Emerson Poll: Trump Positioned to Sweep Connecticut Delegates

Listen to Military Veteran Talk Radio 

iHeart.SmythRadio.com

Facebook.com/SmythRadio

(Getty Images)

NEWSMAX

By Sandy Fitzgerald
Wednesday, 13 Apr 2016 7:53 AM

             Join in! 18 Comments

Donald Trump is well-positioned to sweep Connecticut's 28 delegates in the April 26 primary election, according to results from an Emerson College poll released Monday.

According to the statewide poll conducted on April 10-11 of 354 likely GOP primary voters:
Trump, 50 percent;Ohio Gov. John Kasich, 26 percent;Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, 17 percent;6 percent, undecidedTrump holds the lead in all five congressional districts with margins of 18 to 38 points, with Kasich coming in second and Cruz third, the poll showed. 

Trump also commanded the most loyalty:
80 percent, Trump;38 percent, Kasich;37 percent, Cruz;The Democratic race is much more tight in the state. According to the 356 likely Democratic voters polled:
Hillary Clinton, 49 percent;Bernie Sanders, 43 percent;Six percent, undecided.However, with Connecticut being a closed-primary, same-day registration state, Sanders' gap is only 1 point, if people switch parties to vote for him. Once independents and Republicans who said they support Sanders are added in, bringing the gap to 47 percent for Clinton and 46 percent for Sanders. 

And in head-to-head matchups in the general election, both Trump and Cruz would lose to either Clinton or Sanders, the poll showed:
Kasich over Clinton, 49-38 percent;Kasich over Sanders, 48-40 percent;Clinton over Trump, 48-40 percent;Clinton over Cruz, 52-31 percent;Sanders over Trump, 49-40 percent;Sanders over Cruz, 55-30 percent.Democrats and Republicans alike said dissatisfaction with government is the most important issue in the election. 

Republicans said their second-most pressing issue is stopping ISIS and terrorism, while Democrats said their next most pressing concern is jobs and unemployment.

The margin of error by parties was 5.2 points. Meanwhile, the general election sample consisted of 1,043 likely general election voters, and carried a 3 point margin of error.

Related Stories:
Clinton, Sanders Tied in Support among DemocratsQuinnipiac: Trump Holds 35-Point Lead in New York

© 2016 Newsmax. All rights reserved

Newspaper reporter rated worst job in America

Listen to Military Veteran Talk Radio iHeart.SmythRadio.com
Facebook.com/SmythRadio

www.fox5ny.com

NEW YORK (FOX5NY) - A new survey of the best and worst jobs in the country has declared that being a newspaper reporter is the worst career you could be pursuing.

CareerCast just published its Worst Jobs of 2016 list.

It cited fewer job prospects because of publications going out of business and declining ad revenue providing less money for decent salaries.

The survey put the annual median salary of a print reporter at $37,200.

It is the third year in a row that a newpaper reporter ranked as the worst job.  Being a broadcaster didn't fare much better.  It came in third worst on the list.

“The news business has changed drastically over the years, and not in a good way,” says former Broadcaster Ann Baldwin, president of Baldwin Media PR in New Britain, Connecticut. “When people ask me if I miss it, I tell them ‘I feel as if I jumped off of a sinking ship.’”

The report says that one factor that has many media jobs among the worst is the decline of advertising revenue. And, a drop in advertising sales translates to a decline in positions for advertising sales people. Advertising Sales Person appears on the 10 worst jobs list for the first time (#193), after finishing just outside the bottom 10 a year ago.

As for the best job of the year, that went to data scientists.  The survey cited a strong growth outlook and an annual median salary of $128,240.

COMMENTS

Ted Cruz Defends ban on Dildo's, No Right to Pleasure Genitals....

The Time Ted Cruz Defended a Ban on Dildos

www.motherjones.com

/imgur

In one chapter of his campaign book, A Time for Truth, Sen. Ted Cruz proudly chronicles his days as a Texas solicitor general, a post he held from 2003 to 2008. Bolstering his conservative cred, the Republican presidential candidate notes that during his stint as the state's chief lawyer before the Supreme Court and federal and state appellate courts, he defended the inclusion of "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance, the display of the Ten Commandments on the grounds of the state capitol, a congressional redistricting plan that assisted Republicans, a restrictive voter identification law, and a ban on late-term abortions. He also described cases in which he championed gun rights and defended the conviction of a Mexican citizen who raped and murdered two teenage girls in a case challenged by the World Court. Yet one case he does not mention is the time he helped defend a law criminalizing the sale of dildos.

The case was actually an important battle concerning privacy and free speech rights. In 2004, companies that owned Austin stores selling sex toys and a retail distributor of such products challenged a Texas law outlawing the sale and promotion of supposedly obscene devices. Under the law, a person who violated the statute could go to jail for up to two years. At the time, only three states—Mississippi, Alabama, and Virginia—had similar laws. (The previous year, a Texas mother who was a sales rep forPassion Parties was arrested by two undercover cops for selling vibrators and other sex-related goods at a gathering akin to a Tupperware party for sex toys. No doubt, this had worried businesses peddling such wares.) The plaintiffs in the sex-device case contended the state law violated the right to privacy under the 14th Amendment. They argued that many people in Texas used sexual devices as an aspect of their sexual experiences. They claimed that in some instances one partner in a couple might be physically unable to engage in intercourse or have a contagious disease (such as HIV) and that in these cases such devices could allow a couple to engage in safe sex.

But a federal judge sent them packing, ruling that selling sex toys was not protected by the Constitution. The plaintiffs appealed, and Cruz's solicitor general office had the task of preserving the law.

In 2007, Cruz's legal team, working on behalf of then-Attorney General Greg Abbott (who now is the governor), filed a 76-page brief calling on the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to uphold the lower court's decision and permit the law to stand. The filing noted, "The Texas Penal Code prohibits the advertisement and sale of dildos, artificial vaginas, and other obscene devices" but does not "forbid the private use of such devices." The plaintiffs had argued that this case was similar to Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark 2003 Supreme Court decision that struck down Texas' law against sodomy. But Cruz's office countered that Lawrence "focused on interpersonal relationships and the privacy of the home" and that the law being challenged did not block the "private use of obscene devices." Cruz's legal team asserted that "obscene devices do not implicate any liberty interest." And its brief added that "any alleged right associated with obscene devices" is not "deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions." In other words, Texans were free to use sex toys at home, but they did not have the right to buy them.

The brief insisted that Texas in order to protect "public morals" had  "police-power interests" in "discouraging prurient interests in sexual gratification, combating the commercial sale of sex, and protecting minors." There was a  "government" interest, it maintained, in "discouraging...autonomous sex." The brief compared the use of sex toys with "hiring a willing prostitute or engaging in consensual bigamy," and it equated advertising these products with the commercial promotion of prostitution. In perhaps the most noticeable line of the brief, Cruz's office declared, "There is no substantive-due-process right to stimulate one's genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship." That is, the pursuit of such happiness had no constitutional standing. And the brief argued there was no "right to promote dildos, vibrators, and other obscene devices." The plaintiffs, it noted, were "free to engage in unfettered noncommercial speech touting the uses of obscene devices" but not speech designed to generate the sale of these items.

In a 2-1 decision issued in February 2008, the court of appeals told Cruz's office to take a hike. The court, citing Lawrence, pointed to the "right to be free from governmental intrusion regarding 'the most private human contact, sexual behavior.'" The panel added, "An individual who wants to legally use a safe sexual device during private intimate moments alone or with another is unable to legally purchase a device in Texas, which heavily burdens a constitutional right." It rejected the argument from Cruz's team that the government had a legitimate role to play in "discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex and the pursuit of sexual gratification unrelated to procreation." No, government officials could not claim as part of their job duties the obligation to reduce masturbation or non-procreative sexual activity. And the two judges in the majority slapped aside the solicitor general's attempt to link dildos to prostitution: "The sale of a device that an individual may choose to use during intimate conduct with a partner in the home is not the 'sale of sex' (prostitution)."

Summing up, the judges declared, "The case is not about public sex. It is not about controlling commerce in sex. It is about controlling what people do in the privacy of their own homes because the State is morally opposed to a certain type of consensual private intimate conduct. This is an insufficient justification for the statute after Lawrence...Whatever one might think or believe about the use of these devices, government interference with their personal and private use violates the Constitution."

The appeals court had rejected the arguments from Cruz's office and said no to Big Government policing the morals of citizens. But Abbott and Cruz wouldn't give up. Of course, they might have initially felt obligated to mount a defense of this state law. But after it had been shot down, they pressed ahead, relying on the same puritanical and excessive arguments to justify government intrusion. Abbott and Cruz quickly filed a brief asking the full court of appeals to hear the case, claiming the three-judge panel had extended the scope of Lawrence too far. This brief suggested that if the decision stood, some people would argue that "engaging in consensual adult incest or bigamy" ought to be legal because it could "enhance their sexual experiences." And Cruz's office filed another brief noting it was considering taking this case to the Supreme Court.

Cruz and Abbott lost the motion for a hearing from the full court of appeals. And the state soon dropped the case, opting not to appeal to the Supreme Court. This meant that the government could no longer outlaw the sale of dildos, vibrators, and other sex-related devices in the Lone Star State—and in Mississippi and Louisiana, the two other states within this appeals court's jurisdiction.

The day after the appeals court wiped out the Texas law, Cruz forwarded an email to the lawyer in his office who had overseen the briefs in the case. It included a blog post from legal expert Eugene Volokh headlined, "Dildoes Going to the Supreme Court?" and a sympathetic note from William Thro, then the solicitor general of Virginia. "Having had the experience of answering questions about oral sex from a female State Supreme Court Justice who is also a grandmother," Thro wrote Cruz, "you have my sympathy. :-) Seriously, if you do go for cert [with the Supreme Court] and if we can help, let me know." But for whatever reason—Cruz certainly doesn't explain in his book—Abbott and he did not take the dildo ban to the Supreme Court. And Cruz, who was already thinking about running for elected office, missed out on the chance to gain national attention as an advocate for the just-say-no-to-vibrators cause. Imagine how his political career might have been affected had Cruz become the public face for the anti-dildos movement.

COMMENTS

Promise Kept: Barack Obama Breaks the Coal Industry

Listen to Military Veteran Talk Radio iHeart.SmythRadio.com
Facebook.com/SmythRadio

Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

by STEVE MILLOY13 Apr 20162,818

President Obama’s war on coal has bagged its biggest trophy to date: the bankruptcy filing by the largest U.S. coal company, Peabody Energy.

Make no mistake about it, though, Peabody’s management and that of the rest of coal industry bears much of the blame for its own demise. It ought to serve as a lesson for everyone else targeted by take-no-prisoners progressives.

Peabody’s bankruptcy filing follows that of other major coal companies including, Alpha Natural Resources, Arch Coal, and Patriot Coal. The irony is that coal is actually the world’s fastest growing source of energy, according to the International Energy Agency. So what happened?

Even before Obama vowed to “bankrupt” the coal industry in a 2008 interview with the editorial board of the San Francisco Chronicle, the coal industry had already allowed the seeds of its destruction to take root. It had failed to believe global warming hysteria was an existential threat. The industry thought the demand for cheap and reliable electricity combined with the power of politicians representing coal states would suffice as a defense against attack. But contrary to the myths propagated by global warming activists, the coal industry was never a serious funder of climate skeptics.

This strategy was completely upended when decidedly anti-coal Obama became president and Republicans lost control of Congress. Not only did an unprecedented coal industry-hating “progressive” government come to power, but also an up-and-coming new technology for producing natural gas was coming into its own. Hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling, commonly referred to as “fracking,” began to change the U.S. energy market.

With respect to the anti-coal Obama administration and Congress, the coal industry thought that problem could be managed. Maybe even a deal could get cut. A senior Peabody executive told me in the spring of 2009 that it supported the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill because it would settle the issue and provide a path forward for the industry. At this time, much of the coal industry was operating under the illusion that carbon dioxide emissions could be affordably captured and stored underground, so the modest emissions cuts contemplated by the bill could be achieved.

Although Waxman-Markey squeaked by in a 219-212 House vote, it was never brought up in the Senate and other Senate efforts to pass a cap-and-trade bill faltered — thanks largely to the coincidental rise of the tea party. With the failure of cap-and-trade in Congress, Obama turned to the regulatory agencies he controlled to wage war on the coal industry, the most powerful of which was the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA began issuing a series of devastating anti-coal regulations.

The coal industry was ill-prepared to fight the EPA — an aggressively arrogant, if not entirely rogue, activist agency. The EPA took advantage of the fact that its rules didn’t target the coal industry directly, but instead pressured the coal industry’s customers — coal-burning electric utilities. The EPA’s regulations forced the utilities to reduce emissions from their coal plants.

The EPA regulation known as the Mercury Air Transport Standard was so expensive for utilities to implement that it made more economic sense just to shutter many of their coal-burning power plants — a task made easier by the surge in cheap natural gas and the fact that the moribund Obama economy has not expanded in such a way as to necessitate an meaningful increases in electricity generation.

It’s not that natural gas is necessarily a less expensive way to generate electricity, but it became cost-competitive with coal. And given the regulatory and political pressure on utilities to not burn coal, utilities began switching from coal to gas wherever possible. The natural gas glut has also placed a price ceiling on coal that dramatically thinned the profit margin from coal mining. As the Obama administration has slow-walked the approval of natural gas export terminals, the gas glut is here to stay.

What about exporting U.S. coal to the rest of world, which is in the process of building 2,440 new coal plants? The coal industry does export some coal, but that has been made difficult by environmental activists who have blocked new rail lines and coal export terminals. And while China and, especially, India are burning more and more coal, they are increasing exploiting their own domestic supplies for economic reasons. So global coal prices are way down, again, pressuring export profit margins.

While the entire story of the U.S. coal industry’s demise is worthy of much more discussion, it can be summarized as follows: The coal industry’s political enemies have successfully used expensive, heavy-handed, junk science-fueled regulation which, in combination with an unforeseeable coincidental glut of cheap natural gas, has virtually broken the coal industry’s back.

What is the future of the coal industry? About one-third of our electricity still comes from coal, though that may shrink further. Under current conditions — a natural gas glut, constrained energy demand and heavy EPA regulation — there will not be much profit in coal for the foreseeable future even though we will still rely on it for much electricity.

The best scenario for what’s left of the coal industry is if Republicans win the White House and maintain control of Congress. That would likely relieve the regulatory pressure on the industry and some of the natural gas glut since Republicans would greenlight natural gas exports.

Even if Democrats win, the coal industry is not likely going away, although its management will change dramatically. As I forecast here last year, no one will leave trillions of dollars worth of coal in the ground, especially since future governments will need cash to run the welfare state. So instead, Democrat-friendly billionaires will buy coal companies for a song, politically rehabilitate the fuel, donate to their political allies, and profit.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and is a former coal company executive.

Read More Stories About:

Big Government

Rick Wiley, Former Scott Walker Campaign Manager, Joins Team Trump

YouTube / GOP, Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/Getty Images

by BREITBART NEWS13 Apr 20162,167

Donald Trump has hired Republican strategist Rick Wiley, last seen managing Scott Walker’s 2016 presidential run, to boost his campaign heading into the Republican National Convention.

From the Washington Post:

NEW YORK — Donald Trump has hired a veteran campaign operative with deep roots in the Republican Party establishment to take a senior position on his presidential campaign, as the GOP front-runner moves quickly to incorporate seasoned professionals in his inner circle.

Rick Wiley, who has more than two decades of experience in state and national politics and most recently served as campaign manager for Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s presidential bid, is joining the Trump campaign as national political director, two Republicans with knowledge of the hire told The Washington Post.

Throughout the season, Trump has been criticized for his weak ground game in important states compared to rival 

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

97%

, a Texas senator. Wiley arrives with a mandate from Trump to beef up the campaign’s field operations in the states with primaries ahead on the calendar, including delegate-rich California, as well as prepare for what the Trump team views as a likely general election.

Wiley is the latest big-name hire for Trump, joining a senior team that now includes longtime GOP strategist Paul Manafort, who was hired in late March to manage the campaign’s delegate operations and summer convention plans and also has broad authority with overall campaign strategy.

Read the rest of the story here.

Read More Stories About:

Big Government, 2016 Presidential Race,Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Rick Wiley

RNC member: Trump can win with 1,100 delegates

www.washingtonexaminer.com

Republican National Committee member Randy Evans said Wednesday that Donald Trump would likely be able to secure the Republican nomination if he captures anything more than 1,100 delegates, short of the 1,237 delegates needed for a simple majority.

"If Donald Trump exceeds 1,100 votes, he will become the nominee even though he may not have 1,237," Evans said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe."

Evans' comment is good news for Trump if it's a sentiment shared by other RNC members, since Trump is at risk of falling short of a majority of delegates by the time of the convention in July. But Evans also warned that if Trump slips much more, the nomination would likely fall to someone else.

"If he gets less than 1,000 delegates, then I think we're looking at a contested convention that could go on for many, many days," Evans said.

"And then in the middle, there's that grey area between 1,000 and 1,100, and that's where the unbound delegates or the delegates that have been released by other candidates come into play to see if there are enough of those to get either Cruz or Trump over the finish line," he added.

As of this week, Trump leads Cruz in the delegate race 743-545, but he's expected to pick up most of New York's delegates next week, and has polled well in other states whose primaries are approaching.

COMMENTS

Ice Cube: 'Donald Trump Is What Americans Aspire to Be'

Listen to Military Veteran Talk Radio iHeart.SmythRadio.com
Facebook.com/SmythRadio

www.billboard.com

Ice Cube likened GOP candidate Donald Trump to the "American dream" during a sit-down with Bloomberg.

"Donald Trump is what Americans love. Donald Trump is what Americans aspire to be -- rich, powerful, do what you wanna do, say what you wanna say, be how you wanna be," the rapper-actor said about Trump's appeal. "That’s kind of been like the American dream. He looks like a boss to everybody, and Americans love to have a boss."

Ice Cube then clarified his remarks, saying, "Do I think he’s gonna do anything to help poor people or people that’s struggling? No, because he’s a rich white guy."

He explained Trump's wealth would make it difficult for the presidential hopeful to "relate to the small guy."

Ice Cube & Common Perform on 'Tonight Show,' Style Dolls' Hair for E! News

"He's always been rich," the rapper said. "Being rich don’t make you bad, I ain’t saying that. But I’m just saying, how can he relate?"

When asked about how Trump had previously questioned President Obama's election, asserting that he had been born in Kenya and was therefore not a "legitimate" president, Ice Cube stated, "He sounded crazy to me."

"I could see raising the question, but once you get the answer, man, move on," he said. "To still harp on it and to lie that you’re sending investigators and all this stuff to me was just a guy who couldn’t say that he was wrong."

Watch the interview below.

This article originally appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

COMMENTS