RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/08/trump-in-2024-maybe/

Among Trump-friendly conservatives, there seem to be essentially two strands of sentiment about who should be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. One strand says, “Donald Trump, assuming he runs and his health is good.” 

The other strand exhibits various shades of dubiousness. Some profess admiration for what Trump accomplished in his first term, but lament his “divisiveness,” which they anatomize in various ways as a product of narcissism, impulsiveness, or simple bad character. 

A few in this group blame the divisiveness not on Trump, but the people, inside his administration and out, who spent the entirety of Trump’s first term trying to undermine his presidency. A sizable segment of this dubious group would, truth be told, like to see the back of Donald Trump forever. 

Other segments of this group acknowledge that they would support Trump should he run and win the nomination, but confess, sotto voce, that they would prefer another “Trumpist” candidate. “Trumpism without Trump” is the slogan of many in this group, and it is in these circles that one repeatedly hears the names of Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida, and Mike Pompeo, secretary of state in the second part of the Trump Administration.

Is there such a thing as “Trumpism without Trump”? I do not know. I understand those who argue that asking for Trumpism without Trump is a bit like asking for sunshine without the sun. It was often said, sometimes thankfully, sometimes as a matter of fact, that Trump was sui generis. If that is the case, then it might well be that the message and the messenger are so closely bound up with each other that the effort to disentangle them is doomed to fail. 

I understand the concern about Trump’s vaunted “divisiveness.” But it is well to acknowledge this irony. The tsunami of hatred and vitriol that washed over Donald Trump since before he assumed office until the present moment was nothing if not “divisive.” It infected the Twittersphere as brazenly as any of Trump’s “mean tweets” about Jim Acosta, the “fake news,” or sundry other “losers.” Why was that not castigated as “divisive,” evidence of bad character, against the norms or civilized political behavior? 

We now know that the whole Russia collusion delusion was invented lock-stock-and-barrel in the fetid skunkworks of the Clinton campaign. We know, too, that it was seized upon and pumped up by an irresponsible media and the rancid outposts of the administrative state and its so-called intelligence agencies. Trump was cooked before he set foot in the Oval Office. 

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stephen-kruiser/2022/01/06/the-morning-briefing-desantis-derangement-syndrome-a-boon-for-florida-gop-n1547284

We’ve all been witnessing the spectacle of the leftist panic porn crowd admitting that we here in Knuckle-Dragging Land have been right about everything all throughout the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu plague. OK, they’re not actually admitting that, but I’m hard-pressed to think of a conservative position on Covid that hasn’t been co-opted by the leftist “experts” in the last two weeks.

Of course, the most prominent Republican to have been right all along is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Regulars here know that I’m a big fan of his. As I wrote last fall, every time the Democrats go after him they not only fail, they fail badly.

Little did I know then how badly.

Mr. Green (Stephen the Younger on the PJ Media Ranch) wrote yesterday about a stunning demographic shift in the Sunshine State:

Florida Republicans outnumber registered Democrats for the first time in the state’s history, as Blue State COVID refugees tick the Big R on their voter registrations.

Twitter user TimDCpolitico took Florida’s voter rolls from March 31 of 2020 and compared them to the latest figures. The results, he says, are “jaw-dropping,” and I can’t think of a better way to describe them.

Not only did the Democrats’ relentless slandering over the course of almost two years do no damage to him but it ended up greatly helping his party.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/schumer_shows_the_lefts_desperation_to_build_fraud_into_elections.html

His chosen technique is the equivalent of telling Republicans that, if they don’t commit suicide, he’s going to kill them.

Although the Democrats put most of their political capital in the Build More Communist Bill (known as the “Build Back Better Bill”), the bill that’s more important to them is actually the “For The People” Act, which has already passed in the House. If the Senate passes it, it will build into elections every type of pro-fraud procedure possible. To that end, Sen. Chuckie Schumer wrote to tell Republicans, who will be destroyed if the act passes, that they’d better pass the act or else he’ll destroy the filibuster and pass the act without them.

You may recall that, in January 2021, Sen. Mitch McConnell entered into an agreement with Schumer that raised the possibility of doing away with the filibuster. Currently, the filibuster is a rule that, when brought into play, does away with a simple majority vote in the Senate and, instead, requires a supermajority to pass a bill.

The filibuster has existed since 1806. With Democrat control over both Congress and the White House, following an election so bizarre and tainted that huge numbers of Americans believe Biden got “help” getting into the White House, the filibuster is all that stands between packing the Supreme Court, federalizing election fraud, adding D.C. and Puerto Rico as states, and Building More Communist.

The 50-50 split in the Senate, with Kamala Harris as the tie-breaker, means that Schumer is the majority leader. He offered McConnell an equal power-sharing agreement if the Senate ditched the filibuster. McConnell agreed because Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema promised they wouldn’t vote to end the filibuster. So far Manchin and Sinema have proven surprisingly resistant to Democrat efforts to force them to get on board with the Democrats’ more extreme demands. (Although, unnervingly, Manchin seems willing to have a re-do of the Build More Communist bill, which will destroy the U.S. economy.)

As of yesterday, though, Schumer seems to believe that he can get Manchin and Sinema to betray their promise to McConnell.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/ari-j-kaufman/2022/01/03/former-white-house-official-and-u-s-army-vet-jumps-into-crucial-pennsylvania-race-n1546440

Republicans’ hopes of keeping the U.S. Senate seat in Pennsylvania may soon improve.

David McCormick stepped down from his role as executive officer at Bridgewater Associates Monday to run for the open Keystone State seat that will be vacated by retiring Sen. Pat Toomey.

McCormick has an impressive background, in addition to his business experience the last dozen years.

The Pittsburgh native graduated from West Point, served in the U.S. Army, and also earned a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton University. He was undersecretary of the Treasury during the George W. Bush administration.

McCormick is married to Dina Powell, a former deputy national security advisor in the Trump administration who also served in several roles in the Bush administration.

Other Republican candidates in Pennsylvania include celebrity surgeon Mehmet Oz, Businessman and 2018 Pennsylvania lieutenant governor candidate Jeff Bartos, conservative commentator Kathy Barnette, and former ambassador to Denmark Carl Sands.

Pennsylvania is expected to have one of the most competitive races in the United States this year and, along with Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Wisconsin and other states, will help determine control of the U.S. Senate.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/zuckerbucks-shouldnt-pay-for-elections-mark-zuckerberg-center-for-technology-and-civic-life-trump-biden-2020-11640912907?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

The 2020 pandemic election wasn’t stolen, but it sure was a superspreader of bad precedents. More than a year later, we’re still getting information about the huge private money that underwrote official government voting efforts in 49 states. Much is still unknown, but lawmakers already know enough to ban this practice.

A nonprofit called the Center for Technology and Civic Life, or CTCL, funded by Mark Zuckerberg, says it gave $350 million to nearly 2,500 election departments in the course of the 2020 campaign. Last month it posted its 990 tax form for the period, with 199 pages listing grants to support the “safe administration” of voting amid Covid-19. Some conservatives see this largess of “Zuckerbucks” as a clever plot to help Democrats win.

***

CTCL “consistently gave bigger grants and more money per capita to counties that voted for Biden, ” says an analysis by the Capital Research Center. Its tally for Georgia, to pick one state, shows average grants of $1.41 per head in Trump areas and $5.33 in Biden ones. A conservative group in Wisconsin suggests that extra voter outreach funded by CTCL could have boosted Mr. Biden’s turnout there by something like 8,000 votes. It isn’t hard to see why they’re concerned.

On the other hand, CTCL’s biggest check was $19,294,627 to New York City, and in a scheme to flip America blue, that would be a waste of eight figures. Ditto for sizable checks to red areas. DeSoto County, Miss., population 185,000, went 61% for President Trump, and it received $347,752. The county installed plastic shields, bought more voting machines to prevent lines, and hired workers to sanitize equipment. “This money was a huge help,” a spokeswoman says, since “none of these items were budgeted.”

Another caveat is that it’s hard to untangle partisan bias from urban bias. Big cities have big-city voting problems, and maybe they were more likely to ask CTCL for help. Only two places in Nevada received grants, the Capital Research Center says: Clark County (Las Vegas) and Washoe County (Reno). No other county in the state has 60,000 people, and probably the rugged desert dwellers didn’t need the aid.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/house-democratic-retirements-2021-comes-to-close

With the end-of-the-year holiday break fast approaching, the announcements came quickly.

A trio of Democrats in the House of Representatives – Reps. Stephanie Murphy of Florida, Lucille Roybal-Allard of California, and Albio Sires of New Jersey – last week said that they’ll retire at the end of next year rather than run in the 2022 midterm elections for another term in Congress.

The latest news brought to 23 the number of House Democrats who are retiring or bidding for another office rather than run for reelection in 2022, when their party tries to defend its razor-thin majority in the House amid historically unfavorable headwinds and a rough political climate. The GOP needs a net gain of just five seats in the 435-member chamber next year to regain the House majority it lost to the Democrats in the 2018 midterms. 

Republicans have history on their side – on average the party that wins the White House in a presidential election loses more than 25 House seats in the ensuing midterm election. And the once-in-a-decade congressional redistricting process is expected to favor the GOP, as Republicans control more state legislatures and governors’ offices.

This month’s major setback for President Biden and congressional Democrats in their push to pass a sweeping human infrastructure and climate change combating spending bill, along with the five-month downward spiral of the president’s poll numbers, are also doing House Democrats no favors as try to keep the majority next November.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/586948-ten-democrats-who-could-run-in-2024-if-biden-doesnt

The 2022 midterm elections are less than a year away, but questions are already being raised about what the Democratic ticket will look like in 2024.

The White House has repeatedly said that President Biden intends to run again in 2024, but political watchers point to the fact that Biden would be 82 years old at the start of a second term. He was already the oldest individual to be inaugurated when he was sworn in in January.

On top of that, Biden is facing a stalled agenda on Capitol Hill, declining approval ratings and a continuing pandemic.

Here are 10 Democrats who could run if Biden doesn’t in 2024.

Kamala Harris

Vice President Harris would seem like the most likely pick to run in Biden’s place if he does not run. Many viewed Biden’s pick of Harris as his vice presidential pick as a signal that Harris was being prepped to succeed Biden down the line as a presidential candidate and leader of the Democratic Party.

A hypothetical poll of a future Democratic primary without Biden conducted by Morning Consult showed Harris leading the field with 31 percent support among the party’s potential primary voters. Still, Harris has had to contend with negative coverage throughout the course of her first year as vice president. Recently, a number of Harris staffers have departed her office, although some had previous plans to leave by the end of 2021.

Despite the 2024 chatter, Harris said in an interview last week that she and Biden have not discussed whether he will run again in 2024.

“We do not talk about nor have we talked about reelection, because we haven’t completed our first year and we’re in the middle of a pandemic,” Harris told The Wall Street Journal.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/12/merry_christmas_america__the_veterans_are_coming.html

America is soon facing a great Christmas present. A record number of veterans, from all services are trying to enter our real revolutionary political process the 2022 mid-term elections.

Recently, three US Army pensioners took to a fainting couch while even perhaps symbolically clutching their pearls to issue a dire warning about the 2024 election:

“In short: We are chilled to our bones at the thought of a coup succeeding next time.”

The insightful Victor David Hanson nailed such a thumb sucking article;

The column seemed strangely timed to coincide with a storm of recent Democratic talking points that a re-elected Trump, or even a Republican sweep of the 2022 midterms, would spell a virtual end of democracy.

In fact, one quip about such Democrat coup porn is it gives porn a bad name. The other more salient point was a statement made by my often co-author Robbin Laird when he correctly pointed out then when writing about any future events a bit of humility is called for, “Not a single person in America in 2019 could have predicted the events of 2020”

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2021/12/21/panic-at-the-dccc-the-democrats-house-campaign-arm-is-descending-into-mayhem-n2600894

Two dozen House Democrats have decided to file their retirement papers. They’re not going to go through being bloodied and beaten in what could be an absolute bruiser for the Democratic Party as the 2022 midterms begin. For starters, they got a taste of how far they’ve fallen with voters in the 2021 elections. Virginia booted all the Democrats that occupied statewide offices. The GOP retook the governor’s mansion and the House of Delegates. In New Jersey, Republican Jack Ciattarelli came within inches of clipping incumbent Gov. Phil Murphy. State Sen. Stephen Sweeney, a top Democrat in southern New Jersey, was defeated for re-election. That’s something I thought I’d never see. You can’t do much without Sweeney’s blessing as he was the president of the NJ State Senate.

Now, with Build Back Better in the toilet and being flushed down the drain, moderate House Democrats are saddled with defending a vote for this massive left-wing spending package. They threw their lot in with Pelosi and got screwed—royally. To make matters worse, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) appears to be totally out of touch and adrift on what to do. With Biden’s sinking approval ratings, there are no life jackets unless the DCCC can conjure some messaging magic. It hasn’t.