Trump fires a bunch of his pollsters

Liz Sheld:

“…Another day, another leak from a “friendly.” Do you ever see these kinds of shenanigans coming from the Democrats: people supposedly “on their side” sabotaging their candidate or their president with leaks? No, we see people “on their side” lying under oath to protect their candidate, we see them smashing phones to hide evidence, deleting emails after they were subpoenaed, or even using the government surveillance apparatus in the service of  “their” side. Maybe the internal saboteurs aren’t really on our side? It’s worth a thought.

The leak, which showed that Trump trailed Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential contest in several states, prompted a swell of negative headlines, causing a headache for Trump’s advisers and annoying the president himself. It comes as Trump is preparing to announce his re-election bid during a rally in Orlando, Fla., on Tuesday.

As a result of the leak, the Trump campaign is ending its relationship with Brett Lloyd, Mike Baselice and Adam Geller, according to the person. It will continue working with its other pollsters, Tony Fabrizio and John McLaughlin.

Lloyd is the head of the Polling Company, a firm started by Kellyanne Conway in 1995. Conway is now a senior White House adviser to Trump and is no longer formally connected to the company. Baselice is the founder of Baselice & Associates, a national research firm. Geller is the founder and CEO of National Research Inc., and has done polling for former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey.

The polls in question starting appearing in the media a few months ago. Last week The New York Times reported that Trump wanted the results of the poll downplayed. Scandalous!

It’s much too early to put any stock in the presidential horse race, the media has been weaponizing polls for years and more so now that they have abandoned any pretense to reporting information and are all in with the #resistance. Wasn’t Jeb! on the fast track to the nomination at this time during the 2016 campaign? The polls are an early snapshot of an electorate that has not yet been exposed to campaigning for 2020. The numbers are being used as propaganda…”

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Not to be Outdone, Elizabeth Warren Promises to Cure Smallpox

 

How Eisenhower Dealt With America’s First Illegal Crisis

Keith Farrell:

“…This is not the first time the US has dealt with an illegal immigration problem. Only last time it was dealt with in a decidedly swifter and sterner manner. The response, coordinated by President Dwight Eisenhower, resulted in nearly 3 million illegal immigrants being sent home.

During his administration, Eisenhower became the first American president forced to deal with problems stemming from illegal immigration. Only, in Eisenhower’s time the politically correct culture of liberal sensitivities had yet to emerge.

There was not much in the way of sympathy for those who had crossed into the country illegally.

Eisenhower told the New York Times exactly what had caused the problem: “The rise in illegal border crossing by Mexicans [illegal immigrants] to a current rate of more than 1 million cases a year has been accompanied by a curious relaxation in ethical standards extending all the way from the farmer-exploiters of this contraband labor to the highest levels of the federal government.”

‘Ike’ took quick and decisive action. He used 1,075 Border Patrol Agents to seal the border. In doing so, he achieved a task our government today deems impossible with a force that is 10% larger. Once the border was sealed, Eisenhower went about the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens.

In June of 1954, he appointed retired General Joseph “Jumpin’ Joe” Swing to head “Operation Wetback,” which sent local and federal officials on sweeps of Mexican neighborhoods looking for illegals.

Within one month 50,000 illegals had been captured and deported, while nearly half a million more fled the country to avoid arrest. By September 80,000 more illegals had been removed from the state of Texas alone, and between 500,000-700,000 more had fled the country.

These illegals weren’t just dropped at the border; Swing arranged for buses and trains to take immigrants deep into Mexico before releasing them. Tens of thousands more were shipped by boat from Texas to Vera Cruz, Mexico…”

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Social Justice, or Injustice?

JOEL KOTKIN:

“…The deepest blue cities — San Francisco, New York, San Jose, Los Angeles and Boston — may be ruled by social justice activists but, according to Pew research, suffer the largest gaps between the bottom and top quintiles. Long-standing minority communities like Albina in Portland are disappearing as 10,000 of the 38,000 residents have been pushed out of the historic African-American section. San Francisco’s African-American black population is roughly half that of the 1970s, constituting less than 5 percent of the city’s population. More than half of the Bay Area’s lower-income communities, notes a recent UC Berkeley study, are in danger of mass displacement.

A direct result of climate policies, high energy prices place enormous burdens on California’s working-class families, particularly in the less temperate interior. These policies also discourage growth of manufacturing and other blue-collar industries that long incubated opportunities for working people. As the state’s manufacturing sector has stagnated last year while industrial jobs expanded 14 percent in neighboring Arizona, 5 percent in Nevada and by 3 percent in arch-rival Texas.

Regulations in California have also slowed construction growth, and left employment considerably below the industry’s 2007 numbers. Residential sales have dropped statewide, and California’s rate of new housing permits has fallen behind the national average, making construction workers’ economic prospects even dimmer.

The diminishing prospects in these blue collar industries, as well as high housing costs, may do much to explain why so many minorities, and immigrants, are increasingly migrating away from multi-culturally correct regions like Chicago, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco for less regulated, far less woke places like Phoenix, Dallas-Ft. Worth, Houston, Atlanta and Las Vegas…”

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Corporate Media and Social Media Censor Conservative Speech

ANDREW KLAVAN:

“…The corporate media — including social media — are now engaged in a full-fledged and collusive attempt to silence conservative voices in time for the 2020 election. On Sunday, just as YouTube was threatening to pull down thousands of “hateful” (i.e. conservative) videos, the New York Times printed a breathless and idiotic piece supposedly charting a YouTube viewer’s descent into right-wing radicalism.

How radical did this poor radical soul get from watching conservative videos? Well, okay, he “never bought into the far right’s most extreme views, like Holocaust denial or the need for a white ethnostate… “ But, “he began referring to himself as a ‘tradcon’ — a traditional conservative, committed to old-fashioned gender norms. He dated an evangelical Christian woman, and he fought with his liberal friends.”

The horror. The horror.

This suspiciously timed piece — clearly designed to give cover to YouTube’s censorship plan — featured a collage of faces of right-wing radicals. These included such raving hate-filled alt-right evil-doers as mild-mannered gay centrist Dave Rubin and of course Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro — whom various left-wing outlets have repeatedly identified as the one and only orthodox Jewish Nazi in all the universes!

But while branding Dave and Ben alt-right may be absurd, it’s not unintentional. It is part of a strategy. 1. Convince people that hate speech should be silenced. 2. Define hate speech as alt-right. 3. Label powerful mainstream conservatives “alt-right.” 4. Silence powerful mainstream conservatives…”

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The Long Road To The Student Debt Crisis

Paul Caron via WSJ:

“…The U.S. student loan system is broken. How broken? The numbers tell the story. Borrowers currently owe more than $1.5 trillion in student loans, an average of $34,000 per person. Over two million of them have defaulted on their loans in just the past six years, and the number grows by 1,400 a day. After years of projecting big profits from student lending, the federal government now acknowledges that taxpayers stand to lose $31.5 billion on the program over the next decade, and the losses are growing rapidly.

Meanwhile, four in 10 recent college graduates are in jobs that don’t require a degree, according to the New York Federal Reserve. And many American colleges are dropout factories: At more than a third of them, less than half of the students who enroll earn a credential within eight years, according to the think tank Third Way.

The U.S. is shoveling more and more money into a highly inefficient system that, polls find, Americans are increasingly dissatisfied with. College tuition has soared 1,375% since 1978, more than four times the rate of overall inflation, Labor Department data show. The U.S. now spends more on higher education than any other developed country (except Luxembourg)—about $30,000 a student, according to the OECD. Meanwhile, college presidents are being handsomely rewarded for the success of their enterprises: Seventy of them, including a dozen at public colleges, earned over $1 million in 2016-17, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education…

WSJ 2

…The combination of open access to schools and open access to loans turned the higher education market into a version of the Wild West. Schools of all types, banks, nonprofit guarantee agencies and Wall Street investors competed for federal student-loan dollars. In particular, the system gave colleges an incentive to maximize the tuition they extracted from students and the federal taxpayer by boosting fees and enrollment, which meant relaxing admissions standards. …

The voucher system, combined with a lack of government oversight, created perverse incentives: Colleges could raise money quickly by admitting academically suspect students while suffering little or no consequences if their students dropped out and defaulted on loans.

The market was suddenly flooded with cheap money, which led to a surge in the ranks of college-going students. Colleges responded to higher demand by raising prices, leading Congress to increase loan limits and grants. This cycle continued throughout the 1980s and 1990s, as Sallie Mae and private banks that fronted students the money for the federal student loan program made big profits—and schools collected more money. …

In several important ways, the student loan system has achieved the objectives set out by policy makers a half-century ago. More Americans gained access to college: The number of full-time workers with bachelor’s degrees has risen from 7.6 million in 1980 to 19.5 million today. The share of Americans age 25 and older with a bachelor’s degree reached 34.2% in 2017, double what it was in 1980, Education Department data show. And for the typical borrower, higher education is an investment that pays off: The college premium—the amount graduates earn over workers without degrees—remains at an all-time high. About 40% of all student debt goes to finance graduate degrees, including law and medical degrees, which typically lead to high salaries. …”

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SJW LOGIC VS. COMMON SENSE

David Bernstein:

“…No wonder Oberlin got socked with a huge punitive damages award for libeling a local bakery as racist after detaining students who wound up pleading guilty to shoplifting. Here’s Oberlin’s litigation position, from its court filings: “Gibson bakery’s archaic chase-and-detain policy regarding suspected shoplifters was the catalyst for the protests. The guilt or innocence of the students is irrelevant to both the root cause of the protests and this litigation.” Get that? Whether the students accused of shoplifting had actually been shoplifting or not was irrelevant to whether it was fair to accuse the store of racism etc for detaining the students as shoplifters. The fault lay with the bakery owners for daring to actually stop and prosecute shoplifters!

This is the kind of b.s. that gets you A’s at Oberlin with a certain type of SJW professor, but that normal people rightly think defies common sense. But it can pay off in academia. A very prominent law professor got an Ivy League job after writing a silly book which, among other things, argued that whether the Al Sharpton-promoted Tawana Brawley hoax was true or not was besides the point, because the real issue was whether society was silencing African American girls like her who surely had something bad happen to them…”

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Socialism and Other Things People Still Believe In

2020 Democratic Front Runners

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How Greg Gutfeld’s Success Exposes The Media’s Cultural Blindspots

Emily Jashinsky:

“…As Variety noted in May, “Year to date, Fox News’ ‘Gutfeld’ has secured a bigger average viewership – more than 1.73 million – than any of TV’s late-night offerings except CBS’ ‘Late Show’ and NBC’s ‘Tonight Show.’” A Washington Examiner analysis of Nielson data for the year compared Gutfeld’s average audience on Fox News to his competitors’, and the results were illuminating:

Gutfeld’s show, which airs on Saturdays at 10 p.m. EST, has an average of 1.7 million viewers. Meaning his show averages more viewers than:

-HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” (1.5 million viewers)
-NBC’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers” (1.2 million viewers)
-CBS’ “Late Late Show with James Corden” (1.2 million viewers)
-HBO’s “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver” (1 million viewers)
-TBS’ “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” (835,000 viewers)
-Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” (732,000 viewers)

The difference between Gutfeld’s show and the programs eating his dust is a steady drumbeat of media coverage inflating their cultural influence. Outlets regularly pluck clips from every late-night show trailing Gutfeld’s while virtually ignoring him, despite the gaps in viewership…”

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Joy Behar: Climate Change Could Prevent Joe Biden From Curing Cancer

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Walmart Self-Checkout Machine Wins Employee of the Month Award Again

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