On Thursday, President Donald Trump shocked many in his own party by indicating that he does not believe that Russia is continuing to try to interfere with U.S. elections. In response to a reporter referring Mueller’s conclusion that the interference is ongoing, Trump responded. “You don’t really believe this, do you?”
Here is the exchange:
REPORTER: Mr. President, Robert Mueller said last week that Russia is interfering in the U.S. elections right now. Is that —
TRUMP: “Oh you don’t really believe this. Do you believe this? Ok, fine. We didn’t talk about it. I spoke with President Putin of Russia yesterday. They are having massive fires in their forest. I’ve never seen anything like it. I just offered our assistance because we are very good at putting out forest fires frankly. If they should need it, I offered our assistance. We had a good talk, a short talk but a good talk, and I think he appreciated it.”
Trump’s own Administration, including the FBI, has testified that Russia must certainly is trying to interfere with the elections. Much like Trump’s stance on not calling the FBI with foreign contracts like the one at Trump Tower, this places him at odds with his own intelligence agencies.
In the meantime, the Republicans find themselves in the unprecedented position of being painted as soft on Russia, including billboards appearing in reference to Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as “Moscow Mitch” or “Putin’s Mitch.”
The denial of Trump makes it more difficult for Republicans to say that, while denying collusion, the Republicans are outraged by Russian efforts and united to combat them. Trump’s comments suggest that he not only believes that Russian collusion is a hoax but Russian interference is a hoax.
What the Democratic Party really is:
https://amgreatness.com/2019/08/04/the-dream-team-loses-to-the-nobodies/
I love VDH sometimes. what a guy. He wroteL
When figurehead Robert Mueller likely allowed Andrew Weissman to form his special counsel team to investigate so-called charges of Russian collusion involving Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and the Kremlin, Washington elites became bouncy. The high-profile legal “powerhouse” lineup immediately looked like a sure-thing—an elite slaughter of the yokels.
As they perused the résumés of the New York and Washington prosecutors, and the Wilmer-Hale veterans, reporters were ecstatic that the supposedly straight-shooting Republican Mueller had turned his investigation into what the media soon boasted was a progressive “dream team” of “all-stars,” a veritable “hunter-killer team” of get-Trump professionals. One would have thought mere names and credentials win indictments, regardless of the evidence.
The subtext was that Trump had all but met his Waterloo. Indictments for conspiracy, obstruction, and worse yet inevitably would follow, until Trump either resigned in disgrace or was impeached. The media counterparts of the dream-team on MSNBC and CNN would make short work of the rubes. On air law professors and legal analysts who knew “Bob” Mueller (the same ones who assured us that “Jim” Comey was a “straight-shooter”), after all, swore this would be true.
Almost all the all-stars were not just liberal but “correct” as well. Many were either Clinton donors; a few in the past had defended either Clinton aides or the Clinton foundation. Many also had been tagged as Department of Justice future superstars. Their tony degrees seemed designed to spell the doom of the buffoon Trump.
Wired immediately boasted of Mueller’s team, “From the list of hires, it’s clear, in fact, that Mueller is recruiting perhaps the most high-powered and experienced team of investigators ever assembled by the Justice Department.” If “high-powered” seemed the signature adjective, then “ever assembled” was supposed to sound downright scary.
A Vox headline on August 2, 2017 summed up the progressive giddiness of the time: “Meet the all-star legal team who may take down Trump.” The subtitle offered more snark: “Special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team is full of pros. Trump’s team makes typos.” Get it? Young-gun pros against the so-sos.
So, whom exactly did Trump enlist against the all-stars?
An NPR editorialist in June 2017 condescendingly tried to explain Trump’s hapless plight: “If you asked a Washington insider to come up with a legal dream team for a situation like this, it’s highly unlikely this is who they would come up with. But President Trump came into office as an outsider and continues to operate that way, and in a way his legal team is a reflection of that as well.”
What is “this” and who exactly is “who”?
Trump’s Team: Not a Harvard Law Degree in Sight
The 75-year-old Rudy Giuliani who appeared in seemingly nonstop television appearances was said to have lost a step and to have confused punditry with jurisprudence. He was joined by 69-year-old Ty Cobb, an oddly named, rotund eccentric looking barrister with a handlebar mustache—almost a caricatured contrast with the suave, cool, and much younger Mueller head honcho, Andrew Weissmann.
John Dowd, a 78-year-old lawyer with degrees from Southern Benedictine College and Emory, seemed a slow-talking, septuagenarian who looked and acted his age. Few then imagined Dowd would eventually play something akin to the Wilfred Brimley closer role in Absence of Malice.
Sixty-three-year old TV and radio host Jay Sekulow, a frequent Christian Broadcast Network and Fox News Channel commentator, a Christian convert and Messianic Jew, with degrees from Mercer and Regent universities, and past chief counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, rounded out the original team—and, of course, he was snidely ridiculed as a media operator who would be chewed up when he finally went mano-a-mano with Weissmann’s killers. My God, Sekulow (Mercer and Regent) up against Weissmann (Princeton and Columbia)!
The final insult to the swamp was when Trump in autumn 2018 brought in the husband and wife team of Jane and Martin Raskin as replacements and additions. The Washington Post headline could only tsk-tsk: “Trump needed new lawyers for Russia probe. He found them at a tiny Florida firm.” “Found them” and “tiny”?
The media salivated over the supposedly obvious contrasts. The average age of Trump’s original old four-man legal guard of Cobb, Dowd, Giuliani, and Sekulow was 71. Not one had a Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, or Stanford law degree.
Vox also sniffed of Michael Bowe and Sekulow, “The last two are known more for their time on TV than their time in the courtroom, and don’t have anywhere near the background Mueller’s team boasts to take on this challenge.” Vox apparently saw the fight as a replay of The Verdict, this time with the suave James Mason winning.
In fact, aside from age, looks, and degrees, the outnumbered Trump team was far more experienced than their counterparts, and it was sensitive to the fact that the legal agendas of the Mueller special counsel investigation were little more than pure politics, media hype, leaks, and had little to do with finding out with whom, if any, the Russians had been working to warp an election and sandbag a presidential campaign.
Mueller’s Team of Blunderers
Had the special counsel team been less biased, its lawyers might have discovered within days that the only interventionist foreign national who was actively recruiting Russians as nefarious sources was Christopher Steele, a Clinton operative paid through the firewalls of the DNC, Fusion GPS, and the Perkins Coie law firm to compile a tabloid dossier on Trump, to leak it to old friends and new contacts in the DOJ, FBI, and CIA and thereby to sanctify and disseminate his dirt to the media and tar the Trump campaign—and later an elected president’s transition and administration.
Whereas the Trump team sought to defend their client from charges they knew were false, the Mueller team sought to destroy Trump first, and worry about the evidence later. That proved an enormous disadvantage from the outset. One side saw it as a legal matter of proving an absence of guilt, the other as a political effort to fuel impeachment.
In terms of blunders, they turned out to be all Mueller’s. The Lisa Page-Peter Strozk text trove was an ungodly disaster for Mueller’s team—revealing supposedly professional FBI dreamers of his media-hyped team as adulterous and self-obsessed Washington insiders, with a buffoonish hatred of Trump and schoolyard disdain for his supporters.
That Strozk revealed himself as a blowhard and wannabe in his secret notes to Page was all the more damaging given that he was a sort of swamp FBI everyman. Indeed, Strzok popped up everywhere anything proved suspicious. Strzok convinced Comey to change the wording of his report on Hillary Clinton. Strzok likely initiated the setup of George Papadopoulos. Strozk gave away the game early on with his text to Lisa Page that there was “no big there there.” Strozk interviewed former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and got him to talk without a lawyer. Strozk met with Andrew McCabe to dream up ways of ruining Trump. The most confident and compromised of Mueller’s investigators had always been the most ubiquitous.
That Mueller staggered Page’s and Strzok’s forced departures and never told the media of their unprofessional romantic relationship and embarrassing texts only made “Bob” seem more partisan and less transparent.
Much of the Mueller team had proved indiscreetly partisan before coming aboard in broadcasting their anti-Trump venom. Weissmann had attended a Hillary Clinton “victory” party on Election Night (odd, given the Clinton-bought dossier would become a subtext to his entire investigation) and sent an egotistical email congratulating acting Trump attorney general and former Obama appointee Sally Yates for her stonewalling of a Trump executive order. Was that Ivy League cunning?
No Crime, But Plenty of Innuendo
From the outset Trump’s team was convinced that their client neither had colluded with Russia nor had obstructed an investigation of a crime that did not take place. He had turned over almost everything the all-stars wanted, and freely allowed the White House staff to testify.
From the beginning of the investigations, his lawyers sensed that the Mueller team quickly had concluded there was no crime, but there might be lots of innuendo, rumor, gossip, and Trump antics to be had that could be jammed into their final report and thus provide fodder for impeachment hearings.
When William Barr arrived in February as the new attorney general, replacing the recused Jeff Sessions and the buskin Rod Rosenstein, the Mueller dream team charade finally dissipated. Barr was an old veteran attorney general who did not much care what was said about him, and sensed from the start that Mueller’s team, far from being all-stars, were nothing but rank partisans uninterested in the commission of felonies by an array of Obama officials—deceiving a FISA court, leaking classified memos, lying under oath to congressional committees, and inserting informants into political campaign. Instead, they were obsessed with perjury traps, nutty things like the ossified Logan Act and the Emoluments Clause, and hounding a minor cast of transitory Trump aides.
At about the same time, a similar cultural fantasy was occurring about Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), head of the House Intelligence Committee, whose chairmanship passed to fellow Californian Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) when the Democrats assumed control of the House in January.
Nunes, the scion of Portuguese immigrant dairy farmers from California’s San Joaquin Valley, had first uncovered much of the Obama Administration’s weaponization of the Justice Department, FBI, and CIA and their obsession with destroying Trump through informants, warped FISA writs, unmasking, and leaks to the media of classified documents.
In fact, much of what the country learned from 2017 to 2019 about the various machinations of Glenn Simpson and his Hillary Clinton contracted Fusion GPS skullduggery, the antics of FBI Director James Comey and Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, and the compromised roles of John Brennan and James Clapper was due to Nunes’s relentless digging, supported by a top-notch staff and likewise committed Republican colleagues.
Snobbery and Unmerited Elitism
One would never have known that, however, from the Washington media. They wrote off Nunes from the start as some sort of straw-in-the-mouth hick from Tulare—in obvious contrast to his Democratic better, the haughty Adam Schiff, Harvard Law Graduate and perennial prevaricator who serially hit the CNN and MSNBC circuit to flat out lie that he had the Russian collusion goods on Trump and the walls of indictments and impeachment were closing in each day.
Roll Call’s David Hawkings dismissed Nunes as a bumpkin: “The match between his backstory and his prominence seems wholly incongruous and helps underscore the perception that Nunes is cavalierly playing at a very high-stakes game while in way over his head.” Peter Lance of the Huffington Post sniffed, “There’s certainly nothing in his résumé that would have qualified him for the post.” In the elite world of the Left, “résumés” are everything, past physical hard work and innate intelligence nothing.
MSNBC analyst Elise Jordan also apparently thought farming made Nunes inept: “Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth? A former dairy farmer who House Intel staffers refer to as ‘Secret Agent Man,’ because he has no idea what’s going on.” If the media thought Nunes was the out of place oaf Al Czervik, they never caught on that Adam Schiff was “Caddyshack’s” real loser, the smarmy and incompetent Judge Smails.
Snobbery and unmerited elitism characterized the entire collusion hoax and Mueller boondoggle. But being progressive, woke, and highly credentialed is not synonymous either with intelligence or wisdom. Just as Trump nobodies destroyed Mueller’s somebodies, and just as Nunes the farmer outperformed Schiff the Harvard law graduate, so too Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders each day squared off against Jim Acosta and a mediocre Washington press corps.
Journalists and Hollywood has-beens leveled the same old-same old cultural and class invective at Sanders: “Slightly chunky soccer mom,” “Organizes snacks for the kids’ games,” “Fake eyelashes and formal dresses,” “More comfortable in sweats and running shoes,” “To listen to her pronounce ‘priorities’ is akin to hearing the air seep out of a flat tire, and she leaves half of the consonants on the curb,” “She burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye,” and “Maybe we should take her children away and deport her to Arkansas.”
In sum, the comical effort to destroy President Trump was a bad replay of the cultural cluelessness of a haughty Hillary Clinton in the last days of the 2016 campaign—the Ivy League prima donna, ensuring her “landslide” to come by futilely campaigning in Georgia and Arizona, fueled by the “analytics” of her whiz kids, while the orange, combed over, and uncouth Trump at her rear played the fox in her blue-wall henhouse. Was it Ivy League smarts to label roughly one-quarter of the country “deplorables” or to go to West Virginia to tell the impoverished they would have no more coal jobs?
There is always a civilizational elite of sorts, one based on merit, and it is often divorced from its counterfeit counterpart predicated on aristocracy, credentials, titles, and privilege. Real elites from all walks of life are rewarded for their singular achievement not for their empty reputations and media hype.
The last three years have been a painful relearning of that most obvious but forgotten truth that it is what we do rather than who we say we are that truly matters. That the lesson was lost on self-described egalitarians and social justice warriors is the most ironic lesson of all.
The last three years have been a painful relearning of that most obvious but forgotten truth that it is what we do rather than who we say we are that truly matters. That the lesson was lost on self-described egalitarians and social justice warriors is the most ironic lesson of all.
That is a great article DSS!
“I would rather be governed by the first 2000 people in the Boston telephone directory than by the 2000 people on the faculty of Harvard University.”
Best line by Buckley ’cause he’s so right.
Once i got to ‘appears to be’ I put whtever it was about in the purportedy, reportedly and allegedly category and dumped it.
What would you like on your nothing burger?
Mueller proved no evidence of Russian collusion and conspiracy with Trump
And Mueller has zero evidence of Russian hacking or conspiracy
Russiagate-related:
>>>>
During Mueller’s testimony, Rep. Tom McClintock of Texas pushed back on the Russia-IRA connection.
“Your report famously links Russian Internet troll farms with the Russian government,” McClintock said. “Yet, at a hearing on May 28th [2018] in the Concord Management/IRA prosecution that you initiated, the judge excoriated both you and Mr. Barr for producing no evidence to support this claim. Why did you suggest Russia was responsible for the troll farms, when, in court, you’ve been unable to produce any evidence to support it?”
Mueller demurred. “I am not going to get into that any further than … I already have.”
“You have left the clear impression throughout the country, through your report, that it — it was the Russian government behind the troll farms,” McClintock pressed. “And yet, when you’re called upon to provide actual evidence in court, you fail to do so.”
The stolid Mueller did not respond.
<<<<<
https://www.justsecurity.org/65251/how-secrecy-undermines-mueller-and-the-defense-of-democracy/
We were talking about Baltimore and its problems awhile ago. We hear quick responses from the left written inaccurately and solely to reassure its followers that the vision of the left is correct. The problem is that it is only later that people actually research what is being said. Here is such research on Baltimore. The graphs are removed by the website and should be looked at.
https://www.forbes.com/
Baltimore’s 30,000 Public Employees Cost Taxpayers $2 Billion But Can’t Save Their Own City
Adam Andrzejewski
President Donald Trump’s recent tweet about Baltimore ignited a firestorm of controversy. Baltimore has since become the focal point of a very public fight between Trump and local congressman Elijah Cummings (MD-7).
People on both sides have strong views about Trump’s motives. However, on one level, Trump served to highlight the videos of a local political activist Kimberly Klacik. These videos revealed Baltimore’s systemic problems of rats, abandoned buildings, and trash. Klacik reported that many of the city’s residents feel that they have been forgotten.
President Donald Trump’s tweet about Baltimore ignited a firestorm of controversy
President Donald Trump’s tweet about Baltimore ignited a firestorm of controversy
OpenTheBooks.com
Our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com investigated just how much taxpayer money flows into the Baltimore bureaucracy at every level: federal, state, and local. We found the city drowning in taxpayer dollars.
Our audit shows that $1.1 billion in grants and direct payments (subsidies and assistance) flowed into Baltimore city agencies and other city-based entities including non-profit organizations, corporations, and colleges during the last four years (FY2015-FY2018). That’s the equivalent of nearly $7,000 in federal aid per family of four living in Baltimore during this period.
Federal grants and direct payments amounted to an equivalent of $7,000 per Baltimore family of four during the years FY2015-FY2018.
Federal grants and direct payments amounted to an equivalent of $7,000 per Baltimore family of four during the years FY2015-FY2018.
OpenTheBooks.com
The last time we analyzed the amount of federal grants and direct payments flowing into major U.S. cities (FY2016), Baltimore received more funding per resident ($573) than the comparable cities of Portland, OR ($274); Nashville, TN ($353); Oklahoma City, OK ($201); Detroit, MI ($372); and Milwaukee, WI ($183). However, Baltimore also lagged cities like Chicago, IL ($1,942); New York, NY ($894); and was on par with San Francisco, CA ($588).
Baltimore out-ranks most major U.S. cities in the receipt of federal grants and direct payments per resident.
Baltimore out-ranks most major U.S. cities in the receipt of federal grants and direct payments per resident.
OpenTheBooks.com
All of this, though, only begins to tell the full story of Baltimore’s bureaucracy.
An army of 30,000 public employees at the local and federal levels are based in the City of Baltimore (pop. 620,000). State employee work locations were not disclosed by the Comptroller of Maryland in their payroll production subject to our Freedom of Information Act request. Therefore, state employees based in the city are not known.
It’s a big bureaucracy designed to deliver government aid and spans such services as education, transportation, public safety, housing, health, human services, welfare, and more.
Here’s a breakdown of the local units of government — their employee headcounts and annual cash compensation spending:
The City of Baltimore has 13,522 employees with total payroll exceeding $821 million annually. The mayor’s office alone spent $7 million last year on salaries for 111 employees; another $1 million was spent on public relations.
Milwaukee, Wisconsin and Las Vegas, Nevada are comparable in population and geographic size to Baltimore. Milwaukee has 7,871 public employees and Las Vegas has 9,569 workers on payroll – including the metro police. Even the City of Detroit has less than 7,100 employees.
The City of Baltimore employs 13,500 public workers.
The City of Baltimore employs 13,500 public workers.
OpenTheBooks.com
In the city schools, there are another 10,770 employees with total salaries of $$619.3 million. The first $79.1 million is spent outside the classroom: psychologists ($11.4 million), social workers ($16.4 million), counselors ($7.4 million), bus drivers ($2.7 million), and principals/assistant principals ($41.2 million).
There are 85,602 workers employed by the federal executive agencies based in the state of Maryland. Our auditors learned that 6,472 of them work in the city and earned $521.4 million last year. The largest federal employers in the city were Social Security Administration, National Institutes of Health, and the Internal Revenue Service.
Who’s responsible for the condition of Baltimore? Everyone. Everyone has dropped the ball – all 30,000+ federal, state, and local public employees are responsible. However, everyone can also point to someone else or the system at large and shift the blame.
There are no easy answers to the intractable challenges in cities like Baltimore. But there are unsung heroes and social entrepreneurs transforming lives and leading comeback movements across the country.
Based on our audit, one fact seems clear. If more money for public employees was the answer, Baltimore’s challenges would have been solved long ago.
Note: We reached out to the White House and City of Baltimore for comment and will update the piece with responses, if any.
I should have included the map where one can see where the problems are.
https://www.openthebooks.com/map/?Map=2508&MapType=Pin&Zip=21215
There are answers to Baltimore’s problems, but the local political class doesn’t want to hear the answers. I suspect suburban politicians and voters cannot be bothered either.
free abortions? lifetime supply of KOOLs for all who promise never to return?
JT wrote an excellent piece published today in the Hill related to this topic. Quite humorous and eye opening
He will be called a racist given his Kamala Harris comment.
Careful Jonny!
😉
Democrats demonize wealthy to deflect from disastrous agendas
the top 1 percent of federal taxpayers paid 37.3 percent of taxes, more than the bottom 90 percent combined that paid 30.5 percent. The top 50 percent of taxpayers paid 97 percent of total individual income taxes. That means that the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers are paying virtually no income taxes.
To qualify as the top 5 percent of earners, your household needs to make $300,000 or more. To qualify as one of the top 10 percent, the cut-off is around $118,000. That does not mean that the wealthy should not pay more in taxes. However, Democrats are undermining their push for higher taxes by pledging trillion-dollar programs as if those would involve chump change. Want a house? Senator Kamala Harris will help pay for it if you are African American. Want free college tuition? Virtually all of the candidates are guaranteeing it. Hate your college loans? Gone, by order of Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders.
https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/456037-democrats-demonize-wealthy-to-deflect-from-disastrous-agendas
In the meantime, the Republicans find themselves in the unprecedented position of….
Americans are not afraid of foreign powers like France, Belgium, Russia or Sweden. Few could locate these on a map. They are however now intimately aware of Baltimore’s “third world” status (nod to Bernie), rats and Democrats allowing all of these to grow in spite of decades of liberal failed welfare policies. Not since Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America” have we as a country collectively reexamined government welfare programs and their return on investment. And look how the enablers peddling these failed policies howl. Raaacciissmmm! Even if these lawmakers have enslaved these people for decades on modified plantations. Trump isn’t as elegant in speech as Newt but then again many of the US House Dems are as thuggish as rappers brandishing bling bling and speaking as incoherently.
Heritage President Kay Coles James: Baltimore’s undeniable truths — I grew up on welfare. Here’s what I know
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/heritage-president-baltimore-truth-welfare-kay-coles-james
Liberal policies have failed the people of Baltimore and inner cities everywhere.
As the daughter of a former welfare recipient who spent my early years growing up in government housing, I know the truth of that statement more than most.
For decades, politicians have repeatedly promised urban communities good jobs, good schools, and safe neighborhoods. Instead, they have delivered policies that actually increase crime, degrade educational standards, and make it harder to get work.
In Baltimore, the poverty rate of 22 percent is nearly double the national rate. Baltimore’s schools rank among the lowest-performing in the entire state.
Crime is allowed to fester. When police and prosecutors don’t pursue and punish smaller crimes, criminals remain on the streets and graduate to more serious crimes until things spiral out of control.
During the riots of 2015, Baltimore’s mayor instructed police to give protestors “who wished to destroy, space to do that.”
Baltimore’s homicide rate outpaced all major cities in 2017. In 2018, the city had the highest overall crime rate out of the 30 largest cities in America.
Even Bernie Sanders called Baltimore a Third World country when he visited in 2015.
When I was Virginia’s Secretary of Health and Human Resources, we took on statewide welfare reform. While providing a safety net for those who truly needed it, we limited the amount of time able-bodied people could be on welfare, we created work requirements, and we helped recipients learn new skills and find jobs so they could stop being dependent on the state.
We replaced dependency with independence, which not only lifted people out of poverty, but also restored families and brought back pride, self-respect, and a sense of personal responsibility.
A child of welfare, I can tell you that an overreliance on government assistance has deprived millions of children of the love and security they would have gotten from a family with two parents.
Faith also plays a critical role in civil society. It gives people hope and teaches them love.
It teaches them that there are things bigger than just themselves and that there are consequences for the good and bad that we do.
Churches also provide a sense of community, shared values, and a safety net for those in physical, spiritual, and emotional need.
We must stop the attacks on religious liberty, we must stop pushing churches out of desperately needed human services work, and we must end the marginalization of the truly positive role faith plays in our communities.
POLLS: REPUBLICANS ON BORROWED TIME
IN DENIAL OF CLIMATE CHANGE
President Trump has set the tone for Republicans by deriding climate change, using White House resources to undermine science and avoiding even uttering the phrase. Outside of a handful of states such as Florida, where addressing climate change has become more bipartisan, analysts said Republican politicians were unlikely to buck Mr. Trump or even to talk about climate change on the campaign trail at all.
That, several strategists warned, means the party stands to lose voters to Democrats in 2020 and beyond — a prospect they said was particularly worrisome in swing districts that Republicans must win to recapture a majority in the House of Representatives.
The polling bears out Mr. Heye’s prediction of a backlash. Nearly 60 percent of Republicans between the ages of 23 and 38 say that climate change is having an effect on the United States, and 36 percent believe humans are the cause. That’s about double the numbers of Republicans over age 52.
But younger generations are also now outvoting their elders. According to a Pew Research Center analysis, voters under the age of 53 cast 62.5 million votes in the 2018 midterm elections. Those 53 and older, by contrast, were responsible for 60.1 million votes.
“Americans believe climate change is real, and that number goes up every single month,” Frank Luntz, a veteran Republican strategist, told a Congressional panel recently. He also circulated a memo to congressional Republicans in June warning that climate change was “a G.O.P. vulnerability and a G.O.P. opportunity.”
A new Harvard University survey of voters under the age of 30 found that 73 percent of respondents disapproved of Mr. Trump’s approach to climate change (about the same proportion as those who object to his handling of race relations). Half the respondents identified as Republican or independent.
“Here’s another gap between our party and younger voters,” said a recent report by a Republican polling firm, Public Opinion Strategies. Speaking of younger Republicans, the firm concluded that “climate change is their most important issue” and called the numbers “concerning” for the party’s future.
The full effect quite likely will not be felt until after the 2020 election cycle. President Trump’s campaign appears to have identified a strategy for winning re-election that relies on polarizing the electorate on issues like race, immigration and, it seems, climate change. But conservatives said the long term implications of that gambit were worrisome for the future of the party and the planet.
“He gets to set the national platform,” Joseph Majkut, director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a center-right research organization, said of Mr. Trump. But, he noted, “Every year that goes by, where people are going about their lives as if greenhouse gas emissions are a matter of very small concern, we make the problem worse for ourselves.”
Edited from: “Climate Change Could Be An Electoral Time Bomb, Republicans Fear”
Today’s New York Times
Hillgandist:
Your polls are off.
Gen Z are more conservative than any previous generation;
“according to research, Gen Z is more individualistic, more conservative both socially and fiscally, and they’re already making waves of impact on our political system. Gen Z, those born in 1995 or later, is possibly the most conservative generation since World War II, and it is worrying that their impact has been completely overlooked during this election.”
Guess they have eyes and ears, too.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/ashleystahl/2017/08/11/why-democrats-should-be-losing-sleep-over-generation-z/amp/