Trump’s turn right started a long time ago

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New York Post
Opinion

By Ron Kessler

May 8, 2016 | 8:01pm

Donald TrumpPhoto: AP

The conventional wisdom is that Donald Trump only became a conservative the day he announced his candidacy for the presidency. But like all conventional wisdom about Trump, it’s wrong.

After President Obama took office, Trump told me almost eight years ago the new president was a “disaster” whose economic policies were going to ruin the country.

Trump wasn’t ready to be quoted then. But almost five years ago, in a book that has been largely overlooked during the campaign, Trump laid out exactly what’s wrong with Obama’s vision and why conservative policies are needed to turn around the country’s pathetically slow growth under his leadership.

In “Time to Get Tough: Making America #1 Again,” which came out in December 2011, Trump presented a detailed economic critique that any fiscal conservative would applaud.

The reason “this country is an economic disaster right now,” he wrote, “is because Barack Obama doesn’t understand how wealth is created — and how the federal government can destroy it.”

Liberals “scratch their heads and wonder why businesses don’t want to hire,” Trump wrote. The answer: “Companies know Obama is anti-business, and his government-run health-care takeover has created a major disincentive to hire new workers.”

Raising taxes, as Obama wants to do, merely forces business owners to “lay off employees they can no longer afford,” Trump noted. “It also drives up prices, encourages businessmen and women to move their businesses (and their jobs) to other countries that have far lower tax rates and regulatory costs, and sends people scrambling for tax shelters.”

Conservative though he is, Trump knows how to appeal to most Americans. As Norma Foerderer, Trump’s top aide for 26 years, told me, there are two Donald Trumps: the “outrageous” one portrayed on television and the real one only insiders know.

The private Donald Trump, on the other hand, is “the dearest, most thoughtful, most loyal, most caring man,” Foerderer said.

Illustrating the difference, last summer, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which represents 3.2 million business owners, announced its members would be boycotting all of Trump’s properties following his statements on illegal immigrants and his vow to build a wall across the entire Mexican border. But last September, Trump met privately with Javier Palomarez, the chamber’s CEO.

“There were no bombastic statements of any sorts,” CNN quoted Palomarez as saying admiringly. “It’s kind of interesting, the dichotomy between the private Donald Trump and the public Donald Trump. He listened a lot more than he spoke.”

Far from being a bigot, Trump insisted on admitting blacks and Jews to Mar-a-Lago when several other Palm Beach clubs wouldn’t. When I first got to know Trump while conducting research with my wife Pam for my 1999 book “The Season: Inside Palm Beach and America’s Richest Society,” on the way down to Palm Beach on his plane, Trump imitated the nasal, constricted tones of Palm Beach’s blue-blood Old Guard condemning his club for not discriminating.

If Trump is intemperate, as the conventional wisdom has it, his employees haven’t seen it. Rather, as an employer, Trump is both demanding and loyal, according to Anthony P. “Tony” Senecal, who for 20 years served as personal butler to Trump and is now the Mar-a-Lago historian.

Some years ago, when Senecal had to undergo surgery to implant a stent, Trump called him the day before.

“So when do you go under the knife?” Trump asked.

“Tomorrow,” said Senecal.

“Well, if you don’t make it, don’t worry about it. You’ve had a good life,” Trump said, and then added: “Listen, I don’t want you going back to your place. You come and recuperate at Mar-a-Lago.”

“The guy is fairer than hell,” says Gary J. Giulietti, a Trump friend who handles a portion of his insurance as president of Lockton Cos., the largest privately held insurance brokerage company in the world. “He wants the best for his properties, he wants a competitive price. But he treats everyone with respect.”

The conventional wisdom that Trump is a carnival act will be proven wrong once again when he moves into the White House. Donald already has a winter White House — Mar-a-Lago — picked out.

Ronald Kessler is the author of “The First Family Detail: Secret Service Agents Reveal the Hidden Lives of the Presidents.”

Former Facebook Workers: We Routinely Suppressed Conservative News

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gizmodo.com

Illustration: Jim Cooke

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

In other words, Facebook’s news section operates like a traditional newsroom, reflecting the biases of its workers and the institutional imperatives of the corporation. Imposing human editorial values onto the lists of topics an algorithm spits out is by no means a bad thing—but it is in stark contrast to the company’s claimsthat the trending module simply lists “topics that have recently become popular on Facebook.”

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These new allegations emerged after Gizmodo last week revealed details about the inner workings of Facebook’s trending news team—a small group of young journalists, primarily educated at Ivy League or private East Coast universities, who curate the “trending” module on the upper-right-hand corner of the site. As we reported last week, curators have access to a ranked list of trending topics surfaced by Facebook’s algorithm, which prioritizes the stories that should be shown to Facebook users in the trending section. The curators write headlines and summaries of each topic, and include links to news sites. The section, which launched in 2014, constitutes some of the most powerful real estate on the internet and helps dictate what news Facebook’s users—167 million in the US alone—are reading at any given moment.

“I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news.”

“Depending on who was on shift, things would be blacklisted or trending,” said the former curator. This individual asked to remain anonymous, citing fear of retribution from the company. The former curator is politically conservative, one of a very small handful of curators with such views on the trending team. “I’d come on shift and I’d discover that CPAC or Mitt Romney or Glenn Beck or popular conservative topics wouldn’t be trending because either the curator didn’t recognize the news topic or it was like they had a bias against Ted Cruz.”

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The former curator was so troubled by the omissions that they kept a running log of them at the time; this individual provided the notes to Gizmodo. Among the deep-sixed or suppressed topics on the list: former IRS official Lois Lerner, who was accused by Republicans of inappropriately scrutinizing conservative groups; Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker; popular conservative news aggregator the Drudge Report; Chris Kyle, the former Navy SEAL who was murdered in 2013; and former Fox News contributor Steven Crowder. “I believe it had a chilling effect on conservative news,” the former curator said.

http://gizmodo.com/want-to-know-w...

Want to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of Journalists? Here's What Happened When It Hired Some. Want to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of Journalists? Here's What Happened When It Hired SomeWant to Know What Facebook Really Thinks of Journa

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Another former curator agreed that the operation had an aversion to right-wing news sources. “It was absolutely bias. We were doing it subjectively. It just depends on who the curator is and what time of day it is,” said the former curator. “Every once in awhile a Red State or conservative news source would have a story. But we would have to go and find the same story from a more neutral outlet that wasn’t as biased.”

Stories covered by conservative outlets (like Breitbart, Washington Examiner, and Newsmax) that were trending enough to be picked up by Facebook’s algorithm were excluded unless mainstream sites like the New York Times, the BBC, and CNN covered the same stories.

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Other former curators interviewed by Gizmodo denied consciously suppressing conservative news, and we were unable to determine if left-wing news topics or sources were similarly suppressed. The conservative curator described the omissions as a function of his colleagues’ judgements; there is no evidence that Facebook management mandated or was even aware of any political bias at work.

Managers on the trending news team did, however, explicitly instruct curators to artificially manipulate the trending module in a different way: When users weren’t reading stories that management viewed as important, several former workers said, curators were told to put them in the trending news feed anyway. Several former curators described using something called an “injection tool” to push topics into the trending module that weren’t organically being shared or discussed enough to warrant inclusion—putting the headlines in front of thousands of readers rather than allowing stories to surface on their own. In some cases, after a topic was injected, it actually became the number one trending news topic on Facebook.

“We were told that if we saw something, a news story that was on the front page of these ten sites, like CNN, the New York Times, and BBC, then we could inject the topic,” said one former curator. “If it looked like it had enough news sites covering the story, we could inject it—even if it wasn’t naturally trending.” Sometimes, breaking news would be injected because it wasn’t attaining critical mass on Facebook quickly enough to be deemed “trending” by the algorithm. Former curators cited the disappearance of Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 and the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris as two instances in which non-trending stories were forced into the module. Facebook hasstruggled to compete with Twitter when it comes to delivering real-time news to users; the injection tool may have been designed to artificially correct for that deficiency in the network. “We would get yelled at if it was all over Twitter and not on Facebook,” one former curator said.

“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter.”

In other instances, curators would inject a story—even if it wasn’t being widely discussed on Facebook—because it was deemed important for making the network look like a place where people talked about hard news. “People stopped caring about Syria,” one former curator said. “[And] if it wasn’t trending on Facebook, it would make Facebook look bad.” That same curator said the Black Lives Matter movement was also injected into Facebook’s trending news module. “Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the individual said. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics. When we injected it, everyone started saying, ‘Yeah, now I’m seeing it as number one’.” This particular injection is especially noteworthy because the #BlackLivesMatter movement originated on Facebook, and the ensuing media coverage of the movement often noted its powerful social media presence.

(In February, CEO Mark Zuckerbergexpressed his support for the movement in an internal memo chastising Facebook employees for defacing Black Lives Matter slogans on the company’s internal “signature wall.”)

When stories about Facebook itself would trend organically on the network, news curators used less discretion—they were told not to include these stories at all. “When it was a story about the company, we were told not to touch it,” said one former curator. “It had to be cleared through several channels, even if it was being shared quite a bit. We were told that we should not be putting it on the trending tool.”

(The curators interviewed for this story worked for Facebook across a timespan ranging from mid-2014 to December 2015.)

“We were always cautious about covering Facebook,” said another former curator. “We would always wait to get second level approval before trending something to Facebook. Usually we had the authority to trend anything on our own [but] if it was something involving Facebook, the copy editor would call their manager, and that manager might even call their manager before approving a topic involving Facebook.”

Gizmodo reached out to Facebook for comment about each of these specific claims via email and phone, but did not receive a response.

Several former curators said that as the trending news algorithm improved, there were fewer instances of stories being injected. They also said that the trending news process was constantly being changed, so there’s no way to know exactly how the module is run now. But the revelations undermine any presumption of Facebook as aneutral pipeline for news, or the trending news module as an algorithmically-driven list of what people are actually talking about.

Rather, Facebook’s efforts to play the news game reveal the company to be much like the news outlets it is rapidly driving toward irrelevancy: a select group of professionals with vaguely center-left sensibilities. It just happens to be one that poses as a neutral reflection of the vox populi, has the power to influence what billions of users see, and openly discusseswhether it should use that power to influence presidential elections.

“It wasn’t trending news at all,” said the former curator who logged conservative news omissions. “It was an opinion.”

[Disclosure: Facebook has launched a program that pays publishers, including the New York Times and Buzzfeed, to produce videos for its Facebook Live tool. Gawker Media, Gizmodo’s parent company, recently joined that program.]

COMMENTS

BOMBSHELL! Lois Lerner Tried to Get Obama DOJ and FEC to Also Attack Tea Party Groups

April 16, 2014 By Jennifer Burke

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It’s becoming more and more clear exactly why Lois Lerner refuses to testify and answer questions regarding the IRS scandal of targeting and harassing Tea Party and other conservative groups. It is also clear why the IRS commissioner made the claim that it would take years to produce the emails surrounding this scandal. According to a report by Townhall, the collusion between Democrats, the Obama IRS and the Obama DOJ goes even deeper than initially thought and emails obtained by Judicial Watch shows the extreme coordination between these groups in the targeting of Tea Party and other conservative groups.

Lois Lerner sent the following email to the Obama Department of Justice in May 2013.

“I got a call today from Richard Pilger Director Elections Crimes Branch at DOJ … He wanted to know who at IRS the DOJ folk s [sic] could talk to about Sen. Whitehouse idea at the hearing that DOJ could piece together false statement cases about applicants who “lied” on their 1024s –saying they weren’t planning on doing political activity, and then turning around and making large visible political expenditures. DOJ is feeling like it needs to respond, but want to talk to the right folks at IRS to see whether there are impediments from our side and what, if any damage this might do to IRS programs. I told him that sounded like we might need several folks from IRS,” Lerner wrote in a May 8, 2013 email to former Nikole C. Flax, who was former-Acting IRS Commissioner Steven T. Miller’s chief of staff.
“I think we should do it – also need to include CI [Criminal Investigation Division], which we can help coordinate. Also, we need to reach out to FEC. Does it make sense to consider including them in this or keep it separate?” Flax responded on May 9, 2013. 

After this email exchange, Lerner handed things off to Senior Technical Adviser and Attorney Nancy Marks, who was in charge of setting up a meeting with DOJ.


This news follows the revelation that the second ranking member in the House Oversight Committee, Democrat Elijah Cummings, worked in collusion with the IRS in attacking True the Vote, a group out of Houston who works against voter fraud. Cummings had earlier denied any coordination with the IRS, but that denial has been proven to be a lie.
As this news breaks, Lois Lerner is waiting to see if the House will hold her in contempt after the House Oversight Committee voted to hold her in contempt. TPNN  also previously reported that Lerner “referred to the Justice Department by the House Ways and Means Committee for potential prosecution of her actions. If convicted of the crimes for which she has been accused, she could face 11 years in prison.”
Given the collusion between the Obama Department of InJustice and Lerner in relation to this IRS scandal and attack against Tea Party and conservative groups, many do not believe that Eric Holder will act against her. His refusal to appoint a private and independent investigator into this scandal has been met with criticism from those on the right side of the aisle.
Despite this mounting evidence of collusion between Democrats, the IRS, and the DOJ, President Obama claimed during an interview on Super Bowl Sunday that there was not a smidgen of corruption in regards to the matter.

Arizona Gun Store Owner Stands up against Obama and tells voters to get out.

The Southwest Shooting Authority in Pinetop, Ariz. posted a sign on its door and took out a newspaper ad declaring that if you voted for the president last week, you’re not allowed inside. 

“If you voted for Obama, please turn around and leave! You have proven that you are not responsible enough to own a firearm!” the sign states.

Reynolds told Fox News that as a small business owner, “If you are dumb enough to vote for Obama again – after four years of this — I don’t think you are responsible enough to own a firearm. I don’t care who it makes mad.”
He said he’s gotten support for his new policy from around the country — including one person who ordered hundreds of dollars worth of ammunition — but that there have also been lots of “vile, rude and hateful comments.”
“I hate it because my 17-year-old son answers the phone and they light into him,” Reynolds said. “They call us stupid rednecks and racist.”
Reynolds told Fox that no matter what happens, the sign is staying up.
“If we lose the whole business it doesn’t matter,” he said. “The bottom line is — my values.”

Rupert Murdoch Under Fire for MidEast Tweet

Rupert Murdoch Under Fire for MidEast Tweet: ‘Can’t Obama Stop His Friends in Egypt Shelling Israel?’

  

It blows my mind how Jews in America can continue to vote Democrat when the very party they are voting for is throwing them under the bus.  

Wake up everyone who is of Jewish decent - the democrats do not care about you what so ever. They are throwing your homeland under the bus along with you.  Take a stand against Democrats and Socialism.    

Brian.   

Israel Intercepts Gaza Rocket Aimed at Tel Aviv

The Blaze Reports : Full Story

Footage from Associated Press Television News shows a plume of smoke emanating from an Iron Dome battery deployed in Tel Aviv followed by a flash of light overhead as the rocket is intercepted. People huddled along Tel Aviv’s beachfront boardwalk cheered as the interception took place. Air raid sirens had sounded to warn residents to take cover.

Obama Log #1: "Fiscal Cliff Looming?"

This will be my first of many (possibly thousands) of short posts on SickBias.com where I will log events, facts and news reports that support my theories of Barack Obama being a horrible choice for president, especially when you consider Mitt Romney was our alternative.

Today's topic is "The Fiscal Cliff"

Forbes does a good enough job explaining what exactly the fiscal cliff is in their article in this link, but what leaves me scratching my head is this simple question: If this problem is so important just days after the presidential election that both FoxNews and MSNBC have the topic dominating their coverage then why was this issue never brought up during the campaign season? Were they so distracted that they are just now thinking of this? Experts all agree that the fiscal cliff is going to directly effect the American economy, so why then in a presidential campaign that seemed to revolve around the phrase, "It's the economy, stupid!" did this suddenly-so-important topic get left out?

Some may argue that all those people most concerned with the economy were certain that Romney was going to win, and a President Romney would have fixed problems like this, just as he fixed budget problems in both the state of Massachusetts and the Olympics in 2004, Salt Lake City. But he is not, and will not be our fiscal savior, so all of the sudden this has become a major issue. Well that's just pathetic. It should have been part of our choice on election day - a vote for Obama is a vote for sending America off a cliff. It was withheld from the voters. We were no more informed in 2012 than we were when we voted for the stranger nobody knew about in 2008.

So for this first Obama Log, I would like to sum up by sarcastically saying thank you to all the Obama voters for putting us in this crisis. Because we all know good and well that an election of the successful businessman and former successful governor of Massachusetts would not have resulted in the domination of a "Fiscal Cliff" in the headlines. So if the "fiscal cliff" is such an important issue then why didn't you just cut out the middle man and support Romney for president?

The New Silent Majority

Barack Obama has just been reelected president by a majority of the U.S. population. Although this comes as no surprise to those at MSNBC, I must point out that this win bucks a whole lot of conventional wisdom on polls and turnout. Liberal commentators, pundits, journalists and Obama campaign officials spent the entire month of October pointing to polls that Obama had slight leads in nearly all battleground states. The election results proved the liberals right. But that doesn't mean all the conservatives that claimed that the polls were wrong were deliberately trying to be misleading. In fact their claims had so much merit, it lead me to believe that it was the democrats that were living in Fantasy Land. During October, I looked further into it and it turns out the polls were based on a methodology that included the belief that even though independents were breaking for Romney, a massive turnout of democrats very similar to 2008 was going to make up the difference.

Conservatives had plenty of reasons to be skeptical. First of all 2008 was an historic election for the ages. Supporters of Obama were going to vote for America's first black president. There was so much hope in the air it was electric. The numbers of young, minority and women voters that showed up in 2008 was overwhelming compared to any election before it. People who never voted in their life wanted to be a part of history. Then there was the 2010 election. The newly formed conservative tea party turned out to oust huge numbers of democrats in the house and senate. It seemed to most experts that the election of 2008 was an anomaly. Conservatives were convinced that the polling methodology for 2012 was wrong.

But wait! There's more!

The conventional wisdom of polling statistics was not the only thing that made conservatives skeptical of a huge 2008-like turnout. There was also obvious visual clues as well. In the last month of campaigning, both candidates held many rallies, almost every single day. In the last week there were several rallies per day for both candidates. One of the big stories reported by reputable conservative news organizations both on television and on the internet was that there was a huge difference in turnout to the rallies of Obama verses the rallies of Romney. It was reported that the Romney campaign had to move his scheduled events to larger venues because of the overwhelming turnout. I heard crowds as large as 30,000 were driving in from hundreds of miles away to get in to see what they believe was going to be their future president. By the end of the campaign, Romney was calling it "a movement." At the same time it was told that the Obama campaign was struggling to scrape together a couple thousand people. Reports of half empty venues were all over the place. One conservative article claimed an Obama rally featuring a concert by Stevie Wonder managed to muster up only 200 people! It doesn't help that the liberal news organization were silent about rally numbers. So while it may not be scientific, the reported rally numbers really made many feel like the momentum, energy and excitement was definitely on Romney's side.

More anecdotal evidence:

The visual evidence was not limited to rallies. I live in a swing county of a swing state. A strong argument can be made that Hamilton County, Ohio elects presidents of the United States. We voted for Bush twice and Obama twice. That's where I live and work. I drive all over the county all day, every day. In 2000, yard signs were equally divided between Bush and Gore supporters. In 2004, Bush signs were much more numerous than Kerry signs. In 2008, Obama signs totally overwhelmed McCain signs. This year, Romney signs absolutely dominated Obama signs. I can't speak for the rest of America and what kind of support they display on their residences, but here it is generally loud and proud, and this year the louder support in a county that is a microcosm of the rest of the country was loudest for Romney.

Last but not least...

I am a chronic Yahoo! user. Don't get me wrong - do not think for a second that in my quest for intellectual punishment, my choice of torture device is in any way an endorsement of such a device. I have grown to love to hate Yahoo! and everything their editorial staff stands for. Once you get beyond that, I am hopelessly addicted to their comments section. This is not a new development either. I was a notorious troll on the old Y! Message Boards before it got shut down, gutted and transformed to Y! Answers. These days, the public gets their fix of trolling in the comments section of Yahoo's front page articles. Its extremely popular, and I became convinced over the years that you can use the overall attitude of the collective posts as a bellwether for predicting actions of Americans. For example, back around 2005-2007 I could truly tell that Bush's popularity was waning. The more popular posts (based on their ratio of thumbs up to thumbs down) were mostly anti-Bush posts, and the overall percentage of pro-Bush posts was getting smaller and smaller. Then of course we saw the landslide election of 2006 against Republicans. In 2008 the comments were mostly pro-Obama, or anti-Bush, which of course led to the huge Obama win coupled with the election of the Democrat super-majorty in Congress. In 2010, I saw slightly more comments on Yahoo of pro-tea party types. It was only "slightly" because Yahoo comments section have always been a safe-haven for liberals, as many of the most popular news sources online have become by that time.

Fast forward to October, 2012: Following the debates, the comments section of Yahoo has become more one-sided than I have ever seen them - but not for the liberals. It has been flooded with conservatives earning hundreds of thumbs-ups for pro-Romney and anti-Obama posts. As far as I was concerned, this alone was an indication of a landslide for Romney. There was also the incumbent presiding over the worst economy of our generation, the foreign policy missteps of Benghazi, and to put the icing on the cake, the last few days of the campaign included a Hurricane Sandy that was very quickly looking like a debacle for Obama.

All the conventional wisdom was pointing towards the polls being wrong. How could a majority of independents be for Romney while the overall numbers were showing Obama ahead? How could this be while everything I can see with my eyes and hear with my ears says that most people are going to vote for Romney? How was it that the polls ended up being right on election day despite the conventional wisdom of presidential elections in years past?

The New Silent Majority

The answer is that there were many millions of people who voted for Obama that never put up a yard sign. They either didn't ever log into Yahoo, or stopped posting comments. They were quietly waiting in the shadows and pounced on election day. The are the "Silent Majority". Wait, what? For those not familiar with the phrase, the Silent Majority has in recent history been that large group of politically silent people that largely voted Republican on election day. For more information on the old Silent Majority, click here. The group of Obama voters that proved the polls right on election day are "The New Silent Majority." The question as to whether or not this is an Obama phenomenon or whether it is the new norm for the Democratic Party will not become apparent until the election of 2014.

As I write this, I am listening to Rush Limbaugh express his opinion that the reason Romney lost was because of a lack of turnout of the Republican Base. As of right now, based on what I have said about rally turnout, "Mittmentum," the movement, etc. I am rejecting that claim. Conservatives were fired up about the possibility of ousting Obama and replacing him with anyone. While conservatives were skeptical of Mitt for a long time, his performance in the debates really truly excited conservatives. Besides, just one day prior, Rush was talking about how the election results were a trend, not an anomaly. I'm not writing off the theory, but if Rush is correct, then I would have to write another article explaining how so many indicators pointed to a huge conservative turnout, but it just simply didn't happen on election day. For now, you can just know that it was the New Silent Majority.