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POLITICS

Forget the Sweet Talk — Both Parties Will Go to the Mat By Charles Lipson

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.

A Broward County Senate Steal? Florida’s Democratic stronghold makes a mess of vote-counting.

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.

The Worst Person is in Charge of Broward County’s Count Daniel Greenfield

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.

The Left Won’t Celebrate These History-Making Republican Women, So We Will There were a lot of female ‘firsts’ Tuesday night, but they won’t get the credit they have earned because these winning candidates don’t embrace leftist ideology.By Nicole Russell

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/09/left-wont-celebrate-history-making-republican-women-will/

At the conclusion of Tuesday night’s election, several incredible women made history in their states, winning their races and booting male predecessors from office. So far, they haven’t gotten much media coverage, and likely won’t in the future, simply because they’re Republicans.

If the goal of the feminist movement was to shatter glass ceilings, certainly these women have kicked out a few panels. They should get the credit they deserve regardless of ideology, but they won’t because feminism was never about equality, it was about advancing liberal ideas. No wonder most American women don’t consider themselves feminists.
Meet These Highly Successful Ladies

Several Republican women won big Tuesday night. They won their races, and made history. Here are a few of them.

Young Kim became the first Korean-American woman elected to Congress. She now represents the 65th Assembly District, which includes parts of northern Orange County. She’s an entrepreneur, a minority, and a Republican. Despite fitting identity boxes that the left claims to celebrate, not only is the media failing to celebrate her win, they hardly covered her race at all. Regardless, she is a rising star to watch and her life story is inspiring.

Marsha Blackburn will become Tennessee’s first female senator ever. Blackburn is a mother and businesswoman who formerly represented Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District. Not only did she win her race, making history in the process, but she did so following Taylor Swift’s blockbuster demand that Tennesseans vote for Blackburn’s male opponent, because women’s rights. Blackburn won her Senate race by at least ten points.

The state of Iowa, which politicos typically like to consider a predictor of success for either party, elected their first female governor. Republican Kim Reynolds became Iowa’s first female governor Tuesday, besting her male opponent in a win local Democrats called “confusing.” (Try not to laugh.)

South Dakota also elected their first female governor. Kristi Noem booted her male opponent from office as well.

As of this writing, the Arizona Senate race has still not been called, but results appear to lean in Martha McSally’s favor. If she wins, she will be the first female senator Arizona has elected. She is also the country’s first female fighter pilot, and a Republican who inspires girls who want to join the military.

These are not just politicians but women who are making history across the country, busting through barriers and shattering glass ceilings, which feminists say they celebrate. Yet these women aren’t being celebrated by feminists, proving yet again that their claim of promoting women is a lie. They don’t support women, they embrace progressive ideas.

Democrats: ‘If We Lost, the Voters Must Be Racist’ By The Editors

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?

Democrats Will Investigate, Not Legislate By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/09/democrats-will

In a column published the day after the election, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell warned his fellow Democrats to proceed cautiously after winning the House of Representatives. “Our most fervent supporters hope that we will use our newly found control to investigate almost everything that the Trump administration has done,” he wrote. “Though I understand what has fed this emotion, that would be a grievous mistake if investigations were all we did and we made no attempt to meet the challenges facing everyday Americans.”

But that advice likely will be ignored by a party that has no more use for relatively moderate, older, white men like Rendell. Despite election season slogans about protecting health care and migrant children, Democrats really only care about one thing: Retribution for Trump winning the White House.

Their base wants it, too. Exit polls showed a plurality of voters used their ballot to protest President Trump; two-thirds of voters who supported a Democratic House candidate said they want Congress to begin impeachment proceedings and remove Trump from office, an idea supported by key Democratic lawmakers poised to take over powerful committees. Revenge-seeking henchmen in the 116th Congress will be more interested in serving subpoenas than safeguarding pre-existing conditions. (The joke’s on you, my fellow suburban moms who voted for Democrats because you think they really care about your family’s health care coverage. LOL.)

It will be all investigations, all the time—a two-year grudge match between Congress and the Trump Administration. The games already have begun.

Subpoenas As Far As the Eye Can See
From subpoenaing Trump’s tax returns to probing former and current cabinet officials, Democrats and the media are salivating over all the damaging headlines they think they can generate just as the 2020 presidential race gets underway. The House Oversight Committee alone has at least 60 subpoenas ready to go when Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) takes over.

Linda Sanchez withdraws bid to become chair of House Democratic Caucus after husband indicted on theft of public funds By Thomas Lifson

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/11/linda_sanchez_withdraws_bid_to_become_chair_of_house_democratic_caucus_after_husband_indicted_on_theft_of_public_funds.html

Scandal has struck the leadership of the House Democrats as they prepare to take over that body. Representative Linda Sanchez, just re-elected to her ninth term in Congress representing a heavily Hispanic district in Orange County, California, was hoping to become the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House. But those plans have crashed and burned as her husband has been indicted for stealing public funds. Mike Lillis of The Hill reports:

The U.S. attorney’s office in Connecticut announced that a grand jury returned two indictments against five people for misusing taxpayer funds in connection with the Connecticut Municipal Electric Energy Corporation (CMEEC), an electric utilities co-op. One of those charged is James Sullivan, Sanchez’s husband.

Hours earlier, Sanchez, the vice chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, had withdrawn her bid to replace outgoing Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.) as chairman of the caucus next year. She cited “an unexpected family matter.

Later in the day she issued a clarifying statement.

”Earlier today I learned that my husband is facing charges in Connecticut,” she said. “After careful consideration of the time and energy being in leadership demands, I have decided that my focus now needs to be on my son, my family, and my constituents in California.”

The House Democrats are left with two other candidates for the chairmanship, both of them African-Americans: Rep. Barbara Lee of Berkeley and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, of Brooklyn and Queens. Lee inherited her seat in Congress from Rep. “Red Ron” Dellums, perhaps the farthest left member of Congress ever, for whom she worked as an aide for many years. Hakeem, formerly a corporate lawyer, won his seat representing Bedford-Stuyvesant and other heavily minority areas, after the retirement of veteran congressman Edolphus Towns. Hakeem raised large amounts of money from Wall Street and out-of-state donors, and beat out a rival who was regarded as anti-Semitic by much of the New York Democrat establishment.

Democrat Rashida Tlaib Dances with Palestinian Flag at Victory Party

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/07/democrat-rashida-tlaib-dances-with-palestinian-flag-at-victory-party/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+breitbart+%28Breitbart+News%29
Video of Democrat Rashida Tlaib dancing wearing the Palestinian flag at a victory party emerged Tuesday evening, after she won a largely uncontested race for the open seat in Michigan’s heavily Democratic 13th congressional district.

Tlaib is one of two Muslim women elected to Congress on Tuesday, along with Ilhan Omar, who replaced outgoing Rep. Keith Ellison in Minnesota’s 5th congressional district. Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress. Both Tlaib and Omar have extreme anti-Israel views. Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress.In the video, Tlaib delivered a victory speech in which she acknowledged her family watching from abroad in the Palestinian Authority-administered West Bank. She dedicated her victory, in part, to the Palestinian cause: “A lot of my strength comes from being Palestinian,” she said.

After Tlaib won her primary race in August, she published several anti-Israel tweets, and re-tweeted a fan who declared that Tlaib’s “first fight was for Palestine, always Palestine.”

Tlaib explicitly supports the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel and its replacement of a unitary Palestinian state. That position caused her to lose the endorsement of the far-left group J Street — which, while often adopting anti-Israel positions, nominally supports a two-state solution.

One other Palestinian-American was on the ballot on Tuesday: Ammar Campa-Najjar, the grandson of a Palestinian terrorist who was Yasser Arafat’s deputy and was involved in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, lost in California’s 50th congressional district.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Still the Smartest Guy in the Room By Joan Swirsky *****

https://canadafreepress.com/article/still-the-smartest-guy-in-the-room

Well, whaddaya know? In the midterm elections of November 6, 2018, the American people rewarded the president—for only the third time in almost a hundred years—with a net gain of three and possibly four Senate seats, lost half the House seats that his predecessor lost, and left the radical leftwing Democrats not rejoicing at their meager gains, but still chomping at the bit to bring down the president who has effectively destroyed everything they believed in, worked for, and thought they achieved over the past 75 years.

The Blue Wave that the leftist media has been predicting for a year now turned out to be a blue puddle, with even their most aggressive spokesperson, former House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, making nice and wanting to make deals with the man who sits in the Oval Office. And Republicans still control the Senate and can still boast that President Trump is solely responsible for:

Two rock-ribbed conservative justices on the Supreme Court (for the next 40 years!),
A booming economy,
Sky-high employment of women, blacks, Hispanics, and young people,
A significantly strengthened military,
Equitable foreign-trade deals,
And the beginning of The Wall, which promises to stop the rising tide of illegal aliens and sanctuary cities and the punishing price they cost hard-working Americans.

PLOTTING ANOTHER COUP

After President Trump’s annihilating defeat of Hillary Clinton in the November 2016 election—306 decisive Electoral votes to Hillary’s paltry 232—Americans witnessed an unprecedented reaction from what used to be called the loyal opposition. It was not the requisite graciousness of the disappointed loser. Nor was it the anticipated anger and frustration of those who knew their political philosophy and programs were about to be overturned.

Instead, when the new president was elected—and even before that, on the very day in June of 2015 that he announced his candidacy—the Grand Poobahs of D.C. who always considered themselves the smartest guys in the room by virtue of their educations, lofty positions, fancy credentials, grandiose senses of entitlement, and vaunted self-regard, got together and decided that:

They reviled the results of the election and the loss of the prestigious jobs they believed they’d maintain under a Democrat chief executive,
They feared that a Trump administration would discover the vast corruption of the previous Obama regime and act to prosecute the criminals involved,
They believed it was the job of these far-left socialists, communists, and jihadist sympathizers from Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, Obama’s Department of Justice, Obama’s Central Intelligence Agency, Obama’s National Security Council, et al, to destroy the Trump candidacy and, failing that, his presidency.
They resolved to put their brain trust together, their collective professional experiences, and do anything and everything in their power to depose or criminalize or impeach a duly elected President Trump.

And they fervently believed in their ability to actualize this plan because they had already successfully executed a coup d’√©tat only eight years before, ferreting Barack Obama—of dubious American citizenship and the paltriest of credentials—into the core of America’s body politic, concealing his past history, enlisting their reliable media whores to savage anyone who questioned his eligibility and even his very competence, and counting on their Hollywood stooges to use their vaseline camera trick to give the Obama persona a gorgeous glow.

The plot was hatched, and as Rudy Giuliani, one of the president’s lawyers, told TV host Sean Hannity in mid-August, ex-CIA director John Brennan was behind the entire bogus investigation into the alleged collusion of the Trump presidential campaign with Russian operatives.

At State Level, Democrats Are Still Lagging By Rick Moran

https://pjmedia.com/trending/at-state-level-democrats-are-still-lagging/
“Despite their House takeover, Democrats only picked up a paltry 6 state legislative chambers, leaving Republicans in control of 21 states. ”

Democrats may have taken over the House, but the party didn’t progress much in reversing the decade-long trend of Republican dominance at the state level.

Democrats gained complete control of only four state legislatures, while flipping six chambers. That leaves 61 chambers in Republican control while Democrats are in charge in only 37. (Note: Nebraska’s unicameral legislature is non-partisan.)

National Conference of State Legislatures:

In terms of overall legislative control (both House and Senate), Dems gained control of four on Tuesday. Republicans will control 30 versus the Democrats’ 18 when sessions convene in January. Minnesota is now the only state where legislative control is divided. It’s the lowest number of divided legislatures in more than 100 years, matching 1914 when Montana was the only state with a split legislature.

As for state control, which includes the governor along with the legislature, Democrats went from controlling eight to 14.

The GOP still completely controls 21 state governments with 13 now having divided government and Georgia still undecided.

More facts from NCSL:

No surprise. The party of the president lost seats (and chambers) in this midterm as usual. That’s par for the course—in 28 of the midterm elections held since 1900, that’s been true.
More than 330 seats nationwide shifted from Republican to Democrat. That is short of the typical losses suffered by the party in the White House. The average loss to the president’s party in midterms since 1902 is 424 legislative seats.
Among the six chambers won by Ds were the New Hampshire House, the Maine Senate and the Minnesota House. Those three chambers have been very volatile in recent years. They have all switched party control in four of the last five elections.
The Connecticut Senate went from tied to Democratic control. Since 1900, the Connecticut Senate has changed hands 23 times—more than any other state legislative body in the United States.
No chambers will be tied going into next year’s sessions. At least one legislative chamber was tied from 1966 until 2011, and then Connecticut wound up tied in 2016.
Two top legislative leaders lost their elections, North Dakota House Majority Leader Al Carlson and New Hampshire House Speaker Gene Chandler.
The Republican caucus in the Hawaii Senate took a huge leap forward, from zero members to one.
It is very likely that more women will serve in state legislatures come January than at any point in American history. The numbers are still being crunched.
In the Nevada Assembly, women will hold a majority of all seats—22 out of 42.
As occasionally happens, a legislative candidate passed away shortly before Election Day, but the name remained on the ballot. Nevada brothel owner Dennis Hof, who died Oct. 15, won his race on Tuesday, getting more than 17,000 votes. CONTINUE AT SITE