RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/trending/warren-tops-biden-in-latest-iowa-poll/

Senator Elizabeth Warren surged into the lead past Joe Biden in the latest Des Moines Register poll. Warren was the first choice of 22% of Iowa Democrats while Biden was close behind with 20%. Bernie Sanders faded to third place with 11%.

“This is the first major shakeup” in what had been a fairly steady race, said J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., which conducted the poll. “It’s the first time we’ve had someone other than Joe Biden at the top of the leader board.”

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg follows the three leaders as the favorite of 9% of poll respondents. U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California is at 6%. U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Cory Booker of New Jersey are at 3%.

Polling at 2% are U.S. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke of Texas, businessman Tom Steyer and entrepreneur Andrew Yang.

Eight others are polling at 1% or less.

Warren’s surge coincides with worrying questions arising about Biden’s age and acuity. The former vice president has made several embarrassing gaffes in recent weeks and many in the press are openly speculating about his fitness for office.

But the race is far from over.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/09/democrat_censured_for_voting_with_trump_19_of_the_time_bipartisanship_is_dead.html

One of the more interesting news items this week was the revelation that Arizona Democrats were considering a censure vote against Senator Kyrsten Sinema for being too pro-Trump. 

Apparently, voting against the president 81% of the time constitutes being a raging right-wing reprobate in today’s liberal hive mind.

It is worth noting that the most anti-Obama senator in his last year in office was Richard Shelby, who voted against President Barack Obama 63.9% of the time.  That made the most anti-Obama senator far friendlier to the Democrat president than a Democrat who is being threatened with censure for her apostasy. 

Shelby supported Obama almost 40% of the time.  On average, Senate Republicans opposed Obama’s position less than half the time in 2016.  Bipartisanship was very much alive and well.

Sinema is not even close to being a moderate, unless you define moderation against how far to the left the Democratic Party has swung.  Sinema’s sin is voting for David Bernhardt for secretary of the interior, a name unlikely familiar to 99% of Americans.  She also voted for William Barr for attorney general and opposes the Democrats’ “net neutrality” internet scheme.

But, in today’s resistance-minded Democrat party, any sign of compromise is treated as a cardinal sin. 

https://www.walkawaycampaign.com/
#WalkAway movement urges disgruntled Democrats to leave the party behind.

The #WalkAway Campaign is a true grassroots movement, founded by former liberal, Brandon Straka on May 26th, 2018. The #WalkAway Campaign encourages and supports those on the Left to walk
away from the divisive tenets endorsed and mandated by the Democratic Party of today. We are
walking away from the lies, the false narratives, the fake news, the race-baiting, the victim narrative,
the violence, the vandalism, the vitriol. We are walking away from a party driven by hate. We are
walking toward patriotism and a new, unified America! We are the future of this great nation!

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/greys-anatomy-star-isaiah-washington-opens-up-about-decision-to-leave-the-democratic-party?fbclid=IwAR3iyUzTyXZSXdy6GOt_4-MydFqTz6d2ugUsOshfRIQVYcfILqCflMelo0I

On Fox Nation’s latest episode of “Nuff Said,” “Grey’s Anatomy” star Isaiah Washington opened up about his decision to leave the Democratic Party, and the reaction he got from the Hollywood community after publicly declaring his support for the #WalkAway movement.

“Walking away is… a sacrifice,” Washington said. “There’s a risk and there’s a penalty for it but you have to walk away when it matters…and the reason I chose to walk away from the Democratic party…is that something doesn’t feel right.”Washington, who once played Dr. Preston Burke in the hit TV series, said he was never asked about his politics during his two-year career on the show, and that his political activism developed recently after he attended a celebration at the White House commemorating Trump’s support of the First Step Act.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/good-riddance-bill-de-blasio/

De Blasio ended his presidential campaign today. Maybe now he’ll actually do his day job.

Bill de Blasio ended his presidential campaign today. If you’ve forgotten which candidate he was, he was the tall, abrasive one who didn’t make the third debate and who in the previous one kept trying to take shots at other candidates and interrupt the moderators. He’s also the mayor of New York City.

By the standards of modern American politicians, de Blasio is a really bad one, even when you put the ideological disagreements aside. He’s effectively abandoned his day job during his presidential campaign, spending a mere seven hours — less than one full workday — at City Hall during the month he launched his bid for the White House. He rarely meets with his own city commissioners.

Both as mayor and presidential candidate, de Blasio is always moving on to the next big and exceptionally impractical proposal — Ban steel and glass skyscrapers! Eliminate the gifted and talented programs from public schools! — while other, bigger problems on his constituents’ minds fester.

The city’s public housing is overrun with rats, leaks, mold, and lead paint. The number of homeless students hit a new record. The city’s bus system is the slowest in the nation, and he steers millions to poorly performing school bus companies. (The one area where you probably shouldn’t blame the mayor is the condition of the city’s subways, which are actually run by the state of New York, not the city. Blame governor Andrew Cuomo for your late trains.) His relationship with the city police started bad and got worse.

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

There is ample reason to suspect that Rep. Ilhan Omar has committed multiple frauds.  Scott Johnson of Powerline, a retired attorney, has been covering the freshman House member ever since her run for the Minnesota state Legislature, and has been among the most active investigators of suspicions that she committed immigration fraud by legally marrying her brother in order to get him into the United States.  Yesterday, he wrote about the genesis of his suspicions:

A few days after I started writing about Ilhan Omar on Power Line in August 2016 — after she had won the primary for the DFL state legislative endorsement — I was contacted by a source who agreed to discuss his knowledge of Omar’s family with me. At our meeting he told me that Ahmed Nur Said Elmi — Omar’s legal husband, so to speak, as of that date — was Omar’s brother and that she had married him for fraudulent purposes. 

And Omar herself entered the United States under an assumed identity:

My source told me that Omar and another member or two of the Elmi family had entered the United States as fraudulent members of the Omar family. That would go some way to explain why Omar lacks any acknowledged relative with the name Omar.

Now a tweet that she deleted two days ago is providing corroboration for those suspicions.  Shaikh Tawhidi, the Imam of Peace, called attention to the deletion:

Imam Mohamad Tawhidi

✔ @Imamofpeace
Ilhan Omar has just deleted this tweet from 2013 that proves her father is Nur Said, which makes her Ilhan Nur Said (surnames are the fathers names in most Muslim/MENA countries), and that Ahmed Nur Said, who she married, is in fact her brother.  CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/kamala-harris-presidential-campaign-struggling-california-polls/

Since the early days of this presidential primary cycle, there’s been a quiet but intriguing narrative that Kamala Harris was a much stronger candidate than her national polling might suggest. The gist is that while most years, California is just an ATM for Democratic presidential candidates, this cycle the Golden State will vote on Super Tuesday, March 3. The whole process is so much earlier than usual that absentee and early primary ballots will be mailed out the day of the Iowa caucuses.

California has 495 delegates to the Democratic convention, and they are awarded proportionally — almost a tenth of the total 4535 hard delegates. The pro-Harris theory is that while everybody else is scrambling over a share of Iowa’s 49 delegates or New Hampshire’s 33 delegates, Harris can set herself up to win big in her home state and walk away with, say, 250 or so delegates just out of California, setting herself up to be the frontrunner after Super Tuesday.

It’s an intriguing theory, but history is full of candidates who thought they could make their big move after Iowa and New Hampshire and found themselves sputtering on fumes by the time their preferred primary rolled around. In Rudy Giuliani’s 2008 campaign, Florida was supposed to be the firewall, but winning tends to beget more winning, and losing tends to beget more losing. It’s really difficult to become the nominee if you don’t win Iowa or New Hampshire. The only Democrat who’s done it is Bill Clinton in 1992, and that was an oddity because Senator Tom Harkin was a home-state candidate in Iowa (so most observers discounted it), and Clinton was the “comeback kid” who finished second in New Hampshire that year. (Some might also argue that Hillary Clinton’s win in Iowa last cycle was so close it shouldn’t even count.)

https://pjmedia.com/trending/hillary-clinton-stacey-abrams-should-be-governor-of-georgia/

Back in October 2016, when everybody was telling us that Hillary Clinton couldn’t lose, Donald Trump said: “I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election… if I win.” And the Democrats all lost their minds. How un-American! What an outrage!

In response to Trump’s quip, Clinton gravely intoned: “Donald Trump refused to say that he’d respect the results of this election.That’s a direct threat to our democracy.”

But a funny thing happens when a politician experiences the most crushing electoral loss in living memory: All that $#!+ goes right out the window. Respecting the results of an election is no longer required, and rejecting the results is no longer a threat to our democracy. Forget all about that crap, because there’s a new party line.

Here’s Hilldog today, giving the keynote address at something called In Defense of American Democracy. Apparently, defending democracy now involves directly threatening it:

“We saw what happened in Georgia where Stacey Abrams should be governor of that state”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/09/17/when_politics_smothers_everyd

Partisan politics has crept into every corner of American life. Every topic, from jokes to films, is now refracted through that lens. It’s a revoltin’ development, as one sitcom character used to say, and it’s time to call it out.

Most issues do have a political dimension, of course. But seeing everything that way leaves no space for other topics, no room for play or humor or friends with different views. It intrudes on the private world of family, friends, and voluntary associations. People need that space to flourish. A tolerant, liberal democracy should provide it.

I saw this suffocating environment up-close and personal this week when I posted a funny comment by Louisiana’s Sen. John Kennedy. His earthy metaphors and odd juxtapositions make him one of Washington’s most quotable figures. In today’s hyper-divisive politics, however, even the most innocuous quote can land you in the briar patch. I felt a few of those thorns when I posted his comment.

What did Sen. Kennedy say? “Trusting Russia, North Korea, and Iran is like trusting a Jussie Smollett police report.” What’s wrong with that? Not a thing. It’s funny, fair, and memorable. But when everything is partisan, you can always find something wrong. If nothing comes readily to mind, blame the speaker for something else. He’s from the wrong political party. He supports the wrong policies. He’s the wrong race. He’s the wrong gender. This sour perspective, says Sen. Kennedy, is “why aliens won’t talk to us.”

In case that line had you furiously logging onto Twitter, he meant extraterrestrials, not migrants. I’m with the ETs and spaceships on this one. So are most Americans. I’m not trying to click my heels three times and make partisan differences magically disappear. Our country faces big, difficult issues. The partisan divide often has roots in real policy differences.