Less than a month ago, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey declared a state of emergency. The problem? Progressive policy met reality on her doorstep: more illegal aliens than she knows what to do with, so they’ve been stuffing them into local shelters, hotels, and motels.

Related: Massachusetts Has a State of Emergency, but It Is Not the One They Think …

She can’t pull a Martha’s Vineyard, which did its impression of Survivor last year when it frog marched 48 of them into transports and “off the island” – probably to Mainland Massachusetts, but that is a fraction of the bodies milling about The Bay State as a result of Biden’s borderless America.

Healey has called up more than 200 National Guardsmen to guard the illegals.

 

“Massachusetts is in a state of emergency, and we need all hands-on deck to meet this moment and ensure families have access to safe shelter and basic services,” Healey said Thursday. “We’re grateful to the brave men and women of the National Guard for stepping up to help us ensure that every family in emergency shelter has their needs met, including access to food, transportation, medical care, and education. While we work to implement a more permanent staffing solution, the National Guard will provide an efficient and effective means of delivering these services and keeping everybody safe.”

 

Armed guards for the “new arrivals” when they should probably be deployed to the border to stop the invasion. But Democrats like open borders, third-world disease, human trafficking, more fentanyl sneaking in, and, of course, the thousands of military-aged Chinese men who are arriving dressed in similar clothing with nearly identical backpacks.

Nothing to see here.

How about a nice hotel room, free food, and a cell phone? Can we get you anything else? Would you like a wake-up call? Healey just got one, but she can’t even begin to suggest that her problem, which has no hope of getting better and every expectation of getting worse, could be solved if Joe Biden installed the border wall sections and enforced it instead of selling them and us out to the highest bidder.

 

 

HT | Daily Wire

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Farmers have steadily declined as a share of the American workforce since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, undermined by technological advances, regulatory strictures, and industry consolidation in farming.

Larger farms on ever-pricier land bar new entrants, and a handful of corporations are increasing their domination of food production. Both farm operators and migrant workers are aging, while globalists push unnatural industrial food substitutes that can be grown in a lab without hands in the field.

Technology has always illusorily made big promises to farmers, keeping the downsides in the shadows. The reality is that tractors have compacted soils; plows have tilled lands into erosion and water loss; chemicals, synthetic fertilizers, and confinement feed operations have replaced traditional husbandry.

In an odd parallel, humanity has irrevocably and abruptly shifted from a balanced agriculture where people were tied through communities to one another, their plants and livestock, and the soil, water, and sun that sustained them. What was hitherto achieved through clean, renewable solar power (blades of grass and grain fueled by photosynthesis) is now accomplished by technology. Moderns embrace a machine-dependent technocratic agriculture, subduing endless horizons with computer-guided titanic tractors to be one day, we are told, powered by factory-manufactured solar panels.

From solar to solar, from life to machine. Imagine what the next leap in food production will be, as artificial intelligence softly smooths the covers for humanity to lie down in techno-dependency. We are reaching beyond slavery to that unthinkable time when a man is no longer valued for his labor and has become superfluous.

Farmer Attrition

As machines and corporate greed have destroyed local, small-scale agriculture, farmers have diminished in numbers. The hangers-on are crook-kneed and wrinkling: The average age of American farmers is now 60. More people have been switching to farming careers, but even there, the average was 46.3 years in the 2017 Census, and new farms are more likely to be smaller in size.

Farming is a high-capital, low-margin enterprise, favoring older landowners with accumulated funds. Inflation and demand have pushed farmland prices up more than 7% a year recently, discouraging many would-be growers. Consequently, in 2019, some one-third of America’s 3.4 million farmers were over 65, and nearly another million were over 55. Lands, factories, and feedlots consolidate ever larger as the pool of land stewards shrivels.

Migrant Farmworkers Aging Too

This contraction of the human portion of the food-producing chain is limited not only to principal operators but also to migrant labor. In 2012, the average age of an American farmworker was 36. The National Center for Farmworker Health stated that “the age of agricultural workers in the United States has been increasing since 2000”: 17% are between 14-24 compared to 35% in 1999-2000, and 14% are over 55, compared to merely 5% in 1999-2000. It is not just expensive land prices discouraging farm labor but rapid mechanization.

Notwithstanding calls for better wages for migrant labor, few consumers appreciate that many farmers work not only for less than minimum wage but also, at times, a negative wage. When milk or other farm product prices plummet, family farmers (not their paid workers) must absorb higher costs and keep feeding animals that are losing money minute by minute.

Indeed, for much of the past century, family farmers have suffered through a real-life Steinbeckian tragedy. The US Department of Agriculture reported:

“The reduction in self-employed and family labor through 1990 was more rapid than the decline in hired labor. According to data from the Farm Labor Survey (FLS) of USDA’s National Agricultural Statistical Service (NASS), the number of self-employed and family farmworkers declined from 7.60 million in 1950 to 2.01 million in 1990, a 74-percent reduction. Over this same period, the average annual employment of hired farmworkers — including on-farm support personnel and those who work for farm labor contractors — declined from 2.33 million to 1.15 million, a 51-percent reduction. As a result, the proportion of hired workers has increased over time.”

Both migrant farm workers and farm operators/owners are getting older, and corporations and mechanization continue to seize the day – and the food supply. Many young people seek to return to the land and turn the soil to turn a profit. This is especially visible since COVID and at least partly explains the rising prices for rural agricultural plots as San Francisco and Portland real estate prices head for the manure pile. Policies could instead be fashioned to secure a next generation not of GMOs and macabre splicing of plant-animal-microbe genes but good old-fashioned pitchfork-in-hand American Gothic land stewards.

Foreign Farming Dependency?

The crisis of American farmer attrition isn’t some quaint nostalgia for a Little House on the Prairie idealism but a practical economic, cultural, and health matter. One contributor to farm-income decline is globalization and increasing foreign food dependency. The USDA reported:

“In 2023, net farm income is expected to decrease by 18.2 percent relative to 2022. Farm production expenses are projected to increase 11.0 percent in 2022 relative to 2021 and 1.3 percent from 2022 to 2023 … Total U.S. agricultural trade rose to record levels in 2021. U.S. agricultural exports were valued at $177 billion in 2021, an 18 percent increase relative to 2020. Imports grew by almost 17 percent in 2021 to $171 billion. While the United States typically exports more agricultural goods by value than it imports, from 2012–21, imports grew more rapidly than exports.”

Fostering dependency on foreign, corporate-dominated, highly consolidated, processed, techno-dependent foods shipped long distances threatens food security and international competitiveness. Policies that favor large corporate producers only add to this dependency, especially subsidies for monoculture crops like corn, wheat, and soy. To reverse this dangerous trend, regulatory, tax, and fiscal benefits could be offered to new market entrants, particularly for the acquisition and retention of fertile farmlands, many of which are being lost to development or lapsing into forest-growing carbon sequestration (grasslands sequester far more carbon than trees, and beef tastes better than cordwood!).

Bill Gates is not accumulating farmland so he can tool around in his cardigan on a John Deere tractor practicing inorganic farming. He advocates for bug diets imposed by regulatory fiat, fake meat made of GMO soy, and calf fetal tissue (for which he owns the patents), preserved with his unappealing APEEL (another patent). If Americans don’t want Bill determining what’s for supper, they had better incentivize some young hands to tend the land pronto – from sea to shining sea, with ample waves of grain.

 

John Klar is an Attorney, farmer, and author. Mostly farmer… And Regular Contributor to GraniteGrok and VermontGrok.

 

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For any enterprise to succeed, it has to take actions that will move it toward its goal. Perhaps more importantly, it has to say no to actions that won’t do that.

This means it has to articulate a goal in a simple, straightforward way so that whenever it is contemplating a possible action, it can ask: Will this move me closer to the goal? If so, it’s worth doing. If not, it isn’t.

That is the role of a mission statement. It’s a kind of guiding star, a way of deciding when to say yes and when to say no.

For example, this is the mission statement of Southwest Airlines: ‘To be the world’s most loved, most efficient, and most profitable airline.’

Here was President Kennedy’s mission statement for the space program: ‘This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.’

Simple, but not easy. Ambitious but achievable. And very, very clear.

One of the largest enterprises in New Hampshire is its public school system. What is the mission statement for this enterprise? Unfortunately, no one seems to agree on that.

The more people you ask — legislators, judges, bureaucrats, parents, teachers, taxpayers — the more answers you get: To provide children with bright futures (college and career readiness) and pleasant presents (sports, hobbies, opportunities to socialize with friends); to create a workforce for employers (with subsidized daycare for employees); to allow us to compete in the global economy; to promote tolerance and inclusivity, and so on.

But the public school system does have a mission statement of sorts, at least on paper.

The state constitution is clear in saying that education is ‘essential to preservation of a free government.’ That’s the why.

The state supreme court is clear in saying that it is the responsibility of the state to provide ‘each educable child an opportunity to acquire the knowledge and learning necessary to participate intelligently in the American political, economic, and social systems of a free government.‘ That’s the what.

The legislature has been clear in saying that ‘schools shall ensure that all pupils are performing at the proficient level or above on the statewide assessment.’ That’s the how.

That last bit is buried so deeply — in RSA 193-H:2 — that you almost have to be Indiana Jones to find it. And it recently survived an attempt to repeal it on the grounds that no one was really taking it seriously.

But what would happen if we adopted RSA 193-H:2 as the mission statement for our public school system? That is, what if New Hampshire embarked on what we might call the ‘Granhattan Project,’ a program similar to the moon landing or the development of the atomic bomb? A program attaching a real sense of urgency to a goal that is simple but not easy, ambitious but achievable, and very, very clear.

Something like: ‘This state should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of bringing 95% of students to a 12th-grade level of proficiency in reading.’

Note that in achieving this goal as a society, we would position students to achieve their own goals as individuals: To create their own bright futures. To attend college, or train for a career, or start a business. To learn more about whatever they want, whenever they want, for the rest of their lives. To be active creators, rather than passive consumers, of public discourse on subjects like tolerance and inclusivity — or taxes, public health and safety, criminal justice, welfare, or any other matter of public policy. They would be able to participate intelligently in the political, economic, and social systems of a free government. And in doing so, help preserve a free government.

But we can only do this if we have a yes that is clear enough and understood to be essential enough to let us say no when we need to. To turn away from incidentals that distract from essentials. To follow our guide star instead of veering after each new shiny bauble that appears on the horizon.

And if teaching every student to read is the wrong mission statement, let’s come up with a better one.

How might we do that? One way would be to encourage stakeholders to make lists of all the things they think schools should be doing. Compile the lists and see which items show up 95% of the time.

(It’s the same basic idea as voting for the Baseball Hall of Fame but with a higher threshold.)

The idea is to find consensus in order to avoid contentiousness, to cooperate with our limited resources instead of competing for them, to pull together in a common direction instead of pulling in a dozen directions at once. To chase just one rabbit and catch it instead of chasing a dozen and missing them all.

Zig Ziglar expressed the idea behind a mission statement this way: ‘You can’t hit a target you cannot see, and you cannot see a target you do not have.’ And even more simply: ‘If you aim at nothing, you’ll hit it every time.’

I have yet to see a more accurate description of our public school system. We can do better, and we need to do better. A great first step in that direction would be embracing RSA 193-H:2 instead of eliminating it or continuing to ignore it.

 

[This was originally published at the author’s blog at Bare Minimum Books.]

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I went grocery shopping yesterday and observed paranoid culture in action. The few (both employees and customers) who never stopped wearing a mask have been joined by a few handfuls of others. Mask tyranny has crept back into the collective consciousness.

Several patrons were masked—more than I usually witness. But the majority of the customers, and they were numerous, were going about their business as if they’d not heard the news. There’s an election coming, and we’re at DEFCON ONE.

Arguably, there’s been mixed messaging. Both a Hollywood studio and a major Hospital chain had announced mask mandates then walked them back. But news that other hospitals were priming the mask mandate pump have littered news feeds for days and the online chatter is seeping into the subconscious.

The trained mules are already getting masked, but the CDC hasn’t released any mandates, according to the CDC. This is all organic terrorism.

Lone wolves, if you prefer.

Officially,

 

The agency also doesn’t currently have any mandate in effect, and the “CDC’s advice for individual and community actions around COVID-19 are tied to hospital admission levels,” the spokesperson said.

Earlier this week, a CDC spokesperson told NBC News that there have been no agency discussions about bringing back mask mandates, which comes as a handful of hospitals and offices around the country started reimposing them this month. There has also been speculation that federal officials may bring back mandates or even push for lockdowns, similar to what happened in 2020.

At the same time, the CDC hasn’t issued any updated guidelines regarding mask mandates on its website.

 

The CDC has “recommended that transportation workers, travelers, passengers, and others get the COVID-19 vaccine “before they travel.” This must be to ensure that they catch COVID and bring it home, but nothing about masks, as if they’d need to say a word. The usual suspects know the drill.

 

• In Massachusetts, UMass Memorial Hospital confirmed in a statement on Aug. 24 that it would reimpose masking for staff. Patients and visitors are exempt from the mandate, it stated.
• In New York, several upstate hospitals have required masking for anyone who goes into the facilities.
• In California, a Kaiser Permanente facility in Santa Rosa said it would reimpose its mask mandate, but it then issued a statement several days later saying it only applied to staff.

 

Smoke and mirrors. There were plenty of studies prior to 2020 that showed masking as ineffective for reducing flu transmission. There have been scores of new studies since that confirm that, plus research indicating a rise in health risks.

The only benefit to masking is regime-based. They and the peeps can identify who the rouble makers are becasue they aren’t wearing them.

That works for me.

 

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In our sports vernacular, the expression “losing your fastball” is a euphemism for no longer being able to perform to previous standards. After fireball-throwing Yankee pitcher Jim Bouton lost his fastball in the 1960s, he threw knuckleballs to extend his career.

Everyone “loses their fastball” eventually, as time takes that inevitable toll on one’s cognitive and physical skills. Even Tom Brady eventually retired from football.

When brain surgeons lose their fastballs, they need to retire, lest someone gets accidentally lobotomized. Would that politicians had the good grace to do likewise? Even the great Winston Churchill sadly held on as British Prime Minister into his eighties when he was well past his political prime, to the general detriment of his country, circa 1955.

The late Hall of Fame running back Jim Brown retired in 1965 at the top of his career, after nine great seasons, as opposed to Hall of Fame outfielder Willie Mays, who was a sad shadow of his former self when he retired in 1973 after 23 big league campaigns. He held on too long.

Our 46th U.S. President, Joe Biden, clearly lost his fastball long ago, as we all watch his daily decline—muttering, stuttering, shuffling, and falling down as his mendacious incompetence embarrasses and endangers our country. Some say he never had a fastball to begin with, that he made it to the top as a junk pitcher with spitballs, screwballs, curve balls, and sliders—along with lucky timing and the proper patrons.

(Thanks for foisting Joe Biden on us, President Barack Obama. Not.)

All of which brings us to revered New England Patriots head football coach Bill Belichick. It was only four years ago that he won a record sixth Super Bowl as Pats head coach. He was seen as a genius by many—the “greatest coach of all time.” Since then, of course, he lost Brady (his fastball?) and the team’s struggled. The Pats didn’t even make the playoffs last season. His staffing choices, personnel decisions, and play calling come under increasing scrutiny and criticism. The Pats seem to be on a treadmill to oblivion.

Is Belichick pulling a Willie Mays?

Belichick and Seattle Seahawk coach Pete Carroll are in their seventies. No other NFL coach is older than 64. L.A. Ram coach Sean McVay is only 37 and won a Super Bowl at age 34, demonstrating that one doesn’t have to be old to be successful.

Belichick trails the all-time winningest NFL coach, Don Shula, by 30 victories. Might Shula’s 328 career wins be a personal goal for the Pats coach? That would take at least three more years.

Sometimes a fresh face is needed. In 1988 the struggling Red Sox replaced manager John McNamara with Joe Morgan at the All-Star break. The BoSox won their next 12 games.

Another lousy Pats season will only increase the calls for Belichick to retire. If the team can have a successful season, then that might be even more reason for Bill to step down and retire to Nantucket on a positive note.

Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack managed that team from 1901 until 1950. During his last season, the 88-year-old Mack saw his team go 52-102 and finish in last place in the American League. One might wonder why the A’s owner kept Mack in the dugout for so long. Well, Connie was the owner!

Pats owner Bob Kraft, himself 82 years of age, will no doubt have a candid conversation with Belichick if the Pats flounder. Many team owners somehow retain their fastballs. And fans have fastballs too. Time will tell.

As for Joe Biden, he apparently thinks he’s who our country needs as president for another four years. Most disagree. Ditto re: 77-year-old Donald Trump. America needs a 2024 version of Joe Morgan. A younger, fresher face.

And voters never lose their fastballs!

 

State Representative Mike Moffett of Loudon is a former sports management professor. He chairs the House Committee on State-Federal Relations and Veterans Affairs.

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With the Sanborn scandal breaking the news just hours ago, it unsurprisingly spawned much discussion online. I thought about my House Committee assignments article at the beginning of the year.

We want to thank Julie Smith for this Contribution – Please direct yours to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
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I’m unsure if there’s enough material aside from the usual WMUR and NH Journal offerings in an ordinary internet search on the Sanborns. I took an even closer look at House LEADERSHIP assignments. We already know that most, if not all, committees are evenly divided, including the ones of great public interest. Remember Education, for example, sent SB 272 to the whole House without any recommendation due to it being a tie? Go figure.

I found Democrats with vice chairmanships in the following four committees: Children and Family Law, Fish and Game, Public Works, and Rules. And on top of that, Leishman is a Finance CHAIR! Under no circumstances should any intelligent person give the checkbook to ANY Democrat, ever.

What was Sherman Packard thinking?

And about our Speaker, I am calling him out as a Uniparty establishment RINO and think that a House coup might produce some good, assuming his replacement is not Wilhelm. I would recommend someone competent, seasoned, and respectable. Judy Aron, Carol McGuire, or Paul Terry might be a few ideas to consider, but perhaps there are others(both people and noteworthy reasons).

And let’s not forget that in addition to the Speaker opening a corrupt can of worms, he called former Rep Anne Copp a bitch for not wearing a mask while the microphone was on.

 

 

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We can put the entire Biden corruption situation to bed. Eric Swalwell has told us so, and you have to believe a U.S. Representative who slept with a Chinese spy. At least it was a female Chinese spy. This fact obviously carried some weight with Eric’s wife.

She is still with the scumbag.

Hakeem Jeffries, the Minority Leader in the House and on the short list of Democrat presidential candidates, doesn’t need to review or justify the facts. He just knows the U.S. people recognize Joe Biden as a good and decent man; therefore, all he did wrong was of no consequence. What a crock. Joe Biden is an older man who sucked off the American taxpayer for his entire career. He never had a private sector job or created anything besides huge phony LLC bank accounts funded by bribe money from foreign countries and entities. He plays the system like a Stradivarius, but he, Hunter, and the whole rotten family are playing off key.

I have tried to maintain a modicum of decency and civility in my writing and feel I have been successful in over 1,000 publicized posts. I cannot be in this case. Biden, the Democrats, and the mainstream media are gaslighting us Americans. We need to blow out the torch on this load of B.S. There is nothing good or decent about this man who hoodwinked the American people into putting him and his doctor wife in the White House. He is a conman who made a career in the Senate by fooling the voters of Delaware. He failed twice in his quest for the Presidency and had to withdraw both times after being found to be a plagiarist. And somehow, he got Barack Obama to choose him as a running mate. He ran for President a third time to save the soul of America. He needs to pray to God to save his blackened soul.

Forget the let’s go high when they go low. That will make us the better person but losers. We have to meet these people where they live in the swamp and the gutter. It is not a joke. Whether local, state, or Federal, the Democrats have one mission. That is to control our lives, make us dependent on Government, spend our money like drunken sailors, and keep themselves in power. They will never have the best interests of the people in mind.

These people hate America. This is why they want to destroy or distort American history. This is why they despise patriotism and why they promote Socialism over Conservatism. It is all about raising the few to a higher level and to hell with the general population. They call everything on the Right racist, which is the epitome of projection. They are failing our children with indoctrination instead of education. And Joe Biden, the man who promised to return decency and civility to the White House, has been the most divisive President in history. And the only thing he has brought to the White House is a low-life, alcohol and drug-challenged son who is there to avoid the law. The apple does not fall far from the tree.

The post Joe Biden Is A Good And Decent Man-Not appeared first on Granite Grok.

Looming mask mandates are a hot topic as Hospitals ponder reimposing them on not just staff but patients. The variant chatter is also getting louder, along with calls for a fresh round of vaccines or boosters. The speculation is whether enough people have had enough of that.

One American, the guy who was in charge when the original mandates hit the stress, the commander and chief “booster” of operation warp-speed, has some thoughts about it.

 

Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday accused “left-wing lunatics” of fear-mongering about new COVID-19 variants in order to justify the reintroduction of their left-wing lockdown and mandate policies, which included the use of drop boxes and mail-in ballots in 2020, in a bid to rig the 2024 election.

President Trump made the remarks in a video posted on Aug. 30 on Truth Social, saying that his message should serve as a warning to every COVID-19 “tyrant” who not only wants to “take away our freedom” but who would be playing into the hands of those wanting to exploit COVID-19 restrictions to interfere in next year’s election.

“The left-wing lunatics are trying very hard to bring back COVID lockdowns and mandates with all of their sudden fear-mongering about the new variants that are coming,” President Trump said in the video.

 

One of my issues with Trump since the pandemic has been his continued talk about how he helped make Operation Warp Speed possible. Even after he was shown the door and the vaccine he helped fast-track proved to be a dangerous disaster, every speech included an ode to his involvement in helping get those vaccines out into the world. He may still think that’s a good thing, I’m not sure, but he has come around on the rest of it.

 

“Hear these words: We will not comply!” the former president continued. “We will not shut down our schools, we will not accept your lockdowns, we will not abide by your mask mandates, and we will not tolerate your vaccine mandates.”

 

Watch for yourself and let us know what you think.

The post Watch: Trump has Some Thoughts about the Election Infection and Rumored Mandates … appeared first on Granite Grok.

Please explain to me how any GOP Presidential candidate wins when the “swing States” continue to allow ballot-harvesting … when we have “Election Month” instead of Election Day, so Democrats can harvest votes before voters even have a chance to compare the candidates … when Zuckerbucks and the equivalent continue to flow into “swing States” effectively converting local elections offices into Democrat GOTV operations … when the Deep State continues to interfere in elections … when the Regime-media and Big Tech continue to censor the “news” (Maui? What Maui?). And if your answer is … Elon Musk is with us! He’s with us! … know that Twitter (now X) is reinstating censorship for the 2024 election:

Twitter’s new policy, called “Freedom of Speech, not Freedom of Reach” in a nutshell (see @Safety)

(And, yes, I know it’s “X” now, but honestly it’s just the same old Twitter, censorship and all)

When he locks my account, know I appreciate every one of you who have stood by me. pic.twitter.com/fmoVL7YGCb

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) August 31, 2023

 

The post Twitter (X) Reinstating Censorship For The 2024 Election … But Just Keep Pretending 2024 Won’t Be As Rigged As 2020 appeared first on Granite Grok.

RCP Polls continue to show Donald Trump as a Republican Primary-voter favorite for the nomination. Economist/YouGov has Trump with a 36-point lead. HarrisX has it at 45 points. But the Young Republican National Federation Convention picked DeSantis over Trump.

The Young Republican National Federation (YRNF) hosted its annual convention in Dallas, Texas, from August 16 to August 20. The organization focuses on registered Republicans ages 18 to 40, to “provide them with better political knowledge and understanding of the issues of the day,” according to its website.

After the five-day convention—which included speeches from Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Florida Congresswoman Kat Cammack and former Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake—36.6 percent of the attendees indicated that they wanted to see DeSantis as the next Republican presidential candidate. Trump trailed with 35.4 percent of the vote.

 

DeSantis took the poll with a 1.2% margin, which is something. It’s a big something, actually. It means that if Gov Ron can get young Republicans off the sofa and out from behind whatever screen they are staring at, his chances improve a lot. Bad news for everyone else, though.

 

The other GOP candidates polling in the top five were businessman Vivek Ramaswamy (9.1 percent), former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (7.5 percent) and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott (5.5 percent). Roughly 6 percent of participants indicated that they wanted someone else as the next nominee, according to poll results.

 

Wait, there’s more.

 

Republican voters also appear to be attracted to younger candidates. Several polls taken after the first GOP primary debate last week showed that the two youngest candidates on stage—DeSantis, 44, and Ramaswamy, 38—were considered the “winners” of the two-hour event.

In one such poll taken by The Washington Post/FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos, 29 percent of the Republican voters surveyed said that DeSantis won, while 26 percent selected Ramaswamy. Another poll, by Leger for the New York Post, found that 23 percent of the 1,800 self-identified GOP voters interviewed said that they felt Ramaswamy came out on top, while DeSantis earned 21 percent of the vote.

 

Vivek has come a long way from being nobody in the political realm, which explains why he has been taking a beating (at the debate and everywhere else). I’ve received a pile of emails from folks with links, grousing about his sketchy background. I’m not rising that wave at the moment. When Trump ran in 2016, we were quite brutal about his lack of experience and past ties to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton. We backed him to keep Hillary at bay when he won the nomination, but we weren’t as excited about it as we could have been.

But it worked out. Trump may not have been the most polite president, but he did something no other Republican did. He pushed back hard and kept a lot of promises. As Grokster Aaron Warner wrote a few days ago about Trump’s supporters,

 

They voted to protect the border, he promised to build a wall, and he did.  They wanted more jobs for Americans, and he delivered manufacturing plants to the states.  They wanted to get out of endless wars, and he refused to start any.  They wanted fewer taxes, and so he cut them.

Though he was pilloried as an arch-white supremacist, misogynist, and racist, he somehow managed to create an economy where more black female entrepreneurs succeeded than at any time in history. He freed black prisoners and guaranteed funding to Historically Black Colleges ten times longer than America’s first black president, Harvard’s very own Barack Obama.  CNN’s own black analyst, Van Jones even had to tip his hat to Trump’s victories for black Americans.

We wondered about NATO spending, so he took the member countries to task.  We didn’t want to suffer the economic disaster of the climate change accords in Paris, so he withdrew us from them.  We were tired of fearing Middle Eastern terrorists like ISIS, so he took them out, and we were even more tired of funding them by buying their oil, so he opened up our pipelines and made us energy-independent.

 

He blew it on the pandemic, mostly by surrounding himself with the wrong people and then letting them have a microphone every day. At least a few Republicans I know will never forgive him or can, and if that’s you, be you just remember the left will try to steal the election regardless of who the nominee is.

As for DeSantis, I’d like to see him poll better. It would keep Trump on his toes and force him to address tough questions like, if they play pandemic politics again, what are you going to do? He posted some video on that here (I have a write about it at 6:30), so that’s a step in the right direction, and we know he’d hold money back from states that deprived you of your rights – assuming he’s serious – but how do we know until he is pressed for direct answers?

That won’t happen if he skips all the debates that he could. Someone polling 30-40 points ahead of the nearest challenge has nothing to gain by standing next to a bunch of folks who, combined, still have less support. But I’d like to see him take the heat. Debate is good. And DeSantis might have found some wind he can get beneath his wings.

 

 

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