I love mainstream media reporting. Even when the Democrats lose, they win.
It is astounding how everything gets twisted in favor of the Democrats. Check out this headline from The Washington Post: “Ohio special election shows Democrats on the march – even if they don’t win Tuesday.”
So it doesn’t matter whether the Democrats actually win or not, they still win. Except for one tiny little annoying fact: It does matter.
The most obvious example is that even though according to the mainstream media Hillary Clinton deserved to win, should have won, could not possibly lose and won the popular vote, she is not president.
Donald Trump who had no conceivable path to victory did win and is president while Hillary Clinton is now no more than a bitter older woman who is so depressed about not being president that she appeared in public wearing a housecoat. It’s only one small step to a bathrobe. It may be that it takes so much equipment now to keep Hillary Clinton upright that she needs to wear a housecoat to cover it all up.
Really, she is never going to be president, so why not come clean about whatever health issues she has and be done with it. Healthy people do not suddenly just topple over, and they are able walk up one or two steps without having someone on either side helping.
Here’s another great headline from The Washington Post: “Trump’s political base is weaker than it seems, our new study finds.”
First of all this is a wonderfully written headline because it bashes Trump in a way that cannot be refuted. “Weaker than it seems” is completely meaningless. Weaker than it seems to whom based on what?
But then consider the source. The Washington Post and every other major newspaper in the country have been wrong about Trump from the moment he announced his candidacy to now.
The evidence is overwhelming that The Washington Post has no clue about Trump’s base. It seems that all they know is what they hear from the late night comedians.
The mainstream media predicted that Trump was not a serious candidate when he announced he was running. Before the first primary they said that while people told pollsters they would vote for Trump, they wouldn’t. For the second primary they said the first one was a fluke, and it continued like that right up until the election when despite the fact that we were told mathematically there was no way Trump could win, he did.
And I suppose that’s the point, The Washington Post is not written for anyone who voted for Trump or even for anyone who knows people who voted for Trump. It is being written for those who wake up every morning hoping that the Trump presidency was a bad nightmare and in the real world Hillary Clinton is president.
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Jim Acosta of CNN has a problem with consistency. He apparently believes that everything he says, whether it’s true or not, should be protected by the First Amendment, but when people shout “fake news” at him, they should be stopped and it’s un-American.
I think Acosta has every right to say whatever he wants. He doesn’t as a journalist have the right to stay in a room in the White House and pepper the president with questions after he has been asked to leave. He also doesn’t have the right to monopolize White House press conferences, which are supposed to be for journalists to ask questions of the White House press secretary and other executive branch officials.
White House press briefings are not the time for Acosta to pontificate about how great he is and how horrible the president and the White House is. Acosta can do that as much as his network will let him on the air.
If the White House press corps didn’t lean so far to the left that it can barely stay upright, his fellow journalists would be the ones shouting him down so that they could get their own questions asked.
Acosta doesn’t appear to understand how this journalism deal works. Journalists can ask any question they want, but there is no requirement that the question be answered. And certainly no requirement that it be answered with the answer that the journalist demands, as Acosta repeatedly tries to get White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders to do.
That goes doubly for President Trump. Acosta can shout any question he wants when the press is allowed in the room, but it doesn’t mean that Trump has to answer him. Freedom of the press doesn’t mean that elected officials have to answer questions whenever the media want to ask them.
Acosta is free to go on CNN moaning and complaining about how poorly he is treated. He can complain about the coffee in the White House press area and the temperature of the water. He can complain about anything he wants, for as long as his bosses let him.
It appears his ego is so big that soon they will have to give him two chairs in the White House briefing room because both he and his ego won’t be able to fit in one.
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I was reading a New York Times column where the columnist said that Trump had said he doubted the US intelligence services have proved Russian meddling. Well, that’s true to a point, but Trump corrected that statement.
It’s one of the differences in covering Trump. Most politicians are allowed to say they misspoke and go back and correct whatever they said wrong.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi misspeaks so constantly that it must be a full-time job for someone on her staff to tell journalists what she meant to say.
But with most politicians, the other side gets a big laugh and pokes fun at, say former President Barack Obama who said there were 57 states. But it isn’t reported constantly after that as a statement he made and believed. It is allowed to pass.
Former President George W. Bush garbled words all the time and the press made fun of him, said English wasn’t his native language and that kind of thing, but they let it pass. A month later they didn’t report the misspoken word as something he actually believed.
The mainstream media don’t give Trump that break. At the riot in Charlottesville, where one woman was killed, Trump said there were good people on both sides – and he is called a racist to this day. There were certainly racists at the rally, but not everyone who is against tearing down and disposing of every statue of a former slave owner is a racist.
There hasn’t been a huge hue and cry to rename the nation’s capital city or the state of the same name.
If we want to pretend that the US never had slavery we also have to take the Civil War out of the history books.
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I saw a piece Saturday that said that Obama was going head to head with Trump in midterm elections.
So it’s Obama and not Hillary Clinton that the Democrats want out campaigning for them. That right there says an awful lot about the Democrats current feeling about their 2016 presidential candidate – the candidate who according to the Democrats had the election stolen from her because Trump colluded with the Russians to fix the election.
The fact that in two years of investigation the FBI and the special prosecutor have been able to find no credible evidence of the Trump campaign colluding with the Russians really doesn’t seem to matter. Hillary Clinton said it was so, which is enough evidence for most Democrats.
But if that is the case then why in the world don’t the Democratic candidates want Hillary Clinton out on the campaign trail? Could it possibly be that the Democrats are saying one thing for the news cameras and something entirely different in private behind closed doors?
Of course, the Democrats might want to consider that while sitting presidents mostly stay out of the campaigns for their successors, Obama was out campaigning full time for Hillary Clinton and she lost.
For whatever reason, we know it wasn’t her health because the mainstream media repeatedly told us that she had no health problems other than a quick bout of pneumonia that caused her to faint dead away at a 9/11 memorial service.
But for some reason Hillary Clinton didn’t campaign nearly as much as Trump. She went a year without holding a single press conference and then held one that ended as soon as the powder puff questions were asked and a reporter had the temerity to ask a real question. Even the mainstream media were eventually forced to mention the lack of access the press had to the candidate.
Trump by comparison was flying all over the country, phoning in to call-in shows a lot and answering any questions he was asked.
People talk about transparency. Trump is the most transparent president we have had in modern times. During the Obama years, often the photographers were allowed in to take photos of Obama with different foreign dignitaries, but the print reporters were not because Obama didn’t want to answer questions.
It’s one of the reasons that it is so astounding that Acosta of CNN had to be dragged out of the room. A couple of years ago he never would have been allowed in the room in the first place.
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Judging from his tweets, our president is getting a mite frustrated. But who can blame him?
The mainstream media are once again focusing on the meeting that Donald Trump Jr. and members of the campaign staff had with some Russian citizens who got the meeting by saying, or having someone say for them, that they had dirt on Hillary Clinton.
It turned out they didn’t, the meeting didn’t last long and didn’t result in much of anything. If instead of Russians the people meeting with Trump Jr. had been Albanians, Italians, Chinese or any other nationality in the world, it wouldn’t be a story at all.
But the Hillary Clinton campaign, in an attempt to explain how the smartest woman in the world managed to lose the presidential race to a political neophyte, blamed the loss on Trump colluding with the Russians to fix votes. So far there has been no evidence of this produced, but that hasn’t stopped the Hillary Clinton disciples from spending millions of dollars looking for it.
But if holding one meeting with Russians is a crime (and it is not) then how much worse is it to pay Russians for “salacious an unverified” rumors about your opponent and then have the FBI use those same “salacious and unverified” rumors to get a warrant to wiretap a member of the other team’s campaign staff, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign did.
No one has suggested that any money changed hands during the Trump Jr. meeting, but we know for a fact that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid the law firm Perkins Coie, who paid Fusion GPS, who paid former British spy Christopher Steele, who paid Russians for dirt about Donald Trump.
So if it is a horrible crime to even meet with a Russian, how much worse is it to pay Russians?
According to the mainstream media, paying Russians is not even worth talking about because they were working for the chosen candidate. It’s only a problem if the chosen candidate’s opponent does something that has anything to do with Russians.
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The Russian collusion investigation has taken countless hours away from the Trump administration, hours that could have been spent on issues like the economy, the wall and making American great again.
But there is an upside to this whole Russian collusion ploy. It has kept the Democrats from figuring out how their candidate lost, or at least the mainstream media from writing about what was really going on in the 2016 election.
To find the answer, it’s insightful to go back to the last open election for president in 2008. It is almost a mirror image of the 2016 election in some key areas.
In 2008, you had the old guard, Sen. John McCain, who had been in Washington for 25 years, running against the very junior senator from Illinois, who had served less than one term in the Senate and before that was simply a state senator in the Illinois legislature.
What was McCain’s campaign about? I have no idea, but I know what Obama’s campaign was about; it was about “Hope” and “Change.” Obama was the young upstart with a completely different life story from anyone who had run for president.
The emphasis, of course, was on the fact that he was the first black candidate to be nominated by a major political party and that was a vital part of his campaign. But he was also from Hawaii and had spent a good part of his youth in Indonesia. Both his father and his step father were Muslims, which meant he had a much better understanding of the Islamic culture than anyone on the national scene. He was different. He was an outsider.
McCain could have picked the Obama campaign apart. Obama had virtually no experience in foreign relations – one of the most important roles of the president. He was new to national politics.
So when people went to the polls and had a choice between the the experienced Washington insider and someone new and different, the voters overwhelmingly chose new over old.
In 2016, you had an extremely similar situation with the roles reversed. The Clintons had been on the international stage since 1992.
You can’t find anyone who is more of an insider than Hillary Clinton. Remember when Bill Clinton was running in 1992 and one of the themes of his campaign was that by voting for Bill Clinton you got two for the price of one because his wife, Hillary, was a Yale-educated attorney who wasn’t going to bake cookies, but was going to be a vital part of the Clinton administration? She was put in charge of healthcare reform. It was a complete fiasco and that pretty much ended Hillary Clinton’s public participation in major issues.
But think of the audacity of that. It’s hard to even consider any other president putting his wife, who had not been elected to anything, in charge of a major policy initiative. But the Clintons did it and, of course, the mainstream media cheered.
Hillary Clinton went on to be a US senator and secretary of state.
So in 2016 you had a candidate unlike any candidate who had run for president in modern times, a billionaire whose only previous political experience had been writing checks to politicians. A man who was known to most Americans, not for his public service, but for saying, “You’re fired” on his reality television show.
A man who threw the whole idea of a stump speech out the window and talked to crowds about whatever was on his mind at the moment.
The mainstream media had field day making Trump look and sound like a madman because he often responded to questions and comments shouted out from the audience. Questions and comments that were not picked up by the microphone on the podium, so it was easy to make Trump look like he suddenly started talking about a completely new topic for no reason.
But the crowds loved it. What they saw was a man who was not a Washington insider. Someone who relentlessly attacked the old guard on the left and the right. Someone who was rejected by the hierarchy of his own party and demonized by the hierarchy of the opposing party.
In many ways Trump was more of an outsider than Obama. He had never run for office, never been elected to anything, but spent his career developing real estate that he then named for himself.
The voters in 2016, just like the voters in 2008, chose the outsider.
What did Hillary Clinton stand for in her campaign? One of the numerous campaign slogans she used was, “I’m with her.” Really? Elect me because I’m me. It doesn’t say anything at all about the country; it’s all about Hillary Clinton.
There probably are a few people who don’t know what Trump’s campaign slogan is, but not many. “Make America Great Again.” It has become such a part of the American mindset that now it is more commonly referred to as MAGA. As in the story about a student sent home from school for wearing a MAGA T-shirt. The mainstream media doesn’t feel the need to tell people what MAGA is because everyone knows.
It would appear that the American people are tired of Washington and want someone new in the White House whether he is a Republican or a Democrat.
One might also gather that Americans like candidates with catchy slogans rather than candidates who think people should vote for them because of their fine records.
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Former White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s new book has given the mainstream media the opportunity to rehash some old attacks against Trump. One was the use of the term “alternative facts” by Kellyanne Conway when talking about the crowds at the Trump inauguration. This is routinely used as punch line by the liberal mainstream media.
But as Spicer explained it made sense. The problem might be in the use of the word “facts.” The better word to describe what they were attempting to describe would be “data.” They used alternative data, or perhaps data from alternative sources.
People, including reporters, do this all the time.
The police report there were 10,000 people at an event. The fire department reports that the facility was not over capacity and capacity is 5,000. So which one does the reporter use? The truth is that if it were a Hillary Clinton event they would use the 10,000 figure and if it were a Trump event the 5,000. Not those exact figures, but that actually happened during the campaign.
How could that be? Can the police not count? Is the fire department lying because they don’t want to admit that a lot of people got in without tickets? Perhaps but here is another possible explanation.
The two are talking about different crowds. The fire department is only concerned with the crowd in the building and the building not being dangerously overcrowded.
The police are concerned about both inside and outside the building – those who got in and those who didn’t but chose to hang around outside. So even though the figures seem to contradict each other they could both be correct.
The crowd inside was 5,000 and the total crowd including supporters and protestors outside was 10,000.
So if someone reported 5,000 as the crowd for the event and someone else reported 10,000, couldn’t you say that one was using alternative data or alternative facts?
In the inauguration they used data from different sources. Crowd size is more of an art than a science. A lot of estimation takes place. Aerial photos are used, but as to how many people are standing under trees, awnings or overhangs, it’s a guess. Heads are counted in areas with similar crowd coverage and then estimates are made. Different organizations come up with different estimates.
“Alternative facts” is not crazy, but it was a poor word choice
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The left has completely lost any sense of reality, but it gets reported in the mainstream media as normal behavior.
The Trump administration is under constant attack, being called every vile name there is, for doing what? For enforcing the law.
The Democrats are saying that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency should be abolished. Some have gone so far as to say that ICE agents should be arrested – for enforcing the law.
The ICE agents didn’t make the laws, nor did the Trump administration. Congress made the laws. The job of the executive branch is to carry out the laws made by Congress.
The Democrats are not powerless in Congress even now. The Republicans have a 51-to-49 majority in the Senate. To get any immigration reform law through the Senate is going to take some Democratic support.
Obama could have pushed immigration reform through Congress but he didn’t, and so far Congress has been unable to pass anything. It seems there is universal agreement that the immigration laws need to be changed, but it isn’t possible for the Trump administration, including ICE, to change them.
What Obama did as president was to decide not to enforce the laws. Some would call this a dereliction of duty, and if Obama had enforced the laws it might have brought about the immigration reform that is needed.
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Who decided that 435 seats was the perfect number for the House of Representatives and why was it? It’s not in the Constitution. The founding fathers set no such limit. In fact, while they were still walking this earth, they were pretty free with adding new representatives. But since 1911, even though the population of the country has increased from 92 million to 326 million, the number of representatives has stayed the same.
Based on the belief in 1911 that 435 members was the correct number for 92 million, we should have at least three times that today, which would be 1,305.
Perhaps one of the reasons that people are so down on Congress and Washington in general is that congressional districts have become too large and the answer is to increase the number of members of Congress.
It is certainly worth considering. Imagine if North Carolina, instead of 13 congressional districts, had 39. There would be a much better chance of the members of Congress actually representing their constituency rather than representing their political party.
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The mainstream media are up in arms over Trump relaxing the draconian CAFE standards set by Obama. What the mainstream media routinely ignore is that following the Obama standards will result in more highway deaths.
Bigger cars are safer than smaller cars. An average of 54 miles per gallon would force automakers to manufacture smaller cars and raise the prices of larger cars, which means more people would die out on the roads. Another way to look at it is that with the new Trump standards people who would have died in accidents will live.
Americans like large cars and generally find a way to get them. It used to be that mothers with small children would drive station wagons. Today they drive SUVs. Why? Because the laws made station wagons all but obsolete while SUVs are built on truck chassis, so different standards apply.
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Solar power is all the rage in some circles. It is even being claimed that solar power is less expensive than traditional means of generating electricity, and figures can be compiled that prove that it’s true.
But what people aren’t being told is how many of their tax dollars are being used to make solar power competitive. The government subsidizes electrical production. Since most of us rely on electricity 24/7, there isn’t much complaint, but according to a study by the University of Texas, the subsidies are not what you would call fair.
Production of electricity with coal received an average subsidy of $1.06 per megawatt hour; for oil and natural gas the subsidy averages 91 cents; for wind it’s $12.74; and for solar it’s a whopping $61.31 per megawatt hour.
Talk about not having a level playing field. No wonder solar looks like such a good deal. The government subsidies are enormous.
The other side of solar and wind that environmentalists don’t like to talk about is that it doesn’t lower, and in some ways increases, the infrastructure costs for the electric utility.
Solar doesn’t generate any electricity at night, and less on cloudy days. The real problem for the electric utilities are partly cloudy days because a solar plant can be running full steam and, when a cloud passes between the sun and the solar panels, it instantly produces much less electricity. The utility has to provide a steady source of electricity, which means in many cases it is required to buy solar power that it can’t use.
But in any case the utility is required to have oil, coal, natural gas, hydro or nuclear power to provide enough electricity at night and on cloudy days to make up for what the solar panels provide during sunny days.
The number of solar plants in California has almost caused the entire utility to crash at times. Some of the excess solar electricity is sold to neighboring utilities but some is simply discarded.
Utilities still don’t have a way to store electricity. I wrote this several months ago and was corrected that a California utility was using batteries to store excess electricity generated during the day, and that is true. A California utility is using some Tesla car batteries to store what is a relatively miniscule amount of electricity.
There is a plan being discussed to use excess power to pump water from below the Hoover Dam upstream into Lake Mead. The water will then come back through the hydroelectric turbines and generate electricity again. It works, and because of the different demand for electricity during the day and at night, it may make economic sense. But think about the inefficiency of the system.
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All this hoopla over plastic guns is the left looking for an issue that gets people riled up.
It’s easy to rile up anti-gun people about guns because, judging from statements and interviews, it appears most of them don’t know the basics about firearms, like the difference between an automatic and a semi-automatic weapon.
But as far as plastic guns go, it is already illegal to make a plastic gun that cannot be detected by a metal detector. It’s like anti-gun activists who demand that automatic weapons be banned when they have essentially been banned since the 1930s.
There are some other problems with plastic guns. Law enforcement in New Zealand fired 10 of these plastic guns and every one of them blew up.
But in the US, why would anyone choose a plastic gun that is more than likely to blowup in your hands and can only fire one shot over a metal pistol? As noted, if it is undetectable by a metal detector it is illegal.
But speaking of gun control, Chicago is the poster child for gun control not working. The city has strict gun control laws but last weekend 65 people were shot and 12 people were killed. These people were not shot by law-abiding citizens who possess guns for personal protection. As Mayor Rahm Emanuel said, these are criminals with guns. Anyone who has been convicted of a felony can’t legally possess a gun.
