Voter ID laws have been challenged because liberal Democrats deem them racist. I guess that’s because they see blacks as being incapable of acquiring some kind of government-issued identification. Interesting enough is the fact that I’ve never heard of a challenge to other ID requirements as racist, such as those: to board a plane, open a charge account, have lab work done or cash a welfare check. Since liberal Democrats only challenge legal procedures to promote ballot-box integrity, the conclusion one reaches is that they are for vote fraud prevalent in many Democrat-controlled cities.
Marco Rubio’s recent habit of missing votes in the Senate is suddenly an issue in his campaign for the GOP presidential nomination.
The kerfuffle started with a question from CNBC’s Carl Quintanilla, one of the moderators running last Wednesday’s third Republican primary debate. Quintanilla asked Rubio about a Florida Sun-Sentinel editorial that sternly criticized Rubio’s lack of attendance in the Senate as he runs for president, and called on him to resign his seat. Rubio turned his answer into a complaint about “the bias that exists in the American media today,” which won the audience to his side — and allowed him to beat back the ill-advised attack that followed from rival Jeb Bush.
“Jeb, I don’t remember . . . you ever complaining about John McCain’s vote record,” Rubio said, to more applause. “The only reason why you’re doing it now is because we’re running for the same position, and someone has convinced you that attacking me is going to help you.”
If you’re going to call on Marco Rubio to resign his Senate seat, you’ll have to do better than that.
Yes, Rubio has missed a lot of votes this year — 99 out of 294, to be exact. But running for president requires an intense travel schedule, and there’s no indication that Rubio regularly missed votes before launching his campaign. Prior to this year, Rubio had missed only 77 of 1143 votes — 6 percent of them — as a senator. Even with this year’s spotty attendance record, Rubio’s overall attendance rate remains high — he’s only missed 176 of 1,437 votes in almost five years in the Senate.
Writing with uncharacteristic acidity in Friday’s Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan offered up an explanation as to why Jeb Bush has thus far failed to deliver on his promise. “Reporters,” Noonan proposed, have tended to assume without cynicism that Bush must be a “national candidate” because he is part of a “national family.” The last few weeks have served to disabuse us of that notion.
We have learned, Noonan records, that Jeb is “only a governor” — no more guaranteed success or assured of greatness than any aspirant with a less recognizable surname. Certainly, his pedigree has ensured that the supply side of his campaign would be taken care of: For almost half a century now, America has been furnished with an ample supply of ambitious, well-funded Bushes. On the demand side, however, things have been far less rosy. If, as I consider likely, Bush eventually recognizes that his overtures have been met with jaded indifference, he will have struck an inadvertent blow for meritocracy and demonstrated an age-old truth, to boot: However much polish and gold the masters of the universe can dispense, there is no easy way to sell a superfluous product. Surveying the present scene, critics of both the “establishment” and that protean supervillain “money” should be breathing a touch more easily.
Republicans should be upbeat. They control by large margins the state legislatures and governorships. The Supreme Court is a bit more conservative than liberal. The House and Senate are both run by Republicans.
President Obama, after veritably wrecking his party, has for some time scarcely polled above 45 percent in approval ratings — even after borrowing $8 trillion to spread the wealth, pandering to special interests, echoing nonstop the assertions of his iconic status, and blaming all his failures on his predecessors and opponents.
In addition, parties usually do not succeed in winning the presidency for three consecutive terms. Nor do orphaned presidential elections — ones in which the incumbent president or vice president is not running — usually go to the party that currently holds the White House.
The Republican Senate caucus has been divided in its endorsements of candidates in the 2016 presidential primary, but a Colorado freshman has decided to formally back a senator who helped him with his own campaign last year.
Sen. Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who served in the House before defeating Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) a year ago, announced his support today for Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).
Rubio stepped in with a Spanish-language ad, released by the Chamber of Commerce, on behalf of Gardner in May 2014. More than one in five residents of Colorado is Hispanic.
Rubio and Gardner serve together on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, along with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
No more beating around the bush-Jeb should now leave graciously….he has lived graciously….before his name becomes a national joke…..rsk
The greatest fiction writers will tell you that the best way to describe a character in a story is to show him in action, not to describe him with adjectives.
Unfortunately, Jeb Bush doesn’t employ very talented novelists to write his speeches. In an effort to re-re-reboot his campaign, he gave a major speech in Miami in English on Monday.
First, Jeb started talking about his exciting new book – about his emails.
For eight years, I gave out my jeb@jeb.org email address to anyone who wanted to talk to me.
And email they did!
People across the state told me their stories.
Sometimes they asked questions.
On the Fox show Outnumbered Thursday, Newt Gingrich referred to liberals as “the totalitarian Left.” That same day, on Fox Business’s Varney & Co, political commentator Monica Crowley remarked that the Democrats of today, seeking a fundamental transformation of America, are not the classical liberals of the past.
Gingrich’s description of the Left’s totalitarianism dovetails directly into Crowley’s, since that fundamental transformation is a total one that necessarily must be coerced. Both their comments echo what the Horowitz Freedom Center has been declaring for twenty years: that “inside every liberal is a totalitarian screaming to get out.”
I reached out to Monica Crowley for her further thoughts on the matter.
Mark Tapson: Monica, on Varney & Co you commented that new Speaker of the House Paul Ryan may be under the illusion that he will be dealing with the Democratic party of old, but today’s Dems want to fundamentally transform America and can’t be viewed as partners in restoring America. Could you elaborate on that a bit?
The scathing eye that The Associated Press cast over Hillary Clinton’s latest deceptions will make for an interesting election season if it marks the birth of a trend. Here’s to the hope, a faint one, that the lure of a good story trumps Big Media’s leftist orthodoxy
Only hours after the first Democratic debate closed on October 13, the Associated Press fact-checkers issued their analysis of a random sample of the lies told by the two leading candidates, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. This exercise was charitably described in the headline as “Clinton, Sanders revise history”. But it was weightier than the catalogue of minor errors that usually constitutes media fact-checking.
It pointed first to shameless and serious denials of the truth, such as Mrs Clinton’s claims that she had not reversed herself on the Trans-Pacific Partnership. For some years she has been praising the trade agreement (which she helped to negotiate) as “the gold standard” of such deals. In the debate before a highly-partisan and unionised Democrat audience, however, she switched, claiming with a straight face merely that she had “hoped” it would be the gold standard but that, alas and alack …
The White House is conducting a full-court press to stop the releasing of emails between President Barack Obama and his former Secretary of State , and now the Democratic Party’s presidential heir apparent, Hillary Clinton. According to reports in Washington, D.C., news outlets, the White House is claiming they are required to keep presidential communications confidential at least until a president exits the White House at the end of his or her term.
While the majority of print and broadcast news media all but ignore the information emanating from the drip-by-drip release of Clinton emails, on Friday the State Department released another batch of Hillary Clinton’s emails from her tenure as top diplomat. However, the White House will not allow the release of emails between Obama and Clinton even if some are communications between the two regarding the Benghazi terrorist attack in 2012.
After the media inexplicably dubbed Hillary Rodham Clinton the “winner” of the Benghazi hearings, her apologists dismissed a line of questioning into her unofficial adviser, Sidney Blumenthal.
So he was sending her e-mail offering advice on Libya and other matters of state. In the immortal words of Clinton at an earlier Benghazi hearing, “What difference does it make?”
It matters because Clinton flouted President Obama’s authority, secretly employing a man the administration had banned — then Clinton and Blumenthal pursued a rogue agenda often motivated by political favors and payoffs for friends.
Blumenthal was an aide to President Bill Clinton from 1997 to 2001 and one of his most reliable hatchet men. Luca Brasi without the charm, Blumenthal had smeared Monica Lewinsky, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr, Republicans — and, when the time came, presidential candidate Barack Obama himself. His nickname: “Sid Vicious.”
E-mails show Hillary Clinton wanted him hired at State. But still smarting from Blumenthal’s attacks during the campaign, the administration nixed the appointment.
