Mass stabbing and attempted vehicle attack in Melbourne Australia was inspired by ISIS.

A screencap showing the attacker fighting with the police. Wall Street Journal/STR/EPA.

A mass stabbing and attempted vehicle arson attack in Melbourne Australia which left one person dead was inspired by ISIS. Wall Street Journal. The suspect, a 30 year old Somali immigrant named Hassan Khalif Shire Ali killed one person and wounded two more before being shot and killed by police. Ali was known to Australian police due to radical comments but was not considered a threat. Ali had also set fire to his car that had several gas canisters inside and was apparently attempting to use it as a crude bomb. Though inspired by ISIS an claimed by the terror group as one of their own, no direct links to the terror group have been found. 

EDIT: The video I had posted has been deleted by The Guardian for some reason. 

My Comment:

This attack flew under the radar in America. Our media here is still bloviating on the election and the mass shooting that occurred in California. Those two stories have sucked the air out of the room for any other story, which is why I hadn't covered the story until now. 

It seems like a fairly important attack though. Australia has had quite a few terror attacks recently, mostly from Islamic immigrants. This one is no exception and it just goes to show that even as ISIS has been greatly reduced, the threat of terrorism still holds. Even if ISIS were to be completely defeated their legacy and huge archive of propaganda and followers can still recruit new terrorists. 

This attacker seemed fairly incompetent, which has been a pattern since ISIS has fizzled out. Gone are the complicated and well planned attacks like the Paris attacks back in 2015. Now it's amateur hour. But even amateurs can kill people. This attack won't have the impact as the various attacks during the bloody years where ISIS was dominate but it still will have an effect. 

The attacker was able to set a fire and stab a few people, killing one innocent civilian, but he didn't accomplish much else. His plan to turn his car into a crude bomb by setting it on fire with a few gas canisters was never going to work. He would have been better off hitting people with the car instead, even after Australia has installed barriers to prevent that. I do have to say that he could have accidentally caused way more deaths and injures with the fire if he knew what he was doing. Thankfully it's pretty clear that he wasn't an his plan was a pretty poor one. 

I was totally shocked by the Australian police. Australian police are armed but it was very clear that they didn't shoot this guy soon enough. He as actively trying to stab them and they still didn't put him down until what seemed like several minutes of fighting. In America this attacker would have been ventilated almost immediately after police had arrived on the scene since he was actively trying to kill people. I do know that Australia has different rules of engagement and less violent crime in general, but you would think officer safety would be a larger priority there. It was pure luck that with their current practices that one of their officers wasn't killed in this attack. 

This was another "known wolf" attack insofar as that Australian police were aware of the attacker but didn't realize he was such a threat. It makes me wonder what kind of rules the police in Australia and internationally are using for determining that. My guess is that there are so many Islamic radicals out there that it's hard to separate those that are just shooting their mouths off and those that are an actual threat. If so, I don't envy their job as that sounds extremely difficult to get right. 

Voter fraud in Florida? Governor and Senator Elect Scott successfully sues Broward County over ballot issues.

Florida Governor Rick Scott (R). State of Florida. 

Governor and Senator elect Rick Scott has successfully sued Broward county over ballot issues in the 2018 midterms. Fox News. A judge ruled that the Broward county election officials were violating election laws and the Florida State constitution. The suit alleged that the county officials were hiding the number of votes tallied and counted. The judge ordered immediate access for GOP officials and the preservation of evidence. Two heavily Democratic counties, Broward and Palm Beach, have found thousands of new votes long after the rest of the state has finished their counts and it is tightening what was a sure victory in the Governor and Senate races there. In Palm Beach election officials violated the law when judging damaged or incomplete ballots with no oversight from the GOP or general public. 

My Comment:

The head of the Broward County election, Dr. Brenda Snipes has already interfered with the 2016 election. During that election she declared the results before the votes were fully counted and also destroyed ballots in a congressional race. That alone should have been enough to completely remove her from the political world and give her a hefty prison sentence in a sane world. But in this world she was allowed to interfere again in 2018.

It also boggles my mind that the counties hit by Hurricane Michael were able to get their votes counted just fine. Broward County wasn't hit by the hurricane so they have no excuse for these late ballots. It reeks of incompetence and maleficence. 

As far as I am concerned it doesn't matter if voter fraud went on. Just the fact that these election officials aren't following the law and allowing transparency is a huge threat. Even if everything is on the up and up, people will lose faith in the elections if someone isn't punished here and punished severely. And if actual voter fraud is found then something drastic needs to be done. No if, ands, or buts. 

But did it happen? I am guessing it did. You don't just "find" thousands of ballots that all go against Republicans a couple of days after the election. Ballots don't just appear out of nowhere. Someone has to keep track of them and if the chain of custody is broken then there is no way to trust their validity. My guess is that they had a good idea what the results were and "found" a bunch of ballots that they had filled out themselves using the voter rolls to determine who was registered but hadn't voted. 

Having zero oversight over damaged or incomplete ballots is a massive issue as well. Without neutral or GOP observers there is no way to tell if the officials in Palm Beach were playing it fair or if they were just doing whatever they could to mark ballots their way. It is a massive problem and it is utterly insane to me that it would ever happen like this in America. 

Of course Broward County is one of the most corrupt in the country. There have been election issues there dating back to the election of George Bush. And the rot extends far beyond elections, they also completely screwed up the Parkland school shooting. It's a very corrupt and dangerous county that needs some serious federal investigations. 

It sees like Florida is not the only problem right now as well. President Trump also pointed out that the election in Arizona has been a mess too. The critical senate race there hasn't been called yet with similar problems of "lost" votes showing up. And I remember watching the election results for Wisconsin. Scott Walker had a 1000 to 2000 vote lead for most of the night then, even though Milwaukee County had been called 100%, 30,000 votes for Tony Evers came out of nowhere. 

I do have to say that there is a massive amount of hypocrisy from the Democrats here. For two years we had to hear about how the 2016 elections were invalid due to Russia buying a few facebook ads and some fake twitter accounts. But now that there are accusations of domestic election interference, they are suddenly against transparency and criminal investigations. 

This is also a very dark day for our country. Elections are one of the few ways people have to solve their differences without violence. When elections are corrupt and it's clear that one side isn't playing fair then what recourse is left for the other side short of violence? The aggressive moves by Governor Rick Scott and President Donald Trump may forestall that but if they fail, things could go bad very quickly in this country. We must all hope that the truth in Florida comes out and people are punished for their behavior here. If not our country could be heading to a truly dark place. 

What to make of the 2018 midterm results and what it means for the future.

As you now, the 2018 midterms were yesterday. As of this writing not all of the races have been called, but generally speaking it was a confusing night. The Democrats had a decent night in the house gaining enough seats to gain control of the body. Republicans expanded their lead in the Senate while several Governor's races flipped for each side, including my state of Wisconsin.

It's pretty clear that I was wrong that the Dems would not win the house. I gave it a 70/30 percent chance that the Republicans would win in the house. That didn't happen. In my defense I did say that I was a lot less confident in victory than in 2016, but that doesn't mean I deserve much credit for that.

So what happened?

-Historical inertia. Presidents almost always lose their midterm elections. For example, Barack Obama got destroyed in 2010. The GOP picked up 63 house seats, 6 senate seats and 6 governor's seats as well. It's just one of those things that happen, similar to why Bush was replaced by Obama and Obama was replaced by Trump. It's just as rare for a party to keep the presidency after two terms as it is for a president to keep seats in the house during the midterms. I thought that this election was going to be different but it obviously was not.

-Strategic considerations. It was pretty clear that keeping control of the Senate was a huge priority for President Trump. Without the Senate he wouldn't be able to confirm any new judges or replace any new cabinet members, which he just did today with Jeff Sessions. Control of the house would have been nice too, but it wasn't critical like the Senate was.

Towards this end, Trump campaigned heavily for critical senate races and won most of them. It was also a counter move to the Democrats who dumped millions of dollars into races like Texas against Ted Cruz. If Trump and the GOP had focused on holding the house, they might have kept it but they would have lost the Senate instead.

-Bad leadership in the house. Let's face it, Paul Ryan did nothing to keep control of the lower chamber. Ryan was part of the never Trump wing of the Republicans and never had the President's back. He also was a lame duck candidate that wasn't running this year and would be out of power in a few months anyways. He didn't care what happened in the House because he is phoning it in anyways.

Contrast this to the Senate where leadership like Mitch McConnell and Lindsey Graham were stumping all over the country to try and win the Senate. Unlike Ryan they were actually trying.

-Lack of October surprises against the Democrats. There were a couple of bad stories for the Republicans in the lead up to the election but nothing really bad happened in the lead up to the primaries. There was the Kavanaugh debacle but that was weeks ago and was already out of the news. Had the FISA warrants been released it might have changed things but that would have been a huge risk if Trump lost the senate.

-Media bias. Speaking of the news, the news probably had an effect. Three years of the media just completely abandoning even the most basic attempts to be unbiased. The constant attacks of racism, sexism and every other ism there is in the book probably convinced a few people to vote for Democrats and got the vote out for them as well.

-Tech censorship. In the past I had paid for advertisement for this blog. I did so in the lead up to the 2016 election via facebook. I didn't spend much money at all, but it did help me reach a larger audience. It wasn't a huge effect but I did get a lot more views that way.

This didn't happen in 2018. I had tried to buy a few ads a couple of times on Facebook but it was no longer possible. Facebook no longer allows ads of a political nature unless you sign you life away, give two factor authentication and go through dozens of hoops. It wasn't worth the effort for me and a lot of other smaller writers, bloggers and activists anymore and those were disproportionately on the right.

And even if you could advertise there was no guarantee that your message would be heard. Almost all of the tech companies out there have banned hundreds of conservative accounts. Thankfully I wasn't one of them but many of the most influential people on the right were kicked off all the major platforms. People like Alex Jones, Gavin McInnes and Rodger Stone were completely silenced. And the one big tech company that didn't censor conservatives, Gab? It was taken down right before the election and only came back a couple of days ago.

So what does the 2018 midterms mean for the future?

-For me personally it was devastating. Forget about the national elections, my state got screwed. I have never been a fan of Scott Walker but he has kept the economy of this state humming and greatly expanded gun rights. With Tony Evers in power both of those things are at risk. Unlike the left, I don't want Evers to fail if it means bringing Wisconsin down with him, but I have little faith that he will leave office with Wisconsin being a better state then it was. Horrible.

-This may actually help Trump in the long run. Many of the house Republicans that lost were anti-Trump people that were no help for him and were actually holding him back. With the fat cut out of the party it's very clear that it's Trump's party now.

Trump also has a built in excuse for anything that goes wrong. Any failures in the house the past two years had to be at either his fault or Paul Ryan and for either to call the other out would hurting unity. That isn't a problem anymore as Nancy Pelosi is the perfect scapegoat.

Trump is also set for the 2020 elections. It won't be likely that the Democrats can take back the Senate with the victories yesterday. The map just doesn't work for them anymore.

-Expect total gridlock from the government. With the GOP in control of the Senate and the Democrats holding the house it's an uphill battle for any new legislation. They have almost zero reason to work with each other so almost nothing will get done from the legislative branch, with pot legalization being a possible exception (I might get around to a post on this topic soon).

-Expect rounds of investigations and counter-investigations.The endless Russia distraction is likely to continue and there will be investigations into the investigation of why that investigation started. It seems very clear that the gloves are coming off. With Jeff Sessions being shown the door it also seems very clear that the investigations will not only be coming from the Democrats.

-The Judicial branch and federal bureaucracy will continue to be staffed with Trump people. With a stronger hold over the senate and only one anti-Trump GOP senator left (Mitt Romney of Utah) Trump has a rubber stamp now to approve judges up to and including Supreme Court Justices. There is a very good chance that if Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies or retires the court will be a 6-3 majority. And she's not the only one that might leave...

All that being said, I don't think this election was a disaster (other than for my state with a new Democratic governor). It's going to be status quo ante for the most part. Neither side delivered any knockout blows and nobody can really claim victory.

My midterms voting experience.

Here's my promised "voting experience" post. I was #109 at my poling place and it sure was busy. I arrived there at 7:20 AM and didn't get out of their until 7:55. There was a LOT of turnout, comparable to the 2016 presidential election. Part of that is likely due to the fact that I showed up right away in the morning. 

The crowd skewed older. I don't think I saw anyone over the age of 25. I live in a college town and when I voted in 2016 there were a couple of younger people that were voting, obviously for their first time, but I didn't see them this time around. This may have been due to the time of day, I know that when I was in college I would be voting after lunch at the earliest but still, I expected to see a few younger people. Even the people in their late twenties were the minority as the crowd seemed to be my age (35) and older. 

I also saw only two people register to vote. Everyone else was already good to go. The two that I saw were an older gentleman and a woman who was one of the few people in her twenties. This seemed odd to me as even during other elections there were more people registering for the first time. This was even true for the Wisconsin primaries, which only took about five minutes to vote. 

The mood of the people seemed pretty upbeat, with a few people complaining about the lines. I was kind of surprised that nobody complained that the line extended outside of the building. It was raining here this morning so I got a little wet, but even if a hobo ran up to me and stabbed me in my ribs I was going to vote. A little rain wasn't going to stop me. 

A couple of people did not stay in line after it was clear it wasn't going to be an in and out thing. One younger couple left early without voting as they had to take their kid to school. That's something I have never seen before in any election. I wonder how serious they were about coming back and voting later? They were talking about noon, but that's probably an even worse time to vote with everyone taking their lunch breaks. 

I do have to say that my local polling place seemed a bit disorganized. Part of it was because the line was divided by last name. This seems like a good idea in practice but in execution it never seems to work out. Just like in 2016 the people with names A-N got screwed while the M-Z people were able to skip half the line! Just my luck I was in the first group. 

Other than that it was a fairly painless voting experience. It took a bit longer than I would have liked but that's my fault for not early voting and for doing it right away in the morning. It was the only time I could do it easily though so it worked out. I am so glad that I got to vote and I was even a little irrationally worried that I WAS going to get stabbed by a hobo or get into a car crash or something so I would end up missing voting. Now that it is done, it's like a weight off of my head. 

As for this blog, a reminder. I probably won't have a reaction post up tonight. I do have work tomorrow and I doubt that election results will be completely called by this evening. I also don't expect to write it tomorrow morning but I should have one up by Wednesday night. 

As for tonight, I may have a post up about non-election related things though that is going to depend on what happens in terms of stories and time constraints. I do have to go grocery shopping tonight, so I might just take tonight off and just relax. I think I earned it! 

My general predictions for tomorrow's election.

The last post I had on this blog was all about why I am voting for the Republicans in the 2018 midterms. This post is not that post. Instead I will be posting who I think will win control of the house and senate as a result of this election. It's still my opinion but I hope that my reasoning is as free from bias as it can get. This isn't a "get out the vote" post but "who will win" one.

The media seems to be pretty deep into the "blue wave" theory of the election. The general prediction is that though the Republicans will hold onto the senate or even gain a seat or two, the house will fall under a wave of new Democratic members of congress and that they will easily take control of the house.

I don't buy it. Why? Well for one it seems pretty clear that the media doesn't buy it either. Already they are hedging their bets saying that the GOP has a decent chance to hold onto the house. Given how embarrassed they were in 2016 I am guessing that this hedging is to make any outcome that isn't a total Democrat victory less embarrassing for them. That's why we have seen so many articles the last couple of days where they ask "what if the Republicans win?" and why Nate Sliver is backing down on his predictions. Indeed, even the "Dems win house, GOP wins Senate", narrative is a step down from the original blue wave prediction where the Democrats would win both.

So what do I think? I think that the GOP is going to pick up at least 5-6 seats in the senate and have a chance at a 60 seat super majority. In the house I think they are probably going to lose a couple of seats but won't lose control of the body. I'm not 100% confident of this outcome. If I were to put it into percentages I'd give it about a 50% shot of a minor GOP victory (keeps the house and gains senate seats) a 20% chance of a "red wave" (gains seats in the house and/or gets a supermajority in the senate) a 29% chance of losing the house to the democrats and a 1% chance of a blue wave (where the GOP loses in both the house and the senate).

I'm not as confident as I was during the 2016 presidential election. Why? Well we had history on our side for that one. It's very frequent that after a two term president that the other party gains control. But in the midterms history is against the GOP as the ruling party almost always loses seats during the midterms. In a normal election year it's almost unheard off that the ruling party wins

This isn't a normal election year though, to say the least. For one thing, in the senate, the Democrats are at a huge disadvantage. Few GOP held seats are even up for election while many Democratic ones are. And those seats tend to be in States that went for Trump in 2016. Of the Senate Democrats running in red states, only Joe Manchin seems safe, due in part for his vote for Kavanaugh and his general reputation as the last sane Democrat in the Senate (at least in the eyes of his red state voters).

President Trump's approval rating seems fairly high as well. Rasmussen's daily approval rating for him hovers around 50%  and even the more biased polls have him above 40%, which is much better than it has been. Trump's approval rating among minorities has jumped as well, sometimes hitting as high as 40% among blacks. Those are probably outlier polls but even if 10% of blacks switch to the GOP it will be devastating to the Democrats.

Trump has also been working his ass off trying to get out the vote. He had held dozens of huge election rallies in critical states. The turnout for these rallies has been extraordinary. I've never seen turnout so high for midterm rallies with tens of thousands of people waiting in lines for hours to see their president promote local and federal election candidates. The Democrats election rallies, on the other hand, have been a joke with even major stars like former President Obama or Bernie Sanders only getting a few thousand people. This suggests that voter enthusiasm is on the side of the GOP.

I also don't think that the polls are very accurate. I was citing Rasmussen above but they are one of the few polling companies that got the 2016 election right. Rasmussen today says that the congressional ballot is basically tied, with the GOP having a slight one point lead. This seems more realistic than other polls that say the Democrats have a huge advantage on a general ballot.

Why do I think the other polls have it wrong? I don't think they ever learned their lessons from 2016, or they did and don't care. In those polls they always over sampled Democrats to a ridiculous degree and then adjusted their polling results based on what they thought the polls were telling them instead of just reporting the raw numbers. I consider this to be due to bias by the pollsters and the media who reports on the polls.

I also think that the regular Republicans aren't being honest with pollsters. I know I have seen many people on the right saying that not only do they lie about who they are going to vote for, but they encourage others to do so as well. Some of that is due to real fear of being attacked or otherwise harmed by crazies that hate the GOP, which is especially true in blue states. The rest is due to people just being fed up with the perceived bias of polling companies and trying to make them look even stupider than they already are. This "shy Tory" effect was well documented in the 2016 election and any poll that doesn't try to factor this in is probably underestimating GOP support by a goo 1 to 5%.

The news has been fairly good for the GOP lately as well. The economy is booming right now and I think voters realize that it is largely due to the GOP. I know that I personally received raises both due to the Republican tax cuts and the fact that there are so many job openings my company had to raise wages to compete. With wages going up and tons of new jobs people have very little reason to want to change course outside of culture war BS.

I also think that the Democrats drastically misunderstood how that Kavanaugh confirmation and the Central American caravan would play to the electorate. Time and time again I have heard how the Kavanaugh confirmation was a crossing of the Rubicon for the Democrats. People were utterly disgusted by the behavior of the Democrats during the confirmation hearings. The idea that the Democrats were perfectly willing to destroy a good man over completely unreliable and even made up accusations was a real eye opener for people. I have heard from multiple people that the Kavanaugh confirmation debacle has pushed them from being independent voters to straight ticket GOP.

The Caravan was handled poorly as well. People will tolerate immigrants but the won't tolerate people who so flagrantly violate the law. The Democrats looked like idiots when they claimed that the Caravan were a bunch of innocent women and children when the men in the Caravan were fighting with Mexican police. The Caravan is hugely unpopular and people are furious not only at them but those that are enabling them as well. Whatever you think of Trump's border moves at least he can say he is trying to do something about the Caravan. The Democrats though seem to be actively encouraging them to come here which plays horribly

The bad news for the GOP kind of fizzled as well. The fake bombing campaign by an apparent disturbed Trump supporter had very little impact. Everyone considered the fake bombs to be an absolute joke and among Republicans it was dismissed as either a false flag or a made up controversy. Everyone knew that nobody was in any real danger and that the bomber was a nutjob and not a representative of mainstream GOP thought.

The shooting at a Synagogue might have had an effect but it too disappeared from the news very quickly. Part of that is just general fatigue of mass shooting stories. People just don't care anymore. I also think that the fact that the Synagogue was involved in importing migrants erased quite a bit of sympathy from the victims during this time, as sad as it is to say. Most importantly, the fact that the attacker hated President Trump made it impossible to blame the GOP for it.

So how could I be wrong about this? I do think that voter fraud is a huge issue that hasn't been fully addressed. Voter ID laws have helped but many states still do not have them. And with news from Georgia of the Democrats being accused of hacking election databases, it's clear that the threat is real. And there are still millions of illegal aliens living in America under assumed identities who may be able to vote.

It also might depend on how motivated the Democrats' base is. Though the Democrats haven't really offered voters anything other than a giant middle finger to Trump, that could be enough. Though Trump's approval ratings have risen considerably, the people that hate him REALLY hate him, to the point of irrationality. Angry people do have a tendency to show up at the polls. I think that turnout is going to be good for both sides and we can't just assume that only the GOP is angry.

Still, with all that being said, I do think that the GOP should do well on Tuesday. I will stand by my 70/30 prediction of a GOP win. If they do lose I will be surprised but not totally shocked. But if I were a betting man I would be putting money down on the GOP to win on Tuesday.

Finally, I am not going to be able to cover the election as well as I would want. I do have to work tomorrow and Wednesday so I will not be able to do a late night post recapping the results Tuesday night into Wednesday morning. I do expect to have a recap post up Wednesday night where I will either bask in the glory of correct predictions or try and explain how I am not an idiot despite being wrong. I also expect to have a short "voting experience" post up after I hit the polls Tuesday morning and may even have another non-election post up Tuesday night if I have the time.