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Poll: 77 percent say major news outlets report 'fake news'

More than 3-in-4 of 803 American respondents, or 77 percent, said they believe that major traditional television and newspaper media outlets report “fake news,” according to a Monmouth University poll released Monday, marking a sharp increase in distrust of those news organizations from a year ago, when 63 percent registered concerns about the spread of misinformation.

According to the Monmouth findings, 61 percent of Democrats believe outlets spread misinformation, up from 43 percent from last year with independents rising from 66 percent to 82 percent.

A suspected Russian spy was employed for more than a decade at the US Embassy in Moscow before being fired last year, a senior administration official tells CNN.

The woman, a Russian national, worked for the US Secret Service for years before she came under suspicion during one of the State Department regional security office's routine security reviews in 2016, the official said.

The security office found the woman was having regular, unauthorized meetings with the Russian intelligence service, the FSB.

The Guardian first reported the news.

"We figure that all of them are talking to the FSB, but she was giving them way more information than she should have," the official said.

The regional security office alerted the embassy in January 2017 and the woman was dismissed last summer, after being caught red-handed, the official said.

"We knew it was happening and it was just a process of playing it out and giving her specific information that we saw her give back to the FSB," the official said.

. The poll also finds that Pres. Trump continues to be less trusted than the major cable news outlets as an information source.

The Hot Seats: Republicans Are Barely Hanging On in Ohio, and Bigfoot Porn
A look at the week’s developments in key midterm races.
By JIM NEWELL

AUG 03, 201811:51 AM

We’re finally in August, an interminable final stretch of primaries and other weird nonsense that rises to national attention when people are bored in the late summer. The last big special election of the cycle will finally take place on Tuesday. It’s tight. Meanwhile, some governors’ races are settling into perspective, and a Democratic Senate candidate in a red state is openly saying that Democrats won’t take the majority. Also, Bigfoot’s penis.

Ohio’s 12th District
A dead heat in the final special election of the year.
Republicans have been banking on two late breaks to seal their victory in this Columbus-area special election between Democrat Danny O’Connor and Republican Troy Balderson. The first was a Balderson endorsement from the state’s popular governor, John Kasich, in an ad that is being widely broadcast. The second was O’Connor’s cable-news concession that he might, under certain circumstances, if there were truly no other choice, and there were a gun to his head, support Nancy Pelosi. These may still prove the difference, but they’re not registering sharply in polling in the solid-red district. A Monmouth University poll released this week, conducted in the final days of July, showed Balderson leading O’Connor by one percentage point, 44 to 43. Trump will descend on the district Saturday to juice GOP turnout. It could be a late Tuesday night.


Tennessee Senate
In which a Senate Democratic candidate downplays the possibility of a Democratic majority.
The Tennessee Senate race is now set after Democrat Phil Bredesen, the state’s centrist former two-term governor, and GOP Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a MAGA-as-hell conservative, won their primaries Thursday night. Winning this race is critical to Democrats’ long-shot efforts to take the Senate—and Tennessee Republicans are spreading that data point widely. That’s put Bredesen in the unusual situation of having to allay Tennessee voters’ fears of would-be Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “I expect to be in the minority,” Bredesen told Bloomberg in a story this week. “The number of things that’ve got to fall into place perfectly to get a majority this time around—it seems to me pretty unlikely. I just don’t see it happening.” Vote Democrat: It’s not like he’ll have power!

Texas Senate
Why can’t Ted Cruz put this to bed?
For a race that’s supposed to be comfortably Republican, we keep seeing polling that suggests Sen. Ted Cruz is going to have to grind this one out against his well-funded Democratic challenger, Rep. Beto O’Rourke. Earlier this week, a poll from the nonprofit Texas Lyceum showed Cruz leading by only two percentage points, 41 to 39 percent. A couple of hours later, a Quinnipiac survey came out showing Cruz ahead by six percentage points, stomping out some—some—of the alarmist headlines. It’s still incredible how much work O’Rourke, after nearly 18 months as a candidate, has to just introduce himself (or be introduced, unfavorably, by Cruz): In Quinnipiac, 43 percent of voters still haven’t heard enough to formulate an opinion of O’Rourke. As you might expect, people have no problem formulating an opinion of Ted Cruz. The new polling figures have at least caught Schumer’s attention.



North Dakota Senate
Candidates have an odd new choice: Stand with Trump or the Kochs.
North Dakota Senate candidate Kevin Cramer, who last week praised the Trump administration for bailing out farmers hurt in the president’s ongoing trade war, is getting the cold shoulder from Republicans’ biggest benefactors: The Koch network. Americans for Prosperity, the network’s political arm, announced this week that it wouldn’t back Cramer, as CNN reports, “for his support of a $1.3 trillion spending measure earlier this year and his reluctance to take on the White House on trade and tariffs.” This is not a choice that Republican candidates are used to: showing blanket fealty to the Republican president versus getting those Koch bucks.

Florida Governor
A shameless Trump kiss-ass gets rewarded. Sigh.
It’s all so vulgar. Florida gubernatorial candidate Rep. Ron DeSantis, a conservative Freedom Caucus member, releases an ad in which he instructs his toddler to “build the wall” with toy blocks. Trump returns the favor with a Tampa rally. “I wanted to be here to formally endorse Ron,” Trump said. “He is going to be an incredible governor,” Trump said, adding that he doesn’t “do these endorsements easily.” Trump is cautious, but when you offer video evidence of indoctrinating your children early on into his personality cult, he has no choice, as a statesman, but to wade in. Adam Putnam, DeSantis’ main rival for the nomination, can only watch in despair.


Maryland Governor
Leading Democrats are hesitant to support their leftist nominee.
Don’t be confused by Maryland’s status as a “solid blue” state. For one, consider that the current governor, Larry Hogan, is a popular moderate Republican. Maryland’s Democratic majorities have traditionally rested on federal workers in the Washington suburbs and black Americans in Baltimore; ideological leftists don’t usually make it very far. This year, though, one has: Ben Jealous, the former NAACP president and ardent Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, won the gubernatorial primary. He’s finding that it’s difficult to get the state’s centrist Democratic establishment to rally around him. The state Senate president, Mike Miller—who’s essentially ruled the state for decades—has only offered “tepid” support for Jealous, as the Washington Post reports, while offering kind words for Hogan. And the county executive of Montgomery County—the wealthy D.C. suburbs—so far won’t endorse Jealous over concerns that Jealous would soak his residents to fund his agenda.

Virginia’s 5th District
Bigfoot erotica. Bigfoot erotica? Bigfoot erotica.
I don’t know if it’s fair, or what it means, or what’s even going on in this country anymore, but Democrat Leslie Cockburn, at the end of the week, has successfully labeled her Republican opponent Denver Riggleman “the Bigfoot erotica guy” now and forevermore. These are the sorts of breaks—or smears, we can call them—that Democrats need to pick up an unlikely lean-Republican district or two in November. Prediction: Five to 10 district-specific stories will surface in the next three months that are weirder and dumber than this.

Poll: Views of Democratic Party hit lowest mark in 25 years

Washington (CNN)Favorable views of the Democratic Party have dropped to their lowest mark in more than a quarter century of polling, according to new numbers from a CNN poll conducted by SSRS.

Only 37% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Democrats, down from 44% in March of this year. A majority, 54%, have an unfavorable view, matching their highest mark in polls from CNN and SSRS, CNN/ORC and CNN/USA Today/Gallup stretching back to 1992.

A poll by Vox Populi Polling asked the public about their opinions of legendary baseball players. If you’re not among the 36 percent of people who said they found baseball boring, you may be interested in players’ favorability ratings:

Real polls are showing Trump at 50+ percent over the whole country now.

How the Democrats Lost Their Way on Immigration

The myth, which liberals like myself find tempting, is that only the right has changed. A decade ago, liberals publicly questioned immigration in ways that would shock many progressives today.

There are several explanations for liberals’ shift. Between 2008 and 2016, Democrats became more and more confident that the country’s growing Latino population gave the party an electoral edge. As the Democrats grew more reliant on Latino votes, they were more influenced by pro-immigrant activism.

Alongside pressure from pro-immigrant activists came pressure from corporate America, especially the Democrat-aligned tech industry, which uses the H-1B visa program to import workers. In 2010, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, along with the CEOs of companies including Hewlett-Packard, Boeing, Disney, and News Corporation, formed New American Economy to advocate for business-friendly immigration policies. Three years later, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates helped found FWD.us to promote a similar agenda.

Progressive commentators now routinely claim that there’s a near-consensus among economists on immigration’s benefits. There isn’t. But academics sometimes de-emphasize this wage reduction because, like liberal journalists and politicians, they face pressures to support immigration.

In his book Exodus, Paul Collier, an economist at the University of Oxford, claims that in their “desperate [desire] not to give succor” to nativist bigots, “social scientists have strained every muscle to show that migration is good for everyone.” George Borjas of Harvard argues that since he began studying immigration in the 1980s, his fellow economists have grown far less tolerant of research that emphasizes its costs. There is, he told me, “a lot of self-censorship among young social scientists.”

One way of mitigating this problem would be to scrap the current system, which allows immigrants living in the U.S. to bring certain close relatives to the country, in favor of what Donald Trump in February called a “merit based” approach that prioritizes highly skilled and educated workers. The problem with this idea, from a liberal perspective, is its cruelty.

Studies by the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and others suggest that greater diversity makes Americans less charitable. Surprisingly, Putnam’s research suggests that greater diversity doesn’t just reduce trust and cooperation just among people of different races or ethnicities—it also reduces trust and cooperation among people of the same race and ethnicity.

Liberals must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion. This means dusting off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation. And it means celebrating America’s diversity less, and its unity more.

The next Democratic presidential candidate should say again and again that because Americans are one people, who must abide by one law, his or her goal is to reduce America’s undocumented population to zero. The hard part, which Hillary Clinton largely ignored in her 2016 presidential run, is backing tough immigration enforcement so that path to citizenship doesn’t become a magnet that entices more immigrants to enter the U.S. illegally.

In 2014, the University of California listed melting pot as a term it considered a “microaggression.” What if Hillary Clinton had traveled to one of its campuses and called that absurd? What if she had challenged elite universities to celebrate not merely multiculturalism and globalization but Americanness? Some on the left would have howled. But I suspect that Clinton would be president today.

California: #1 In Human Trafficking Cases—Sanctuary State the Cause!

“California has the highest number of human trafficking cases in the United States, with San Diego, Los Angeles, and San Francisco labeled by the FBI as cities with high-intensity child sex trafficking. While Santa Barbara isn’t among the top 10, its position along Highway 101 between major cities makes it a “hub” for sex trafficking, according to the agency. A large majority of the victims found in the county are children, so many identified so frequently that a safe house has been created for them.”

Toronto Jihad and Deadly Jihad Denial

For the most part, they aint, and they don't want to be, your friend.