PrairiePundit

Neil Braithwaite: DOJ opens the door for future FBI political corruption The DOJ set a dangerous precedent with its decision not to prosecute fired FBI director James Comey for violating department and FBI policies identified in the I.G. Report. The I.G. Report's " Conclusion " specifically stated (emphasis mine), that: Comey set a  dangerous example  for the over 35,000 current FBI employees — and the many thousands more former FBI employees…" and went on to strongly warn that "were current or former FBI employees to follow the former Director's example and disclose sensitive information in service of their own strongly held personal convictions,  the FBI would be unable to dispatch its law enforcement duties properly . The DOJ's decision not to prosecute Comey cannot be reconciled with what the I.G. Report clearly warns against. ... What the report seems to ignore is that Comey did these things as part of a coup attempt against the Presi...

Legal Insurrection: Reports: Small Israeli copter-drones blew up key Iranian missile equipment in heart of Hezbollah stronghold The attack “damaged a planetary mixer … needed to create propellants that can improve the engine performance of missiles and increase their accuracy. The machine was hit … shortly before Hezbollah planned to move it to a secured site.” There is a good compilation of reports from various news sources about the nature of the attack and the nature of the target.

Washington Free Beacon: The Trump administration on Thursday issued a new batch of sanctions on the Lebanese terror group Hezbollah in the latest salvo aimed at disrupting the Iranian-backed organization's illicit funding and weapons networks, according to information provided by the State and Treasury Departments. As Iran continues to ratchet up regional support for terror groups that have attacked American and allied forces, the Trump administration is moving to disrupt these terror groups by hitting them in their pocketbooks. The latest sanctions target Lebanon's Jammal Trust Bank SAL, which the Trump administration has identified as providing "illicit financial and banking activities" for Hezbollah. ... While Hezbollah was officially designated by the United States as a terrorist group in 1997, it has continued to receive great amounts of funding from Iran and its allies in the Lebanese financial community. The targeting of Jammal Trust Bank with sanctions...

NY Times: How a Tax Break to Help Poor Communities Became a Bonanza for the Rich Opportunity zones were created as part of the Trump tax law to lure investment to distressed areas. But much of the money is fueling real-estate developments targeting the affluent. It appears they did lure investments in distressed areas. The rich are more likely to have enough money to invest regardless of the location. The poor pay very little in taxes and do not have money for investments generally.  However, the poor do benefit from these investments because of the jobs created by the development in their area.  The criticism of the program in this story looks like liberal gobbledygook.

Washington Examiner: Michael Flynn’s lawyers on Friday claimed the Department of Justice had “affirmatively suppressed evidence” that “impugned their entire case” against Flynn while at the same time “putting excruciating pressure on him to enter his guilty plea and manipulating or controlling the press to their advantage to extort that plea.” In a brief filed Friday at a federal court in Washington, the attorneys accused the Justice Department of “malevolent conduct,” demanded access to classified Trump-Russia information, and asked the court to hold the Justice Department’s prosecutors in contempt for concealing exculpatory information from their client. The massive amount of material being requested could delay Flynn's sentencing, which was expected to occur this fall, and could shed light on the FBI's conduct of the investigation into the alleged ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Flynn's lawyers claimed that “the government continues to deny our request ...

Fox News: The centuries-old remains of more than 200 children have been discovered in Peru, according to reports. Experts say that the macabre discovery is likely the world’s largest child sacrifice site. Peruvian press agency Andina reports that archaeologists found the skeletal remains of 250 children and 40 warriors at Huanchaco, 346 miles north of Lima. “This is the biggest site where the remains of sacrificed children have been found,” the excavation’s chief archaeologist, Feren Castillo, told AFP . REMAINS OF 140 CHILDREN FOUND AT SITE OF WHAT MAY BE HISTORY'S LARGEST MASS SACRIFICE: REPORT The children, who were aged between four and 14, were reportedly sacrificed to honor the gods of the pre-Columbian Chimu culture. Killed during wet weather and buried facing the sea, experts think that the children were sacrificed in relation to an “ El Nino ” event. ... Andina reports that the remains at Huanchaco have been dated to the 13th to 15th centuries. The Chimu civilization w...

NY Post: Apple apologizes for letting contractors eavesdrop on Siri’s sex recordings I am not sure why someone would have Siri operating while they are engaged in sex.  Were they expecting advice on their performance?

CNS News: Many of them have become co-conspirators in a coup attempt against the President and spreading hate against the President's supporters. See also: Hemingway: Months After Mueller Report, Media Russia Truthers Are Embarrassing And Sad And: 24 Hours of Media Malpractice

Oil Price: The U.S. could “drown the world in oil” over the next decade, which, according to Global Witness, would “spell disaster” for the world’s attempts to address climate change. The U.S. is set to account for 61 percent of all new oil and gas production over the next decade. A recent report from this organization says that to avoid the worst effects of climate change, “we can’t afford to drill up any oil and gas from new fields anywhere in the world.” This, of course, would quickly cause a global deficit, as the world continues to consume around 100 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil. Global Witness notes that the industry is not slowing down in the United States, notwithstanding recent spending cuts by independent and financially-strapped oil and gas firms. If anything, the consolidation in the Permian and other shale basins, increasingly led by the oil majors, ensures that drilling will continue at a steady pace for years to come. It isn’t as if the rest of the world ...

Washington Examiner: Rep. Devin Nunes called the Justice Department inspector general's report on former FBI Director James Comey a "building block" for a criminal referral he delivered to the agency. "For a long time I have very been hesitant to get too far out in front on the IG's capabilities. I believe what today is, is another example — it's a building block. It's important information," the California Republican said Thursday evening on Fox News. Specifically, he said, Horowitz's findings contain "very important pieces of evidence that would build into the conspiracy complaint that we have sent to the Department of Justice." Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, appeared on Sean Hannity's show, along with fellow Reps. Mark Meadows and John Ratcliffe, to react to Inspector General Michael Horowitz's 83-page scathing report on Comey released earlier in the day. The watchdog found that Comey...

David Druker: President Trump’s high confidence in winning Texas is vexing some Republican insiders, who fret that his 2020 campaign is unprepared to handle a generational challenge from the Democratic Party for control of the state’s critical 38 votes in the Electoral College. The Democrats flipped two suburban Texas congressional districts and another dozen seats in the state house in the midterm elections, while Democrat Beto O'Rourke nearly ousted Republican Sen. Ted Cruz. GOP strategists with deep experience in Texas are bracing for the possibility of more turbulence next year, with some worrying that Trump’s top political officials in the state are ill-equipped for the competition. Others are pleased with the campaign’s Texas leadership, but question party strategy. “Personnel are fine,” said a veteran Republican operative with Texas ties who requested anonymity to avoid publicly criticizing Trump or the Republican National Committee. “But [I] still don’t believe Trump ...

NY Times: Comey Is Criticized by Justice Dept. Watchdog for Violating F.B.I. Rules The department’s inspector general said the former F.B.I. director set “a dangerous example” by releasing memos about his interactions with President Trump to people outside the bureau. The NY Times underplays its own role in the conspiracy against the President perpetrated by FBI officials like Comey and McCabe.  They along with government plotters were active participants in a coup attempt against the President based on the Russian collusion lie.

Fuel Fix: The shale boom that led to cheaper fuel prices, increased consumer spending and less crude oil imports may have had a significant positive effect on the U.S. economy, researchers with the Federal Reserve system found. In a working paper published by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas , researchers Nida Melek, Michael Plante and Mine Yücel estimate that although the oil and gas sector represents less than 1.5 percent of the U.S. economy, the increase in light oil production may have boosted U.S. GDP by 1 percent in 2015 compared to 2010. The U.S.'s GDP increased by 10.8 percent from 2010 to 2015. "The effect of the shale boom is significant, at about one-tenth of growth," researchers wrote. The use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracking beginning in the mid-2000s sparked an explosion in oil production in the U.S. Since 2010, U.S. oil production has more than doubled from 7 million barrels per day to over 12 million barrels per day in 2019. Texas...

Daily Mail: Humans first arrived the in the United States 16,500 years ago - a millennium EARLIER than previously thought Experts from Oregon State University found stone tools and other artefacts at an archaeological dig at the Cooper's Ferry site in Idaho suggesting that people lived in the area as much as 16,500 years ago. This is a story of early migrants to America and not indigenous people.  I think people use the term indigenous because they do not like the name that Columbus gave the early migrants.  Columbas made that mistake because he was trying to get to India.

Red States: Speaking to Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball Wednesday, 2020 hopeful and everyone’s favorite multimillionaire socialist uncle — Bernie Sanders — heaped praise upon progressive China: “But what we have to say about China, in fairness to China and it’s leadership, is — if I’m not mistaken — they have made more progress in addressing extreme poverty than any country in the history of civilization. Okay? So they’ve done a lot of things for their people.” Ted Cruz, apparently, found the comment curious. Therefore, he decided to Crush Uncle Bernie mercilessly: “Sure, the Chinese Communists have wrongfully imprisoned & tortured millions, and they have murdered over 65 million people, but Bernie may have a point: when you’re dead, your poverty’s solved, right? #AbsurdLeftistPropaganda.” ... Bernie seems blind to the evils of communism.

AP: Former FBI Director James Comey violated FBI policies in his handling of memos documenting private conversations with President Donald Trump, the Justice Department’s inspector general said Thursday. The watchdog office said Comey broke bureau rules by giving one memo containing unclassified information to a friend with instructions to share the contents with a reporter. Comey also failed to return his memos to the FBI after he was dismissed in May 2017, retaining copies of some of them in a safe at home, and shared them with his personal lawyers, the report said. “By not safeguarding sensitive information obtained during the course of his FBI employment, and by using it to create public pressure for official action, Comey set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees — and the many thousands more former FBI employees — who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information,” the report said. The report is the second in as many years to crit...

John Solomon: Trump can change history by declassifying three Obama-era documents ... Uranium One, the Iran deal, Clinton’s emails — all have dominated headlines for many years without a full public accounting. Trump has an unprecedented opportunity to close the loop on these controversies and to give Americans more transparency and visibility into what happened, as well as how we can make government better when national security is at stake. Clinton corruption and illegal activity along with Obama's ridiculous Iran deal could be exposed.

Washington Examiner: Joe Biden’s campaign is working relentlessly to minimize his habitual verbal lapses, accusing the media of unfairly scrutinizing the Democratic front-runner while dismissing critics’ suggestions that he is unfit for the presidency. As eyebrow-raising misstatements flow from the former vice president, his campaign is challenging the media’s credibility and painting rivals as equally prone to verbal blunders. Asked for comment, a Biden spokesman referred the Washington Examiner to an interview Deputy Campaign Manager Kate Bedingfield gave to MSNBC. “I think the press has to be more careful about applying an unfair standard to Joe Biden than they’re applying to other candidates,” she said. "He’s always speaking from his heart. And sure, that means sometimes he’s going to misstate a couple of things. But frankly, so does every other candidate.” Biden, 76, has committed a string of mistakes in interviews, speeches, and town hall meetings since launching h...

Joseph Sacco: While I don’t believe that any new gun laws would prevent any future mass shootings, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) does have legislation in the works that would work towards keeping guns out of the hands of convicted felons. Cruz pointed to the example of the Sutherland Springs church shooting, noting that the shooter had lied on his background check information concerning previous felonies. He believes that if the shooter had been prosecuted by the federal government for circumventing , he would have ended up in prison and unable to commit that heinous crime. The Cruz bill would create a new task force within the Department of Justice that would focus on prosecuting felons who try to purchase a firearm. ... Of the 112,000 applicants by people who were ineligible to purchase a gun only 12 were prosecuted.  It clearly is not a priority for DOJ.

NY Times: U.S. Cyberattack Hurt Iran’s Ability to Target Oil Tankers, Officials Say The strike came on the same day that President Trump called off a retaliatory airstrike against Iran after it shot down an American drone. This appears to be a bloodless response to Iran's piracy efforts as the sanctions against them continue to bite.

Daily Mail: FBI and IRS agents carried out raids in at least four states, including at the homes of United Auto Workers President Gary Jones in Michigan and California home of former President Dennis Williams in California, amid allegations of corruption within the union. Investigators are probing into bribes, kickbacks and attempts by auto executives to influence labor negotiations with the UAW, a person with knowledge about the raids told DailyMail.com. Nine people currently face charges because of the investigation and another eight are already serving time in prison linked to a scandal that alleged Fiat Chrysler Automobiles wined and dined labor officials and lavished them with gifts, including $1,000 French shoes, in exchange for concessions in a union labor pact. In the raids staged on Wednesday, federal agents armed with search warrants showed up at Jones' home in Canton, a suburb of Detroit, and Williams' home in Corona, California, the person said Williams...

Conservative Treehouse: An interesting article in the  South China Morning Post  outlines how Chinese companies producing everything from canned mandarin oranges, to mid and high-tier furniture, cannot sustain a business model without access to the U.S. market. Their problem?… In essence, when they established their decades-old business model the overwhelming majority of their manufacturing was/is contingent on U.S. buyers. Right now those Chinese companies are praying the CCP central government keeps devaluing their currency, because U.S. purchasers, including wholesalers and intermediaries, have told those manufacturers they will not pay the import duties. Apparently, U.S. corporate buyers are leveraging the pressure applied by President Trump – a remarkable dynamic. ( SCMP ) […] “The US client called us last weekend and asked us to pay the additional tariff of 5 per cent. We could not refuse since it was our idea to bid to supply the canned fruit for the supe...

David Rosenthal: In 1844, when the Ottoman Empire still controlled the Holy Land, a census was conducted, which revealed that Jews constituted a majority of the population of Jerusalem. Where were the "Palestinians"? Where were the Canaanites? The census count reported the presence of three groups in the city: Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Canaanites were apparently not present. But suddenly, inexplicably, all Palestinians were spontaneously transformed into Canaanites in 2019, just as quickly as all Jordanian and Egyptian Arabs in Israel were spontaneously transformed into Palestinians in 1967. It took nothing more than the word of Yasser Arafat to create Palestinians out of thin air in 1967. And it took nothing more than the word of Mahmoud Abbas to turn them all into Canaanites in 2019. Who knew that the expressions of Arab leaders could be so magical? So now that there are no more Palestinians, since they have all been magically transformed by Mahmoud Abbas...

Paul Sperry: More than three months after President Trump granted his attorney general unprecedented power to declassify intelligence files, key U.S. intelligence agencies are still withholding documents related to the Trump-Russia affair, say people with direct knowledge of White House discussions on the subject. The source of the logjam: the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which Trump is in the process of shaking up after the resignations last month of its director, Dan Coats, and principal deputy, Sue Gordon. “Establishment” officials in that agency are still dragging their feet, say the sources, who spoke on condition that they not be further identified. Sources who have seen the documents generally described their contents to RealClearInvestigations. They said the material still under wraps includes: Evidence that President Obama’s CIA, FBI, and Justice Department illegally eavesdropped on the Trump campaign --- cases separate from the FBI’s disputed FISA ...

Daily Mail: Shocking video shows touch-screen polling machine malfunctioning and repeatedly changing voter's selection in Mississippi's GOP governor primary runoff Mississippi's GOP governor primary runoff was held on Tuesday Shocking video from one of the polling booths shows an electronic touch-screen voting machine malfunction as a voter tries to cast his ballot The man selects his preferred option for governor, but the machine selects an alternative choice The voter goes on to select his preferred choice 14 times, but the machine still does not accurately register his vote There were reports of malfunctioning touch-screen machines in seven counties across Mississippi on Tuesday Paper ballots that are machine-readable are probably the safest way to count votes.

Guy Benson: Over the last few weeks, we've been exploring the competing narratives about the US economy -- with the White House insisting that all is well, as many in the media hype up the possibility of a coming recession. My general conclusion at this point has been that while there are some soft spots and genuine warning signs, the economy's fundamentals remain quite strong. Unemployment has been quite low, the job market has been quite robust, and wage growth has broken free from years of frustrating stagnation. We also recently received positive news on other indicators, including productivity, retail sales, and overall consumer spending: U.S. consumers spent more in July than economists expected, the federal government said on Thursday, as retail sales rose 0.7% vs. the 0.3% estimated. Excluding automobile sales, a more volatile component, retail sales rose 1% — double what economists anticipated. Why it matters: Consumers were largely unfazed by the increasing ec...

Red States: ... The writer tells us, “The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finds that — despite Americans’ overall satisfaction with the state of the U.S. economy and their own personal finances — a majority say they are angry at the nation’s political and financial establishment, anxious about its economic future, and pessimistic about the country they’re leaving for the next generation. She immediately discounts the good news (for Trump) with the word “despite,” and gives us the bad news. We are told that 69% of respondents are “satisfied with their overall financial situation today” but they do not tell us what the result was in 2015. I assume it was lower or they would have included it. Then, they quickly write that “a majority — 56 percent — also say they feel “anxious and uncertain because the economy still feels rocky and unpredictable. That’s down slightly from 61 percent in 2015.” I’m surprised that was included. The writer reports that “70% of Americans say t...

Washington Examiner: The Justice Department inspector general has determined all four Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrants against onetime Trump campaign aide Carter Page were illegally obtained, attorney Joe diGenova said this week. In an investigation that began last year, Inspector General Michael Horowitz examined the Justice Department's and FBI's compliance with legal requirements as well as policies and procedures in applications filed with the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court related to Page as part of a larger counterintelligence inquiry into President Trump's campaign. Back in May, diGenova, a former U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, said the three FISA warrant extensions against Page were illegally obtained, adding "the only question now is whether or not the first FISA was illegally obtained." Now diGenova says Horowitz made the same determination about the warrant that started it all. “I can report categorical...

Bloomberg/Fuel Fix: Democratic presidential candidates are jousting over who best can save the planet. But even if one of them wins the White House, the Senate would threaten to scuttle any action to ease the effects of climate change. If Democrats fail to win the Senate, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is expected to block even incremental steps to limit carbon emissions — forget the ambitious Green New Deal proposed this year that calls for eliminating fossil fuels by 2030. Even so, Democratic candidates are forging ahead with their proposals because climate change is a top issue among primary voters and they hope to shift the national conversation in their direction. Yet some worry that the voters aren’t paying enough attention to congressional races that are critical to moving climate legislation. The best-case scenario for Democrats is that they win a narrow Senate majority, which would still require some cooperation by Republicans to reach the 60 votes needed to ...

Walter Williams: The New York Times has begun a major initiative, the "1619 Project," to observe the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe American history so that slavery and the contributions of black Americans explain who we are as a nation. Nikole Hannah-Jones, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine wrote the lead article, "America Wasn't a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One." She writes, "Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different -- it might not be a democracy at all." There are several challenges one can make about Hannah-Jones's article, but I'm going to focus on the article's most serious error, namely that the nation's founders intended for us to be a democracy. That error is shared by too many Americans. The word democracy appears nowhere in the two most fundamental founding docum...

Patricia McCarthy: Everyone paying attention to current events and the political wars that bedevil us all knows that CNN, NBC, and MSNBC are not honest brokers in any sense of the word. For the eight years of the Bush administration, they verbally assaulted the president all day, every day. George W. ignored their dishonest, calculated attacks in an effort to remain above the fray. Bush gave these alleged news outlets a pass by refusing to take them on. This was a mistake that Donald Trump learned not to repeat. He has fought back from moment one, with a quick retort or tweet. The same media and their mouthpieces slavishly idealized Barack Obama and overlooked and or covered up his many crimes and egregious errors in judgment. For the left media crowd, Obama could have ordered a genocide, and they still would have idolized him. Obama effectively did sanction the slaughter of Christians throughout the Middle East during his administration; he welcomed many thousands of Muslim ...

Nolan Rappaport: Our Constitution was supposed to make America a nation of laws , not of men. That changed when President Barack Obama put aside the classes of deportable aliens listed in section 237(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) and created his own list of deportable alien classes . The Democrats are still restricting deportations, but they are doing it now by preventing Trump from receiving the funds he needs for effective enforcement measures. Moreover, they make enforcement costly for him politically by demonizing him whenever he initiates a significant enforcement measure. They didn't have to resort to such tactics. They could have just replaced the INA with their own immigration bill during the early years of the Obama administration. From January 2009 to January 2011 , they had a majority in the House, and until Scott Brown’s special election in 2010, they had enough votes in the Senate to stop a filibuster. They were able to pass the Patient Protecti...

David Drucker: Hidden beneath the hoopla at a major organized labor gathering, which had become a de facto Democratic pep rally, were two quiet supporters of President Trump. The men, union activists, were on hand for an Iowa Federation of Labor convention that featured a procession of top Democratic presidential contenders. Nearly all entered and exited the modest events center ballroom in Altoona, just up the road from Des Moines, to standing ovations, as they argued that Trump had failed the union households that helped propel him to office in 2016. But the Trump-supporting labor organizers, who spoke to the Washington Examiner outside the ballroom, on condition of anonymity as their colleagues whooped it up with the president’s would-be challengers, affirmed their support for the incumbent in 2020. They said fellow union members were preparing to follow suit, despite a trade dispute with China that threatens their livelihoods. Such sentiments could sink the eventual Democrati...

Washington Post: Boris Johnson moves to suspend Parliament, cutting its time to halt no-deal Brexit The idea of suspending — or proroguing — Parliament at this crucial time in the Brexit process sparked howls of outrage from many lawmakers. Getting out from under the EU bureaucracy should save Britain billions and restore sovereignty.  It will also fee the way to a trade deal with the US.  The remainers, as they call themselves, have been trying to thwart the democratic vote to leave since they were surprised at how unpopular the EU had become.

Fuel Fix: Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador said his administration has reached a deal ending a $3 billion controversy over contracts for five natural gas pipelines that were built by three companies south of the border. During a Tuesday morning press conference, Lopez-Obrador announced that Mexico's federal government had reached a deal on Monday night with Canadian pipeline operator TC Energy, a Mexican subsidiary of San Diego utility company Sempra Energy and Mexican construction firm Grupo Carso. Negotiations remain ongonig with Mexico City-based contractor Fermaca. Natural gas for the pipelines will be sourced from the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas and the Permian Basin of West Texas, providing a much-needed outlet for the record production that both regions have experienced over the past five years. "We'd like to thank the companies for reaching an agreement that advances both natural interests and business interests," Lopez-Obrador said. ...

David Harsanyi: Last weekend, the former chairman of psychiatry at Duke University, Dr. Allen Frances, claimed that Donald Trump “may be responsible for many more million deaths” than Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong combined. Frances, author of the fittingly titled “ Twilight of American Sanity ,” would later clarify by tweeting that he was talking about the “[t]errible damage Trump is doing to world climate at this global warming tipping point may be irreversable/could kill hundreds of millions of people in the coming decades.” That’s quite the bold statement, considering the hefty death toll the Big Three extracted. But, really, it isn’t that shocking to hear. Frances’ pseudohistoric twaddle comports well with the pseudoscientific twaddle that’s been normalized in political discourse. Every year Democrats ratchet up the doomsday scenarios, so we should expect related political rhetoric to become correspondingly unhinged. All of this is a manifestation of 50 years of s...

Breitbart: The Washington Post‘s medic critic, Erik Wemple, on Monday scorched the New York Times for its “triggered” reaction to a Breitbart News article that exposed antisemitic and racist tweets from one of its senior editors. Breitbart News reported Thursday that a senior editor at the Times , Tom Wright-Piersanti, had a history of antisemitic and racist tweets, including a tweet from January 1, 2010, that read: “I was going to say ‘Crappy Jew Year,’ but one of my resolutions is to be less anti-Semitic. So… HAPPY Jew Year. You Jews.” The Times at first refused to respond to repeated requests for comment from Breitbart News, but did respond to the New York Post and other outlets’ requests for comment with a very terse: “We are aware of these tweets, which are a clear violation of our standards. We are reviewing next steps.” On Sunday, however, the Times responded with a piece claiming there was a “new front in the war on the press” to embarrass and discredit journalists ...

Red States: Gallup: Significantly Fewer Voters Identify As Democrats Today Than In Either November 2016 Or January 2019; Here’s Why Since 2004, Gallup has conducted a monthly party affiliation poll party. They ask voters, “In politics, as of today, do you consider yourself a Republican, a Democrat or an independent?” Results from a November 1-6, 2016 poll showed that 31% of voters identified as Democrats, 27% as Republicans and 36% as Independents. A recently conducted poll indicates a significant shift in those numbers. Currently, 27% of voters consider themselves to be Democrats, 29% as Republicans and 38% as Independents. What to make of the 4% plus in those identifying as Democrats? Did half of these voters make the switch to the Republican column and the other half to the Independent column? That would account for the two point increase in those two categories. Also, while there have been many fluctuations along the way, a glance at the number of those who identify as Demo...