RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/hillary-will-run-again-1541963599

Get ready for Hillary Clinton 4.0. More than 30 years in the making, this new version of Mrs. Clinton, when she runs for president in 2020, will come full circle—back to the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994. True to her name, Mrs. Clinton will fight this out until the last dog dies. She won’t let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House.

It’s been quite a journey. In July 1999, Mrs. Clinton began her independent political career on retiring Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s farm in upstate New York. Her Senate platform included support for a balanced budget, the death penalty and incremental health-care reform. It was a decisive break from her early-1990s self. Hillary Clinton 2.0 was a moderate, building on the success of her communitarian “It Takes a Village” appeals and pledging to bring home the bacon for New York. She emphasized her religious background, voiced strong support for Israel, voted for the Iraq war, and took a hard line against Iran.

This was arguably the most successful version of Hillary Clinton. She captured the hearts and minds of New York’s voters and soared to an easy re-election in 2006, leaving Bill and all his controversies behind.

But Hillary 2.0 could not overcome Barack Obama, the instant press sensation. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Mrs. Clinton held fast to centrist positions that would have assured her victory in the general election. But progressive leaders and donors abandoned her for the antiwar Mr. Obama. Black voters who had been strong Clinton supporters in New York and Arkansas left her column to elect the first African-American president. History was made, but not by Mrs. Clinton. Though she won more delegates from Democratic primaries, activists in caucus states gave Mr. Obama, who had called her “likable enough,” the heartbreaking win.

Licking her wounds, Mrs. Clinton served as secretary of state while she planned her comeback. It was during this time that the more liberal Hillary 3.0 emerged. She believed she could never win a primary as a moderate, so she entered the 2016 primary as a progressive like Mr. Obama. Then she moved further left as Sen. Bernie Sanders came closer to derailing her nomination. This time she was able to contain her opponent’s support, crucially by bringing African-American voters into her camp.

But Mrs. Clinton’s transformation during the primaries, especially on social and cultural issues, cost her an easy win against Donald Trump. As Hillary 3.0 catered to the coastal elites who had eluded her in 2008, Mr. Trump stole many of the white working-class voters who might have been amenable to the previous version. Finally she had the full support of the New York Times and the other groups that had shunned her for Mr. Obama—but only at the cost of an unforeseen collapse in support in the Midwest.

Claims of a Russian conspiracy and the unfairness of the Electoral College shielded Mrs. Clinton from ever truly conceding she had lost. She was robbed, she told herself, yet again. But after two years of brooding—including at book length—Mrs. Clinton has come unbound. She will not allow this humiliating loss at the hands of an amateur to end the story of her career. You can expect her to run for president once again. Maybe not at first, when the legions of Senate Democrats make their announcements, but definitely by the time the primaries are in full swing.

Mrs. Clinton has a 75% approval rating among Democrats, an unfinished mission to be the first female president, and a personal grievance against Mr. Trump, whose supporters pilloried her with chants of “Lock her up!” This must be avenged.

Expect Hillary 4.0 to come out swinging. She has decisively to win those Iowa caucus-goers who have never warmed up to her. They will see her now as strong, partisan, left-leaning and all-Democrat—the one with the guts, experience and steely-eyed determination to defeat Mr. Trump. She has had two years to go over what she did wrong and how to take him on again. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/heres-a-preview-of-house-democrats-cavalcade-of-investigations/

Incoming Democratic chairmen of various House committees spread out over the airwaves on Sunday to preview the coming avalanche of investigations into the president and Republicans.

All that’s missing is a guillotine.

I suppose this is what passes for “the people’s business” in the Democratic Party universe.

Axios:

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), the incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week” that protecting the Mueller investigation will be his top oversight priority. Nadler said that if acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker is still in office when he takes the gavel, his first order of business will be to invite or subpoena him to appear before the committee.

Nadler also added that the Judiciary Committee will re-examine the White House’s apparent stifling of the FBI investigation into sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on CNN’s “State of the Union” that “the appointment of Mr. Whitaker should concern every American — Democrat, Republican, liberal conservative — who believes in rule of law and justice.”
Schumer said that he, Nancy Pelosi and several other ranking members have sent a letter to the chief ethics officer of the Justice Department asking him to issue guidelines urging Whitaker to recuse himself from all matters related to the Mueller investigation.
Incoming House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said on “This Week” that one of his top oversight priorities involves the Trump administration’s decision to add a citizenship question to the census.
He also added that looking into voter suppression is a priority: “We cannot have a country where it becomes normal to do everything in folks’ power to stop people from voting.”
Incoming House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that Democrats will have to “ruthlessly prioritize” which investigations to follow so that their “positive agenda” — things like fixing health care — does not get lost.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/fire-brenda-snipes-florida-broward-county-election-supervisor/

Brenda Snipes, the supervisor of elections in Florida’s Broward County, does not deserve to be within a thousand miles of any election office anywhere in these United States. She should be fired at the earliest possible opportunity.

Snipes has held her position since 2003, in which year her predecessor, Miriam Oliphant, was suspended for “grave neglect, mismanagement and incompetence” and, quite literally, marched out of her office. Alas, Snipes has proven no better at fulfilling her duties than was Oliphant. On Friday, a court in Broward County found that Snipes was guilty of violating both Florida’s public-records laws and the state’s constitution by failing to provide mandatory updates to the public, and it ordered the immediate release of the missing information. As that ruling was coming down, Snipes’s office was laying out more lawsuit bait. According to the Miami Herald, an election worker found bags of “uncounted early ballots” in the Broward County office — ballots whose provenance could not be established. Snipes, meanwhile, was busy mixing together rejected provisional ballots and accepted provisional ballots, processing them all together. She justified her decision to add these provisional ballots to the official tally on the grounds that it would be better to include some illegal votes than to nix the legal ones with which, by her own incompetence, they had been blended.

Such behavior is by no means out of character. This year alone, Snipes has been reprimanded by the courts twice: once, in May, for illegally destroying ballots during the 2016 Democratic primary, in violation of both state and federal law; and again, in August, for illegally opening mail-in ballots in secret. How long, we wonder, does it take to establish a pattern?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/report-broward-elections-supervisor-mixed-good-and-bad-provisional-ballots/

Broward County elections supervisor Brenda Snipes contaminated some 200 valid provisional ballots by combining them with more than a dozen rejected ballots, the Miami Herald reported late Friday.

The Broward canvassing board discovered the mistake when Snipes conceded to Republican attorneys’ demand that she present the board with 205 provisional ballots for inspection Friday evening.

The 205 contaminated provisional ballots were filled out by voters whose information did not appear in the databases at their respective polling stations, but whose registrations were confirmed when election workers called the Broward elections headquarters. As a result of the discrepancy, the ballots were not added to the final count and were submitted separately Friday evening at the request of attorneys representing governor Rick Scott, the Republican senate candidate.

Broward election officials have not explained how the rejected ballots were first introduced to the pool of valid ballots.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/11/10/forget_the_sweet_talk_–_both_parties_will_go_to_the_mat_138614.html

“We have two years to show we can make things work,” Republican Mike Braun told Indiana voters in his Senate victory speech. He is wildly optimistic. Both parties are already on war footing, and, barring divine intervention, they will remain that way until 2020.

Their only bipartisanship is a shared commitment to push hard positions favored by their activist bases and enraged donors. President Trump’s unprecedented fight with the legacy media deepens the division. He attacks with ferocity; they take the bait, fill the airwaves with unremitting criticism, and crush underfoot the wall between hard-news reporting and opinion.

Calls for compromise ring hollow from the politicians who make them. In the same speech, they often issue a call-to-arms, as Nancy Pelosi did in claiming victory. The House’s minority leader, who is expected to take the speaker’s gavel in January, spoke softly and urged bipartisan legislation — but quickly added that she and fellow Democrats would stand their ground on all major issues. Trump did the same, even as he spoke about possible deals on taxes, infrastructure and immigration. If he seriously pursues those deals, he risks alienating the very voters who carried him to victory.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-broward-county-senate-steal-1541809807

Democrats have a hard time accepting electoral defeat. They’ve spent two years claiming with little evidence that Vladimir Putin elected Donald Trump. And now comes a vote-counting debacle in southern Florida that is at best gross incompetence, though don’t rule out an attempt to steal GOP wins for Senate and Governor.

Florida Gov. Rick Scott is about 15,000 votes ahead of Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson for a seat in the Senate. That puts the race in range of an automatic recount under state law. But at 11:30 p.m. on election night, Mr. Scott led by 57,000 votes. The same trend is happening in the gubernatorial race that went for Republican Ron DeSantis over progressive Andrew Gillum, though neither race appeared to be heading for a recount on election night.

The spread has narrowed in the past couple days by what can only be described as a suspect process in notorious Broward County. Three days after Election Day the county wasn’t finished reporting results from early voting, which ended on Sunday.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio was among the first to note the irregularities. Broward won’t disclose how many ballots are left, and “isn’t reporting hourly or regularly, but rather releasing thousands of additional votes, often in the overnight hours, that are chipping away at GOP leads,” as Senator Rubio put it.

On Thursday a teacher in Broward found a container labeled “Provisional Ballot Box” in a storage area of an elementary school that had been a polling station. The Sun-Sentinel reported Friday that a Broward County election official said there were no ballots in the box, which would be more reassuring if country officials were more transparent.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/271901/worst-person-charge-broward-countys-count-daniel-greenfield

It’s stunning that we’re monitoring the elections of some states because of events that happened generations ago. Meanwhile Broward County is allowed to pull shenanigans like these.

Time after time.

The election supervisor in Florida’s second-most populous county broke the law by destroying ballots cast in last year’s congressional primary involving Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, according to election-law experts across the political spectrum. The congresswoman’s opponent has sued to get access to the ballots.

The case — one of three ongoing independent lawsuits plaguing Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes’ troubled office — stems from a June lawsuit filed in circuit court by Democrat Tim Canova. He had wanted to inspect the optical-scan ballots cast in his Aug. 30 primary race against Wasserman Schultz because he had concerns about the integrity of the elections office.

Under longstanding federal law, ballots cast in a congressional race aren’t supposed to be destroyed until 22 months after the election. And under state law, a public record sought in a court case is not supposed to be destroyed without a judge’s order.

Snipes’ office, however, destroyed the paper ballots in question in September — in the middle of Canova’s lawsuit — but says it’s lawful because the office made high-quality electronic copies. Canova’s legal team found out after the fact last month.

Here’s how things work in Snipes world.

Supervisor of Elections Brenda Snipes is a prime example of double dipping in the public trough.

Snipes is earning $4,336 monthly in state pension benefits from her time in the Broward school system. She also gets over $12,000-a-month from her job as supervisor, according to state records.

That’s roughly $200,000 annually…increasing every year.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/democrats-if-we-lost-the-voters-must-be-racist/

Storyline A: “We didn’t lose!” Storyline B: “If we did lose, it’s because you’re a racist!”

The Democratic party’s transformation into an undergraduate intersectionality seminar at Oberlin is proceeding at a remarkable pace. The party’s current strategy is to scream “Racist!” at people voting for Mia Love and Tim Scott while insisting that Jared Kushner’s father-in-law and Benjamin Netanyahu’s best political friend is a scheming anti-Semite.

At issue is the defeat of Andrew Gillum in the Florida governor’s race and of Stacey Abrams in the Georgia governor’s race. Democrats are busily trying to undo those defeats as of this writing (Florida Democrats have a real knack for suddenly discovering caches of ballots from sympathetic voters at the opportune moment) while simultaneously arguing that the reason these two candidates failed is that they are black, and that Donald Trump’s America is just one tweet away from repealing the 13th Amendment.

Senator Bernie Sanders — who abandoned his native Brooklyn for Vermont, the whitest state in the union — insists that white voters are “uncomfortable” voting for a black candidate. Maybe some are. But Barack Obama won more than 100 more electoral votes running against Mitt Romney than Hillary Clinton won running against a man who’d never run for office before. The signals are at least mixed.

There may be a less nefarious explanation: Florida hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 1994. Alex Sink, the state’s chief financial officer, is at the moment the only Democrat to have been elected to a statewide office in Florida in this century. Georgia hasn’t elected a Democrat as its governor in this century, either. (Georgia went the entire 20th century without electing a Republican governor, and Georgia’s Democratic governors haven’t exactly been covered in glory: The state could have done without the services of Lester Maddox.) Democrats of all hues have had a hard time of it in those states in recent years, for good reason — the policies they support would be catastrophic for Georgia and Florida, two of the most prosperous states in the country. Florida is booming, and Georgia has been named the best state in the nation for doing business for five years in a row. Floridians and Georgians have good reason to be broadly happy with the direction of their governments.

And what were the Democrats offering?