“Nobody knows anything…… Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.” – William Goldman, Hollywood screenwriter

***

1964: Republican Presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, tarred as a terrifying, warmongering radical, suffers an overwhelming defeat at the hands of Lyndon Johnson. People say the GOP may never recover.

1968: Johnson – under fire from his own party because of the Vietnam War – declines to run again.  His likely Democratic successor Robert F. Kennedy is assassinated, and George Wallace’s independent run for President causes further chaos. Republican Richard Nixon – the same Nixon who lost in 1960 and couldn’t get elected Governor of California two years later – is elected President.

1972: Democrat George McGovern is overwhelmingly beaten by Nixon in the Presidential election, following a disastrous campaign in which McGovern goes through two running mates and much of his own party abandons him.  He doesn’t even carry his home state. All of this comes after Nixon, a devout anti-communist, shocks the world by re-opening relations with Mao’s China. People say the Democratic Party may never recover.

1976: Watergate brings down Nixon, and takes down many Congressional Republicans with him.  Successor Gerald Ford holds off a primary challenge from Ronald Reagan, and the media has a field day with his high-profile gaffes.  Americans send Democrat Jimmy Carter to the White House. People say the Republican Party may never recover.

1980: Reagan is elected President, and the GOP takes back the Senate, after Carter struggles with the Iranian revolution and hostage crisis, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, economic stagnation and Ted Kennedy’s primary challenge. People say the Democratic Party, tainted with the malaise of the seventies, may never recover.

1982: The Democrats make big gains in the midterm elections, and the Reagan Administration struggles with a gruelling recession and increasing international tensions.  Half the world is convinced “Raygun” might start a nuclear war at any minute.  People say Reagan may never recover.

1984: Reagan wins re-election in a 49-state landslide, establishes a productive working relationship with Soviet premier Gorbachev, and the Cold War begins to thaw.  People say the Democratic Party may never recover.  Two years later, the Democrats win back complete control of Congress, and the Iran-Contra scandal damages Reagan’s Presidency – but not quite enough to keep his Vice-President, George Bush, from succeeding him in 1988.

And then a year later, the freaking Berlin Wall comes down.

1991: after triumphing in the first Gulf War and deftly handling the collapse of Communism – including the literal dissolution of the mighty Soviet Union – President Bush attains previously unimaginable levels of popularity.  Prominent Democrats decline to seek their party’s Presidential nomination, fearing another blowout.  People say the Democratic Party may never recover.

1992: After Bush is hit with a recession, a primary challenge from Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot’s third-party bid for the White House, Democrat Bill Clinton – the Governor of Arkansas – wins the Presidency.  People say the old and tired Republican Party may never recover.  Two years later the GOP takes over Congress in an electoral earthquake from which people say Clinton may never recover.  Two years after that, Clinton is re-elected in a landslide.

2001: After the 9/11 attacks, Americans rally around Republican President George W. Bush, whose popularity soars.  The GOP takes control of Congress in the 2002 mid-terms, the United States invades Iraq and takes down longtime foe Saddam Hussein, and Bush is re-elected in 2004.  People say the demoralised Democratic Party may never recover.  Two years later, after Iraq succumbs to sectarian violence and Hurricane Katrina devastates New Orleans, Democrats control Congress again.

2008: something once thought unthinkable happens – a little-known but exceptionally gifted and charismatic African-American Democrat named Barack Hussain Obama beats out the heavily favored Hillary Clinton to win his party’s nomination, and defeats respected GOP Senator John McCain in the general election.  The Republican Party is tied to a brutal recession and an unpopular war in Iraq, and McCain’s polarizing running-mate Sarah Palin – loved by the party base, a laughingstock to many more – creates further turmoil.  People say the Republican Party may never recover.

2010: the GOP storms back to life, sweeping both Houses of Congress and openly proclaiming their intent to make Obama a one-term President.  People say Obama may never recover.  Then 9/11 mastermind Obama bin Laden is found and killed on his watch, Obama is re-elected in 2012, and people say demographic trends mean the Republican Party may never recover.

2016: you know what just happened, and people are saying the Democratic Party – and the United States itself – may never recover.

2018, 2020 and beyond: that’s up to you, Americans.

In politics, just like the movie business, nobody knows anything.

(originally posted to my Facebook page)

Did Trump beat Clinton because of racism and sexism? In many cases, undoubtedly so. For those of us inclined to think Americans are mostly good people, it’s depressing to see how many backed Trump’s blatantly xenophobic campaign.

But the overall picture is more complicated, and I think left-wingers will make a big mistake in simply writing off 48-49% of their fellow Americans as irredeemable bigots.

South Carolina went for Trump. Not surprising for a southern state, right? But they also reelected an African-American Senator (Tim Scott) and are governed by an Indian-American female Governor (Nikki Haley). They’re both Republicans – and presumably many of that state’s Trump supporters voted for them.

I said he wouldn’t actually run for President. I was wrong.

I said he had no chance of getting the nomination. I was wrong.

I said there’s no way he’d be on the ballot for November. I was wrong.

I said there’s no way he can possibly be elected President of the United States. I was wrong.

I think he will he a catastrophically bad President.

I hope and pray I’m wrong.

Not long ago, after the Access Hollywood tape came out, I pondered the possibility of Hillary Clinton winning every single state in Tuesday’s presidential election.

Yeah, that’s not gonna happen.

But even in this week of closing polls, FBI anti-Clinton leaks and Republican voters supposedly “coming home” to their party’s candidate, I still think Hillary Clinton is going to win the election – and it won’t even be close. In fact, by 11PM Eastern time on Tuesday, I think we’ll be wondering what we were so worried about. 

Behold my map:

Click the map to create your own at 270toWin.com

The reason? Turnout. Even if Trump is even in the polls, that doesn’t mean anything if his supporters don’t get out and vote.

Donald Trump is a genius at using the mass media to get his message out, but compared to Clinton, his ground operation is sorely lacking.  The Democrats are spending more money, and using many more people, to make sure that their supporters make it to the polls.

Plus, Trump’s conspiracist message – that the system is rigged and the election itself might be fixed – can work against him.  If you’re a Trump supporter and you know that the fix is in, why bother taking the time to vote in the first place?

Finally, Hillary Clinton is acting like a candidate playing for the win, not just holding her gains. She is spending much of this weekend in Ohio, a state where Trump has consistently led in the polls. Team Hillary is still trying to expand its map, not just fight over battleground states like Florida.

Never mind the must-win purple states like where Trump has to run the table: if he loses Ohio he is finished.

When the dust settles I’m predicting a decisive win for Clinton, including the close but traditionally Republican-supporting states of Arizona and Georgia. Trump is ahead in these states, but not enough to overcome the Democrats’ ground advantage.

One last thought: if you really, legitimately believe Trump would be better for the country, by all means, vote for him. I won’t hold that against you.

But if you know Trump is dangerously unqualified but support him anyway, out of pure partisan spite…that will be neither forgotten nor forgiven.

Sixteen years ago, an Ontario man agreed to donate sperm to a medical school classmate so she could conceive his child.  Now, she’s coming after him for child support:

…in 2000 she called on him to fulfil a decades-old promise: donate his sperm so she could undergo IVF and become a mother. Eventually, she would have two babies using those embryos, both of whom are now teenagers.

Ranson’s legal team say he agreed to be a “spuncle” — fertility law slang for known sperm donors who stay involved in their offspring’s lives. As a gay man, he had no intention of having his own children but was happy to help his old friend, and to remain in contact with the kids as a member of their extended family.

“The problem is he never would have donated if had he known she was seeking any financial support from him,” said Kelly Jordan of Jordan Battista LLP and Levitan’s co-counsel.

(Prediction: a sitcom called “Spuncle” will air for half a season on ABC within the next decade.)

A curious wrinkle to this case is that the sperm donor actually remained very active in the lives of his biological children.  It will be interesting to see if the court compares this to an in loco parentis situation, where a person who is not a biological parent nonetheless takes on a parenting role, imposing upon him an obligation to pay child support.

Cullimore, in her application first filed in 2015 in an Ontario court seeking child support, claims Ranson has acted the part of the father the teens’ whole lives. (Cullimore’s lawyer responded to a request for comment by telling the National Post not to publish the story and did not address an emailed series of questions.)

His parents acted as grandparents; the teens met Ranson’s extended family on holidays. Ranson paid for trips for the children to visit him in Europe, or to take them to Disneyland. In 2011, he gave Cullimore $22,000 to help out with costs, a chunk of which is now in Registered Education Savings Plans to pay for the teens’ pending post-secondary education.

After the second child was born in 2002, the pair signed an agreement giving her full custody, as well as power over education and health care. It said she “would not look to (Ranson) for any financial support.”

But now she’s arguing he has acted as a father all along.

“They clearly view him as their ‘dad,’” the application states, adding the teens exchange emails with him, he signs them “dad” and as recently as 2015 they spent a week with him and his partner in Italy. “The Applicant Mother has tried to pay for all activities, including ongoing child-care costs of over $800 per month as she works 24-hour shifts (as a medical doctor), but she can no longer afford to do so.”

[…]

If Cullimore is successful in her case, Ranson will be on the hook for four years of retroactive child support, since 2012, as well as other expenses, including post-secondary education. His contributions would be “significant” and based on a grid used to determine child support payments, his lawyers said.

“He feels like now he’s being punished for having been a good spuncle,” Jordan said. “How does he maintain a good relationship with these kids now?

“This is not something he signed on for.”

In Nova Scotia and many other jurisdictions, the courts view child support as the right of the child, not something easily signed away by the parent.  If the parents come to an agreement that no child support will be paid (or even if the support amount deviates from the amount specified for the payor’s income in the Child Support Guidelines)  the Judge will want a reasonable explanation before issuing a consent order or registering a separation agreement.

In other words, even if the parties in an assisted-reproduction case had a signed agreement that the mother wouldn’t seek child support, the court may not uphold its provisions.  And that’s why anyone who steps forward as a sperm donor should bear in mind that he may find himself taking on a very large financial burden.

1st world American non-Muslims at @splcenter listed me, a liberal reform Muslim, as an “anti-Muslim Extremist”. This is a target on my head.

— Radical (@MaajidNawaz) October 27, 2016

Attacking Muslims and criticizing the Islamic faith are not the same thing.  The former is bigotry; the latter is subjecting a set of ideals and religious tenets to the same test that every other religion – including my own – should be subjected to.

That distinction is lost on many of the far-right professional anti-Muslims listed in a “Field Guide to Anti-Muslim Extremists” published by the Southern Poverty Law Center.  Unfortunately, it looks like the distinction is also lost on the SPLC itself.

Alongside such deserving targets as Frank Gaffney and Pam Gellar (the latter of whom once pushed the theory that Malcolm X was Barack Obama’s real father) the SPLC savages Daniel Pipes for such crimes as wrongly suggesting that the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing was carried out by Islamists – an unfortunate error, but understandable a mere two years after the original World Trade Center bombing.  Also – you might want to sit down for this one – he says the Islamic State is Islamic in nature:

In a Sept. 10, 2014, article in The National Review, Pipes reacted furiously to President Obama’s “preposterous claim” that the Islamic State was “not Islamic” in nature. Contrary to Obama’s “idiocy,” he said, the infamous terrorist organization is “100 percent Islamic … profoundly Islamic.”

Only a radical would believe that ISIS represents all Muslims. Pipes is deemed a radical for saying that ISIS are Muslims in the first place.

The SPLC report also takes a shot at atheist ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, but the most despicable inclusion is that of practicing Muslim Maajid Nawiz, who has written consistently and clearly about how he believes elements of his religion should be reformed.   Apparently he got a lap dance once, so checkmate.  Also, this:

According to a Jan. 24, 2014, report in The Guardian, Nawaz tweeted out a cartoon of Jesus and Muhammad — despite the fact that many Muslims see it as blasphemous to draw Muhammad. He said that he wanted “to carve out a space to be heard without constantly fearing the blasphemy charge.”

The SPLC, it would appear, thinks tweeting a cartoon of Muhammad is an act of bigotry, because many Muslims see it as a blasphemous act.

In other words, they’re letting the most devout, illiberal members of the faith set the rules for everyone else, Muslim or not.  It’s like saying eating shellfish is an anti-semitic act, or using birth control is anti-Catholic bigotry.

Anti-Islam bigots like Gellar say that there’s no such thing as “moderate Islam,” and that the extremists are in fact accurately representing their faith.  Turns out that the storied Southern Poverty Law Center, in its own way, is saying the exact same thing.

After a 2014 shooting at Fort Hood, Texas, Hollywood agent turned extreme-right commentator Patrick Dollard weighed in thusly:

Dolllard still hates Muslims, but lately he’s been turning his attention elsewhere:

Jewish Billionaire Tom Steyer Registers 1 Million Millennials To Vote Against Trump https://t.co/dBPcaiiQjQ #tcot #pjnet #gop

— Patrick Dollard (@PatDollard) October 24, 2016

Concern Grows Over Jewish Anti-Christian Soros’s American Voting Machines https://t.co/lHOHuQJol7 https://t.co/uppS06DOPf

— Patrick Dollard (@PatDollard) October 24, 2016

WATCH – Jewish #ESPN Host: “I Had No Right” To Say Blacks Aren’t Still Oppressed By Whites https://t.co/qgSLoO0Ikh #tcot #lnyhbt #gop #pjnet pic.twitter.com/WIU8LtPCP2

— Patrick Dollard (@PatDollard) October 24, 2016

Poll: Anti-American, Anti-Caucasian, Anti-Christian Hillary Leads Trump By 42 Points Among Jewish Voters https://t.co/7IvVbu5awa#tcot#gop

— Patrick Dollard (@PatDollard) October 6, 2016

Yes, Dollard is something of a fringe character – even Breitbart.com, to which he once contributed, disassociated themselves from him after his 2014 “slaughter all Muslims” tweet.  But he’s not the only Trump-supporting alt-rightist who despises the Jews.  Not even close:

She had seen her face superimposed on the body of a concentration camp inmate. She had been called “a slimy Jewess.” She had been told she “deserved the oven.” One anonymous individual had electronically harassed her for 19 hours straight.

Things got so bad that Bethany Mandel, a 30-year-old freelance writer in Highland Park, N.J., decided one afternoon last spring to drive to a nearby gun shop. A mother of two small children, she now keeps a .22 in her home.

What had she done to provoke so much vitriol? She posted some messages onTwitter drawing attention to the fact that Donald J. Trump seemed to have a lot of anti-Semitic supporters.

[…]

Anti-Semitism has been resurgent in Europe for years. But it has taken on a new dimension in the United States with the emergence of the Trump campaign, whose battle against political correctness has provided a kind of on-ramp for bigotry to enter the political mainstream.

During its investigation, the organization found that 2.6 million anti-Semitic messages were posted on Twitter from August 2015 to July 2016. Of those, 19,253 were directed at journalists.

There was a significant uptick starting early this year, when the presidential campaign began to intensify, the organization said in its report, to be released on Wednesday. More than 800 journalists have been the subject of anti-Semitic attacks on Twitter, with 10 of them receiving 83 percent of the total attacks.

The words appearing most frequently in the Twitter biographies of the attackers were “Trump,” “nationalist,” “conservative” and “white.” Many of the owners of the 1,600 Twitter accounts were anonymous, though at least two are prominent white supremacists: Andrew Anglin, the founder of the website The Daily Stormer, and Lee Rogers of the Infostormer.

The report was careful not to suggest that the Trump campaign “supported or endorsed” the anti-Semitic attacks, but noted that many had been sent by his supporters.

That’s why it was so startling to see the pro-Trump Ezra Levant gleefully spreading a meme revived by Germany’s extreme right, and associated with the freaking Nazis:

CBC lugenpresse calls Canada’s oilsands the “tarsands”. https://t.co/ezcfWy5Afm

— Ezra Levant (@ezralevant) October 23, 2016

Lugenpresse literally means “lying press,” and while the term long pre-dates the Nazis, they’re the ones who really took it to the next level.  Lately, the word has been revived by Germany’s anti-immigrant PEGIDA movement, and now the Trump campaign:

“Tell the truth!” and “CNN sucks!” have become staples at nearly every Trump rally.On Saturday night, a new and foreign accusation came to the fore: “Lügenpresse!”

The term, which means “lying press” in German, has a history dating back to the mid-1800s and was used by the Nazis to discredit the media. In recent years, it has been revived by German far-right anti-immigrant groups. And on Saturday, it made an appearance at a Trump rally in Cleveland, Ohio.

After the rally finished, one man approached the press pen and shouted insults, accusing the media of being in the tank for the Clintons and being “bought and paid for.” Another man, wearing a Make America Great Again hat and holding a sign with the same slogan, walked up beside him and began yelling at the press that we were “lügenpresse,” adding that the phrase means “lying press” in German. The first man started shouting it too, then turned to the second and made a self-deprecating remark about not pronouncing it right.

[…]

The alt-right has been emboldened this year by Trump’s rise; the chairman of Breitbart News, who has spoken of his website being a home for the alt-right, is now Trump’s campaign CEO, and Hillary Clinton’s speech tying Trump to the alt-right launched the movement to new heights of notoriety. The embrace of a term like “lügenpresse” is, as [white nationalist leader Robert] Spencer says, classic alt-right; the proud “shitlords” of the movement take pride in embracing edgy terminology, the more anti-PC the better.

Like many of his alt-right brethren, Levant seems to think this is all a big laugh, a way to stick it to the politically correct virtue signalers.  I don’t think it will be so funny when his allies inevitably turn on him.

(Disclosure: when Levant’s The Rebel started up, I contributed to its now-dormant group blog, The Megaphone.  To give credit where it’s due, the site posted several pieces which went against its editorial line, including several anti-Trump posts.)