We start right now with Brianne Pfannenstiel of the Des Moines Register and the all-too-predictable announcement of the Selzer ballot exhibiting that Quantity 45 has an almost 30-point polling benefit over his nearest rival for tomorrow’s Iowa Caucuses.
Former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley is in a distant second place, having overtaken Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
However whilst Haley has moved into second place, a brand new Des Moines Register/NBC Information/Mediacom Iowa Ballot signifies her assist could also be based mostly on “shaky floor,” mentioned pollster J. Ann Selzer, who carried out the ballot.
The Iowa Ballot exhibits 48% of possible Republican caucusgoers decide Trump as their first alternative for president — a slight dip from the 51% who said the same in December. […]
Selzer, who’s president of the nationally acknowledged agency Selzer & Co., mentioned Saturday’s outcomes recall to mind these of the final Iowa Poll before the 2016 Republican caucus. […]
The ballot exhibits troubling indicators round possible caucusgoers’ enthusiasm for Haley, which might turn into notably necessary as Iowa faces what is predicted to be a historically cold caucus night following a blizzard that dumped a foot of snow throughout a lot of the state.
Whereas Haley has surpassed DeSantis, Selzer mentioned, “a lot of the remainder of the info right here shouldn’t be excellent news.”
I’m reminded of a time period that I do know from the school soccer message boards and blogs referred to as a “unhappy landing.”
It’s when a staff that’s being completely blown out in a recreation manages to attain a landing, often within the final 5 minutes of a recreation when the opposing staff’s protection has second and even third-stringers within the recreation. Nonetheless, the sport continues to be a blowout.
That’s what Nikki Haley’s second place polling end in Iowa jogs my memory of: a tragic landing.
And Ron DeSantis has turn into like Florida State within the Orange Bowl.
Judd Legum writes for his “Well-liked Info” Substack that Twitter/X proprietor Elon Musk has been trafficking in a lot of misinformation about numerous facets of voting.
This week, Elon Musk has repeatedly promoted false and deceptive claims about voting to his 168 million followers on X, the social community previously generally known as Twitter. Musk then used these misguided claims to justify massive restrictions on voting in the United States, together with eliminating early voting, abolishing most mail-in voting, and imposing new identification necessities.
On January 9, for instance, Musk posted that “Arizona clearly states that no proof of citizenship is required for federal elections.” This revelation was accompanied by a picture posted by an X person named Mark Jeffery, a cryptocurrency investor and self-published creator of science fiction novels. A highlighted portion of the picture states that people who don’t present proof of citizenship will probably be supplied with a “federal solely” poll.
On January 10, Musk posted that he lately realized “illegals aren’t prevented from voting in federal elections,” and that “got here as a shock.” That declare is totally false. […]
Musk’s alarm about non-citizen voting shouldn’t be grounded actually. A examine by the Brennan Middle for Justice evaluating 23.5 million votes throughout 12 states in 2016 discovered 30 incidents of suspected non-citizen voting, 0.0001% of the 2016 vote in these jurisdictions. A 2022 audit of Georgia voting rolls discovered about 1600 noncitizens making an attempt to register to vote over a 25-year interval, and no non-citizens had been really allowed to register or vote.
Clare Malone of The New Yorker reviews on accusations {that a} CNN reporter working in Gaza faces has pro-Israeli bias. (Be aware that the catalyzing occasion bringing about this particular accusation in opposition to this particular reporter is extra trafficking in misinformation by Elon Musk.)
On December twelfth, the CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward grew to become the primary Western reporter to enter Gaza with out an I.D.F. escort since the war began. Crammed into the again seat of a automobile, she and her crew captured photos of the bombed-out buildings and streets of Rafah, the southernmost metropolis in Gaza which shares a border with Egypt. In line with one current U.N. estimate, eighty-five per cent of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents had fled there. Crowds milled exterior a bakery, and oldsters walked hand in hand with their kids previous mountains of rubble. “The Israeli army says it has hit Gaza with greater than twenty-two thousand strikes,” Ward mentioned throughout the trip. “That by far surpasses something we’ve seen in fashionable warfare when it comes to depth and ferocity, and we actually, actually, are simply getting a glimpse of it right here.” […]
Ward instructed me that she had by no means been in direct contact with the I.D.F. about moving into Gaza. After I requested whether or not she was against getting into Gaza with a army escort, she took a protracted pause earlier than answering. “I personally felt for me it is going to be tough to do the kind of reporting that I sometimes do underneath these circumstances,” Ward mentioned. “The embeds that I’ve seen with the I.D.F.—it’s very tough to have conversations with extraordinary individuals.”
However that stance hasn’t shielded Ward from criticism. Two days after the October seventh assaults, she and her crew had been on the bottom in Israel, overlaying the aftermath, when rocket hearth from Gaza began to crackle via the air. Ward and the others ran to a roadside ditch, the place Ward, mendacity on the bottom, caught her breath and delivered into the digicam a composed synopsis of the scenario. The section was good tv—and plainly captured the worry and anxiousness that existed alongside the border following the Hamas assaults. However, quickly after it aired, a right-wing YouTube channel referred to as TheQuartering overlaid a satirical voice-over on the footage, making it appear as if Ward and her staff had exaggerated the hazard of the episode. The video obtained 5 million views on Twitter—Elon Musk replied to the publish—and misinformation shortly unfold, leaping from Twitter to TikTok and Instagram. In a matter of days, Ward’s report grew to become an emblem to a few of the Western media’s supposed willingness to prop up sympathies for the Israeli aspect.
Heather Cox Richardson writes for her “Letters of an American” Substack a couple of face-off and the U.S.-Mexican border between U.S. Border Patrol brokers and the Texas Nationwide Guard that resulted within the deaths of a girls and two kids.
Final night time a lady and two kids drowned within the Rio Grande that marks the border between the U.S. and Mexico close to Eagle Move, Texas.
U.S. Border Patrol brokers knew {that a} group of six migrants had been in misery within the river however couldn’t attempt to save them, as they usually would, as a result of troops from the Texas Nationwide Guard and the Texas Army Division prevented the Border Patrol brokers from getting into the world the place they had been struggling: Shelby Park, a 47-acre public park that gives entry to a steadily traveled a part of the river and is a spot the place Border Patrol brokers usually encounter migrants crossing the border illegally.
They might not enter as a result of two days in the past, on Thursday, Texas governor Greg Abbott despatched armed Texas Nationwide Guard troopers and troopers from the Texas Army Division to take management of Shelby Park. Rolando Salinas, the mayor of Eagle Move, posted a video on Fb exhibiting the troops and saying {that a} state official had instructed him that state troops had been taking “full management” over Shelby Park “indefinitely.” Salinas made it clear that “[t]his shouldn’t be one thing that we needed. This isn’t one thing that we requested for as a metropolis.” […]
Abbott and MAGA Republicans are teeing up the difficulty of immigration as a key line of assault on President Joe Biden in 2024, however whereas they’re insisting the difficulty is so necessary they won’t comply with fund Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s 2022 invasion till it’s solved, they’re additionally unwilling to take part in discussions to fund extra border officers or immigration courts. Right this moment, as soon as once more, Biden reminded reporters that he has requested Congress to cross new border measures since he took workplace, however reasonably than cross new legal guidelines, Republicans look like doubling down on pushing the concept that migrants threaten American society and that a person state—Texas, on this case—can override federal authority.
Rogé Karma of The Atlantic seems on the relationship between the media and public opinion because it pertains to the financial system.
Journalists have lengthy gravitated towards calling out issues reasonably than highlighting feel-good tales. Exposing wrongdoing and injustice is, in spite of everything, a part of the job description. (Extra cynical readers will level out that audiences have lengthy rewarded the press for doomerism.) However in response to new analysis from the Brookings Establishment, relating to financial information, this proclivity for negativity has recently gotten much more pronounced. For the examine, the economists Ben Harris and Aaron Sojourner compared an index of the “sentiment” of financial protection in a set of mainstream newspapers with what is definitely occurring within the financial system. They discovered that, from 1988 to 2016, modifications within the two tracked carefully collectively: The sentiment of financial tales tended to turn into extra constructive when measures equivalent to inflation, employment, and the inventory market had been trying good, and extra unfavorable once they had been trying unhealthy. Originally of Donald Trump’s presidency, nevertheless, the connection started to interrupt down; protection grew to become extra unfavorable than the financial fundamentals would predict. After Joe Biden took workplace, the gulf widened much more. In an e-mail, Harris and Sojourner instructed me that they discovered that from 2017 to 2023, the media’s “negativity hole” was practically 5 occasions bigger than it was throughout the earlier three many years. […]
For his or her evaluation, Harris and Sojourner didn’t have a look at Fox Information or different partisan media. As an alternative, they used the San Francisco Fed’s Day by day Information Sentiment Index, which tracks the diploma of constructive and unfavorable language in economics protection in a set of 24 newspapers, together with The New York Occasionsand The Wall Avenue Journal. (This kind of text-based sentiment evaluation has its limitations however is useful for monitoring directional shifts over time.) They discovered that one thing modified over the previous seven years: Even controlling for the underlying indicators, financial protection has gotten sharply extra unfavorable total. The authors stress that they will’t show that this shift triggered the drop in client sentiment. But when individuals are influenced by what they learn, then it might stand to cause that the shift in protection has performed a job. […]
We can also’t rule out the chance that, relating to the connection between the media and public opinion, the causal arrow runs in the wrong way: Possibly the vibes are driving the protection, not the opposite manner round. Journalists are individuals, in spite of everything—actually, we’re people who find themselves paid to be attuned to what different individuals are experiencing. In a forthcoming paper, the political scientist Christopher Wlezien analyzes the connection between client sentiment and media tone from 1980 to 2013. He concludes that though the affect runs in each instructions, public attitudes towards the financial system are likely to form financial protection way over the protection shapes individuals’s attitudes. Might this clarify the divergence of the previous few years? If history is any guide, few forces can tank public perceptions of the financial system as dramatically as bouts of excessive inflation can. The media may merely be doing their job nicely, choosing up on already horrible financial sentiment. “After I was working for the Biden administration, we had been terrified of claiming something too good in regards to the financial system, as a result of we didn’t need to appear insensitive to how individuals had been feeling,” Harris, who beforehand served because the assistant secretary of the Treasury for financial coverage, instructed me. “I believe journalists are underneath comparable strain.”
Amy Hawkins and Helen Davidson of the Guardian report that Beijing is mad that Western leaders have been calling and congratulating Lai Ching-te on his win in Taiwan’s elections.
Lai won an unprecedented third term in power for the pro-sovereignty Democratic Progressive get together (DPP) in Saturday’s election, with greater than 40% of the vote. Lai is taking up from the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen, who has been president since 2016, promising to proceed her international coverage efforts in resisting China’s plans to annex Taiwan.
A spokesperson for the US state division congratulated the Taiwanese individuals “for as soon as once more demonstrating the energy of their sturdy democratic system and electoral course of”.
Chatting with reporters shortly after the end result, US president Joe Biden, who plans to ship an unofficial delegation to Taiwan subsequent week, reiterated that the US does not support Taiwanese independence.
Nonetheless, China’s international ministry mentioned on Sunday that the US state division assertion “significantly violated US guarantees that it might solely preserve cultural, financial and different non-official ties with Taiwan”. The Chinese language ministry mentioned it had lodged “solemn representations” with the US over the feedback.
The US, the UK, the European Union and Canada additionally supplied their congratulations to the DPP. The UK’s international secretary, David Cameron, mentioned the end result was “testomony to Taiwan’s vibrant democracy”.
Lastly right now, The Grammarian writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer about one other situation that conservatives had with former Harvard President Claudine Homosexual.
Grammatical hysteria was simply the factor to inflame the bottom.
“Elite College Scrubs A number of Internet Pages About ‘Id Recognitions,’ Pronouns,” screamed the headline on Dec. 18 within the ultraconservative Daily Caller, whose story then reverberated within the right-wing echo chamber of the Tennessee Star, the Ohio Star, the Virginia Star, the Florida Capital Star, the Michigan Star, and presumably another, extra initially named publications. (Presumably not.) […]
Someday shortly after publication, nevertheless, the Day by day Caller found that the pages weren’t “scrubbed” in spite of everything — simply briefly down. So it added to the article the ungrammatical, “the hyperlinks to each pages at the moment are been restored.” The conspiracy unraveled shortly, however the nonstory remained on the positioning.
Issues regarded completely different within the Star galaxy. On these information websites mirroring Poulter’s authentic story, the textual content was by no means up to date. It nonetheless erroneously states, “Each hyperlinks now route on to the Range and Inclusion homepage.” Which may have been the case for a minute, nevertheless it’s not true.
True or not, it took just some weeks for the Harvard non-controversy over pronouns to snowball together with a bunch of different allegations about plagiarism and {qualifications} and antisemitism. The ensuing din led Homosexual to resign on Jan. 2, whereas MAGA claimed victory over an elite Ivy League establishment.
Attempt to have the very best day everybody!
