The racist right and the Chumph are on the same page…
But they have miscalculated exactly how badly they are outnumbered.
Tag Archives: americans
Most Americans Believe Comey Over the Chumph
Who do you love?
By a significant majority…It ain’t Putin’s Bitch.
POLL: Americans Trust James Comey Over Trump
Few think Trump was right to fire Comey.
Americans largely believe that former FBI director James Comey is more trustworthy than President Donald Trump, a new HuffPost/YouGov poll finds, although his testimony did little to change minds about the seriousness of the relationship between the White House and Russia.
In a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Thursday, Comey directly questioned the president’s candor in explaining why he kept detailed records of their conversations. “I was honestly concerned he might lie about the nature of our meeting,” Comey said, “so I thought it important to document.”
By a 20-point margin, 46 percent to 26 percent, Americans say Comey is more honest and trustworthy than Trump, with the remainder unsure.
Similar shares of the public hold favorable views of both men: 38 percent for Trump, and 35 percent for Comey. But Trump’s unfavorables, at 53 percent percent, are significantly higher than Comey’s, at just 33 percent. …
43% of Americans Want The Chumph Impeached…36% Still Support Him
Yeah…Its that bad.
Hope our Chumph supporters don’t asphyxiate themselves…Standing in that corner holding their breath waiting for it to never happen!
SUPPORT FOR DONALD TRUMP’S IMPEACHMENT IS NOW HIGHER THAN HIS APPROVAL RATING
Virtually every single poll tracking President Donald Trump’s approval rating showed the figure plummeting Monday morning, well below the margin of error compared to the rising level of support for impeachment. The results follow Trump’s controversial decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord; the ongoing investigation into his campaign’s possible ties to the Kremlin is also a factor.
The president’s approval rating dipped from nearly 42 percent to just 36 percent over the weekend, according to a Gallup daily tracking poll published Monday. Trump’s declining popularity is inching closer toward his all-time low of 35 percent as president in March, when Gallup had the president’s approval at just 35 percent. What’s more, nearly 43 percent of American voters support the idea of beginning the official impeachment process for Trump, according to a Politico/Morning Consult poll published Wednesday.
There are slight discrepancies between several leading polls as to where the president’s approval officially stands, though each tracking poll published Monday and over the weekend seemed to show a decline in popularity following Trump’s decision on the Paris Agreement. Even right-leaning poll sites like Rasmussen Reports are indicating dips in support for the president’s job performance, reporting that as of Monday, 54 percent of the nation disapproves of Trump’s tenure as commander in chief.
Chumph’s Racism Destroying Agriculture
So…What happens if the Chumph gets his wish to deport all illegal aliens in this country…
The Agricultural industry in the US collapses.
Despite incessant whining by the white right snowflakes of flyover country…There just aren’t going to be any white folks out there picking cotton as long as they can get a welfare check, Even if you raise the pay to be competitive with other work.
Tell me again “who” is exactly unwilling to work for a living?
Wages rise on California farms. Americans still don’t want the job
Trump’s immigration crackdown is supposed to help U.S. citizens. For California farmers, it’s worsening a desperate labor shortage.
Arnulfo Solorio’s desperate mission to recruit farmworkers for the Napa Valley took him far from the pastoral vineyards to a raggedy parking lot in Stockton, in the heart of the Central Valley.
Carrying a fat stack of business cards for his company, Silverado Farming, Solorio approached one prospect, a man with only his bottom set of teeth. He told Solorio that farm work in Stockton pays $11 to $12 an hour. Solorio countered: “Look, we are paying $14.50 now, but we are going up to $16.” The man nodded skeptically.
Solorio moved on to two men huddled nearby, and returned quickly. “They were drug addicts,” he said. “And, they didn’t have a car.”
Before the day was through, Solorio would make the same pitch to dozens of men and women, approaching a taco truck, a restaurant and a homeless encampment. Time was short: He needed to find 100 workers to fill his ranks by April 1, when grapevines begin to grow and need constant attention.
Solorio is one of a growing number of agricultural businessmen who say they face an urgent shortage of workers. The flow of labor began drying up when President Obama tightened the border. Now President Trump is promising to deport more people, raid more companies and build a wall on the southern border.
That has made California farms a proving ground for the Trump team’s theory that by cutting off the flow of immigrants they will free up more jobs for American-born workers and push up their wages.
So far, the results aren’t encouraging for farmers or domestic workers.
Farmers are being forced to make difficult choices about whether to abandon some of the state’s hallmark fruits and vegetables, move operations abroad, import workers under a special visa or replace them altogether with machines.
Growers who can afford it have already begun raising worker pay well beyond minimum wage. Wages for crop production in California increased by 13% from 2010 to 2015, twice as fast as average pay in the state, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Today, farmworkers in the state earn about $30,000 a year if they work full time — about half the overall average pay in California. Most work fewer hours.
Some farmers are even giving laborers benefits normally reserved for white-collar professionals, like 401(k) plans, health insurance, subsidized housing and profit-sharing bonuses. Full-timers at Silverado Farming, for example, get most of those sweeteners, plus 10 paid vacation days, eight paid holidays, and can earn their hourly rate to take English classes.
But the raises and new perks have not tempted native-born Americans to leave their day jobs for the fields. Nine in 10 agriculture workers in California are still foreign born, and more than half are undocumented, according to a federal survey.
Instead, companies growing high-value crops, like Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Napa, are luring employees from fields in places like Stockton that produce cheaper wine grapes or less profitable fruits and vegetables.
Growers who can’t raise wages are losing their employees and dealing with it by mechanizing, downsizing or switching to less labor-intensive crops.
Jeff Klein is doing all of the above. Last year Klein, a fourth-generation Stockton farmer, ran a mental ledger, trying to sort out the pros and cons of persevering in the wine business or quitting. He couldn’t make the math work.
Wineries pay Klein a tiny fraction of what they pony up for the same grape variety grown in Napa, and the rising cost of labor meant he was losing money on his vineyards. So in October, Klein decided to rip out 113,000 Chardonnay grapevines that once blanketed land his family has owned for decades. Now they lay heaped into hundreds of piles, waiting to be taken to the dump.
“I try to make any decision I make not emotional. When you’re running a business, it has to be a financial decision,” he says, sifting through the mangled metal posts.
Five years ago, Klein had a crew of 100 workers pruning, tying and suckering his grapevines. Wineries paid $700 for a ton of grapes, and Klein could make a solid profit paying $8 an hour, the minimum wage.
Last year he could barely get together 45 laborers, and his grapes sold for only $350 per ton. Klein knew his vines were done for when California passed laws raising the minimum wage to $15 by 2023 and requiring overtime for field laborers.
“There’s not enough guys, and everybody is fighting for everybody else’s guys,” he says. “In Napa and Sonoma, they’re getting $2,000 a ton [for grapes]. So, those guys can afford to pay $15. For me, I’m just trying to break even.”
Although Trump earned Klein’s vote, he worries that recent executive orders ratcheting up deportation plans and calling for a wall are putting a chokehold on an already tight pool of workers.
“That’s killing our labor force,” says the 35-year-old grower.
Already, fewer Mexicans had been willing to risk border crossings as security and deportations escalated under the Obama Administration. At the same time, Mexico’s own economy was mushrooming, offering decent jobs for people who stayed behind.
With the grapevines he has left, Klein is doing what he can to pare his crews. Last year, he bought a leaf puller for $50,000, which turns the delicate process of culling grapevine canopies into an exercise in brute force. The puller hooks onto a tractor and, like an oddly shaped vacuum cleaner, sucks leaves from grapevines.
He used to spend $100 an acre culling the canopies, which allows the right amount of sunlight to hit the grapes and turn them into sugar balls. Now, he says, “It will cost me 20 bucks, and I can get rid of some labor.”
Klein says he’ll spend the next five years replacing his 1,000 acres of grapevines with almond and olive trees, which require a fraction of the human contact to grow.
About 80 miles west in Napa, growers aren’t facing quite the same challenge. Cabernet Sauvignon grapes in Napa go for nearly $6,900 per ton, 10 times more than in San Joaquin County.
Here in Virginia, this is one of my neighbor’s Tomato Fields. This one is run by a major company, and the crop can wind up in anything from your Marinara and Spaghetti Sauces under a major label, to canned tomatoes, depending on what they plant. There are about 300,000 to 3 million plants out there on this field (of which the photo is only of a small part). All of these tomatoes are picked by hand by immigrant labor. Teams of hundreds go out to pick the crop, twice, before the plants are killed, and a second crop is planted. Typically they get two crops a year in Spring to fall. If the Chumph deports these workers…There ain’t gonna be any Mamma Ragu anymore.
Why Asian Americans Fled The Republican Party
In the 2012 election, President Obama got 73% of the Asian American vote. Looking at the anti-immigrant and anti-minority message, that somehow Asians are “coming here” and taking jobs from white folks…
Is a driving reason, along with the use of Asians as the “Model Minority” wedge against all other minorities in racially coded right wing arguments.
Why Asian Americans don’t vote Republican
During the recent No Labels-hosted Problem Solver Convention in New Hampshire, things got a little uncomfortable.
When Joseph Choe, an Asian-American college student, stood up to ask a question about South Korea, Donald Trump cut him off and wondered aloud: “Are you from South Korea?”
Choe responded, “I’m not. I was born in Texas, raised in Colorado.” His answer prompted laughter from the audience, and nothing more than a shrug from the GOP presidential candidate.
A fellow conference attendee who walked by Choe subsequently joked, “You’re gonna have to show him your birth certificate, man!”
Although Trump probably did not intend to offend, this interaction likely reminded Choe and other Asian-American voters that being Asian often translates to being perceived by fellow Americans as a foreigner.
However innocuous Trump’s question may seem, this is exactly the sort of exchange that could, in part, be pushing Asian Americans – the highest-income, most-educated, and fastest-growing segment of the United States – toward the Democratic Party by landslide margins.
n the 2012 presidential election, Barack Obama won 73% of the Asian-American vote. That exceeded his support among traditional Democratic Party constituencies like Hispanics (71%) and women (55%).
Republicans should be alarmed by this statistic, as Asians weren’t always so far out of reach for Republicans.
When we examine presidential exit polls, we see that 74% of the Asian-American vote went to the Republican presidential candidate just two decades ago. The Democratic presidential vote share among Asian Americans has steadily increased from 36% in 1992, to 64% in the 2008 election to 73% in 2012. Asian Americans were also one of the rare groups that were more favorable to President Obama in the latter election.
The hated question
Asian Americans are regularly made to feel like foreigners in their own country through “innocent” racial microaggressions. Microaggressions are “everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of color by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent.” An example is being asked “Where are youreally from?” – after answering the question “Where are you from?” with a location within the United States. Another is being complimented on one’s great English-speaking skills. In both cases, the underlying assumption is that Asian Americans are outsiders.
According to a 2005 study by Sapna Cheryan and Benoit Monin, Asian Americans are right to feel excluded. The study shows Asian Americans are seen as less American than other Americans.
A 2008 study by Thierry Devos and Debbie Ma confirmed this result. The study found that in the mind of the average American, a white European celebrity (Kate Winslet) is considered more American than an Asian-American celebrity (Lucy Liu).
But while Asian Americans are perceived as less American by other ethnic groups, Cheryan and Monin found that Asian Americans are just as likely as white Americans to self-identify as American and hold patriotic attitudes. This makes attacks on their identity as Americans hurtful…
When we examined the 2008 National Asian American Survey (NAAS), a nationally representative sample of over 5,000 Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, we found that self-reported racial discrimination, a proxy for feelings of social exclusion, was positively correlated with identification with the Democratic Party over the Republican Party.
Analyzing the NAAS data, we find that racial discrimination is not rare. Nearly 40% of Asian Americans suffered at least one of the following forms of racial discrimination in their lifetime:
-
being unfairly denied a job or fired
-
being unfairly denied a promotion at work
-
being unfairly treated by the police
-
being unfairly prevented from renting or buying a home
-
treated unfairly at a restaurant or other place of service
-
being a victim of a hate crime.
Republicans have positioned themselves, in trying to solidify the white southern vote – as the Party least likely to defend rights, and resist discrimination.
Where’s the Russians When You need Them?
A few months ago, some Somali Pirates captured by a Russian warship were repudiated to have been “encouraged” to “Walk the Plank”…
Couldn’t we get a contract with the Russian Navy for “Pirate disposal”?
US Military: Americans on Hijacked Yacht Killed
The U.S. military says pirates have shot and killed four Americans aboard a hijacked yacht off the coast of Somalia.
U.S. Vice Admiral Mark Fox told reporters that U.S. naval forces were trying to negotiate the hostages’ release Tuesday when, without any warning, pirates fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a U.S. warship.
Fox said the grenade missed, but sailors then heard gunfire aboard the yacht, the SV Quest.
U.S. Special Forces boarded the hijacked vessel and discovered all four hostages had been shot by the pirates. Despite immediate medical care, the four Americans died of their wounds.
Fox said the boarding party seized control of the yacht, killing two pirates and detaining 15 others. Two other pirates were found dead on board.
Pirates hijacked the yacht on Friday and had been steering it toward the Somali coast, with four U.S. Navy warships trailing and observing the vessel.
This is believed to be the first time U.S. citizens have been killed by the pirate gangs operating off the Somali coast.
Media reports have identified the four Americans killed as yacht owners Scott and Jean Adam of Marina del Rey, California, and Phyllis Macay and Bob Riggle of Seattle, Washington.
Btx3's Blog 