RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ron-desantis-military-plan-china-defense-culture-wars-pentagon-b3eb2211?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Ron DeSantis is gradually laying out his presidential agenda, and on Tuesday he unveiled a plan to build a “Mission First” U.S. military. The Florida Governor has several worthy ideas to restore American confidence in the armed forces, though fighting the culture wars isn’t a substitute for preventing an actual war.

“We need a military that is focused on being lethal, being ready and being capable,” Gov. DeSantis said in South Carolina. The U.S. military is suffering from institutional drift, as senior officers rush to associate themselves with progressive causes. One example: Space Force Lt. Gen. DeAnna Burt in a June speech unleashed a political broadside against elected state legislatures for considering what she styled as “anti-LGBTQ+” measures.

One good priority is reviving American military education. Gov. DeSantis is right that the service academies ought to be “narrowly focused” on disciplines such as engineering or military history and leadership. Civilian academics have taken over most military educational institutions such as war colleges, and the instruction is often, as Gov. DeSantis says, “substandard.”

The Governor, a Navy veteran, also says he would review the performance of every four-star flag officer and remove those who aren’t focused on lethality. There is reason to wonder if the services are producing the war fighting talent the country needs by picking leaders on the merits. More aggressive civilian oversight would help.

Case in point: In 2021 a Navy admiral suggested the service should bring back photos as part of promotion boards to achieve more diversity. Gov. DeSantis said he’d ban “race and gender quotas in military recruiting and promotions.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/07/19/trump-biden-still-hold-big-leads-but-can-they-last-ii-tipp-poll/

Both of the leading candidates for president in 2024 have come under intense scrutiny and political pressure in recent weeks, but it hasn’t dimmed their prospects much. Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump maintain solid leads against their main party rivals, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows. The big question is, can it last?

In the national online poll of 616 Democrats, taken July 5-7 and having a +/-4 percentage point margin of error, we once again asked the party faithful the following question: “If the Democratic presidential primary were held today, whom would you support for the nomination?”

As before, Biden emerged substantially ahead of the field of challengers, but that came before a rough week of gaffes, stumbles, confusion and embarrassing behavior during his European trip. Some 36% of those responding said they would support Biden in the primary, even after the Hunter Biden bribery scandals. Once again, none of the 16 likely challengers to Biden received more than a single-digit poll reading.

Biden is followed in descending order by former First Lady Michelle Obama (9%), Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders (8%), Vice President Kamala Harris (7%), Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (5%), former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and environmentalist lawyer and activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (both at 4%), Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and California Gov. Gavin Newsom (3%), and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar (2%).

A long list of others, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, won 1% or less of the tally.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/16/not-my-concern-will-help-narrow-gop-field/

Who won the Republican blow-out interview lalapalooza with Tucker Carlson in Iowa Friday night? Besides Tucker himself—who was on the Q side of this extended Q & A—the participants were South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, former Vice President Mike Pence, former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.

Let me say straight off that the biggest beneficiary was probably Tucker himself. He is a master interviewer, outgoing and friendly in manner, informed about the issues, unrelenting in his questioning. Some of his hosts at the Family Leadership Summit, which with Blaze Media sponsored the event, were so impressed with his performance that they suggested to the audience that Tucker himself should run for president. It’s an idea that has been in circulation for a while and it got a notable “trending” uptick as the evening unfolded. Tucker himself has dismissed the idea in no uncertain terms, but it is worth noting how widespread his support is among the politically mature.

But even though Tucker emerged as one of the stars of the evening, the show was not about him but about that clutch of GOP hopefuls. Who among that gang of six won?

It’s probably easier to start with the loser, chief among whom was Mike Pence, who might just as well have used the occasion to perform an act of self-immolation. The key moment came in an exchange about foreign policy, in particular U.S. policy with respect to the war in Ukraine. Pence said he was distressed that we had yet to send Ukraine the promised Abrams tanks or train Ukrainian pilots to fly F16s.

“You are distressed,” said Tucker, “that the Ukrainians don’t have enough American tanks. Every city in the United States has become much worse in the last three years. . . .and yet your concern is that the Ukrainians . . . don’t have enough tanks? Where’s the concern in the United States in that?”

“Well, that’s not my concern. Tucker, I’ve heard that routine from you before, but that’s not my concern.”

“Not my concern.”

Bang. “Not my concern.”

The internet lit up over that one, with some people saying that Pence had just committed suicide and others wondering what he was saying. To what did “that’s not my concern” apply?

Mollie Hemingway was probably correct that Pence was flummoxed and that it is “fair to say he intended to say something about how we can fight forever wars with unclear ties to national interest at the same time we begin to fight American decline.” Unfortunately for Pence, as Hemingway went on to observe, “many GOP voters would say he’s wrong on that as well.”

Indeed, conservative commentary seemed to veer from, at the generous end of the spectrum, unhappy ah-ha comments like this: “Oh see what Pence MEANT to say is that America can both fight/fund endless wars abroad that have only a tenuous connection to the national interest, and ALSO accomplish a series of empty platitudes from the GOP platform circa 2012. I get it now.” At the further end of that spectrum were clipped dismissals like the one contained in unfamily-friendly memes like this.

There was, at the margins, a little backsliding and floundering, but I think the consensus was that Pence did himself significant damage. The “not my concern” slip might be corrected, explained away, as was Obama’s “57 states” comment. But that suffocating sense that the former Vice President is a priggish, platitude-emitting machine will be hard to overcome.

What else happened? Well, Tim Scott strutted on stage with a grinning hallelujah wave but said . . . not much. Nikki Haley was much better than I thought she would be but, at the end of the day, agreed that Joe Biden 1) had actually got 81 million votes (he didn’t) and 2) even though there were “irregularities” in the 2020 election, Biden was legitimately elected.

In other words, she is part of the problem.

One of the best responses was from Vivek Ramaswamy, the young ferociously articulate candidate who, I think, will not be president this time, but who truly gets it. Asked about the origin of January 6, 2021, the little contretemps at the Capitol in 2021, he said, “Well it was probably because of censorship.”

Tell people they cannot speak, he said, and they will scream. Tell them they cannot scream, and they will start taking things apart.

There you have it. I love Vivek. Maybe he will be president someday. Not this time, I think, but maybe soon (how about a Trump Vivek ticket? I am just saying).

https://www.city-journal.org/article/gop-voters-preference-for-last-times-loser

Perhaps the biggest weakness of Republican presidential voters is their attachment to last time’s loser. Time and again, Republicans have nominated the candidate they rejected in the primaries the last time around, only to have general-election voters resoundingly reject that candidate this time around.

Over the past 30 years, Republicans have nominated the runner-up during the previous Republican primary (when not featuring a GOP incumbent) three times. Of these, Bob Dole won 30 percent of the electoral vote in 1996 (losing by 220 electoral votes), John McCain won 32 percent in 2008 (losing by 192), and Mitt Romney won 38 percent in 2012 (losing by 126). Only once during this stretch have the Democrats nominated last time’s loser: Hillary Clinton, who won 42 percent of the electoral vote in 2016 (losing by 77).

Meantime, the two parties have combined to nominate four candidates over that span who weren’t last time’s loser and hadn’t previously been elected as president or vice president. Among such “new blood” candidates, George W. Bush won 50.4 percent of the electoral vote in 2000, John Kerry won 47 percent in 2004, Barack Obama won 68 percent in 2008, and Donald Trump won 57 percent in 2016.

In sum, new blood candidates have three wins to one loss over the past three decades (winning an average of 56 percent of the electoral vote), while last time’s losers have zero wins and four losses (winning an average of 36 percent).

When they nominate last time’s loser, however, at least Democrats don’t generally pick someone who has already been rejected by the general electorate. Republicans seem to believe that swing voters think like Republicans do when seeing a candidate they rejected last time: Oh, I didn’t vote for him (or her) before, but I’m familiar with him (or her), so I’ll do it this time. But the way actual swing voters think is more like this: I didn’t vote for him last time, and there’s no way I’ll vote for him based on his resume since then.

If Donald Trump had vanished from the scene on November 3, 2020, and swing voters’ only memory of him was the first 46 months of his presidency, they might seriously contemplate giving him another shot.

https://amgreatness.com/2023/07/14/dont-believe-the-leftist-media-narrative-about-the-state-of-the-2024-race/

To the surprise of no one, the leftist corporate media’s coverage of the 2024 presidential race has been abysmal. Predictably, their reporting is full of omissions, half truths, and wishful thinking. Once again, they only report their preferred narratives, in a desperate attempt to persuade stupid people and gullible news outlets into believing them, including Conservative Inc.

As usual the leftist coastal elites are attempting to shape their perceptions into reality.

Here are the two mainstream narratives thus far.

The first one says that Joe Biden, despite suffering from alarming rates of delirium and senility, while presiding over horrendous poll numbers will unequivocally be the Democratic nominee for President.

The second narrative says that no matter how early it is, Donald J. Trump has an insurmountable lead in the ever-expanding GOP field, and thus will be the Republican nominee for President for a third consecutive time. This despite the fact that the Iowa Caucuses are not occurring for another six months.

Let’s analyze the first leftist corporate media narrative—that Joe Biden is the de facto nominee. As much as the objective journalists at the New York Times and Washington Post would like the gaffe-ridden career politician to remain in the White House, there are many plausible reasons why Team Biden, to the extent he even has a political operation, should be concerned.

Let’s put aside the fact that under Biden’s watch he has overseen the worst border crisis in U.S. history, the highest inflation in four decades, a historic crime wave in Democrat run cities, a disgraceful and embarrassing exit from Afghanistan, weakness towards China, indecision and mismanagement towards the war in Ukraine, appeasement towards Iran, betrayal against Israel, pathetic pandering in defense of “LGBTQ rights,” including supporting providing life altering puberty blockers to minors, attempting to jail his leading political opponent for the same supposed “crime” that he committed, and let’s not forget, a corrupt family that sold our country out, while raking in millions from China, Russia, Ukraine and Romania.

https://unherd.com/2023/07/gavin-newsom-the-president-nobody-needs/

For many Democrats, Gavin Newsom has become an object of desire. Aged 55, the Governor of California’s relative youth, coiffed good looks and ability to speak in something close to coherent English contrasts with their bumbling leader, whom as many as two in three Americans feel is not entirely up to the job. As a result, the chorus calling for Newsom to become America’s 47th President has been growing steadily louder.

Not surprisingly, Newsom himself seems to be waging his own campaign to achieve that end. He is, according to Politico, acting “like the president-in-exile”, promoting a new gun control constitutional amendment, working to ban petrol-powered cars and threatening to arrest the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, for “kidnapping” migrants. Indeed, his profile seems to be growing just as Biden’s handlers ramp up their efforts to insulate the President from the media, his poor cognitive state posing a danger both to himself and to his legislative programme.

Yet Newsom’s sparkling ascendency might dim somewhat if the media bothered to consider what is actually happening in his fiefdom. Flicking through the mainstream press, one could be forgiven for realising that Newsom has presided over California’s fall from economic pre-eminence: the Golden State is now home to record homelessness, sub-par GDP growth, the nation’s highest poverty rate, a tech downturn fuelled by the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and a consistently underperforming public education system. These factors have fuelled a powerful out-migration trend — up 135% in just two years. Recent polls find upwards of 40% of residents are considering leaving, while the rising tide of wealthy emigrees has already taken away $20 billion in adjusted income since 2018.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4095744-did-trump-just-give-desantis-a-boost/

Donald Trump just reminded Republican voters — even many who voted for him twice before — why they might want someone else to top the party’s ticket in 2024. Moreover, he may have singlehandedly breathed new life into Ron DeSantis’s struggling campaign.

The former president has picked a fight with Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s popular GOP governor, apparently because she dared get too cozy with DeSantis, Trump’s nearest rival for the 2024 nomination. Reynolds has appeared at several DeSantis events in her state and recently teamed up with his wife in rolling out Mamas for DeSantis, a grassroots effort to bolster the Florida governor’s standing with women.

Reynolds has said she will remain neutral in the Iowa GOP race; she has offered to attend events hosted by front-runner Donald Trump and has appeared with candidate Nikki Haley. Apparently, this is not good enough for Trump, however, who takes credit for her becoming governor because he appointed her predecessor ambassador to China, opening the seat, and also campaigned for her.

This is classic Trumpian behavior — self-centered and imprudent. The Iowa caucuses will not determine who wins the nomination (in 2016 Trump came in second, behind Ted Cruz), but lashing out at the GOP leader in the state, who won reelection by 20 points last year and enjoys high approval ratings, seems foolish.

And, typical. During his four years in office and in the time since, the former president has alienated scores of former allies. While in the Oval Office he churned through staff at historic rates, with one blowup after another sending talented colleagues packing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-moral-equivalence-of-political-karens/

EXCERPT:

“Problem-solving,” then, bespeaks the influence of progressive technocracy, rule by credentialed elites. In times of crisis like war, “working across the aisle” and “bipartisanship” make sense. But in legislating peace-time policies, such cooperation can empower malign bills, like last December’s $1.85 trillion omnibus spending bill that threw more fuel onto the feckless spending and debt bonfire. This fiscal atrocity was a bipartisan, “reach across the aisle” disaster, with

18 Republican Senators and nine House Republican members voting for the bill.

Protecting our unalienable rights and freedoms is the purpose of federal power, whereas “solving problems,” with few exceptions, should be the purview of states, communities, and civil society.

Finally, the understandable “pox on both your houses” sentiment frequently involves a specious moral equivalence. We can sympathize with the dying Mercutio’s curse on both the Montagues and Capulets, but Romeo and Tybalt are not morally equivalent. Romeo was impulsive and naïve, but Tybalt was a vicious bully and a thug.

So too with No Labels’ moral equivalence between the two parties, or especially between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, which is the rationale for fielding a third-party candidate. But the metric for judging between parties and candidates is not decorum or “problem-solving,” but freedom: Which candidate and party is the champion and defender of ordered liberty, and the Constitution’s institutional bulwarks against tyranny? Which respects the freedom of individuals, families, the states, and civil society to direct and manage their lives without the heavy hand of a technocratic Leviathan and its bureaucratic minions interfering and imposing their ideological preferences?

In the end, there’s only one choice––between freedom and tyranny. Everything else is the duplicitous distractions of political guildsmen and lupine opportunists.

https://thefederalist.com/2023/07/10/why-has-election-day-turned-into-election-month/

A case challenging North Dakota’s 13 extra election days is about helping to bring confidence back to elections nationwide.

Remember when Election Day used to be an actual day? You’d gather with your family and friends to find out who the next president was going to be. It was a time to celebrate our republic as Americans went to have their voices heard at the ballot box. The Public Interest Legal Foundation, of which I am president, is fighting in federal court to restore the “day” in Election Day.

We filed a federal lawsuit in North Dakota to enforce federal law and stop the state from accepting ballots up to 13 days after Election Day. We allege that North Dakota’s law allowing the election to drag on for almost two extra weeks conflicts with federal law.

This case doesn’t claim that anyone stole the North Dakota election. Indeed, North Dakota is only involved in the case because it is one of the most extreme states in accepting ballots weeks after the election.

The case challenging North Dakota’s 13 extra election days is about helping to bring confidence back to elections nationwide. It’s time Election Day means Election Day again.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-trump-iowa-ron-desantis-yucca-mountain-renewable-fuel-standard-2024-presidential-primary-gop-6796e888?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

President Trump is leading the GOP’s primary polls by 30 points, but maybe he’s more worried about Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis than he lets on. The Iowa State Fair is still a month away, but step right up to Mr. Trump’s political booth, ladies and gentlemen of the primary electorate, and he will tell you whatever he thinks you want to hear.

“I fought for Iowa ethanol like no President in history and ethanol, period, like no President,” Mr. Trump said in Council Bluffs. “Every Iowan also needs to know that Ron DeSantis totally despises Iowa ethanol and ethanol generally.” In Congress, Mr. DeSantis supported ending the Renewable Fuel Standard, or RFS. Mr. Trump called this “his vicious plan to annihilate the Iowa farming industry,” while saying that Mr. DeSantis wants to “outsource every American farming job to a foreign country.”

On Saturday the panderama was in Las Vegas. “DeSanctimonious voted to fund Yucca Mountain as a dumping ground for nuclear waste,” Mr. Trump said. “That’s not just a little area. That stuff, it’s all over the place. What a mess.” As if that were too subtle, Mr. Trump added: “If you don’t mind nuclear waste dumped in your backyard, I suggest you vote for Ron DeSanctimonious.”