Quick Hits

Mark Penn @Mark_Penn

America forgot

What's it is like to have a presidential press conference that is not staged.

Real questions and real answers are back and critical to democracy and whether you agree or disagree with the answers having an actual exchange rather than pre screened journalists and pre set answers is refreshing.

Trump's approval rating is at a historic high of 55%.

For those of you who aren't as mathematically advanced as I am, imagine a pie chart. Now cut that pie chart in half. Now you get to eat the "half" of the pie that you sneakily cut to be decidedly larger than the other, so you have defeated your enemies.

It's all about PIE, baby.

Hugh Hewitt tries to figure out why Trump 47 is so much more popular than Trump 45.

"President-elect Donald Trump's popularity has reached a seven-year high and the majority of Americans approve of his handling of the transition process," Forbes recently reported. "A majority of respondents to a CNN/SSRS poll released Wednesday said they believe Trump will do a good job when he returns to the White House next month (54%)," the story continued, "and approve of how he's handling the transition so far (55%)."

These numbers are in sharp contrast to eight years ago when Donald Trump was "President-elect" the first time. Pew Research Center conducted a national survey from Nov. 30-Dec. 5, 2016 and found that, among the 1,502 adults surveyed then, only "40% approved of Trump's cabinet choices and high-level appointments, while 41% approve of the job he has done so far in explaining his policies and plans for the future."

It's not an apples-to-apples comparison, but the level of approval today is sharply higher than eight years ago. The big--and significant--question is: Why?

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Two additional possible explanations beyond "He's not Joe or Kamala."

First, the Trump upset in 2016 was shocking and even painful to Manhattan-Beltway media and political elites. I know this first-hand from having been on the set of "NBC Election Night Coverage" from 30 Rock eight years ago. As events unfolded on that memorable night in 2016, it was far more than a surprise that swept the NBC studios. It was a thunderclap of a reality of which a legacy news organization was wholly unaware might be coming, and it left a stunned, disbelieving newsroom in its wake. (Two floors of newsrooms, in fact, as MSNBC was one floor lower than the NBC News Election Night set). A lot of the shock and pain among legacy media elites became a sort of "referred pain" among the population at large. The country was shocked because Big Media was shocked in 2016, and as legacy media's anger and disbelief spread out, much of the country reeled along with those elites.

...

Trump had never spent one night in D.C. this time eight years ago, and the shock of his 2016 win was followed by prophecies of doom from the usual suspects that never stopped, and the "Resistance" was already taking up their stations in the media. The "pink hats" were booking their flights to Trump's Inauguration day-after counter-demonstration. "Hillary was supposed to have won, damn it," and when she didn't, the media elites and the political left went into overdrive to persuade America that Trump was, at best, completely corrupt and possibly an authoritarian. Eight years later, after endless investigations and years of lawfare, it turns out the majority of Americans aren't buying what legacy media is selling anymore.

But that's not it either. Trump's previous highest approval rating until this new "honeymoon season" of 2024 was 49% --and that number was reached only at the start of 2020, as three years of low taxes and deregulation combined with surging energy production had America cooking with gas...until COVID hit.

That Trump is now at 55% is nothing short of astonishing, as the past five years since that 49% have been, well, event-filled.

The public has enough evidence now to know that everything the Democrat Cult says is a lie. Their promises and prophecies no longer matter.

A DC waitress refused to serve Trump staffers. She is now seeking other opportunities for employment.

A Washington, D.C.-area restaurant server has been fired after she spoke out about possibly refusing service to incoming Trump administration officials.

"I personally would refuse to serve any person in office who I know of as being a sex trafficker or trying to deport millions of people," Suzannah Van Rooy, a server at Beuchert's Saloon on Capitol Hill, told the Washingtonian this week. "It's not, 'Oh, we hate Republicans.' It's that this person has moral convictions that are strongly opposed to mine, and I don't feel comfortable serving them."

Her remarks were part of a report about whether there would be local "resistance" to certain Trump figures when they were in public settings again after several high-profile incidents during his first term. They included then-aide Sarah Huckabee Sanders being ejected from a restaurant in Lexington, Va., and protesters swarming then-Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen at a D.C. Mexican establishment.

"People were a lot more motivated the first time around to do those kinds of shows of passion. This time around, there is kind of a sense of defeat and acceptance," Van Rooy said, according to the Washingtonian. "But I hope that people still do stand up to this administration and tell them their thoughts on their misbehavior."

According to a review of her LinkedIn page on Friday, which has since been taken down, Van Rooy listed her duties as doing daily operations, messaging strategies for the restaurant, developing relationships with influencers, and managing in-house events for political figures and VIPs.

Her page also said she worked as an organizer for Texas Democrat Beto O'Rourke's failed run for governor in 2022.

Beuchert's Saloon told Fox News Digital that Van Rooy's remarks were "reprehensible" and she had been fired for violating their "zero-tolerance policy on discrimination."

Beuchert's said the former employee was a part-time server and not a manager. It put out statements on social media condemning her remarks after being made aware of them on Thursday.

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By Friday, the restaurant said it had decided to dismiss the server because of this incident, calling her comments and subsequent behavior, "unforgivable." It also said she had signed on to the restaurant's social media accounts to speak on behalf of the restaurant without authorization.

A Kamala Harris advisor admits that the NYT and WP are exclusively leftwing Democrat Regime rags.

Vice President Kamala Harris' deputy campaign manager admitted there is zero value in Democrats talking to outlets like The New York Times (NYT) and The Washington Post (WaPo) because those outlets are already in the tank for the party.

Rob Flaherty told Semafor's Max Tani that the Harris campaign decided to skip interviews with major corporate press outlets because data showed readers of outlets like the NYT and WaPo already supported Harris.

"There's just no value -- with respect to my colleagues in the mainstream press -- in a general election, to speaking to the New York Times or speaking to the Washington Post, because those [readers] are already with us," Flaherty said.

You don't say?

You're not going to believe this, but all of the jobs supposedly created in the second quarter in Biden's Miracle Economy (Jack!) were fake.

Back in August, many were surprised by the accuracy of our forecast, when we predicted that in its annual revision, the Biden Bureau of Labor Statistics would revise jobs for the April 2023-March 2024 period by "up to 1 million", something which we said would mean that all job report "beats" recorded in the past year will have been misses and the US labor market is in far worse shape than the admin would admit.

The final results, as everyone knows by now, was a shocking 818K revision lower, just as the Philadelphia Fed had predicted 6 months prior, in March, when it calculated correctly that the Biden Department of Goalseeking Propaganda had overstated payrolls by "at least 800,000."

The answer ended up 818,000 for the 12 month period ended March 31 (or about 68,000 per month) and the implied sharp deterioration to the job market was the main scapegoat used by the Fed to launch its easing cycle with a jumbo 50bps rate cut (now that "suddenly" the economic golden age pushed by the Biden propaganda regime, and trillions in debt, had just collapsed).

We mention all of this up because on Friday, the Philly Fed served up its latest shocker: not only did the Biden admin lie again, but the collapse in the labor market that had been covered up for much of the past year and was only exposed with the annual benchmark revision, extended into the second quarter.

"Estimates by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia indicate that the employment changes from March through June 2024 were significantly different" - read lower - "in 27 states compared with preliminary state estimates from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' (BLS) Current Employment Statistics (CES)", the Philly Fed said on December 12.

"According to the early benchmark (EB) estimates conducted by the Phily Fed, employment was lower in 25 states, higher in two states, and lesser changes in the remaining 23 states and the District of Columbia."

Translation: 23 states unchanged, 1 revised higher... and 25 lower. The breakdown is shown below.

Maybe someone can calculate what the odds of that distribution occurring naturally are, but here is our guess: virtually nil. Which is why would make such a loud stink every month after the Biden BLS revised jobs data lower month after month after month. The whole point was to make the labor market appear stronger than it was, then to gradually revised it all away. And now the Philadelphia Fed confirms - again - that we were right all along.

And so, after it first revised the 12 months ending March 31 by 818K, the downgrads extended into the second quarter of 2024, when the Philadelphia Fed early benchmark estimates showed that instead of the 1.1% gain shown initially by the BLS, payroll jobs in the 50 states and the District of Columbia were actually down 0.1%!

Pie charts and cake graphs at the link.

Leftwing propaganda organization Politi"Fact" decided on a Lie of the Year, and no, it wasn't Biden and the entire Traitor Media claiming that Biden was as fit as a fiddle and spends his time playing Gymnastic Chess (you move around on a human-sized board via floor exercise tumbling passes) at a grandmaster level, and no, it wasn't Biden lying for years that his son was innocent, that he had no business in Hunter's "businesses," and that he would never, ever pardon Hunter.

No, the lie was the non-lie that "They're eating the cats, they're eating the dogs."

Multiple Springfield residents who spoke to The Federalist in September also shared stories of seeing fewer fowl in the parks and felines in the streets. One resident said she had even seen a male migrant carrying what looked like a dead goose by a park in the city's west end, though the incident was just a minor episode compared to the time she says she was chased by a Haitian man wielding a machete. While tales of animal rituals captured national attention, residents have simultaneously grappled with an objectively self-evident public safety crisis in the city.

This spring, one migrant was found guilty of multiple felonies after smashing a local school bus off the road when driving without a license last year. The crash killed an 11-year-old boy and injured more than 20 other students on the first day of school. The Haitian driver was sentenced to at least nine years in prison instead of immediate deportation.

Drama Queen Jim Acosta has "fact" checked Trump 95 times on his "news" show. Care to guess how many times he's fact checked Biden?

Leftwing open-borders advocates writing in the leftwing open-borders advocate Atlantic: Yeah, Democrats went too far in pushing open borders and they won't return to power until they convince people they've repented and reformed.

The Atlantic published a piece today which was co-written by a long-time member of National Council of La Raza and an adviser to the Harris campaign. They argue that Democrats have lost their way on immigration and won't be returning to the White House until they fix their approach.

One of us, Cecilia, spent two decades at the National Council of La Raza, America's biggest Latino advocacy group, and later advised Obama on immigration issues as head of his White House Domestic Policy Council. The other, Frank, ran pro-immigrant organizations for more than three decades, and advised the Harris campaign on immigration. This is a heartfelt critique, informed by our decades of experience as immigrant advocates who also understand the realities of governing. Unless something changes, Republicans will continue exploiting the situation at the border, more immigrants will suffer, and Democrats will continue to lose the trust of voters--damaging their chances of unseating the authoritarians now returning to power.

So what is the problem exactly? According to the authors, Democrats have drifted too far left. Instead of keeping the border secure, they listened to activists who essentially wanted open borders.

When Clinton ran for president in 2016, activists pushed her to the left on immigration, imploring her to break with Obama and commit to a dramatic rollback of enforcement. In an interview with Jorge Ramos of Univision, Clinton did just that, promising to focus on deporting "violent criminals" and "people planning terrorist attacks." Her platform made only a cursory mention of enforcement. Activists had assured her that she'd see an increase in Latino and Asian turnout in response, but the votes never materialized, and Trump won...

Four years fighting Trump seemed only to further radicalize the left...

Emboldened, self-described "abolitionists" pilloried mentions of border enforcement, deportations, or immigration limits as legitimizing Trumpian extremism. Activist groups rolled out their bold new vision in a platform called "Free to Move, Free to Stay," which called for "freedom from deportation" and "freedom from the enforcement machine." The platform, perhaps understandably, focused on condemning Trump's harshest measures, but it opened the door to criticism that advocates were less focused on U.S. interests than on the right to migrate in a borderless world.

I remember going crazy attempting to publicize Hillary Clinton's vow in the 2015 Democrat nomination fight to deport no illegal aliens whatsoever unless they were terrorists or serious criminals. The media did not report it -- they knew this was a promise that only fellow leftwing Democrats should hear, as the public would be outraged.

I also routinely brought this to the attention of NeverTrump, who insisted that Hillary Clinton was a serious "centrist" candidate. They never even responded to my posting the clip of her making this vow on stage at one of the little-watched Democrat debates of 2015.

Just a few apartment buildings are being taken over by foreign prison gangs and turned into torture bunkers:

Mollie @MZHemingway In his propaganda newsletter today, @brianstelter notes that a longtime FBI informant pled guilty to lying about the specifics of the Biden family business (in which members of the Biden family got paid millions of dollars from foreign oligarchs, Chinese Communists, and various other unsavory characters in exchange for access to Biden).

As per his usual obsession, Stelter goes after Fox for saying, he claims, that the long-time FBI informant was "extremely trustworthy." To substantiate this claim about Fox, he links to a story from anti-free-speech activist Oliver Darcy, a former CNN employee. But that story does not include the phrase "extremely trustworthy."

The thing is, it was not Fox but the FBI itself that claimed its long-time source was "highly credible." (Despite that stated belief of the FBI, the DOJ worked very hard to ignore and hide this source's claims about Biden.) Various media outlets, including Fox, quoted the FBI claim. For instance, a July 20, 2023, CNN article describes the long-time FBI informant as being perceived that way. it's not really news that Fox also accurately described the FBI's claim.

CNN, you might recall, falsely claimed for years that Christopher Steele, the proprietor of a concocted dossier alleging Donald Trump colluded with Russia in order to steal the 2016 election, was highly credible. That lie was in the ***second paragraph*** of CNN's big story revealing the dossier. The lie about Steele's credibility was repeated a few thousand times.

I know this is too much for propagandists to consider, but the lesson of all of this is to realize and internalize the fact that the FBI will claim that sources are "highly credible" or "not credible" mostly as it suits their political goals. Steele's dossier was always a joke and at the time the FBI was leaking lies to CNN about it they knew it was a joke. Similarly, extremely credible sources are dismissed as "not credible" or having made claims "without foundation" when those claims conflict with FBI goals. (See my story today for example!)

But CNN can go ahead and SIT DOWN about any discussions of source credibility after what they perpetrated against the American people during the Russia collusion scam.

And the daily propaganda from CNN in service of an anti-free-speech agenda continues to be dangerous.

The Supreme Court is a place that's very special for making all of its members' dreams come true:

posted by Ace at 06:36 PM

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