Three by Mike Lester

Three from a top political cartoonist . . .

All cartoons from http://www.gocomics.com/mike-lester

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More on media bias

art credit: kwizoo.com

If your neighbor or relative relies on, say, the New York Times or ABC news or local TV news for his/her information, you can be 100% sure they are NOT getting the news. I’ve had a tiny bit of success in persuading family and friends to expand their sources of news, as that approach is less confrontational than criticizing particular news sources. 

I always start by suggesting the online aggregators. The Drudge Report is an obvious place to start. Next on my recommended list is RealClearPolitics, not because it is at the top of my own list, but because it posts news and analysis from the far left to the far right, and everything in between. It’s user friendly. The site itself doesn’t provide for reader comments, so it as close to neutral as possible. (I also suggest conservative talk radio - any conservative talk radio -- for those who don't want to go the internet route.)

A voter who begins to realize that the reports they are relying on are incomplete, heavily edited, selective, etc. will perhaps go to the next step and further expand their sources of news. A few people I know have had the ultimate Epiphany when they realized to their shock and horror that The Plain Dealer, The New York Times, CNN [or fill in the blank] are not fair and balanced. (For what it is worth, I don’t rely on Fox much, either.) But if you have any relatives or friends who will tolerate a conversation on the media and news, maybe they’ll consider a suggestion that they try expanding their sources of news, at least for a few days just to see what they find.

Steve Feinstein at American Thinker posted an article (“Pre-Empting the Liberal Media”) on media bias and its role in shaping public opinion. Here are some extracts:

Liberal mainstream media bias for Hillary Clinton is the single biggest factor so far in this election season contributing to her lead in the polls. The nightly news on NBC, ABC, CBS, NPR, the NY Times, Washington Post, the morning and late-night TV shows, CNN, MSNBC, and all the websites associated with these sources are strongly and openly behind Hillary and her “first woman” status. Many so-called journalists have dropped any pretense of objectivity and are quite unashamedly and openly supportive of Clinton, while they derisively dismiss Trump as an unserious nonentity. 

Ostensibly, it is Trump’s presence in this year’s race that has caused liberal bias to be so prominent, but no rational observer could possibly think that the media would show any less favoritism towards First-Woman Hillary if her Republican opponent were Cruz, Rubio, or Kasich.

Hillary has many well-known vulnerabilities and character flaws: her role in Benghazi debacle and the subsequent rewriting of history in order to avoid accountability and blame, her non-accomplishments in every major foreign affairs arena where she played a role as Secretary of State, her private e-mail server and her continual distortions and parsing in an attempt to deflect scrutiny and shift responsibility (“Colin Powell told me to do it!”), and of course, the widening-by-the-day Clinton Foundation corruption controversy.

These factors are completely independent of who her opponent happens to be. . . .

. . . The "circular firing squad" that Republicans have created this year because of Trump -- who won the primaries fair and square, regardless of anyone's personal feelings about him -- is truly idiotic and inexplicable.

The Republicans need to remember who their real opponent is in 2016 -- it’s not the “untraditional Republican” Donald Trump, it’s the liberal media propping up an astonishingly deficient Hillary Clinton.  . . .

The entire article is here.

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The Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries

Democracy Lost: 

A Report on the Fatally Flawed 2016 Democratic Primaries

The title is a 96-page report, sources included, from EJUSA. No, I had not heard of EJUSA, either, until I read a comment by CM-TX on the Treehouse blog here. (If you are planning to work the polls, this report will be of particular interest to you.) The parts of the report that I read through struck me as responsibly researched and digested. In brief, 

Election Justice USA (EJUSA) is a national, non-partisan team of seasoned election integrity experts, attorneys, statisticians, journalists, and activists. The circumstances surrounding Arizona’s presidential primary on March 22nd, 2016—widely acknowledged as one of the most disastrous election days in recent memory—were the lightning rod that catalyzed the formation of EJUSA. Throughout the course of the 2016 presidential primary season, EJUSA has emerged as a leader in the fight for honest elections, pursuing legal action in several states in an attempt to counteract specific forms of targeted voter suppression and election fraud.

Unfortunately, Ohio turns up in the document word search 15 times. Here are two relevant sections:

OHIO Attorney Bob Fitrakis has filed a lawsuit against Edison Media Research asserting that Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders actually earned more pledged delegates in the primaries than were shown by the results. The suit seeks the release of raw exit polling data which documents dramatic differences between exit polls and electronic vote totals in eleven states in the 2016 presidential primaries. Exit polls have been adjusted to fit electronic vote totals since 2004, when they appeared to show Kerry winning against Bush. At that time, Karl Rove (then an assistant to George Bush) developed a theory to explain the alleged unreliability of exit polls. After citizens on the internet began to notice wide discrepancies in this election, the exit poll sponsors, The Media Consortium and Edison Media Research, canceled exit polls for all remaining states in the primary season. The lawsuit demands that media organizations release the raw data for the 2016 exit polls for the first time.

. . .

Of ten places where exit polling has missed by more than 7% (South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, New York, California), seven are states where all or the majority of election jurisdictions are using machines ten years old or greater. For six of these seven states (excluding California which only included an early voting poll with a very large discrepancy of 14- 22%) the average initial exit polling miss is a whopping 9.98%.

Bear in mind, this report analyzes the Democrat Party primary voting. I vote in Cuyahoga County, I mark my choices on a paper ballot that is fed into a scanner for tabulation. At least in that case, there is a paper trail that can be used to reconcile votes cast with final results. That will not be the case in many other counties. Scary.

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Trump on the African American vote: A Lincolnesque Moment

photo credit: therightscoop.com

Yesterday, I appended a link to an article by David Horowitz at FrontPage Magazine. It was an afterthought posted on the blog about  Rep. Marcia Fudge’s complaining that Trump rallies are not attended by people of color. Horowitz’s article is worth a blog on its own. The entire article is here, under the title "Donald Trump’s Lincolnesque Moment: A landmark in the emergence of a new Republican Party”. Here’s a take-away:

Trump’s Dimondale speech was a pledge to African Americans trapped in the blighted zones and killing fields of inner cities exclusively ruled by Democrats for half a century and more, and exploited by their political leaders for votes, and also used as fodder for slanders directed at their Republican opponents. This was his appeal:

Tonight, I am asking for the vote of every African-American citizen in this country who wants a better future. The inner cities of our country have been run by the Democratic Party for 50 years.  Their policies have produced only poverty, joblessness, failing schools, and broken homes. It is time to hold Democratic Politicians accountable for what they have done to these communities.  It is time to hold failed leaders accountable for their results, not just their empty words.

Time to hold the Democrats responsible for what they have done. For twenty years I and many others on the right have waited for Republican leaders to do just this. Until now we have despaired of seeing this happen in our lifetimes. But here is Trump articulating the very message we have been waiting for - support for America’s inner city poor – a message that should have been front and center of every Republican campaign for the last fifty years.

Trump: “Look at what the Democratic Party has done to the city of Detroit. Forty percent of Detroit’s residents live in poverty.  Half of all Detroit residents do not work. Detroit tops the list of Most Dangerous Cities in terms of violent crime. This is the legacy of the Democrat politicians who have run this city.  This is the result of the policy agenda embraced by Hillary Clinton…. The one thing every item in Hillary Clinton’s agenda has in common is that it takes jobs and opportunities from African-American workers.  Her support for open borders.  Her fierce opposition to school choice.  Her plan to massively raise taxes on small businesses.  Her opposition to American energy.  And her record of giving our jobs away to other countries.”

Tying the fight to liberate African Americans and other minorities from the violent urban wastelands in which Democrats have trapped them to his other proposals– secure borders, law and order to make urban environments safe, jobs for American workers, putting Americans first – these are a sure sign that Trump has an integrated vision of the future towards which he is working. Call it populism if you will. To me it seems like a clear-eyed conservative plan to restore American values and even to unify America’s deeply fractured electorate.

I love this line: “America must reject the bigotry of Hillary Clinton who sees communities of color only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future.” Yes African Americans and other Americans too are suffocating under the racism of the Democratic Party which takes African Americans for granted and lets the communities of the most vulnerable sink ever deeper into a maelstrom of poverty and violence without end.

Read the rest here. Whether you support Trump or not, his message should be heard by anyone who considers him- or herself a Tea Party person.

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Rep Marcia Fudge, Donald Trump, Darrell Scott, Diamond and Silk, etc

Breitbart reports: Rep Marcia Fudge: ‘No People of Color’ at Donald Trump Rallies

The story is just more complaining from a member of the professional grievance industry. First, here’s the photo from the Breitbart story:

Here’s the Cleveland Heights pastor who introduced Donald Trump at the Cleveland, Ohio rally at the IX Center (if you missed this video earlier, it's a Must See):

And Cleveland Tea Party's own blog of photos, taken at the Trump rally in downtown Cleveland during RNC week, is here. One of the last photos on that blog is of Diamond & Silk,

and most of their appearances stumping for Trump are over at YouTube, such as here; just search for Diamond and Silk.

Rep. Marcia Fudge could learn from these two marvelous ladies.

UPDATE: See David Horowitz's FrontPage analysis of Trump on the African-American vote: “Donald Trump’s Lincolnesque Moment”: A landmark in the emergence of a new Republican Party” HERE.

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Nigel Farage’s Brexit campaign and Trump’s

Brexit advocate Nigel Farage was Donald Trump’s special guest at yesterday’s rally in Jackson, Mississippi, attended by around 10,000 Trump supporters. It’s just over 6-minutes on the YouTube video, it’s fun to watch, and the two campaigns, Brexit and Trump’s, have much in common: 

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No more “Golden Week” early voting in Ohio

art credit: www.americanthinker.com

Good news on Cleveland.com:  

Appeals court says Ohio can scrap 'Golden Week': A federal appeals court panel ruled Tuesday that Ohio can shorten its early-voting period, handing a victory to Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted over Ohio Democrats who challenged the change. As cleveland.com's Robert Higgs explains, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel overturned a lower-court ruling that the state could not get rid of its first week of early voting – the so-called "Golden Week," during which Ohioans can register and vote early at the same time. Ohio Democratic Party chairman David Pepper indicated the party may appeal.

Who benefits from “Golden Week” except those looking for opportunities to stuff the ballot box? This ruling is at least a start to restore some integrity to Ohio voting.

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