RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/tim-scott-presidential-primary-gop-south-carolina-conservatism-2c4b2cce?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

One regrettable reality of today’s politics is that a left-right condominium is preaching that America is a failed experiment. All the more reason to welcome GOP Sen. Tim Scott as a presidential candidate running on better days ahead and a “new American sunrise.” The question is whether he can refine his aspirational politics into a credible agenda for national renewal.

“I know America is a land of opportunity, not a land of oppression,” the 57-year-old from South Carolina said in a three-minute video released this week. “I know it because I’ve lived it.” Mr. Scott was raised by a single mother in poverty. “I was that hopeless kid in America,” he said in a 2020 speech.

But he graduated from college and started his own business, and he credits his success in large part to the support of his Christian mother and a local Chick-fil-A franchisee who took an interest in him. Many voters will see the better angels of America’s nature in this story.

Mr. Scott has been a Senator for a decade, which isn’t an asset in an era when most of the country dislikes Washington. But he has been largely a constructive force, as Senators go. He helped build the GOP coalition for tax reform in 2017, and he rightly says the Tax Cut and Jobs Act built “the most inclusive economy” in recent U.S. memory, with record low unemployment for black and Hispanic Americans.

http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/wp-admin/post-new.php

There is little doubt in people’s minds that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of former President Donald Trump is politically motivated. Polls show that 60 percent of Americans believe it to be the case, including 70 percent of independent voters, and even 30 percent of Democrats. 

Bragg has so far failed to reveal any legal merit to his prosecution, especially since he bumped the charges from misdemeanors to felonies. Incidentally, his tenure as district attorney has been marred with a staggering 22 percent increase in crime, partly due to his decision to downgrade 52 percent of felony charges to misdemeanors.

The double standards employed in this case are clear as day and the public relations repercussions of Bragg’s actions did nothing but favor Trump’s bid for his party’s nomination for the presidential election next year. In the 48 hours following his arraignment in a New York City court, the Trump campaign took in more than $5 million in donations, while the great majority of the Republican Party rallied behind the former president, including some of his prospective competitors in the primaries.

Needless to say, Bragg’s rationale in pursuing such a reckless line of action deserves scrutiny. The general consensus in the media is that he is catering to a more radical segment of New York liberal voters. He hopes to shore up support, especially given his dismal record on the job.

As a campaign strategist, however, I am currently observing a masterclass in subversive campaigning on the part of the Democrats, not very dissimilar in logic to the approach they adopted during the last midterm elections, pulling an upset when they managed to tame the expected “red wave.”

Observers were baffled as to why the Democrats’ campaign talking points veered from vital issues of the day, including the poor state of the economy and the Biden Administration’s humiliating foreign policy choices, in favor of seemingly secondary subjects such as gender politics and abortion rights.

It turned out that some strategists in their campaign were thinking outside the box and figured that they were unable to convince Republicans to switch camps or independents to vote for a party that is clearly mismanaging the country. They could, however, prioritize consolidating their own voters, guaranteeing high voter turnout and commitment, particularly in swing states.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3940807-ron-desantis-the-next-scott-walker/

“After listening to Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin as he has traveled the country preparing his campaign for president, which officially begins on Monday, admiring voters most often describe him as ‘authentic,’ ‘real’ and ‘approachable,” Mr. Walker’s advisers say.” 

That’s the opening paragraph of a July 2015 New York Times story following Scott Walker’s announcement of a presidential run. The hype for Walker was palpable. Here we had a young governor who had won three gubernatorial elections in the swing state of Wisconsin with tons of momentum seeking the GOP nomination. As a result, Walker was leading in a Monmouth University poll at the time over Donald Trump 22 percent to 13 percent in a crowded field. 

But a funny thing happened on the way to the nomination: Walker disappeared among the 17 other candidates seeking to represent the GOP. Within two months of his announcement, he had gone from frontrunner to near the bottom of the polls, capturing just 2 percent support in a September 2015 ABC News/Washington Post poll nationally and 3 percent in a Quinnipiac poll among Iowans. 

Many point to Walker’s careful approach, low-key manner and lackluster debate performances for his downfall. As ABC News noted after one debate:

“Walker’s performance came across to many observers as overly cautious and scripted. Sticking closely to his talking points throughout, Walker spoke quickly when it was his turn and didn’t use up all the time he was allotted. To the extent that Google search data offers insight into how voters responded to candidates’ debate performance, Walker’s name was one of the least searched during the debate.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/10/can-anyone-beat-biden-or-trump-in-2024-primaries-ii-tipp-poll/

It’s April but, with just 10 months to go, the clock is ticking down to January when the first two states (Iowa and New Hampshire) pick their favorites for president. The clear favorite for the Democrats is President Joe Biden, and for Republicans, former President Donald Trump. But neither contender can take their lead for granted, the latest I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

Look at the Democrats, for example. Biden is favored by 39% of Democrats and Democrat-leaning voters. That’s a four-point drop from 43% in March, according to the April online I&I/TIPP Poll of 662 Democrats/independents who lean Democrat, taken from March 29-31.
The poll has a +/-4.0 percentage percentage point margin of error.

Who’s No. 2? Well, it’s not a person. It’s “Not sure/Someone else,” which received 11% of the responses. The only other “challenger” within even sniffing distance of double digits is Michelle Obama, at 8%, the same reading as March.

What about Vice President Kamala Harris? Unable to reverse her flagging popularity, she actually fell in the latest poll, from 9% backing in March to just 7% in April.

Only Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg has increased his tally, going from 3% support to 5% in April, a gain that’s still within the margin of error.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/america/2023/03/a-cunning-plan-to-help-trump-win/

What is widely reported to be the impending indictment of Donald Trump by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg provides an example of many things — politically motivated prosecution, for starters, and, intriguingly, perhaps a hidden agenda. Here is a Democrat operative of the progressive Left, a man whose rise has been financially supported by George Soros, who turns hundreds of serious criminal offenders free without bail every month, yet who zealously pursues a matter other agencies have examined and rejected as a triviality unlikely to result in conviction.

Yes, we can reasonably suspect that Trump lied about a liaison with Stormy Daniels. Bragg’s case, such as it is, posits that a sex scandal would have hurt his chances of being elected to the White House, therefore the $130,000 allegedly paid to Ms Daniels to secure her silence counts as an unreported campaign expense. It is as doubtful that anyone but a candidate named ‘Trump’ would ever have become the target of such a grand jury inquisition as it is that such a scandal would have hobbled Trump in the least. Had it been, say, George W. Bush credibly accused of cavorting with a porn actress, then the shock would have been real — it’s just not W’s style. But there would have been no dropped jaws about Trump’s covert horizontalism coming to light, none whatsoever. This is, after all, the man who boasted on the front page of the New York Post of having left first wife Ivana for “the best sex I ever had” with soon-to-be second wife Marla Maples. Go on, DA Bragg, pull the other one.

Even from the distance of half a world away it all looks very much like the further partisan weaponising of American justice and, most worryingly, suggests an accelerating descent into the sort of Third World legal bedlam that would do Malaysia proud.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3897641-lori-lightfoots-loss-is-a-call-to-action-for-democrats-on-crime/

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s (D) stunning loss in her bid for reelection should serve as a warning to Democrats: Even in the most liberal areas, a perceived failure by those in power to address surging crime will bring undesirable electoral consequences for the party. 

It is essential to recognize that Lightfoot’s underperformance was not an isolated incident; rather, it was one of many instances over the last two years where voters in blue states and cities explicitly rejected ostensibly soft-on-crime Democratic candidates and policies. 

Unless Democrats course-correct by assuming a tougher stance on the issue at the national and local level — akin to the positions Joe Biden adopted when he was in the Senate, as well as those of current New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) — the party could lose control of the Senate and the White House in 2024, while also solidifying their position as the minority party in the U.S. House.  

Democrats lost control of the U.S. House in November largely because of the failures of New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) and Democratic congressional candidates in the state to address public safety, a position which Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif) has candidly articulated.  

Indeed, Hochul, who barely paid lip service to the state’s crime problem, won her race by just under six points against a Trumpian Republican, Lee Zeldin, who made public safety the focal issue of his campaign. To put this in perspective, Democrats have a statewide registration advantage of 3.6 million voters in New York, yet Hochul won by just 325,395 votes. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/catherinesalgado/2023/03/16/new-poll-shows-what-voters-think-about-trump-and-the-2020-election-n1679101

One man still Trumps other Republicans in popularity. A new Rasmussen Reports poll shows that the majority of voters believe Republicans and Democrats secretly worked together to sabotage Donald Trump’s re-election bid, and a significant majority of GOP voters still see Trump as the best leader of the Republican Party.

Rasmussen published survey results on March 16 with both surprising and not-so-surprising results. As most polls have shown consistently for years now, Donald Trump is still perceived as the most important leader of the Republican Party; 37% of all likely voters told Rasmussen that Trump was a better leader for the Republican Party, and 60% of Republicans also chose Trump (Trump has 77% favorability with GOP voters and 52% favorability among all voters).

More men (56%) than women (50%) voters had a somewhat favorable opinion of Trump, along with 48% of unaffiliated voters. And 51% of Democrats, 12% of Republicans, and 38% of independents had a “Very Unfavorable impression of Trump.” The poll did not ask specifically about the 2024 presidential primary.

But the Rasmussen poll also found that not only did more than two-thirds of Republicans, but a majority of all likely voters think it’s “somewhat likely” Republicans secretly colluded with Democrats to stop Trump’s re-election. It adds interesting data to the ongoing debate surrounding alleged voter fraud and controversial candidates in the 2020 and 2022 elections.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/03/elections_have_consequences_stolen_elections_have_catastrophes.html

“Put the adults back in charge,” they whined.  “Donald Trump will break the world,” they lied.  Well, they manipulated election rules to certify suspicious vote totals that preposterously portrayed senile Joe Biden as the most popularly elected president in history; censored and locked up anyone who complained; and covered up their crimes with J6 show trials drenched in untruths meant to hide from history the Uniparty’s underhanded machinations in outright stealing a presidential election.  The whole mess was so banana-republic-yucky that Biden was inaugurated behind barbed wire and a show of military force befitting the small junta who attended the successful coup’s celebration.  And as a result of the Uniparty’s installation of Dementia Joe as White House marionette, the American people have been plagued with crime, inflation, political persecution, COVID tyranny, deadly battlefield retreat, open borders, staggering drug deaths, proxy wars, bankruptcies, bank runs, endless new regulations, a plummeting standard of living, economic panic, and social volatility.  Elections have consequences, but stolen elections have catastrophes.

For over two years, the State-controlled press and the permanent political class have accused anyone who challenges the ruling regime’s legitimacy of being an “election denier” pushing the “big lie” that the 2020 race was rigged.  That resort to low-minded name-calling always seems like the “big tell” that they know that the people know that they’re full of it.  Never mind that Time ran an exposé shortly after the election diagramming in great detail how “a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, work[ed] together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information.”  Never mind that the American people later learned that Facebook CEO “Mark Zuckerberg and other left-wing actors commandeered election operations in blue hubs of swing states in 2020” by “strategically bankroll[ing] and staff[ing] local government election offices, which are in charge of voter registration, voting, and vote counting.”  Never mind that leftist agitators had spent months in the run-up to the election threatening to unleash mayhem if Biden “won” the so-called “national popular vote” but lost the Electoral College.  Never mind that those same leftist agitators also spent months seeding a public narrative that a “red mirage” would show Trump winning before days of ballot-hunting eventually overturned those ephemeral victories.  Nope — put all those public admissions and “color revolution” propaganda campaigns aside, you dumb deplorables, and blithely accept the authorities’ assurances that Biden’s election was on the up-and-up.  People with power crossed their hearts and promised they were telling the truth; what more could Americans without power possibly require?  

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mike-pence-deep-state-patsy/

Former President Donald Trump was a wrecking ball — that’s what people like me voted for in 2016. We recognized the existence of an unelected deep state, composed mostly of Democrats and their shills. And, we understood instinctively that we needed an outsider to demolish the accretions of tyranny.

Trump delivered in spades. He was the first real threat to the bureaucratic state since Nixon.

But, wrecking balls aren’t precision instruments. They’re crass, blunt force trauma, kinetic energy mechanisms of destruction that lay waste. The destructive energy released is the precursor to creation, renewal, and resurrection. But, if you need something deconstructed in quick order, there’s nothing else suited to the job. Trump tore down and built over the rubble, just as he’d done countless times through the decades while building a real estate empire.

President Donald Trump’s accomplishments will leave you gobsmacked when they’re stacked one on top of the other — a magic beanstalk of wins whose terminus is lost in a nimbus of high-flying cirrus clouds. Here’s a list. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in, it’ll take you a while to get through all fourteen pages.

Trump wasn’t perfect. He broke some china. For the snowflakes, feelings got hurt. Trump tweeted harshly. He emoted often — a bunch of highly entertaining, but impolite thoughts. He insulted people, generally, the ones who richly deserved it. In a manlier age, no one would have cared. I certainly didn’t, and don’t.

However, his appointments left a great deal to be desired. At the top of my “wish he’d picked someone else list” are current FBI Director Chris Wray and former Vice President Mike Pence.