Settled Bets: Answers to Questions Brett Kavanaugh Has Us Asking
We (and you) have been talking a lot about Brett Kavanaugh for the past few weeks. Here are our closing thoughts on the issue, as well as a full accounting of how unbelievably awesome we are at predicting the future and making you money.
FIRST, THE BETTING ROUND-UP: If you had bet $10 bucks on the markets we picked, when we picked them, you would have turned a 188% profit. Summary below:
Will the Judiciary Report Kavanaugh by Oct 1?
$10 of YES at 42 cents — $23 gross — $13 profit
Will Bob Corker Vote for Kavanaugh by 10/31
$10 of YES at 58 cents — $17 gross – $7 profit
Will Kavanaugh be the next Supreme Court Justice?
$10 of YES at 62 cents – $16.00 gross – $6 profit
Will any Democrat vote for Kavanaugh?
$10 of YES at 57 cents -$17 gross – $7 profit
Will Kavanaugh get 51 votes in the Senate?
$10 YES at 20 cents – $0 gross — $-10 profit
Will Kavanaugh get 50 votes in the Senate?
$10 YES at 10 cents – $100 gross – $90 profit.
So for $60 of wagers, you would have returned a $113 profit. That’s a 188% yield.
And if you had doubled your bet on 50 votes, as we did, that jumps up to $203 at a 338% yield. Not bad for just reading a crummy blog.
PERSONAL LESSONS LEARNED: I learned that I am officially suspending my campaign to be a Supreme Court Justice.
That’s because when I was 20, I participated in a game called, “Edward Forty Hands.” Naturally, I do not want to be forced to testify in front of the Senate about who “Edward” was and why we were touching him with “Forty Hands.” Oh and also, I’ve never spent a day in law school.
While I’m at it, I think that the way Democrats handled Brett Kavanaugh basically gave Tennessee’s open Senate seat to Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R).Â
If the reason for this isn’t obvious to you, then I don’t know what to say. I can’t fix 20 years of bad parenting in 500 words of blogging. But as a reminder to those of you who have been living under a rock for the past six years, the University of Tennessee has been reeling since the infamous “butt chugging” scandal of 2012.
Fans of Old Rocky Top know what it’s liked to have your reputation ruined by unproven allegations about teenage binge drinking and are no doubt sympathetic to Brett Kavanaugh. There is no way that Democrat Phil Bresden can get elected in a climate like this. Also, there is no way that any of these guys ever butt chugged a beer. Ever. None. I deny it, CATEGORICALLY!!!
BIG PICTURE, LESSON LEARNED: Modern character assassinations remind me a lot of drug killings.
You might think that Kavanaugh did it. Or, you might think that the PC cops profiled him, then planted the evidence. But it’s interesting that every witness of the alleged crime had the same thing to say:
This tells me that either: (1) The Wire is an extremely popular TV series among alumni of Washington, D.C., prep schools; or, (2) Americans understand that politics operates by the same rules as the crack game. Namely, that “snitches get stitches,” which was probably a good thing for Kav’s friends to remember, given that all the politicians who took a hard stance on either side of the Kavanaugh question are currently getting more death threats in the mail than credit card offers.
Who ever thought that “political survival” would be a literal term in the USA?
TRUE STORY: Mitch McConnell is William Wallace, but the Republicans are still a hot mess.
The Godfather really pulled a rabbit out of his hat by uniting the Republican Party behind Brett Kavanaugh. It was a big departure from the GOP we’ve been used to since the Tea Party arrived — one where the Senate floor is usually used to advance ambitions for higher office (Ted Cruz) or to quibble over what it means to be a “true conservative” (Jim DeMint, Ben Sasse, Rand Paul, John McCain) at the expense of actually getting anything done.
So hats-off to McConnell for uniting an army behind Brett Kavanaugh that is demographically identical to the one that fought with William Wallace in 1298.
Don’t be a dummy though…
If you think that party unity among Republicans will last, you are wrong. When the new Congress starts, it’ll be back to this:
LESSON FOR FUTURE BETS: You should view the upcoming election with only the bare minimum level of nuance.
What does that mean? Okay, here we go…
Everyone knows that liberal America has been so outraged by Donald Trump that a majority of likely Democratic voters thinks that Rachael Maddow has a really cool haircut. But recent polls are also showing that the Kavanaugh hearings stirred-up Republican voters for the first time since 2016.
What this means to me is that many of the races that used to feel like anomalies will veer towards the predictable. For example, Republicans have been getting hives over Rep. Marsha Blackburn’s Senate race in Tennessee. But now that their voters are actually planning to show up this election, she will probably make a skin lamp out of former Gov. Phil Breseden’s campaign. Same goes for Senator Heidi Heitcamp (D-ND), who basically left a political suicide note last week. I would be shocked if she wasn’t already packing up her office in D.C.
Conversely, Republican Congressional seats in California look as uninhabitable as the deserts on the other side of the San Gabriel Mountains. I expect Democrats to score historically significant and potentially irreversible victories in Orange County, the last bastion of Ronald Reagan’s empire of California conservatism.
To politicos, this is about as shocking as waking up one morning to learn that George W. Bush was named chairman of the NAACP. But to a gambling addict, it fits into a new vision of this election: one where the energized bases of both parties clash and the victory goes towards whatever the regional demographic norm suggests. This is sort of like the Russian/Chinese model of warfare, where whichever side rushes more bodies at the enemy trench wins, never mind the stink and rot of the pointless slaughter.
As for the Democrats, this election is really a question about “how good can it get?” The real drama will come afterwards, when traditional Democrats have to learn to tolerate the diversity of the radical progressives who are about to wash-in on the blue wave. You know what this class is going to be full of: college campus liberals who believe in two methods of civil disobedience– the sit-in and the letter bomb. Let’s hope they stick to the former.
But where are the bets???
We’ll have some picks for you this week. Just say thank you for all the free money we gave you during the Kavanaugh Circus.
KEENDAWG.
