* Evidently, what Trump had to say in his big speech was pretty persuasive, if I say so myself.
* It is interesting watching all the framing and narrative wrangling going on.
Google news seems to be in the tank for Hillary.
* Mr. Trump’s speech nailed the root causes of our worst woes.
Singlehandedly, Mr. Trump obliterated the Overton Window. He’s the Father of “a new birth of freedom.”
Mr. Trump is the only public figure in the United States that has had and shown the testicular fortitude to say what must be said, and to propose to do what must be done to save our country – to save, indeed, Western Civilization.
With each passing day my admiration for Mr. Trump grows. In his own way he may well prove to be our Charles Martel.
Martel himself was not perfect, and neither is Trump. But in History they are both the right man at the right moment.
* Content matters and what Trump had to offer white blue collars and middle-class voters in his is quite substantial.
In fact it hasn’t been done by GOP politicos, well since ever. Previous GOP pols would simply tell the helots that we need to take it in the ass via austerity measures to help corporations globalize and send our jobs overseas in the name of progress and profit and that we could forget about retiring and have to work until we died. Of course they’d couch it in “fiscal conservative” talk that would go over like a lead balloon and have no real appeal.
Then the GOP bosses would whine why no one except the rich liked their agenda. Usually with reporters and journalists who themselves who were worth millions.
Funny thing, most of those issues Trump talked up used to be Democratic ones until the Clinton’s came along and kicked them out of the party in favor of K Street and globalist interests.
* Nate Silver’s model says Trump has a 40% chance of winning. His model adds a little to Trump’s polling to correct for Dem bias and subtracts temporarily a little more to account for convention bounce.
His “now-cast” says if the election were held today it would be a replay of 2000: Hillary narrowly wins the popular vote while Florida puts Trump over the top, both by less than 1%.
It isn’t a perfect replay of 2000 however. This looks like it will be the first election since the Nixon realignment almost 50 years ago in which Pennsylvania votes more Republican than Virginia. And this was before Tim Kaine was Veeped. Ohio is also moving to the right. It was the tipping point state in 2004 that put Bush over the top, and ultra-close in 2000 as well. Mitt Romney was a WWC disaster, so this delayed the shift. It looks like rather than a pure swing state, it is a slightly lean-Trump state. Colorado is going the other way, Trump is polling poorly there and its hispanic and SWPL population is growing fast.
Besides being the states shifting to the left the fastest, Virginia and Colorado share something else in common. In both states Democrats are overperforming in statewide races because they carefully select and unite behind candidates, the result of being the weaker party for so long. The GOP base in these states, by contrast, has not accepted the need to nominate less conservative candidates and avoid divisive primaries, resulting in Alabama-style Republican candidates like Ken Buck and the Ken Cuccinelli who keep losing winnable races
* Trump’s gains in the battleground counties in Ohio and Pennsylvania were especially impressive. I have noted before that, if Trump manages to win the same states Romney won in 2012 (total 206 EVs), all he needs to do is win Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Michigan to get to 289 EVs, well above the 270 needed to win. Even without Michigan’s 16 EVs, he gets 273, enough to eke out a victory. So, despite what the MSM have been saying all along, it does not take much to make Trump President. That completely disregards many other states where Trump is likely to do well.
* Historically the GOP was the protectionist party, and the Democrats the opposite. That changed after 1932.
If I recall correctly, Romney ran many ads labeling China a currency manipulator in my home state of Ohio. The left-wing media claimed he was stoking a trade war.
In the aftermath, I remember reading that some observers thought Asian voters took criticism of China as racist, I quite vividly remember Indian writers assailing the GOP for mentioning Christianity in the most mundane context. (Ignoring the whole point of their homeland’s BJP)
Romney’s China schtick wore out after he lied over and over about the Toledo Jeep factory being shut down.
I also know that Google visited the white house more than any other company and was one of the top lobbyists.
I’m now wondering why I even thought they would pretend to hide their bias on their news site.
My own naivety amazes me sometimes.
* I can’t count the number of times over the past year that I’ve heard writers and online commentators say things like:
“Hip-hop artists from Killah D to the Smoove Dogs have name-checked Trump over 100 times!”
and
“NBA draft prospect Vontavious Buckthorn just tweeted out a pro-Trump message!”
Most of these people don’t even have a fixed address that won’t change between now and November, much less are actually registered to vote, much less intend to actually go vote for Trump.
The biggest single group of black voters is middle-aged and older church ladies. After them, you have groups such as welfare cases (low rates of voter registration, but they nake up for it with volume), lower-middle-class retail workers, and fake-revolutionary black college students. After all them, you have blacks who might consider voting Republican. And even they, as you’ve noted, aren’t the type to fall for Trump.
The average poor but “cool” black guy on the street corner, and the thugged out athletes and musicians he admires, are simply not a factor in national elections.
* First, he is not in the pocket of the Russians. Because of his self-financing campaign he isn’t in the pocket of anyone. Well, I take that back. It appears he now is in the pocket of one group based upon some of his recent statements. But I think he had to do it if he wanted a snowball’s chance in hell of winning.
Second, many social conservatives seem to have a stuck vision of Russia as being one in the same with the old, atheistic USSR. If these folks saw that the Russian government was trying to reestablish Christianity and was building Churches, their opinions might change. Though they might fail in their attempt to reestablish the Church, I think most social conservatives would be floored that the Russian government is even trying it.
Most of us who lived through the Cold War believed that the USA was the leader of a moral, Christian West and the Soviets were the godless communists. To see how the USA is rapidly becoming anything but Christian, and how the Russians are trying to promote it is shocking. But the media won’t promote this view. As a result most Americans and social conservatives still probably believe the Russians are the godless commies of yore. It is similar to how most Americans were led to believe Saddam was behind 9-11 right up to the start of the Iraq War.
* One of the interesting things about the heroic figures in the Old and New Testament is how just about all of them were extremely flawed in one way or another – with one major exception, Christ, of course. Muslims, for instance, cannot comprehend that Noah was a drunk and was molested by his two nieces while he was passed out, david had another man killed in battle to take his wife he lusted after, Paul once gleefully sent christians to their death for fun, or Samson hung out with a prostitute who convinced him to do the main thing he was instructed to never do: cut off his hair and remove all of his power.
Christians understand that everyone is flawed, and often God has acted through some very flawed men to change the world for the better. We may be witnessing a modern day Samson with the way trump has come out of nowhere to champion causes that we all thought were doomed, has done it without fear or backing down, and has been slaying Goliaths left and right much to the shock of pretty much everyone.
* I’ve particularly enjoyed NPR coverage of the Democrat Convention where one reporter was nearly drowned out by catcalls coming from the floor as she suggested the Democrat Convention showed much less evidence of party divisions than the Republican.
* Bill Clinton was responsible for the drop in crime as much as the crowing rooster is responsible for the sun rising every day. It is well documented that the crime rate peaked and started declining dramatically in 1990 not only in NYC but across the country for reasons that are still inexplicable, although many explanations have been advanced. Clinton did not become President until January 20, 1993, and he had no responsibility for crime on the street. Clinton did propose his “Cops on the Street” legislation, which wasn’t enacted until 1994 and didn’t result in new cops on the street until 1995. The crime rate, in the meantime, continued to drop dramatically. I have debunked the same claim made by Rudy Giuliani, who didn’t become mayor until January 1994, but at least he set the tone for NYC by banning the squeegee guys and taking a tough attitude toward criminals and changing the methods of policing, thus changing the perception of the public. A good use of the bully pulpit, at the very least, so I am willing to give Giuliani some credit for the decline in crime. His policies were continued by Mayor Bloomberg during his three terms in office, and the crime rate continued to decline to the point where it is probably the lowest among big cities in the U.S. and historically low for NYC.
You allude to the “Clintons” reducing crime. Exactly what was Hillary’s contribution as First Lady to reducing crime in the 90′s? This is the same woman who couldn’t find billing records of the Rose Law Firm for two years, although they were found hiding in her bedroom at the White House. I wonder how they made their way from Little Rock to Washington.
BTW the formal name for the logical fallacy involving Bill Clinton and the reduction in crime is post hoc ergo propter hoc. The same fallacy applies to the claims that Bill Clinton was responsible for the economic recovery of the 90′s. That ignores the indisputable fact that the economy bottomed out in March 1991 (according to the NBER, official arbiter of business cycles), nearly two years before Clinton became President on January 20, 1993. The boom of the 90′s was largely attributable to the manipulations of the Federal Reserve, which is why the boom ended in 2000 with the bursting of the internet/telecom stock market bubble. Hillary’s silly notion that her decrepit husband, showing signs of early senility, can recreate the economic boom of the 90′s is based on the falsehood that he was responsible for the 90′s boom in the first place and that he is some kind of economic wizard, which is very far from the truth. Did he take even one economics course when he was in college?
P.S.–Your notion that nothing can be done about crime until the Democrats return to power seems to overlook the dramatic increase in crime over the last two years (as documented by the Washington Post) with a Democrat in the White House, who seems relatively clueless.
* “— The same people on the Clinton team who made enormous efforts to claim her private email server, which operated unencrypted over the Internet for three months including during trips to China and Russia and which contained Top Secret national security data, was not hacked by the Russians now are certain that the DNC server was hacked by the Russians.”
* I see no reason to disbelieve Wikileaks and Julian Assange when they take full credit for revealing the extent to which the Clintons have corrupted the political process. Neither Wikileaks nor Assange has yet been caught out in a lie.
* Homicides dropped considerably in the 1980s before crack came along late in the decade. Homicides were dropping among older offenders for a long time as more and more of them got locked up.
But crack was kind of a black swan disaster — the perfect drug — that suddenly recruited a whole bunch of new killers out of high schools. It burned out after a few years in any one city.
