Trump's Early Lead on Facebook

At the L.A. Times, via Memeorandum, "Trump’s big, early lead in Facebook ads deeply worries Democratic strategists":

Almost every time voters who lean toward President Trump visit Facebook, they get deluged with invitations to his rallies or pleas to support his immigration policies: That’s no surprise — the platform was central to his victorious 2016 campaign.

What they probably don’t expect is that the Trump campaign also follows them to more distant corners of the internet — placing ads that supporters see on YouTube channels like Epic Wildlife, Physiques of Greatness and BroScienceLife, even the liberal site Daily Kos. The campaign’s willingness to spend money on such sites may or may not pay political dividends, but its willingness to gamble points to something bigger that unnerves the Democratic Party’s top digital thinkers.

“His campaign is testing everything,” said Shomik Dutta, a veteran of Barack Obama’s two campaigns and partner at Higher Ground Labs, an incubator for progressive political tech. “No one on the Democratic side is even coming close yet. It should be gravely concerning.”

Trump is using the advantage of incumbency, a huge pile of campaign cash and a clear path to his party’s nomination to build a digital operation unmatched by anything Democrats have. His campaign is testing all manner of iterations, algorithms and data-mining techniques — from the color of the buttons it uses on fundraising pitches to the audiences it targets with short videos of his speeches.

By the time Democrats pick a nominee, some of the party’s top digital strategists warn, Trump will have built a self-feeding machine that grows smarter by the day. His campaign has run thousands of iterations of Facebook ads — tens of thousands by some counts — sending data on response rates and other metrics gleaned from the platform to software that perpetually fine-tunes the campaign messages.

As with most campaign tactics, no one knows for sure how much difference the flood of money and advertising on Facebook might make. Despite all the testing of how people respond to specific messages, even the richest political campaigns don’t spend much money on rigorously researching the ultimate question of what, if anything, sways voters, especially with an incumbent who inspires such strong feelings — positive and negative — as Trump.

Still, the central fact of the 2016 election likely will remain true for 2020: Trump’s victory margin in key states was so slim that just a handful of voters staying home or showing up could make the difference...

Jay Leno's Garage: Dodge Hellcat Redeye 2019 (VIDEO)

Jay Leno loves cars, and he really loves the Dodge series Challengers.

Previously, "Jay Leno Takes the Dodge Demon to Pomona Raceway."

At the video, they first discuss the red 485hp Challenger "Scat Pack" wide-body, which is going to be my next car in a few years, lol. They're extremely affordable at under $40,000, and Dodge has transferred much of the technology from last year's Demon down to the lower price-range vehicles.

And Jay's endorsement is off the charts. A great show:

All-Carbon Body '70 Dodge Charger (VIDEO)

It's at Hoonigan's, the life-style hot-rod burnout brand, based in Long Beach. I blogged about them here, "HOONIGAN Mazda Miata Long Jump (VIDEO)."

What does it take to make a BIG muscle car like the '70 Dodge Charger handle? Try dropping around 900lbs. Getting that much weight loss ain't easy without ending up looking like ShartKart... so Speedkore turned to Boeing-levels of weight loss tech, by going all carbon on the body. Wild.

Lauren Southern Retires

From the "far-right" internet thug life, lol.

She's a sweetie, and fearless to boot.

Read her farewell essay. (Hint: She's tired of the fight, having achieved great things, and wants to go back to school.)

She directed a film full-length feature film, "Borderless," which is a pretty stunning thing for a young hottie like that.

Farewell ❤️

I've enjoyed this all greatly but it's time to start a new chapter of my life. Thank you to all my incredible colleagues who I'll be cheering on in their fight for truth - and my wonderful supporters who made all I've done possible.https://t.co/iK4tu4gGw0

— Lauren Southern (@Lauren_Southern) June 3, 2019

Watch the full movie here, "Borderless (2019): Official Documentary."

Evelyn Taft's Weather Record-Setting Forecast

It's going to be really hot today. Stay cool folks!

Here's the fabulous Ms. Evelyn, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles.

Barbara Palvin Luisda Films 2019 (VIDEO)

She's nice.

As Homelessness Crisis Worsen, Democrat Presidential Candidates Stay Mum

You'd think homelessness would be in the Democrats' policy wheelhouse, but it's not.

And that's no surprise. Homelessness hits white working-class families particularly hard, and the Democrats hate white people.

At the Los Angeles Times, "Homelessness is a crisis in California. Why are 2020 candidates mostly ignoring it?":

When new figures released last week showed a jarring rise in homelessness around Los Angeles, the response throughout Southern California was shock and indignation.

The reaction from the crowded field of Democratic presidential candidates: silence.

While White House hopefuls crisscross the country, making big promises on issues such as college debt relief, climate change and boosting the working and middle classes, they have largely ignored an issue — the soaring number of unsheltered Americans — that has reached a crisis point in communities on the West Coast and elsewhere.

The reason, said Sam Tsemberis, is simple.

“It doesn’t have a constituency or an advocacy group that has enough money,” said Tsemberis, who leads Pathways Housing First, a Los Angeles nonprofit that works to end homelessness. “The National Coalition for the Homeless is not the National Rifle Assn.”

Not that voters are uninterested. In California, for instance, a sizable majority of likely voters — Democratic, Republican and independent — consider homelessness a big problem, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

But even as presidential candidates pay greater attention to California, mindful of its early March 3 primary, none has seized on the crisis as a rallying cry.

The silence is particularly notable coming from California’s Sen. Kamala Harris, who lives in L.A. Her campaign declined requests for comment on the latest homelessness figures. Harris and her rivals broadly address issues relating to homeownership or rent affordability, but offer little aimed at the desperate plight of those already living on the street.

Harris has two housing proposals: One is a subsidy for renters paying more than 30% of their income on housing. The second is a monthly cash stipend for low- and middle-income workers.

Both plans, her campaign says, would target the neediest and save people from evictions, a leading cause of homelessness.

The twin issues of affordable housing and homelessness are a “crisis [that is] not receiving the kind of attention that it deserves,” she said in a speech to the National Alliance to End Homelessness last year before she launched her candidacy.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, the former mayor of Newark, is the only one with a housing proposal that specifically talks about eliminating homelessness nationwide, by doubling funding to $6 billion for federal grants geared toward serving that population.

Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s housing plan ties in factors like affordable-housing scarcity, housing discrimination and the needs of people who require substance-abuse treatment, all issues that influence a person’s vulnerability to homelessness.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ campaign website features his stands on 25 issues, but housing is not among them. When he ran for president four years ago, Sanders called for increased federal spending on rent vouchers for the poor, repairs to public housing projects and construction of low-rent housing.

In March, Sanders tweeted that the country has “a moral responsibility to make certain that no American goes hungry or sleeps out on the streets.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign did not respond to requests for the candidate’s plans to address homelessness.

Julián Castro, who was Housing and Urban Development secretary under President Obama, stood out among Democratic rivals by highlighting homelessness on the campaign trail. On an April visit to Nevada, he toured a storm-drain tunnel beneath the Las Vegas Strip where hundreds had set up encampments.

“This is not the kind of issue that a lot of people open their arms to, but they should,” Castro said Thursday in an interview.

He is set to release his housing agenda, including plans to reduce homelessness, in the weeks ahead...

They're all a bunch of idiots and losers.

The Making of a YouTube Radical

I was fascinated with this piece, even though it's a pathetic smear of conservatives. The New York Times was appropriately dragged for it.

.@PatriarchTree The New York Slimes smears “far-right” #YouTube personalities. 🙄 #YouTubePurge cc. @MichelleMalkin https://t.co/87jNXdKpP0

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) June 8, 2019

See also, the Daily Caller, "The New York Times Somehow Continues to Lose Even More Credibility."

And at Twitchy, "New York Times: The path to YouTube radicalization leads through economist Milton Friedman."

Jennifer Delacruz's Hot June Forecast

I thought we were supposed to have June gloom, lol.

I was out in Palm Desert this weekend, and it was scorching. Supposed to be 113 out there tomorrow.

Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer with the week's forecast, for ABC News 10 San Diego.

Shoko Takahashi

On Twitter, plus some more women in the thread.

See, Playboy Hall on Twitter.

Roaming Millennial on Populism (VIDEO)

She doesn't go by "Roaming Millennial" anymore, because she couldn't get the coveted blue check on Twitter. Hmm, but let's talk about elites, lol.

I'm kidding. Lauren Chen's a good lady, and she pretty much nails it on populism.

Lucy Nicholson ‏

Nice lady.

Hi everyone, just wanted to address this as many people have been saying it’s not actually me on here😘 pic.twitter.com/StJdBc1Ww4

— Lucy Nicholson (@UnitedLuce) June 3, 2019

What’s worse than a heartbreak? pic.twitter.com/wRHGInEYq9

— Lucy Nicholson (@UnitedLuce) June 5, 2019

Kristen Stewart

At Drunken Stepfather, "KRISTEN STEWART TOPLESS OF THE DAY."

President Trump's Comments at 75th Anniversary of D-Day Landing at Normandy (VIDEO)

At USA Today, "'He can be a statesman': Trump's Normandy speech well-received by critics, Scarborough says, 'I hope he means it'."

(Fuck Joe Scarborough.)

Visting Normandy American Cemetary

This is a phenomenal essay.

Very moving.

From Rachel Donadio, at the Atlantic, "Nothing Prepares You for Visiting Omaha Beach."

On the 75th anniversary of D-Day tomorrow, President Trump and President Emmanuel Macron will participate in a commemoration at the Normandy American Cemetery. I visited this part of Normandy recently and it left an indelible mark. https://t.co/4ulsjFeDIv

— Rachel Donadio (@RachelDonadio) June 5, 2019

Lindsay Lohan Nude for Playboy Magazine

At London's Daily Mail, "Lindsay Lohan steals Marilyn Monroe's style as she goes NAKED in retro-inspired Playboy shoot... complete with peroxide blonde tresses, vampish nails, sky-high heels and nothing else."

Lindsay Lohan steals Marilyn Monroe's style as she goes NAKED in retro-inspired Playboy shoot https://t.co/TXSt7MwDZp

— Daily Mail Celebrity (@DailyMailCeleb) June 6, 2019

Women Taking Selfies

At Drunken Stepfather, "TOP 10 SELFIES OF THE DAY."

The Quietest Generation: Yellowed World War II Records Vividly Show Valor That Veterans Concealed

This is such an interesting story.

At the New York Times, "Their Fathers Never Spoke of the War. Their Children Want to Know Why":

NEW ORLEANS — All his life, Joseph Griesser hungered to hear the story of his father’s Army service in World War II.

What he had were vague outlines: that Lt. Frank Griesser had splashed onto Omaha Beach on D-Day; that his lifelong pronounced limp had come from an artillery blast. But the details? They remained largely unspoken until the day his father died in 1999, leaving Mr. Griesser wishing he knew more.

“He never talked about it; I just knew he was injured in the war,” said Mr. Griesser, who lives in Stone Harbor, N.J. “We went to see the movie ‘The Longest Day’ together, but that was pretty much the extent of our conversation about the war. I think he just wanted to put it behind him.”

Many of the Americans who fought to crush the Axis in World War II came home feeling the same way — so many, in fact, that those lauded as the Greatest Generation might just as easily be called the Quietest.

Where did they serve? What did they do and see? Spouses and children often learned not to ask. And by now, most no longer have the chance: Fewer than 3 percent of the 16 million American veterans of the war are still alive, and all are in their 90s or beyond.

But that has not kept their children and grandchildren from wanting to know their stories, especially as the 75th anniversaries of the D-Day invasion and the other triumphs of the war’s final year have neared. And a growing number of them are turning to experts to help glean what they can from cryptic, yellowed military records.

“We have people calling every day to try to find out about their fathers,” said Tanja Spitzer, a researcher at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans. “They regret that they didn’t do anything when their parents were alive. We get a lot of apologizing about it. For them, it is very emotional.”

Ms. Spitzer tells them it is not too late. Among the nation’s many staggering accomplishments in World War II were the billions of pages of personnel files that War Department and Navy clerks amassed to keep track of everyone in uniform. Most of those records still exist, stored in a climate-controlled facility in St. Louis by the National Archives and Records Administration.

The repository is immense, with enough boxes of files to stretch more than 545 miles. The boxes hold everything from the mundane, like payrolls and medical screening forms, to the heart-tugging: photos of young recruits, letters from worried mothers, medal citations. Researchers can use them to recreate the individual stories that many troops never told.

“We can tell a lot,” Ms. Spitzer said. “If you know what you are looking for, you can really create a full picture.”

Responding to the growing interest, the museum created a research team this year focused solely on piecing together profiles of veterans from the archives, joining an array of military historians-for-hire who work with families like the Griessers.

“It’s a lot of sons and daughters, wishing they had the conversations that were too painful to have when their fathers were still alive,” said William Beigel, an independent historian in Redondo Beach, Calif., who has been researching World War II veterans for 20 years. He said demand has been surging as the ranks of living veterans have dwindled, and he now gets as many as 25 requests a day.

*****

Dolores Milhous remembers her father, Lt. James E. Robinson Jr., only as the tall man who came through the screen door and hoisted her onto his shoulders shortly before he shipped out. When he was killed in combat in the spring of 1945, she was 2 years old.

“Mother always talked about him,” said Ms. Milhous, 76, who lives in Dallas. “But there was so much I didn’t know — things I wished I asked before Mother passed away, but I hesitated because it made her so sad.”

Knowing that the memory of her father would only erode further as it was passed down to her five grandchildren and two great-grandchildren, she asked the museum researchers to look for his file.

They returned with a stack of 240 partially burned pages from the archive, detailing a stunning story she had known in outline but not detail: Her father, a slight 25-year-old with a slim mustache and a Texas accent, had turned the tide in a battle involving thousands of men, and was posthumously awarded the military’s highest award for heroism, the Medal of Honor.

Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day

A new edited volume, with Rick Atkinson.

At Amazon, Cornelius Ryan, The Longest Day.

Liel Leibovitz on the Ahmari/French Debate Over Conservatism

A big story on Twitter right now is Steven Crowder getting demonetized by YouTube, after a homosexual dude known as @GayWonk got his feelings hurt and mounted an all-out jihad against Crowder, claiming "homophobia," "racism," and who knows what else?

The Other McCain blogged on this a couple of days ago: "Totalitarian @GayWonk Is Attempting to Silence Conservative @SCrowder."

Meanwhile, I'm very interested in the debate Sohrab Ahmari kicked off with his blistering essay at First Things. I blogged about it here: "Our Existential Struggle."

I'm on Sohrab's side, but boy is this debate getting testy.

I'll have more, no doubt, but definitely read this piece from Liel Leibovich, at the Tablet, "Why Jews Should Pay Attention to the Recent Debate Rocking American Conservatism":

One of the best entries to the fun conservative debate of the moment. Among other things, it looks at whether NeverTrumpism is as civil as it loudly claims to be. https://t.co/HS3JyYCnEG

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) June 4, 2019

You don’t have to be conservative, or particularly religious, to spot a few deep-seated problems with the arguments advanced by French, Stephens, and the rest of the Never Trump cadre. Three fallacies in particular stand out.

The first has to do with the self-branding of the Never Trumpers as champions of civility. From tax cuts to crushing ISIS, from supporting Israel to appointing staunchly ideological justices to the Supreme Court, there’s very little about the 45th president’s policies that ought to make any principled conservative run for the hills. What, then, separates one camp of conservatives, one that supports the president, from another, which vows it never will? Stephens himself attempted an answer in a 2017 column. “Character does count,” he wrote, “and virtue does matter, and Trump’s shortcomings prove it daily.”

To put it briefly, the Never Trump argument is that they should be greatly approved of, while Donald Trump should rightly be scorned, because—while they agree with Trump on most things, politically—they are devoted to virtue, while Trump is uniquely despicable. The proofs of Trump’s singular loathsomeness are many, but if you strip him of all the vices he shares with others who had recently held positions of power—a deeply problematic attitude towards women (see under: Clinton, William Jefferson), shady business dealings (see under: Clinton, Hillary Rodham), a problematic attitude towards the free press (see under: Obama, Barack)—you remain with one ur-narrative, the terrifying folk tale that casts Trump as a nefarious troll dispatched by his paymasters in the Kremlin to set American democracy ablaze.

Now that this story has been thoroughly investigated and discredited, it seems fair to ask: Is championing a loony and deeply corrosive conspiracy theory proof of anyone’s superior virtue? The fact that these accusations were false implies that the Never Trumpers who made them early and often were among the political pyromaniacs, and are therefore deserving of the very obloquy that they heaped on Trump. And what about people like Carter Page, a blameless ex-Navy officer who was defamed as an agent of a shadowy, ever-expanding conspiracy headquartered in Moscow?

Conspiracy-mongering doesn’t seem like much of a public virtue. Certainly, the Never Trumpers should have known better than to join in the massive publicity campaign around a “dossier” supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence officer rehashing third-hand hearsay and paid for by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. You can still find many faults with Donald Trump’s behavior in and out of office, including some cardinal enough perhaps to merit impeachment, without buying in to some moronic ghost story about an orange-hued traitor who seized the highest office in the land with the help of Vladimir Putin’s social media goons. All that should go without saying, especially for people who ostensibly devote their lives to elevating and enriching the tone of our public discourse.

It is therefore particularly strange to find that David French lent his considerable conservative credibility to the Russiagate lunacy. Here he is, for example, mocking those calling Russiagate a hoax by accusing them of being complicit with Trump receiving oppositional research from a foreign power—which, ironically, is precisely what the Clinton campaign had in fact done, in compiling the “dossier” in the first place. And here he is cheering for the now highly contested BuzzFeed story alleging that Trump instructed his lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress, an allegation that is contradicted by the Mueller report itself. And here he is dismissing the suggestion, by then backed by mounting evidence, that Russiagate may be a hoax or itself some kind of conspiracy.

It is true that French took care to sound unfailingly fair, a lone voice for reason in a political reality inflamed by lunatics left and right. The thing he was being reasonable about, however, was an FBI investigation that emerged out of a blatant politically motivated forgery. Now, it’s perfectly plausible that French was carrying on his arguments in good faith, even when overwhelming evidence to the contrary was always there for a slightly more curious or skeptical journalist to discover. What’s disturbing, from the public virtue standpoint, is that French has yet to admit his own failings, which are compounded by his less-than-courageous misrepresentations of what he actually wrote: In his reply to Ahmari, he strongly denied he had promoted the collusion story, a point of view that’s difficult to defend when your byline appears on stories like “There Is Now Evidence That Senior Trump Officials Attempted to Collude with Russia.”

French and the other self-appointed guardians of civility, then, should do us all a favor and drop the civic virtue act. They’re not disinterested guardians of our public institutions; they are actors, working in an industry that rewards them for dressing up in Roman Republican drag and reciting Cicero for the yokels. This is why Bill Kristol, another of the Never Trumpers, could raise money for his vanity website, The Bulwark, and why he could expect his new creation be lauded on CNN as “a conservative site unafraid to take on Trump,” even as the site was staffed by leftist millennials and dutifully followed progressive propaganda lines. Like anyone whose living depends on keeping on the right side of a leftist industry, they understood that there’s only so much you can say if you care about cashing a paycheck—especially when the president and leader of your own party won’t take your phone calls.

The Never Trumpers, of course, aren’t the first Americans to hide cold careerism behind a wall of virtue-signaling. It’s why so many in the professional punditry went the way of Never Trump: More than anything else, the decision to align oneself with a movement that, ontologically, vows to reject the president a priori, no matter what he might say or do, regardless of your own supposed political beliefs, is a way of affirming one’s professional class loyalties, thus ensuring that your progeny will still be accepted and acceptable at Yale.

Which, really, wouldn’t be much of a problem if the Never Trumpers were all as genuinely committed to gentility as David French. Sadly, they’re not, and you needn’t go much further than Stephens’ column to understand why. Stephens and Ahmari are friendly. It was Stephens who helped Ahmari get his first job at The Wall Street Journal. And Stephens is thanked in Ahmari’s recent memoir, a candid, thoughtful, and deeply moving account of his journey to Catholicism. And Bret Stephens is a gentleman, in a way that Donald Trump surely is not. Yet it is possible to imagine Stephens as the wrong kind of gentleman when reading his column contra Ahmari: Sounding every bit like a bigoted member of a 19th-century gentleman’s club railing against the papists, Stephens casually and cruelly robs his former protégé of the intricacies of his faith-based argument for the pleasure of painting him as “an ardent convert” merrily rolling along on his way to a Handmaid’s Tale-like future for America.

To tell an Iranian immigrant that he doesn’t understand the way American liberalism works because he ended up on the side of faith rather than on the side of deracinated cosmopolitan universalism isn’t just an impoverished reading of America’s foundations or a blatantly condescending comment; it’s also indicative of a mindset that seeks to immediately equate any disagreement with some inherent and irreparable character flaw.

On the subject of dissenters, the Never Trumpers eternal and immovable contempt merely apes that of their newfound pals on the left, for whom the president is a Nazi, the Republicans are perennially in the throes of a War on Women, and anyone who doesn’t fully subscribe to the latest lunacies of the identity politics-driven college campus cult is a racist creep. You may believe such an approach to politics is effective, but to pretend it is somehow morally superior is dishonest at best and, at worst, nefarious—a sleazy attempt to portray anyone who disagrees with you as not quite clean enough to be admitted into the league of enlightened gentlemen.

So much for the cocktail party chatter. The larger problem here is that at no point do Stephens, French, et al. deliver a concrete explanation of how they propose conservatism go about opposing, to say nothing of reversing, the new social and moral order that the progressive left has been busily implementing in America for a decade or more. At best, they claim that there’s no real crisis after all.

Presumably, the Never Trumpers and their ilk were simply manipulating the rubes and making bank when they denounced tenured radicals and liberal judges and the like under Clinton and Obama. In reality, they are perfectly content to live in a culture in which universities reject scientifically sound peer-reviewed papers for fear of offending the transgender community; in which pro-Israel speakers are routinely shouted down on campuses, and people with unpopular views are physically attacked; in which large technology platforms actively censor speech; in which journalists giddily defend the doxxing of a private citizen who created and shared a video they didn’t like; in which faith and those who practice it in earnest are dismissed as benighted bigots; in which the whims of unelected bureaucrats trump the rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. Never Trump was therefore a misnomer; they were simply elitist progressives who did an awkward kind of dance before arriving at their predestined home in the Democratic Party.

Ahmari, not unlike the zealous left he opposes, has a very distinct idea of where he wants the country to go. He doesn’t want it to end up where objecting to lunatic theories, forged by crackpot academics and defying millennia of lived human experience, gets you called a bigot and fired from your job. He doesn’t want to try and engage in dialogue with people who believe that disagreeing with their opinions causes them some sort of harm and that speech must therefore be regulated by the government or large tech companies. He doesn’t want an America in which color of skin and religious affiliation and sexual preference trump or mute the content of your character. Looking at public schools and private universities, Hollywood and publishing, academia and social media, Ahmari sees the threat posed by progressive doctrine to established American norms and values as entirely real. That he wants to fight it doesn’t make him, as Stephens suggested, a Catholic mullah-in-waiting. It makes him a normal American...

RTWT.