RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ex-democrat-catching-trumps-robert-f-kennedy-jrs-eyes-rcna143941

Tulsi Gabbard wanted to be president. Now she wants to be vice president. And while that’s hardly unusual, the paths — plural — she’s considering to get there are. 

Neither involve the Democratic Party, which Gabbard used to represent until she left it in 2022. The four-term former member of Congress from Hawaii is now getting consideration for both former President Donald Trump’s and independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tickets, two sources familiar with the candidates’ deliberations told NBC News.

It’s a remarkable turnaround for the onetime progressive rising star, who within the span of eight years has gone from supporting Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign to running for the Democratic presidential nomination herself in 2020, eventually endorsing President Joe Biden, before then gravitating to the right and becoming a regular conservative media personality and conference speaker. 

More so, it’s exceedingly rare for a politician to attract interest from more than one presidential ticket or party. (Ahead of the 1952 election, Democrats and Republicans led dueling efforts to draft another politically ambiguous veteran, Dwight Eisenhower, the former supreme Allied commander in Europe during World War II, for the presidential race.)

But Gabbard’s 2024 possibilities are not fully in her control, nor are they both equally likely. As one source said, Gabbard would be more likely to seriously consider running as Kennedy’s vice presidential nominee had she not been swept up by the possibility of serving with Trump. This person said Gabbard “was enticed” by the chance of serving on Kennedy’s ticket but is now focused on the possibility that Trump will select her. 

“My understanding is that Tulsi is convinced that Trump is going to pick her,” this person said. “Had that not been the case, she probably would have gone with Kennedy.”

https://amgreatness.com/2024/03/14/rnc-sues-michigan-secretary-of-state-jocelyn-benson-over-bloated-voter-rolls/

The Republican National Committee has filed a lawsuit against Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) over the state’s inaccurate voter rolls, arguing her office has failed to follow the National Voter Registration Act.

Newly appointed RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said Wednesday that Benson’s noncompliance with the NVRA has left the battleground state “with inflated and inaccurate voter rolls ahead of the 2024 election.”

The NVRA, passed in 1993, “requires states to keep voter registration lists accurate and current, such as identifying persons who have become ineligible due to having died or moved outside the jurisdiction.”

According to RNC, 76 of Michigan’s 83 counties have inflated voter rolls, demonstrating Benson’s lack of compliance with the act.

The RNC filed the suit along with two Michigan voters, Jordan Jorritsma, and Emerson Silvernail, over Benson’s failure to “keep their rolls accurate and up-to-date,”  Whatley said in a statement to the Washington Times.

The Complaint states that at least 53 Michigan counties have more active registered voters than adult citizens over the age of 18.

“That number of voters is impossibly high,” the RNC contends in the lawsuit.

An additional 23 counties have active-voter registration rates that exceed 90 percent of adult citizens over the age of 18. That figure far eclipses the national and statewide voter registration rate in recent elections.

“Retaining voter rolls bloated with ineligible voters harms the electoral process, heightens the risk of electoral fraud, and undermines public confidence in
elections,” the plaintiffs said.

https://spectator.org/in-prosecuting-trump-democrats-have-exonerated-him/

Despite their best efforts, have Democrats begun an inexorable elevation of former President Donald Trump? For the better part of a decade, Democrats and the Left have thrown everything they could think of against the man they live to loathe. In the process, they have created a quasi-caricature that appears to be decreasingly believable to an increasing proportion of Americans. The question is whether these attacks have come full circle, accomplishing what Democrats most sought to avoid. Have they vilified Trump to victimhood and prosecuted him back into the presidency?

Since Trump burst on the political scene in 2016, Democrats and the Left have busted their guts laughing at him. When that didn’t work and he won, they burst all boundaries going after him. Their efforts have ranged from slights to a Russian dossier to two impeachments. Even after Trump left office, they refused to stop. Unquestionably, these efforts have had an effect — and equally unquestionably, Trump has given ample fodder to use against him: the result being that with Trump poised to win an unprecedented third successive major party presidential nomination (a feat last accomplished by Franklin D. Roosevelt 84 years ago), he has become a highly polarizing figure.

Yet amid their attacks, Democrats and the Left must confront a nagging reality. Trump is not simply continuing to win political contests; his popularity is growing. In 2016, Trump won the presidency with 45.9 percent of the popular vote. In 2020, he lost the presidency with 46.9 percent of the popular vote. Today, in the RealClearPolitics average of national polling, he stands at 47.4 percent in a two-way contest with President Joe Biden. The gains are not dramatic, but neither can they be ignored. For a politician so relentlessly attacked — in the establishment media, throughout entertainment, and across America’s elite — this is nothing short of astounding.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/13/voters-see-double-standard-in-trump-charges-for-mishandling-classified-documents-ii-tipp-poll/

Special Counsel Robert Hur found that President Joe Biden for decades broke laws by hoarding classified records, but refused to bring charges against him. Yet, former President Donald Trump faces charges for keeping classified items at his Mar-a-Lago home. The I&I/TIPP Poll asked voters: Is this a double standard? Their answer? “Yes.”

To start with, I&I/TIPP asked the poll’s 1,419 respondents whether they were following the Hur investigation “very closely,” “somewhat closely,” “not very closely,” “not at all closely,” and “not sure.”

Only those responding with the first two answers, “very closely” or “somewhat closely,” were counted. That totaled 568 people, or roughly 40% of all those who took the poll.

From there, the poll was broken into multiple questions. The first:

“Special Counsel Robert Hur concluded that no charges should be brought against President Biden for mishandling classified documents, citing his well-meaning nature and failing memory. Considering these factors, do you agree or disagree that Hur’s decision not to bring charges against President Biden was lenient?”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/one-angry-biden/

A demagogic fuming Biden gave another Phantom of the Opera speech blasting conservatives for all the destruction that he has caused and has resulted in his own historic unpopularity.

All too aware that he was confused and incoherent, his handlers felt that the antidote was to come out barking and bellowing at his imaginary enemies.

Any Never Trumper who would vote for such a screeching maniac is suicidal. The night’s nadir? Joe, of the Hunter-Biden family consortium, damned the money-grubbing “rich” who “don’t pay their fair share of taxes”—all of this when his own son is now facing multiple felony counts for not paying any income tax at all! And Joe himself has received lots of family money without paying tax on such “loan repayments”.

In truth, Biden gave the most livid state-of-the-union address in modern memory, a surreal teleprompted rant from a “get off my grass” old man. At points, he started howling at the seated opposition and even called out Supreme Court Justices. Determined not to reveal cognitive decline, Biden instead came late to the podium shouting nonstop, grimacing in reptilian style for over an hour.

If the planned Adderall-fueled screaming was to prove he was still alive, most would have preferred his drowsy incoherence.

But mostly the speech was one of abject lies as he either blamed all his disasters on others or claimed they were his greatest achievements.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/jamaal-bowmans-voting-rights-hypocrisy

Rep. Jamaal Bowman of New York, best known for pulling a fire alarm in the Capitol, has made voting rights a signature issue. A member of the uber-progressive “Squad” led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bowman has even engaged in a hunger strike and been arrested while protesting the Senate’s failure to suspend the filibuster rule to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Act, which effectively would have federalized state voter laws. Following his arrest, Bowman insisted that he would “do it again and again and again” and promised to do “everything in my power to bring attention to the crisis we are in and ensure our democracy functions in a manner that represents the people.” For all his preening, however, Bowman stands to benefit from New York State’s especially restrictive voter-registration laws in his own hotly contested primary this June.

Bowman’s polarizing politics have drawn a serious challenger into the Democratic primary field: moderate Westchester County executive George Latimer, whose entry into the race was prompted, in part, by Bowman’s anti-Zionism. The Squad member notably supported a House resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire within days of Hamas’s attacks on Israel and conspicuously boycotted Israel president Isaac Hertzog’s address to Congress. In response, major Jewish groups, including the American Israel Political Action Committee and even the left-leaning group J Street, have supported Latimer’s campaign.

But Bowman’s opponents have had to race against time, and the constraints of New York’s voting laws, to improve Latimer’s chances by expanding the pool of primary voters, especially Jewish independents. While New York’s Democratic primary isn’t until June 25, the state set a February 14 deadline for voters to choose or change their political party—four months before the election. That’s the earliest deadline in the country, according to John Opdyke of the group Open Primaries, and it especially hurts Latimer, who had not announced his campaign until late December.

https://issuesinsights.com/2024/03/06/biden-trump-stay-neck-and-neck-but-will-winning-2024-popular-vote-be-enough-ii-tipp-poll/

Each side in today’s often-angry political debate over the upcoming presidential election seems convinced that its candidate has a clear advantage. But, as of now, neither President Joe Biden nor former President Donald Trump has an obvious edge in the popular vote as we enter the final eight months of the 2024 election season, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Despite being widely criticized for his lackluster campaign and showing continuing signs of age-related mental impairment, Biden holds a slender 43% to 42% lead over Trump. The online national poll of 1,246 registered voters was taken from Feb. 28 to March 1, with a margin of error of +/-2.8 percentage points.

Among those taking the poll, 8% said they preferred someone “other” than Biden or Trump, while 7% said they were “not sure.”

The partisan breakdown was fairly even, with 85% of Dems favoring Biden and 86% of Republicans favoring Trump. Among independents, a crucial swing vote for both candidates, the prospective vote broke 37% in favor of Trump, 36% in favor of Biden, with a hefty 16% saying “other” and 11% “not sure.”

https://www.thefp.com/p/stefan-simchowitz-senate

PASADENA, CA — Stefan Simchowitz, 53, is no one’s idea of a viable candidate, including his own. 

“I have no illusion that I can win or that I stand a chance to win, which is also quite liberating, because I’m not running to win a campaign. I have no prayer,” he tells me. 

Simchowitz, who is running for Senate as a Republican in a seat that has been held by a Democrat for 32 years, is perched at the kitchen island in one of his four homes, an updated Victorian farmhouse on an acre in Pasadena that he’s been building into an exhibition space and artist residency for the past year or so. He calls it Red Barns. 

In a tan Altadena Hardware shirt and one of his signature bucket hats, the contemporary art dealer once dubbed “the Art World’s Patron Satan” offers me sparkling water and a bite of his blueberry muffin. Unlike the Democrats vying for Dianne Feinstein’s open seat—Representatives Katie Porter, who has a $12 million war chest and Adam Schiff ($32 million)—and the Republican front-runner, former L.A. Dodger Steve Garvey, Simchowitz doesn’t seem concerned with shaking hands, kissing babies, or winning votes.

“Sometimes if you know you’re going to lose you can only win,” he says. Stefan sees this campaign as a “vehicle to sell his ideas.” In other words: a performance art project of sorts. How else to make sense of this Democrat-turned-Republican, with no political experience, throwing his hat into the ring? 

This outsider approach has served him well as the enfant terrible of the art world, where he’s circumvented the closed-circuit system of MFA programs, critics, museums, galleries, auction houses, and curators that decide whether an artist is marketable, and for how much. Simchowitz came up by finding starving artists—literally on the brink of starvation, he claims—on Facebook and Instagram, then paying for their studios, materials, and sometimes entire bodies of work outright, before flipping them to buyers, or holding them in his extensive private collection. 

His clientele—which historically includes tech founders who exited their companies and started itching for a Josef Albers; newly flush poker players; and A-list entertainers—trust him implicitly. “He sees opportunities and then he puts a spotlight on them,” Brian Butler, a longtime gallerist in L.A., tells me. “He’s got a tenacity about him.” (Butler himself is voting for Katie Porter, but says he’d vote for Simchowitz “if I was a Republican.”) Though Butler calls Simchowitz a “super mensch,” he conceded he has a “gruff exterior.” 

While his bluntness and allergy to pretension has earned him fans, the management class of the art world scorns him with equal passion. Many collectors, dealers, and artists won’t work with Simchowitz, or anyone who does, arguing that he exploits struggling artists by buying up all their work, then artificially pumping and dumping it. Another L.A. gallerist once called him a “sociopath” and compared him to Charles Manson before walking it back. 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2024/03/05/supreme-court-trump-ballot-unanimous-ruling-election/72843559007/

“Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos.” Those words from the Supreme Court in its Trump v. Anderson ruling on Monday put an end to the effort of Democratic secretaries of state to engage in ballot cleansing by removing former President Donald Trump from the 2024 election.

The court’s decision was one of the most important and impactful moments in its history.

During the first Trump impeachment in 2019, I cautioned Democrats not to toss aside constitutional standards out of their hatred for the president. I quoted from the play “A Man For All Seasons,” when Sir Thomas More is told by his son-in-law that he would “cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?” More responded, “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned ‘round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat?”

As More described England, the United States also is “planted thick with laws, from coast to coast.” The nation’s highest court on Monday decided to leave them standing.

After months of activists and experts calling for the court to allow ballot cleansing by individual states, the justices refused. Figures like Harvard professor Laurence Tribe had insisted that the legal theory allowing Trump’s removal from ballots was “unassailable” and rejected opposing positions as “absurd.”

Many news outlets posted the analysis of former federal court Judge J. Michael Luttig, who also called the theory “unassailable” and denounced the arguments against disqualification as “revealing, fatuous, and politically and constitutionally cynical.” He predicted that the court would simply affirm the Colorado Supreme Court.

Democratic members of Congress further pushed the narrative that only judicial activists and MAGA justices would oppose disqualification. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., declared: “This is their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.”

Think what you want about Trump.But even liberal justices agree Trump should stay on ballot. Progressives still melted down.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/us/comment/2024/03/04/donald-trump-supreme-court-colorado-ballot-us-election/

“Scarcely any question arises in the United States which does not become, sooner or later, a subject of judicial debate.” So Tocqueville wrote 200 years ago in what is still the greatest book about both America and democracy. His observation remains as true today as it was in the 1830s. It applies to the likely nominees of both political parties.

Most of attention has been devoted, quite rightly, to the mountain of legal problems facing former President Trump. But it is worth noting that the current occupant of the White House faces legal problems of his own. 

Joe Biden has been shown to possess classified documents without authorization and store them in insecure places, like his garage. The allegations were laid out in detail by Special Counsel Robert Hur, who declined to prosecute because President Biden was “elderly” and “forgetful” : hardly the sort of descriptors a presidental candidate would want to promote. 

Troubling as President Biden’s cognitive problems are, his legal issues are dwarfed by those facing former President Trump. The former president’s supporters and many independent voters see them a “lawfare,” the tendentious use of the legal system for political gain. His opponents see them as the even-handed rule of law.

What is striking about the cases pending against Trump is how they all came together in the midst of a presidential campaign. Surprise, surprise. Of course, the alleged crimes and civil violations occurred years ago.