RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://patriotpost.us/articles/68373-democrats-panic-after-iowa-2020-02-05

With the Democrats’ Iowa caucuses fiasco dragging on into its third day — no official winner has yet been announced — there are clear indications that party leaders are panicking. Longtime Democrat strategist and former Bill Clinton campaign manager James Carville wondered why Tom Perez was still leading the Democratic National Committee. “The polling averages have not been very good the last 10 days and I’ve some pretty good polls that show enthusiasm among Democrats is not as high as we might like it,” Carville observed. “This is not going particularly well so far. And why is Tom Perez still the chairman of the Democratic National Committee? I have no idea. This party needs to wake up.” He later added, “I know these donors and they’re not going to give a popsicle to the DNC right now. I can promise you that.”

Carville isn’t the only high-profile Democrat sounding the alarm. David Axelrod, former senior advisor to Barack Obama, bemoaned, “However bad the handling the count has been, the Iowa’s Democratic Party’s handling of the messaging around it has been an abject disaster. It should be taught in classrooms as an example of what not to do in a crisis.”

Then there’s the growing specter of election malfeasance, which will only further complicate the DNC’s future efforts of getting its base to coalesce around the party’s eventual nominee, let alone gin up voter enthusiasm.

Speaking of coalescing, the divide within the party between hard-left socialists and non-socialists has Carville even more concerned. “I mean, I’m 75 years old. Why am I here doing this? Because I am scared to death, that’s why,” he complained. It’s more than an image problem, Carville argues. “All the Sanders people were taking pictures wishing Jeremy Corbyn the best. … The press corps went AOC crazy. … We got to decide what we want to be. Do we want to be an ideological cult or do we want to have a majoritarian instinct to be a majority party? … The urban core is not going to get it done. What we need is power. You understand? That’s what this is about. Without power, you have nothing. You just have talking points.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/02/sotu_trumps_boom_means_kaboom_for_dem_hopes.html

Trump has poached all the Democrat’s core constituencies.  He has outperformed them in their self-assigned territory.  He is going right at their core strength, the black voting bloc.

In President Trump’s beautiful words, he has created a ‘blue-collar boom.’

This boom means ka-boom to Democrat chances of holding on to the working-class vote.  Ka-boom to Democrat chances of keeping 95% of blacks in lockstep voting for their failed policies.  Ka-boom to the lies that Republicans are racists who only care about rich white people.

Trump’s approach to the economy is not the dry old Republican message that tax cuts boost investment.  Trump puts people first, always.  It is the not the message of a politician, staying in the safe zone of what everyone always does and says.  It is the message of a businessman and warrior, with the courage to defy conventional thinking on trade, manufacturing and domestic energy.

YouTube screen grab

Trump’s message is full of heart for ordinary people.  It is signature Trump: “Our agenda is relentlessly pro-worker, pro-family, pro-growth, and, most of all, pro-American.”  

Trump’s economy eats the Democrats’ lunch.  Trump has poached all the Democrat’s core constituencies.  He has outperformed them in their self-assigned territory.  He is going right at their core strength, the black voting bloc.  He is winning people over on the on merits. 

President Trump’s SOTUS theatrics are so effective because they are not merely theatrics.  He is bringing home the bacon.  It’s not boasting when you are reporting on what you have actually achieved. 

The first segment of the SOTUS, the list of economic achievements, was a “Wow!”

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/trump-critics-denounce-pro-trump-blacks-as-sellouts-while-criticizing-trump-for-not-having-more-sellouts/

The Donald Trump White House put out a photograph of the president’s task force on the coronavirus. CNN promptly showed its displeasure, not with the task force’s effort, but with its racial composition. There was insufficient “diversity” in the photo.

In a piece called “Coronavirus Task Force Another Example of Trump Administration’s Lack of Diversity,” CNN national political writer Brandon Tensley wrote: “Who are these experts? They’re largely the same sorts of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who’ve dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning.

“By contrast, former President Barack Obama’s circle of advisers in the face of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in West Africa was hardly so monochromatic. Neither was it so abysmal in terms of gender diversity. (Of course, to contextualize, Obama’s administration, on the whole, was far more diverse than Trump’s.)

“And yet, as unsurprising as the diversity issue in the Trump era has become, it’s still worth pointing out from time to time, especially as the country approaches the 2020 presidential election in earnest.

“That’s partly because the recent photos of ‘the best experts’ telegraph the kinds of people the administration deems worthy of holding power — and even being in close proximity to it.”

That’s a mouthful.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

Democrats’ impeachment effort was never about removing President Donald Trump from office. If it had been, it would not have been rushed through the House of Representatives without a proper predicate or investigation.

No reasonable person expected the Republican-controlled Senate to remove a sitting president for anything Rep. Adam Schiff repeatedly alleged, no matter how unfairly he characterized Trump’s thoughts, words, or actions.

Impeachment was about satisfying the corporate media and Democratic base that had demanded it for years. And since removal was never a realistic outcome, it was about harming Trump in an election year.

By that standard, it could not have gone worse. Here are three ways that Pelosi’s gambit backfired bigly.

1. Donald Trump’s Numbers Went Up, Not Down

The latest Gallup poll of registered voters shows that Trump’s approval rating is the highest it’s been since his inauguration — 49 percent. That number went up from 39 percent in October, which was during the House’s impeachment process, such as it was.

During that same time, approval of the Democratic Party fell from 48 percent to 45 percent and approval of the Republican Party shot up from 43 percent to 51 percent. That’s the first time the GOP has had majority approval since 2005. The party also has a rare partisan-ID advantage.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/02/05/what_bloombergs_money_can_buy__142322.html

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s big-spending foray into the presidential race is getting noticed by millions of Americans. You can’t miss his seemingly ubiquitous television advertising, especially in states unaccustomed to seeing campaign commercials in primary season.

But a tiny, yet knowing, subsection of the public was captivated for an entirely different reason just days before Bloomberg spent $10 million to advertise during the Super Bowl. His year-end campaign finance report showed a free-spending organization that was met with a mix of disbelief and jealousy by political operatives throughout the country.

Most seasoned campaign workers and consultants can regale you with tales of boot-strapped campaigns, the proverbial uphill-both-ways-to-school story. Tales of campaign workers sleeping in the office and living off donated candy and booze are the stuff of lore.

While it may sound quaint in an era of super PACs and self-funders, the vast majority of campaigns today are still largely run on shoestring budgets. Ten grand for sushi you say? How about 10 bucks for pizza and we all chip in for the beer? An apartment in Midtown? How do you feel about staying in the basement of the candidate’s house? 

Don’t get me wrong — this is not passing judgment on a candidate or anyone working for wealthy candidates willing to spend their own money to get elected. As someone who toiled on several political campaigns, I’ve had the good fortune of experiencing both the well-funded and the not-so-well-funded.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/the-art-of-warping-elections/

N o sooner were Democrats’ Trump-Russia collusion charges debunked than they began to claim that Trump will do again in 2020 what Robert Mueller found he did not do in 2016: rig the election.

After 22 months, nearly 500 subpoenas, and somewhere around $35 million in costs, special counsel Robert Mueller’s much praised progressive “all-star” team of lawyers and investigators found no evidence that Donald Trump had colluded with the Russians. Trump did not warp the 2016 election, and so he had not unfairly defeated the supposed sure-winner Hillary Clinton. But again those who have investigated and attacked Trump nonstop probably are seeking to do in 2020 what they falsely accused Trump of doing in 2016.

Mueller’s failure to find any collusion evidence was not for want of the dream team’s “bombshell” and “walls are closing in” leaks to CNN and MSNBC talking heads, over the course of 88 weeks. Almost daily we heard ad nauseam that Trump was soon to be indicted, convicted, removed, or summarily dispatched.

If anyone should have found “collusion,” it was certainly the Mueller zealots, then de facto ramrodded by current MSNBC partisan “legal” analyst Andrew Weissmann. (How odd that John Brennan, James Clapper, Andrew McCabe, and Andrew Weissmann leak to MSNBC and CNN and then, in the out-phase of their perpetually revolving-door careers, end up rewarded by their receptacles as paid TV analysts).

In the end, the “hunter-killer team” imploded.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/democracy-works-dems-vote-for-none-of-the-above-in-iowa/#comments

Terry Jones of Monty Python passed on last month, but his spirit was present at the Iowa Caucuses last night as “none of the above” emerged as the apparent winner. The combined efforts of the comedy writers of Tinseltown couldn’t have produced a sillier outcome. A technical glitch delayed the delegate count, but the contingent in this case reveals the necessary: The Democrats don’t have a clue whom they want as a presidential candidate, because the Democratic Party has become a suppurating stew of contending resentments. Do they want a recycled Communist to soak the successful and distribute the spoils to self-defined losers in the form of student-loan forgiveness or subsidized health care or a job-killing minimum wage? Do they want an eco-gender icon who flatters the faddish predilections of young urban professionals? Do they want a feminist standard-bearer with an aggressive redistributionist agenda? Do they want an African-American candidate to embody the rejection of “white privilege” and correct the supposed original sin of slavery? Or do they want an aged, empty vessel whose only qualifiication is a past association with a Democratic Party that once upon a time won elections?

Democratic voters don’t want any of these. No doubt the Iowa Democrats will release results eventually, although challenges and recriminations may persist for a while. But the actual vote, whatever it is, will show a degree of fragmentation among Democratic voters never seen since the party’s founding. The radical vote is big enough to block Biden, a shadow of the crafty, nasty politician who crushed Paul Ryan in the 2012 vice-presidential debates, a pathetic figure who says what his handlers made him memorize when you pull the string at the back of his neck. Bernie Sanders, the one candidate who came into the primaries with a national reputation and a field organization, lacks the credibility to unite the radicals, and Elizabeth Warren is too shrill, too extreme and too crazy to do anything but siphon votes away from Sanders. The black candidates have withdrawn from the race. Pete Buttigieg may emerge in front of the pack because he’s everyone’s second choice.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/02/elitist-bill-kristol-becomes-democrat-rabbi-aryeh-spero/

Here is the announcement that so-called neo-con Bill Kristol has just found solace in the arms of the saintly Democrats: Bill Kristol @Bill Kristol: “Not presumably forever, not perhaps for a day after Nov. 3, 2020…. But for the time being one has to say: We are all Democrats now.”

So, Bill Kristol is now identifying with and preferring the Democrat Party, which promotes the dangerous socialist dystopia; has 120 congressional members endorsing CAIR; is trending in an anti-Israel trajectory; refuses to condemn anti-Semitism in and of itself; accepts ANTIFA; attacks the traditional family and race-baits constantly; condemned our take-out of the foremost jihadist terrorist Soleimani; supports the Iran Deal and the $billions funding the mullahs; pushes for open and unprotected borders; and violated all the bedrock laws of due process in order to nullify the will of the electorate and destroy a President.

Someone lamented that Kristol has a good mind. So, what!; he seems to lack character and has used his mind for the last three years to severely damage our institutions, America itself, and has been a major engine in putting this country through Hell. Good minds are a dime a dozen, but are frightening when used to scheme and plot destruction. Kristol never knew when to stop the destruction he was causing this country.

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/story/2020-02-04/clinton-campaign-vets-behind-2020-iowa-caucus-app-snafu

On a tense, chaotic night, with the eyes of the nation trained on the Iowa caucuses, that state’s Democratic Party was counting on a slick new smartphone app to make everything go smoothly.

The app was coded by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of them a former Google engineer. It was designed to meet new requirements instituted after that year’s contentious Iowa caucuses, in which Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders. To provide more transparency this time around, the state party promised to report not just the final results but voters’ initial and second choices as well.

With so much more data to tabulate than in previous years, party leaders feared that the established system of reporting numbers by phone would be too slow. A proposal for a “tele-caucus” system enabling virtual voting was rejected as too vulnerable to hacking. An app that could instantaneously relay the numbers as soon as precinct chairs input them, developed by Democratic Party loyalists, looked like the perfect solution.

It turned out to be a crushing failure.

Throughout the long, long night, precinct chairs found themselves unable to make the app work properly. Some never figured out how to download or install it in the first place. Those who tried to report their results via a backup phone line found themselves on hold, sometimes for more than an hour.

Results from Monday’s caucuses could not be transmitted to Iowa party headquarters, and state Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price blamed the problem on a coding error. “While our plan is to release results as soon as possible today, our ultimate goal is to ensure that the integrity and accuracy of the process continues to be upheld,” he said in a statement Tuesday morning.

https://www.investigativeproject.org/8287/the-anti-islamist-muslim-challenging-ilhan-omar

All that journalist Dalia al-Aqidi was asking for was a brief interview, one-on-one, to air on a TV station in the Middle East. She was, after all, one of the region’s best-known and most accomplished international reporters. But then-newly-elected Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar refused even to respond to her request.

Now al-Aqidi, an Iraqi refugee who has lived in the United States since 1988, is challenging Omar to represent Minnesota’s 5th Congressional district.

The decision to run for office didn’t come easily to the 51-year-old al-Aqidi. But “after Omar was elected, her activities and her statements – it offended me as an American, as a Muslim, and it offended me as an immigrant, and that made me concentrate on her activities,” she explained in a recent Skype interview. Omar’s non-response to her interview request, though, was what ultimately set her on her current path. “After that I said, ‘I don’t want to interview her. I’m going to talk to her district, and talk to her people.'”

In the process, she found that although Omar is herself a Somali refugee, many of her constituents, and particularly those in the Somali community, felt much the way al-Aqidi did. “Ilhan Omar is trying to give a false picture of what immigrants want,” al-Aqidi says. “People now think Somalis come to the U.S. to sit and get handouts, and come for free this and free that – it’s not true at all. [So] now a large percentage of her own Somali community can’t stand her anymore, because they see the damage she is doing to them.”