RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2018/08/13/conservative-combat-vet-seeks-gop-senate-nomination-in-wisconsin/

MADISON, Wis. — The outcome of a hotly-contested “insider versus outsider” Republican primary in Wisconsin could potentially decide which party holds the Senate after November.

The outsider is Kevin Nicholson — a young, decorated veteran-turned-businessman who walked away from the Democratic Party during his service in the U.S. Marine Corps. The insider is state lawmaker Leah Vukmir — a nurse-turned politician with almost sixteen years in the Wisconsin legislature. The winner of Tuesday’s primary will face incumbent Sen. Tammy Baldwin in what Democrats are treating as a vulnerable seat this year. Baldwin has a large war chest, but her attempt to moderate away from her hyper-liberal, Madison-centric former congressional district has been marred by several controversies that offer the eventual GOP opponent plenty of ammunition.

Republicans tried to seize this seat in 2012 when then-Democratic Sen. Herb Kohl retired. As it turned out, a bad year for Republicans nationally compounded by an aging GOP nominee who had spent his entire adult life in elected or appointed office gave Baldwin the opening she needed.

Nicholson knows this history, and so his biography as a problem-solving businessman and veteran who is running for office for the first time represents a different formulate for winning the seat. Politico — hardly a friend of conservatives — touted him as a Republican “dream candidate” with one small caveat: he used to be a Democrat.

His Democratic past isn’t something Nicholson r

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/12/wisconsin-race-show

Kevin Nicholson is the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate who neither the Wisconsin GOP chieftains nor the Democratic incumbent wants to win. But the political novice—a decorated Marine combat veteran—embraces his role as the establishment party-crasher trying to unseat Senator Tammy Baldwin and give Republicans a surprise pickup in the Badger State.

“We are in an extremely good position to win,” Nicholson told me from the campaign trail on Saturday. “I would not want to trade places with either one of my opponents in the primary or the general election right now. They are the establishment. But voters know that only someone from outside the political class can bring change.”

On Tuesday, Nicholson faces State Senator Leah Vukmir in the state’s primary election. Vukmir has endorsements from House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the Wisconsin Republican Party, and several Republican lawmakers. But recent polls show a tight race.

Nicholson, 40, spent the weekend traveling across the state—from Green Bay to Milwaukee to Sheboygan—trying to convince Republican voters to choose him on Tuesday.

“I feel good about our support and turnout in the northern part of the state and the rural areas,” he said. That is the same region that went heavily for Donald Trump in 2016, making Trump the first Republican since 1984 to win that state and snatch away critical electoral votes from Hillary Clinton.

Nicholson’s message is centered on policies and not on his opponent. The businessman and father of three young children has an impassioned, rapid-fire way of explaining why he decided to run for office for the first time (he apologized to me for talking too fast) and why the policies he now advocates policies are “best for everyone.”

CHELY FARLEY FOR SENATE AGAINST GILLIBRAND

Running, Conservative, Reform, Republican for U.S. Senate – Jr

https://www.chelefarleyforsenate.com/

NAOMI LEVIN FOR CONGRESS (r=R) DISTRICT 10
https://naomiforcongress.com/
Daughter of refugees turned activist turned candidate for Congress in NY CD10. There is so much momentum today behind new and radical changes in policy.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/another-ocasio-cortez-backed-primary-candidate-goes-down-in-flames/

Another candidate backed by democratic socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has gone down to defeat in humiliating fashion. In the Hawaii First District Democratic primary, former congressman Ed Case easily bested Lt. Governor Doug Chin and Donna Kim with 40% of the vote to win the right to run against a sacrificial Republican in November.

The Ocasio-Cortez-backed candidate, democratic socialist Kaniela Ing, received only 6% of the vote despite OC campaigning for him personally this past week.

The Hill:

Case faced his toughest challenges from Hawaii Lt. Gov. Doug Chin and former state Senate President Donna Mercado Kim.

Chin, who was appointed to lieutenant governor in February, gained national recognition as attorney general for suing the Trump administration over every version of the travel ban. Trump announced his initial ban a week after taking office in late January 2017 and Hawaii sued shortly after that.

Mercado Kim, who’s been a state senator for 18 years, led the pack as the top fundraiser. She’s also held a number of local elected positions, including serving on the Honolulu City Council for 14 years.

Case also defeated state Rep. Kaniela Ing, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America who ran on a platform of single-payer health care and free college tuition.

Ing had gotten a boost from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a democratic socialist who pulled off a massive primary upset against a longtime incumbent in New York. She campaigned with Ing in the days ahead of Saturday’s primary.

Even Hawaii, one of the bluest states in the union, decisively rejected the socialist messaging of Ocasio-Cortez. It’s no different than the results from last Tuesday’s primaries where Democratic voters opted for less radical alternatives to “the future of the Democratic party.”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/08/12/free-speech-the-righ

For many, the most arduous aspect of supporting free speech is the principled requirement to defend disagreeable speech; moreover, the degree of difficulty in defending free speech increases in proportion to the detestable nature of the individual or entity uttering said offensive speech.

Yet we must. For to infringe upon the free speech rights of one, however loathsome, is to endanger the free speech rights of all. And, really, who doesn’t like to do a little bitching?

Therefore, let us examine a pundit-class kerfuffle to prove how it is possible and necessary to defend free speech, regardless of how unsavory we deem the speaker.

Recently in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman opined that the optimal way to defeat President Trump was for America

to see every [Trump] tweet, every rally, every word and every reaction so that they can ask themselves: “Is this who I want my kids to see as our president? Are these the people with whom I want to be aligned?” It’s too late to move Trump’s core base on these questions, but I would not give up on his passive supporters.

One of the entities Friedman would give up on is, of course, Fox News. Not surprisingly, one Fox News wag didn’t take this sitting down (though it is what he does all day on television).

Greg Gutfeld, the author of a glorified travel brochure, Lessons from the Land of Pork Scratchings: A Miserable Yank Finds Happiness in the UK (among other impenetrable tracts), disagreed with Friedman’s conclusion; and, alternately, argued such ubiquitous coverage had and would continue to help President Trump:

What a great idea. Because remember what happened the last time the media covered every tweet, every rally, every word in every reaction of Donald Trump? . . . They elected Donald Trump…So telling the media to focus on Trump’s behavior, you are in effect saying “hey, remember how we elected Trump in 2016? Let’s do it again.”

Not in the mood to be contradicted by an “active” Trump supporter, Friedman appeared on CNN and declared Gutfeld a “moron.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/marc-molinaro-underdog-candidate-for-new-york-governor/Is Marc Molinaro an underdog? Or a sacrificial lamb?

Governor Andrew Cuomo has called him a “Trump mini-me” — “anti-woman, anti-immigrant, anti-LGBTQ.”

Marc Molinaro, the Dutchess County executive and Republican candidate for governor of New York, takes this in stride. When I ask him about it, he shrugs and quotes Michelle Obama: “When they go low, we go high.”

Focusing on moral character and personal integrity seems important to Molinaro’s campaign, which is striving against considerable odds to win the governorship in a state that has not sent a Republican to the executive mansion since 2002. But if any Republican can achieve that goal, Molinaro says, he’s the man for the job. He was brought up on food stamps, he says, and had to grow up fast. When I suggest that such government support could have sent him in a Democratic direction, he replies that, on the contrary, it taught him the value of hard work and achievement, the refrains of the Republican playbook: that he needed to take the support he had been given and make something of it, and therefore of himself. Limited government, he says, can be helpful in overcoming poverty and societal hardship — but help is synergistic, and the individual then has to use what he was given to surmount the worst obstacles himself.

He considers himself a pragmatist, a middle-of-the-road Republican who can work with political rivals to, say, make sure the garbage gets picked up. He’s a social moderate — pro-gay-marriage (“I’ve evolved” since voting against it in 2011, he says — “like Barack Obama, like Hillary Clinton, like Andrew Cuomo”) and pro-choice, albeit with restrictions and not for late-term abortions (“there are certain lines I just can’t cross”). He adds that he can build the relationships necessary to work across the aisle, with Democrats including New York City mayor Bill de Blasio, and that he will listen to everyone who disagrees with him — from the left and from the right. He points to Cuomo’s June 2014 remarks that “extreme conservatives . . . have no place in New York” as proof that working across the aisle is something that the current governor simply cannot do.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/top-dem-contender-for-president-cant-name-a-single-accomplishment/

Senator Kamala Harris (D-Calf.) was asked by a radio host to name her top accomplishment since coming to the Senate and all she could come up with is that she sat on committees.

Harris has been prominently mentioned as a potential nominee for president from the Democratic Party.

Podcast host Aminatou Sow asked Harris, “We’re wondering, maybe, if you could talk about what at this point you consider your biggest win, or the thing that when you’re like ‘Wow, when I look back at those 18 months, this is the thing that I want top of the resume,'” Sow said.

Harris answered:

I’ll tell you. Umm. One of the things that I think, for me, is most important is the role that I serve on that various committees that I’m on — umm — which are oversight committees. Let’s be clear. Those committees exist to watch and question what is going on with our government, the United States government. So, I’m on Senate Intelligence, I’m on Homeland Security, I’m on Judiciary and the accomplishment then is for me is a function of what I think my role should be. Often, especially in the last 18 months, has been to try and get at the truth.

Wow. That’s some “top of the resume.”

From that same interview: “And so, the accomplishment is, and the goal is to always make sure that we are being, and the system is being, as transparent as possible, and that, frankly, that the American public has the answers and that we’re being told the truth,” she said. “And when that happens, I feel a sense of accomplishment and when it doesn’t happen, I feel a sense of frustration.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/arizona-republicans-brace-for-a-storm-1533936117

Anyone who’s lived in Arizona is familiar with the summer monsoons that sweep across the desert, bringing a tsunami of sand. The rain can come on suddenly but is usually presaged by hurricane-force gusts carrying dark, thick plumes. Some people say they can sense a storm coming by the electricity in the air.

For Republicans, this year’s midterm elections have that sort of ominous feel. Liberal intensity has been building across the country, fueled by revulsion at Donald Trump. Longtime GOP redoubts are suddenly up for grabs in special elections. Republicans this week appear to have eked out a victory in Ohio’s 12th Congressional District, which the GOP had won in 2016 by more than 35 points.

Arizona, the land of Barry Goldwater, has long leaned right. Between 1952 and 2016, Democrats carried the state in only one presidential election, in 1996. Today Republicans control the governorship, both chambers of the Legislature, both U.S. Senate seats and five of nine House seats. But demographic changes are pulling the electorate leftward, even as Mr. Trump is polarizing voters.

Hispanics make up nearly a third of the state’s population and more than 40% in the two biggest cities, Phoenix and Tucson. Mr. Trump carried Arizona by a mere 3.5 points in 2016, compared with Mitt Romney’s 9-point margin in 2012. Many Republicans and independents in the suburbs are repelled by the president’s abrasive personality and restrictionist immigration policies. Caught in the political maelstrom are Gov. Doug Ducey and Rep. Martha McSally.

Ms. McSally is running for the GOP nomination to succeed Sen. Jeff Flake. A second-term congresswoman from Tucson, she would seem to be a GOP dream candidate: a former Air Force fighter pilot who can return liberal fire. Her military background is a major asset in a state with 1,200 aerospace and defense companies. CONTINUE AT SITE