Commentary and analysis on American politics, culture, and national identity, U.S. foreign policy and international relations, and the state of education
- from a neoconservative perspective! - Keeping an eye on the communist-left so you don't have to!
The hotly-anticipated Senate Republican health care bill came out on Thursday morning. The airwaves quickly filled up with predictable talking points from both sides. But once the dust settles, it will emerge that the Senate bill will have far-reaching effects on American health care: for the better.
Substantial improvements to the House bill
In March, when House Republicans published their bill to replace Obamacare—the American Health Care Act—I described it in Forbes this way: “GOP’s Obamacare Replacement Will Make Coverage Unaffordable For Millions—Otherwise, It’s Great.” I meant it. There were great things about the House bill, in particular its far-reaching reforms of the Medicaid program.
But Paul Ryan’s bill contained a fatal flaw. Its flat tax credits, which provided identical assistance to the poor and the wealthy, would price millions of near-elderly low-income workers out of the insurance market and trap millions more in poverty.
Fortunately, buried in the House bill was a way out of the morass. Section 202 of the bill contains a transitional schedule of tax credits that was meant to serve as a bridge between the old Obamacare system, ending in 2017, and the new Paul Ryan system, beginning in 2020.
It turns out that if you simply kept that bridge in force, and tossed overboard the Paul Ryan flat tax credit, you’d solve all of these problems with the House bill. By making that change, the near-elderly working poor would be able to afford coverage, and the poverty trap would be eliminated.
And that’s precisely what the Senate bill did! Section 102 of the Senate bill—the Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017—closely mirrors Section 202 of the House bill, with age- and means-tested tax credits up to 350 percent of the Federal Poverty Level.
Making this change not only solves the problems I described above. It also makes it easier to reform the Medicaid program.
Real Medicaid reforms
The Senate bill includes and refines the best part of the House bill: its reforms of Medicaid, the dysfunctional government-run health care program for the poor whose enrollees have no better health outcomes than the uninsured.
Because the Senate bill’s tax credits are robustly means-tested and available to those below the poverty line, the bill is able to repeal Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion while offering higher-quality coverage to individuals who signed up for Medicaid under the expansion.
The reason that Medicaid’s health outcomes are so poor is because the outdated 1965 Medicaid law places a laundry list of constraints on states’ ability to manage their Medicaid programs. As a result, the main tool states have to keep Medicaid costs under control is to pay doctors and hospitals less and less each year for the same care. Hence, many doctors don’t take Medicaid, and Medicaid enrollees struggle to gain access to care.
The Better Care Reconciliation Act of 2017 addresses these problems in several ways.
First, the bill repeals Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion, and replaces it with tax credits so that low-income Americans can buy the coverage of their choice at an affordable price.
Second, the bill gives states a new set of tools to make their Medicaid programs. For example, under Obamacare, states are only allowed to check if someone is eligible for Medicaid once a year, even if that enrollee has moved to a different state, or becomes no longer eligible, or is no longer alive. Jonathan Ingram of the Foundation for Government Accountability, in a recent report, recommended allowing states to redetermine eligibility more frequently and thereby culling their rolls of ineligible individuals.
Third, the bill puts the legacy Medicaid program on a long-term per-capita cap tied to medical inflation through 2025, and conventional inflation (CPI-U) thereafter. This change is important, because Medicaid per-enrollee spending is growing at a slightly slower rate than Medical inflation; hence, making the program sustainable requires the use of CPI-U. The fiscal sustainability of Medicaid is essential to making sure that those who depend on the program can know it will be there for them in the future...
The cops gunned down this dude. The cops murdered him. It's plain as day. It's not, however, a case for the "Black Lives Matter" movement. That's about cop-killing. We're supposed to be a nation of laws. There was no justice in the Philando Castile case, and that's really sad.
There's still a couple of things reassuring about the whole mess at Evergreen: One, the leftist totalitarians are still outnumbered by people who oppose them (and who have powerful ways to get the opposition message out); and two, at some point, the Evergreen students will have to go out and make it in the real world. Most of these students will seek jobs at leftist non-profits and radical progressive interest groups and think tanks (if they indeed seek work at all). But if some of them want employment in regular corporate America, they'll find there's a limit at even the most tolerant and progressive firms to the obscenities of social justice extremism.
As has been pointed out, Professor Weinstein “supported Bernie Sanders, admiringly retweets Glenn Greenwald and was an outspoken supporter of the Occupy Wall Street movement” and calls himself “deeply progressive,” but that’s not enough for the thugs at Evergreen.
Can the U.S. succeed in Afghanistan? Not without a sustained, and sustainable, commitment. President Trump’s decision to give Defense Secretary Jim Mattis the authority to add several thousand more U.S. troops to the 8,400 currently deployed is encouraging—but only if it is a first step in a comprehensive approach.
Army Gen. John Nicholson, commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, should also receive greater leeway in the use of U.S. and NATO air power. And officials should remain open to the possibility of reconciliation with some insurgents, probably just those that break off from the central Taliban.
An intensified military effort could arrest the gradual loss of territory held by the government in recent years—now estimated by U.S. Central Command at only 60% of the country—and to regain battlefield momentum. Congress should enable all this by appropriating the $5 billion or so a year above current levels that such a strategy will require.
America’s leaders should not lose sight of why the U.S. went to, and has stayed in, Afghanistan: It is in our national interest to ensure that country is not once again a sanctuary for transnational extremists, as it was when the 9/11 attacks were planned there. We have been accomplishing that mission since the intervention began in October 2001. Although al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan is diminished, it could rebound if given the opportunity. Islamic State could expand its newfound Afghan foothold as well.
The augmented troop levels Mr. Trump has authorized would be only 12% to 15% of the peak U.S. force levels, in 2010-11. The country can sustain that level of commitment. While all casualties are tragic, our losses in Afghanistan would likely remain far fewer than the losses from another major terrorist attack in the U.S.
Today the U.S. and its coalition partners lack the capacity to train and assist Afghan forces adequately in the field. As recently as 2015, the allied forces did not even have a full-time advisory presence for the main Afghan army corps in Helmand province. Largely as a result, the Taliban gained control of much of the province. Nor did the coalition have adequate advisers to help the smaller Afghan formations near Kunduz before that city fell to the Taliban in 2015. It was later liberated only at high cost, especially to Afghan forces and civilians. Restrictions on coalition air power reduced America’s ability to help Afghan partners.
Adding some 3,000 to 5,000 U.S. and allied troops could provide the capacity for several dozen deployable mentoring teams. That is far from enough to assist each Afghan brigade or battalion. But it could support the units that are engaged in the toughest fights and are most intensively involved in rebuilding their capabilities. Supporting those teams logistically and with air power, and providing quick-reaction forces in several parts of the country to help them if they get in trouble, would drive additional requirements for coalition troops into the low thousands.
On the civilian side, President Ashraf Ghani and Chief Executive Abdullah Abdullah need to continue their efforts against corruption, which have shown gradual, modest results to date. With U.S. help, they need to reform the electoral commissions that will oversee parliamentary and presidential elections over the next two years.
Then there is Pakistan, where the U.S. needs a tougher approach...
More than a decade ago, the country was lauded for its treatment program. Now, Venezuela is years into a political and economic crisis.
Juan Coronel was so thin that his kneecaps jutted out like tent poles in his sweatpants. He was 39 when I met him a few weeks ago, with reddish-brown hair that clung to his scalp like a baby’s and deep hollows below his cheekbones. His voice was soft and raspy, and he seemed dazed at his own fragility. “I need to go and look for medicine,” he said, “but I’m having trouble getting around.”
I had not seen a person who looked like Mr. Coronel – a person dying of untreated AIDS – since I covered the pandemic in Africa at its height more than a decade ago. In fact, there is nowhere in the world today where people are dying of AIDS at the pace and in the sheer numbers that they are in Venezuela: Even the poorest African countries today have HIV treatment programs. They still don’t reach everyone, and people are still dying, or getting treatment only after they become very ill – they may come to look as Mr. Coronel did when I met him. But in other countries, they are the exception. Today, in Venezuela, his case is the rule...
This is good, from Shermichael Singleton, at the Hill:
You don’t have to be a seasoned political operative to question the logic behind Democrats investing so much money into a congressional district that has gone Republican for nearly 40 years, yet that is exactly what the Democratic Party did.
They believed they could switch moderate Republican voters to vote for a Democratic candidate and mobilize Independents by spouting a progressive message, which is philosophically antithetical to the values held by most voters — such as limited government due to a fear of government encroachment and excessive regulation — as well as utopian ideas about society, which many frankly believe are unrealistic.
Grand visions about the future are typically distrusted by most people regardless of their ideological leanings because people live in reality, and nothing in reality happens overnight. Most Americans want pragmatism that builds toward a better tomorrow, rather than grandiose promises built on unproven ideas.
Maybe the intent of progressive Democrats is good. Maybe it isn’t. However, what is most concerning about progressive ideology is that it maintains the belief that ultimate good comes from a centrally planned state or in essence the government. Similar to socialism, progressivism advocates for a government built on compulsory force.
The government cannot possibly know the needs of every single person today, so that the needs of the individual are met for tomorrow. Any more than a socialist system knows how much of a product to produce. The two are arguably one in the same.
One of the biggest problems with progressivism is that they advocate the importance of a centralized nurturing state with a moral goal, but that has never been the role of government. Government, as advocated by progressives, is impossible because it is impossible for a government to know exactly what each individual need or how much of it that they need.
Democrats foolishly believed that college-educated Republicans would vote for a progressive Democrat over a Republican because of their disdain for President Trump and his many mishaps. The unknown Jon Ossoff ran against the known Karen Handel, who once chaired Fulton County Board of Commissioners from 2003 to 2006. She was then elected and served as Georgia’s secretary of state from 2007 to 2010.
And she even threw her hat in the ring for the highly contested U.S. Senate race in 2014 to replace former Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.). In essence, she isn’t a political newcomer and the fact that Democrats actually believed they could flip a district that has gone Republican for nearly four decades purely because of Trump’s actions shows how out of touch their strategy is.
Handel made the election about issues, pointing out that a vote for Ossoff would be a vote for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who is far more unpopular with Republican voters, including those with a disdain for Trump...
About forty minutes into Risk, Laura Poitras’s messy documentary portrait of Julian Assange, the filmmaker addresses the viewer from off-camera. “This is not the film I thought I was making,” she says. “I thought I could ignore the contradictions. I thought they were not part of the story. I was so wrong. They are becoming the story.”
By the time she makes this confession, Poitras has been filming Assange, on and off, for six years. He has gone from a bit player on the international stage to one of its dramatic leads. His gleeful interference in the 2016 American presidential election—first with the release of e-mails poached from the Democratic National Committee, timed to coincide with, undermine, and possibly derail Hillary Clinton’s nomination at the Democratic Convention, and then with the publication of the private e-mail correspondence of Clinton’s adviser John Podesta, which was leaked, drip by drip, in the days leading up to the election to maximize the damage it might inflict on Clinton—elevated Assange’s profile and his influence.
And then this spring, it emerged that Nigel Farage, the Trump adviser and former head of the nationalist and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (UKIP) who is now a person of interest in the FBI investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia, was meeting with Assange. To those who once saw him as a crusader for truth and accountability, Assange suddenly looked more like a Svengali and a willing tool of Vladimir Putin, and certainly a man with no particular affection for liberal democracy. Yet those tendencies were present all along.
n 2010, when Poitras began work on her film, Assange’s four-year-old website, WikiLeaks, had just become the conduit for hundreds of thousands of classified American documents revealing how we prosecuted the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis, as well as for some 250,000 State Department diplomatic cables. All had been uploaded to the WikiLeaks site by an army private named Bradley—now Chelsea—Manning.
The genius of the WikiLeaks platform was that documents could be leaked anonymously, with all identifiers removed; WikiLeaks itself didn’t know who its sources were unless leakers chose to reveal themselves. This would prevent anyone at WikiLeaks from inadvertently, or under pressure, disclosing a source’s identity. Assange’s goal was to hold power—state power, corporate power, and powerful individuals—accountable by offering a secure and easy way to expose their secrets. He called this “radical transparency.” Manning’s bad luck was to tell a friend about the hack, and the friend then went to the FBI. For a long time, though, Assange pretended not to know who provided the documents, even when there was evidence that he and Manning had been e-mailing before the leaks.
Though the contradictions were not immediately obvious to Poitras as she trained her lens on Assange, they were becoming so to others in his orbit. WikiLeaks’s young spokesperson in those early days, James Ball, has recounted how Assange tried to force him to sign a nondisclosure statement that would result in a £12 million penalty if it were breached. “[I was] woken very early by Assange, sitting on my bed, prodding me in the face with a stuffed giraffe, immediately once again pressuring me to sign,” Ball wrote. Assange continued to pester him like this for two hours. Assange’s “impulse towards free speech,” according to Andrew O’Hagan, the erstwhile ghostwriter of Assange’s failed autobiography, “is only permissible if it adheres to his message. His pursuit of governments and corporations was a ghostly reverse of his own fears for himself. That was the big secret with him: he wanted to cover up everything about himself except his fame.”
Meanwhile, some of the company he was keeping while Poitras was filming also might have given her pause. His association with Farage had already begun in 2011 when Farage was head of UKIP. Assange’s own WikiLeaks Party of Australia was aligned with the white nationalist Australia First Party, itself headed by an avowed neo-Nazi, until political pressure forced it to claim that association to be an “administrative error.”
Most egregious, perhaps, was Assange’s collaboration with Israel Shamir, an unapologetic anti-Semite and Putin ally to whom Assange handed over all State Department diplomatic cables from the Manning leak relating to Belarus (as well as to Russia, Eastern Europe, and Israel). Shamir then shared these documents with members of the regime of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who appeared to use them to imprison and torture members of the opposition. This prompted the human rights group Index on Censorship to ask WikiLeaks to explain its relationship to Shamir, and to look into reports that Shamir’s “access to the WikiLeaks’ US diplomatic cables [aided in] the prosecution of civil society activists within Belarus.” WikiLeaks called these claims rumors and responded that it would not be investigating them. “Most people with principled stances don’t survive for long,” Assange tells Poitras at the beginning of the film. It’s not clear if he’s talking about himself or others...
I've never liked nor respected Assange, who I consider an enemy.
But note how Halpern gets the basic background wrong: That "graphic video of American soldiers in an Apache helicopter mowing down a group of unarmed Iraqis" was actually a video of anti-American journalists embedded with Iraqi insurgents armed with RPGs. The Apache took them out in self-defense, following strict rules of engagement. That story's been totally debunked. But as with most other things in the news, the initial lie becomes the official truth for the radical left. That's why you can never let your guard down.
Media outlets are playing down the victories of the National Front, but Marine Le Pen can now claim she's got governing experience. This seat is a platform for her national aspirations.
Sarasota-Manatee’s median age keeps marching upward
The population of Sarasota and Manatee counties does not rank among the oldest in the United States but, like two-thirds of the nation’s counties, its median age keeps edging upward.
According to updated data released today by the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 2016, the median age reached 55.6 in Sarasota County and 47.8 in Manatee.
By comparison, the nation’s median age reached 37.9 — up from 35.3 since 2000.
“Our country’s demographic profile is aging and looks a lot different than it did two decades ago,” bureau demographer Lauren Medina said in an announcement.
“The baby-boom generation is largely responsible for this trend,” Peter Borsella, a bureau demographer, added. “Baby boomers began turning 65 in 2011 and will continue to do so for many years to come.”
Residents age 65 and older now account for 15.2 percent of the nation’s population, up from 12.4 percent in 2000.
As of 2016, Maine continued to have the highest median age (44.6) — followed by New Hampshire (43), Vermont (42.7) and West Virginia (42.2). Although better known than those states as a retirement mecca, Florida ranked fifth with a median age of 42.1.
The youngest states or jurisdictions include North Dakota (34.8), Texas (34.5), Alaska (33.9), the District of Columbia (33.9) and Utah (30.8).
The acceleration of the age boom in Florida has compelled more communities here to join the Age-Friendly movement, an initiative sponsored by the World Health Organization and AARP to help populations prepare for the effects of this demographic shift. Kathy Black, a professor at University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee who is instrumental in the Age-Friendly Sarasota effort, said recently that it’s important for people to question their own assumptions about others based on age...
I was on Twitter last night, and it was serious laugh riot after Jon Ossoff's epic defeat.
As readers might have noticed, I wasn't all that invested in this race. I think I posted maybe once on it (I can search the archives, heh). And frankly, I wasn't too worried about Republicans keeping the district. For one thing, I don't trust the polls, and as it turns out, they were wrong again. The other main thing is that Georgia's 6th congressional district is historically Republican, with Handel having something like GOP +10% automatic margin. It was over-hyped, everywhere, and this race once again reflects badly on the Democrats, national radical progressives, and the hopelessly left-wing mainstream media.
The president's party normally loses seats in midterm elections, so the Democrats, as demoralized as they are today, can keep hope alive for some gains in 2018. Whether they can pick off enough seats to retake the majority remains to be seen, and as it's 18 months away, I imagine it doesn't do a lot of good to start handicapping individual races at this point. Let's see what happens during primary season next year. If Democrats wise up and nominate really good candidates, not carpetbaggers and far-left radicals, perhaps we'll see some real competition. But all the normal structural factors remain in play, especially partisan gerrymandering that's helped the GOP and the polarized ideological tribalism that means there's few undecided voters in districts around the country for Democrats to attract.
One thing's for sure: If the Dems don't retake the House next year, the lols are going to be a million more times better than last night, and they were pretty good, heh.
Well, that does seem kinda low. But folks are comparing her's to Henry Cavill's $14 million payday for 2013's "Man of Steel."
It turns out, though, that Cavill's $14 million figure includes royalty payments and bonuses (or however you calculate the after-market residuals).
Gal Gadot's up-front $300,000 is before royalties and bonuses, and she's in contract renegotiations for her upcoming reprisals as Diana Prince (since "Wonder Wonder" performed spectacularly in theaters).
In any case, at London's Daily Mail and Vanity Fair:
Revealed: Gal Gadot made just $300k for Wonder Woman (while Henry Cavill raked in $14MILLION for Man of Steel) https://t.co/lLLDg2z8a5
— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) June 20, 2017
"Democrats have long accused the Green Party of being like a watermelon—green on the outside, red on the inside—and Stein’s closeness to a Kremlin-backed entity like RT has only fueled those suspicions."
“Democrats have long accused the Green Party of being like a watermelon—green on the outside, red on the inside” https://t.co/Mw00k5Afmg
The Social Justice Warrior Handbook will unlock the secrets to identifying social injustice and surviving in a world that doesn’t care about your feelings.
Whether you’re a militant feminist, social media activist, workplace warrior, privileged college student, or Hollywood actress desperate to be taken seriously, The Social Justice Warrior Handbook will help you navigate the complex, exciting world of activism with minimal effort.
Discover:
* What to do when someone assumes your gender
* How to infiltrate a right-wing event
* How to fake authentic vintage style
* How to survive a holiday meal that doesn’t follow your food philosophy
* What you need in your SJW bug-out bag
* How to do an epic takedown of someone more successful than you
Remember: The only thing necessary for the triumph of good over evil is to tweet about it.
The high-pressure system still hasn't peaked and we're going to see record temperatures Tuesday and Wednesday, with triple-digits in many parts of the Southland.
Luckily, it's been quite enjoyable near the coasts.
Here's the lovely Ms. Amber, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:
Looks like a good read. Gingrich is a prolific writer, but he knows what he's talking about. He's a hustler, for sure. He hustles the bucks, and in this case he's clearly able to publish a book exploiting his establishment insider creds.
Still, he's helluva lot more trustworthy on this than most.
For all the pre-interview fuss, NBC’s new star exposed the Infowars host for what he is. But the controversy was never really about him.
The censorious powers of the heckler’s veto have evolved now to the point that people are willing to call for the banning and shunning of works of journalism not yet published. Former Fox News Channel and current NBC News anchor Megyn Kelly got the treatment this week as news of her Sunday Night With Megyn Kelly interview with Infowars mainspring Alex Jones, well before it was scheduled to air June 18, made the rounds. At least the Ayatollah Khomeini waited for the publication of Satanic Verses before he issued a fatwa ordering the murder of its author, Salman Rushdie.
Sandy Hook Elementary families implored NBC News to dump the segment because Jones has called the Newtown, Connecticut, school killings a hoax—by actors, not real people—designed, Jones said, to encourage new gun control laws. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio concurred, writing, “Pull the segment.” The NBC affiliate in nearby Hartford refused to air the episode because the “wounds of that day that have yet to heal.” Fleeing from the controversy, advertiser JPMorgan Chase dropped its spots from the show, and the usual voices damned Kelly for giving Jones “a platform.”
Not to be outshone, Jones performed some culture jamming of his own, releasing his own secretly recorded audio of the pre-interview in which Kelly buttered him up. “It’s not going to be some gotcha hit piece, I can promise you that,” Kelly told Jones on the tape. Predictably, Jones made his own call for a boycott, tweeting, “I’m calling for @megynkelly to cancel the airing of our interview for misrepresenting my views on Sandy Hook.”
When Kelly’s show finally aired, she took the mendacious Jones apart in such a textbook manner you had to wonder what all the shouting had been about. The Jones pattern, she said at the segment’s top, is making “reckless accusations followed by equivocations and excuses” when questioned. The two best examples of this are his promotion of the “Pizzagate“ lies about a satanic child porn ring and his wild allegation that Chobani was “importing Migrant Rapists,” as Infowars hyped its report on Twitter. In both cases, lawsuits have forced Jones to retract and apologize for airing these dishonest stories, and yet in conversation with Kelly he still hedges and quibbles like a con artist in an effort to have his conspiracy pizza and keep his yogurt, too. Likewise with the pathetic claims about the Sandy Hook killings. He’s still throwing the see-through drapery of devil’s advocacy to blur the fact that on most subjects he’s talking out of his tinfoil hat.
Short of waterboarding him, I don’t know what more Kelly could have done to expose Jones’ dark methods...
*****
Most viewers extend to broadcasters like Anderson Cooper, Chris Wallace, Jake Tapper and Erin Burnett the sort of goodwill they draw on to tackle fraught topics and subjects that will end up upsetting somebody. Due to her Fox background, Kelly doesn’t command that sort of goodwill—the protests against her show are more about her than they are Alex Jones or Sandy Hook. Kelly’s enemies, places like liberal agitprop outfit Media Matters for America, which has been riding this story hard, would likely be raising a ruckus if she went to work as a Today co-host and did celebrity fluff.
Would the calls for a Kelly boycott be so insistent if a similar technique hadn’t succeeded in driving Fox’s Bill O’Reilly off his network? My guess is that they wouldn’t. Kelly won this round, but she wasn’t the only one to pay the price. If you like edgy, truth-telling journalism, the spirited campaign against her has written a heckler’s veto playbook that future activists and scolds will eventually apply to your preferred anchor, be it Rachel Maddow or Sean Hannity. You’ve been warned.
Otto Warmbier, an American college student who was in a coma when he was released by North Korea, has died in Ohio. He was 22.
His family said in a statement that Warmbier died Monday afternoon.
The family thanked the University of Cincinnati Medical Center for treating him but said, “Unfortunately, the awful torturous mistreatment our son received at the hands of the North Koreans ensured that no other outcome was possible beyond the sad one we experienced today.”
The Yankees have the best offense in baseball, so a four-game sweep by the last-place Athletics has to be embarrassing for New York (and freakin' awesome for Oakland).
The A’s clubhouse had a nightclub feel, complete with lights flashing through a spectrum of colors and music blasting at a near-deafening volume.
“The vibe is good right now, and it’s growing,” starting pitcher Jharel Cotton said. “I think we’re confident, and we’re only going to get that much better.
“I just love it.”
That’s what a four-game sweep of the Yankees will do for a team, a feat the A’s accomplished on a scorching hot Sunday afternoon with a 4-3 victory in front of a crowd of more than 34,000 at the Coliseum.
The A’s snapped a string of 26 series without a sweep, a streak that dates to beating Kansas City four straight in September. They hadn’t swept a four-game series in Oakland since victimizing Toronto in July 2014.
“Against a team of that caliber, it’s tough to sweep a three-game series, let alone a four-game series,” A’s manager Bob Melvin said after sending the Yankees away on a six-game skid. “… It was a big series, especially for the younger guys. … To know that you can have a series like this gives you a lot of confidence in yourself and the team.”
Look, this hits too close to home, which is why even Karen Handel has backed away from it (she's hoping not to scare off independent moderates in the district who might feel sympathy for Ossoff, who will whine about how he's being unfairly attacked).
But hey, I can't find fault with this ad (below), out from the folks at Principled PAC.
I’ve warned for more than a decade about the unhinged Left’s rhetoric and the despicable double standards that have given progressives immunity as they falsely blamed Republicans and conservatives for every last random outbreak of violence.
In fact, Unhinged could be re-released today and readers would hardly notice it was written 11 years ago!
Are there any decent Democrats or left-wingers in the public square willing to acknowledge the existence of their own climate of hate — festering with misogyny, liberal racism, and assassination fascination?
Do words and rhetoric only have consequences if they can be used against conservatives and Republicans?
Or will we spend the rest of the day being bombarded with vile gloating like this...
* The primary conflict structuring the two parties involves questions of national identity, race, and morality, while the traditional conflict over economics, though still important, is less divisive now than it used to be. This has the potential to reshape the party coalitions.
* By making questions of national identity more salient, Donald Trump succeeded in winning over “populists” (socially conservative, economically liberal voters) who had previously voted for Democrats.
* Among populists who voted for Obama, Clinton did terribly. She held onto only 6 in 10 of these voters (59 percent). Trump picked up 27 percent of these voters, and the remaining 14 percent didn’t vote for either major party candidate.
* To the extent that the Democratic Party is divided, these divisions are more about faith in the political system and general disaffection than they are about issue positions.
* By contrast, Republican voters are more clearly split. For the most part, Trump and Cruz supporters look fairly similar, though Cruz supporters are considerably more conservative on moral issues, and notably less concerned about inequality and the social safety net, and more pro- free trade. Kasich supporters are the true moderates, caught in between the two parties on almost every issue, both economic and social.
* In both parties, the donor class is both more conservative on economic issues and more liberal on social issues, as compared to the rest of the party.
* Democrats may be pressured to move further left on identity issues, given that both younger voters and the party’s donor class are quite far to the left on identity issues. If so, American politics would become further polarized along questions of culture and identity...
And can you blame the guy, considering? And that's not to justify it, but sheesh. Britain's been taken over. You're likely to have a race war any time now. Leftists can't be surprised.
Of course it matters, especially since virtually the entire mainstream media establishment is pitching fake news 24/7.
As noted, I stopped watching any television news last semester, and just have now starting inching back toward any kind of regular viewing. I simply do not trust reporters and traditional outlets to report fairly or accurately. It's just a given now, and of course it influences politics. We're living in two virtual countries with two virtual realities. And it takes a lot of power to shift those realities and make a new narrative strong enough to shift votes. That's why leftists hate President Trump. He beat the fake news industry and still does it everyday by getting his message out on Twitter and through his campaign-style rallies, God bless him.
As noted in the previous article, most people learn to adjust for fake news in a medium with which they are familiar. Otherwise, tabloids would hardly be shelved at the checkout counter, as they have been for decades. But many are now convinced that fake news put out on social media helped tip the US to Trump. Post-election, Hillary Clinton decried the epidemic of fake news, as did outgoing President Obama.
The air has been thick with statistics on both sides, with conservatives and the far right usually fingered as the culprits. Actually, fake news was purveyed on both sides. Ben Carson did not, for example, say that the ghosts of aborted babies haunt hospitals. Mainstream media sometimes publish fake news too. The Burlington Electric Company’s grid was not hacked by Russia, as the Washington Post recently claimed. Apparently, the Post staffers had not followed the conventional rule of phoning the facility to check before running the story. But did it make much difference anyway?
As it happens, claims for social media’s awesome power aren’t new to the 2016 election. Similarly dramatic claims were made after the 2008 election. Back then the outcome was welcomed by the proponents of the social media power, so we were unlikely to hear much about the perils of fake news.
Indeed, as “astroturf” investigator Sharyl Atkisson observes, before mid-September 2016, fake news was hardly mentioned. Concern arose among Clinton allies thereafter via progressive site Media Matters and caught on widely from there in traditional media.
Either something happened rather suddenly to social media or there are more conventional explanations for Clinton’s loss. Let’s look at some of the latter:
It wasn’t fake news that made the difference; it was missed news. First, Trump was not the Republican party’s choice of candidate. He was propelled by a base that felt ignored—and ridiculed—by both parties. Sociologist Charles Murray describes that base quite clearly in Coming Apart (2012): They are the working class communities ("Fishtown," in his narrative) quietly disintegrating amid global societal changes. Meanwhile, middle class communities ("Belmont," in his narrative) are thriving, indifferent or even censorious, a few kilometres away.*
The Democrats did not have a Trump. Their candidate was a party establishment figure with massive intelligentsia and media backing. Among those who felt that their concerns would never be heard in those venues, that was her handicap. It’s a good question why Trump was one of the few public figures to grasp the significance of the demographic shift and exploit it. But little will be learned about that from an intense examinations of fake news. Newly recruited Trump voters were motivated by actual bad news in their own communities.
The hole created by the missed news was widened by the Democrats’ heavy reliance on millennial social media experts to connect with voters. Kay Hymowitz explains at City Journal:
In the past few years, their influence has only grown, as mass-market fashion magazines like Elle, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire have given them column space, effectively crowning them the new elite experts on women’s issues.
They weren’t. They had heads full of academic theory and millennial angst but little life experience with—and virtually no interest in—military wives from South Carolina or Walmart managers from Staten Island, who also happen to fall into the category “women.” Nor did the new luminaries or their bosses seem to notice that the latter group far outnumbered their own rarefied crowd.
The internet changes a great deal but it does not change the fundamental nature of reality. One small Atlanta-based pollster sensed that the military wife or the WalMart manager might not wish to risk humiliation, even in the abstract, by giving an honest opinion. So he asked his respondents who they thought their neighbors would vote for. He called the big contest right while major polling firms got it embarrassingly wrong.
The $50 million fight to fill Tom Price’s congressional set is now the most expensive House race in American history—and Republicans can blame Trump if Jon Ossoff wins on Tuesday.
SANDY SPRINGS, Georgia—Take the New Hampshire presidential primary, move it next to a Waffle House, douse it in cash and the sweltering June heat of Georgia, and you’ll get the special election runoff in the state’s 6th Congressional District.
In a race that was never expected to be close, the once sleepy collection of solidly Republican suburbs has suddenly become ground zero for the resistance to the presidency of Donald Trump.
“What’s happening? The president is happening,” said Barbara Carr, a 6th District voter who had volunteered to hold a Jon Ossoff sign, along with a dripping Popsicle, on a busy Atlanta street corner Saturday as the temperature climbed past 90 degrees. Trump “doesn’t represent my values.”
The hopes of local Democrats like Carr and others across the country are piled onto Ossoff, a 30-year-old former congressional staffer who was practically unknown—even to fellow Georgia Democrats—before 2017. But when civil rights icon (and a former boss of Ossoff’s) Rep. John Lewis (D-GA) endorsed him in January, a fire-hose of small-dollar donations from Democratic activists began to pour into Ossoff’s campaign coffers and never stopped.
The nonstop money bomb allowed Ossoff to raise a truly obscene amount of money, $23 million so far, and build a monster campaign big enough to challenge both the Republican machine in Georgia and the Republican on the ballot against him on Tuesday, former secretary of state Karen Handel. Keenly aware that a loss in Georgia would be spun as a loss for the president and his agenda, National Republican leaders, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, sent super-sized resources of their own to Georgia. The $50 million-plus contest has now become the most expensive House race in American history.
“They’re getting statewide saturation,” said Jeff DiSantis, a longtime Democratic operative in the state who ran Michelle Nunn’s 2014 Senate race. “Everybody knows everything there is to know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like it, even in a presidential [election].”
It is hard to describe the sheer scope of the campaign Ossoff has been able to build, first to win 48 percent of the vote in the April primary and now to be running even with Handel in a district that is widely considered “R +10,” meaning a GOP candidate starts out with a safe 10-point advantage over any Democrat they’ll face.
While most political candidates, including Handel, have to spend hours a day, and sometimes their entire day, calling wealthy donors for campaign contributions, the small-dollar activist machine fueled by Daily Kos and End Citizens United has largely freed Ossoff from the onus of call time. Instead of dialing for dollars, Ossoff can show up at nearly every meet-and-greet, neighborhood meeting, or canvass party he gets invited to.
He and his campaign can also knock on voters' doors. Lots of them. With two days left before Election Day, the Ossoff campaign has knocked on more than 500,000 voter doors, including 80,000 on Saturday alone. The campaign has six field offices, more than 100 full-time paid staffers, and more than 12,000 active volunteers. The Georgia Democratic Party has focused another 12 full-time staffers solely on minority voter engagement in the district.
An Atlanta-Journal Constitution poll showed that 51 percent of likely voters had been reached directly by the Ossoff campaign, while 32 percent of voters said they’d heard from Handel or her team.
But that same poll also revealed the greatest hurdle Handel faces on Tuesday, and it isn’t Jon Ossoff or his operation. Instead, it is the broad anti-Trump sentiment in the district, including that 35 percent approval rating...
Temperatures reached 116 degrees in Palm Springs yesterday, and the forecast is 120 today. These are record-breaking temps. Interestingly, the coastal areas saw barely cooler weather yesterday, which is from the low-pressure moisture that's clinging along the beaches. That's the place to cool off.
So, I'll be sitting pretty in Irvine today, but if you're inland, take a load off your feet, pump the air conditioning, and stay hydrated.
Here's the fantastic Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 from yesterday:
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