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JUNE 22, 2022

NAILING THE MEDIA.  GUILTY AS CHARGED:  Apparently, many of those terrible things we say about the media are true.  From The Hill:

To say there’s a disconnect between many journalists and the public they serve is a gross understatement, according to a new in-depth survey by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center. 

Per Pew, 65 percent of the nearly 12,000 journalists surveyed say the media do a solid job of “covering the most important stories of the day” and reporting news accurately. But a solid majority of the American public at large has the opposite view, with just 35 percent feeling the same way. That’s a 30-point perception gap. 

When asked if journalists perform well when “serving as a watchdog over elected leaders,” 52 percent of journalists agreed. But the number dropped precipitously again when the general public was asked, with less than 3 in 10 agreeing with the assessment. 

When asked if journalists manage and correct misinformation consistently, 43 percent of those in the industry said yes, while just 25 percent of the general public agreed. 

Almost half (46 percent) of journalists said they felt connected to their readers and viewers, while just one-quarter of the public says they feel connected to the media outlets from which they get their news. 

So why the disconnect? Perhaps it’s like the old saying about the key to good real estate: Location, location location. Most of the national media are located in two places: New York City and Washington, D.C. 

In the 2020 election, just 9 percent of Manhattan voters voted for Donald Trump. In D.C., the Trump support was just 5.4 percent, underscoring that those who live in or near these cities exist in overwhelmingly liberal silos. It’s only human nature that a journalist’s perception of issues will generally conform to the places and people with whom he works and lives.

Longtime newsman Bob Schieffer dove into this subject a few years back, explaining just how insulated journalists have become.

“In 2004, one reporter in eight lived in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles,” Schieffer notes in his must-read book “Overload: Finding the Truth in Today’s Deluge of News.” “That number is now down to one-in-five who live in those three places.”

COMMENT:  Read the rest.  A well-reported story, though I can't be shocked by the findings.  The press tilts leftward, and a great deal of damage is done by that tilt.  First, the perception of bias diminishes public belief in the press.  In a true national emergency, that can be catastrophic.

Joseph Pulitzer set the standard in the 20th century, trying to establish a press that would report "without fear or favor."  That standard is largely gone, replaced by something we started to see in the 1960s – a press made up of people who think their job is not to report the news, but to create a better society, one with liberal values. 

When the story of our time is written by historians, and if it is a story of a diminishing nation, I believe that the historians will attribute a great deal of the decline to an egotistical, underinformed press that has forgotten its true mission.  Sad.

June 22, 2022     Permalink

THE TITANIC IS SINKING.  QUICK, GET A BAND-AID, OR IS IT A BIDEN-AID?  The president of the United States has thought carefully and deeply about prices at the pump.  He has come up with an answer that salutes his intellect.  Please stop laughing.  It's not nice.  From Fox Business: 

President Joe Biden will ask Congress on Wednesday to suspend the federal gas tax until September as Americans across the country grapple with soaring prices as the pump.

The president will urge members of Congress to institute a three-month federal gas tax holiday without stripping money from the Highway Trust Fund that finances highways and mass transit.

"I want to be very clear, the president is calling on Congress to take this step to help American families without harming the Highway Trust Fund, which is funded by these taxes," a senior administration official said Tuesday evening.

The official suggested that the federal government's budget deficit shrinking by $1.6 trillion this year gives the U.S. leeway to suspend the gas tax while using other revenues to make the Highway Trust Fund whole for the roughly $10 billion cost.

The federal government currently charges 18 cents in taxes per gallon of gasoline and imposes a 20% tax for each gallon of diesel, the official said.

Biden will also call on states, oil companies and retailers to pause gas taxes. The Penn Wharton Budget Model published estimates Wednesday revealing that gas tax holidays in Georgia, Maryland and Connecticut saved consumers money at the pump. Most of the savings in these areas went to consumers instead of service stations and others in the energy sector.

The cost of gas began to soar last fall and continued to rise following Russia's invasion of Ukraine in late February, although the administration is framing the increase in gas prices as the "Putin price hike."

"[Biden] believes that states, oil companies and retailers have a responsibility in this unique moment – to do their part to ameliorate Putin's price hike," the official said. "He's calling on states to suspend their gas taxes or else find other ways to deliver the same relief, such as consumer rebates or relief payments."

The official further stated that the president is pushing for the gas industry and oil retailers to cut the price of gas as oil prices begin to lower.

"He is also calling on the industry to put its record profits to work and step up with more supply and more refining capacity to bring down gas prices and specifically calling for major oil refineries to come to the table with concrete solutions when the secretary of energy convenes them later this week," the official said.

"And when the cost of oil does come down as it has over the last couple of weeks, the president is calling on retailers to properly lower their prices and pass the savings on to consumers," the official continued.

The national average for a gallon of gas currently sits at near $5. Before this year, the highest national gas price average ever recorded by AAA was $4.114 per gallon in July 2008.

The president accused oil refiners of driving up gas prices in letters sent last week to seven refinery operators, including Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP. But oil refiners have said their ability to produce additional gas and diesel fuel is limited.

The American Petroleum Institute and American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers sent a joint letter to Biden last week saying that refineries are already operating close to their maximum capacity and nearly half of the capacity taken off-line was because of the facilities converting to renewable energy production.

And Chevron CEO Michael Wirth wrote a letter to Biden Tuesday pointing out that the company works every day to "help provide the world with the energy it demands and to lift up the lives of billions of people who rely on these supplies."

He continued, "Notwithstanding these efforts, your Administration has largely sought to criticize, and at times vilify, our industry. These actions are not beneficial to meeting the challenges we face and are not what the American people deserve."  

COMMENT:  It's a joke.  The savings to the American family will be small.  The real answer to our energy crisis is for the president to rescind the madhouse orders he gave on his inauguration day that vastly reduced energy production in the United States, and barred fracking, one of the most efficient methods of getting energy from the ground.  Biden did this to satisfy the hysterical left of his party and the fanatical extremists of the environmental movement.  Presumably, according to the left's political doctrine, the world would have come to an end if the president hadn't issued those orders.

Now we find Biden running around the world begging dictators to pump more oil.  What a contrast with the day President Trump left office.  Then, the United States was energy independent.  As a nation we had worked for that status for years.  And now it is gone.

June 22, 2022     Permalink

JUNE 21, 2022

MORE DEMOCRATIC EROSION:  There are fewer and fewer rented chairs needed for Democratic Party rallies.  The whole party might soon be enclosed in shrink wrap.

We have received reports for at least the last six months of how support for the Dems within the Hispanic community has nosedived.  Republicans are even dreaming, realistically I think, of winning a majority of Hispanic votes in upcoming elections.  A growing number of Hispanics, according to informed analysts, feel the Democratic Party no longer represents their interests or values, and actually does very little for the Hispanic community, which tends to be hard-working, church-going and socially conservative. 

We've speculated here that other minorities in the Democratic coalition would start to feel the same way, considering the party's lurch to the left, and its fairly strong obsession with African-American concerns.  Minority communities don't necessarily agree with each other, or even like each other.  And when one minority seems favored by the party, the others start to ask, "What about us?"

The fastest-growing minority in the United States is Asian-Americans.  Their general lifestyle doesn't sound much like a Democratic backyard
barbeque.  And indeed, new polling suggests that a number of Asian-Americans are looking for the Democratic off-ramp.  From CNN:

A lot of attention has been paid to the problems President Joe Biden and other Democrats have with core party constituencies, including young and Hispanic voters. And there's been plenty of polling to back that up.

Far less attention, though, has been paid to potential declines in Democrats' standing among groups for which polling is more limited. Getting data on these groups usually requires aggregating polls and looking at trends in real-world elections. I've noted, for instance, Biden's declining approval rating with Black adults.

But what about Asian American voters, who made up only 4% of the electorate in 2020? Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic portion of the electorate, which makes them electorally important.

And that's where we begin our statistical journey today.

My interest in examining Asian American voters within the context of the larger electorate came about because of what has arguably been the political earthquake of the year thus far -- the June 7 recall of progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin in deep-blue San Francisco.

One big reason Boudin went down to defeat: Asian American voters.

That election result and other data reveal that Asians are still likely to vote Democratic on the whole, but the party has seen a disproportionate decline in support among this group.
Let's start with the national polling. As I mentioned at the top, it's hard to get national polling that tracks Asian voters specifically. I would therefore take these trends as preliminary.

Pew Research Center polling, however, does show that Biden's standing with Asians has dropped precipitously. He's averaged a 53% approval rating and a 47% disapproval rating (or a +7 net approval rating, without rounding) in 2022 data. Biden won Asian voters by 44 points in 2020, according to Pew data.

In other words, his net approval margin with Asian adults now is 37 points lower than his margin over Republican Donald Trump among Asian voters in 2020.

That's far greater than the drop he's had with the electorate overall. Biden's net approval rating has averaged about -14 points this year in Pew polling. He won the 2020 election by a little less than 5 points, according to Pew data. That puts his net approval rating about 19 points lower than his margin over Trump in 2020.

A peek at the generic congressional ballot shows that these trends are not happening in a vacuum.

Pew's March poll gave Democrats a 28-point advantage among Asians on the ballot test, which asks voters which party they would support for Congress in their districts. That's 16 points lower than the margin Biden won them by in 2020. The same generic ballot had Democrats and Republicans tied among all voters, which is only about a 5-point drop for Democrats overall compared with Biden's 2020 margin. So the dip in Democratic support among Asian voters looks to be about 3 times as large as it is overall.

COMMENT:  The Democratic coalition, built largely around identity politics, appears to be crumbling.  We cannot know whether the crumble will stop and be reversed, or will continue and mark the end of the Democratic Party as we know it.   We can ask, of course, who would replace minority voters if they keep leaving.  The party reminds us of the old Soviet Union – people agitating to get out, not many agitating to get in. 

June 21, 2022     Permalink