Thursday, October 25, 2018
Deception Is Democrats' Weapon of Choice
The party of the BIG Lie is at it again, and midterm campaign examples abound.
Some call it spin. Some might refer to a political reality. Others may say it’s the use of propaganda. Regardless, this election is chock-full of devices that either reframe a candidate to hide his or her authentic approach to governance or, in many cases, outright lies are being told to confuse and misrepresent the facts.
The weapon of choice this (and every) election cycle for Democrats is deception.
Let’s look at just a few examples to understand that, while campaigning, some Democrats want to run from their actual record and appear to voters as “Republican-lite.” The reality, however, couldn’t be further from the truth.
The Senate has been the perfect example of the vast schism between reality and political “reality.” Let’s look at a few facts and understand that Democrats not only ignore, avoid, and distort the truth; they don’t recognize truth in their world of the aggrieved and offended. That helps explain their ongoing efforts to engineer chaos and mob rule.
Let’s begin in Michigan, where Sen. Debbie Stabenow, the incumbent Democrat, is facing a tough GOP opponent in John James, a black businessman with distinguished service in the U.S. Army during Operation Iraqi Freedom. Once upon a time, Stabenow was a vocal supporter of tax cuts that “create jobs here rather than overseas.” Funny, she voted against the historic Tax Acts and Jobs Act that added 39,700 jobs in Michigan already this year, 5,500 more than in 2017. Now, the promise of the Democrats is to reverse the Republican tax cuts … simply because President Donald Trump signed them into law.
Run down to Tennessee’s open Senate seat in the Marsha Blackburn vs. Phil Bredesen slugfest and see if you can figure out who’s running as the Republican nominee. Publicly, Democrat and former governor Bredesen can’t run fast enough from the names of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and former NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg. Yet Bredesen landed $3.5 million in ads from Schumer’s political action committee and $1.6 million contributed directly to his campaign while enjoying a high-dollar fete at the New York home of gun-control extremist Bloomberg. The billionaire socialist has pledged $20 million to the Senate Majority PAC, fueling Democrat races in the nation’s upper legislative chamber. Add all this to the undercover video capturing Bredesen operatives freely admitting his deception regarding his support for Brett Kavanaugh, and the camouflage donned in the Volunteer State right now is not just worn by hunters.
A few more on the deception dance card in the Senate are Jon Tester in Montana and Claire McCaskill in Missouri, both of whom campaigned on the importance of securing the southern border, yet voted against funding all the recent measures to fund personnel, structure, and resources to actually stem the tide of illegal immigrants coming to America. Likewise, when Kyrsten Sinema was running for Congress in Arizona in 2012, she pledged legislation that “secures our border from the threats of criminal cartels and criminal syndicates In Mexico.” Now, as a Senate candidate, Sinema has no recollection of voting against immigration reforms. Let’s not forget Sinema’s list of outrageous statements, including getting caught telling stay-at-home moms they are leeches in the world of progressive feminism. She went all in with the pink-hat-gals.
Bundle up and head to North Dakota to see Heidi Heitkamp’s voting history that matches Schumer’s 80% of the time, despite promising she’d be that same kind of independent that Bredesen conjures up. Heitkamp has likely sealed her own doom with TV ads aimed to tie newly confirmed Justice Brett Kavanaugh to domestic assault victims — partly because she failed to get approval to use the victims’ names in the ad. Exploitation for the cause of deception — we guess that’s the collateral damage Nancy Pelosi spoke of last week when calling her Resistance crowd to action.
There is so much more, but the theme is clear: You can’t trust Democrats to tell the truth during campaign season or to govern in a manner that upholds the respect of our laws, our nation’s border and sovereignty or, sadly, the financial security and privacy of average Americans.
While we may laugh in disgust at the dishonesty of politics, heed a serious warning. The type of behavior witnessed by Democrats in power — weaponizing agencies of government like the IRS, DOJ, EPA, etc. to control and punish political foes; using slander at every turn alleging sexism, racism, and all other -isms to marginalize; agitating the offended to the point of riot and violence; importing foreign individuals as part of a ploy to disrupt our government under the guise of asylum and safety; and employing a two-tiered system of justice to exempt criminal acts of the elite but not the average — is not just despicable, it’s dangerous. In decades past, these acts would be accurately defined and viewed as totalitarianism.
#WalkAway from the deception and dangers of the Democrats.
SOURCE
*********************************
Could Trump Win 20 Percent of the African-American Vote in 2020?
The provocative Donald Trump certainly seems to be disliked by a majority of African-American professional athletes, cable news hosts, academics and the Black Congressional caucus. Yet there are subtle but increasing indications that his approval among other African-Americans may be reaching historic highs for a modern Republican president.
Some polls have indicated that Trump’s approval rating among black voters is close to 20 percent. That is far higher than the 8 percent of the African-American vote that Trump received on Election Day 2016.
A recent, admittedly controversial Rasmussen Reports poll showed African-American approval of Trump at 36 percent.
Even 20 percent African-American support for Trump would all but dismantle Democratic Party presidential hopes for 2020. Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election with 88 percent of the black vote. That was about a six-point falloff from Barack Obama’s share of the black vote in 2012.
But far more importantly, an estimated 2 million of the African-American voters who cast ballots for Obama in 2012 simply did not show up at the polls in 2016 to vote for the off-putting Clinton.
Even a small drop in African-American turnout or anything less than the usual 85 percent to 90 percent supermajority for a Democratic presidential candidate on Election Day can prove fatal. Why?
Republican presidential candidates now routinely win 55 percent to 60 percent of the so-called white vote, and about 70 percent of voters are white. That lopsided margin may widen further, given that progressive Democrats are not making any effort to recapture turned-off white working-class voters.
With continually diminishing white support, Democrats must increasingly count on massive minority turnout and bloc voting — especially among African-American voters, who make up about 12 percent of electorate.
Roughly a third of Asians and Latinos vote Republican, and voter turnout among these groups generally isn’t as strong as it is among whites and African-Americans.
But why is the supposedly odious Trump having any success in undermining the traditional marriage between African-Americans and Democrats?
The most recent jobs report revealed that the unemployment rate for African-American teenagers fell to 19.3 percent, the lowest figure on record. That number stands in marked contrast to the 2010 rate of 48.9 percent under the Obama administration. Overall black unemployment is currently at 5.9 percent, which is close to a record low.
Under Trump, the economy is growing at nearly 4 percent per year. The robust growth coincides with Trump’s effort to curb illegal immigration and imported labor. The net result has been to empower minority job applicants in ways not seen in nearly half a century.
Trump’s implicit message is that every American worker is now crucial in maintaining the red-hot economy. In a job-short economy, laborers suddenly have a lot of leverage over their employers. And wages are rising.
Trump’s nationalist message adds to this sense of empowerment, especially when he campaigns on putting Americans first in his economic decision-making.
A former entertainer, Trump is courting African-American celebrities such as rapper Kayne West and football legend Jim Brown. Activist Candace Owens and her Turning Point USA organization are trying to convince black voters that being politically independent forces both parties to compete for the African-American vote.
Ironically, Trump is reaching out to the African-American community to a much greater degree than progressives are reaching out to the estranged white working class.
Trump has other issues that might fuel the effort to redirect black support. Abortion, for example, is supposedly a Democratic sacrament. But few progressives talk much about the high rate of black abortions. African-Americans make up between 12 percent and 13 percent of the American population but account for as many as 35 percent of all abortions.
Yet liberal family-planning advocates were not always shy about their occasionally eugenics-inspired agendas of the past. The spiritual founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, was an unapologetic eugenicist who professed that the object of birth control was to discourage the reproduction of those she derided as “the unfit.”
Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal icon, once couched her support for abortion in neo-eugenic terms. In a disturbing 2009 interview, she was quite blunt: “Frankly I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”
Trump should stress other issues that might appeal to African-Americans, such as the right of access to charter schools, and how boutique environmentalism and over-regulation drive up the cost of affordable housing, fuel and electricity.
Trump might also make it clear that his message is geared to all Americans, including African-Americans. As a group, they are already doing better economically today than during the Obama administration — and everyone gains political clout when politicians must work for, rather than feel entitled to, their votes.
SOURCE
*******************************
ASTROTURF
Is this the October surprise from the Donks?
A new Republican women's group who is "fed up with Trump" and pouring cash into toss-up congressional districts is bankrolled solely by a male billionaire venture capitalist who is a major donor to Democratic campaigns and causes, Federal Election Commission filings show.
Republican Women for Progress, a Washington, D.C.-based "grassroots" nonprofit, was founded by Jennifer Pierotti Lim and Meghan Milloy and is comprised of "right-leaning" women who are opposed to President Donald Trump. The group has garnered glowing national media profiles that include a ten-minute segment on CBS News and articles in publications such as Glamour, Slate, and others.
The group is so far active in competitive congressional districts in New Jersey, Kentucky, and Michigan.
"We think the best thing that we can do for the party and for the country right now is to make sure there are good women—Democrat or Republican—that are elected to office and who can serve as a check on this administration and on the president," Milloy told the Detroit Metro Times. "[This effort] really was inspired by us talking to Republican women in these districts where they said there was just no way that they could vote for the Republican."
The group established a political action committee, the Republican Women for Progress PAC, on Sept. 13 to support their work for the midterms and has since spent $231,000 on independent expenditures for voter recruitment and advertisement productions in the toss-up districts in three states.
The PAC disbursed $76,000 on ads and recruitment in support of Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey's 11th congressional district, $78,000 backing Amy McGrath in Kentucky's 6th congressional district, and $77,000 on Elissa Slotkin in Michigan's 8th congressional district.
The PAC's October quarterly filing—the first from the group—also shows that the group of Republican women is bankrolled by just one donor: Reid Hoffman, a venture capitalist and co-founder of LinkedIn, who is a major donor to Democrats. Hoffman cut a $400,000 to the PAC on Sept. 27, its filings show.
Hoffman has pushed millions into the coffers of Democratic committees and campaigns this cycle.
More HERE
*********************************
The Trump Manufacturing Jobs Boom: 10 Times Obama's Over 21 Months
The Great Recession officially ended in June 2009, six months into former President Obama’s first term. The economy continued to shed jobs until the following March. Manufacturing was particularly hard hit, with almost 2.3 million manufacturing jobs—some 1 in 6—lost between January 2008 and March 2010.
As is the case during recoveries, jobs bounced back, with seasonally adjusted nonfarm employment expanding almost 12% from March 2010 until January 2017, when President Obama handed over the presidency to Donald Trump.
But during the same period, manufacturing employment grew only 7.7% with manufacturing payrolls virtually flat in the last 21 months of the Obama administration.
We were told it was the new normal.
At a town hall in June 2016, President Obama famously said that some manufacturing jobs “are just not going to come back.” He went on to mock then-candidate Trump by saying he’d need a “magic wand” to make good on this manufacturing job promises.
Months later, as the shock of a President-elect Donald Trump was still being absorbed, New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman tweeted on November 25, 2016, “Nothing policy can do will bring back those lost jobs. The service sector is the future of work; but nobody wants to hear it.”
Well, a funny thing happened—Trump’s policies, and just as importantly, the expectation of Trump’s policies, ignited a manufacturing resurgence.
In the first 21 months of the Trump presidency, nonfarm employment grew by a seasonally adjusted 2.6%. In the same period, manufacturing employment grew by 3.1%, reversing the trend under Obama when overall employment grew faster than employment in the manufacturing sector.
Comparing the last 21 months of the Obama administration with the first 21 months of Trump’s, shows that under Trump’s watch, more than 10 times the number of manufacturing jobs were added.
Three things likely sparked this manufacturing jobs spike.
First, eight years of the Obama Administration’s piling on regulation upon regulation, from labor rules, to the Clean Power Plan, to the implementation of ObamaCare, placed industry into a defensive crouch. Business leaders were fearful of investing capital, not knowing how the federal rules might capriciously change, thus wiping out their expected return on investment.
That defensiveness ended in November 2016 when the expectations of additional regulatory burdens under a prospective President Clinton vanished. Not coincidentally, manufacturing employment started its sustained upswing the very month of Krugman’s tweet.
Second, the Trump Administration’s deregulatory practice exceeded expectations, with red tape being cut at a faster clip than achieved under President Ronald Reagan 36 years earlier.
Third, with the Republican Congress, President Trump delivered on a major overhaul of the tax code, including a significant cut to business taxes as well as a change to the treatment of overseas profits that incentivized the repatriation of some $300 billion in the first quarter of 2018 out of what the Federal Reserve estimates is $1 trillion in multinational profits held abroad.
Whether this manufacturing jobs boom will continue is now largely dependent on the Trump Administration’s high-stakes trade stand-off with the People’s Republic of China.
Some economists warn that Trump’s tariffs put our healthy economic expansion (stimulated by tax cuts and deregulation) at risk. The administration’s defenders, on the other hand, see tariffs not as an end to themselves, as they were with the protectionist Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930, but as part of a wider effort to renegotiate the terms of trade with China. Included in the effort are the difficult issues of widespread and systematic Chinese intellectual property theft and opaque non-tariff barriers.
Past performance is no guarantee—but so far, President Trump’s pro-growth policies have confounded his critics’ predictions with the prime beneficiaries being hard-working Americans.
SOURCE
********************************
For more blog postings from me, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated), a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in). GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.
Email me here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or here (Pictorial) or here (Personal)
**************************
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Didn't Obama claim that a 1% to 1.5% growth in GDP was the new normal, that there was no magic wand to fix the economy?
Post a Comment