Chickens can't fly they said.
Real America's Voice (RAV)
@RealAmVoice
BREAKING: @RepMTG talks the resignation of U.S. Attorney and J6 prosecutor, Matthew Graves.
https://x.com/RealAmVoice/status/1873831339054493718
Good song.
Harriet Hageman Picked As Chairwoman For House Anti-Woke Caucus
When it comes to going “woke,” U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman is at the forefront of trying to block the federal government from pursuing these controversial social policies.
On Monday, Hageman was named chair of the Anti-Woke Caucus, a group of U.S. House Republicans dedicated to fighting the growing influence of "woke" ideologies in government, business and society. She will be taking over from U.S. Senator-elect Jim Banks, R-Ohio.
“Harriet Hageman has played a critical role in our caucus since Day 1, and I can think of no one better to lead our members as they work alongside the Trump administration,” Banks said in a press release announcing Hageman as chair. “We are winning the war against wokeness, and Republicans in Congress now have a golden opportunity to defeat it once and for all.”
What Do They Do?
Hageman joined the Anti-Woke Caucus early on in her first term in April 2023. The stated goal of the caucus at that time was to expose and defund far-left programs in the federal government.
The group has championed legislation seeking to restrict the teaching of critical race theory in schools and corporate diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. Many of these initiatives are built upon a desire to elevate minority members of society as a way to counterbalance systemic racism.
For instance, in 2023 the Anti-Woke Caucus endorsed legislation that would prohibit the Biden administration or any other recipient of federal money from intentionally discriminating against or granting preference to any person based on race, color or national origin.
Some Republicans accused President Joe Biden’s administration of using $39 billion meant to build computer chip factories to further “woke” ideas such as requiring some recipients to offer child care and encouraging the use of union labor.
Federal agencies like the Department of Veterans Affairs, NASA and the U.S. Army have also been accused of embracing “woke” policies.
Future Goals
According to Hageman, the caucus wants the U.S. to return to being “a merit-based society that prioritizes free speech, fiscal responsibility, and the rule of law.”
“I am proud to assume the role of chairwoman of the Anti-Woke Caucus and continue our fight against the harmful overreach of left-wing policies,” Hageman said in the press release. “Under the Biden-Harris administration, government, educational institutions and even corporations bent to the will of extremist leftist ideologies that undermine American principles, common-sense policies and the Constitution itself.”
The Anti-Woke Caucus will have much more power entering the 119th Congress now that Republicans control both chambers and the presidency. Many Republicans view President-elect Donald Trump’s win as a mandate on removing woke ideologies.
Hageman said the Caucus will work hand-in-hand with Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s “Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to implement policies that align with the will of the people.”
U.S. Sen. Cynthia Lummis has joined the DOGE Caucus in the Senate to help with these goals.
“Our mission is simple: restore accountability, reinstate open discourse and ensure that Americans are not forced to accept a political agenda that contradicts the values that made this country great,” Hageman said. “Together with President Trump and the Department of Government Efficiency, we will work to root our remnants of the radical leftist agenda still suffocating our social spaces.”
https://cowboystatedaily.com/2024/12/30/hageman-picked-as-chairwoman-for-house-anti-woke-caucus/
Dr. Leanna Wen wants FDA to approve bird flu vaccine for farm workers
Amid concerns about the bird flu, the Biden administration should be making rapid tests available and ask the FDA to authorize the already-existing H5N1 vaccine, says former Baltimore health commissioner
@DrLeanaWen.
"I feel like we should've learned our lesson from COVID, that just because we aren't testing doesn't mean the virus isn't there."
https://x.com/FaceTheNation/status/1873409443313885489
America now has more Republicans than Democrats
Something very unusual by historic standards happened in this year’s election: there were lots more Republicans than Democrats in the electorate.
After the exit polls were reweighted to reflect the final popular vote result, Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 5 points in the AP VoteCast survey and by 4 points in the network exit polls.
Historically, this is practically unheard of. Democrats have held a longstanding advantage in party identification that dates back to the New Deal, with Republicans drawing even on only a couple of occasions — the 1994 Republican Revolution and the immediate post-9/11 period.
Until Ronald Reagan remade the Republican Party’s image in the 1980s, Democrats held a massive advantage in party ID that often reached 2-to-1 in the 1960s and ‘70s. Only after Reagan’s 1984 landslide did the modern narrow Democratic advantage take hold, where it’s stayed for the most part ever since.
The historic Democratic identification advantage has been with us since the advent of modern polling and has been an inexorable fact of political life for the better part of a century.
This did not stop Republicans from winning their fair share of national elections during this period, including landslides like Richard Nixon’s in 1972, when he won by 23 points in a country that was Democratic by 17. This Democratic brand advantage did nevertheless manifest in a structural majority in Congress and at the state and local levels until 1994, one of the points where Republicans briefly overtook Democrats in party ID.
2024 marked a decisive breakthrough for Republicans: the first time in a modern predifential election where GOP identifiers outnumbered Democrats, rather than merely drawing even. But the end of this period where voters were more willing to call themselves Democrats than they were to vote for Democratic presidential candidates, probably ended in 2020, when the party managed to narrowly win a trifecta while GOP turnout was roughly on par with Democrats—behind by 1 in the exit poll and up 1 in AP VoteCast.
We are now entering a period where the roughly even party ID split reflects the highly competitive nature of national elections. All things being equal we should expect a 50-50 political environment to yield tied party ID, rather than a 3- or 4-point Democratic ID edge. Good Democratic years will mean more Democratic identifiers in the electorate, and good Republican years will mean more Republican identifiers.
Will this last?
The question that naturally will get asked next is whether this is a new equilibrium or a short-term mirage. After all, Republicans have drawn even before, only to fall back behind Democrats.
Partisan polarization is one big reason why now might be different. The “ancestral” Democrat who identifies as a Democrat and votes for the party’s candidates downballot while being a de-facto Republican federally is gradually becoming extinct. If you voted for Trump, you’re more likely to just call yourself a Republican.
Does the Republican advantage this year signal something more than a period of parity—but perhaps dominance? Trump is a cultural icon who’s provided a rallying point for young and minority voters to vote for a Republican for the first time. If he plays his cards right — restoring the sense of pre-Covid stability and normalcy, securing the border, and Elon-ifying the federal burecuracy — he could prove a transformational figure just like Reagan was for Republicans in the 1980s.
From an analytical point of view, two things can be true at once: Republicans did enjoy a short-term turnout boost thanks to the failure of the Biden Administration and the long term baseline has gotten more Republican. That neutral baseline is now parity between the parties or a one or two point Republican advantage.
The key tell here is the 2020 presidential election, where in a fairly “neutral” partisan ID environment, Democrats won a trifecta, winning the presidential popular vote by 4.5 points and in the House by 3 points. Both exit polls averaged out to a tied environment in party ID, a pretty good indicator of what the baseline was. Likewise, this year’s Pew NPORS poll, a high-quality survey conducted with tens of thousands of Americans to provide other pollsters with weighting targets, yielded an R+1 party ID result among adults.
The hard data aligns with the polls showing short- and long-term Republican gains. First, voter registration data showed voters switching and registering with the Republican Party at a torrid pace all throughout the Biden years. That reflects both the Democrats’ relative unpopularity under Biden and a long-term unwinding of the Democrats’ New Deal advantage in partisan identification and registration. The “stock” of existing voter registrations is more Democratic than these voters actually behave, particularly in rural areas. As people update their registrations, voters die, and new voters come online, the voter registration figures will gradually come to reflect the Trump era partisan alignment.
But there was also a Republican turnout surge specific to this election year. The strongest Trump 2020 counties outvoted the strongest Biden 2020 counties by around 10 percent. The reason the electorate was R+4 and not Pew’s R+1 was because of this surge. When we compare the actual 2024 turnout to a model trained on 2020 turnout, the split in party registration states is 2-3 points more Republican in 2024.
Predict party ID, predict the election
We are now in an era where party ID is closely coupled with election outcomes, with a slight Republican ID advantage. And for the first time in 2020 and 2024, the historic pattern of Democrats overperforming on ID reversed itself. Trump actually underperformed the Republican ID margin both times.
That makes having a realistic party ID mix in polls extremely important. And pollsters may have to take heavy-handed measures to achieve it. This is probably the subject of another post, but when all is said and done, party ID and not recalled vote is probably the only semi-stable partisan benchmark you can weight to that voters are somewhat truthful about.
But can you predict party ID and create a fixed target for it in your polls? If they want to avoid bias, pollsters increasingly may have to. Doing so may be a function of taking the party ID baseline and adjusting the margin up to 3 points for the political environment. If one assumes the baseline is R+1 today, the range of possible outcomes in an election is anywhere between D+2 to R+4, but in 2024 a pro-Democratic environment should probably have been ruled out, so that yielded a potential party ID range of R+1 to R+4 in 2024, and we ended it at R+4. The tricky part here, of course, is that the baseline itself isn’t stable, so you need to adjust it based on trends in high-quality surveys that aren’t weighting on party identification.
This is a slightly uncomfortable thought as it’s almost the equivalent of fixing the election result itself before the fact. But many pollsters already did a version of this by weighting to a recalled vote benchmark that turned out to be too far left, because more Trump 2020 voters turned out this year. Just making an educated guess at what party ID will be, or allowing your final party mix to trade in a very narrow band around this, might be the lesser of evils approach.
https://www.patrickruffini.com/p/america-now-has-more-republicans
Conservatives lead Liberals 45-16 in new Canadian poll
A poll recently conducted by the Angus Reid Institute has shown that the Liberals have fallen to third place nationally.
The Conservatives, meanwhile, have risen even closer to 50%.
According to the poll, 45% of Canadians expressed an intention to vote for Pierre Poilievre's Conservatives, up 2% since the survey was last sent out. The NDP under Jagmeet Singh gained 1% support, bringing their total to 21%. With Justin Trudeau at the helm, the Liberals lost five points, coming in at just 16%.
The Conservatives saw their support grow or remain stable in every region of the country, save for Alberta and Ontario, where it went down by 1%. In British Columbia, support for the party went up by 10%.
The Liberals were down across the board, suffering their greatest losses in Quebec, -8%, and British Columbia, -6%.
In a press release, the Angus Reid Institute explained that the Liberals' results were "the lowest level of support for the party" it had reported since 2014, and "quite possibly the lowest vote intention the Liberals have ever received in the modern era."
Among those who voted Liberal in 2021, only 7% said they "strongly approve" of Trudeau's performance. A further 39% said they "moderately approve."A full 25% said they now "strongly disapprove of the leader of the party that had their support last time around.
Among all voters, Trudeau's popularity fell to 22%, the lowest in his tenure as prime minister.
The poll was conducted between December 27 and 30, 2024 among a representative randomized sample of 2,261 Canadian adults, all of whom were members of the Angus Reid Forum.
https://www.westernstandard.news/news/60805
Over 1,000,000 people have converted to Christianity in Iran as 50,000 mosques close
A million Muslims have accepted Christ in Iran as tens of thousands of mosques in the Islamic country have closed, according to reports on the ground and multiple ministries in the region. In February, Mohammad Abolghassem Doulabi, a senior cleric in Iran, revealed that 50,000 of the nation's 75,000 mosques had closed because of a substantial drop in attendance.
At the same time, Muslims are finding Jesus, with approximately 1 million Muslims in Iran coming to Christ, according to the international radio ministry The Tide and a new report from CBN.
Todd Nettleton, vice president of message for The Voice of the Martyrs, said many Iranians are searching for hope.
"You have a country with one of the highest drug addiction rates in the world. You have a country where corruption runs rampant. You have a country where more than half the people live below the poverty line," Nettleton told CBN. "And the people of Iran are looking at this, and they are saying, 'Wait a minute. If this is what Islam has brought us in the last 45 years, we're not interested. We want to know what the other options are.'"
A December survey of Iranians from the Netherlands-based Gamaan Institute found that 80 percent reject the Islamic Republic and want a democratic government.
The potential of a "Jesus revolution" within Iran has sparked pushback from the Islamic government, Nettleton said. Conversion from Islam to Christianity is illegal in Iran.
"This is not something that is making the regime happy. And, really, in many ways, they are seeking to solidify their power and to crush any kind of dissent," Nettleton told CBN. "We have heard multiple stories this year of Bible study, a home church being raided. Everyone there is photographed, everyone there is questioned. But then the leader of the meeting is held onto. They are arrested. They are detained, they're put in prison."
Don Shenk, executive director of The Tide ministry, said Muslims are responding to gospel-centered messages that are broadcast into Iran.
"We get responses from listeners who say, 'Now I understand that God loves me. I always thought that God wanted to punish me,'" Shenk told CBN. "And I think there's an awakening that is taking place across the Muslim world, not just in Iran."
The international ministry Open Doors said Christianity in Iran is only tolerated if "you're part of a traditional Christian community, for instance, Armenian or Assyrian Christian."
But for "Christians who convert from Islam," Open Doors said, "not even the veneer of tolerance is present."
"The government views conversion as an attempt by the West to undermine Islam and the Islamic government of Iran," Open Doors reported. "This means that anyone who is discovered to be a member of a house church can be charged with a crime against national security, which can lead to long prison sentences. Anyone arrested or detained can be tortured and abused while in jail. Some Christians are released and monitored – and know a second arrest would mean a long prison sentence."
Shenk's ministry, The Tide, reported that "what is happening in Iran is just the tip of the iceberg, as similar movements to Christ are happening across the Muslim world." The ministry said it is not uncommon for Muslims to dream about Christ.
"There is one common thread across these testimonies of Jesus appearing to Muslims in dreams: the dreams by themselves do not immediately result in conversion," a blog on The Tide website said. "Rather, they are a step in the spiritual journey, where the Lord breaks down some of the barriers which were the result of growing up in the Islamic faith. After receiving these dreams, these Muslims are often led to believers who engage them relationally."
https://www.crosswalk.com/headlines/contributors/michael-foust/1-million-muslims-in-iran-have-turned-to-christ-as-50000-mosques-closed.html
Tesla replaces laid-off U.S. workers with foreigners using visas pushed by Musk
Electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla has reportedly hired foreign workers with H-1B visas after a wave of layoffs in the U.S.
Electrek reported on Monday that Tesla recently "ramped up its use of H-1B visas to replace U.S. workers it let go during a wave of layoffs earlier this year."
Current and former Tesla employees confirmed the car company's move in recent days, Electrek said. Tesla reportedly laid off at least 14% of its 120,000 workers in 2024.
Over the past week, supporters of President-elect Donald Trump's MAGA movement have been furious with Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) co-chairs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy after they called for an increase in H-1B visas and suggested U.S. workers were inferior.
Musk is also Tesla's CEO and largest shareholder.
"The reason I'm in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B," Musk wrote on X last week. "Take a big step back and F— YOURSELF in the face. I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend."
Electrek pointed out that Musk entered the U.S. on a student visa. Musk's brother later admitted that they were in the country illegally when their Zip2 startup company was launched.
H-1B visas are controversial because some believe they take job opportunities from U.S. workers. Visa holders must continue working for the company that sponsors them or leave the country.
https://www.rawstory.com/tesla-h1b-visas-elon-musk/