RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/2019-election-results-governors-races-sanctuary-cities-mayor-petes-successor-and-more/

Voters across the country went to the polls on Tuesday, handing Democrats some key victories but also electing the first black Republican attorney general in Kentucky. Voters also addressed a broad swath of issues from Airbnb to sanctuary cities.

In Virginia, Democrats took both the House of Delegates and the state Senate. Democrats nationwide interpreted the win as a sign of strength for their party, but the Commonwealth has increasingly favored Democrats in presidential elections and had been moving left in recent years.

“Woo-hoo! Congratulations to the people of Virginia for flipping both the state House and state Senate,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a leading 2020 Democrat, tweeted. “Voting is what our democracy is all about, and Virginia proved that today as they elected [Democrats] up and down the ballot.”

While Democrats will rightly celebrate these victories, it is important to keep in mind that in 25 percent of the state senate races, the Democrat did not face a Republican challenger. I wrote in seven names on my ballot yesterday, voting for the two Independents on the ballot. I had no Republican option.

Karl Frisch, a far-left activist who once worked for Media Matters, became the first openly gay man elected to the Fairfax County School Board.

The two high-profile governor’s races seemed to go in opposite directions. In Kentucky, Attorney General Andy Beshear, a Democrat, enjoyed a close lead in early results and declared his victory while Republican Gov. Matt Bevin refused to concede. In Mississippi, Republican Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves defeated Democrat Attorney General Jim Hood. Trump campaigned for both Republicans.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/kamala-harris-blames-american-racism-failed-daniel-greenfield/

Senator Kamala Harris polled at 3% in last month’s Quinnipiac poll. That must make the San Fran and Hollywood donors who stuffed $11.6 million in her pantsuit pockets this quarter feel good about giving to charity.

A quarter of Iowa Democrat caucusgoers have a negative opinion of Harris. That’s up minus eleven points since June. So, Harris is making weekly trips to Iowa while claiming that she’s going to move there. Not even Democrats are stupid enough to believe that she’s going to leave her Brentwood mansion to move to a place where the temperatures are currently hovering around the low thirties.

And her Iowa stump speech is now all about accusing anyone who doesn’t vote for her of racism.

In her speeches, Harris claims that “electability”, the question of whether a candidate polling 3% nationwide can beat President Trump, is the “elephant in the room—but actually more accurately, the donkey in the room.”

There’s a donkey in the room all-right. Or maybe it’s a jackass.

“It’s been coming up in connection to my campaign: is America ready for that? Are they ready for a woman of color to be President of the United States?” Harris insists.

When Harris tried this line in an Axios on HBO interview, a baffled Margaret Talev asked, “America was ready for a black man to be President of the United States.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/nancy_and_willie_warning_democrats.html

 A few days after witnessing “Democrats minus two” vote for some version of an “impeach but not impeach” resolution, we get these two warnings from the West Coast.

First, Willie Brown, retired Democrat, warned Democrats about impeachment.  He was brutally honest:    

If the goal was to damage President Trump by formalizing the impeachment inquiry, it’s Mission Unaccomplished for House Democrats.

If anything, the vote solidified Trump’s hold on power. There were zero GOP defections, meaning we have zero drama heading into the public phase of impeachment. Everyone is pretty much in the same lanes they’ve been in since the Russian-collusion investigation, the obstruction of justice investigation and every other investigation.

Unfortunately for the Democrats, that gives people little reason to be glued to their screens when House committees take public testimony. The basic story — Trump pressured Ukraine to announce investigations into Democrats that would help Trump — is out there already. People know how they feel about it, and if you believe the polls, they’re pretty evenly split on whether the president deserves to be thrown out of office.

Again, that was Willie Brown, not Rush Limbaugh.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-reelection-campaign-white-working-class-democratic-nominee/

How the white working class — and the Democratic nominee — could save Donald Trump in 2020

At first glance, President Trump’s reelection chances don’t look good. Stories about impeachment and presidential misbehavior dominate the news. Trump’s disapproval rating is high. Independent voters are against him. GOP congressmen are retiring from suburban districts that trend Democratic. The generic ballot is about where it was last cycle. Trump’s win in 2016, when some 78,000 voters in three states gave him the Electoral College, was a close-run thing. Seems hard to repeat.

And yet liberals are filled with apprehension. They are coming to recognize the potential size of the president’s pool of supporters. They fret over the capacities and liabilities of the eventual Democratic nominee. And their concerns are related: Trump’s ability to recapitulate or expand his winning coalition depends in large part on the identity of his opponent. Given these uncertainties, it would be foolish to predict Trump’s fate. He might even be stronger than he appears.

“Despite demographic trends that continue to favor the Democrats, and despite Trump’s unpopularity among wide swathes of the electorate, it will still be difficult for the Democrats to prevail against an incumbent president who has presided over a growing, low-unemployment economy and retains strong loyalty among key sectors of the electorate,” write Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin of the Center for American Progress. No conservatives they.

The Democratic difficulty has a name: the Electoral College. Twice in the 21st century, the level of the presidential vote has mattered less than its distribution. Trump’s people are spread much more evenly across the country than his opponents are. His base of white voters without college degrees, say Teixeira and Halpin, “make up more than half of all eligible voters in critical Electoral College states he won in 2016—including Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—and in key target states for 2020 such as New Hampshire.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bonfire-of-the-democratic-partys-once-rising-stars/

Let the 2020 cycle be a warning to political correspondents who write glowing profile pieces on the next great Democratic party hope. For some of us, the best part of this cycle so far is watching the slow-motion implosion of so many wildly over-hyped “rising stars” of the Democratic party — relentlessly trying and failing to gain traction against a trio of well-worn septuagenarians. This primary is turning into a giant bonfire of once-promising political talents who could make national reporters swoon.

As far back as 2017, Vogue and other national glossies gushed over the presidential potential of Kirsten Gillibrand.

Beto O’Rourke was the favorite subject of glowing profiles in national publications throughout 2018.

Julian Castro spent much of the past decade being touted as “the Latino Obama.”

Cory Booker was the subject of documentaries and a social media star . . . and like the rest, he’s an afterthought.

And as our John McCormick notes, Kamala Harris’s campaign may be reaching the stage of an M.Night Shamalayan character — long since dead, but still walking around in denial of this difficult truth. Harris stands out from the others because in early summer, she appeared to have reached the top tier, or at least be knocking on the door. But difficulties in defending her record as a prosecutor have her well behind everywhere, even in her home state.

Some of the blame for these crash-and-burn campaigns goes beyond the candidates. It’s tougher to stand out among twenty-something candidates than among a half-dozen. Booker spent much of his career emulating the early Barack Obama and trying to cultivate a post-partisan problem-solver image, and with the election of Donald Trump, Democrats aren’t as interested in that — consider him a species that could not adapt to political climate change.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/kamala-harris-to-cut-staff-and-restructure-campaign-to-save-sinking-presidential-bid/

Kamala Harris, according to a memo obtained by Politico on Wednesday, is reportedly letting go of “dozens” of campaign staff at her Baltimore headquarters and will send some to Iowa as she hopes to save her presidential ambitions.

Harris’ decision to double-down on Iowa comes after her campaign posted poor fundraising numbers for the third quarter, struggling to garner the necessary resources and support required to be a competitive candidate. Politico reports that the “overhaul will touch nearly every face of Harris’ operation,” with staff layoffs and reassignments coming from New Hampshire, Nevada, and California, the senator’s home state.

High-level campaign staff, including Campaign Manager Juan Rodriguez will also see their salaries cut.

Harris’ latest decision to re-focus her efforts on Iowa comes after the California senator already announced in September that the month of October would be focused on the critical first-in-the-nation caucus state, spending 15 of the month’s 30 days so far in the Hawkeye state.

“I’m f-cking moving to Iowa,” Harris was caught joking to Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono.

The campaign pledged a third-place finish in the state to stay competitive in the primary, a campaign promise that Harris’ latest moves signal might have been a bad bet as she finds herself polling worse there than she did at the beginning of the month.

According to Real Clear Politics’ latest aggregate of polls, Harris is only polling with 2.7 percent support, trailing behind six other candidates and tied with Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and billionaire Tom Steyer.

Harris entered the race as a top-tier candidate. With a breakout moment at the first Democratic primary debate calling out former Vice President Joe Biden for his previous opposition to bussing, Harris was once seen as a candidate on the rise before seeing a steady decline in support starting in July.

Nationally, Harris is at 5 percent support in Real Clear Politics’ aggregate of polls, behind Biden, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2019/10/30/the-j-street-democrats-n2555560

This week, four of the top candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro and Bernie Sanders — gathered at the J Street Conference to explain why the United States ought to pressure the state of Israel to make concessions to terrorists, why the Obama administration was correct to appease the Iranian regime and why American Jews ought to value the opinions of Bernie Sanders over those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the future of Jewish safety. Two other top Democrats — Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden — sent video messages in support of the group.

By contrast, when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee held its annual conference in March, not a single Democratic presidential candidate showed up. The Democrats are, by and large, simply too ashamed to stand with an actual pro-Israel group, although prominent congressional leaders still show up to mouth nostrums about bipartisan support for Israel.

But the heart of the Democratic Party has moved against Israel. That’s because Israel is economically successful, while its enemies are not; Israel is liberal, while its enemies are not; Israel is the tip of the spear of Western civilization in an area known for its tribalism and brutality. This means that according to the radical left, Israel is an exploitative country hell-bent on domination, despite its lack of territorial ambition — Israel has signed over large swaths of land won through military victory to geopolitical enemies, and offered much more repeatedly.

So the Democrats built up and gave credence to J Street, a Trojan horse group dedicated to undermining American support for Israel and justifying left-wing hatred of the Jewish state. J Street was founded by Clinton operative Jeremy Ben-Ami and Israeli far-left political figure Daniel Levy in late 2007. One of its chief sources of funding — a source obscured in the early years by its founders — was anti-Israel radical George Soros.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/i-can-defeat-trump-and-the-clinton-doctrine-11572389508

Hillary Clinton emerged recently to claim, with no basis in fact, that I am being “groomed” by the Russian government to undermine America. As a major in the National Guard who served in Iraq—one of the many disastrous regime-change wars Mrs. Clinton championed over her career—I swore an oath to only one authority: the U.S. Constitution.

I’m running for president to undo Mrs. Clinton’s failed legacy. From Iraq to Libya to Syria, her record is replete with foreign-policy catastrophes. It’s a primary reason why I resigned as vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 to endorse Bernie Sanders. Mrs. Clinton and the powerful media and political network she built up over decades have never forgiven this slight. The smears have been nonstop ever since.

Hardly a week goes by when I’m not asked a question about how I’m being secretly backed by Russia or other foreign powers—on top of countless other falsehoods intended to destroy my reputation. Those who are indebted to the war machine and the overreaching intelligence agencies, as well as their cheerleaders in the media, are determined to take me down because they know they can’t control me. I’m directly challenging their power.

This isn’t a petty “spat” between Mrs. Clinton and me. It’s a serious contrast in views about the choice voters face as they decide which Democratic candidate is best equipped to defeat President Trump. Mrs. Clinton already lost to Mr. Trump once. Why would Democrats think a Hillary 2.0 candidate would result in anything different?