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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/merritt-shaking-up-gop-politics-in-georgia/

Merritt Shaking Up GOP Politics in Georgia By Jack Fowler

It’s impossible not to like or respect Danny Merritt, the young warrior, successful businessman, husband, dad (of four), and member of the extended National Review family who is now turning his attention to politics: He has launched a primary challenge against Congressman Buddy Carter, the incumbent Republican who has held Georgia’s first-district seat since 2015.

The co-founder, with his brother Tyler, of the enormously popular Nine Line Apparel, Merritt — a decorated Army officer (now a major in the reserves) and combat veteran who was a platoon leader in Iraq in 2008 prior to serving in Afghanistan with the 1st Cavalry Division — threw his helmet in the ring this May because he believes that more veterans need to serve in Congress. A strong supporter of President Trump, he would make VA reform a priority. His campaign, so far, has been grass-roots and self-funded.

In a recent interview with American Military News, Merritt described a key motivation for running: lawmakers cashing in on their office: “So many times we see our representatives are using their positions to enrich themselves, to improve their own lives or the lives of their family members. Everybody scratches each other backs. . . . Americans are sick and tired of it.” Describing himself as a “complete outsider” who is “completely new to politics,” Merritt says he will “have a fresh look at how things are done and be able to do things differently,” adding, “I’ve done that in business and in combat and been successful, and I’m hoping to do that in Congress.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/hillary-clinton-labels-trump-an-illegitimate-president/

Hillary Clinton said that Donald Trump is an “illegitimate president” during a Wednesday appearance on ABC’s “The View.”

The former presidential candidate made the comment after host Joy Behar asked what she made of Trump leading “lock her up!” chants at campaign rallies.

“I do think that [Trump] knows that he’s an illegitimate president,” said Clinton to applause from the studio audience. “Because of that, he’s very insecure about it.”

Washington Examiner
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“He knows that he’s an illegitimate president and because of that — he’s very insecure about it.”

Clinton’s campaign met with harsh public backlash after she was accused of using a private home server to receive classified emails from the State Department in violation of federal laws governing the handling of classified information. After an F.B.I. investigation, then director James Comey announced that the agency would not press charges against Clinton, but referred to her actions as “extremely careless.”

The investigation into her use of a private server for classified emails became a key issue in the 2016 elections, with Trump and supporters shouting “lock her up!” at rallies and alleging that Clinton had overstepped the bounds of the law.The State Department is continuing its own investigation into the matter.

During the 2016 election season, Trump hinted that he would not accept the election results if he were to lose. Clinton herself went on to question the legitimacy of the results in a 2017 interview with in Mother Jones.

Later in the Wednesday interview, Clinton accused Trump of “being helped a lot” in the 2016 elections, presumably referring to the Kremlin’s efforts to sway the election in his favor.

amgreatness.com/2019/10/01/kamala-harris-is-the-winner-from-the-impeachment-push-but-the-game-is-on/

The Democratic strategy is to create a coalition that excludes mainstream voters and their concerns entirely. That’s why Paleface Warren can’t do this job. It has to be Kamala Harris.

The Democrat leadership and political elite have decided to go all in on impeachment. It’s just their latest big media play. It remains to be seen how far they push it beyond posturing and investigations, since Nancy Pelosi’s “official investigation” reportedly is what Representative Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) has been doing all along. Nonetheless, in political terms, the Democrats are making a consequential move that is likely to undercut the Biden campaign.

Republican pundits are busy pointing out that the Ukraine story will hurt Joe Biden more than President Trump. They are wondering why Democrats would go back to the same failed ploy they tried with the Mueller investigation, which only uncovered wrongdoing by the Clinton campaign and Obama’s CIA and FBI appointees, and none by President Trump. These pundits are missing the point.

Winners and Losers

There are two losers here and two winners. The losers are President Trump and candidate Joe Biden. The winners are Elizabeth Warren in the short term, and Kamala Harris in the long-term.

President Trump loses because, once more, his brand is associated with a bad smell. The screeching press coverage of the flimsy Ukraine accusations amount to powerful, free campaign ads for his opposition and they’re running 24/7. They are aimed at low information swing voters who never bother to get the details, just the headlines. And as such they work.

The key audience here is Democrat voters themselves, the moderate but loyal Democrats who are becoming restive about their party’s left turn. A small but significant percentage of these voters ordinarily would give President Trump a fair chance. There is a lot for them to like in his record. President Trump has been an outstanding president in the two realms that count: the economy and national security. We are in a period of job growth not seen in decades, and unheard of in the lifetime of millennials. President Trump has disproportionately helped blacks and Hispanics. We are at peace.

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/10/14/elizabeth-warrens-strange-shifting-identities

/Conservative; liberal; white; Cherokee; Harvard prof; tribune of the people; possibly extraterrestrial

‘Fauxcahontas” and “Lie-awatha” are serviceable enough as one-word descriptors for Elizabeth Warren. But her decades-long phony insistence on Cherokee identity, which is to identity politics what stolen valor is to military service, is just part of her oleaginous, changeling habit of cycling through one persona after another. She’s Chief Spitting Bull, the lady with a J.D. in B.S.

Whether she’s claiming her white parents had to elope because of racism or, five years after the matter was litigated, falsely asserting that Michael Brown “was murdered” in Ferguson, Mo., or stating she was the “first nursing mother to take a bar exam in the state of New Jersey,” as though anyone kept tabs on such strange details (“Excuse me, madam, are you lactating at the moment? I’m making a record book”), Elizabeth Warren is always ready with a load of bull. Warren will say whatever is convenient for her ambitions of the moment. “I am not running for president of the United States,” Senator Warren said last March on Meet the Press. “I am running for the United States Senate in 2018 in Massachusetts.” The month after she was reelected she announced she was forming an exploratory committee to mull a presidential run.

And note the false, strained way she did get in the presidential race, in that infamous video. She starts recording. Then — hello, soon-to-be-conquered Earth people, I understand you like brewed malt beverages on this planet — she immediately takes a break to get a beer. Her programmers in the Nebula 235X star system have told her that ordinary Earthfolk are intimidated by proper grammar, so she phrases this entirely natural and spontaneous decision like this: “Hold on a sec, I’m gonna get me, uh, a beer.” Then she follows up with this classic: “Hey! My husband Bruce is now in here!” Her husband was in her house? Where does she normally keep him, in the shed with the lawnmower? Warren isn’t just phony, she’s creepy and alien and able to change form to play on your nightmares: She’s It of the Charles. Occasionally she lets the mask slip, as when, in Greenwich Village, she positioned herself as the candidate opposed to half the population. “We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men,” she said. “In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.” Huh? Warren must be the first candidate in history to think that winning the working class means deriding the sex that does most of the grunt labor in this country. Should she make it to the general election, and advisers somberly inform her that she is losing the men’s vote by 97 points and that all of her male supporters wear Capris and live in Brooklyn, I wonder what her Dukakis-in-a-tank response will be. My guess is it’ll involve a misbegotten attempt to imbibe tequila during a show at Bada Bing’s, where she somehow mispronounces the word “bro.” Someone will ask who her favorite member of the New England Patriots is and she’ll say something like “Eli Kaepernick.” 

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/pelosis_impeach_trump_announcement_a_bad_bad_sign_for_our_republic.html

Joshua Foxworth is a congressional candidate in the 14th District of Texas.

Yesterday, House speaker Nancy Pelosi announced that the first steps are being taken to impeach President Donald Trump.  While few people actually believe that these actions will result in the disclosure of any offense on the part of the president or in a formal impeachment vote, the actions signify that what once made America function so much better than any previous nation is now lost.

In the hotly contested election of 1800, the Democratic-Republican Party — led by Thomas Jefferson — won the presidency and control of Congress.  This was not a mere transition of the gavel from one hand to the next.  Each of the two sides believed that the future of the nation was at stake.  The Federalists believed in a strong central government and ties to the British crown.  The Democratic-Republican party favored decentralization to the states.

Still, when the election was over, the Federalists conceded power to the party led by Jefferson.  It is widely believed that this was the first peaceful transfer of power between two groups with opposing views on the future in all of history.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/tulsi-gabbard-qualifies-for-october-democratic-debate/

A Monmouth University poll released today has made Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard the twelfth Democrat to qualify for next month’s presidential primary debate, to be hosted in Ohio by CNN and the New York Times.

The Monmouth poll put Gabbard at 2 percent in New Hampshire, one of the states to hold an early Democratic presidential primary next year. In order to qualify for the next debate, candidates must have achieved at least 2 percent support in four qualifying polls, as well as have collected donations from 130,000 people, by no later than October 1.

Gabbard failed to qualify for last month’s debate, although she met the donor threshold, because she did not achieve 2 percent in enough qualifying polls. Her campaign has taken issue with the Democratic National Committee standards, particularly because she obtained 2 percent support in a number of polls that did not count toward debate qualification.

So far, the ten candidates who participated in the debate earlier this month have all qualified for October’s, along with billionaire investor Tom Steyer. It has not yet been announced whether the debate will follow the format of those in June and July, with candidates split up between two nights of debate, or whether all the candidates will share the stage for one evening of debate as they did earlier this month.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/michigan-city-clerk-charged-with-altering-ballots-in-2018-midterms/

Sherikia Hawkins was charged Monday with six felony counts for allegedly altering absentee ballots during the November 2018 election in her capacity as city clerk for the Detroit suburb of Southfield, Mich.

Hawkins, a 38-year-old registered Democrat, stands accused of altering 193 absentee ballots. She was arraigned Monday in Southfield on charges including falsifying returns or records, forgery of a public record, misconduct in office, and multiple counts of using a computer to commit a crime. She was released on $15,000 bond.

The alleged misconduct was discovered after the Oakland County Clerk’s Office noticed that 193 voter files had been changed to reflect that the voters failed to include a valid signature or return date, when all of the implicated voters had in fact included both items. The county clerk’s office later discovered the original voter files in the trash at the election-division office. The Michigan State Police then launched an investigation that resulted in Hawkins’s arrest.

In a statement announcing the charges, Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel and secretary of state Jocelyn Benson, both of whom are Democrats, stressed that Hawkins’s behavior was anomalous and did not affect any election outcomes.

“Voting is fundamental to the very essence of our democracy,” Nessel said during a Monday news conference. “It is incumbent upon state governments to safeguard the electoral process and ensure that every voter’s right to cast a ballot is protected.”

Hawkins, who makes $101,500 per year, has been placed on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of her trial.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/kasich-scolds-republicans-for-lack-of-response-to-trump-ukraine-call-what-are-they-hiding/

Former Ohio governor and presidential candidate John Kasich wondered aloud in an interview Monday why Republicans weren’t doing more to pressure President Trump to reveal details regarding a whistleblower complaint against him.

“This needs to be investigated: if in fact the President of the United States pressured the leader of another country to investigate his [Trump’s] political enemy,” Kasich said in the interview with CNN.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/23/how-hard-are-democrats-trying-to-lose-in-2020/

Democrats are feeling pretty cocky about the upcoming presidential campaign. They look at polls showing their top three candidates all lead President Trump and start feeling like it doesn’t matter who they nominate.

Many Democrats forget that four years ago, polls showed Donald Trump as the only Republican losing to Hillary Clinton. They also forget that the Republicans are raising tons of cash to spend on ads defining Democrats’ nominee. Their cockiness can be seen in the degree to which Democrats act as if they have stopped caring about persuading swing voters.

In fairness, both sides are focused on a base turnout strategy for 2020 over a persuasion strategy. Team Trump may have the financial advantage necessary to work on expanding the electoral map, at a minimum causing his opponent to spend time and money on states a Democrat would like to take for granted. The president will also continue pitching moderates on his record, because he is always closing. Nevertheless, his campaign is founded on retaining the coalition that won 2016.

Democrats have their own base turnout strategy. Their current debate over “electability“ assumes they can win if they turn out the “rising American electorate” of unmarried women, minorities, and younger voters. They don’t remember—or don’t want to remember—that Barack Obama may not have eagerly sought votes from blue-collar white voters, but he made the effort not to lose too many of them.

Nate Cohn, who covers elections, polling, and demographics for The New York Times, recently warned Democrats on Twitter: “I think the salience of ‘persuasion’ in elections – whether voters flipping is a major force explaining variance in election results – might be the single area where I most completely disagree with the conventional wisdom on Twitter, or at least what the CW looks like to me. My ‘interactions’ are full of people asserting things like: there are no swing voters; the only thing that changed in 2018 is turnout, Democrats can’t and haven’t won over any Trump voters. And whatever you think of the optimal strategy for Democrats, this is all facially untrue… In our final polls of GA06, IL14, CA48 over the last days of the race, the sample was R+6 or more in all. Dems led in all, and ultimately won. Dems had huge inroads with past GOP voters.”