“NBC Dismisses Push to Censure Schiff as ‘Symbolic’; ABC & CBS Ignore”
“On Monday, the network morning shows devoted a total of 15 seconds of air time to congressional Republicans moving to censure House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff for his handling of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Only NBC actually covered the news – in a dismissive tone – while ABC and CBS completely skipped the story.”
“Pollsters are at it again, pushing sketchy polls, not to reflect public opinion, but to shape it. This is called propaganda, a popular tool for dictators who want to control the information flow from an all-powerful government to their subjects, the people.
What once passed for journalism is now mostly propaganda, an effort by major media organizations to insert themselves into the political process, to push their agenda, even if it means throwing any pretense of journalistic principle and integrity to the wind. Look at the Project Veritas undercover videos of CNN for the latest example.
Polls of any type are designed to take a scientific snapshot of opinion at a particular point in time. A small sample is taken from a larger population and if the sample is representative of the entire population, then the poll should be valid.
When cooking a sauce, the chef might taste a bit to determine if additional seasoning is needed. If the sauce is mixed properly, then the small sample represents the entire sauce. Polls work the same way. A skewed sample will produce bogus results. This may be accidental or intentional. Which is it? I’ll report, you decide, to coin Fox News’s latest catch phrase.
Pew Research Center is the latest pollster to weigh in on President Trump and impeachment. Let’s see whether their polling sample sauce was well stirred before they took a taste.
Pew sampled 3,487 “randomly selected” adults between October 1-13. That may or may not be representative of the general population but given that only about half of eligible voters actually vote in presidential elections, a better sample would be registered, or even likely voters.
Who was in that sample? Of the 3,487 total sample, 1,453 were or leaned Republican, 1,942 were or leaned Democrat. In other words, 56 percent Democrat and only 42 percent Republican, a 14-point difference favoring Democrats.
The polling sauce wasn’t well mixed, and they sampled the unsalty portion of the pot, leading the chef to believe more salt was needed in the recipe. When served, the sauce will be too salty, just as many pollsters learned on election night 2016.
The Pew poll asked whether, “The House should conduct impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.” Notice that the question is about beginning formal impeachment, not whether Trump should actually be impeached or removed from office. To date the House has not begun actual impeachment, instead using the House Intelligence Committee to hold secret hearings, excluding Republicans, selectively leaking to the media, all to create a charade of impeachment without the House actually voting for it.
Pew found 54 approving the beginning of an inquiry versus 44 percent opposed, a 10-point difference. If the 14-point difference in political affiliation within the poll sample was negated, there may be a 4-point majority in favor of NOT beginning impeachment proceedings. The unmixed sauce did not provide a useful taste test for the chef.
Is there a 14-point difference in political affiliation between Democrats and Republicans in the US population? For one measure, look at any recent Trump rally. The crowd outside the rally, as seen below in Dallas, is larger than the actual audience for any of the Democrat candidates. 20,000 people inside, the same number outside, and many more not even getting tickets. In city after city, week after week.
Gallup provides a more quantitative assessment. In early September 2019, they polled asking about party affiliation and found 29 percent Republican, 31 percent Democrat, and a whopping 38 percent independent.
This sample is much different than the one Pew used, explaining the skewed result. Was the Pew poll designed to reflect popular opinion or shape it?”
“Why Washington D.C. Compulsively Lies About Donald Trump
Beltway types still haven’t grasped that voters decided long before Trump arrived on the political scene that most of what passes for standard operating procedure in D.C. is just as farcical.”
“‘Regulative Fiction’
For some time, I have been trying to articulate a specific idea about how various elites and institutions cover for the political class and how the Trump-era “resistence” was the antithesis of this. Then a very smart friend of mine, thinking along nearly identical lines, blurted this out over email:
I think the world generally, and the world of the powerful in particular, is far less lucid and more incoherent than most assume. The main difference between Trump and his predecessors is that the professional class / deep state / neoliberal order / whatever-you-want-to-call-it is fluent in a language that imposes a kind of regulative fiction on that chaos. Their fluency gives them a patina of legitimacy and not a little power over the less fluent, which comforts some normies but also drives conspiratorial thinking. Trump and a lot of the people around him lack this fluency and have no interest in cultivating it.
For what it’s worth, the phrase “regulative fiction” is borrowed from Nietzsche, or at least his translator.
I think this desperate need to maintain the regulative fiction in Washington is the whole ballgame for understanding what is going on with the Trump administration. For a very long time before Trump, the “regulative fiction” was getting very, very discordant with reality. Certainly, the WMD issue and poorly planned wars in the Bush administration soured even conservative voters. And then the Obama administration happened and things got a million times worse, because while the media are as invested in maintaining the regulative fiction generally, they are very interested in it as a partisan and specifically ideological matter.
So the Obama presidency was brazenly lying about killing the insurance policies of millions of Americans, sleepwalking through the rise of ISIS, and sending pallets of cash to the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, among other things. Voters who wanted answers were instead force-fed endless variations of that silly Obama in sunglasses “I got this” meme even when it was abundantly obvious Obama didn’t have “this” under control. Eventually, you even had Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy wunderkind, bragging in The New York Times about how easy it was to get media to spin their disastrous foreign policy.
I think voters in no small part voted for Trump because they were sick of being told rosy stories about how the government operates. A part of Trump’s appeal is that he’s almost psychologically incapable of varnishing things and unafraid to utter coarse truths that roil the establishment. He’s upended discussions of trade and foreign policy, topics where the D.C. consensus was notoriously effective at shutting out dissenting voices, regardless of whether they were more aligned with voter sentiment.
Yes, the notion of Trump-the-truth-teller is a bit at odds with his monumental self-regard. But even when he puts his own absurd egotistical spin on events, it’s so obviously hyperbolic that it heightens the contradictions. Every time Trump says “What I’m doing is the greatest,” his delusion causes the media and “deep state” to try and pull back the curtain and expose Trump as a fraud once and for all.
Except they can’t do that without asking voters to choose between Trump’s behavior and Washington’s preferred narrative of how things are supposed to work, and Beltway types still haven’t grasped that voters decided long before Trump arrived on the political scene that most of what passes for standard operating procedure in D.C. is just as farcical.
This heightening of dueling contradictions becomes more obvious when Trump’s opponents accuse him of violating “norms” or even explicitly use government power against him. Whether it’s federal judges issuing dubious national injunctions against his immigration policy or holding impeachment proceedings that don’t follow basic precedents, Trump’s opponents often only end up exposing how creaky and, frankly, dangerous the machinery of government has become.
Leaning Into the Chaos
The results speak for themselves: In the process of purporting to show that Trump is a mentally unstable bad man, we spent two years learning that James Comey and the senior leadership of the FBI were corrupt, lying to us in significant ways, had terrible judgment, and committed crimes. By contrast, Trump’s foibles, for better and for worse, were already priced in with his voters and Trump at least has some measure of democratic accountability. It was far less obvious what was going on at the FBI, and to have long-simmering deep state concerns confirmed so dramatically means Trump voters are leaning into the chaos to see what else gets dragged into the light.”
“With the constant drumbeat from the mainstream media, Democrats now hope that the whirlwind in Washington of the so-called impeachment investigation will spread so much smoke that people won’t be able to see what’s going on, except to subliminally conclude that with all that smoke around Donald Trump, there must be a fire, and that it’ll die down with his removal from office.
In fact, President Trump has so much smoke around him because history has thrust on him the role of American firefighter-in-chief charged with extinguishing corruption in government and in the media, as well as fighting a myriad of other smoldering battles — from protecting the nation’s sovereignty and borders and redressing unfair trade deals and cost-sharing of military defense alliances to promoting policies to secure energy independence and drive economic growth, with a particular passion to deliver opportunity for those at the bottom.
With a second term, Trump is likely to become a historically consequential political realignment leader — what Andrew Jackson was to the Democrats and Abraham Lincoln was to the Republicans. He has already broadened the base of the Republican Party, and with a little more political jujitsu he can easily make more inroads and gain support from minorities and other constituencies who feel they’ve been neglected, or worse — have been used as political pawns by the Democrat Party elites, election cycle after election cycle.
The United States is absolutely unique in human history being founded on two bedrock tenets. First, the American people are endowed with unalienable individual rights that come from God and not the state — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, along with privacy rights, due process and a presumption of innocence. Secondly, the legitimacy of the American government established by the Constitution comes solely from the will of the people determined by their choice through elections. States and districts choose their senators and representatives by popular vote, but the chief executive — the President — is elected by an Electoral College system, with electors being proportionally equal to each state’s number of U.S. House Representatives plus one for each of its two U.S. senators. The Founders’ wisdom regarding a need for an Electoral College thus established a blueprint for a governing a large and diverse country by balancing the preferences and will of the people living in sparsely populated states with the different priorities of densely populated states and urban areas that typically have a greater concentration of government dependency and welfare — and the sort of patronage and political corruption that comes with that.
Few can deny that the ascendance of the United States from colonial poverty to the world’s top economic and military superpower in just 200 years is a historic miracle. It is attributable to a few key differentiating factors: Judeo-Christian beliefs and work ethic, family values and the rule of law enshrined in the founding documents of Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Essentially, America was unique in its birth creating a system of limited government and the empowerment of its citizens to take risks, innovate and build.
And so it should come as no surprise that America’s social and cultural decline that has accelerated in the last 50 years has coincided with growing secularism, a loss of respect for and practice of religion (and that is overwhelmingly Christianity), the decline of traditional family values and work ethic, as well as the fraying of the U.S. Constitution and the corruption of the nation’s law enforcement and judicial order, culminating in a two-tiered justice system.
It may not be a crime to engineer the manipulation of public opinion, but it certainly is a multiple-count felony to conspire and submit false information to a FISA court to obtain surveillance warrants to spy on a presidential campaign — an actual U.S. intelligence operation initiated on July 31, 2016 against the Trump campaign, known as “Crossfire Hurricane.” The justification for surveillance was allegedly that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian operatives in their efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. The real reason for spying can be deduced from FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, who referred to Crossfire Hurricane as “the insurance policy,” the purpose of which was to leak and seed the media with enough dirt on Trump to discredit him and sabotage his campaign leading up to the November election.”
“CNN is upset because President Donald Trump’s border control policies are working so well thanks in large part to the cooperation of the Mexican government. And it is that cooperation with Mexico that also irks Univision anchor Jorge Ramos from whom it is obvious CNN got many of their talking points.
Oddly enough, however, CNN while being upset with Mexico, also concedes that Trump’s border policies are working well. You can see that suprising concession in the very title of their Sunday story by Catherine Shoichet and Natalie Gallón (with talking points lifted from Jorge Ramos), “Why some say Mexico already built Trump’s wall — and paid for it.”
Mexico, they argue, actually built US President Donald Trump’s border wall after all — not with concrete or bricks or steel, but with thousands of federal forces like this camouflage-clad commander and the troops following his orders.
And Mexico, they argue, is paying for it.
So isn’t this a good thing? Well, not in the CNN/Ramos world as we shall see.
Yes, US taxpayers have been footing the bill for efforts to build new physical barriers at the US-Mexico border.
But experts note that Mexico’s massive deployment of National Guard troops over the past few months has played a major role in blocking migrants from reaching the US border in the first place. It’s a point Trump himself has made at several recent events — a dramatic change in tone from his sharp criticisms of Mexico earlier this year.
International cooperation to solve a problem but not of the sort that CNN approves.
In a recent New York Times column — headlined “Mexico is the wall” — Univision anchor Jorge Ramos noted that Trump’s comments that he was “using Mexico” had riled many Mexicans.
“It’s true: President Trump is using Mexico. And, against all logic, Mexico is letting him get away with it,” he wrote. “This has to change.”
It has to change? So Ramos would prefer the situation of a year ago when we had a border crisis that most of the mainstream media denied even existed?”
“Democrats are beginning to worry about President Trump’s 2020 war chest, which is larger than any other sitting president in history at this point in the campaign.
Some strategists believe the eventual Democratic nominee will not be able to compete against the Trump campaign’s and Republican National Committee’s joint fundraising, which combined have $158 million on hand, according to Politico.
Trump’s reelection effort has raised about twice as much as former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign had at this point in the race.
“The resources [Trump] has will be put to work anywhere and everywhere that he feels like he can scare up electoral votes, and Democrats will never catch up. It’s just too much money,” Texas-based Democratic strategist Chris Lippincott said. “That’s real trouble … I’m not here to curse the dark, but it’s dark.”
“The conventional wisdom in politics is that the coasts represent the economic future of the United States. Higher incomes and potential growth seem to be with cities like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. Even in the aftermath of her 2016 election loss, Hillary Clinton famously dismissed flyover country. She declared, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of American gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
In many ways, however, the coastal regions that Clinton lauds represent the equivalent of a personal finance ponzi scheme. While many topline statistics like average income appear on the surface to show much higher standards of living in states like New York and California, a deeper dive into the numbers tells a different story altogether.
Poor policy decisions in blue states, including higher taxes on both the wealthy and working people, housing barriers, and higher prices due to regulation mean that higher incomes vanish upon inspection. When accounting for the cost of food, housing, and commodities, the dollar goes significantly further in red states than in it does in blue states. A hundred dollars will get you less than $90 worth of goods and services in New York and California. In Texas, Florida, and across the mountain west except for Colorado, a Benjamin Franklin will buy you more than its value. Across the midwest, the value actually exceeds $110.
Comparing state level purchasing power is a bit of raw data, especially considering the disparity of cost between rural and urban areas. When the same $100 is ranked by metropolitan area, the numbers get even starker. Across much of the south, the same bill will purchase more than $120 in goods and services. In Seattle it is $89, in Los Angeles it is $85, in Manhattan it is $82, and in San Francisco it is $78.
Even worse, these figures do not take into account the sky high cost of rent and taxes in blue states. The average cumulative tax rates in most of these Democratic strongholds is indeed far higher than their Republican counterparts. The combination of gas, sales, income, local, and capital gains taxes eats into the incomes of residents who live in New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut even more.
Try an experiment using back of the envelope math. The average 2018 per capita income in New York is $68,690, while in Texas it is $50,360. At first glance, the New York salary seems more attractive. But after correcting for cost of living, taxes, and housing costs, Texas comes out ahead. New Yorkers pay the highest tax burden in the nation, at nearly 13 percent of their annual income, while Texans pay about 8 percent.
After taxes, New Yorkers rake in an average of $59,800 annually, while Texans take home $46,240. If you live in Manhattan, you pay an average of $35,340 each year for a one bedroom apartment. In Austin, one of the highest cost of living cities in Texas, the same apartment will run you $17,200, plus more square footage. Minus taxes and housing, you take home $24,460 a year in Manhattan and $29,040 a year in Austin.
Accounting for the cost of goods, Texas wins even further. The actual value of $99 your $100 brings you in Austin compared to the $82 in Manhattan means that your true adjusted take home pay is about $28,900 in the Lone Star State capital and exactly $20,000 in the Big Apple. Even with the higher income in Manhattan, moving to Austin means picking up nearly a 45 percent increase in you discretionary income.”
“Jury rules against dad trying to save his 7-year-old from gender ‘transition’”
“A jury has ruled against Jeffrey Younger, the father who is trying to protect his seven-year-old son, James, from chemical castration via a gender “transition.” This means James’ mother, Dr. Anne Georgulas, will be able to continue “transitioning” him into “Luna,” and now has full authority to start him on puberty blockers and eventually cross-sex hormones.
The jury’s decision likely means that Mr. Younger will be required to “affirm” James as a girl, despite his religious and moral objections, and will also be forced to take a class on transgenderism.
With a consensus of 11 of the 12 jurors, the jury decided not to grant Mr. Younger Sole Managing Conservatorship over his two twin boys. They voted that the current Joint Managing Conservatorship should be replaced by a Sole Managing Conservatorship, but that Mr. Younger should not be that person. Judge Kim Cooks will read her ruling on possession, child support, and Dr. Georgulas’ other requests at 1:30 p.m. CST on Wednesday.
Mr. Younger and Dr. Georgulas were in court last week fighting over custody and decision-making abilities for James and his twin, Jude. Mr. Younger argues his ex-wife is “transitioning” James against the boy’s will.
Dr. Georgulas, who brought the lawsuit, was asking Mr. Younger’s possession schedule be altered to decrease overnight stays and to force his visits with the boys to be supervised. Dr. Georgulas brought the original modification suit to the court and did not request a jury trial. Mr. Younger, in his counter petition, asked for a jury trial. Since Mr. Younger requested the jury trial, the jury ruled on his specific request for Sole Managing Conservatorship and the judge ruled on all other aspects of the petition as brought by Dr. Georgulas.
She was also asking that Jeff be forbidden from calling his son James – his given and legal name – and that he be prohibited from bringing James around people who do not “affirm” James as a “girl.”
————–
And to make matters even worse.
“Dr. Georgulas testified today James and Jude are not actually biologically related to her. They were created through in-vitro fertilization and the couple used an egg donor. ”
this transgender thing is not trivial, as is much of the liberal stuff that can be changed.’
I’m convinced that we are entering another “dark age”. This time Satan has the tool of instant communication.
And a segment that man has control over his naturel environment. They are connected, whether we realize it or not. I think something else is going on, as with music in our churches, but I haven’t worked it out in my mind yet.
As for the news casters, I haven’t trusted one since Paul Harvey.
I had an aunt, the one who lived in Idaho for several years, who listened to Paul Harvey.
I just miss the former (of not so long ago) CNN.
The church in the west has become theologically weak, creating a cultural void. And voids are quickly filled with all manner of things. Human nature hasn’t changed.
Turning Reagan’s 1980s (It’s morning in America) campaign motto on its head, it may be late evening in America. All in God’s hands and it’s always hard to look into the future from our limited perspective. But this clearly isn’t a particularly good time in our culture or political life.
Only to a partisan rag would the proper response to Brennan’s criminal acts be an obsession.
NEW: Sources believe John Brennan is a focus of the Barr/Durham probe, and Trump has called privately for investigating Brennan—putting his personal "obsession" w/the former CIA director on a collision course with the Justice Department's inquiry. https://t.co/9B1WPXK68l
So the NYT finally gets around to admitting there really is a Deep State, but it’s cool, because they’re doing god’s work.
Hacks.
The deep state is alive and well, composed of patriotic public servants. Their aim is not to bring down President Trump out of personal or political animus but to rescue the Republic from his excesses, says @mcottle. https://t.co/nk6Gwr0tXU
“FOX News has posted full video of Sean Hannity’s interview with President Trump yesterday (below). Impeachment is more or less the focus of the interview for the first 30 minutes. The interview begins with the infamous phone call of congratulations to the president of Ukraine, a garbled account of which was somehow instantly converted by Nancy Pelosi into the ground of her so-called impeachment “inquiry.”
Trump fights back as he sets the context of the phone call in the election of 2016. Long story short: this is the Russia hoax revisited (i.e., as Trump puts it, “it starts up again”). It is another expression of what Kim Strassel calls Resistance (At All Costs).”
—
Lather, rinse, repeat. Everything old is new again.
You’ll hear a lot about the staged and scriped testimony of the latest “whistleblower” that appeared today.
And staged it was, planned in advance.
I had a two hour dinner with Bill Taylor when I was in Kiev last month. What an impressive man – a true patriot who didn’t have to come out of retirement to accept this difficult assignment. But he did, because he loves his country.
Hill was sleeping with someone she employs in her official office and is trying to turn her ethics violation into her being attacked https://t.co/dK20L1yOEo
Katie Hill denies extramarital relationship with her male congressional staffer, but apparently doesn't deny extramarital relationship with her female campaign staffer https://t.co/wg5Lq6YoQz
Look at Politico's dishonest and hackish lede pretending she denies the whole allegation…while the body confirms that she slept with the campaign staffer.
Wait a minute – Ricky routinely insisted there is no Deep State. Now, finally, one of his favorite sources claims that the Deep State does indeed exist? Pray tell…
In a rational nation, today would be a turning point. However, rational people do not nominate Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as their presidential candidates.
"Donald Trump's impeachment may have been turbo charged today by the testimony of career diplomat Bill Taylor, who NBC News is reporting, draws a direct line to President Trump demanding an investigation in exchange for military aid for Ukraine…" – @NicolleDWallacepic.twitter.com/Ndz0BW5iJ4
Wandering Views 
I guess it’s only a bad thing when an R does it.
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You would think the media would be concerned about truth and honest, accurate reporting of the facts.
You’d be wrong.
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/kyle-drennen/2019/10/21/nbc-dismisses-push-censure-schiff-symbolic-abc-cbs-ignore
“NBC Dismisses Push to Censure Schiff as ‘Symbolic’; ABC & CBS Ignore”
“On Monday, the network morning shows devoted a total of 15 seconds of air time to congressional Republicans moving to censure House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff for his handling of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Only NBC actually covered the news – in a dismissive tone – while ABC and CBS completely skipped the story.”
—–
Here’s the story they’re ignoring.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/house-conservative-introduces-measure-to-censure-schiff
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Polls are pushing propaganda.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/pew_pushes_polling_propaganda.html
“Pollsters are at it again, pushing sketchy polls, not to reflect public opinion, but to shape it. This is called propaganda, a popular tool for dictators who want to control the information flow from an all-powerful government to their subjects, the people.
What once passed for journalism is now mostly propaganda, an effort by major media organizations to insert themselves into the political process, to push their agenda, even if it means throwing any pretense of journalistic principle and integrity to the wind. Look at the Project Veritas undercover videos of CNN for the latest example.
Polls of any type are designed to take a scientific snapshot of opinion at a particular point in time. A small sample is taken from a larger population and if the sample is representative of the entire population, then the poll should be valid.
When cooking a sauce, the chef might taste a bit to determine if additional seasoning is needed. If the sauce is mixed properly, then the small sample represents the entire sauce. Polls work the same way. A skewed sample will produce bogus results. This may be accidental or intentional. Which is it? I’ll report, you decide, to coin Fox News’s latest catch phrase.
Pew Research Center is the latest pollster to weigh in on President Trump and impeachment. Let’s see whether their polling sample sauce was well stirred before they took a taste.
Pew sampled 3,487 “randomly selected” adults between October 1-13. That may or may not be representative of the general population but given that only about half of eligible voters actually vote in presidential elections, a better sample would be registered, or even likely voters.
Who was in that sample? Of the 3,487 total sample, 1,453 were or leaned Republican, 1,942 were or leaned Democrat. In other words, 56 percent Democrat and only 42 percent Republican, a 14-point difference favoring Democrats.
The polling sauce wasn’t well mixed, and they sampled the unsalty portion of the pot, leading the chef to believe more salt was needed in the recipe. When served, the sauce will be too salty, just as many pollsters learned on election night 2016.
The Pew poll asked whether, “The House should conduct impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump.” Notice that the question is about beginning formal impeachment, not whether Trump should actually be impeached or removed from office. To date the House has not begun actual impeachment, instead using the House Intelligence Committee to hold secret hearings, excluding Republicans, selectively leaking to the media, all to create a charade of impeachment without the House actually voting for it.
Pew found 54 approving the beginning of an inquiry versus 44 percent opposed, a 10-point difference. If the 14-point difference in political affiliation within the poll sample was negated, there may be a 4-point majority in favor of NOT beginning impeachment proceedings. The unmixed sauce did not provide a useful taste test for the chef.
Is there a 14-point difference in political affiliation between Democrats and Republicans in the US population? For one measure, look at any recent Trump rally. The crowd outside the rally, as seen below in Dallas, is larger than the actual audience for any of the Democrat candidates. 20,000 people inside, the same number outside, and many more not even getting tickets. In city after city, week after week.
Gallup provides a more quantitative assessment. In early September 2019, they polled asking about party affiliation and found 29 percent Republican, 31 percent Democrat, and a whopping 38 percent independent.
This sample is much different than the one Pew used, explaining the skewed result. Was the Pew poll designed to reflect popular opinion or shape it?”
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Lies have become their go to move. And this is why we have Trump.
https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/21/why-washington-d-c-compulsively-lies-about-donald-trump/
“Why Washington D.C. Compulsively Lies About Donald Trump
Beltway types still haven’t grasped that voters decided long before Trump arrived on the political scene that most of what passes for standard operating procedure in D.C. is just as farcical.”
“‘Regulative Fiction’
For some time, I have been trying to articulate a specific idea about how various elites and institutions cover for the political class and how the Trump-era “resistence” was the antithesis of this. Then a very smart friend of mine, thinking along nearly identical lines, blurted this out over email:
I think the world generally, and the world of the powerful in particular, is far less lucid and more incoherent than most assume. The main difference between Trump and his predecessors is that the professional class / deep state / neoliberal order / whatever-you-want-to-call-it is fluent in a language that imposes a kind of regulative fiction on that chaos. Their fluency gives them a patina of legitimacy and not a little power over the less fluent, which comforts some normies but also drives conspiratorial thinking. Trump and a lot of the people around him lack this fluency and have no interest in cultivating it.
For what it’s worth, the phrase “regulative fiction” is borrowed from Nietzsche, or at least his translator.
I think this desperate need to maintain the regulative fiction in Washington is the whole ballgame for understanding what is going on with the Trump administration. For a very long time before Trump, the “regulative fiction” was getting very, very discordant with reality. Certainly, the WMD issue and poorly planned wars in the Bush administration soured even conservative voters. And then the Obama administration happened and things got a million times worse, because while the media are as invested in maintaining the regulative fiction generally, they are very interested in it as a partisan and specifically ideological matter.
So the Obama presidency was brazenly lying about killing the insurance policies of millions of Americans, sleepwalking through the rise of ISIS, and sending pallets of cash to the world’s leading state sponsor of terror, among other things. Voters who wanted answers were instead force-fed endless variations of that silly Obama in sunglasses “I got this” meme even when it was abundantly obvious Obama didn’t have “this” under control. Eventually, you even had Ben Rhodes, Obama’s foreign policy wunderkind, bragging in The New York Times about how easy it was to get media to spin their disastrous foreign policy.
I think voters in no small part voted for Trump because they were sick of being told rosy stories about how the government operates. A part of Trump’s appeal is that he’s almost psychologically incapable of varnishing things and unafraid to utter coarse truths that roil the establishment. He’s upended discussions of trade and foreign policy, topics where the D.C. consensus was notoriously effective at shutting out dissenting voices, regardless of whether they were more aligned with voter sentiment.
Yes, the notion of Trump-the-truth-teller is a bit at odds with his monumental self-regard. But even when he puts his own absurd egotistical spin on events, it’s so obviously hyperbolic that it heightens the contradictions. Every time Trump says “What I’m doing is the greatest,” his delusion causes the media and “deep state” to try and pull back the curtain and expose Trump as a fraud once and for all.
Except they can’t do that without asking voters to choose between Trump’s behavior and Washington’s preferred narrative of how things are supposed to work, and Beltway types still haven’t grasped that voters decided long before Trump arrived on the political scene that most of what passes for standard operating procedure in D.C. is just as farcical.
This heightening of dueling contradictions becomes more obvious when Trump’s opponents accuse him of violating “norms” or even explicitly use government power against him. Whether it’s federal judges issuing dubious national injunctions against his immigration policy or holding impeachment proceedings that don’t follow basic precedents, Trump’s opponents often only end up exposing how creaky and, frankly, dangerous the machinery of government has become.
Leaning Into the Chaos
The results speak for themselves: In the process of purporting to show that Trump is a mentally unstable bad man, we spent two years learning that James Comey and the senior leadership of the FBI were corrupt, lying to us in significant ways, had terrible judgment, and committed crimes. By contrast, Trump’s foibles, for better and for worse, were already priced in with his voters and Trump at least has some measure of democratic accountability. It was far less obvious what was going on at the FBI, and to have long-simmering deep state concerns confirmed so dramatically means Trump voters are leaning into the chaos to see what else gets dragged into the light.”
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A man for such a time as these.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/like_him_or_not_trump_is_uniquely_suited_for_such_a_time_as_this.html
“With the constant drumbeat from the mainstream media, Democrats now hope that the whirlwind in Washington of the so-called impeachment investigation will spread so much smoke that people won’t be able to see what’s going on, except to subliminally conclude that with all that smoke around Donald Trump, there must be a fire, and that it’ll die down with his removal from office.
In fact, President Trump has so much smoke around him because history has thrust on him the role of American firefighter-in-chief charged with extinguishing corruption in government and in the media, as well as fighting a myriad of other smoldering battles — from protecting the nation’s sovereignty and borders and redressing unfair trade deals and cost-sharing of military defense alliances to promoting policies to secure energy independence and drive economic growth, with a particular passion to deliver opportunity for those at the bottom.
With a second term, Trump is likely to become a historically consequential political realignment leader — what Andrew Jackson was to the Democrats and Abraham Lincoln was to the Republicans. He has already broadened the base of the Republican Party, and with a little more political jujitsu he can easily make more inroads and gain support from minorities and other constituencies who feel they’ve been neglected, or worse — have been used as political pawns by the Democrat Party elites, election cycle after election cycle.
The United States is absolutely unique in human history being founded on two bedrock tenets. First, the American people are endowed with unalienable individual rights that come from God and not the state — life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, along with privacy rights, due process and a presumption of innocence. Secondly, the legitimacy of the American government established by the Constitution comes solely from the will of the people determined by their choice through elections. States and districts choose their senators and representatives by popular vote, but the chief executive — the President — is elected by an Electoral College system, with electors being proportionally equal to each state’s number of U.S. House Representatives plus one for each of its two U.S. senators. The Founders’ wisdom regarding a need for an Electoral College thus established a blueprint for a governing a large and diverse country by balancing the preferences and will of the people living in sparsely populated states with the different priorities of densely populated states and urban areas that typically have a greater concentration of government dependency and welfare — and the sort of patronage and political corruption that comes with that.
Few can deny that the ascendance of the United States from colonial poverty to the world’s top economic and military superpower in just 200 years is a historic miracle. It is attributable to a few key differentiating factors: Judeo-Christian beliefs and work ethic, family values and the rule of law enshrined in the founding documents of Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Essentially, America was unique in its birth creating a system of limited government and the empowerment of its citizens to take risks, innovate and build.
And so it should come as no surprise that America’s social and cultural decline that has accelerated in the last 50 years has coincided with growing secularism, a loss of respect for and practice of religion (and that is overwhelmingly Christianity), the decline of traditional family values and work ethic, as well as the fraying of the U.S. Constitution and the corruption of the nation’s law enforcement and judicial order, culminating in a two-tiered justice system.
It may not be a crime to engineer the manipulation of public opinion, but it certainly is a multiple-count felony to conspire and submit false information to a FISA court to obtain surveillance warrants to spy on a presidential campaign — an actual U.S. intelligence operation initiated on July 31, 2016 against the Trump campaign, known as “Crossfire Hurricane.” The justification for surveillance was allegedly that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian operatives in their efforts to interfere in the 2016 election. The real reason for spying can be deduced from FBI Deputy Assistant Director of Counterintelligence Peter Strzok, who referred to Crossfire Hurricane as “the insurance policy,” the purpose of which was to leak and seed the media with enough dirt on Trump to discredit him and sabotage his campaign leading up to the November election.”
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CNN is mad at Trump and Mexico, for helping Trump and America.
In other news, water is wet.
https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/pj-gladnick/2019/10/20/cnn-upset-over-mexican-cooperation-trump-border-control
“CNN is upset because President Donald Trump’s border control policies are working so well thanks in large part to the cooperation of the Mexican government. And it is that cooperation with Mexico that also irks Univision anchor Jorge Ramos from whom it is obvious CNN got many of their talking points.
Oddly enough, however, CNN while being upset with Mexico, also concedes that Trump’s border policies are working well. You can see that suprising concession in the very title of their Sunday story by Catherine Shoichet and Natalie Gallón (with talking points lifted from Jorge Ramos), “Why some say Mexico already built Trump’s wall — and paid for it.”
Mexico, they argue, actually built US President Donald Trump’s border wall after all — not with concrete or bricks or steel, but with thousands of federal forces like this camouflage-clad commander and the troops following his orders.
And Mexico, they argue, is paying for it.
So isn’t this a good thing? Well, not in the CNN/Ramos world as we shall see.
Yes, US taxpayers have been footing the bill for efforts to build new physical barriers at the US-Mexico border.
But experts note that Mexico’s massive deployment of National Guard troops over the past few months has played a major role in blocking migrants from reaching the US border in the first place. It’s a point Trump himself has made at several recent events — a dramatic change in tone from his sharp criticisms of Mexico earlier this year.
International cooperation to solve a problem but not of the sort that CNN approves.
In a recent New York Times column — headlined “Mexico is the wall” — Univision anchor Jorge Ramos noted that Trump’s comments that he was “using Mexico” had riled many Mexicans.
“It’s true: President Trump is using Mexico. And, against all logic, Mexico is letting him get away with it,” he wrote. “This has to change.”
It has to change? So Ramos would prefer the situation of a year ago when we had a border crisis that most of the mainstream media denied even existed?”
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Historic. 🙂
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trumps-historic-lead-on-2020-fundraising-is-starting-to-rattle-democrats
“Democrats are beginning to worry about President Trump’s 2020 war chest, which is larger than any other sitting president in history at this point in the campaign.
Some strategists believe the eventual Democratic nominee will not be able to compete against the Trump campaign’s and Republican National Committee’s joint fundraising, which combined have $158 million on hand, according to Politico.
Trump’s reelection effort has raised about twice as much as former President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign had at this point in the race.
“The resources [Trump] has will be put to work anywhere and everywhere that he feels like he can scare up electoral votes, and Democrats will never catch up. It’s just too much money,” Texas-based Democratic strategist Chris Lippincott said. “That’s real trouble … I’m not here to curse the dark, but it’s dark.”
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Are red states the economic future of the US?
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/466648-red-states-are-the-economic-future
“The conventional wisdom in politics is that the coasts represent the economic future of the United States. Higher incomes and potential growth seem to be with cities like New York, San Francisco, and Seattle. Even in the aftermath of her 2016 election loss, Hillary Clinton famously dismissed flyover country. She declared, “I won the places that represent two-thirds of American gross domestic product. So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”
In many ways, however, the coastal regions that Clinton lauds represent the equivalent of a personal finance ponzi scheme. While many topline statistics like average income appear on the surface to show much higher standards of living in states like New York and California, a deeper dive into the numbers tells a different story altogether.
Poor policy decisions in blue states, including higher taxes on both the wealthy and working people, housing barriers, and higher prices due to regulation mean that higher incomes vanish upon inspection. When accounting for the cost of food, housing, and commodities, the dollar goes significantly further in red states than in it does in blue states. A hundred dollars will get you less than $90 worth of goods and services in New York and California. In Texas, Florida, and across the mountain west except for Colorado, a Benjamin Franklin will buy you more than its value. Across the midwest, the value actually exceeds $110.
Comparing state level purchasing power is a bit of raw data, especially considering the disparity of cost between rural and urban areas. When the same $100 is ranked by metropolitan area, the numbers get even starker. Across much of the south, the same bill will purchase more than $120 in goods and services. In Seattle it is $89, in Los Angeles it is $85, in Manhattan it is $82, and in San Francisco it is $78.
Even worse, these figures do not take into account the sky high cost of rent and taxes in blue states. The average cumulative tax rates in most of these Democratic strongholds is indeed far higher than their Republican counterparts. The combination of gas, sales, income, local, and capital gains taxes eats into the incomes of residents who live in New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut even more.
Try an experiment using back of the envelope math. The average 2018 per capita income in New York is $68,690, while in Texas it is $50,360. At first glance, the New York salary seems more attractive. But after correcting for cost of living, taxes, and housing costs, Texas comes out ahead. New Yorkers pay the highest tax burden in the nation, at nearly 13 percent of their annual income, while Texans pay about 8 percent.
After taxes, New Yorkers rake in an average of $59,800 annually, while Texans take home $46,240. If you live in Manhattan, you pay an average of $35,340 each year for a one bedroom apartment. In Austin, one of the highest cost of living cities in Texas, the same apartment will run you $17,200, plus more square footage. Minus taxes and housing, you take home $24,460 a year in Manhattan and $29,040 a year in Austin.
Accounting for the cost of goods, Texas wins even further. The actual value of $99 your $100 brings you in Austin compared to the $82 in Manhattan means that your true adjusted take home pay is about $28,900 in the Lone Star State capital and exactly $20,000 in the Big Apple. Even with the higher income in Manhattan, moving to Austin means picking up nearly a 45 percent increase in you discretionary income.”
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State sanctioned and court ordered child abuse. Make no mistake, that is what this is.
And once again, the father and his opinion is made irrelevant.
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/breaking-jury-rules-against-dad-trying-to-save-his-7-year-old-from-gender-transition
“Jury rules against dad trying to save his 7-year-old from gender ‘transition’”
“A jury has ruled against Jeffrey Younger, the father who is trying to protect his seven-year-old son, James, from chemical castration via a gender “transition.” This means James’ mother, Dr. Anne Georgulas, will be able to continue “transitioning” him into “Luna,” and now has full authority to start him on puberty blockers and eventually cross-sex hormones.
The jury’s decision likely means that Mr. Younger will be required to “affirm” James as a girl, despite his religious and moral objections, and will also be forced to take a class on transgenderism.
With a consensus of 11 of the 12 jurors, the jury decided not to grant Mr. Younger Sole Managing Conservatorship over his two twin boys. They voted that the current Joint Managing Conservatorship should be replaced by a Sole Managing Conservatorship, but that Mr. Younger should not be that person. Judge Kim Cooks will read her ruling on possession, child support, and Dr. Georgulas’ other requests at 1:30 p.m. CST on Wednesday.
Mr. Younger and Dr. Georgulas were in court last week fighting over custody and decision-making abilities for James and his twin, Jude. Mr. Younger argues his ex-wife is “transitioning” James against the boy’s will.
Dr. Georgulas, who brought the lawsuit, was asking Mr. Younger’s possession schedule be altered to decrease overnight stays and to force his visits with the boys to be supervised. Dr. Georgulas brought the original modification suit to the court and did not request a jury trial. Mr. Younger, in his counter petition, asked for a jury trial. Since Mr. Younger requested the jury trial, the jury ruled on his specific request for Sole Managing Conservatorship and the judge ruled on all other aspects of the petition as brought by Dr. Georgulas.
She was also asking that Jeff be forbidden from calling his son James – his given and legal name – and that he be prohibited from bringing James around people who do not “affirm” James as a “girl.”
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And to make matters even worse.
“Dr. Georgulas testified today James and Jude are not actually biologically related to her. They were created through in-vitro fertilization and the couple used an egg donor. ”
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He’s their parent, she isn’t.
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this transgender thing is not trivial, as is much of the liberal stuff that can be changed.’
I’m convinced that we are entering another “dark age”. This time Satan has the tool of instant communication.
And a segment that man has control over his naturel environment. They are connected, whether we realize it or not. I think something else is going on, as with music in our churches, but I haven’t worked it out in my mind yet.
As for the news casters, I haven’t trusted one since Paul Harvey.
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Nobody here remembers Paul Harvey, Chas.
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I do.
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I had an aunt, the one who lived in Idaho for several years, who listened to Paul Harvey.
I just miss the former (of not so long ago) CNN.
The church in the west has become theologically weak, creating a cultural void. And voids are quickly filled with all manner of things. Human nature hasn’t changed.
Turning Reagan’s 1980s (It’s morning in America) campaign motto on its head, it may be late evening in America. All in God’s hands and it’s always hard to look into the future from our limited perspective. But this clearly isn’t a particularly good time in our culture or political life.
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I am making a list of things I care about intensely.
I plan to post it on April 1. So far , I have
Quid pro quo
Hillary
whistled Blower
anything else I need to add?
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Stand by for the news.
And that’s…… the rest of the story.
I remember him too. 🙂
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I remember Paul Harvey.
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My grandfather used to have him on while he sat in his recliner and played solitaire. 🙂
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Great Drudge headline today:
“President Threatening to Sue Everybody…”
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DJ,
Well why not return the favor?
They’ve subpeoned everyone and everything, and file lawsuits to block him at every turn. Why shouldn’t he play by the same rules?
Fair is fair, right?
And it’s The Daily Beast, so……
“According to…unnamed and confidential sources close to the president….”
Lather, rinse, repeat.
🙂 🙄
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All the news that’s fit to bury.
More egg on the face of CNN.
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Only to a partisan rag would the proper response to Brennan’s criminal acts be an obsession.
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So the NYT finally gets around to admitting there really is a Deep State, but it’s cool, because they’re doing god’s work.
Hacks.
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Like I said, he’s fighting back.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2019/10/trump-fights-back.php
“FOX News has posted full video of Sean Hannity’s interview with President Trump yesterday (below). Impeachment is more or less the focus of the interview for the first 30 minutes. The interview begins with the infamous phone call of congratulations to the president of Ukraine, a garbled account of which was somehow instantly converted by Nancy Pelosi into the ground of her so-called impeachment “inquiry.”
Trump fights back as he sets the context of the phone call in the election of 2016. Long story short: this is the Russia hoax revisited (i.e., as Trump puts it, “it starts up again”). It is another expression of what Kim Strassel calls Resistance (At All Costs).”
—
Lather, rinse, repeat. Everything old is new again.
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You’ll hear a lot about the staged and scriped testimony of the latest “whistleblower” that appeared today.
And staged it was, planned in advance.
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https://twitter.com/RaheemKassam/status/1186700199139467269
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Now whose colluding?
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Yikes.
———–
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————
Quick! We need a media outlet to carry her water!
There ya’ go. 🙄
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Wait a minute – Ricky routinely insisted there is no Deep State. Now, finally, one of his favorite sources claims that the Deep State does indeed exist? Pray tell…
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DJ, It is probably time for you to print your annual explanation of the function of editorial pages for the benefit of the Trumpkins.
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Oh that’s right Ricky.
It’s OK to push false narratives and flat out lies, as long as you call it opinion, right?
Don’t you have a false narrative and more lies to push elsewhere?
That is your thing now, sadly.
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In a rational nation, today would be a turning point. However, rational people do not nominate Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump as their presidential candidates.
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Actually, yes. 🙂 Opinion is opinion, it is free speech. Let it rip.
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