which sponsor most polls, have committed themselves to Clinton. They haven’t even tried to hide it this time. So how has that affected the polling questions they’ve formulated, and the consequently skewed results, leading to inaccurate conclusions? Again, hard to quantify.

The majority of the people voting FOR Clinton (as opposed to AGAINST Trump) are the party faithful, and they’d vote for anybody who won that party’s nomination, and quite happily. But that’s not at all the case with Trump. Those who actually want to vote FOR him (as opposed to AGAINST Clinton) managed to essentially take over the GOP nomination process and force him down the party’s throat. It was a populist uprising. A revolt. Many are party members, or former members, but many are people who feel that the GOP – and probably both parties – haven’t represented their interests for a long time. They joined the GOP to support Trump into the nomination, but they’re not committed to that party at all. How can they be categorized, and consequently polled?

There’s an “enthusiasm” aspect which pollsters have started to acknowledge in recent years that has an effect on voting turnout, and that turnout can have a major impact on election outcome. But again, in a race between repulsive candidates, how can you quantify that “enthusiasm”? Will one’s enthusiasm to vote FOR a candidate be more meaningful than another’s “enthusiasm” to vote AGAINST that same candidate?

There are other factors, too, but I think these are the big ones. That’s why I think the results of this race are still up in the air. I don’t find any of the current polling, or predictions, to be persuasive, frankly. It could be a squeaker either way; it could be a landslide blowout, either way. I just don’t have a clue, and I don’t think the pollsters do, either.

In support of my thesis, here’s a (Link) to an interview with John Zogby that was conducted a couple of days ago. Zogby’s one of this country’s most prominent and reliable pollsters, and the title of the article says it all:  “Pollster John Zogby: Presidential Race Far From Over”.

There’s still time to save this country, folks. Let’s get out there and do our part.

 

 

©Brian Baker 2016

 

“Double Standard” and “Hypocrisy”: Words Completely Inadequate to the Task

It turns out that Donald Trump has in the past made some very raunchy jokes about women, the kinds of things we only expect to hear from juvenile boys in the locker room, and in Seth Rogan “comedies”. I’m sure that comes as a big surprise to absolutely no one, except maybe some yokel living in a cave somewhere, completely isolated from TV and newspapers and utterly oblivious up to now of who Trump even is.

Of course, the Dem/socialists and their sycophants and accomplices in the mainstream media are all over this like white on rice, throwing fainting spells, gasping into their hankies, and ginning up their faux outrage machine.

Right along with them are the pansies from the Establishment GOP, those spineless hacks who wouldn’t know an actual principle if it walked up and smacked them in the face. The same pantywaists who thought “Jebbie!!” was a great candidate, when they weren’t out losing their own elections; people like John “Amnesty” McCain, and Mitt “Aw Shucks” Romney.

Were Trump’s comments despicable? Sure. Were they illegal? Nope. Did they affect any US policy? Nope. Was anybody hurt by them? Nope, except maybe the “feelings” of some liberal snowflakes somewhere, since there were no “trigger warnings” issued so they could go to their “safe spaces” to hide from those “microagressions”.

In the meantime, there’s Bill Clinton running around in this campaign drumming up support for his wife, all the while being fawned over by that same mainstream media. Bill Clinton the convicted perjurer and accused serial rapist. A guy who, as his state’s Governor, corrupted state cops into being his personal pimps. The same guy who sexually molested at least one young female intern right in the Oval Office while President, giving new meaning to the words “there’s nothing like a good cigar”.

The candidate he’s on the stump for? His wife, Her Royal Arrogance, Miss Pantsuit Clinton, an unindicted federal felon and pathological liar, whose career of corruption is so far-reaching – from Travelgate to the Rose Law Firm to the “Bimbo Eruptions” right up to her email scandal and sham “Foundation” slush fund – that just about everyone who enters her circle gets sucked in, like light into a black hole. A woman whose policies as a failed Secretary of State have led directly to the meltdown in the Middle East, to the cost of thousands of lives and a vast amount of this country’s fortune.

Yet what do all those allegedly “objective” reporters, and columnists,  and limp-wristed political hacks focus their attention on?

Trump’s stupid jokes.

The only real upside to this election that I can see is that the overwhelming hypocrisy of the mainstream media AND the Establishment GOP, as well as the absolute lack of any standards of decency of the Dem/socialist party, are all being fully exposed in the harsh glare of the spotlight for all to see.

Will this country apply its collective wisdom to benefit from this experience?

 

 

©Brian Baker 2016