RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/424051-democrats-must-prove-they-are-worthy-of-their-house-majority

For the first time since 2011, the Democrats took control of the House thanks to their midterm victory. The election of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House continues her legacy as the first woman to hold this leadership position in our history. She is the first Speaker of the House in more than half a century to lose the majority, not be pushed out by her party shortly thereafter, and then to ultimately regain this top position years later.

Despite a movement led by a number of Democrats in the House, such as Seth Moulton and Tim Ryan, to oust her as the leader, Speaker Pelosi once again showed her political prowess by not only crushing any dissent, but also by receiving votes from both Moulton and Ryan. With the government entering the third week of its shutdown, numerous departures from the Trump administration, and the beginning of the 2020 presidential race, Americans are looking for the party that they can trust going forward.

The Democrats have an opportunity before them to demonstrate that they are the party of leadership, the party of pragmatism, and the party of strength. Ryan has underscored the importance of the Democrats exhibiting strong leadership ahead of 2020. In a statement about the party retaking the House, Ryan said President Trump is “worried about the investigation that is breathing down his neck,” adding that “his only goal is to appeal to Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham, and Rush Limbaugh.”

Ultimately, given that sole mission of President Trump seems to be trying to protect his dwindling base from abandoning him, the Democrats have a tremendous opportunity to make gains with moderate voters who feel that that his priorities do not line up with their own. As Speaker Pelosi reclaims the gavel in the House, the nation will be closely watching for her first few legislative moves. Those steps will include reopening the government and outlining the policy priorities for the Democrats in the 116th Congress.

There is certainly a need for strong leadership that contrasts with the style exhibited by the President Trump. However, Speaker Pelosi cannot make the mistake of being an obstructionist. Voters across the country are frustrated with Washington. They want solutions, not shutdowns. Thus, if Speaker Pelosi takes a card from Senator Mitch McConnell and attempts to block everything the Republicans propose, then Democrats running in 2020 will not be able to paint themselves as dealmakers who are able to navigate politics, and voters will only view them as adding to the problem. What we need now is the ability to find common ground for solutions.

https://edwardcline.blogspot.com/2019/01/congresss-trump-derangement-syndrome.html

The Democratic side of the 116th session of Congress kicked off its business with an agenda aimed almost solely on “getting” President Donald Trump.

The Dem 2019 Platform: Abolish ICE, Legalize Tranny Bathrooms, Free Healthcare, Free College, Increase the Minimum Wage, Open Borders, Gun Confiscation, Abolishing Prisons, Unrestricted Abortion Rights, Gender Fluidity, More Limitations of Free Speech, Higher Taxes, Voting Rights for Illegals, Lowering Voting Age to 16, and the Proliferation of Crying Closets..But, above all, to “impeach” or remove Donald Trump. Snub Trump by taking time off.

As Michael Goodwin of the New York Post reported on January 5th, in his column, “Democrats Keep Proving How Detached they are from Reality”:

In its common definition, the job of president of the United States is to deliver peace and prosperity. Donald Trump is doing well on both fronts, so let’s impeach the bastard!

As insane as it sounds, that and only that is what many Democrats have in mind. Impeachment, or death by a thousand investigations, is the heart of their plan.

For proof, eliminate their desire to remove Trump from office and see if you can pinpoint anything else with broad Dem support. Some advocate for open borders, others for tax hikes or Medicare-for-all, but ending the Trump presidency ASAP is the glue holding the party together.

Legislation? Can’t be bothered. Mental energies must be focused on impeaching or opposing Trump.

Is the Trump Derangement Syndrome real, or “faked”?

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/05/mitch-mcconnells-complicity

The partial government shutdown is well into its second week. And given the mix of Democrat enthusiasm and complete Republican apathy, it looks like it may stay that way for a while.

Ask any reporter or Capitol Hill staffer who has worked through previous government shutdowns, and we’ll all tell you the same thing about this one: it’s bizarre.

Government shutdowns are generally characterized by a pervasive sense of urgency and frazzled, frantic negotiations. Beleaguered members tramp back and forth to the White House and hold daily press conferences, both chambers hold late-night sessions for votes and speeches, and, of course, everyone howls on cable news. But, minus a few exceptions on the cable news networks, hardly any of this has occurred.

Instead, the clock chimed on the shutdown and Congress just went home. The Republican House, in a last-minute Hail Mary, passed a government funding bill that included the president’s requested $5 billion in wall funding. But upon receiving it, the Republican Senate collectively yawned and packed up for home on December 21. They didn’t come back until 4 p.m. on January 2.

They weren’t alone. Newly minted Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) decamped for Hawaii, for which she received approximately zero criticism in the press. The new junior senator from Utah, Mitt Romney, apparently spent the break crafting a sanctimonious missive against the administration he previously sought to join. And nary a peep was heard from anyone else in congressional leadership, Republican or Democrat.

Backward Priorities
President Trump, meanwhile, remained in Washington, practically begging for a negotiating partner. Or, at the very least, a sparring partner.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/ocasio-cortez-fans-joke-about-assassinating-steve-scalise/

On Saturday, Rep. Steve Scalise (R-S.C.), the House minority whip, responded to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who had advocated for a 70 percent top tax rate. When Ocasio-Cortez shot back, her supporters joked about assassinating Scalise, who nearly lost his life in the 2017 congressional baseball game shooting.

“Snipe his a**!” the popular satirical account Raandy tweeted, responding to Ocasio-Cortez. His tweet received 582 “likes” and 7 “retweets.”

Another chimed in, “she’s got better aim than James Hodgkinson, that’s for sure.” This tweet received 25 “likes.”

she’s got better aim than James Hodgkinson, that’s for sure
— matt’s making medium missives on mobile (@averybigbear) January 6, 2019

James Hodgkinson was the shooter who nearly killed Scalise in 2017. The congressman almost lost his life multiple times during and after the shooting.

“Raandy” is a satirical account that played a hoax on conservatives during the 2016 election by claiming to be a post office worker and ironically confessing to “ripping up absentee ballots that vote for Trump.” His tweet is clearly a joke, but the 2017 shooting is no laughing matter. Any of the 582 people who “liked” this message on Twitter might be inspired to actually carry out what Raandy so glibly jokes about.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-a-republican-survivor-11546647007

Everywhere he takes me, Rep. Will Hurd tells people—coffee-shop staff, breakfasting retirees, the proprietor at the historic Mi Tierra Cafe—that I’m here to figure out how he keeps winning Texas’ big swing congressional district. Sometimes he’s more blunt: How does a black Republican get elected in an area that’s 70% Hispanic?

“It’s not rocket science,” Mr. Hurd says. “Look—show up, talk to people, represent them, right? It starts with the philosophy that my bosses are the 800,000 people that I represent, not anybody else.”

But clearly he’s doing something unusual. In 2016, 23 Republicans, including Mr. Hurd, won House districts that Hillary Clinton carried. Today only two of those seats are in GOP hands—Mr. Hurd’s and John Katko’s, in upstate New York. Democrats flipped the rest in November, beating many well-regarded GOP politicians. Minnesota’s Erik Paulsen and Illinois’s Peter Roskam—gone. Colorado’s Mike Coffman and Virginia’s Barbara Comstock—bye-bye. Texas’ Pete Sessions and John Culberson—hasta luego.

To reach back further, there were 13 House districts that voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and then Mrs. Clinton in 2016. In the last Congress, they were all held by Republicans. Now they’re all occupied by Democrats, with the lone exception of Mr. Hurd. His most recent victory, a squeaker by 926 votes, wasn’t called until two weeks past Election Day. In the interim, his Democratic challenger attended congressional orientation with her fingers crossed. But a win is a win, so the question stands: What’s Mr. Hurd’s secret sauce, and can other Republicans learn the recipe?

CONTINUE AT SITE

https://pjmedia.com/trending/green-new-deal-may-become-key-litmus-test-for-democrats-in-2020/

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s “Green New Deal” doesn’t have a chance of passage in Congress and would not be signed into law by Donald Trump anyway.

But the proposal is growing in popularity on the left and congressmen who oppose it may find themselves in hot water with Democratic primary voters in 2020.

Common Dreams:

In a signal that Democratic voters aren’t satisfied with timid steps to address the human-made global climate crisis, new polling from Data for Progress—initially reported by HuffPost on Thursday—shows that incumbent congressional candidates in 2020 could be ousted by progressive primary challengers if they fail to back a Green New Deal.

Championed by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a growing collective of Democratic lawmakers and climate campaigners, a Green New Deal would combine efforts to curb global warming and create a more just economy through generating clean energy jobs and other initiatives. Such a deal, however, has been met with opposition from more conservative Democrats.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272458/right-underestimating-ocasio-cortez-mark-tapson

The gaffe-prone new U.S. Representative for New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has been an easy target for rightwing mockery thanks to her tenuous grasp of economics and the self-mythologizing of her youth on the Brooklyn streets (the daughter of an architect, she actually grew up mostly in an affluent town in Westchester County, New York). Conservatives are having great fun online with internet memes ridiculing the proud “Democratic Socialist” as a brainless fraud. But if those who dismiss her aren’t careful, it will be Ocasio-Cortez who has the last laugh.

A self-declared “radical,” Ocasio-Cortez wants to tax the wealthy as high as 70% to fund her climate change plan called the “Green New Deal.” She supports Medicare for all, tuition-free public college, the cancelation of all student loan debt, and housing as a federal right. Steeped in the oppressor/oppressed paradigm of identity politics, she is predictably pro-Black Lives Matter, anti-Israel, and wants to abolish ICE. She lacks both knowledge of and reverence for the U.S. Constitution. In other words, she checks off all the right boxes among a growing number of young Americans who find the idea of “democratic socialism” appealing, despite the fact that they can’t actually define it. It helps her enormously that new-Latina-on-the-block Ocasio-Cortez has a hip, youthful, multicultural appeal in a party burdened with doddering old white people like Nancy Pelosi, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Hillary Clinton.

As Ocasio-Cortez was being sworn in to Congress on Thursday, a LiveLeak video featuring the rising star of the Democratic Party began going viral on Twitter after being shared by an anonymous account called, well, AnonymousQ1776. “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is,” the tweet read. “High School video of ‘Sandy’ Ocasio-Cortez.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/04/aoc-shadow

To get a sense of how powerful freshman Congressmember (her preferred title) Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is, just look at her effect on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Specifically, look at the difference between Pelosi’s inaugural speech in 2019 and her speech in 2007, when the California Democrat was elected the first female speaker in U.S. history.

Back then, Pelosi offered several tributes to American soldiers fighting in Iraq. We must honor our military, veterans and first responders as “the heroes that they are,” she graciously offered. That sentiment was met with a rousing standing ovation from both sides of the aisle. The question of climate change—then gaining attention as a key issue thanks to Al Gore’s documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” released the year before—merited only one sentence.

But Pelosi’s message on Thursday was almost directly and proportionately reversed. After an obligatory shout-out to our troops and their families, Pelosi urged her colleagues to face “the existential crisis of our time, the climate crisis, a crisis manifested in natural disasters of epic proportions.” (A claim that is patently false, but unlikely to be scrutinized by the media’s biased fact-checkers.)

A new select committee on climate change would be convened, Pelosi announced, to “put an end to the inaction and denial of science that threaten the planet and the future.” The cure for the working class would be the creation of green jobs from sea to shining sea, she promised. Pelosi’s Democratic subjects rose to applaud her.

The military earned one other brief mention at the end of her speech, and the existential threat of Islamic terrorism officially was replaced by carbon dioxide emissions.

Even though the wealthy, septuagenarian from San Francisco now wields the speaker’s gavel, it is the bartender-turned-representative Millennial from the Bronx who possesses the power. Cortez essentially is this Congress’s shadow speaker, agitating the Democrats’ policy agenda and creating her own caucus of diverse, radical soulmates. Further, she is the poster girl for a left-lurching Democratic Party. Democrats now view socialism more positively than capitalism, according to an August 2018 poll and also want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service as they impeach the president.

Ocasio-Cortez is earning the media attention and adoration other politicians can only dream of having. Hours before she was sworn-in on January 3, a cute video surfaced of Ocasio-Cortez dancing with friends in college—putting an “I’m just like you” face on her dangerous left-wing ideology. Her Twitter posts go viral immediately; other politicians now are trying to emulate her unpretentious approach on social media, such as when she whips up a quick dinner while talking about political issues to her 1.3 million Instagram followers. (In a cringe-worthy Instagram video this week, Senator Elizabeth Warren popped open a beer in her kitchen and chatted about her newly-formed presidential exploratory committee. Let’s just say it didn’t go over as her handlers had hoped.)

But Ocasio-Cortez is more than a pretty face with a devoted social media following. Armed with a hubris born out of inexperience and a leftist worldview born out of economic and historical ignorance, Ocasio-Cortez’s real charm is that she is unafraid to confront the old-guard leadership on Capitol Hill.

Her raison d’etre is human-caused climate change, the refuge of international socialists for the past three decades. Every means to dramatically alter the way people live—the mendacious objective of the Left—can be masqueraded as a noble desire to save the planet. Climate change largely was ignored by both Republican and Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2018; in fact, most climate-mitigation ballot proposals were defeated across the country in November. But thanks to Ocasio-Cortez’s aggressive activism—and hundreds of millions in political contributions flowing from billionaire environmentalists—it’s likely that issue will take center stage in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/israel-replaced-with-palestine-on-rashida-tlaibs-office-map/

Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a newly-minted Muslim congresswoman now infamous for calling President Donald Trump a “motherf**ker,” supports Palestine over Israel and now has a world map where Israel has been re-marked as “Palestine” with a sticky note.

Tlaib has not responded to multiple requests for comment on whether or not she approved the alteration and what it might mean. She has, however, celebrated with Women’s March leader Linda Sarsour, who has urged Muslims not to “humanize” Israelis.

“Someone has already made a slight alteration to the map that hangs in Rashida Tlaib’s new congressional office,” BuzzFeed reporter Hannah Allam tweeted Thursday, showing the map with a sticky note reading “Palestine.”

While the note was clearly intended as a replacement for the name of the Jewish state, it includes an arrow that points just barely north of Cairo, the capital of Egypt.

According to reports, Tlaib herself may not have posted the note. BuzzFeed’s Allam reported that a comedian in the crowd put up the sticky note, and Forward identified him as Palestinian-American comedian Mo Amer. Amer did not respond to PJ Media’s request for comment as to whether or not he had Tlaib’s permission.

Whether or not the sticky note remains, and whether or not Amer got permission, Tlaib opposes the two-state solution that would allow both Israel and Palestine to have separate governments. Instead, she supports a one-state solution with Palestine essentially subsuming Israel. She has also advocated for the withdrawal of all U.S. funds from the Jewish state.

She framed this withdrawal of funds as preventing “American foreign aid” from being “used to violate the human rights of people of any race, nation, or ethnicity.”

In fact, her support for the one-state solution is a minor scandal, since her early support for a two-state solution gained her the endorsement of J Street, a pro-Israel organization. She changed her position shortly after winning the Democratic primary, and faced no Republican opponent last November. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/dems_debut_their_clown_show_strategy_for_the_216th_congress.html

Now that voters have handed them control of the House of Representatives, Democrats are forced to reveal who they are to the national electorate, and it ain’t pretty. The party has more than its share of bizarre eccentrics, able to win a local election in a deep blue district, and they are feeling their oats. They thrive on media attention, which they get because they are colorful and young and say radical things that excite progressive journalists.

But money and power remain in the hands of the gerontocracy branch of the party, headed by Nancy Pelosi, the shrewd power player who learned her craft at the knee of the political boss of Baltimore, her father, Tommy D’Alesandro, who knew a few things about money, power, and deal-making.

Her first speech as speaker of the House this term feigned stately grace (calling the Capitol a “temple of democracy,” for instance) and bipartisanship fairly effectively, and she brought her grandkids to the podium at one point. However, her disturbing quirks as a public speaker were all too evident, even as she read her prepared speech.

Listen to the bizarre giggles she cannot repress as she is being applauded.

Anger and downright hatred for the sitting president of the United States powers most of the 40 newly elected members of the House Democratic Caucus, along with many veterans, including “Mad Max” Maxine Waters, slated to become chair of the House Financial Services Committee and very publicly committed to impeachment. Pelosi is shrewd enough to realize that impeachment without a smoking gun would be a disaster for Democrats, but that won’t stop the Trump-haters, who believe they have momentum and support of the party’s faithful. Eleven-term veteran Congressman Brad Sherman, of Ventura County, California, has already introduced articles of impeachment, and that’s just the beginning of the ordeal Pelosi will have trying to rein her crazies.