by dap | Sep 26, 2023 | Fox News
is on his way to Michigan on Tuesday to walk the picket line with striking autoworkers. It is a desperate and embarrassing move by a candidate who describes himself as the most “pro-union president” ever but who has failed to secure the endorsement of one of the nation’s biggest private sector unions – the UAW. The same UAW which, by the way, has endorsed every Democrat running for president in our lifetimes and backed Biden in 2020.
Biden is panicking as his polls sink ever deeper and his upbeat messaging about the state of the economy fails to gain traction. A
shows support for the president’s handling of the economy and immigration at career lows. In addition, 44% of respondents say they’ve become worse off since he took office – the most for any president since 1986.
Rubbing salt in the wound, voters are now essentially split on Donald Trump, with 47% approving of the former president and 49% disapproving; that approval number matches his all-time high while in office. When Trump exited the Oval Office, he had an approval rating of only 38%. In a hypothetical match-up next year, Trump beats Biden by 9 points.
Worse for Biden, if the government is shut down over budget fights, 44% of voters would blame the president and his Democrat colleagues while only 33% would hold Republicans responsible. Wow – what a wipeout.
The ABC poll does not identify respondents’ ratings by income or race; for that analysis we turn to Economist/YouGov polling. In the most recent survey, 41% of those polled approved of Biden’s job performance, and 55% did not, about in line with the average of polls, according to Real Clear Politics. As worrisome as the totals, the breakdowns by race and income group must terrify the
Hispanics, for instance, register 48% disapproval and only 44% approval, shockingly low for a Democrat president. Even blacks show only tepid enthusiasm for Biden, with 57% approval. Given that exit polls found 87% of Blacks and 67% of Hispanics voted for Biden in 2020, the slide is ominous.
Similarly, his lowest approval (39%) comes from middle-income Americans, earning $50,000 to $100,000 per year. In 2020, 56% of voters earning less than $100,000 went for Biden.
One group critical for Joe is
. To quote AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in a 2020 post-election speech, “Biden’s path to the White House ran through America’s labor movement. Initial toplines from our post-election survey show union members went 58% for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. While the general public supported Biden by three points, our members favored him by 21 points. Simply put, we got out the vote. In Wisconsin. In Michigan. In Pennsylvania.”
Simply put, Joe Biden cannot win re-election without union voters. Hence, the president’s
, the first time ever a president has taken sides so blatantly in a union negotiation.
But Biden’s relationship with the UAW is tricky. They blame him for pushing the transition to electric vehicles, mandating that 67% of all cars sold by 2032 be all-electric, a move that threatens the very existence of their rank-and-file. Not only does the assembly of EVs require 40% less labor than a conventional internal combustion engine, the supposed replacement jobs from manufacturing batteries have largely been planned in right-to-work states where automakers are able to hire
. Who loses? The UAW.
In June, Biden’s White House approved a $9.2 billion loan to fund three battery plants to be jointly operated by Ford and South Korea’s SK in Kentucky and Tennessee, both among the country’s 28 right-to-work states. Fain was outraged, asking, “Why is Joe Biden’s administration facilitating this corporate greed with taxpayer money?” In Fain’s world, “corporate greed” describes any company trying to earn a profit, without which there would be no money for research and development, no new investment and no hiring of workers.
Weeks after the loan was announced, Sean Fain scored a meeting at the White House at which he reportedly pushed for “the president’s public support for strong labor standards in the transition to electric vehicles,” according to the Detroit News. A UAW spokesman doubled down, confirming that “attaching labor standards to subsidies and loans going to auto companies was a top priority.” Fain also demanded that Biden issue “public support for the union’s demands,” which the president has done on several occasions.
Fain also had harsh words for former president Donald Trump, who is planning to speak to union members in Detroit on Sept. 27, the night of the second GOP debate. Trump has suggested that UAW’s leaders are not looking out for the workers’ best interests, and has blasted Biden’s push for electric vehicles, which he says will destroy the car industry and the union.
Fain said in an emailed statement, “Every fiber of our union is being poured into fighting the billionaire class and an economy that enriches people like
at the expense of workers. We can’t keep electing billionaires and millionaires that don’t have any understanding what it is like to live paycheck to paycheck and struggle to get by and expecting them to solve the problems of the working class.”
Of course, the same could be said about millionaire Joe Biden.
Biden is struggling to keep union members in his column. Working-class Americans have been hammered by inflation on Biden’s watch, which many economists attribute to excessive federal spending splashed onto a fast-recovering economy. Since Biden took office, real wages (adjusted for inflation) have gone down 4 percent.
Voters blame not just outsized spending for inflation – they are also angry that
has caused oil and gasoline prices to rise again.
Union workers have drifted away from Democrats in recent years for good reason; time will tell if Uncle Joe marching with workers will bring them home again.
by dap | Sep 26, 2023 | Fox News
While the
to acknowledge the migrant crisis, it’s impossible for them to hide the impact their disastrous border crisis is having on Democrat-run sanctuary cities and states.
Customs and Border Protection sources confirmed to Fox News that the total
to date 2023, at 2,388,350, have surpassed the 2022 total of 2,378,944, setting a new record. With fiscal years running from October to October, this puts migrant crossings at over 9,000 a day on average, according to Griff Jenkins, who is embedded at the border.
Many of these migrants made New York their end destination, upending the quality of life in a city already struggling with untenable crime, drug use and homelessness. Mayor Eric Adams warned that this crisis will “destroy New York City,” with
migrants not to come to her state.
While I sympathize with New Yorkers – or Chicagoans, Denverites and others – who have to live with the crisis, voters hold some of the blame. They embrace radical left politicians who proudly signaled their support for asylum seekers. They just never thought anyone would take them up on their sanctuary offers.
During the Trump presidency, you couldn’t swing a dead cat without hitting a Democrat proudly declaring their city, county or state a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, a safe haven for immigrants seeking a better life – an escape from poverty or conflict in their home countries. Some jurisdictions established laws or policies for the first time during the Trump administration, while others strengthened pre-existing ones.
But they virtually all had the same effect: An influx of illegal immigrants took these sanctuaries up on their offers for shelter and freedom, putting a strain on local resources. Accepting so many unvetted illegal immigrants led to an increase in preventable crime and negatively impacted the quality of life for residents.
Denver codified its sanctuary status on Aug. 28, 2018, after community activists demanded protections against Trump’s immigration policies. The Public Safety Enforcement Priorities Act prevented city employees from sharing information about a resident’s immigration status, prohibited the sharing of information for the purposes of immigration matters, and forbade law enforcement from detaining an illegal immigrant for the sole purposes of turning them over to federal immigration officials.
“Last year we watched as our new president called us rapists, drug dealers and criminals. Our children cried in fear as our new president threatened to separate their families and build a wall of deportation,” Councilman Paul López, one of the sponsors of the bill, explained while holding back tears in a nearly 15‑minute self-aggrandizing speech ahead of the bill’s passage.
Lopez and the others extolled what they treated as the most historic civil rights bill in the city’s history. It was a nauseatingly rehearsed performance of left-wing theatrics, filled with calculated pauses that feigned thoughtfulness. It was nothing more than performative politics.
“Look, there’s never anything false about hope, right? Our movement needs these allies. We need allies to stand in this gap, and we usually refer to civil rights and human rights as something in history books. But it’s not in history books. Ladies and gentlemen, it is today, in these chambers, in this city, at this moment that we were born to be here for. And we all have this responsibility to stand up to injustice, and if we all stand together… we cannot be moved.”
toward illegal immigrants ended with the Trump presidency. While proudly proclaiming to be a sanctuary for immigrants while Trump was in office, the mood changed with President Biden’s porous southern border. The city saw a dramatic increase in illegal immigrants in December 2022, and local leaders were unprepared.
A steady stream of illegal immigrants was bused to Denver, and the city coped. But then came a much larger group of Venezuelans between the ages of 20 and 40. City leaders didn’t know who sent the group, but they were forced to scramble to provide emergency shelter. Despite initial statements from Democrat Mayor Michael Hancock that their No. 1 priority was the “health and safety of all our residents, including those who are migrants,” their priorities quickly changed.
Less than a month after the surprise visit of Venezuelans, Democrat Gov. Jared Polis announced he was shipping the migrants elsewhere. In partnership with Denver, Polis’ office arranged for “culturally competent navigators” (whatever that is) to help ship the migrants “in the most humane possible way” to their final destination. Polis promised this would be done “in coordination with the receiving community.”
Polis strained to portray his plan as compassionate, but his actions were almost identical to those coming from Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, both Republican. Still, Polis got a pass from left-wing national media.
Instead, Republican governors earned national headlines rebuking their so-called callous and uncompassionate stunts using vulnerable migrants as political pawns. Unwilling to continue to shoulder the burden of the costs and crimes associated with illegal border crossings, they bused and flew migrants to Democrat-run sanctuary cities, just like Polis. New York Mayor Adams called this “unfair.”
What’s unfair for local governments is to bear the burden of an open border and lax immigration policy. It is supposed to be the responsibility of the federal government. But is it unfair for local governments to take on the obligation when they touted their sanctuaries as beacons for immigrants? What was the point of designating itself a sanctuary city, county or state, if they were unwilling to help bear the burden of migrants illegally crossing the border?
The radical left didn’t think through their plans because their sanctuary declarations were acts of virtue signaling. Their real plan was to burden Republican-led border states, while Democrats earned future voters in areas they haven’t yet been able to win. Their strategy came back to haunt them, and their residents paid a price.
the tail end of 2022 complaining about the influx of migrants straining the city’s resources. At one point in August, the city’s shelters housed 4,900 migrants seeking asylum. At first, Adams turned the busloads of migrants shipped to his city into a publicity campaign to celebrate the city’s compassion, personally greeting them and offering food. When the cameras were not recording, Adams’ office volunteers were “screaming at the refugees to smile at the mayor,” according to Ariadna Phillips, the founder of South Bronx Mutual Aid.
New York became a sanctuary city well before Trump was in office. The proclamation was passed in 1989 under Mayor Ed Koch.
, the city went even further with a bill that limited most cooperation with federal officials by “end[ing] cooperation with federal ‘detainer requests’ for all residents, except those who have been convicted of violent or serious felonies.”
Some migrants were receiving hotel rooms and free food. Others were housed in complexes with big screen televisions, Xbox consoles and cushy sofas.
Immigrants would see this as more of an incentive to make the dangerous journey into the United States. And that’s exactly what they did. The surge continued, as
did next to nothing to stem the tide of migrants. And look where that’s got us.
Portions of this op-ed were excerpted from “What’s Killing America” by Jason Rantz. (Copyright 2023) Used with permission from Center Street, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
by dap | Sep 26, 2023 | Fox News
is shaping up to be yet another public policy issue where elites are out of step with the public.
In Silicon Valley, Congress and the Biden administration, leaders are buzzing about AI. For those in the Valley, killer robots with lasers for eyes dominate the conversation. The Beltway, in contrast, is spending a lot of political capital to deal with
.
And yet, the general public isn’t primarily worried about either machines gaining control or about algorithms being biased. What concerns them about AI are the national security implications and the potential for job losses.
Last month, our organization asked 1,000 U.S. voters to rank their top benefits and concerns related to AI. The top concerns include killer computers, transparency, bias, job loss and national security. The results of our poll, which was conducted with YouGov, show there is a gap between the concerns of the public and the concerns of those in power.
Over one-third of people rank job loss as their No. 1 worry when it comes to AI. This matches findings from a poll the CGO conducted earlier this summer that found four out of five Americans worried that AI will displace jobs “generally.” (Notably, only two out of five Americans were worried AI would displace their own job.) Following that, about a quarter rank national security as the most important aspect of AI. At the bottom of the rankings are bias and killer computers at around 10% each.
In other words, people aren’t as worried about the esoteric harms of killer robots and bias and are more worried about concrete harms like job loss and losing
.
It is a commonly held notion that the government has done little on AI but the Biden administration has been quite active, especially when it comes to countering bias. To name just a couple of recent efforts, they have taken “New Steps to Advance Responsible Artificial Intelligence Research, Development, and Deployment,” have tackled “Racial and Ethnic Bias in Home Valuations,” and have laid out a “Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights.” The common theme among all the initiatives in the executive is the goal of reducing algorithmic bias.
Of course, the government does have a role to play in policing bad actors in housing, finance and education. But there are already rules on the books that would prevent biased hiring, for instance, and crafting new rules for AI is much easier said than done because there is no agreement on the definition of AI. Poorly crafted rules meant to regulate AI could easily affect all software.
Similar definitional issues are at play when analyzing bias and different experts come to different conclusions. What isn’t often admitted in these high-level discussions is that the same data can lead to radically different conclusions depending on who analyzes it. In a number of different studies, independent research teams have been given the same data to decipher, resulting in opposite and conflicting results. Teams working to reduce unfairness might not converge on the same model or parameters.
However, the government needs to be mindful of the potential unintended consequences of its actions. Overly restrictive regulations could limit innovation and slow the adoption of new technologies. Furthermore, the government needs to be aware that its efforts to address algorithmic bias may be perceived by the public as an attempt to
.
Bias and physical safety shouldn’t be ignored. However, just like the American public, policymakers would do well to prioritize these
and national security to ensure the public understands the benefits and risks of AI systems in these sectors.
Aligning solutions to match the clearer, more pressing problems, is an approach that works well in AI policy and all other public policies.
