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POLITICS

Who Is Paying for Sandy O? By James Lewis

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/03/who_is_paying_for_sandy_o.html

So, a new star is born!

Not just a pop star, but a D.C. power pop star.

Alexandria!

But if we have any political brains, we know perfectly well that miraculous new stars coming out of bartending in the Bronx represent Big Money somewhere. You don’t buy a hot new barrista from the Bronx without a lot of careful stage management, big investments, and payoffs to Nancy Pelosi to back off and let this freshling rise far beyond her actual achievements — and the media, let’s face it, are anti-American.

So we have to ask our own questions and guess at some reasonable answers.

In Hollywood, stars are launched, not “discovered” by magic. They represent huge studio investments. Launch the wrong star, and somebody loses a ton of money. Hollywood is not in biz to lose money.

So here is the puzzle.

Alexandria O-C, AKA Sandy O, is suddenly rising to high headline status, followed by a gazillion Twitter-heads, including some actual human beings, perhaps, and it all happened with amazing speed.

Is Dan Crenshaw (R-TX District 2)the Future of the GOP? The right’s newest young star in Congress offers a vision for the party somewhere between Trumpism and NeverTrumpism. But it’s not easy walking the line in Washington. By John McCormack

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/02/i

NATIONAL HARBOR, Maryland—It’s 4 p.m. on Wednesday, the first day of the 2019 Conservative Political Action Conference—not exactly a prime speaking slot—but a standing room-only crowd has gathered to hear from freshman Congressman Dan Crenshaw. While we wait for the 34-year-old Texan, who is running late due to a vote in the House, the first person I talk to at the back of the Eastern Shore meeting room is Jacob Foster, an 18-year-old high-school student at Gann Academy outside Boston, who is attending CPAC for the third time in his young life. Foster is something of an endangered species at the conference: a conservative who likes a lot of the policies advanced by President Donald Trump yet doesn’t intend to vote for him in 2020 because of Trump’s character. But Crenshaw gives Foster hope.

“The glaring difference is he’s not facing accusations of sexual assault, he hasn’t had three marriages, he didn’t dodge the Vietnam draft,” Foster says. “On policy issues, there are meaningful differences. On trade, he’s not as quick to use tariffs.”

When Crenshaw arrives, the former Navy SEAL speaks about how to inspire “people back home” to embrace conservative values—personal responsibility, limited government, virtue, liberty—over a culture of outrage.

Adding to Social Insecurity House Democrats propose to increase the entitlement burden.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/adding-to-social-insecurity-11551650108

Memo to young workers: The Democrats you recently elected want to raise Social Security benefits for retirees while taxing you more to pay for it. Too bad they didn’t tell you about this last year when they were running against Donald Trump. Among the many tax increases Democrats are now pushing is the Social Security 2100 Act sponsored by John Larson of House Ways and Means. The plan would raise average benefits by 2% and ties cost-of-living raises to a highly generous and experimental measure of inflation for the elderly known as CPI-E. The payroll tax rate for Social Security would rise steadily over two decades to 14.8% from 12.4% for all workers, and Democrats would also apply the tax to income above $400,000.

More than a million paid out in California state sex harassment suits, and Kamala Harris recalls nothingBy Monica Showalter

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/more_than_a_million_paid_out_in_california_state_sexharassment_suits_and_kamala_harris_recalls_nothing.html

Kamala Harris, who’s running for president on a vehement #MeToo platform as a Democrat, sure has a lot of memory problems.

It’s not just the $400,000 the state had to shell out based on the disgusting sex harassment behavior of her top lieutenant, Larry Wallace, her handpicked director for the division of law enforcement at the state attorney general’s office, which is quite a whopper in itself. It’s the $700,000 in more California taxpayer payout money for the sex-harassing activities of her other lieutenants. The Los Angeles Times reports that it did a search of public records and found that the total payout tally was $1.1 million. I am going to assume that includes the $400,000 payout from Harris’s wingman Wallace, although the report doesn’t say. Here’s the L.A. Times opener:

The California Department of Justice paid more than $1.1 million to settle claims with employees who alleged they were sexually harassed or retaliated against by co-workers during the tenure of then-state Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris from 2011 to 2017, according to documents obtained by The Times.

Rep. Ilhan Omar: Anti-Semitic to the Bone By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/rep-ilhan-omar-anti-semitic-to-the-bone/

Rep. Ilhan Omar is once again under fire for using an anti-Semitic trope about the “dual loyalty” of supporters of Israel.

It’s beginning to look like her anti-Semitism is embedded so deeply that she has no conscious thought about Israel and Jews that doesn’t drip with Jew-hatred.

She said this during a town hall meeting in Washington:

What I’m fearful of — because Rashida [Tlaib] and I are Muslim — that a lot of our Jewish colleagues, a lot of our constituents, a lot of our allies, go to thinking that everything we say about Israel to be anti-Semitic because we are Muslim.

Not everything. Just those things you say that are blatantly anti-Semitic.

To me, it’s something that becomes designed to end the debate because you get in this space of – yes, I know what intolerance looks like and I’m sensitive when someone says, “The words you used, Ilhan, are resemblance of intolerance.” And I am cautious of that and I feel pained by that. But it’s almost as if, every single time we say something regardless of what it is we say… we get to be labeled something. And that ends the discussion. Because we end up defending that and nobody ever gets to have the broader debate of what is happening with Palestine.

Bernie Sanders: Government ‘Cannot Go Too Far’ in Addressing Climate Change By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/bernie-sanders-government-cannot-go-too-far-in-addressing-climate-change/

Senator Bernie Sanders (D., Vt.) dismissed Friday the notion that the recently introduced Green New Deal plan is extreme and unrealistic, arguing instead that there is no action too drastic for the government to take to address climate change.

“Does the Green New Deal go too far?” Sunny Hostin asked Sanders Friday on ABC’s The View.

“No. You cannot go too far on the issue of climate change. The future of the planet is at stake, ok? . . . According to the best scientists in the world, we have twelve years to begin substantially cutting carbon emissions,” Sanders responded.

Hostin also pressed Sanders on Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s recent suggestion that couples are rightfully hesitant to have children because of the threat of climate change.

“[Ocasio-Cortez] claimed that the looming threat of climate change that continues to exacerbate global conflicts has gotten so dire that it is a legitimate question to ask whether it is moral for people to have children now. Does she have a point there or is that too radical?” Hostin asked.

“Obviously that’s an enormously personal choice that every couple is going to have to make,” Sanders said before redirecting the conversation to President Trump’s past skepticism of the threat posed by climate change.

Washington Governor Announces Presidential Bid With Focus on Climate Change By Jack Crowe

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/washington-governor-announces-pre

Washington governor Jay Inslee announced Friday that he will enter the already crowded 2020 Democratic presidential field, citing the “existential threat” of climate change as the primary motivation for his run.

Inslee, who represented Washington in Congress for 20 years before becoming governor in 2012, sought to differentiate himself from the eleven other Democrats in the field by emphasizing his commitment to addressing climate change.

“I’m Jay Inslee and I’m running for president because I’m the only candidate that will make defeating climate change our number one priority,” Inslee said in his announcement video released Friday

Don’t Root for a Trump Primary Challenge By Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-primary-challenge-2020-trouble-republican-party/

Does anyone really believe that Weld, Hogan, or Kasich is going to define the future of the post-Trump Republican party?

The race for 2020 is taking shape, although there are still significant unknowns, including whether Donald Trump will get a serious primary challenge.

His fiercest Republican critics say, “Yes — please, please, yes.”

They are probably wrong, and it’s certainly nothing to root for.

Trump’s dominance of the party begins with his lockdown support of the right, forcing any primary challenger to the left. This isn’t fertile territory. Self-identified moderates and liberals are only a fraction of the party, and it is grass-roots conservative activists who have fueled the most potent Republican primary challenges (Ronald Reagan in 1976, Pat Buchanan in 1992).

Because a primary challenge would naturally come from the left and is unlikely to succeed, it will tend to attract people who don’t have a future in GOP national politics and lack conservative bona fides — the wayward former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld; the centrist governor of Maryland Larry Hogan; the former Ohio governor John Kasich, who convincingly demonstrated his lack of national electoral appeal in 2016.

Mark Penn: Socialism is a rising danger in Democratic Party

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/mark-penn-socialism-is-a-rising-danger-in-democratic-party

The Democratic Party is reaching a dangerous tipping point over socialism and what it really stands for as the American economy grows nearly 3 per cent, poverty is down and the number of people employed is at a record high.

Yet among young people and a large part of Congress now, socialist sentiment is rising sharply and could be the defining issue of the next elections.

In the February Harvard-Harris Poll, 64 per cent of registered voters said that the Democratic Party is supporting socialism. This is a major shift in the image and perception of the Democratic Party and it could have enormous consequences.Only about 27 per cent of people classify themselves as liberals, so liberalism and socialism are now about the same in terms of electoral strength.

In the same poll, 65 per cent of Americans said they personally favor mostly a capitalist system for America, indicating a huge and growing disconnect between the Democrats and the rest of the country. Capitalism was particularly strong with voters over age 65 as nearly 80 per cent of them are capitalist.

Virginia Democrats Elect Their First Islamist Anti-Semite How the Dems are mainstreaming the worst kinds of Jew-Hate. March 1, 2019 Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272969/virginia-democrats-elect-their-first-islamist-anti-daniel-greenfield

While Virginia Democrats were debating whether to oust Governor Northam for wearing blackface, Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax over alleged rape and Attorney General Mark Herring for also wearing blackface, a much more blatant example of contemporary bigotry by a Virginia Democrat had come to light.

It received virtually no coverage by the media.

Ibraheem Samirah, running in a special election for a seat in the Virginia House of Delegates, had his social media history exposed. Aside from the usual rants about Israel, Samirah had posted that the Jews had stolen his grandfather’s land and “washed off as the Promised Land for Jews only (using the Torah and Zionist ideology, a 3000 yo religious book and a 100 yo Jew-only philosophy.)”

Samirah’s hatred for Israel wasn’t news. The Jordanian Muslim BDS activist had co-founded a chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace (a misnamed pro-terrorist hate group that is neither peaceful nor Jewish), had served as a spokesman for Students for Justice in Palestine, a hate group whose chapters had been involved in numerous anti-Semitic incidents ranging from hate speech to acts of violence, and had spoken at an American Muslims for Palestine conference: an organization accused of supporting Hamas.