Trump wakes Ad agencies: not everyone wants to be a politically correct coastal city yuppie

The seismic shift continues.

In the new Trumpocene, executives have suddenly realized that there is whole other world out there. This is pretty big stuff. People in Manhattan are even thinking they might need to hire country folk, or, crikey, set up country offices. They are suggesting maybe Big Data from internet surveys is missing the point (and half the country), and wait for it… they may have to really talk to rural people, and (pause, because this is so profound) … face to face.

Even possibly in their homes.

Trump’s Win Has Ad Agencies Rethink How They Collect Data, Recruit staff

Wall Street Journal

“This election is a seminal moment for marketers” says Joe Tripodi, Subway sandwich chain.

Trump’s win spurs concerns that ad agencies are out of touch with consumers

In the wake of Donald Trump’s victory, advertisers are reflecting on whether they are out of touch
with the same people who propelled the businessman into the White House.
By ALEXANDRA BRUELL and SUZANNE VRANICA

 A few days after the Nov. 8 election, the chief executive of the ad agency giant McCann Worldgroup summoned top executives to discuss
what the company could learn from the surprising outcome. One takeaway for him and his staff was that too much advertising falsely
assumes that all U.S. consumers desire to be like coastal elites.

“Every so often you have to reset what is the aspirational goal the public has with regard to the products we sell,” said Harris Diamond,
McCann’s CEO. “So many marketing programs are oriented toward metro elite imagery.” Marketing needs to reflect less of New York and
Los Angeles culture, he said, and more of “Des Moines and Scranton.”

I predict the ABC in Australia will miss this seismic shift entirely, though they need it so desperately. A  lot of the ABC problems would be solved if we booted them out of Ultimo in Sydney and asked them to live in Bourke, Mildura, or Wagga… you name it. Indeed, how about Orange (where the Nationals just lost a seat they’ve held forever to the Shooters, Fishers and Farmers party, a result that zero ABC commentators predicted. The Trump effect has reached 16,000 kilometers across the ocean. It appears the electors have discovered they can vote in people who are not politicians.

Some marketers, concerned that data isn’t telling them everything they need to know, are considering increasing their use of personal
interviews in research. Meanwhile, some ad agencies are looking to hire more people from rural areas as they rethink the popular use of
aspirational messaging showcasing a ritzy life on the two metropolitan coasts. One company is also weighing whether to open more local
offices around the world, where the people who create ads are closer to the people who see them.

Read it all (though it may be behind the paywall) Wall Street Journal

h/t a friend in the Alps and David B.

 

The U.S. now needs to decide,
That the urban-rural divide,
Between city adorables,
And country deplorables,
Should end and be swept to one side.

— Ruairi

9.4 out of 10 based on 64 ratings

108 comments to Trump wakes Ad agencies: not everyone wants to be a politically correct coastal city yuppie

  • #
    ЯΞ√ΩLUT↑☼N

    We Leftards don’t need to be scientists to see climate change, Iowa corn or Russia, just look out the window.. oops.. There’s actually a whole country out there? I thought it only existed on telly.

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      tom0mason

      That the problem with Windows™, some people only use the modern version and not the original non-electronic version.

      ™Microsoft.

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      Oliver K. Manuel

      Ad agencies, the internet and TV pandered to the lowest common denominator in humans – using addictive drugs to reduce inhibitions toward the seven deadly sins – to control the attention of the masses for the elitists.

      The rest of the world has been enslaved, just as China was enslaved by opium for many decades.

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      • #
        Tom O

        A lot of truth. They aren’t really concerned that they have missed out on these people, they are concerned with how to steal from them with misleading ads. There is truth in the statement that a man looking for a car that will give him 50 mpg – 21 KMpL, isn’t interested in seeing ads for BMWs, Cadillacs, or a Tesla. They want reliable, safe, and economic means of travelling, not being able to drive from electric plug to electric plug, since there are many roads that are longer than 150 miles, or about 240 KM, and won’t have a plugin along the way. We might want to “cut emissions,” but it would be better to do it with fuel economy, rather than switching to an impractical method of transportation. We might want to cut back on electrical power, but are interested in refrigerators that are inexpensive and efficient, not are internet ready and capable of ordering your groceries from the local supermarket. They missed out on the fact that we are not slaves to technology, we want technology that will work for us. We want to wear out our clothes, not buy clothes that have been sandpapered to look like they are worn out, or however they do, and we really aren’t into fads since life, itself, is fun enough. We aren’t “old fashioned,” we are practical. We aren’t interested in propaganda, we want information. Yes, they missed out on a lot of people, and it cuts across generations, it isn’t just “baby boomers,” X-gen, Y-gen, or millennials, it’s some of every group.

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        • #
          Oliver K. Manuel

          Do you remember when TV was first described (correctly) as a vast wasteland ~50 years ago?

          Now we have access to thousands of channels, without a single channel providing helpful educational or cultural information – e.g., classical literature – to a society suffering from lack of education and cultural information.

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          • #
            Yonniestone

            This and the use of personal debt to capture people in a pressure situation where quasi political decisions are drip fed via banal MSM news stories that deflect what is actually happening in the world, when caught in this cycle of lies the people are conditioned to believe any political decision is worthy of its source no matter how inept or useless that source is.

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            • #
              OriginalSteve

              I get criticized by my relativesfor not being “plugged in” enough – I keep having to remind them that
              (a) I can turn off the news for a month and not miss much at all ( not that much of it is truly newsworthy anyway – blogs like this distill it all down )
              (b) I dont use twit-ter and farcebook so couldnt care about what drunken exploits people get up to
              (c) I have to take on a “smart” phone ( tracking device ) becasue telcos are pandering to brainless lemmings who want to wtahc each other on vacuous shows like “Big Brother” ( the absolute deepest low point in humanity ….)

              Now ponder why “Zombie” movies are so popular…its basically the Elite laughing at society – the elite have formed society into programmed brainless zombies….the idiot box is well named.

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        • #
          Rod Stuart

          Modern marketing is about ‘creating a market’ for something.
          The plebs don’t realise they need some fancy new gadget until we show them that they must have one to keep up with the jones’.

          It is the push towards a technocracy, in which all but a few in control of the world order are incarcerated using technology, directing every facet of their lives.

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      • #
        Oliver K. Manuel

        I agree with Trump’s decision NOT to prosecute Hillary, contingent on her willingness to help end 69 years of betrayal of our government by globalists after nations and national academies of sciences were united on 24 OCT 1945:

        https://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2016/11/22/trump-wont-prosecute-hillary-politics-in-the-matrix/#comment-191541

        Otherwise, a civilian grand jury should be established to decide if the 1945-2016 unholy alliance of crooked politicians and government scientists stepped beyond ALMOST TREASON

        https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/ALMOST_TREASON.pdf

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        • #
          bobl

          I don’t, if she has committed a crime she must be held to account. MUST! There should not be any protected space for the elites. While Trump is probably thinking about settling down the jitters – I don’t think pardoning Hillary for her sins is the right way. President Ford was wrong about that – Nixon should have been prosecuted. Me, I hope it’s a ploy to avoid her being pardoned preemptively – to be followed up by an indictment come Jan 21.

          Frankly this should be investigated by whatever passes for a Royal Commission in the USA

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          • #
            David Maddison

            The US equivalent of a Royal Commission is a Presidential Commission.

            https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Commission_(United_States)

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          • #
            Oliver K. Manuel

            Nobody should be prosecuted now for 69 years of deception by an alliance of well-meaning scientists and politicians about nuclear energy, E = mc^2,”

            Betraying the trust of nations worldwide by uniting nations and national academies of sciences on 24 OCT 1945 to hide the energy that powers atomic bombs, NEUTRON REPULSION,”

            The source of energy in the Sun that also sustains human life and controls human destiny, . . .

            Provided National Academies of Sciences now publicly admit or publicly deny
            1. The logical error in Weizsacker’s definition of nuclear binding energy
            2. Decades of space age measurements that show the Sun is the pulsar remnant of a star that made our elements and birthed the solar system 5 Ga ago.”

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        • #
          Bulldust

          Covered in The West Australian as well – more backflips than Nadia Comaneci:

          https://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/a/33296615/trump-backflips-six-times-in-one-hour-interview/

          Here’s hoping he sticks to his guns on climate change, at the very least.

          40

        • #

          Oliver I agree with you wholeheartedly, except for one small detail;I was born 24Oct 1945 and I’m aged 71 not 69!
          Sometimes though, I feel it may all be my fault . .
          Funny moment. GeoffW

          20

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  • #
    Leo Morgan

    I’ve already had a Facebook friend post a request to defend(sic) the ABC.
    Of course I’m on her side.
    I just had to point out she misspelled ‘defund’.

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    • #
      Mike

      Funding and defunding are the realm of ‘economic climate science’ and that 99.9999999999999 percent of climate scientists agree that the economic climate at the ABC is quite predictable and do further observe that its economic climate there is getting colder.

      If only economic climate scientists were consulted more often.

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    • #
      Steven Fraser

      Sure like,that !

      60

  • #
    PeterS

    That’s the trouble with big cities – they are like ivory towers full of people who think they know everything and think their beliefs are right and everyone else in the rest of the world are wrong. It’s a lot like Universities and CSIRO here – they are so convinced in believing their own BS they can’t see they are in the wrong. A lot of managers and execs in big business think that way too. Anyone with half a brain could have told Woolworths their experiment with Masters was going to be a major flop. It’s time to smash the fake world of the elite and start smelling the roses. It will be fun to watch them scurry like drowning rats when Trump becomes President and begins dismantling the AGW scam for example.

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    • #
      bobl

      The problem with Masters was just that they didn’t do what they said, one visit to Masters and you found out that Masters were charging 15-20% more than Bunnings, their whitegoods were more expensive than Harvey Norman. It’s hard to take customers from an incumbent when you refuse to compete.

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      • #
        Angry

        We actually got a terrific deal on a new BBQ in the Masters closing down sale.

        Normal rrp $1200 (verified by the manufacturer)
        Sale price $719

        Not too shabby !

        PS It was a Beefeater BBQ

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  • #
    cedarhill

    They’ll likely come up with more of those awful Budweiser commercials that started after a French company bought the beer company.

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  • #
    TdeF

    news.com.au just prints rubbish about Donald Trump now. Any made up opinion piece with zero facts.

    “The crazy cost of protecting Trump”
    “Trump unleashes firing squad”
    “Has Trump given China ultimate power”

    I think it is the reporting of real world events which is most missed.

    Expect the media to give up on reporting facts about Trump and just attack him relentlessly, his suits, his feet, his hair any characteristic. His wife, his children. After all it worked on bully, mysogynist, stuttering Abbott while nothing bad was ever said about Julia. It worked. People actually thought tasting an onion was a crime and looking at his watch was bullying and even his parental support for working women scheme was an error of judgement, despite the fact that the public service and the ABC elites who have all this and double dip never minded their hyprocrisy.

    It will be hard to take, where not a bad word was said about giving Iran nuclear weapons, arming ISIS or fomenting devastating revolutions in Libya, Egypt and Syria and withdrawing support from Iraq. Saint Obama could do no wrong and about to be replaced by Saint Hilary. Now we have the devil incarnate, Trump and no made up story is too coarse, despite the fact that he is not even President yet.

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    • #
      Yonniestone

      The self styled capital city elites will discover the peasants are revolting and not in a personal hygiene/no dental plan kinda way but a I like where I grew up and won’t stand for destructive policy made thousands of miles away that attacks my way of life kinda way.

      Americans voted Trump for the same reasons Australians voted minor parties in such numbers that Turnbull only just scraped in despite all pre-election advantages, a message is being sent that the people want the person that made the car not the twat that sells it!

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    • #
      Manfred

      Australasian MSM is a collection of some of the more traitorous Fourth Estate. These Libtard cultural marxists appear likely to be both unable and unwilling to adapt to the Trumpocene. They risk becoming another mass extinction event. When one lives as an Oozlum Bird, whether here or in the US, the physics is the same … disappearance up one’s own black hole is the only end-point.

      As for the wider populous, I have been pleasantly surprised about the number of people I have encountered who like to open the conversation with a PC eye roll and ‘let’s not talk about America’. I’ve edged the conversation in habituating increments toward the US by observing the growing Western expression of “populism” and merely shrugged at its inevitability … after all, when borders are open (which they’ll need to be for people to start walking to the next job in China or Africa, if the globalists de-industrialise the West), segue smoothly to look at the trouble in Germany, and then a quick spin at “trade deals” done in secret (TPP) to provide the required key trade blocs the UN describe in their post-2015 sustainable development agenda, before a final bow at the daily billions extravagantly wasted on the non-problem of CO2 and the Satanic emanations from the Ministry of We Know Best For Your Own Good stating we should tax food for the sake of climate changeTM

      After that lot, the dawn of the Trumpocene, Brexit, Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen seem not only vital and necessary but preferable, inevitable and embraceable. Serendipitously, as if the very celestial heavens concur it appears The Pause of ’98 has returned as correctly predicted by many after the demise of the recent El Nino.

      So, not only is it not warming (can you hear the joyful whoops from the Greens?) but the expressed intention of President-elect DJT to cease funding the globalist eco-junket has enormous merit, not least because it is obviously better to spend the money on rehabilitating the infra-structure of the US. The only rational and sane thing to do is to immediately stop pouring money down a black eco-hole and start pouring concrete instead.

      To borrow from Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore, “I love the smell of [progress] in the morning.”

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  • #
    Leo Morgan

    I know many New Yorkers fear the Trump Presidency means the apocalypse.
    While I think they’ve been badly mislead, I sympathise with their fear.
    I know many in rural America feel the same way, and to prove it I tender this advertisement.
    http://cdn.slowrobot.com/103020122000187.jpeg
    Sorry I’ve been unable to correctly code to display the image.

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  • #

    Uh-oh. Remember when Gareth Evans went for a seat in the reps and they had to teach him to call people “sport” and “mate”? Or when Keating had to find a passion for his “beloved Doggies” down at Belmore? Turnbull’s undignified trudge to the footy ground at Penrith?

    I’d rather they didn’t try, thanks all the same. I don’t want to be “reached” or “messaged” or “tapped into”. Really, all I want is the total obliteration of the climatariat and the damnation of its memory into all eternity. Is that asking so much?

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  • #
    KinkyKeith

    It’s not only the advertising people who are missing the boat.

    The people, the recipients of the adds, live their lives enclosed in the multifaceted media cocoon found in the big cities

    It seems that Trump is leading something far better than we may have expected, a huge dose of reality for USA and the world.

    Advertising may be useful when voters have jobs and cash to spend but not of much use if you are living on the margins of society.

    KK

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  • #
    pat

    speaking of recruitment:

    22 Nov: UK Daily Mail: Ariel Zilber: Donald Trump and his Republican allies are ‘ready to slash the federal work force, impose hiring freezes and halt automatic pay raises’
    Trump vowed during campaign to institute federal hiring freezes
    Republicans say slashing work force will save the government billions
    Newt Gingrich, the former speaker, says no more ‘jobs for life’
    Gingrich expects chief strategist Steve Bannon to oversee effort
    Democrats vow to fight any attempt to roll back worker benefits
    The incoming administration and its allies on Capitol Hill are planning to try and trim the public sector work force, in line with campaign promises to roll back government benefits, The Washington Post reported on Monday.
    With Republicans in control of both houses of the legislature as well as the executive branch, they now have a chance to enact reforms which federal employees once thought they were immune from, including lower pensions, hiring freezes, a halt to automatic raises, and a crackdown on publicly funded union business…
    Gingrich, a top adviser to Trump, said the era of federal employees having a ‘job-for-life’ is coming to an end.
    ‘We’re going to have to get the country to understand how big the problem is, the human costs of it and why it’s absolutely essential to reform’, said Gingrich.
    The former speaker predicted that Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, would lead the effort.
    In his Contract With the American Voter, the president-elect stated that his downsizing reforms are necessary ‘to clean up the corruption and special interest collusion in Washington, D.C.’
    Trump has also called for ‘a hiring freeze on all federal employees to reduce federal workforce through attrition (exempting military, public safety, and public health)’…
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3958848/Donald-Trump-Republican-allies-ready-slash-federal-work-force-impose-hiring-freezes-halt-automatic-pay-raises.html

    call them on it, Bannon:

    1 Nov: InvestorsBusinessDaily: Good News: 35% Of Government Workers Might Quit If Trump Wins
    A survey of federal employees by the Government Business Council and GovExec.com found that 14% said they would “definitely” consider quitting their jobs if Trump wins the election on Nov. 8, another 13% said they might consider it. Just 65% said they’d stay on at their jobs no matter who wins.
    Whatever Trump’s many flaws, that’s an awfully tempting reason to cast a ballot for him. Except for the fact that these workers will almost certainly decide to keep their jobs no matter who wins, if for no other reason than most of them would probably find jobs in the private sector utterly intolerable…
    A more recent analysis by the Cato Institute found that federal employees make 76% more than private sector workers…
    What’s more, federal workers put in less time than private sector workers…
    http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/good-news-35-of-govt-workers-threaten-to-quit-if-trump-wins/

    ***here’s another benefit:

    2 Feb: HuffPo: Amanda Terkel: 25 Percent Of Federal Workers Might Quit If Donald Trump Becomes President
    Boom. Smaller government, just like that.
    Fourteen percent of government workers in a new Government Business Council/GovExec.com survey said they would “definitely” consider leaving their jobs if the GOP front-runner wins. Another 11 percent said they would “maybe” do so. ***Democrats, not surprisingly, were significantly more likely to say they would leave.
    Many Republicans would like to see a smaller federal government, so these survey results might not be that upsetting to them. Trump has said he would be interested in eliminating the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency if he becomes president…
    Fifty-nine percent of respondents also said they’d feel “embarrassed” if they worked under Trump. Forty-nine percent said the same about Democrat Hillary Clinton…

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    • #
      ianl8888

      25 Percent Of Federal Workers Might Quit If Donald Trump Becomes President

      Not a hope.

      Just as Tinseltown won’t move to Canada and van Oncealot won’t tear up his US passport and …

      These people aren’t “virtue signalling”, they are just pretending to throw toys out of the cot

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      • #
        AndyG55

        “they are just pretending to throw toys out of the cot”

        I like that one… so, so true ! 🙂

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      • #
        AndyG55

        “25 Percent Of Federal Workers Might Quit If Donald Trump Becomes President”

        Quit….. or, “YOU’RE FIRED” 🙂

        Would be a great start to reducing the size of the public service.

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        • #

          Would be a great start to reducing the size of the public service.

          Hmm! Campbell Newman tried that and look how that worked out.

          Now totally reversed under the Palace Chook!

          Tony.

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          • #
            Bulldust

            Palace Chook – love it!

            The Laborites haven’t managed to replace her internally then?

            10

            • #

              Bulldust, I have a theory on that, with the Palace Chook.

              Bear with me here, because this is party politics and Labor factions politics in its stark highlight.

              Let’s go back, way back to the water problem, and how Wivenhoe nearly ran dry.

              Beattie bit down on the bullet and announced some (mostly useless) dams, and one of them was on the Mary River, and the locals in that area went absolutely berserk. You know, typical South East Corner Labor, (big politics) with a new hint of Green, telling the people that they (all of Queensland, but really only the SE corner) needed this, and then placing this uselessness not in their own backyard, but out in an electorate where no one had ever voted Labor anyway, so it’s not like they were going to lose a seat. (Sound familiar with what has happened with Trump)

              The locals rebelled, big time, huge, and Beattie, ever the populist, didn’t want it reflecting back on his ‘golden glow’. So, he asked for a (umm) volunteer to face the music, and that was Anna Bligh, under the proviso that if she did this, then Beattie would admirably step aside at a point not too distant into the future, ostensibly to be more with his family. Factional politics came into play here, as you might expect. Anna Bligh faced the music, took the heat, was booed constantly for more than 2 hours without getting one word in. She did all this, safe in the knowledge that the light at the end of the tunnel was the Premiers job, hers.

              That came to pass.

              Roll on Campbell Newman, and in much the same manner as Trump, the people had finally had a gutful, and Labor was smashed.

              The Palace Chook was virtually all that was left, from her Father’s own seat, Inala, which would be Labors, no matter what, for all eternity. Another Labor lawyer who incidentally has never worked one day in that legal profession since her graduation.

              All the Senior Labor Party people were gone, all those factional bosses wiped out in the Newman landslide.

              The only senior one left was the Palace Chook, who got a job she was never ever ever going to have, (because of those factional politics) Leader of the Party.

              She snuck in on the Newman backlash, because he may have actually tried to do too much in as short a time as possible, and now here she is Premier, another job she would never ever have had, or for that fact, even aspired to.

              ALL the Labor factional heavyweights are now back in place, but it would not look good to depose her, so she stayed there, a talking head at the top, a face to point at the cameras, which she does virtually every day, and often, the archetypal Pixie Ann Wheatley.

              Very soon now, probably in the lead up to the next State election here in Queensland, she too will find the pressing need to step back from the Premiers job to, umm, be more with family, and the factional leaders whose turn it is next, and who now have the numbers and the backing will take her place.

              Oh, and Peter Beattie, the Premier who retired to be with family, well, as soon as he did retire from Politics, he fled went off to America, almost immediately, and on his own too.

              Then when Newman was beaten, he came back, and then when Palace Chook became Premier, Peter Beattie got the job running the Comm Games, say, nice work if you can get it eh!

              Jobs for the boys. Jobs for loyal service. Jobs as repayment.

              Naah! He’s just the best man for the job, eh.

              The Palace Chooks reign is almost complete now. She got her loyalty bonus, and now it’s the turn of the real heavyweights.

              You just watch!

              Pass the popcorn.

              Tony.

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          • #
            Bulldust

            I’m sure there would be a Joh Bjelke-Petersen joke in there somewhere…

            20

  • #
    pat

    surely our Govt should be doing some waste-cutting of their own, starting with ABC/SBS:

    AUDIO: 19 Nov: Australian: Darren Davidson: ABC radio program crows over public-purse pay deal
    The ABC has mocked private-­sector workers in a radio program and tried to cover up the incident by doctoring a recording of the comments on the public broadcaster’s website.
    A report on current-affairs program The World Today on slow wages growth no longer includes dismissive remarks and laughter about private-sector pay by ABC reporter David Taylor and host Eleanor Hall.
    The Australian has obtained a clip of an exchange between ­Taylor and Hall that ABC Radio editors attempted to hide from public view…
    Adopting sarcastic tones ­Taylor replies: “Some wages are in fact … if you’re in the public sector like we are, we’re better off than the private sector … that’s why we’re at the ABC.”
    Hall responds by laughing…
    The ABC’s agreement with its almost 5000 staff delivers cash and domestic violence leave on top of annual wage rises.
    It includes a one-off $500 payment in addition to annual 2 per cent pay rises, back pay, seven days of domestic violence leave and an increase in maternity and spousal leave.
    News of the incident comes as government MPs called on ABC managing director Michelle ­Guthrie this week to explain why some of the ABC’s journalists took to ***social media to react stridently against president-elect Donald Trump in the lead-up to his ­victory.
    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/abc-radio-program-crows-over-publicpurse-pay-deal/news-story/ad4c146b766494da980297a341e84488

    ***NOT ONLY SOCIAL MEDIA.
    someone called Paul commented on Tim Blair’s “ABC BUSTED” thread: Not only that. ABC employees are currently retiring on two thirds salary for life. Transferable to their partner should they ‘turn up their toes’ first. And, they can take early retirement and still get it. They don’t have to stick it all the way as do Police and such. Our Golf Club is full of them. Swanning around as if they’re very successful. Makes you sick when you think of the people at the Bus Stop at 5:00am doing thankless hard work, getting ripped off by their Union while the pompous elitists from the ABC lord about complaining about the fools who voted for Trump, Brexit et al.

    ***Hugo, columnist at The Times & Spectator, is son of long-time Tory politician, Malcolm Rifkind, who didn’t stand in last year’s election. Hugo is virulently anti-Brexit, and has a go at Farage as well in the following. read the comments:

    22 Nov: Australian: from UK Times: ***Hugo Rifkind: Planet destroyers back on the march again after Trump’s victory
    Ask yourself why Donald Trump says climate change is a hoax. Yes, a hoax. Not for him the careful equivocation of the “sceptic” who, perhaps, believes that the Earth is warming but doubts that it is mankind’s doing. Or doubts that a warmer planet would necessarily be bad. Or doubts that mankind could fix this problem even if it was warming. Or that the vast economic costs of fixing it are remotely worthwhile. None of that…
    Has he pored over the peer-reviewed science in five successive assessment reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and found them unconvincing?…
    Or, and I’m going out on a limb here, has he arrived at this view on a hunch and a whim, because it puts him in agreement with people with whom he wishes to agree, and in opposition to the people with whom he wishes not to? …
    Whatever his reasons, the politics worked. As a general rule of thumb, Americans outside of big cities were more likely to vote for Mr Trump, and the same people are also less likely to believe in man-made climate change. It is far easier to doubt that the planet is choking when even the declining heavy industry in your small town exists against a backdrop of the general American wide-open massiveness of everything…
    Mr Trump has sworn to rip up most of Barack Obama’s environmental policies, and probably even meant it. In his transition team, such things are the remit of Myron Ebell, a climate sceptic so hawkish that he makes Lord Lawson of Blaby look like Swampy.
    Mr Trump lacks the power to cancel last year’s Paris agreement, under which most of the world agreed to limit their emissions, but he can certainly ignore it, and surely will…
    For the most part small-town America will cheer him on while urban America, to put it mildly, will not…
    Here in Britain, nobody really talks about climate change any more. Even our Green Party is less green than red…
    Environmentalists are reeling. Last week, the 22nd UN climate change conference concluded in Morocco, the first since the triumphs of Paris. Amid the great American meltdown, hardly anybody even noticed…
    Well, they’re backed into a corner now. On their crowded buses and subways, and in their tiny, expensive homes, they have witnessed the war against experts and facts, and seen the wrong side win, again and again. And perhaps, before too long, they’ll start looking for a banner around which they can coalesce. Don’t bet against it being green.
    http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/the-times/planet-destroyers-back-on-the-march-again-after-trumps-victory/news-story/c6b9ae6ac861363b6b24c82422db3c34

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    To give a sense of what is happening out here in fly-over land. The fastest growing Minnesota high school sport is skeet shooting. In 2009, competitive clay-target shooting drew 30 participants. This summer, it drew 6,000 with 20,000 spectators.

    While the coastal elites and urbanites are decidedly anti-gun, us deplorables still cling, harder, to our guns.

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    pat

    21 Nov: InvestorsBusinessDaily: Kerry Jackson: Global Warming: Trump Is Adult Supervision The Climate Kids Need
    Outgoing United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki Moon says the Paris climate deal is unstoppable. That’s nothing more than what he wants the world to think. It can be stopped in the U.S., and if that happens, it will be shut down.
    And who needs it anyway? The Earth is cooling.
    Moon and French President Francois Hollande, both horrified that American voters would choose a candidate who isn’t squeezing political mileage out of the man-made global warming hysteria, announced a week after Donald Trump was elected that the 2015 Paris Agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions will not be rescinded.
    Moon said “what was once unthinkable has become unstoppable.” Hollande called the deal “irreversible.”
    Certainly the elitists who want to run the world through the government policies and international agreements they enact after they’ve frightened the public about some phantom menace or other tried their best to make sure that’s the case…
    Obama’s signed acceptance is a scrap of paper with little authority, just the selfish, unilateral, pen-and-phone act of one person among 325 million. Without the U.S. as a fully bound party to an authentic treaty, the deal might as well have never been written…
    Actually, if a recent report is correct, even if all countries cut their emissions more deeply than the targets set in the Paris deal, the efforts would still be useless. According to the Real Climate Science blog, there has been “record global cooling over the last eight months.”
    The alarmists will pooh-pooh the report, of course. But it can be no more erroneous than their record. Their climate models have overestimated the warming, sometimes wildly so, and the temperature record is at best uncertain. Trump just might be the adult who will finally tell the children their game is over.
    http://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/global-warming-trump-is-adult-supervision-the-climate-kids-need/

    21 Nov: Syracuse.com: Glenn Coin: It’s been snowing for 38 hours in Syracuse — and we’re at almost 20 inches
    That makes Sunday and Monday the second-snowiest two-day period on record for November. The record belongs to Nov. 29 and 30, 1944, when 20.1 inches fell.
    With just 1.3 inches more today, that record could be broken. The next official reading will be about 7 p.m…
    http://www.syracuse.com/weather/index.ssf/2016/11/its_been_snowing_for_38_straight_hours_in_syracuse_–_and_its_not_done.html

    101

  • #
    Dave in the States

    People that live in urban centers, and academia, and consider themselves the elites of society often look down upon rural society as poorly educated and less intelligent. This is not true generally and I could cite numerous examples. However, I will cite only one.

    A few years ago a very attractive young female TV news anchor came to my father’s small town to cover a political rally. She saw my elder father get out of his beat up old pick up truck in his beat up old cowboy hat, and decided to interview him about economics and climate change (the political rally was in part about CPP). My father, who holds a bachelors and a masters in science and has many additional post graduate credits since receiving degrees, not to mention a lifetime of experience in the real world, did not give her the answers she was expecting. You should have seen the look on her face when my father started educating her. The interview in whole or in part was never aired that I am aware of.

    241

  • #
    Ruairi

    The U.S. now needs to decide,
    That the urban-rural divide,
    Between city adorables,
    And country deplorables,
    Should end and be swept to one side.

    230

    • #
      Oliver K. Manuel

      Yes. Not just the USA, but the whole world. We each have to be the change we want to see in the world!

      We now have an opportunity
      To replace deceit with truth,
      Contempt with compassion,
      Hatred with understanding.

      We’re all on the same journey,
      Marching from birth to death.
      We didn’t ask to be here, and
      We’ll depart without request.

      Let’s leave the world better
      For all those coming next
      cause we made the journey first

      100

    • #
      Annie

      Just when I think you can’t get any better, you come up with something even more brilliant Ruairi!

      Deplorable Annie.

      50

  • #
    Lionell Griffith

    The MSM and the establishment “ruling” class have been at war with reality. They believed they controlled reality by controlling what the makers and traders thought, said, and did. They thought they had made sure the makers and traders could not act without their rules, restrictions, and permission.

    Yet every thing the establishment “ruling” class did required confiscation of the wealth created by the makers and traders, at the point of the government gun. Which itself was created by the makers and traders. The “ruling” class contributed NOTHING but still more government. All the makers and traders had to do was wake up and say “Enough is enough! Begone with you!”

    The entire alternate universe that had been carefully constructed, by the establishment “ruling” class, was shattered and is crumbling into a justly deserved trash heap. It is truly a remarkable revolution.

    An important question remains, will the outcome be a Second American Revolution leading to a free, stronger, and productive nation or a replay of the French Revolution leading to still one more failed attempted empire.

    Benjamin Franklin (1706–90)

    “Well, Doctor, what have we got—a Republic or a Monarchy?”

    “A Republic, if you can keep it.”

    Can we keep it?

    At least we have a chance. That is more than I would have said two years ago.

    140

  • #
    crosspatch

    I would suggest they not read too much into Trump’s win. It is more about Hillary being that bad than Trump being that good. The Democrats have lost their base outside of the coast cities through their own actions but Hillary was exactly the worst possible candidate the Democrats could have chosen.

    132

    • #
      TdeF

      No, Trump is really good. It is only the press which makes him out to be bad. We now know the very worst of Trump and he is no crook and he is no saint. Saint Hilary was supported by 95% of journalists and the media and almost nothing bad was said. She was carried out of one presentation stiff as a board, but nothing was said. The Trump foundation was hardly mentioned and the pay for play scandal too. The fact that everyone had copies of the emails of the secretary of state was ignored. The FBI and NYPD investigations will continue.

      The result with a fair and balanced media picture of both candidates would have been a landslide for Trump even in the coast cities. We were told blacks, latinos, the poor, the people on welfare would all vote Democrat regardless. It was just not true. Only Trump gave them hope of a better tomorrow. The educated and privileged voted Hilary, 98.3% in D.C. and over 60% in New England (except New Hampshire) but it was not enough. The Democrats did not lose their base, they lost their way. All the Democrats promised was more of the same plus confrontation with Russia and another lawyer President.

      40

    • #
      Mark D.

      It is more about Hillary being that bad than Trump being that good.

      Fair dinkum at face value. What remains to be seen is what Trump is capable of doing that you will find to be good. He’s in now and I have significant hope.

      Hillary would have been BAD. Donald remains to be seen.

      10

  • #
    mike restin

    If that’s all it was one of the better candidates would have won the primary.
    Clinton would have beat Bush, Rubio, Cruz and all the rest like a drum.
    The first time she yelled sexist they would have hidden under the bed.
    Trump won because he was the only one smart enough to know how to demolish Clinton.
    Some of us knew he would win.
    Rallies of thousands and thousands of people everywhere he went.
    She had hundreds, sometimes not so many.
    He beat the media, the Republicans, the Democrats, the unions, Hollywood plus all of Obama’s government.
    But mostly, he beat Soros!
    I’d say he’s pretty much what many in our country are looking for.

    190

  • #
    Ross

    “But mostly, he beat Soros!”

    Absolutely Mike. Whoever is finally confirmed as AG needs to go after Soros –I believe it is a crime to pay for protests/riots, for a start. He’ll probably run away like he has effectively done with Russia where there is a standing arrest warrant out for him but somehow he needs to be stopped.

    110

    • #
      Rod Stuart

      One could always hope that the bastard will croak, but he has a son Alex to carry on the devil’s work. (and the money)

      10

  • #

    I hate to be downbeat in such upbeat company, but there are one or two slightly worrying developments, including this article in the Guardian. Politicians, as we all know, sometimes say things to get elected and then soften their stance to appease those in the establishment. It is human nature.

    51

    • #
      Graeme No.3

      It is only The Guardian, probably indulging in wishful thinking – their favourite pastime ( wishing not thinking ).

      50

    • #
      el gordo

      Donald is a skeptic but knows little of climate change.

      20

      • #
        TdeF

        What is there to know? What Climate change? What Global Warming? What good is the $1,000Bn a year doing? Trump knows all he needs to know.

        60

        • #
          el gordo

          He’s a commercial skeptic and thinks finances should be returned to homegrown environment issues around the world than wasted on stopping global warming.

          Its been the hottest year ever and global cooling is set to begin, it would be nice if he just came out and said it.

          20

          • #
            TdeF

            The hottest year ever, by 0.01C? Year to year temperature has to go up, stay still or go down. How much fiddling was required to stop it going down, so necessarily creating this amazing ‘hottest year ever’, the only acceptable figure. Imagine if they had to announce the world temperature had gone down, even by 0.01C?

            I remain totally skeptical of the alleged 0.5C (pre satellite) computed increase in the 1980s as instrumental changed slowly from thermometers to thyristors.

            The more reasonable conclusion is that the temperature has not changed significantly for 50 years, if you even ascribe to the idea of a world temperature and how it is defined and derived and what it means. The planet is not an homogenous radiator with constant surface conditions. It also has huge cycles, the biggest being the ice ages. As for the idea that the temperature was once ideal because it was, who said so? There is certainly no 0.5C per decade, +5C in 100 years as was originally predicted with certainty. It is all vanishing. Why should Trump care? Governments and mankind does not control the world temperature, at least not until someone can actually prove such an incredible idea.

            20

    • #
    • #
      TdeF

      More that politicians find the administration is packed with people who voted 98.3% for Hilary. Thousands of Sir Humphrey Applebees. It is possibly why Donald Trump will surround himself with people he knows act for him, not frustrate him. There is absolutely nothing good about Climate Change and no one really knows what it is.

      A good proportion of Americans think it is a hoax. It is. Climate Security is another new scare when Energy Security is really under threat in Australia as working, reliable power plants are dynamited by extreme Green governments.

      So I cannot see Trump backtracking from his vehement dislike for Global Warming which is not happening, expensive energy, endless windmills to no point and handing America’s jobs overseas. Where is the Climate actually changing? How can Carbon Dioxide change the climate when it cannot even change the temperature? How can anyone tell the cause of any change, even if one could be identified. Is there in fact a single prediction of the Climate Change army which has come true?

      No, Trump will not back down. The question in Australia is when the Liberal party and the Nationals will realise that Malcolm Turnbull is killing their government and put Abbott back before it is too late. Abbott would present the ABCC three times again and go straight to another election, adding One Nation to his coalition. Waffling effete Turnbull is unelectable and the election made matters worse. South Australians would vote for more electricity. Victorians would vote for better government. Queensland is in electoral revolt against both the Liberals and Labor.

      Tony Abbott called Climate Science ‘crap’. He agrees with Trump. He agrees with Nigel Farage. It is time for the National Party to act, or kiss their support goodbye.

      120

      • #
        el gordo

        Barnaby for PM.

        30

      • #
        el gordo

        ‘Is there in fact a single prediction of the Climate Change army which has come true?’

        https://sunshinehours.files.wordpress.com/2016/11/global_sea_ice_extent_zoomed_2016_day_326_1981-2010.png

        What is your opinion of this universal impact of climate change?

        On the ground the greenleftoids are talking seriously of a ‘tipping point’.

        10

        • #
          TdeF

          This is one of those (Arctic only) deliberate optical illusions where the lowest result is placed at the bottom and the zero is not shown at all. The drop is only 20% of very little. This is sea ice. It is more than compensated by the huge, maximum ever recorded ice growth in central Antarctica, not just the sea ice which is seasonal but on the plateau. It corresponds by my calculations to about 6mm in dropping sea levels. No one mentions this huge event.

          There is more. The average temperature in the Arctic in summer is 0C and it can get to 25C. Ice melts. Significantly because the average is 0C, the sea ice extent is highly variable and can be very deceptive and ultimately meaningless. A warm wind can change everything. All the ice could vanish and it would mean very little. It means nothing to ocean levels as the ice is floating and if it all vanished, that would be a boon for trade, a really good thing. After all, the 2km ice sheet over the Northern latitutdes vanished only 10,000 years ago. We are all so grateful as 60% of humanity now lives in that region. Only 2% of humanity live south of the Tropic of Capricorn.

          However in Antarctica where the temperature average ranges from -50C in winter to -25C in summer, there is no impact of Global Warming but the ice sheet is growing. Why? Global Cooling? This change, unlike the highly variable northern sea ice is highly significant and points to Global Cooling, not warming. Cooling is scary. Warming is welcome. Only a nutcase would want the ice age to begin. Even with all the energy in the world, you cannot live under kms of ice.

          41

          • #
            el gordo

            Yeah but all the action is taking place in the mid-latitudes, high winds and extremes in temperature are typical of a plunge into a mini ice age.

            I consider the weak polar vortex at both poles is responsible for the low sea ice.

            20

  • #
    Paul

    I’ve thought for the last several yrs that if all you watched was network tv and the commercials, you would assume that everyone in the US was in a bi-racial relationship and every family had at least one LGBT (NTTIAWWT)

    50

    • #
      Mari C

      TV is so reliable, yes? Especially the ads. That this on the tv at all is proof that some things have changed hugely, and I don’t want to see things go back. There isn’t enough love in the world, too much anger, and accepting bi and multi -racial -orientation couples isn’t the end of the world. Hatred and war is.

      Most people don’t care, one way or the other, as long as it isn’t shoved in their faces. I may be a liberal on issues like race, orientation, but even those I know who aren’t just don’t care who does what as long they don’t have to watch or participate.

      00

  • #

    My only concern here is that, if you look at sites like news.com, or listen to the morning TV MSM, they are now stating Trump will not follow up on the Clinton wrongdoing, and is making softening noises relating to AGW. This would be a disaster in my eyes. Trump was elected on certain key issues, to demonstrably abandon them even before he’s sitting in the chair would be tantamount to saying we were completely fooled, and it’s too late to do anything about it. Trum HAS to abandon the TPP, he can at least leave to Congress, via its oversight role, any investigation into the Clinton pay to play, the foundation etc; Get in a new FBI Director, completley defund the UN in relation to Climate Change; overhaul immigation and sort out the EPA. Anything less, he’s a failure in my eyes.

    70

    • #
      Mark M

      Perhaps Trump has said this so Obama has no reason to pardon Hillary before he goes?

      And, it is all over the MSM, who failed to see Trump’s manipulation of them and the subsequent exposure of the MSM’s failure to report news.

      Trump is not POTUS, yet, and, there are ongoing investigations underway related to the emails.

      Trump showed he is no-ones’ fool.

      40

    • #
      Deplorable Lord Jim

      Donald Trump’s Contract with the American Voter

      SECOND, I will announce our withdrawal from the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

      FIFTH, I will lift the restrictions on the production of $50 trillion dollars’ worth of job-producing American energy reserves,including shale, oil, natural gas and clean coal.

      SIXTH, lift the Obama-Clinton roadblocks and allow vital energy infrastructure projects, like the Keystone Pipeline, to move forward.

      SEVENTH, cancel billions in payments to U.N. climate change programs and use the money to fix America’s water and environmental infrastructure

      https://assets.donaldjtrump.com/_landings/contract/O-TRU-102316-Contractv02.pdf

      100

    • #
      ROM

      Just been reading through the political commentariat re Trump in the media and on the net.

      So much of this commentariat have never been elected to political office and therefore had to both adhere to the policies they espoused to get elected and to carry the public with them to get those policies implemented.
      Nor have they ever had to face up to the public and explain how and why their policies failed or did not achieve what they claimed they were going to.

      Yet in their total arrogance and hubris the same media commentariat continue to hand out utterly impractical and useless advice based mostly on bias and ignorance of the real world of the ordinary citizen outside of the media bubble they inhabit, to Trump and the politicals who have been elected to run the country and who will have to answer for any policies they implement.
      The same media commentariat will then tear them to pieces and walk away secure in the knowledge nobody, they assume perhaps with not quite the same arrogant cockiness as previously, will ever call them to account for the immense damage they have been doing and have done to society when they abandoned any pretence at being impartial and unbiased and totally faithful to the facts in all of their media presentations.

      But what has struck me about the almost universal attitude of the media commentariat is their almost total inability to break away from looking at everything Trump does through the political lenses they themselves have used and become rigidly fixated on throughout their professional political commentary lives.

      They seem utterly incapable of recognising that politically Trump is a out and out political mutation driven by the formerly hidden and elitist dismissed forces of the abandoned ones, Clinton’s so described “Deplorables”.

      The media commentariat have failed almost completely to recognise that Trump has never had a deeply imprinted political culture and therefore a deeply imprinted political way of thinking and acting.
      He has never been at any time a political operator and therefore culturally, at a very deep psychological level does not think like a long term politician and the way the same politically ingrained media commentariat think.

      Trump first, last and always at his age and with his life experiences will always be deep down both mentally and culturally, a developer, a builder, a creator and finally an organiser of people to run the real estate empire he personally created.

      He will think and act very differently in his decision making and in times of trouble to somebody who has been a part of the political establishment for a long time as are almost without exceptions, every Presidential and political leadership contender everywhere.

      To the political commentariat Trump will appear to be unpredictable but only because the media political commentariat are themselves almost totally ignorant of any profession and job and the culture and mentality outside of the media bubble, that goes with those professions and jobs and the ways of thinking of the citizens who hold down those jobs
      The political commentariat who have lived in a political bubble for all of their working lives are going to be mostly and completely non plussed by many of Trump’s decisions .

      And for some or most they will demonstrate that they are so rigid in their thinking and political culture that they will fail to adapt to and grasp Trump’s ways of working as a President.

      And that is a point that has been entirely overlooked by the media and the political and the anti Trump elitist establishment in America.
      And perhaps even more so in the European political establishment which makes the American political elitist establishment look positively proletarian.

      Trump will either make a great President or be a failure.

      But he has broken wide open an elitist political culture that was becoming so entrenched, so self aggrandising and so selfish and narrow in its outlook and so disrespectful and contemptuous of the great mass of the citizens that it was well down the road to steadily destroying the freedoms and the drive and flexibility of the western democratic nations and their citizens.

      And those same citizens, those Deporables have finally found a potential political saviour and are now taking the opportunity to give the single digit salute to the elitist political and media establishments across the western world.

      80

    • #
      TdeF

      This is the MSM, especially the unaccountable, irresponsible and even communist ABC trying to paint Trump as deceitful and to force his policy direction by telling him what the ‘people’ think, when in fact it is what their journalists think. Malcolm Turnbull used this to paint Abbott as unpopular when Abbott would have romped home mid term in the Canning by election, which is what Turnbull and his turncoats feared.

      Many journalists now print their opinions as fact, the absolute truth, the feeling of the community and use their position to act as the government in waiting. They report some facts and not others. We were told Latinos hated Trump. The opposite was true. So papers like the Melbourne ‘Age’ are dying because people do not want to be told what to think. You now have to read a newspaper carefully, trying to pull the bones out of the prejudice. Which media predicted Trump would win 300 electoral college seats? None.

      As for the juvenile, even puerile web sites like news.com.au, they are just annoying shallow, rubbish now. It’s hard to know what happened as they are too busy commenting on Trump’s choice of clothes or his hair or his wife’s accent, when she at least speaks multiple languages.

      Trump will be a great President, for all Americans. You could not be worse than Obama/Clinton. Nothing good happened in his 8 years. Nothing good can happen in Malcolm Turnbull’s ineffectual posturing, chasing after Obama, chasing the TPP, chasing Climate Change. Yesterday’s man meeting yesterday’s President.

      40

    • #
      Mari C

      Trump doesn’t have to prosecute Hillary. Now that the election, and all the pressures of politics, are done, whatever information they have can be quietly rechecked and someone else can make the decision. I don’t think they will send her to jail, but I doubt she, or her hubby, will have the influence or power they once had. No one wants to touch something shown to be dirty, lest they be drawn into the muck themselves.

      00

      • #
        Rod Stuart

        Andrew Bolt(probably doesn’t mean anything to you Mari, as he is a Conservative Aussie TV presenter and blogger) annoyed me on his show last night because he referred to this statement as a ‘broken promise’. It annoyed me for this reason:
        a) There is a nasty little habit of pretending that ANYTHING a politician said during an election campaign is a promise. Even a declaration made in good faith is not a ‘promise’ if the situation changes. In this case it was a debating point that Trump made during the second debate.
        b)While it was a good debating point, the reality of the situation is that the executive and judicial branches are quite separate. It is not within the President’s bailiwick to direct the judicial branch to do anything, except maintain law and order. It is possible that Trump did not even realise that, or at least didn’t think it through in the heat of the moment.
        c)It was very wise for Kellyanne to come out the other day and say that Trump had decided not to PURSUE HRC over her ‘EMAIL DISGRESSIONS’. This could be because the quality of advisors he is assembling pointed out that even after 20 Jan he cannot insist or even suggest to his new AG that anyone be ‘pursued’. It is more likely that the statement is intended to project some empathy, some forgiveness, and most of all some unification of the polarised political scene.
        d)Bolt is usually more astute than to be critical of a decision without understanding its basis. For 18 months now, the lamestream media has been parroting the idea that Trump is not a politician, and does not understand politics. I believe this is a stroke of political genius. Regardless of what he said during the debate, there has always been the possibility that Obama will pardon HRC during the first two weeks of January. This carries risk for both Obama and HRC, since it is essentially an admission of HRC’s guilt. But if Obama were to pardon her now, after Trump has declared his intention not to pursue, it would make both Obama and HRC look stupid. At the same time, it is impossible to interpret Kellyanne’s statement as a declaration that Trump will pardon Billary. Far from it. DJT knows full well that the FBI are in full investigation mode of other more serious infractions, in particular with not only the Clinton Foundation, but the pedophilia, child abduction, and murder scandals. If there is a connection that can be made linking either or both Clintons to executions past and present, trips on the Lolita Express, Haitian children, Seth Rice, Monica Petersen, Vince Foster, etc., the FBI will bring the case forward to an honest AG and justice will take its course without any presidential involvement at all, as it should be.
        They said that DJT was no politician, but I believe he has out pollied them all.

        00

  • #
    Ross Stacey

    In latest ABC news Trump is softening stance on Climate Change. Humans may be having an influence.

    01

  • #
    redress

    With reference to #19 and #19.3 above, I think that all will be revealed AFTER the Electoral College finalises their vote on Decenber 19th.when the electors of the Electoral College will cast their ballots. Until then, the Election is not concluded…..Until then. Donald Trump may want to keep his powder dry.

    While Donald Trump is still nominaly President, there is the very remote possibility that those elected to the Electoral College can change the way they vote from the way their states voted, i.e. vote for the Democratic candidate instead of President-elect Donald Trump.

    Its called “Faithless Elector” and has been done before, most recently in 2008.

    Change.org are currently running a petition to try and achive just that outcome. The petition is based on the concept of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.

    https://www.change.org/p/electoral-college-electors-electoral-college-make-hillary-clinton-president-on-december-19?utm_campaign=autopublish&recruiter=330624291&utm_medium=facebook&utm_source

    Ten states Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Washington, Vermont, California, Rhode Island and New York and the District of Columbia have signed on to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, in which states agree to award all their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote. The Compact only takes effect when states totalling 270 electoral votes sign on.

    Most electors are loyal members of the party that selected them, and in 26 states, plus Washington, D.C., electors are bound by laws or party pledges to vote in accord with that vote.
    However…………
    Electors could, in principle, change their vote, but doing so is rare, and, while this actually seems to be technically possible, realistically, considering how big a lead Trump has, who the electors are, how their votes are counted, and hundreds of years of American democratic norm I sincerely hope it will not happen.

    The media and the Clinton Push is trying desperately to achieve this “Faithless Elector” outcome, and appears to be gaining some momentum.

    30

    • #
      Mark D.

      If you want to see riots in the streets, it will happen if the Electors go against Trump.

      It won’t start in the streets, mind you, it will be along country roads and marching for miles out to the streets. If I were a street urchin, I’d be very worried about what comes from the country-especially if they are angry.

      30

    • #
      el gordo

      Thanks for that information redress, unlikely to happen because of the very strong possibility of a violent political revolution in its wake.

      20

  • #
    pat

    redress –

    another mad piece, ***but faithless electors don’t have the final say anyway:

    21 Nov: Politico: Kyle Cheney: Democratic presidential electors revolt against Trump
    Even the most optimistic among the Democratic electors acknowledges they’re unlikely to convince the necessary 37 Republican electors to reject Trump — the number they’d likely need to deny him the presidency and send the final decision to the House of Representatives.
    ***And even if they do, the Republican-run House might simply elect Trump anyway…
    http://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/democrats-electoral-college-faithless-trump-231731

    20

  • #
    pat

    re Trump & Paris Agreement.

    it is a completely toothless Agreement, even more so after Marrakech, and Trump is taking a different route to dismantling CAGW legislation anyway.

    22 Nov: NYT: Donald Trump’s New York Times Interview in 12 Tweets
    Asked by the Op-Ed columnist Thomas L. Friedman about whether he thought human activity was linked to climate change, Mr. Trump said: “I think there is some connectivity. Some, something. It depends on how much.”
    But while acknowledging the connection, he said in response to questions about the warming climate that he was thinking about “how much it will cost our companies.”…

    MSM always chooses to mock Trump with the “China” hoax stuff, but he has been more nuanced in the past, something they preferred to ignore:

    13 Sept: The Hill: Timothy Cama: Trump: Climate change science still needs to be ‘investigated’
    Responding to a questionnaire from Scientific American and numerous scientific organizations, Trump repeated his doubt about climate change, putting quotes around the term and saying that the country’s limited resources should probably go somewhere other than fighting it
    “There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of ‘climate change,’” he wrote…
    He then wrote that the country’s limited money should “perhaps” go to other causes, like ensuring clean water, fighting malaria, feeding a growing population or even reducing the need for fossil fuels.
    “Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels,” he said. “We must decide on how best to proceed so that we can make lives better, safer and more prosperous.”
    Later, on the topic of scientific integrity, Trump wrote that “science is science and facts are facts.”…
    Democrat Hillary Clinton, by contrast, said the science is “crystal clear” that climate change “is an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time and its impacts are already being felt at home and around the world.”…
    Green Party nominee Jill Stein called climate change the “greatest existential threat that humanity has ever faced”…
    Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson did not respond to the questionnaire, Scientific American said.
    http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/295633-trump-climate-change-science-still-needs-to-be-investigated

    10

  • #
    Analitik

    H/T Judith Curry’s blog site – The Real War on Science by John Tierney

    Referring to the “damage” by conservative CAGW “deniers” and “big oil” etc.

    Where are the scientists who lost their jobs or their funding? What vital research has been corrupted or suppressed? What scientific debate has been silenced?

    A very good read outlining the ad hominem attacks, groupthink / confirmation bias, distortion of data, total adherence to nurture over nature (incl gender inequality) and political activism used by the left in conjunction with the MSM to skew “science” to their ends. No wonder the masses are losing faith in anything to do with science.

    50

  • #
    pat

    written prior to the meeting with NYT:

    21 Nov: WaPo: Bjorn Lomborg: Trump’s climate plan might not be so bad after all
    It should not need to be restated in 2016 that climate change is real and mostly man-made. It is hard to know whether Trump will acknowledge this. He has called global warming a “hoax” perpetrated by the Chinese, but stated that this was a joke; he denied the existence of climate change during the campaign, but supported global warming action as recently as ***2009…
    So far, we know that President Trump will drop the Paris climate change treaty. This is far from the world-ending event that some suggest and offers an opportunity for a smarter approach…
    However, Paris was a well-meaning — if flawed — attempt to address a genuine global issue. With no international climate policies at all, it is probable that we would see a temperature rise of perhaps 7 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century…
    Climate economists have found that green energy R&D investment would be a much more efficient approach.
    This is very much in line with Trump’s campaign promise of “investment in research and development across the broad landscape of academia” and with its suggestion that we could develop “energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels.”
    This investment in U.S. ingenuity could help innovate the price of green energy down below fossil fuels…
    Statements by Trump’s campaign also indicate that the next administration will create a global development and aid policy that recognizes that climate is one problem among many.
    Asked about global warming, the campaign responded, “Perhaps the best use of our limited financial resources should be in dealing with making sure that every person in the world has clean water. Perhaps we should focus on eliminating lingering diseases around the world like malaria. Perhaps we should focus on efforts to increase food production to keep pace with an ever-growing world population.” …
    The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development analyzed almost all aid from the United States and other rich nations and found that about one-fourth is climate-related aid.
    This is immoral when 2 billion people suffer from malnutrition, 700 million live in extreme poverty and 2.4 billion are without clean drinking water and sanitation. These problems can be tackled effectively today, helping many more people more dramatically than “climate aid” could…
    Far from being a disaster, such a policy could mean a real solution to climate change and help the world’s worst-off more effectively.
    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trumps-climate-plan-might-not-be-so-bad-after-all/2016/11/21/f8c37aa8-acef-11e6-a31b-4b6397e625d0_story.html?utm_term=.a4b9c1f66772

    ***more to come on 2009.

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    pat

    online, much was made earlier in the year about this 2009 ad in NYT.

    Registered Democrat Trump – who has changed from Republican to Democrat to Independent multiple times – had re-registered as Republican in Sept 2009.

    AD PIC: 8 Jun: Grist: Donald Trump once backed urgent climate action. Wait, what?
    By Ben Adler and Rebecca Leber
    In every conceivable way, the letter contradicts Trump’s current stance on climate policy. On the campaign trail, Trump has said he is “not a big believer in man-made climate change.” …
    Trump’s signature on the ad, which ran in the Times on Dec. 6, 2009, stands out on a list dominated by liberal media and business figures, including the founder of Patagonia, the cofounders of Ben & Jerry’s, the president of CREDO Mobile, the executive producer of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, celebrity chef Tom Colicchio, actors Kate Hudson and Adrian Grenier, media heavyweights Martha Stewart and Graydon Carter, and New Age author Deepak Chopra.
    ***None of the signers that Grist interviewed this week could recall who had organized the letter or knew who had asked Trump to sign. The website of the group listed on the ad, businessleaders4environmentalchange.us, is now defunct, and no information was available on who had registered it…
    http://grist.org/politics/donald-trump-climate-action-new-york-times/

    ***Revkin jumped on this, but didn’t bother to clear up who placed the ad, which would have been a simple matter, no?

    AD PIC: 8 Jun: NYT Dot Earth: Andrew C. Revkin: A Glaring Climate Shift Joins Trump’s Long Line of Flip-Flops
    But Grist’s Ben Adler and Rebecca Leber have reported a fresh doozy, finding Trump’s name among dozens on a full-page ad that ran on Dec. 6, 2009, in The New York Times, as climate treaty talks were beginning in Copenhagen, calling for President Obama and Congress “to strengthen and pass United States legislation, and lead the world by example.” (Deepak Chopra, another signatory, published the letter(LINK) on Huffington Post.)
    Reflect for a second on just how profoundly the following portions of the ad text contradict Trump’s recent attacks on Obama’s climate concerns…
    http://mobile.nytimes.com/blogs/dotearth/2016/06/08/a-climate-contradiction-joins-trumps-long-line-of-flip-flops/

    more to come.

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    pat

    Grist/Revkin couldn’t find out the following? didn’t want to?

    5 Dec 2009: 1Sky.org: Business Leaders Rally Obama in NYTimes Ad
    By Gillian Caldwell
    Here’s a colorful, full-page ad that our wonderful friends at ABC Carpet and Home in NYC have sponsored to run in this Sunday’s New York Times.
    It’s a letter from businesses nationwide to President Obama and the Congress on the eve of the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, urging bold leadership here and abroad. Thanks to our colleagues at ***CERES for their ongoing work with us to bring businesses to the table.
    http://www.1sky.org/blog/2009/12/business-leaders-rally-obama-in-nytimes-ad

    check link for Sky1.org’s LENGTHY donors’ list & their allies page.

    2-part investigation. Skoll Foundation belongs to former eBay President, Jeff Skoll:

    March 2014: Counterpunch: 350.org’s Friends on Wall Street
    by Cory Morningstar
    An investigative report on the global “movement” to divest from fossil fuels. [Read Part 1 here.]
    (scroll down) Skeletons (and Skolls) in the CERES/1Sky Closet
    In 2009, 1Sky’s campaign director, ***GILLIAN CALDWELL, a lawyer by training, was paid $203,620 (US) through the Rockefeller Family Fund. Although McKibben often refers to 350.org/1Sky as a “scruffy little outfit” – a salary of more than $200,000 is hardly typical of a legitimate grassroots organization.
    In the Dec 3, 2009 article Prepping for Copenhagen as found on the Skoll Foundation website, the author reports, “The Skoll Foundation, along with a number of Skoll social entrepreneurs and partners, will be participating in the Copenhagen meetings on climate change later this month. Reflecting the high caliber of environmental leaders in the Skoll portfolio, some 10 Skoll social entrepreneurs and/or their organizations will be at Copenhagen: ACORE, Amazon Conservation Team, BioRegional Development Group, Ceres, EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East, Fundacion Gaia, Global Footprint Network, Health Care Without Harm, IDE-India, and ***GILLIAN CALDWELL (formerly of Witness), representing 1Sky.”…
    http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/03/14/350-orgs-friends-on-wall-street/

    the writer, Gillian Caldwell, is now head of Global Witness:

    July 2015: Global Witness: Welcome to Gillian Caldwell – our new CEO
    Gillian went on to head up WITNESS, an organisation co-founded by Peter Gabriel that has won multiple awards for its innovative approach to investigating and exposing international human rights abuses in their many guises. Later she led 1Sky, a US campaign that grew into 350.org…
    And now we are rallying ourselves around our next challenge – the greatest of our time – climate change. Gillian left WITNESS to focus on climate change because she was concerned that its humanitarian dimensions weren’t well recognised or addressed. In recent years we have been documenting the humanitarian crisis that is unfolding on our environmental frontiers – how people on the frontline of climate defence, far from being celebrated as the heroes they are, are being murdered at the hands of industries and governments seeking to grab their land, gut their forests, and hoover up the minerals beneath their homes…

    Jeff Skoll & TED owner, Chris Anderson, were both signatories to the 2009 NYT letter to Obama:

    March 2014 (pre-Caldwell): Global Witness receives two prestigious awards: The Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and the TED Prize

    ALL I WILL ADD IS…TRUMP, LIKE ALL OF US, IS ENTITLED TO CHANGE HIS MIND. GRIST WRITERS/REVKIN CAN’T SEEM TO IMAGINE THAT IS A POSSIBILITY!

    after all, jo and I voted Green, once upon a time…lol.

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    pat

    finally, it’s not just Myron Ebell that has the CAGW mob frothing at the mouth:

    19 Nov: ThinkProgress: Natasha Geiling: Donald Trump’s first staff picks all deny the threat of climate change
    Introducing the Five Horsemen of the Climate Apocalypse.
    Attorney General: Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL)
    In 2015, during a hearing on the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed budget, Sessions grilled EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy on her climate and weather knowledge, despite the fact that McCarthy is a bureaucratic administrator, not a climate scientist. Sessions then wrote McCarthy a letter claiming that “although questions regarding the impacts of climate change were clear and straightforward, none of the questions received direct answers, and many responses contained caveats and conditions.” …

    CIA Director: Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-KS)
    “There are scientists who think lots of different things about climate change,” Pompeo said. “There’s some who think we’re warming, there’s some who think we’re cooling, there’s some who think that the last 16 years have shown a pretty stable climate environment.”…

    National Security Advisor: Retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn
    Flynn’s most notable statement about climate change came this summer, in the wake of the mass shooting in Orlando, Florida. Weeks later, Obama traveled to Canada to discuss — among other things — climate change. Flynn went on Fox News to criticize Obama’s move, arguing that the president was more interested in climate change than national security.
    “And here we have the President of the United States up in Canada talking about climate change,” Flynn said. “I mean, God, we just had the largest attack…on our own soil in Orlando. Why aren’t we talking about that?…

    Chief White House Strategist: Steve Bannon
    Breitbart News, Bannon’s conservative website, has tried to claim that climate change is a hoax created by activists, scientists, and renewable energy executives. Breitbart has published pieces calling NASA and NOAA scientists “talent-less low-lives.”
    Bannon himself has accused the Pope of “hysteria” on climate change. He has called for unfettered fossil fuel extraction, arguing on a radio interview that there could be an “American renaissance, and an industrial renaissance in front of us, if we can just get the government out of our way.” James Delingpole, a British climate denier who Bannon recruited to write for Breitbart, told E&E News that “one of [Bannon’s] pet peeves is the great climate change con.”…

    White House Chief of Staff: Reince Priebus
    As RNC chair, Priebus oversaw an organization whose platform criticizes “Democratic party environmental extremists.” It calls the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “a political mechanism, not an unbiased scientific institution.” It rejects crucial international climate agreements, like the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement, and calls for shifting environmental policy from the federal level to the states.
    https://thinkprogress.org/trump-top-picks-climate-denial-record-d9e6f438b104?utm_source=Daily%20Carbon%20Briefing&gi=cc54bf1e7a12#.2kbueoffh

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    Dean

    And from the scienced up Huffington Post.

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2016/11/16/the-weirdest-ways-the-universe-is-reversing-climate-change/?utm_hp_ref=au-green

    Number 1 is bird poop helping to seed clounds. In an incredible display of the dangers of correlation equaling causation, the birds somehow know to come to the Arctic in Summer so they can poop to cool it down.

    Thanks birds indeed………

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    Angry

    There is a surprise waiting for leftist that try and disrupt Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day……….

    [Snip. Link to a site that does not meet standards] ED

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    pat

    22 Nov: Real Clear Politics: Carl Icahn: Question Isn’t Why Would You For Vote Trump, It’s Why Wouldn’t You Vote For Trump?
    Posted By Tim Hains
    Billionaire investor and Trump supporter Carl Icahn speaks with Fox Business Network’s Neil Cavuto about the president-elect’s proposals to reduce regulations on business and the energy industry, why working people supported Donald Trump, and whether or not he would consider taking a role in the Trump administration.
    About Trump’s appeal to working people, Icahn said: “The pundits all wonder what happened, but I think it was extremely simple… Think of a middle-class guy working out in the middle west. The real question is not why did he vote for [Trump], but why wouldn’t he vote for him?”
    “I said to Donald right in the beginning,” Icahn continued. “His message was right on. The only one that could defeat Donald was Donald, and he didn’t do it, he didn’t defeat himself.”…
    Watch the full interview below.
    Transcript: …
    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2016/11/22/icahn_question_isnt_why_would_you_for_vote_trump_its_why_wouldnt_you_vote_for_trump.html

    22 Nov: Real Clear Politics: Bernard Goldberg: The Tsunami the Media Never Saw Coming
    It’s no secret that reporters were rooting for Hillary Clinton. All that was missing were buttons on their coats saying, “I’m with her.” As Will Rahn nicely put it on the CBS News website: “Had Hillary Clinton won, there’d be a winking ‘we did it’ feeling in the press, a sense that we were brave and called Trump a liar and saved the republic.”
    The media elite thought she was right when she said half of Trump supporters belonged in a basket of deplorables. They thought if his minions weren’t racist or sexist, they were, you know, not too smart.
    So, on Election Day, voters fed up with the arrogance of the elites didn’t only reject Hillary Clinton — or Barack Obama and his legacy, or big swatches of liberal culture in general — they also rejected the liberal media elite, the ones who thought they were smarter and better than ordinary Americans…
    All of this got me thinking about something I wrote in my 2003 book, “Arrogance,” in a chapter entitled “Lose the Enablers”: …
    Here’s what I suggested: “I have come up with a list of five very nice places in this great country of ours, any one of which would be a good choice for ABC, NBC and CBS to locate their new worldwide news division headquarters, far from New York City.”
    I suggested, Tupelo, Mississippi, or Mitchel, South Dakota, or Oklahoma City, or Indianapolis, or Laughlin, Nevada.
    I could have picked a hundred different cities and towns. The places I settled on mattered only because they were not New York City or Washington, D.C…READ ON
    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/22/the_tsunami_the_media_never_saw_coming_132413.html

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    pat

    MSM loves this. even news.com.au already has it. CNN page autoplayed the final Clinton rally, with celebrities/noise when i opened it.

    billions of dollars are at stake with the Clinton loss, & Podesta & the gang aren’t going down quietly. truly disgusting:

    23 Nov: CNN: Dan Merica: Computer scientists urge Clinton campaign to challenge election results
    (CNN’s Theodore Schleifer and Jeremy Diamond contributed to this report.)
    Hillary Clinton’s campaign is being urged by a number of top computer scientists to call for a recount of vote totals in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, according to a source with knowledge of the request.
    The computer scientists believe they have found evidence that vote totals in the three states could have been manipulated or hacked and presented their findings to top Clinton aides on a call last Thursday.
    The scientists, among them J. Alex Halderman, the director of the University of Michigan Center for Computer Security and Society, told the Clinton campaign they believe there is a questionable trend of Clinton performing worse in counties that relied on electronic voting machines compared to paper ballots and optical scanners, according to the source.
    The group informed John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman, and Marc Elias, the campaign’s general counsel, that Clinton received 7% fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic voting machines, which the group said could have been hacked. Their group told Podesta and Elias that while they had not found any evidence of hacking, the pattern needs to be looked at by an independent review…
    Their urging was first reported by New York magazine…
    Additionally, at least three electors have pledged to not vote for Trump and to seek a “reasonable Republican alternative for president through Electoral College,” according to a statement Wednesday from a group called the Hamilton Electors, which represents them…
    http://edition.cnn.com/2016/11/22/politics/hillary-clinton-challenge-results/index.html

    COMMENT FREEREPUBLIC: Oh, and it just happens to be in three states that went for Trump. Gee, not a hint of bias from these “scientists.” What about New Hampshire? Nevada? New Mexico? Minnesota? Virginia? States that went blue are apparently free of any problems!

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    pat

    risk averse children:

    22 Nov: ABC: AP: Phuong Lee: Washington State Youth Sue Government Over Climate Change
    The petitioners, between 12 and 16 years old, asked a state judge to step in and require the state Department of Ecology to come up with science-based numeric emissions reductions.
    The state argued that it has complied with the court’s prior orders and there’s no basis for finding the Department of Ecology in contempt.
    After hearing arguments Tuesday afternoon, King County Superior Court Judge Hollis Hill said she needed more time and would rule at a later date.
    The case is part of a nationwide effort led by the Oregon-based nonprofit Our Children’s Trust to force states and the federal government to take action on climate change…
    Aji Piper, 16, of Seattle is a plaintiff in both the federal and Seattle cases. He said he and others are fighting for their right to live in a world that is healthy, safe and sustainable…
    http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/juvenile-activists-sue-government-climate-change-policy-43725711

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    pat

    as I commented on a previous thread, this program should have been pulled. period.

    23 Nov: Quadrant: Tony Thomas: Alberici and Their ABC, At It Again
    The latest episode of Foreign Correspondent says so much about the spigot of bias that is our national broadcaster it is difficult to know where to begin. Let us start, though, with the show’s inherent dishonesty — and then wonder why an allegedly conservative government funds a billion-dollar disgrace
    READ ALL
    http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2016/11/alberici-abc/

    a Republican I’ve always enjoyed reading:

    22 Nov: Real Clear Politics: Patrick Buchanan: A Besieged Trump Presidency Ahead
    The arrogance, the assumed posture of moral superiority, the conceit of our cultural elite, on exhibit on that stage Friday night, is what Americans regurgitated when they voted for Donald Trump.
    Yet the conduct of the “Hamilton” cast puts us on notice. The left neither accepts its defeat nor the legitimacy of Trump’s triumph…
    Among the reasons the hysteria over the Trump election has not abated is that the media continue to stoke it, to seek out and quote the reactions they produce, and then to demand the president-elect give assurances to pacify what the Post says…READ ON
    http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/11/22/a_besieged_trump_presidency_ahead_132412.html

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    Anton

    These people live in coastal cities? Almost a pity that sea level isn’t rising dangerously…

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    RAH

    Heh! Anderson, IN ran Target out of town within 18 months after they disallowed Salvation Army bell ringers. the libtards don’t get it and will never get it no matter how they try to understand us folks in “flyover” country. We’re worlds apart. Just think back. Why was the nomenclature “silent majority” ever coined? It’s not because we’re actually silent! It’s because they didn’t bother to find out what we were saying. And when we did arise and go to them to let them know what we were thinking in the form of the Tea Party, they didn’t like what they heard and so denigrated us. And by “they” I don’t mean just the democrats either. The Republican establishment dominated by neocons were just as bad. So to all you Libtards and Republican Establishment Neocons that live and die by the echo chamber along I-95 from Boston to DC I have one thing to say. The “Silent Majority” has now spoken and CAN YOU HEAR US NOW?

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