Luke Ford

Dick Morris writes:

History will undoubtedly say that the Comey announcement that the FBI is reopening its investigation into Hillary’s emails that turned the 2016 race around and brought Hillary down. But that’s a false narrative. And to grasp what is happening, we must put it aside and concentrate on the real reasons Trump began to overtook Hillary in the week leading up to Comey’s announcement on Friday, October 28th.
Polling suggests that Trump’s gains predate Comey’s announcement. Most dramatic was the heavily Democratic biased ABC poll that began the week giving Hillary a 12 point lead and ended the week with Mrs. Clinton clinging to a one point margin. Most ABC interviews were conducted well before Comey spoke.
So what happened?
• Trump’s negative ads began to hit in swing states. Until this week, Hillary’s attacks on Donald had been dominating the airwaves for months. But, during the past ten days or so, his negative ads — devastatingly effective — began to make their impact felt.
• ObamaCare premiums increases began to hit. While the full impact of the price hikes won’t be felt until after November 1st — in time for the election — the early notices that they would go up by an average of 25% with many even higher, had a big impact on the race. And Trump moved adroitly to exploit the increases in his speeches.
• Before the Comey bombshell, the drip-drip-drip of WikiLeaks emails had been taking a daily toll on Hillary’s vote share. The coup de grace was the memo from Doug Band that was written in response to Chelsea’s accusation that she had not done enough for her father. Stung by the first daughter’s charges, Band ticks off the deals that led to a $60 million personal profit for Bill Clinton, a list that vindicates the direst of the pay-for-play accusations.
• Hillary’s illness prevented her from campaigning more vigorously and her campaign staff, obtuse as ever, failed to give her new issues and material to use on hitting Donald. Once they ran out of abused women to complain about Trump, they had nothing to say.

Sun Sentinel: Faced with ever-increasing traffic jams, South Florida’s public officials have come up with a plan: Make it worse.

Instead of fixing the problem, government officials are deliberately adding to it in hopes we’ll all walk, ride the bus or take the train.

“Until you make it so painful that people want to come out of their cars, they’re not going to come out of their cars,” Anne Castro, chair of the Broward County Planning Council, said during a meeting last year. “We’re going to make them suffer first, and then we’re going to figure out ways to move them after that because they’re going to scream at us to help them move.”

A Sun-Sentinel analysis of South Florida’s roads and development plans reveals how planners are creating neighborhoods in urban areas where gridlock is the norm.

• Cities are approving high-density housing at a rapid pace, bringing thousands more vehicles into urban areas.

• The state Legislature has fostered the problem by allowing cities to approve development without regard for the effect on traffic.

• Some cities are deliberately reducing the number of lanes on major roads to make room for bike lanes and wider sidewalks, while cramming more cars into a smaller space.

The growing congestion in part led Broward and Palm Beach counties to ask voters to approve a penny sales tax increase in the November election. A portion of the tax would be dedicated to mass transit and other ways of getting around.

It’s a gamble. Will people ride bicycles or walk to work in South Florida’s heat, rain and lightning storms? Or ride buses that often run late and make for long, inconvenient rides?

“It’s a big experiment,” said Robert Poole, a Plantation resident and an engineer with the Reason Foundation, a public policy research group in Washington, D.C. “We won’t know for another 10 years if it’s going to work.

“If it doesn’t work, we’re going to have some big white elephants on our hands — and even worse congestion.”

Forecast: More gridlock ahead

What South Florida planners want is to create bustling urban neighborhoods, with apartments, condos, offices, restaurants and shops.

If they succeed, it will be “so busy it’s not pleasant to drive here,” said Nick Uhren, executive director of the Palm Beach Metropolitan Planning Organization. And planners say that’s a good thing, he said.

“A robust, healthy downtown is a sign of a healthy, vibrant economic community,” he explained. “[Cities] don’t want to say no to development because of traffic congestion.”

Comments: Weiner strikes me as the kind of snake who would save up incriminating material on others as a useful bargaining chip for getting out of jams; just another type of sleazeball found in the Clinton entourage. It will be amusing if the Clinton mafia is finally destroyed by one of their proteges; a corrupt creature brought on board because they thought him a useful tool in furthering one of their lesser deceptions, a beard for Hillary’s mistress.

When I teach a criminal justice course I will tell my students that the original L&O is entertaining and not a totally bad depiction of reality, although there’s still a lot of nonsense inserted for dramatic effect, e.g., the courtroom proceedings would result in instant disbarment for most lawyers.. The spinoffs, particularly, SVU, are total crap, full of sensationalism, having almost no contact with reality, and spinning a lot of SJW nonsense. The cops and lawyers both would go to prison in real life for some of the nonsense in the scripts. I watched one episode in its entirety and since then have seen SVU only when forced to, e.g., when visiting with a friend whose idiot wife is addicted.

* I am convinced that one of the biggest factors in creating the current “Rape Hysteria-Hoax” environment has been Law & Order: SVU. The show is wildly popular amongst women, and its first-run ratings do not show it’s real reach: women (especially those on their periods) will sit and watch a five or ten hour marathon on USA/Netflix/DVD on a Saturday or Sunday and have their heads filled with so much nonsensical, hysterical, outlandish b.s. rape-stories presented as “ripped from the headlines” (i.e. as true) that it warps their world view. (I have known several women from very different walks of life and ages who do this regularly, and if you doubt it, bring up SVU in your next conversation with any woman and she will tell you she’s a huge fan.)

If men binge-watched pornography in such lengthy sessions, we’d think something seriously wrong with them. Well, this is just victim-porn for girls.

SVU goes beyond most female-centered, sensationalized drama by almost always having the setup of blamelessly-innocent, treacly victim (almost always female) and Evil White Male baddie who is both 1) well over the top; and 2) fabulously Machiavellian at hiding his tracks and protecting himself in/from the system. And the leads continuously repeat how no matter what, the woman is not at fault. If you wonder how young women can think they can walk around half-naked and drunk and go home with a guy and agree to have sex with him and STILL claim it’s rape, SVU has to be a culprit in destroying any sense of responsibility or agency in them.

If the availability of 24-7 internet pornography can warp men in a bad way, I think SVU and its ilk have done the same in many women. Everything about that show makes me sick.

Comment: Transportation officials are deliberately making driving more unpleasant, trying to force people to use public transportation. They openly admit it:

http://www.sun-sentinel.com/local/broward/fl-traffic-gridlock-20161028-story,amp.html

The ultimate goal of such social-engineering projects, as Steve has pointed out many times before, is to make suburban living undesirable, even intolerable, and concentrate whites in urban areas where folks have dogs instead of kids and vote for Democrats.

(The irony is that Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties are already heavily Democratic. Even the Miami Cubans aren’t solidly Republican anymore.)

“Until you make it so painful that people want to come out of their cars, they’re not going to come out of their cars,” Anne Castro, chair of the Broward County Planning Council, said during a meeting last year. “We’re going to make them suffer first, and then we’re going to figure out ways to move them after that because they’re going to scream at us to help them move.”

“Make them suffer” … “rub their noses in it” … what makes utopian leftists so blatantly sadistic?

• Cities are approving high-density housing at a rapid pace, bringing thousands more vehicles into urban areas.

• The state Legislature has fostered the problem by allowing cities to approve development without regard for the effect on traffic.

• Some cities are deliberately reducing the number of lanes on major roads to make room for bike lanes and wider sidewalks, while cramming more cars into a smaller space.

So the unelected public officials who are supposed to be serving the public are spending taxpayer dollars on “making [us] suffer,” so they can force everyone to take the bus.

I’m in Dade, not Broward, but I can report that the buses are as crappy as ever. Many key thoroughfares are served by routes with once-an-hour service, at best. (If the bus doesn’t show up, you have to wait another hour for the next one. And if that one doesn’t show up … you get the idea.) The Metrorail and Metromover cover only a tiny sliver of the county.

Meanwhile, revenues from the ever-increasing exorbitant tolls are earmarked for such useless projects as the construction of ugly walls lining the expressways that block your view of anything but the road. As these walls sprout like weeds, driving to work becomes ever more soulless and depressing.

COMMENT: * In US urban planning, the vague jargon “stakeholders” comes up a lot. (It’s usually paired with its twin “sustainability” which can mean whatever the speaker wants it to mean.) Often it’s used when reps from a quasi-governmental Regional Planning Agency swoop down on a sleepy, sedate, “white bread” town/suburb and try to convince the locals through faux-collaborative “visioning” presentations that there needs to be dense, mixed use cluster development in town. Rosy pictures of a pedestrian-friendly utopia are projected on screen, cars largely banished due to “traffic calming” street restructuring.

(If y’all like conspiracy theories, here’s an article about Regional Planning persuasion techniques that could be described as attempts at “manufacturing consent.”)

Who the stakeholders are is vaguely defined. The townsfolk and local business owners are the obvious acknowledged ones. Not discussed are the outside developers, social justice agitators, and government agencies looking to Affirmatively Further Fair Housing and spice up the peaceful whitopia.

Classic bait-and-switch: A proposed 200-unit development that is implied will be built to meet a stated need for aging Boomers to downsize and stay in town, with secondary priority given to other longtime town residents…

Then later: Actually, these units are for stakeholders in need, wherever they may be from. It would be racist to reserve any units for you privileged whites. New arrival Rigoberta has three Zika-head babies, and Dashawn and his mother Caprice need housing just as much as any of you. And making them pay market rent (or any rent) is just wrong.

If the locals see the scam and resist, the threatening mantra is uttered: Change is coming and you all have to get used to it.

* Government provided roads for fast car traffic create negative externalities for the neighbors (pollution, noise, deadly inattentive drivers) so those neighbors now ask the government to find methods to reduce those externalities. It’s not social engineering, it’s just politics.

WIKIPEDIA: Traffic calming uses physical design and other measures to improve safety for motorists, pedestrians and cyclists. It aims to encourage safer, more responsible driving and potentially reduce traffic flow. Urban planners and traffic engineers have many strategies for traffic calming, including narrowed roads and speed humps. Such measures are common in Australia and Europe (especially Northern Europe), but less so in North America.

In its early development in the UK in the 1930s, traffic calming was based on the idea that residential areas should be protected from through-traffic. Subsequently, it became valued for its ability to improve pedestrian safety and reduce noise and air pollution from traffic.

For much of the twentieth century, streets were designed by engineers who were charged only with ensuring smooth traffic flow and not with fostering the other functions of streets. Traffic calming initiatives have grown to consider other design functions as well. For example, it’s been shown that car traffic severely impairs the social and recreational functions of public streets. The Livable Streets study by Donald Appleyard (1981)[2] found that residents of streets with light traffic had, on average, three more friends and twice as many acquaintances as the people on streets with heavy traffic which were otherwise similar in dimensions, income, etc.