Here is another image that brings back great memories and foretells good times this year.
Yosemite Thanksgiving
Yosemite Thanksgiving
I am absolutely jam-packed at work and trying to get all my stuff done before the upcoming holiday. I am really looking forward to Thanksgiving in Yosemite. I love the memories and I love the place. Here is a photo from Thanksgiving 2014.
The Trouble with Polling
A long comprehensive look at polling, some recent mistakes, where the industry is going.
Karlyn Bowman:
“…As political pundits and the general public prepare for the 2018 midterm elections this fall, it’s a safe bet that pollsters will undergo fresh scrutiny. Questions are still being raised about their performance in the 2016 presidential election, and the results from some major 2017 contests did little to allay those concerns. Few polls, for example, predicted the size of Virginia governor Ralph Northam’s nine-point victory last November. And in the special election last December for a U.S. Senate seat in Alabama, the final polls ranged from a nine-point victory for Republican Roy Moore to a 10-point victory for Democrat Doug Jones. Jones won by one and a half percentage points…”
https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-trouble-with-polling
What Kind of Democrat Can Beat Trump in 2020?
Democrats should watch a Trump MAGA rally. I saw portions of one yesterday at a hangar at some airport. There were 20,000 people there according to official estimates. The crowd was raucous, fired-up, clapping and screaming for each of Trump’s stump statements. I haven’t seen this kind of thing for a politician in midterms. This is one of many such rallys the president has attended in the last few months.
Frank Bruni:
“…Too many Democrats spend too much time trumpeting Clinton’s popular-vote victory, blaming the Russians or combing the shadows for anything that absolves them of error. They dismiss Trump as an accident, a freak or a fad. It’s consoling, sure. It’s also an invitation to his next inauguration…”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/02/opinion/midterms-democrats-trump-2020.html
CALIFORNIA’S PROPOSITION 209 PASSED ON THIS DAY IN 1996, THUS AMENDING THE CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTION
Gail Herriot:
“…Its operative clause states: “The State shall not discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, any individual or group on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin in the operation of public employment, public education or public contracting.”
The hope of many Proposition 209 supporters was that the measure would reduce the effects of mismatch. And during the years it was adhered to, it appears to have done exactly that: Minority graduation rates rose rapidly, and minority on-time (four-year) graduation rates rose even faster. At the same time, minority science and engineering rose by about 50%, while the number of minority students majoring in ethnic studies or communications fell by 20%. And minority GPAs increased…”
Progressive Elite Control of Education Embitters Americans
“…Modern America is characterized by an intense grassroots distrust of American elites — with red America especially disdainful of progressive elite institutions. Much ink has been spilled explaining the reasons for this distrust, and I don’t intend for a single short piece to encompass the whole of the argument, but I do think we underestimate the extent to which prolonged exposure to a flawed and biased elite-ordered and elite-controlled education system is profoundly dispiriting and embittering for millions of Americans.
Public education has been marked by diminished local control, top-down reform driven by ideological and educational fads, and failed experiment after failed experiment. For example, the intense opposition to the Common Core in the recent past was driven in part by the too-fresh memory of other grand ideas and technocratic national movements.
As for higher education, its gatekeepers are often explicit ideological radicals. At their worst, they attempt to micromanage a freshman class’s racial and socioeconomic background (and sometimes its political composition) based on theories about privilege that are utterly at odds with the lived experience of the American families at their mercy…”
Academia is a cult
The lesson: Always think for yourself
“…I “blew out” of the cult — to use its own lingo for leaving — after my senior year to attend a Catholic university 20 miles away. I still read the Apostle Paul, but Jane Austen and James Joyce, too. Then I earned a PhD in English at the University of Minnesota, where I rehearsed Marx’s and Freud’s critiques of religion. Simmering with smug resentment, I was certain that I, an intellectual, was on the right side of history, a sworn opponent of the oppressive ideologies I ascribed to organized religion.
But I had to climb only so far up the ivory tower to recognize patterns of abuse that I thought — in my new, secular life — I had left behind. Because academia, I slowly realized, is also a cult.
Cults are systems of social control. They are insular but often evangelical organizations whose aims (be they money, power, sex or something else) are rooted in submission to a dogma manifested by an authority figure: a charismatic preacher or, say, a tenured professor. The relationship between shepherd and sheep is couched in unwavering commitment to a supposedly noble, transcendent cause. For the Living Word Fellowship, that meant “the Lordship of Jesus Christ”; for academia, “the production of knowledge.” In both cases, though, faith ultimately amounts to mastering the rules of the leaders, whose infallibility — whether by divine right or endowed chair — excuses all else.
Looking back, the evidence was everywhere: I’d seen needless tears in the eyes of classmates, harangued in office hours for having the gall to request a letter of recommendation from an adviser. Others’ lives were put on hold for months or sometimes years by dissertation committee members’ refusal to schedule an exam or respond to an email. I met the wives and girlfriends of senior faculty members, often former and sometimes current advisees, and heard rumors of famed scholars whisked abroad to sister institutions in the wake of grad student affairs gone awry. I’d first come in contact with such unchecked power dynamics as a child, in the context of church. In adulthood, as both a student and an employee of a university, I found myself subject to them once again. . . . The Ronell scandal should alert us to the broader ways in which the 21st-century university is an absolutist institution, a promoter of sycophancy and an enemy of dissent…”
Voter Index
I found this diagram instructive
https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-test-of-trump-midterms-could-result-in-a-mixed-verdict-1541336400
Senate Judiciary Committee Releases Report on Kavanaugh Investigations
The Judiciary Committee report finds no evidence to support any charge against Kavanaugh
Summary of Investigation, page 3, 4th paragraph:
“…After an extensive investigation that included the thorough review of all potentiallycredible evidence submitted and interviews of more than 40 individuals with information relating to the allegations, including classmates and friends of all those involved, Committee investigators found no witness who could provide any verifiable evidence to support any of the allegations brought against Justice Kavanaugh. In other words, following the separate and extensive investigations by both the Committee and the FBI, there was no evidence to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault made against Justice Kavanaugh…”
Yosemite Falls
River and Falls
Powerful Intellect
It is popular to celebrate this guy on the right side of politics, and under normal circumstances, that would be cause for me to reject this man. That would be a mistake. This is a smart man worth listening to. His celebrity is earned.
Long-Shot Beto
This is a great piece on media and democrats. Click over and read it.
Jim Geraghty:
“…The national media started sending correspondents to hang out with O’Rourke, and just about all of them fell in love with him: Vanity Fair, Town and Country, Spin, GQ (twice!), BuzzFeed, Yahoo News, the New York Times, Rolling Stone, Time, the Washington Post (twice!), the Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, Bloomberg News, the BBC . . .
Correspondents seemed oddly fixated on his sweat. Politico swooned, “Sweat pours off his lean, 6-foot-4-inch frame.” In Vanity Fair, Peter Hamby described him “sweating through a button-down shirt at one of his jam-packed town halls.” The BBC wrote, “His toes are well over the edge of the boards” of the stage “and his suede shoes are soaking up dark splashes of sweat from his brow.”
It’s Texas. It’s summer. It’s hot. Everybody sweats at outdoor events.
Beyond their not-so-hidden partisan preference, many reporters want to discover the southern Democrat with national potential — Bill Clinton 2.0 — and write the first glossy profile piece of a future president. The piece will double as a book proposal, and the book will allow its author to spend the latter half of his or her career as a quasi-historian expert on a particular president.
Reading through all of these profiles as they emphasize the same points over and over again — He was in a punk-rock band! He skateboards! He’s handsome! He’s Kennedyesque! He speaks fluent Spanish! — one keeps waiting for the section that describes what makes O’Rourke actually unique among Democratic candidates. And that section never arrives…”
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2018/11/12/long-shot-beto/
IF THERE WERE A DEMOCRAT IN THE WHITE HOUSE, THE ECONOMY WOULD DOMINATE THE NEWS
Economy adds robust 250,000 jobs in October in last employment report before election. “The unemployment rate was unchanged at a near 50-year low of 3.7 percent. Annual wage growth topped 3 percent for the first time in nine years.”
Related: Is America Running Out Of Workers? “It’s fashionable in media circles to laugh at President Trump’s non-stop salesmanship about the performance of the U.S. economy on his watch. But there’s no doubt that workers are benefiting from a historically tight labor market. Companies are eager to hire.”
Trump is Finished (over and over again) or Media Self-Identify as Nitwits
Tech Workers Bankroll 2018 Dems: 96 Percent at Google, 95 Percent at Facebook, 89 Percent at Amazon
If you don’t think big tech is biased against republicans, you’re not paying attention
…”We have strong evidence of partisanship, and they have access to tools for manipulating opinions and votes that we can’t even see,” the psychologist warned. In September, he published an article in The Epoch Times outlining 10 ways Big Tech can shift millions of votes — without anyone knowing. Google can impact opinion by placing search results, by offering search suggestions, and by censoring results. Facebook can bias its trending box, users’ news feeds, hide content, and send voter registration reminders.
Epstein has caught Google manipulating its search engine to favor political candidates in the past. His analysis of the 2016 election revealed that Google’s bias in Hillary Clinton’s favor was likely responsible for most of her win margin in the popular vote. He supported Clinton in that election, but he is far more concerned about the integrity of American elections…”
Trump declares his first national monument, honoring African American troops
Worst Nazi, racist, misogynist, white supremacist president ever!
“…In the first such use of his executive powers, President Trump on Friday designated a national monument, establishing a 380-acre site in Kentucky to honor African Americans’ role as soldiers during the Civil War…”
Image of the Day (Late Edition)
Data Show Trump Is Right About Mail Bomber Coverage
President Trump argued Monday night that media coverage of mail bomber Cesar Sayoc was biased when compared with how news outlets treated James T. Hodgkinson’s shooting of Republicans practicing for the Congressional Baseball Game last year. According to the president, Sayoc’s admiration of Trump was heavily emphasized, whereas the coverage of Hodgkinson barely focused on his loyalty to Bernie Sanders. Some media outlets were quick to dismissTrump’s assertion, but he raises an interesting question: Do the data show any validity to the president’s concerns?
On June 14, 2017 Hodgkinson opened fire on a GOP baseball practice, wounding several people, including House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. The identity of the shooter and the fact that he volunteered for Sanders’ presidential campaign was known within hours. Early headlines, including at CNN, clearly pointed out the connection.
However, coverage quickly dropped the association with Sanders, with a Politico article three weeks later referring to the shooter merely as “James Hodgkinson of Illinois.”
In contrast, one of the most striking elements of coverage of last week’s mail bombing campaign was how blame was almost immediately assigned to Trump. Long before even the most basic information was known about the suspect, media personalities and their guests had largely pinned responsibility on the president. As Philippe Reines later put it on MSNBC, “We didn’t know the name of the bomber but we know who to blame.”
The timeline below overlays coverage of the first nine days of coverage after both events, showing the percentage of daily English language online news coverage of the event that mentioned Sanders or Trump, as monitored by the GDELT Project.
