RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/08/21/ii-tipp-poll/

Congressional investigators claim to have strong evidence that President Joe Biden and his family received a staggering $20 million or more in payments from foreign sources while he served as vice president under Barack Obama. If proven true, two-thirds of Americans say that Biden should either resign or be impeached, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll indicates.

The accusation of possible bribery is serious. And a key House investigative panel says it has evidence, mostly bank statements, to back up claims that Biden took money from oligarchs in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

“The tally of foreign money to the Biden family has hit at least $20 million, based on the third round of bank records the House Oversight and Accountability Committee released Wednesday — pointing to millions from oligarchs from Russia, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine,” reported the Daily Signal.

In its latest monthly sounding of public opinion, the national online I&I//TIPP Poll of 1,369 voters, taken Aug. 2-4, asked Americans, what should be done if the allegations prove true?

A significant 67% majority responded that Biden should either “resign immediately” (24%) or “be impeached and removed from office” (43%). Those supporting more lenient treatment totaled just 23%, with 15% saying Biden should “be allowed to finish his term in office, but not run again,” and 8% supporting “run again in 2024, regardless of the findings.”

Another 10% responded “not sure.” The poll has a margin of error of +/-2.7 percentage points.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-ducks-the-gop-debate-candidate-politics-gop-nominee-race-election-2024-polls-indictment-c838c967?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Donald Trump’s decision to skip Wednesday’s presidential debate shows that he wants to avoid having to tussle with competitors who might criticize him. The more interesting question is how Republican voters will respond to the former President’s evident presumption that he owns their allegiance.

Instead of debating, Mr. Trump says he will commune somewhere with Tucker Carlson. The former Fox News host will be on hand less as an interviewer than to endorse the former President’s claims that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine is America’s fault and that the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot was merely a case of exuberant supporters getting slightly carried away.

Mr. Trump clearly think he has the nomination all but wrapped up, and judging by the current polls he has reason to think so. But what a message he is sending about the loyalty he thinks GOP voters owe him.

It would mean the Grand Old Party is going to nominate, for the third time, a man who has been indicted four times on 91 felony counts. We don’t mean despite being indicted. We mean because he’s been indicted.

In order to spite the Democrats for their partisan prosecutions, GOP voters would be doing exactly what Democrats and the press corps want them to do. Democrats want Republicans to nominate the man who has shown over the last three national elections that he is the greatest voter turnout machine for the Democratic Party since Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

https://pjmedia.com/columns/chris-queen/2023/08/19/vivek-ramaswamy-speaks-about-an-american-revival-n1720536

The last 2024 GOP presidential hopeful to speak at Erick Erickson’s Gathering in Atlanta on Saturday was Vivek Ramaswamy. I’ll confess that he’s the top-tier candidate I knew the least about, but he sat with Erickson for a fascinating conversation.

Before introducing Ramaswamy, Erickson joked that he didn’t like the idea of a presidential candidate who is younger than he is — Ramaswamy just turned 38 — but the candidate spoke with polish and wisdom beyond his years. Erickson led off by asking Ramaswamy about the tragic fires in Maui, which PJ Media’s own Lincoln Brown reported were at least partially the result of government mismanagement.

“If we don’t learn from our mistakes, we’re destined to make them again,” Ramaswamy stated. “There was an Obama appointee, a climate change activist who also believes as part of this broader Gaia-centric world view of the earth that water rights are to be protected, which led to a five-to-six-hour delay in the critical window of getting waters to put out those fires, and we will never know, although certain signs point to the fact that we very well could have avoided those catastrophic deaths, many of them if water had made it to the site of the fires on top.”

Ramaswamy transitioned to talking about the invasion of wokeness into every part of our culture, including education and the military. He pointed to patriotism and faith as the way to make our way out of the cultural fights that rage in America today. The phrase that he returned to time and time again was “American revival.”

The candidate said that Americans are missing that combination of faith and patriotism, and he asserted that “we have to fill that vacuum with our vision of what it means to be a citizen of this nation, do it without apology, and that is how we will dilute these woke agendas to irrelevance.”

The candidate stated that the key to “American revival” was to replace the focus on race, gender, class, and identity with the individual, family, country, and God.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/18/nikki-haley-is-hillary-2-0/

Nikki Haley has microwaved Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and made her own all about being a woman, as if Republicans care.

Of all the terrible things about Nikki Haley — her enthusiasm for more foreign war funding, her deference to corporate cultural assault — the cringe-worthy attempts to hype her status as a woman (A mom! A wife!) and Indian (“I’m a minority first!,” “I’m as diverse as it gets!”) are the least offensive. But it’s still really, really bad.

Her whole campaign is Hillary 2.0.

Haley currently polls nationally at less than 5 percent, and it’s the same in early Republican primary states Iowa and New Hampshire, so there aren’t a ton of reasons to spend time thinking about her. But it’s truly awe-inspiring that there exist Republicans who still believe there’s anything to gain from the party’s voters by rubbing their faces in identity politics rot.

When have Republicans ever showed any appetite for it? They haven’t. They don’t care. It’s only interesting to the extent that ethnic minorities and women who run for office as Republicans are contrary to the racist media’s preferred narrative. Outside of that, it’s meaningless and has no bearing on a voter’s decision to trust any given candidate with power.

Haley has already disqualified herself for the nomination by cheering on more war between Ukraine and Russia, stupidly undermining the only Republican senator trying to uphold the law that abortions not be funded with taxpayer money, and ceding authority to corporations that promote gross left-wing social causes.

https://themessenger.com/politics/trump-to-skip-first-gop-debate-will-do-interview-with-tucker-carlson-report

Former President Donald Trump plans to skip the first GOP debate next Wednesay in Milwaukee and will instead do an online interview with former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, according to a report in the New York Times.

Sources close to the former president told The Times he has told those close to him he will skip the debate and do the sit down with the former top-rated Fox News host.

The news comes less than 24 hours after Trump wrote on Truth Social that he is polling well ahead of the other candidates, adding, “Reagan didn’t do it, and neither did others. People know my Record, one of the BEST EVER, so why would I Debate?”

The Trump campaign refused to confirm or deny the report to The Messenger. 

“Tucker has been the plan for some time. But Georgia might change that. Don’t be surprised if he shows up in Atlanta on debate night,” said a Trump adviser who recently spoke with him about the options of his debate night whereabouts.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/08/18/the-gop-primary-obviously-isnt-over-but-the-first-debate-is-crucial/

If one is to believe the prevailing narrative from Donald Trump’s current campaign to retake the White House, the 2024 Republican presidential primary might as well be over. The former president has been consistently dominating the top-line horse race polling for months now, the argument goes, despite (or perhaps because of?) the fact he has now been criminally indicted four separate times, by three different prosecutors, in four different jurisdictions. Therefore, the Trump triumphalists shout from their rooftops, the other candidates should just drop out right now. “Spare your dignity and coronate Trump today!!!”

This argument is absurd for approximately a million different reasons.

First, and perhaps most important, the last time I checked the calendar, it still said, “August 2023.” While commentators, campaign operatives and political junkies with apparently nothing else better to do in their free time are already intensely following the Republican presidential primary, the same is simply not true for the vast majority of Americans who largely tune out the news during the dog days of summer. A political party’s first televised presidential primary debate marks the unofficial beginning of its normal, non-activist voter base paying attention in earnest. Yes, Trump has maintained a stubborn lead in the national horse race polls for months now. But it is still ridiculously early.

Second, and perhaps next important, it is totally unclear what shape Trump might find himself in six months from now, to say nothing of one year from now. Many of the former president’s “coronate him today!”-style enthusiasts tend to suppose, because of the thoroughly unjust nature of the ruling class’s sprawling multistate legal persecution of Trump, that he will be inevitably exonerated from all charges and acquitted of all legal woes.

Trump’s supporters are right on the unjustness of the Regime’s jihad against Trump – though the former president’s often-myopic conduct, from his ignoring a grand jury subpoena in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents retention case to the outlandish, infamous Jan. 2, 2021, phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in the Fulton County, Georgia case, makes it all-too easy for his foes. But Trump’s supporters are wrong about the very nature of these four indictments, each one of which necessarily involves a different judge and a different juror pool, and all of which present differing likelihoods of guilt, acquittal or some sort of ultimate plea deal. In the interim, furthermore, Trump will be strapped for time as he is forced to physically jet off to courtrooms in four jurisdictions, and his campaign and supporting super PAC will continue to have their coffers bled dry with ever-mounting legal bills.

https://ijr.com/vivek-ramaswamy-infuriates-fox-news-host-trump/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=ijr-breaking&utm_campaign=breaking&utm_content=firefly

Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy expertly turned the tables on Neil Cavuto when the Fox Business host tried to get him to attack the GOP frontrunner in the 2024 race.

The pair spoke Tuesday on “Your World” about the various criminal charges filed against Donald Trump this year and Ramaswamy’s promise to pardon the former president if elected.

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If Cavuto was hoping the entrepreneur would blast Trump over the indictments, he was wrong.

Indeed, Ramaswamy told the host it is the indictments that are wrong.

“I will be unabashed about standing on the side of principle when I say, yes, these prosecutions are wrong,” he said.

“But there are 91 criminal charges in all … as you’re aware, over four criminal cases. They can’t all be politicized, can they? I mean, there’s something that the former president must have done in any one of these that struck you as wrong, if not illegal,” Cavuto said.

“I think, Neil, just because the government has brought a case, if we’re going to be a culture that now starts to say, ‘There must be something wrong if the government has charged 91 counts,’ I think that’s a … people of sheep. And when the people behave like sheep, that breeds a government of wolves,” Ramaswamy answered.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/08/10/why-ron-desantis-is-the-man-to-lead-the-great-american-comeback/

Presidential candidate Gov. Ron DeSantis will do for these United States what he has done for Florida and raise our expectations for the executive.

Even prior to arriving in Florida to work for the Office of Gov. Ron DeSantis in 2020, I was immediately struck by the bravery and conviction he exhibited during the early days of Covid. He stood on principle and fortified his position with data.

This endeared me to his causes. My own path to Florida began with studying and sharing Covid data online. In contradicting some of the federal government’s narratives, I endured a tsunami of smears from corporate media attempting to attack my credibility and qualifications for my job.

For saying things like masks didn’t stop respiratory viruses, lockdowns were destructive, and the virus may have come from a lab, I was ridiculed and vilified. In fact, some congressional Democrats tried to have me canceled after I accepted a position with the state.

Despite the onslaught, the DeSantis administration never budged. Going with the governor against Anthony Fauci was the correct decision.

Now, my path has diverged a bit. But my resolve has not.

A few months ago, I left the state office to join the Ron DeSantis for President campaign. It required little contemplation. You only commit to such an endeavor knowing it’s a finite journey that could be a roller coaster ride of emotion.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/how-biden-trump-exit-2024-race

What a mess. 

The United States of America, the greatest country in the world, looks set to field one candidate for president in 2024 who faces possible impeachment and is trying to put his opponent in jail and another who has now been indicted by three different prosecutors and who continues to deny the results of the last election.

No matter your politics, this is not a healthy state of affairs. People on both sides of the aisle will be mostly voting out of anger and hatred in 2024 and not because they admire their candidate. Polling shows the public has a historically low opinion of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump. 

Democrats are consumed – yes, nearly deranged – by hatred of Donald Trump, even though our country prospered under his leadership. Republicans are equally furious that the former president has been falsely accused on bogus charges for years, and now faces what many consider politically-driven prosecutions.  

Is there a way out of this predicament? Perhaps.

When playing golf, players occasionally enjoy a “good-good” moment. Both have arrived on the green, perhaps four feet from the hole. Neither is in contention to win the contest, both are tired and instead of requiring each other to make the remaining putt, they declare “good-good.” They give each other that last putt and walk off the green happy. 

For the good of the country, that’s what we need from Joe Biden and Donald Trump: a “good-good” moment. What would that look like?