Images | Commentary | Digital Scrapbook
“…President Trump has repeatedly called out Google, Facebook and Twitter for liberal bias. Two weeks until the midterms, it would appear he may have had a point.
Employees of the tech giants have given a total of $2.4 million to House and Senate candidates, according to Federal Election Commission filings. Of that, only $176,000 – just eight percent – went to Republicans.
By comparison, in the last midterms in 2014, Google, Facebook and Twitter workers gave a total of $838,000 to congressional candidates, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Of that, $679,000 went to Democrats and $259,000 went to Republicans.
In July, President Trump accused Twitter of “shadow banning” prominent Republicans. “Not good,” he tweeted. He also accused Google in a series of tweets in August of playing up negative articles about him in search results…”
David Gelernter:
“…Every big U.S. election is interesting, but the coming midterms are fascinating for a reason most commentators forget to mention: The Democrats have no issues. The economy is booming and America’s international position is strong. In foreign affairs, the U.S. has remembered in the nick of time what Machiavelli advised princes five centuries ago: Don’t seek to be loved, seek to be feared.
The contrast with the Obama years must be painful for any honest leftist. For future generations, the Kavanaugh fight will stand as a marker of the Democratic Party’s intellectual bankruptcy, the flashing red light on the dashboard that says “Empty.” The left is beaten.
This has happened before, in the 1980s and ’90s and early 2000s, but then the financial crisis arrived to save liberalism from certain destruction. Today leftists pray that Robert Mueller will put on his Superman outfit and save them again.
For now, though, the left’s only issue is “We hate Trump.” This is an instructive hatred, because what the left hates about Donald Trump is precisely what it hates about America. The implications are important, and painful…”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-real-reason-they-hate-trump-1540148467?mod=hp_opin_pos1&fbclid=IwAR3p2dY69CNP1LE7mhLlB78dsSAopIbmXix-2rzhE6m3mKXNViMHY_ziQSc
Angelo Codevilla:
“…Partisan “dirty tricks” are unremarkable. But when networks within government and those who occupy society’s commanding heights play them against persons trying to unseat them, they constitute cold civil war against the voters, even coups d’etat. What can possibly answer such acts? And then what?
These people, including longstanding officials of the FBI and CIA, are related to one another intellectually, morally, professionally, socially, financially, politically, maritally, and extramaritally. Their activities to stop the anti-establishment candidate, and president—in this case, Trump—have spanned the public and private realms, and involved contacts in Britain and Australia. They enjoy The Washington Post’s, The New York Times’, the Associated Press’s, CBS’, NBC’s, ABC’s, and CNN’s unquestioning megaphone effect to the rest of the media.
The Democratic Party’ opposition “research,” for which the wife of a senior FBI official was partly responsible, was cross-validated by the FBI and became the substance of a counterintelligence warrant for surveilling the Trump campaign. After Trump’s victory, the intelligence agencies’ agencies’ summits continued their political and socially partisan alliance as “resistance” against the elected President. Even before inauguration, the Times and the Post published what the highest intelligence officials said were the agencies’ conclusion (no evidence, just conclusions) based on highly classified information, that Trump had “colluded” with Russia to steal the election.
When the surveillance and the investigation turned up nothing, intelligence and Justice Department officials played peek-a-boo with snatches of classified information behind transparently bogus claims of national security, and tried to catch him in perjury traps and other “procedural violations.” With the Media’s help, they created headlines and hampered Trump from governing. Two years later, the agencies continue to fight Congress’s demand that the classified bases for the allegations be made public. . . . What matters a lot is that our ruling class does not deal and will never again deal with their opponents as fellow citizens. Theirs was a quintessentially revolutionary act, after which there is no stepping back…”
An “academics only” approach to skill development has failed; it’s time to consider apprenticeship programs as well.
“…The 2016 election heightened the nation’s awareness of the economic woes of many American workers, especially blue-collar workers lacking a college degree. Wage stagnation, while worsened by the slow recovery from the Great Recession, is not a new trend. Men’s long-term earnings have stagnated with each passing cohort from those entering the workforce in 1967 to those entering in 1983. (Women’s earnings increased 59 percent over the period, but from a low base.) Another concern about declining opportunities in America is the erosion of middle-class jobs due to some still debated combination of outsourcing and automation.
Commentators and political factions blame these labor market problems on everything from bad trade deals, to declines in manufacturing jobs, to corporate greed, to outsourcing, to an uncompetitive tax and regulatory environment, to lax immigration policy. But there is another contributing factor that receives less attention: the weaknesses of secondary, postsecondary, and job-training systems in preparing students for well-paid jobs and rewarding careers.
U.S. researchers too often equate “skills” with years of schooling, completion of degrees, or scores on tests of math and verbal capabilities. In their well-known book, The Race Between Education and Technology, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz argue that increases in educational attainment have been too slow to yield healthy economic growth and reduce wage inequality. This view of skills is one driver of the expansion of higher education spending over recent decades. In 2014, the United States spent $27,900 per full-time equivalent student in postsecondary education, 81 percent more than the OECD average of $16,400…”
https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/10/17/the-virtue-of-aprenticeship/
“…Nearly two thirds of registered voters showed a high level of interest in the election—the highest ever recorded in a midterm election since the Journal/NBC poll began asking the question in 2006.
“It’s a barnburner,” Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster who conducted the survey with Democrat Fred Yang, said of the surge of voter interest. “There’s a switch that’s been flipped…They are engaging in the campaign and the process.”…”
https://www.wsj.com/articles/interest-in-midterms-surges-boosting-trump-approval-rating-
I have few policy agreements with Glenn Greenwald, but he is a man of character and integrity. We have much more in common than we have differences. This is true for most Americans.
Make no mistake the recent military events with Switzerland, talk of the end of Swiss neutrality and joining NATO, joint operations like that in the image below with Norway, all these things are an aggressive message to Russia that despite Russian belligerence, The US is a powerful and committed foe that occupies your western frontier and has many small nation-state allies in the region.
“…Senator Warren is the main offender of the moment, a significantly-whiter-than-the-average-white-woman white woman who has for years been masquerading as a Native American, telling transparent bumfodder stories about how her parents had to elope because her mother was part Cherokee and part Delaware, an obvious attempt to claim some of that victimhood juice secondhand. She allowed herself to be advertised as a woman of color by Harvard, happy in the coincidence that “her major professional advances — to the University of Pennsylvania and then to Harvard — came after she began formally identifying as Native American, a distant descendant of Cherokee and Delaware tribes,” as the Boston Globe put it.
(She is a woman of color: Pantone 11-0602.)
Warren, previously a mostly obscure academic and an author of dopey self-help books — The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan — needed a little extra kick to stand out from the crowd of sanctimonious white ladies who rest like a dollop of low-fat sour cream atop the nation’s educational institutions. And so she went all in on her fictitious Indian ancestry: You’ll remember the recipe for “Pow-Wow Chow” and other “Indian” dishes plagiarized from the New York Times…”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/the-blackface-party/?fbclid=IwAR0glPGHdYr9F0ZrO6ljoWzWgV
“…It’s good news for consumers that a superior court judge may put the brakes on a case alleging that the popular killer Roundup causes cancer. The science behind this claim — and nearly 9,000 other similar cases pending against Roundup’s manufacturer, Monsanto — is sorely lacking.
If this case and others succeed, Roundup will likely be removed from the marketplace based on junk science claims about its risks. As a result, it would be more difficult for farmers to produce an affordable food supply for the rest of us, and consumers will have a harder time controlling weeds in their own gardens.
The case involved a former groundskeeper, whose claimed that glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup, caused his non-Hodgkins lymphoma. The jury awarded $39 million for compensation and $250 million a punitive award because Monsanto did not provide warning that the chemical might cause cancer.
In response to a Monsanto appeal, San Francisco Superior Court Judge Suzanne Bolanos indicated that she will likely throw out the entire $250 million in punitive award and call for a new trial. According to CNN, Judge Bolanosexplained that the plaintiff “presented no clear and convincing evidence of malice or oppression to support an award of punitive damages.”…”
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/oct/18/judges-ruling-on-roundup-is-good-news-for-far
Fred Barnes:
“…We now know why President Obama had to struggle so hard to spur the economy and allow it to grow more than 2 percent a year. And that was the high-water mark. In the last quarter of his presidency, growth had slipped to 1.5 percent. Today it’s obvious what Obama’s problem was. He had the wrong policies‚ lots of them.
How do we know this? Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, and the Republican Congress reversed Obama’s policies. The result, from the day Trump was elected, has been a more robust economy. Nearly 4 million jobs have been added, and unemployment has dipped to the lowest point in nearly a half-century. Let’s compare what Obama did with what Trump is doing.
Obama raised taxes. Trump cut them. Obama was a regulatory zealot. Trump is passionate about deregulation. Obama’s Clean Power Plan killed the coal industry. Trump is reviving it. Obama downgraded the role of entrepreneurs and free markets in boosting the economy and lauded the wonderful things government does.
Obama’s biggest breakthrough was the Affordable Care Act, a big step toward a single-payer, government-run health care system. Trump got rid of the individual mandate that forced everyone to buy expensive insurance or be fined—a big step toward a return to free markets in health care.
The entire Obama economic agenda was “systematically reversed,” says economics writer Stephen Moore, a Trump adviser in the 2016 campaign. He and Arthur Laffer are authors of the new book Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy.
Presidents love to tout their achievements. In Trump’s case, a White House report issued last week said his administration had produced 289 accomplishments in 20 months. We all know Trump exaggerates and brags. But many of the economic gains were impressive, especially the fact that job openings outnumber job seekers for the first time on record.
Being a liberal himself, Obama relied on liberal economists. They led him astray, as they did President Kennedy in the 1960s. They favored higher taxes and increased spending, policies that caused an economic downturn.
Kennedy was smarter than Obama. He finally turned to his Republican Treasury secretary C. Douglas Dillon, who recommended tax cuts. JFK grabbed onto them and the result was an economic boom, the Roaring ’60s…”
https://www.weeklystandard.com/fred-barnes/what-trump-knows-that-ob
“…The Army has successfully fired a 155mm artillery round 62 kilometers (38.5 miles) – marking a technical breakthrough in the realm of land-based weapons and progressing toward its stated goal of being able to outrange and outgun Russian and Chinese weapons.
“We just doubled the range of our artillery at Yuma Proving Ground,” Gen. John Murray, Commanding General of Army Futures Command, told reporters at the recent Association of the United States Army Annual Symposium.
Currently, most land-fired artillery shot from an M777 Towed Howitzer or Self-Propelled Howitzer are able to pinpoint targets out to 30km (18.6 miles) – so hitting 62km marks a substantial leap forward in offensive attack capability.
Murray was clear that the intent of the effort, described as Extended Range Cannon Artillery, is specifically aimed at regaining tactical overmatch against Russian and Chinese weapons…”
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/major-breakthrough-army-artillery-hits-target-at-38-miles-dou
Steven Hayward:
“…This is all a long preface for setting up notice of Thomas Edsall’s column in the New York Times today, “The Democrats’ Left Turn Is Not an Illusion.” Edsall, keep in mind, is a liberal, though he’s long been critical of his own side, and keenly attuned to the populist rejection of establishment liberalism. His warnings, however, went unheeded. Here are a few excerpts from today’s article:
Over the past 18 years, the Democratic electorate has moved steadily to the left, as liberals have displaced moderates. . . From 2001 to 2018, the share of Democratic voters who describe themselves as liberal has grown from 30 to 50 percent, according to data provided by Lydia Saad, a senior editor at the Gallup Poll. . .
Well-educated whites, especially white women, are pushing the party decisively leftward. According to Gallup, the share of white Democrats calling themselves liberal on social issues has grown since 2001 from 39 to 61 percent. Because of this growth, white liberals are now roughly 40 percent of all Democratic voters.
Edsall does not shrink from pointing out some truly astonishing findings in the survey data, like this:
White liberals are well to the left of the black electorate on some racial issues. Take the issue of discrimination as a factor holding back African-American advancement. White liberals are to the left of black Democrats, placing a much stronger emphasis than African-Americans on the role of discrimination and much less emphasis on the importance of individual effort.
Hmmm. . . Maybe this is related to the polls showing surprising levels of black approval of Trump, and the apparent apathy of Hispanic voters about Democrats.
Toward the end Edsall quotes Harvard’s Yascha Mounk (mentioned here recently), who warns his fellow liberals:
One of the dangers for the Democratic Party — and the left-leaning parts of the establishment more broadly — is that they confound their actual audience with a small but highly visible group of activists…”
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/10/the-democrats-leftward-mar