Tag: beto o’rourke

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Beto O’Rourke ‘Fully Supports the Second Amendment’ and Other Obvious Lies

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

All the BetoMania SJWs and snowflakes be all like “Say whaaaaaaattttt?”. – In their debate on the SMU campus Friday night, Texas Senator Ted Cruz forced gun-grabbing Democrat challenger Irish Bob O’Rourke into saying, multiple times, that “I fully support the second amendment.”  No word if the all-abortion, all-the-time Congressman from El Paso also now claims to somehow be “pro-life”, but it would be an equally honest statement.

Hooboy.

 

11/9 appears to be roughly its box office gross. – Michael Moore’s new Trump-bashing film, stupidly titled “Fahrenheit 11/9” is tanking at the box office.  Man, nobody could have seen that one coming.

 

A little Twitter Truth here…

And another bit of Twitter truth from my own Twitter feed (which each and every one of you should be following, by the way, dammit)…

 

And hey, if you followed me on Twitter (@GDBlackmon), you’d get to enjoy witty, sexy banter like this on a daily basis:

Ok, back to business.

 

Next time some nitwit tries to tell you Donald Trump is not popular, whip this out:

Now, think about this:  This is how you know that all the media reports about how Trump’s base voters are all discouraged and probably not going to come out to vote on November 6 are nothing more than fake news media wishful thinking.

That line in Missouri last night was no fluke, not an exception to the rule.  In all, police estimated that more than 20,000 people had lined up to try to get into the 11,000 seat arena.  The fact is that, just like during the 2016 election campaign, the President’s rallies all draw far more people wanting to get into the event than the venues will hold.  All of them.  Without exception.

If these people are going to come out at 5:30 in the morning to stand in line hoping to get into a rally that starts 14 hours later, do you really think they are going to hesitate to go out and stand in line for maybe 5 minutes at their local polling station on November 6?  Please.

But it gets even better.  CNN’s Kaitlan Collins had to be terrified to learn what she put into this tweet:

Ok, but Ms. Collins’ employer wants you all to think that that guy, the guy who waited in line for 22 hours in the drizzle to get a glimpse of the President of the United States is going to just sit at home on Election Day despite that same POTUS urging him to get out and vote.  Yyyyyeeeaaaahhhh, no.  That’s not going to happen.

You want to know what else is not going to happen on Election Day, 2018?  A Blue Wave.  Bank it.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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Why 2018 is a Status Quo Election

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Annnndddd the race between Cruz and O’Rourke is…still all over the damn place. – A polling group that calls itself Vox Populi   came out with a poll in the Texas senate race on Thursday, showing Ted Cruz and Irish Bob O’Rourke tied at 50-50 in the race.  In its sample, Vox Populi included 39% Republicans and 36% Democrats, a sample that the group apparently feels is reflective of the Texas voter population.

Think about that for a minute.  Texas is a state in which no Democrat has won a statewide election in 24 years.  Not one.  It is a state in which Republicans prevailed in the statewide elections four years ago by about 15-20 points each.  It is a state in which the GOP voter turnout in the primaries earlier this year exceeded Democrat primary turnout by a whopping 50%, even though the Democrats had close contested races for the governor’s race and several other statewide offices.

Does that sound like a 39-36 state to you?  I’m picking on Vox Populi, but the reality is that their sample is pretty typical of the samples being taken in polling in Texas this year.  It is instructive to note that, four years ago, Texans were being treated to an array of polls about this time in the race pretending to show that Democrat Wendy Davis was a serious threat to Republican Greg Abbott in the governor’s race.  Abbott won that race by 21% of the vote.

In fairness to Vox Populi, the group does say it applies a complex weighting method to its sampling, including this passage:  “These screens significantly improve how reflective the sample is to the actual target voting population. Finally, Pop Polling weights survey results based on projected voter demographics. We do not weight on partisan affiliation or identification, helping reduce the risk of any bias during our analysis process.” Ok, cool, this is pretty common practice, but does it really inspire public confidence to know that, after the interviews have been conducted, the group goes in and monkeys around with the results?  Maybe it does – who knows for sure?  But if you’re going to apply this complex weighting method after the surveys are complete, why not just conduct more surveys and then stratify your sample via random eliminations in the various demographic groups to the breakdowns you want once that is done?

Also on Thursday, a new Public Policy Polling poll pegged the race at a 48-45 lead for Sen. Cruz.  That poll surveyed 40% Rs and 35% Ds.  So, that’s a little better, but is it really reflective of how Texas voters vote?  This PPP poll was conducted on behalf of a pro-Obamacare activist group.  So perhaps this one is a case of the polling group engaging in a little confirmation bias for its sponsor.  Or maybe not – who knows?

For a third data point, you have the Quinnipiac poll released earlier this week that shows Cruz leading by 54-45.  Quinnipiac unfortunately does not reveal the poll’s breakdown between Rs and Ds, but by extrapolating backwards from the results, it looks like it was right at 8-9% more Rs than Ds, a much more reasonable reflection of how Texans actually vote.

So, what you end up with is a confusing mish-mash of differing methodologies producing wildly different results, yet with all of them claiming to have just a 3-4% margin of error.  Embarrassing, for the whole polling industry.

Meanwhile, over in BLUE WAAAAAAAVVVVVEEE country… – We also have an interesting new poll in Texas Congressional District 32, in which incumbent Pete Sessions is supposedly facing a tough re-election challenge.  This poll, conducted by Siena College, shows Sessions holding a 52-44 lead over his Democrat opponent.

This one’s interesting because this is a seat the Democrats pretty much have to win in order to gain a majority in the House of Representatives in November, and previous polling in CD 32 have indicated the race was tight.  My view is that this race is reflective of what is going to happen all over Texas and really the rest of the country as Election Day grows closer.

As I’ve pointed out several times in the past, my view is that the best way to predict what is going to happen in any election is to judge the overall mood of the public.  Every election has an overriding inertia that serves to move the public in one direction or another on Election Day.  The overriding mood in 2016 was for major change, and we ended up with the most major change results in modern times.

The trend we are likely to see this year is that voters who make up their minds late in the game in this particular election are going to overwhelmingly decide to preserve the status quo in their state or district, wherever that may be.  Why?  Because, to quote James Carville, it’s the economy, stupid.  And the economy is roaring.

Despite all the daily hysteria brought to you by the fake news media, extraordinarily good economic news comes out on almost a daily basis.  In such times, late-deciding voters are going to take a look around their neighborhoods and see all those people who collected unemployment for the 8 years of Barack Obama getting up and going to work in the morning.  They’re going to see the new car in their neighbor’s garage, and the new refrigerator in their own kitchen.  They’re going to see that the balance in their 401(k) plan is 25% higher than it was 2 years ago.  They’re going to see all those cranes building that new manufacturing plant on the outskirts of their city.

They’re going to look around and see all of those real, tangible things that are taking place in their communities and think, “hey, maybe this isn’t the time to go vote for some guy who wants to eliminate ICE and take my guns away.  Maybe ol’ Ted isn’t so bad after all.”

This is a status quo election.  There is no “Blue Wave” coming.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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The Democrat/Media’s ‘Blue Wave’ Crashes on the Shoals of Texas Reality

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

But…but…but…BLUE WAVE!!!!…or…or something… – Just as Beto Mania and We’re Turnin’ Texas Purple Fever began to really kick into high gear, that inconvenient thing called “harsh reality” jumped up and slapped Democrats and their fake news media press agents in their collective ugly face in Texas on Tuesday.

The first event early in the day came in the form of a new poll from Quinnipiac, showing Governor Greg Abbott holding a 19-point lead over his poor, un-funded, out-of-her-depth Democrat opponent, Lupe Valdez, and coming up with a 9-point lead for Ted Cruz over Irish Bob O’Rourke, who likes to call himself “Beto” in order to try to attract Hispanic voters.  While this poll is probably no more useful than any of those that came before, it did at least survey “likely” Texas voters, and provides one data point indicating the race is moving into a more normal paradigm as Election Day approaches and Cruz. after basically ceding the playing field to his opponent during the first 9 months of the year, actually begins to campaign in earnest.

For those of you still thinking “But Beto’s soooooo cute!  Beto cusses a lot so Millenials will rush to the polls to vote for him!  Beto’s just like a Kennedy!  Beto can stillllllll wiiiiiinnnnnnnn!!!!”, think about this:  While some polls taken in this race this year have indicated that it might be close, not a single one of them has resulted in a lead for Irish Bob.  Not one.  Even an August poll that absurdly used a sample containing an even percentage of Republican and Democrat voters showed Cruz with a narrow lead.

If this race were really all that close – like the Senate races in Missouri or Florida, for example – you would have polls alternately showing Cruz and Irish Bob with leads.  That hasn’t happened because this race really isn’t close.  It’s a 10-12 point election in favor of Ted Cruz – always has been, and will be in the end.

The second event that threw Texas Democrats into fits of despair was the runoff election in Texas Senate District 19, in which long-time Democrat state legislator Pete Gallego squared off against Republican Pete Flores in the race to replace former Democrat Sen. Carlos Uresti, who was sentenced to prison in a fraud case earlier in the year.  Given that the race was in a heavily-Democrat district, a district that The Pantsuit Princess won by 12 points in 2016, and featured a seasoned veteran as the Democrat candidate, Texas Democrats assumed they’d be able to hold the seat.

Uh, no.  The voters in District 19 decided they’d had enough Democrat representation for awhile, and Flores walked off with a surprisingly easy 6-point victory.  For Texans, it is important to note that the pickup of this seat most likely means that the GOP will control a true super-majority in the Texas state senate when the legislature convenes in January for the first time in, well, forever.  Texas isn’t turning “purple” in 2018 – it’s most likely going to end up turning even more “red.”

God Bless Texas.

The Kavanaugh accuser is clearly lying, and it shows. – How do we now know for certain sure that Christina Ford is lying about her accusations against Brett Kavanaugh?  Let us count the ways:

  • She’s now refusing to show up on Monday to tell her tale of a 36-year-ago sexual assault that really wasn’t a sexual assault at all to the Senate Judiciary Committee;
  • She’s absurdly demanding the FBI conduct an investigation into a 36-year-ago event for which, even if it is a thing, the statute of limitations ran out at least 29 years ago, and for which literally the only “evidence” is her claim.  Any FBI agent can perform all the “investigation” necessary by simply reading the Washington Post;
  • She makes this ludicrous demand safe in the knowledge that a) the FBI doesn’t have jurisdiction in the case in any event, and b) the FBI has already announced it won’t be investigating anything because, hey, IT DOESN’T HAVE JURISDICTION IN THIS CASE;
  • Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the despicable, corrupt creep who initially served as Ford’s sponsor in this transparent attempt to delay or derail the nomination, started crawfishing late yesterday, telling reporters that she “can’t be sure everything is true.  I just don’t know.”  This is creepy politician-speak for “She’s lying; I know she’s lying, so I’m going to start slowly backing away from her and pretending I really had nothing to do with any of this in order to cover my own butt.”

Naturally, Ford’s lawyer rolled out the obligatory “she’s been getting death threats” claim as her client’s story was falling apart yesterday in a desperate effort to curry favor with the news media and the public.  This is something like Page 72, paragraph 3 of the Democrat/fake news media Saul Alinsky Memorial Playbook, and was so predictable you just have to look on in wonder at the fact that some people are still stupid enough to buy it.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley and Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally started to grow some huevos late in the day as their indignation at this spectacle grew, with both men holding firm to next Monday as Ford’s one and only shot at coming forward to make her transparently false claims under oath and possible penalty of perjury.  But it’s a long way until Monday, and the Democrats and fake news media will continue to pound for further delay day after day until then.  We’ll just have to wait and see if these gents can hold firm in the face of all of that, and there is literally no reason at all to believe they will, based on past performance and the fact that they continue to take their communications advice from the very same firms that advise all these creepy, corrupt Democrats.

What will most likely happen will be for Ms. Ford to go onto several of the Sunday morning talk shows – avoiding Fox News Sunday like the plague, of course – where she can be sure she will only be asked easy, softball questions by reliable Democrat toadies like George Stephanopoulos, Chuck Todd and Jake Tapper.  Most importantly, she won’t have to answer questions under oath or thus face potential perjury charges. ABC, CNN and NBC will no doubt the thrilled to serve as her vehicles in this endeavor because, hey, this is what they do for leftwing activists like Ms. Ford.

The most intelligent course for McConnell and Grassley will be to just realize nothing they do will appease the fake news media, which will pummel them regardless.  So they might as well just hold firm to Monday’s date, give Ford until noon Friday to accept the offer, and cancel the hearing if she refuses to accept.  That’s a more than fair process, and will pretty clearly demonstrate to any fair-minded individual that Ford should be disregarded if she isn’t willing to participate in it.

After that, hold the damn vote and get the man confirmed.  Stop letting the senate minority and our fake national news media hold this country hostage.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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If You Get Your News From Twitter, Tuesday was, like, Totally Awesome

The Evening Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Some Twitter highlights from today:

Wait, you mean, like, newspapers that print inflammatory, blatantly false op/eds defaming the President of the United States without identifying the writer? Hey, I know one…

So, what do you do if you’re one of the fake news media outlets that has been promoting the notion that Irish Beto O’Rourke is going to beat Ted Cruz in the Texas Senate race, and you see a new Quinnipiac poll that has Cruz expanding his lead in the race to 9 points?  If you’re the newsfakers at @The Hill, you hilariously bury the lead as far and deeply as you can possibly bury it:

…and if that doesn’t get you far enough into fakery, you issue another tweet with another hilariously-biased headline that names the Democrat, but identifies the Republican with the four-letter last name only as “Texas GOP senator…”.  Holy cow, that is some serious #fakenews right there.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller lightens the mood with a hilarious offering of his own, lampooning the shameful efforts by Democrats to falsely portray the FBI’s jurisdiction in the Kavanaugh matter…

Houston radio talk show host nails Democrats and their voting habits here:

Meanwhile, back in #fakenews world, NBC refuses to be outdone by The Hill or anyone else.  Note the use of the term “blindsided”.  Yes, because President Trump has only been transparently previewing his declassification action for about four months now:

 

Watching this guy change positions is like watching a child with a damn yo-yo. Blast Jeff Flake all you want, but at least he is consistently venal and cowardly.

Back in #fakenews world, MSNBC’s Kyle Griffin delivers a real “scoop” – that shameful valor thief Richard Blumenthal opposes the Kavanaugh nomination.  You’re a real scoop-meister, there, Kyle.

And finally, from our Good God Who Cares department, the Daily Caller delivers this little gem:

*sigh*

Just another day in getting the news as only Twitter can deliver it America.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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Mark Meadows Drops a Bomb on Fox News that the Rest of the Media Will Desperately Ignore

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

So long, Cynthia, we hardly knew ye.  And we’re really happy about that. – Bad actress Cynthia Nixon turned out to be an even worse far, far, far, far, far, far, far left-wing political candidate, as she got her whiny head handed to her in last night’s Democrat primary by ultra-corrupt New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.  Nixon couldn’t even get up to Wendy Davis numbers, pulling just 34.5% of the vote in the race.  What the results showed was not how much the despicable Cuomo is loved by New York voters, but how much Nixon and her Marxist ideology are still hated, even in a very liberal state like New York.

Let’s learn this lesson, because it is really important:  Nixon got slaughtered not because she “couldn’t get her message out,” but precisely because she became the darling of the New York and national fake news media and her senseless, destructive ideology was fully exposed to the voters.  This is in direct contrast to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who was able to pull off her surprise win over a longtime Democrat incumbent who barely campaigned, and thus was never exposed to the voters until after the voting had taken place.

The lesson here is clear:  The way to defeat these Marxist “Democratic Socialists” is to fully expose them to the voters.  You can bet this lesson will not be lost on Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who is in a fairly close race against extreme liberal Irish Bob O’Rourke (who calls himself “Beto”), who is being portrayed as just a moderate Democrat by the Texas and National fake news media who have adopted him and his campaign as their pet cause.

We can expect the Cruz campaign to focus and spend heavily on exposing the reality of Irish Bob to the voters.  The fake news media will accuse Cruz of running a “negative” campaign as if that is something bad, but the reality is that when the media won’t do its job of vetting candidates for the voters, the opposing candidate must do it for them.  Assuming Cruz adopts that strategy, what appears to be a close race in September will end up about a 10 point victory in November, because Texas voters aren’t going to want to sent a Cynthia Nixon clone to the U.S. Senate.

Speaking of lessons learned… – As he has watches as the depraved Democrats pander to Cynthia Nixon’s and Irish Bob O’Rourke’s ultra-leftist voters by pulling out literally every trick they can think of to defame, demean and destroy Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, we must hope that the lesson President Trump takes away from all of this is that, when the next Supreme Court opening comes up, there is no reason at all not to nominate a real, hard core conservative jurist like Amy Barrett.  The process will be the same no matter who he puts forth, so no use pussy-footing around next time.

A big bomb went off on Fox News last night… – and you won’t see any “mainstream”, i.e., fake media outlet talking about it.

Rep. Mark Meadows (R-NC) appeared along with Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) on the Sean Hannity show to discuss this latest texting scandal involving disgraced ex-FBI Agent Peter Strzok and his paramour FBI lawyer Lisa Page.  For those unaware, this latest episode involves Strzok and Page discussing the fact that multiple deep state anti-Trump cabal participants within the FBI and DOJ were “leaking like crazy” to various media outlets last year during the run-up to the start of the Robert Mueller Special Counsel investigation.

Jordan had told Fox Business host Stuart Varney earlier in the day that one leftwing reporter was getting leaks from as many as 13 different individuals within the DOJ/FBI cabal, and repeated that fact to Hannity.  Meadows followed with this huge bit of information:

Rep. Mark Meadows: “There are dozens of other documents that will support the fact that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page had ongoing relationships with multiple reporters and that they were feeding them information to spin a narrative against this president… We know that James Comey leaked, we know that Andrew McCabe leaked, we know that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page leaked. We also know that the reporters who they leaked to know that they leaked. And look we got names. We also have the reporters’ names.”

That high-pitched crunching sound you heard around 8:30 CT last night was the sound of sphincters tightening in the offices of the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC and CBS.

Even without the names, it would not be hard to figure out who the reporters are.  The fake news media was literally filled to the gills during this time frame with stories damaging to President Trump sourced solely from “a source close to the White House,” “sources within the FBI,” “multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation,” or however else the Times and Post could think to couch it.

All of which is why you won’t see any of this reported at the Times or the Post or any other fake media outlet.  They’re all praying to whatever god they worship that all of this gets delayed past Election Day, the Democrats win a majority in the House, and the coverup can thus be completed.

As the Campaign Update has told you repeatedly over the last 10 months, the fake news media was not only supportive of the conspiracy within the DOJ/FBI to first deny Trump the 2016 election and then to bring down the Trump Presidency, it has been and remains complicit in these past and ongoing efforts. Rod Rosenstein and his lackeys at DOJ continue to feverishly work to cover it all up and stonewall congressional document requests, but sooner or later it will all come out, and when it does, hell is coming with it.

Just another day in the fake news media is part of the deep state America.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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Hollywood Performs a Cultural Appropriation on Neil Armstrong

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Wait, you hired a Canadian to play Neil Armstrong?  Isn’t that, like, cultural appropriation or something? – Hey, everybody, Hollywood has finally made a film about American hero Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon.  That only took half a century.

That’s the good news.  The bad news is that they left out the iconic moment in which Armstrong plants the U.S. Flag on the moon’s surface, because of course they did.  Predictably, this is causing a backlash from many…wait for it…patriotic Americans!  Go figure.

The film’s Canadian star, Ryan Gosling, defended what he said was an intentional decision because Armstrong’s achievement – which was done on the back of billions of American dollars, a decade of American research and exploration, and with the support of more than 400,000 people, all of whom were…wait for it…AMERICANS – “transcended countries and borders.”

No.  Not it did not, you smarmy jackass.  As a great Twitter meme pointed out on Friday, there are two kinds of countries:  The kind that use the metric system, and the kind that has put men on the moon.

Just one more reason why if you go to the movies these days to see any film not produced by Dinesh D’Souza, you are part of the problem.

Tired of all this Winning yet?  Part I – Far left fake news outlet The Village Voice announced yesterday that it will cease all publication immediately, leaving the nation far better off as a result.  Let’s do The New York Times next.

Tired of all this Winning yet?  Part II – The State Department announced that the U.S. will withhold all contributions to a U.N. sponsored money pit that pretends to provide aid to Palestinian refugees.  A spokesman for the State Department called the agency’s business model “unsustainable,” which in diplomatic speak means all the money was being siphoned off either to support Palestinian terrorist acts against Israel or going into the pockets of corrupt U.N. officials.  Just one more element of the un-American legacy of Barack Hussein Obama gone.

Tired of all this Winning yet?  Part III – The Democrats’ 2004 presidential nominee and former failed Secretary of State John Kerry is refusing to rule out another presidential run in 2020.  Oh, please, please, please, let this happen.  I really cannot wait for a rerun of that particular fiasco.

Hey, the Texas news media has been telling us he’s just like a Kennedy, so… – Irish Beto O’Rourke took a wallop to his campaign on Friday, as the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express News both ran stories detailing new facts about his drunk driving incident from 20 years ago.  To be fair, O’Rourke has long admitted to the fact he was arrested for DWI, calling it an inexcusable act.  But what he has left out of his maudlin confessions are the facts that he blew a 1.36 on the breathalyzer test that night, and that he attempted to flee the scene of the wreck he caused in his drunken state before being arrested.

The Democrat-tilting news media in Texas have been comparing O’Rourke to a Kennedy for months now.  We just didn’t know prior to yesterday that they were talking about Ted Kennedy.

While the Chronicle and Express News are to be commended for actually filing these reports, they have yet to report on the fact that, in 1995, young Irish Beto was also tossed in the pokey on burglary-related charges while in college.  According to Politifact Texas, “O’Rourke and fellow students were arrested for “attempted forcible entry” under the section of the Texas penal code titled “Burglary.” We also added O’Rourke’s reference, in Palestine, to the burglary arrest.”

Gosh, maybe now we know why Irish Beto suddenly backed out of the debate with Ted Cruz that was supposed to have taken place last night.  The two candidates have four more scheduled debates over the coming weeks – we’ll just have to wait and see if our “Kennedy-esque” boy wonder chooses to keep any of those appointments.

Why is it always such a shock when someone at the FBI actually does their real job? – After state law enforcement officials in New Mexico had completely hosed up the case against the five radical Islamic terrorists who were training kidnapped children to commit atrocities in our country, the feds finally decided to step in.  On Friday, the FBI actually took time out from its ongoing silent coup efforts against President Trump to do its real job for a change, placing the five terrorists under arrest for violations of federal weapons and conspiracy laws.

“The defendants, Jany Leveille, 35, a Haitian national illegally present in the United States, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 40, Hujrah Wahhaj, 37, Subhanah Wahhaj, 35, and Lucas Morton, 40, are charged in a criminal complaint that was filed earlier today in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico,” the bureau said in a statement.

“The criminal complaint charges Jany Leveille with being an alien unlawfully in possession of firearms and ammunition in the District of New Mexico from Nov. 2017 through Aug. 2018,” the bureau said. “The criminal complaint charges the other four defendants with aiding and abetting Leveille in committing the offense, and with conspiring with Leveille to commit the offense.”

Presumably, the arresting agents can now go back to stonewalling document production requests from various congressional committees in the hopes of getting safely past the midterm elections.  Because that is the real focus of our nation’s “premier law enforcement agency” these days.

Just another day in every day is a new day America.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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Our Public Opinion Polls are Still as Awful as They Were in 2016

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Why we should all stop paying attention to the polls. – In Florida’s GOP primaries, numerous polling groups conducted polls of the governor’s race over the past few months. The RealClearPolitics average of all the most recent polls pegged the race at a 6.7% advantage for Ron DeSantis, who was endorsed by President Trump.

The final result? DeSantis wins by a whopping 20% of the vote.  None of the polls taken in the race had DeSantis pulling more than 41% of the overall vote.  He actually won 56%.

In addition to all of that, barely two months ago, a poll commissioned by Fox News showed DeSantis trailing the other major candidate in the race, Adam Putnam, by 15%.  So the people at Fox are trying to convince us that this race turned around by 37 points in a little over 60 days.  Sure it did.

Stop worrying about polls. They are no better this year than they were in 2016. Most of them are conducted using awful methodologies and absurd samples for the purposes of a) creating fake news stories; b) generating clicks to the web pages of the entities sponsoring or conducting the poll; and c) attempting to influence public opinion.

The race between incumbent Senator Ted Cruz and Democrat challenger Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke in Texas is another great example of why many of these polls really don’t give us a shred of reliable information.  A recent poll in that race, sponsored by the Texas Lyceum, showed the contest actually in almost a dead heat, with Cruz polling 41% support to O’Rourke’s 39%.

Wow.  Shocker, right?  I mean, Texas is a state in which no Democrat has actually won a statewide election in a quarter of a century, a state won pretty easily by Donald Trump in 2016, one in which Democrat statewide candidates had trouble finishing within 20% of their GOP opponents in the last statewide elections in 2014.  So a win by O’Rourke, a man of Irish descent who is attempting to convince Texas’s Hispanic voters that he is one of them with his hip nickname, and Millenials that he is one of them by doing lots of cursing in his campaign events, would be a huge upset.

The Lyceum poll’s snapshot of a dead heat race appeared to gain some support with last week’s release of a poll from Emerson College showing the Cruz lead down to just 1%, at 39-38.  Again, wow, if only it were true.

The problems with these polls are numerous, however.  The Lyceum poll’s sample is fairly large at 1,178, but 27% of those polled aren’t registered to vote, and just 27% of respondents said they were “extremely interested” in the campaign.  All of which means this poll tells us pretty much nothing at all about what might actually happen at the polling places in Texas in November.

But it gets worse.  It turns out that the people who conducted this poll chose to pretend that Texas – a state in which no Democrat has won a statewide race since 1994 – is a dead even state in terms of party identification, choosing to question 39% Democrats, 39% Republicans and 22% Independents.  Now, based on past voting patterns, these percentages should really look more like 44% Republican, 30% Democrat and 26% Independent.  Something close to that, anyway.

All other aspects of this poll being equal, the choosing of a sample truly representative of the Texas adult population would probably have ended up showing Cruz with a lead of 8-10%.  Focusing the sample on likely voters most likely would have increased Cruz’s polling margin, given the historic disparity in party voter turnout patterns in Texas in recent elections.

The Emerson College poll is equally problematic.  While it does focus on registered voters, the sample size consists of just 550 people in a state with a wildly diverse population of 25 million or so. The number of different ethnic groups living in the city of Houston alone probably exceeds the total sample surveyed by this poll.

To make matters worse, party identification breakdown for the poll is impossible to discover.  It may be out there somewhere, but if so, it is extremely well-hidden.  One distressing result of the hilariously inaccurate polling outcomes of the 2016 elections has been a trend of these polling entities being reluctant to publish full, accurate details about the nature of their samples.

Increasingly, polling entities like Emerson do their best to avoid revealing key factors like party ID breakouts to the public.  This is the case with another recent poll in the Cruz/O’Rourke race – the NBC/Marist poll – which shows Cruz’s lead at 4%, but doesn’t really inform us how it got there.

What does that tell us?  It tells us that these polling companies, universities and sponsoring media outlets have little, if any, confidence in their polling methods in today’s rapidly changing society.  Rather than simply be honest and clearly inform the public of that reality, they hide aspects of their methodologies in order to minimize criticism.

Is the race between Cruz and O’Rourke fairly close at this point, with Cruz’s lead at least within single digits?  Yes, probably.  Irish Beto has thus far benefitted from the love affair he’s engaged in with the Texas and national news media, and the fact that most of the Texas population has little idea who he is or knowledge of his radical leftist policy views.  A fear of ending that knowledge gap is probably why Mr. Beto suddenly backed out of his scheduled debate with Sen. Cruz this Friday.  No use spilling those troublesome beans to the voters before he absolutely has to.

But is this a 1 or 2 point race, as these two highly problematic polls attempt to indicate?  Not bloody likely.  What these two polls really tell us is the same thing the disparity between the polls and the actual outcome of the race in Florida tells us:  We should all stop paying attention to these polls.

Just another day in the public opinion polls are a sad joke America.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

Open post

The Fakest Fake News This Week Comes From an Unexpected Source

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Hey, remember that “Blue Wave” that was going to carry Irish Beto O’Rourke to a smashing victory over Ted Cruz in November?. – Yeah, that’s not really a thing, no matter how much some desperate media mavens in Texas want it to happen.  The Blue Wave media lobby’s hopes were raised back in early April when Quinnipiac University issued a poll purporting to show the race between Irish Beto and Cruz within the margin of error, with Cruz holding just a 47-44 lead.

But a new Quinnipiac poll issued on Wednesday now pegs Cruz’s lead at a much more believable 51-40, which is likely within a point or two of where it will end up finishing in November.  The same poll has Texas Governor Greg Abbott holding a whopping 19 point edge over the latest poor soul the Democrat Party nominated to be its sacrificial lamb this fall, former Dallas County Sheriff Lupe Valdez.  This is a dramatic 10-point uptick for Abbott since the April poll.  Abbott defeated Democrat Wendy Davis by almost 20 percent of the vote four years ago, and other than wishful thinking on the part of the media and the professional political class in Austin, there is no real reason to believe Sheriff Valdez will improve on that performance in any substantial way.

Speaking of Greg Abbott, it’s not even 2 weeks down the road from the tragic school shootings in Santa Fe, Texas, and the Texas Governor has already spearheaded an effort to develop a plan to provide upgraded security and mental health screening at the state’s public schools.  The total cost of the plan is $110 million – the majority of which can be funded with existing federal grants – and the great preponderance of the measures it contains should be implemented by the start of the next school year in mid-August.

Naturally, media stories “reporting” on the plan went out and copiously quoted Ms. Valdez and other Democrats and teacher’s union reps who knee-jerked in opposition, but they’re just lost voices wandering the woods as the adults in the state go about trying to provide better protection for the state’s school children.  Because most Texans tend to like leaders who actually exercise leadership rather than just point fingers and criticize.  One would think Texas Democrats would eventually figure this out, but one would apparently be wrong.

God Bless Texas.

Fakest #fakenews of the week, and it’s not from CNN, NBC, the NYTimes or the WaPo?  Can this be true? – Yes, it is true, and the story comes from the Wall Street Journal.

The fakery starts with the story’s headline:  “‘Tropical Messiah’: A Trump-Style Politician Is Mexican Presidential Front Runner”, and only goes downhill from there.  The subject of the story is the race for the presidency in Mexico in general and specifically on the guy who is going to win, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.  The WSJ spells Mr. Obrador’s name correctly, and that’s where the story begins to break down.

At one point, the story describes Obrador as a “leftist nationalist”, hardly the path being followed by U.S. President Trump, who has governed as the most conservative chief executive in modern times.  Guess who else was a “leftist nationalist”:  the late Venezuelan thug Hugo Chavez.  Oh, and the guy who succeeded Chavez, Nicolas Maduro.  These guys were role models for Barack Obama, not Donald Trump.  Those guys are also responsible for turning what was a thriving and prosperous Venezulean economy into a socialist misery pit.

Like every other person who has run for the Mexican presidency as the drug cartels have risen in power over the last 30 years, Obrador promises to rid the nation of …wait for it… the drug cartels!  Great idea – tell us how socialism is going to accomplish that.

Frightfully, Obrador has also hinted that he will also re-nationalize the nation’s oil industry, just as Mexico, under the leadership of current President Enrique Pena Nieto, has begun to really benefit from the opening of the industry to foreign investment that took place in 2013.  A re-nationalization and seizure of assets of private investors will ensure that no company will be willing to invest in Mexico’s economy again for decades to come.

The authors of the otherwise fawning profile even appear to recognize this reality with the following passage:

“Foreign investors are nervous about Mr. López Obrador’s plans to reassess Mexico’s opening to private investment in the country’s oil industry, which is expected to bring $150 billion to the energy sector. They also worry about his threats to cancel Mexico City’s multibillion [dollar] new airport, currently under construction.

Such talk reminds many Mexicans of President Luis Echeverría, who governed Mexico in the 1970s. Mr. Echeverría combined import-substitution policies, sharply increased government spending and socialist rhetoric. The story ended badly: Inflation skyrocketed and the government devalued the peso for the first time in 22 years.”

Yes, and it is inevitable that this story will end badly as well, because that story – as with the story currently playing out in Venezuela – is in fact the inevitable outcome of the implementation of the socialist, command-and-control policies that Obrador’s election will inevitably bring to the country.

How the story’s authors see any of this as being similar to the story playing out in America today – a story in which the U.S. economy is booming thanks to the overtly anti-socialist policies being implemented by Donald Trump – is simply mind-boggling.

The story playing out in Mexico’s presidential election right now is a tragic one, one that does not deserve the fantasy-based, kid glove treatment of Obrador provided by the Wall Street Journal.

Just another day in the fake news comes from all directions America.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

Open post

Your Fake News Media in Action!

Today’s Campaign Update

(Because The Campaign Never Ends)

Hey, let’s do that with Obamacare, too! – Chuckie Schumer announced on Friday that he’s introducing a bill that would essentially rescind federal marijuana laws because, he claims, he is such a huge believer in the concept of federalism that he thinks we should just let the states decide on whether pot should be legal or not.  This marks the first issue in his long political career on which the old collectivist expressed a fealty to federalism.

Talking Points Parrot for Senate! – Just minutes after Schumer had held his press conference, Texas senate candidate Irish Beto O’Rourke took to his Twitter feed to join in the fun:

So, there you go, Texans – you have a choice of re-electing Ted Cruz or replacing him with a guy who will loyally do or say whatever Chuck Schumer wants him to do or say for the next six years.  This really shouldn’t be hard.

Your Fake News Media In Action! – At mid-day Friday, the Justice Department announced the bombshell story that Inspector General Michael Horowitz is investigating drama queen ex-FBI Director James Comey for potential violations of the Espionage Act.  So I thought I’d go to Politico.com to see what that political news outlet of record for the Inside-the-Beltway set had to say about this huge story.

The answer, as of 6:43 a.m. Central Time this morning is…nothing.  Wait, can that be right?  Let me go through all the stories on the landing page – there are dozens of them – again.  Hold on….

Ok, yeah, that’s right.  Not a word.  Politico does have front page headlines about EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt’s apartment, one about a half-century-ago affair between Fidel Castro and some ABC reporter, a typically slanted “analysis” of a bunch of fake “conflicts” Rudy Giuliani brings to his new role on the Trump defense team, and an ultra-critical story about what some liberal fake journalist hack thinks Melania Trump can learn from the late Barbara Bush.

But not a peep about the stood-up homecoming queen ex-FBI Director being investigated for violations of the nation’s Espionage Act.

Holy cow.

Your Fake News Media in Action!  Part II – CNN’s Chief Political Analyst, Gloria Borger, is no doubt on thin ice at the fakest of all the fake news outlets this morning after she made the enormous error of actually speaking truthfully about the absurd lawsuit filed by the DNC on Friday.  When asked how she would classify the suit by fake host Brooke Baldwin, Borger called it a “100 percent stunt”.  Here’s the exchange:

“How much of this do you think is just a stunt versus a pretty smart ploy for the court of public opinion?” Brooke Baldwin asked political analyst Gloria Borger.

“A 100 percent stunt, 100 percent,” Borger responded. “They want to get in the act, obviously. They want to keep the story moving. This is nothing new.”

Note how Baldwin attempted to get Borger to the “right” answer in the view of CNN’s management and the Democrat Party with her “pretty smart ploy” lead-in.  But Borger slipped up, and now CNN – which is no doubt intent upon focusing on this fake story for the entire weekend in order to avoid having to report on all the bad-for-Democrats stories related to Comey, Andrew McCabe and the flailing Mueller investigation – is stuck trying to find a way to rationalize the moment of inadvertent honesty by its vaunted el jefe Political Analyst.  Good luck with that, guys and gals.

Your Fake News Media in Action!  Part III – Oh, hey, the Crazy Little Fat Guy in North Korea announced on Friday that he is suspending his missile testing program and completely closing down his main missile test site in advance of his anticipated meeting with President Trump next month.  CNN, MSNBC, the WaPo and the NYTimes will spend all weekend twisting themselves into pretzels trying to rationalize how to deny Mr. Trump any credit for this happy turn of events.  Good luck with that one, too.

Your Fake News Media in Action!  Part IV – Finally, since no one at any of the fake news media outlets is honest enough to report it, President Donald Trump (I never tire of typing those three words) took to his Twitter feed late Friday night to point out a key fact related to the Comey memos that were released this week, 8 of 15 pages of which contained redactions marked “classified”:

Yes, some of us know what it means.  But you’ll never get anyone in the fake news media to acknowledge that reality.  Nice try, though.

 

Just another day in fake news media America.

That is all.

Follow me on Twitter at @GDBlackmon

Today’s news moves at a faster pace than ever. Whatfinger.com is my go-to source for keeping up with all the latest events in real time.

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