Josh Mandel: just another dishonest RINO

 

Josh Mandel and William Kristol.  Photo credit: wksu.org

This latest report from BigLeaguePolitics --

"Ohio Senate Candidate Josh Mandel Pocketed Donations Intended for 2018 GOP Nominee, Paid Tens of Thousands to Mistress"

-- will come as no surprise to readers of this blog, although it is of concern that an Ohio liberty group has endorsed Mandel's candidacy for the US Senate seat presently held by RINO Rob Portman.  Richard Moorhead reports:

Ohio Republican Senate candidate Josh Mandel paid tens of thousands of dollars to a woman he was dating during his 2018 Senate campaign, while married to another woman.

FEC reports show that Rachel Wilson, Mandel’s finance director and mistress, was paid more than $100,000 between his 2018 campaign and a PAC supporting his candidacy.

. . .

Three dozen Republican women, including three women who left Mandel’s campaign citing a toxic work environment created by Wilson in her continuing duties with Mandel’s 2020 campaign, have urged Ohio Republicans to reject Mandel, warning he’ll “embarrass” the party if nominated as a candidate for the US Senate.  Mandel has run for statewide office five times in the past 12 years, with some Ohio Republicans criticizing Mandel, who has served in elected office since 2003, as a career politician who’ll put on the act he needs to in pursuit of the next political gig.

. . .

Questions of Mandel’s ethics go beyond his financial arrangements with his girlfriend while he was married to another woman. Mandel broke onto the scene of national politics as a protege of war criminal Bill Kristol, handpicked as an instrument to advance the nefarious neoconservative’s political views in the United States Senate in an ultimately failed 2012 campaign against Sherrod Brown. Kristol, an advocate of Middle East regime change wars Donald Trump partly ran against in 2016, had recruited Mandel as a candidate in Ohio’s 2012 US Senate election to challenge Sherrod Brown.

Read the full – ugly - report here.  Mr. Mandel says all the right things in front of the camera, but he is obviously just another self-serving hack.  Candidate Mike Gibbons looks better and better.

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Friday lightning round

Cleveland Tea Party’s roving photographer got some good ones last night:

Images by Pat Dooley Photography (no Facebook page any more!)

Go Home, Quarantine, and Wait Till You Get Good and Sick

 

Pandra Selivanov at American Thinker reports:

One of the more bizarre twists in the saga of the COVID pandemic has been doctors growing increasingly frustrated and even angry with patients asking for medical treatment rather than wholesale vaccination. We have been told for almost two years that COVID is a deadly disease. Naturally, when people test positive for COVID, they want to be treated to avoid serious illness. Instead, they are sent home to quarantine, with no medical treatment until they become seriously ill.

. . .

Doctors are having none of it. Instead, they lash out at the very idea that patients should expect to be treated for COVID. They complain of being imposed upon by people who refuse to be vaccinated, overlooking the fact that even the vaccinated have become seriously ill or died of COVID or one of the many variants that have emerged since mass vaccination began. Doctors are not supposed to hurt us—yet I can’t think of anything more hurtful than telling people who test positive for COVID to go home and wait to see how sick they will get, then getting angry at those same people when they ask for a treatment that might prevent them getting sick at all.

Our household has experienced a physician’s unwillingness to prescribe therapeutics such as ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, and zinc prior to admittance into a hospital, by which time it’s often too late.  America's Frontline Doctors or Pushhealth are still offering help online, but for how long before they get cancelled and de-platformed?  

Full article at American Thinker is here. 

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Mark Steyn: "not a serious country"

 

Mark Steyn is my favorite author and columnist.  I used to enjoy his appearances on Fox News, but since I crossed Fox off my list many months ago, I have to be satisfied with his written commentary.  Yesterday, his commentary was decidedly pessimistic, but I could not see where he was getting it wrong.  Here are some excerpts:

. . .

The biggest-selling book with American conservatives right now argues that the answer to all of the above [litany of government-caused problems] is "constitutionalism". On the other hand, the radio host Jesse Kelly says:

We're not a serious country and we're not a country that will be around much longer.

I incline to the latter view myself.  At this point, conservative complaceniks tend to trot out Adam Smith: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation." But not this much - not Covid lockdowns and open borders, Afghan "translators" and Haitian "refugees", Big Tech and Big Trans, BLM and CRT, ID for the IHOP but not for the voting booth, China as America's manufacturer and America's loan shark...

. . .

To go back to that Jesse Kelly line, "we're not a serious country": A nation where a pasty privileged pajama boy can demand the ruination of his professor because he traumatized the class by making them watch a Laurence Olivier performance is too unserious to survive, and doesn't deserve to.

If the Constitution is the bulwark against madness, then it has already failed; if "capitalism" is the bulwark against express-elevator descent into full-blown madness, the only thing holding that up is the chimera of the US dollar's status as global currency.

. . .

"Land of the free and the home of the brave"? Both are conspicuous by their absence.

The full column is here.  Grim, but highly recommended.

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Betsy McCaughey: Build Back Broke

 

Betsy McCaughey was a go-to resource when Congress was preparing to ram Obamacare down our throats.  Today in the New York Post, she gets into the weeds with the bazillion dollar Build Back Better bill:

Democrats are quarreling over the price tag of their Build Back Better bill. But the real problem is what’s in it. The bill coerces workers to join unions, imposes racial preferences on every facet of life and redistributes money from workers to takers.

Fortunately, the bill is in limbo. Moderate Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va) insist the bill has to be pared down to less than half its current price tag. The far left is outraged. But the bill can’t pass without every Senate Democrat supporting it.

Not passing it would be best: This bill is as un-American as it gets. Here are some of its details, which Democrats would prefer you not see. Judge for yourself.

Here are the bullet points:

• First-generation down-payment assistance: Most people work and save for years to buy a home. This bill makes them into suckers. It gives $6.8 billion to low-income first-time homebuyers with no conditions. It’s part of President Biden’s scheme to increase racial and economic diversity in the suburbs.
• Home-efficiency rebates: The bill offers up to $14,000 to homeowners who lower energy use by installing new heat pumps, air conditioning systems, insulation and energy-efficient appliances. It’s a pot of gold for homeowners who qualify and tens of billions of dollars in new business for [union] contractors.
• Direct-care workforce: The bill awards $1.48 billion to labor unions and community organizations to recruit and train workers to care for the elderly or disabled at home. Top priority is training workers in their rights and organizing them. This is your tax dollars at work creating a new army of likely Democratic voters.

Click here for the rest of the column.  None of it is good news.

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Facebook Down

 My kind of satire – this one on Babylon Bee:

Hackers Warn That If Demands Aren’t Met They Will Reactivate Facebook

The text is here. Funny.

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Mark Steyn on free speech: another casualty

 

image credit: contrarypedant.blogspot.com

Mark Steyn’s column today reports on another grim milestone: the death of Lars Vilks, one of the vocal few who made up the front line in the “free speech wars”:

Here's the score card from that 2010 event [in the free-speech wars, gathered to mark the fifth anniversary of the Danish Mohammed cartoons in Copenhagen in 2010]: Lars Hedegaard, of the Danish Free Press Society, had invited five of us that day - a Dane, a Swede, a Norwegian, a Dutchman and yours truly:

~The Norwegian comedienne Shabana Rehman had already had her family's restaurant firebombed; she now lives under 24/7 police protection, which is not the easiest way to practice observational standup;

~The Dutch cartoonist Nekschot was obliged, for security reasons, to appear on stage with his face obscured and unidentifiable. So he chose to wear a burqa. Funny, but not quite secure enough. Nekschot had already been arrested for "hate speech" with the authorities openly taunting him about the impending loss of his anonymity. He now lives in hiding, and is no longer a cartoonist;

~Our host Lars Hedegaard was subsequently shot at point-blank range, but fortunately by an incompetent, so he survived. Mr Hedegaard also lives in hiding; the would-be assassin lives free in Turkey, where Sultan Erdogan refuses to extradite;

~and now Lars Vilks is dead.

Yesterday, Sunday afternoon, he was being driven in a bulletproof car by two of his protection officers when there occurred what Swedish police regard as a freak collision with a truck. An almighty fire ensued and neither Lars nor the policemen survived; the driver of the other vehicle is seriously wounded and in hospital. This all happened near Markaryd, about an hour north-east of Helsingborg, where Lars was born. Helsingborg, like many Swedish cities, is utterly transformed, which is why Lars Vilks ended his life in an unmarked car being driven home under police protection from a guarded lunch with an old friend.

The BBC reported his demise thus:

Muhammad cartoonist killed in traffic collision

He was not, in fact, a cartoonist. He was an artist, primarily a sculptor - of limited technical skills (as he conceded) but of whimsical imagination. Yet, as the gates clank shut on free speech across Europe, it's easier for lazy Beeb hacks to lump every dissenter under the category of "Muhammad cartoonist".

. . .

It was an unusual traffic accident. On a divided carriageway with a sturdily fenced median, the police vehicle somehow managed to cross into the oncoming lane to find itself just in front of a large truck. As Robert Spencer puts it:

The names of his police guards need to be released. As does the name of the truck driver. Note that 'the rescue service and the police said it would take a lot for a vehicle to be able to pass into the other lane, given that it is separated by a wire fence.'

The Swedish police continue to investigate. Whatever the circumstances of the fatal crash, Douglas Murray is correct as to the broader cause of death:

Lars Vilks was a man, and an artist, of enormous courage. He should never have been in this situation, and if other artists and others across Europe had not been such cowards then he never would have been.

I ponder the grim arithmetic of that 2010 event. Six of us on stage that day: One firebombed, one forced into hiding and out of his job, one shot, and now one dead. It's like Agatha Christie for jihadists: And Then There Were None. Maybe someone would like to produce a film or a play on the theme. Ah, but no: As Douglas says quite correctly, Lars Vilks was only in that van because of the miserable cowardice of our so-called artists, a "community" that spends the whole year giving each other awards back and forth for their "courage" and "heroism".

Mark’s full column is here.

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