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POLITICS

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: MISSOURI #SHE TOO (D) CLAIRE McCASKILL VS. (R) JOSH HAWLEY

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/claire-mccaskill-demands-investigation-into-exposure-of-her-planned-parenthood-ties/
McCaskill Demands Investigation into Exposure of Her Planned Parenthood Ties By Jack Crowe

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri has demanded that a special prosecutor be appointed to investigate a sting operation that exposed previously secret alleged ties to Planned Parenthood and various gun-control-advocacy groups.

McCaskill’s campaign manager David Kirby called on her Republican Senate challenger Josh Hawley, the sitting Missouri attorney general, to appoint a special prosecutor to launch an investigation into the video-surveillance operation that captured her staffers discussing tactics used to conceal Planned Parenthood’s financial support for their campaign.

“We have reason to believe that fraud has been committed against our campaign,” Kirby told reporters Wednesday. “There’s no question that the videos were captured under false pretenses and misrepresentations, which under Missouri law is fraud.”

McCaskill accused Hawley of participating in the sting operation during a Tuesday television appearance.

“It is startling that Josh Hawley would be part of fraudulently embedding somebody in my campaign,” McCaskill told KOLR-10 in Springfield, Missouri on Tuesday.

Hawley, who previously denied participating in the operation, dismissed the notion of a possible investigation in a response posted to Twitter Wednesday.

In the secretly captured surveillance video, released Wednesday by the controversial right-wing investigative group Project Veritas, McCaskill campaign staffer Nicholas Starost explained that Planned Parenthood secretly funnels donations to the senator to avoid the scrutiny of Missouri’s conservative electorate.

“They go through other means to get us that money,” Starost says while being recorded on a hidden camera. “They specifically will not donate to us.”

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: TEXAS GOP TED CRUZ VS. DEMOCRAT BETO O’ROURKE

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/beto-orourke-media-coverage-embarrassing-spectacle/
The Embarrassing Spectacle of Betomania By Heather Wilhelm

It’s enough to drive even the most mild-mannered Texan crazy.

Attention, journalists of America: Time is running out! You have under three weeks left to publish your last batch of over-the-top pre-election puff pieces on Texas Democrat/cross-country liberal sensation/wing-and-a-prayer Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke!

It is here that we must face the difficult truth: Barring a GOP-related disaster of some sort, O’Rourke — he of that ineffable “cool factor” and “special sauce,” at least according to easily impressed columnists at the Washington Post — is likely to lose big. According to the latest polls, Senator Ted Cruz leads him by anywhere between seven and nine points. Tuesday’s debate between the two, meanwhile, was so mismatched that O’Rourke’s best moment might have involved a random deer-in-the-headlights story in which he described how he “got to meet this blind squirrel who is slowly regaining its sight.”

In summary, this year’s Betomania — a somewhat weird phenomenon, as we’ll explore in a bit — seems set to disappear from view just as quickly as it arrived, at least in the Lone Star State. On one hand, this possibility warms my heart, given that in my neck of Texas, it has grown rather exasperating to have to wade through 15,000 blaring BETO yard signs when I’m simply trying to get a breakfast taco or four. On the other hand, I also feel a tinge of melancholy and regret about all of this, given that I never got my act together enough to print ironic t-shirts with the following brilliant slogan I made up all by myself: “You BETO vote for Ted Cruz.”

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. I’d like to further discuss the debate between O’Rourke and Ted Cruz, and also actual policy issues, and also perhaps the fact that many people in politics seem to be slowly going insane. But first, can we talk about how embarrassing Betomania is? Friends, I am deeply concerned for our culture. When you look at a middle-aged establishment politician as an icon of “rock star” cool, you’re doing something wrong.

GOP Candidate Recovering From Assault Blames Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, and Eric Holder By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/trending/gop-candidate-recovering-from-assault-blames-maxine-waters-hillary-clinton-and-eric-holder/

Shane Mekeland, a Republican candidate for the Minnesota House of Representatives, blamed Democrats for the climate of incivility and violence that led to the assault against him last weekend. He also called out the Minnesota Democratic Party for refusing to fire a staffer who posted on Facebook that Democrats would “guillotine” Republicans after the election.

On Friday evening, he suffered a concussion after being sucker-punched in the head in a politically motivated attack. A full recovery will take 4 to 6 weeks. The election is in 19 days.

In an interview with PJ Media on Wednesday, Mekeland described his struggles with memory loss and light sensitivity after the attack, and blamed Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), former secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and former attorney general Eric Holder for stoking a climate of incivility and violence that led to his assault.

“Right as he hit me, he said, ‘You f*cking people don’t give a sh*t about the middle class,'” Mekeland told PJ Media, recounting the assault. “How can you take my getting sucker-punched in the head to be anything other than politically motivated?”

The candidate recounted the suspect’s interview with police after the assault. The assailant, remorseful after the attack, admitted that Mekeland did nothing to provoke him, and confessed, “I hit him right in the side of his head by his eye, and I think I hit his nose, too.”

As the candidate got hit, he remembered, “The chair goes flying over, it whacked my head on the floor and that’s the last thing I remember. I guess the guy jumped on me, he wasn’t done.”

The assault has wreaked havoc on Mekeland’s day-to-day life. “Right now, I’m taking round 6 of Advil,” the candidate told PJ Media. “No TV, stay away from computer screens. I went into town on Monday, I didn’t realize the sun was giving me a headache! I’m sitting there thinking, ‘How the hell am I going to get home?’ CONTINUE AT SITE

Democrat Official Excommunicated for Saying He Stands for the Flag, Kneels for the Cross By Jeff Reynolds

https://pjmedia.com/trending/democrat-official-excommunicated-for-saying-he-stands-for-the-flag-kneels-for-the-cross/

Behold the latest scalp claimed by social justice warriors intent on enforcing groupthink: a Gulf War veteran hired as the executive director of the Allegheny County, Pa., Democratic Party. His crime? Expressing support for the national anthem and asking for prayers for a cop involved in a shooting of an unarmed teenager. Evidently, no room exists for such insensitivity toward the Black Lives Matter movement in today’s Democratic Party.

The Allegheny County Democratic Party hired Mark Salvas as their executive director in September. Merely one month later, he resigned after Democratic officials expressed concern over two posts on Facebook they deemed controversial.

In the more recent post, in July 2018, his wife — not Salvas himself — expressed concern for a personal family friend, a cop involved in a fatal shooting of an unarmed black teenager. She asked for prayers for their personal friend in the aftermath of the shooting.

The other post goes all the way back to 2017, in which Salvas posted a picture of himself and his wife with a popular frame saying, “I stand for the flag and kneel for the cross.”

Salvas shared his love of country, patriotism, and personal service on his Facebook profile:

Apparently this didn’t sit well with Pennsylvania Democrats, many of whom protested his hire and spoke of his insensitivity toward African Americans. KDKA-TV, the Pittsburgh CBS affiliate, reported:

“I was asked by the chair of the Allegheny County Democratic Party to resign my position due to the controversy that was taking place on social media, and I did,” Salvas told KDKA political editor Jon Delano on Wednesday. “It’s never easy when people you have never met accuse you of things and call you names, and you’ve never met them.”

A former Marine and Gulf War veteran, Salvas was just hired in September as executive director of the county party, long after he posted a picture of his wife and him on Facebook with the words, “I stand for the flag, I kneel at the cross.”

“I’m not ashamed of my patriotism, not one bit. I fought for this country. I think I have a right to have a voice and be patriotic,” says Salvas. CONTINUE AT SITE

Could Trump Win 20 Percent of the Black Vote in 2020? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/18/could-

The provocative Donald Trump certainly seems to be disliked by a majority of African-American professional athletes, cable news hosts, academics and the Congressional Black Caucus. Yet there are subtle but increasing indications that his approval among other African-Americans may be reaching historic highs for a modern Republican president.

Some polls have indicated that Trump’s approval rating among black voters is close to 20 percent. That is far higher than the 8 percent of the African-American vote that Trump received on Election Day 2016.

A recent, admittedly controversial Rasmussen Reports poll showed African-American approval of Trump at 36 percent.

Even 20 percent African-American support for Trump would all but dismantle Democratic Party presidential hopes for 2020. Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 election with 88 percent of the black vote. That was about a six-point falloff from Barack Obama’s share of the black vote in 2012.

But far more importantly, an estimated 2 million of the African-American voters who cast ballots for Obama in 2012 simply did not show up at the polls in 2016 to vote for the off-putting Clinton.

Even a small drop in African-American turnout or anything less than the usual 85 percent to 90 percent supermajority for a Democratic presidential candidate on Election Day can prove fatal. Why?

Republican presidential candidates now routinely win 55 percent to 60 percent of the so-called white vote, and about 70 percent of voters are white. That lopsided margin may widen further, given that progressive Democrats are not making any effort to recapture turned-off white working-class voters.

With continually diminishing white support, Democrats must increasingly count on massive minority turnout and bloc voting—especially among African-American voters, who make up about 12 percent of the electorate.

The Incredibly Fake End of Elizabeth Warren A long pathetic narrative of lies, cowardice and fraud. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271663/incredibly-fake-end-elizabeth-warren-daniel-greenfield

Elizabeth Ann Warren has been many things in her life. All of them fake.

She represented an insurance company in an asbestos case before becoming a consumer rights crusader. She was paid $350,000 to teach a single course before deciding to fight student debt. She was a Republican, then became a socialist, and then announced, “I am a capitalist to my bones.”

She’s also the fake minority professor who plagiarized the recipes of a French chef for the Pow Wow Chow cookbook and killed her shot at 2020 with a DNA test which claimed that she wasn’t lying about her Cherokee background because she might have a 1/1,024th ancestry from somebody from Peru.

Like a snake, Senator Elizabeth Warren has shed her beliefs as easily as her minority status.

Warren went from being a Cherokee to the whitest woman in the Senate, the same way that she swung from her, “You didn’t build that” speech to, “She believes in markets. She loves markets.”

The truth about Senator Herring is that she’s always been a liar, a coward and a fraud.

Her presidential hopes didn’t end in 2018. They ended in 2015 when instead of challenging Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Warren cut a deal with her to be considered as her VP and get some of her key allies into administration positions in the second Clinton administration that never came into being.

Hillary didn’t pick Warren as her running mate. The jokes would have written themselves. And after losing the election, she was in no position to appoint Warren’s allies to anything except cleaning up her broken wineglasses.

Elizabeth Warren began getting ready for 2020, but she had already missed her last and only shot.

While Liz was playing the inside game, maneuvering for power within a future Clinton administration, her radical backers went looking for someone else to challenge Hillary. They settled on an obscure socialist senator from Vermont who was even angrier, more awkward and more radical than Warren.

Democrats’ treatment of Kavanaugh was depraved. America won’t reward them at the polls.By Marc A. Thiessen

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/democrats-treatment-of-kavanaugh-was-depraved-america-wont-reward-them-at-the-polls/

Just a few weeks ago, analysts thought that control of the U.S. Senate was in play this November and that momentum was shifting to the Democrats. Thanks to their brutal campaign of character assassination against now-Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, those chances appear to be slipping away.

Case in point is Tennessee, where Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn was struggling in her Senate race against popular former Democratic governor Phil Bredesen. In mid-September — after the first Kavanaugh confirmation hearings — a CNN poll showed Blackburn trailing by five points (in a state Donald Trump won by 26 points). But as the ferocity of the attacks on Kavanaugh grew, so did Blackburn’s poll numbers. By early October — after Christine Blasey Ford testified and Kavanaugh was accused of exposing himself to a college classmate and participating in high school gang rapes — a CBS News poll showed that Blackburn had pulled ahead by eight points. And last week, after Kavanaugh was finally confirmed amid scenes of angry protesters banging on the doors of the Supreme Court, a New York Times poll showed Blackburn leading by 14 points. That is a shift of 19 points in one month.

In other words, the Democrats’ smear campaign of uncorroborated sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh has united Tennessee Republicans behind Blackburn and poured cold water on Democrats’ chances in the Volunteer State. And rightly so. It probably didn’t help with Tennessee voters that Democrats excoriated Kavanaugh for his high school drinking and for inside jokes in his high school yearbook — as if being a beer-drinking jock was some sort of crime. Worse, Kavanaugh was publicly branded a sex offender for accusations decades old and uncorroborated by any witnesses or evidence. A man’s good name was being destroyed.

With FL, IA Races in Play, Ryan’s PAC Ponies Up . By Adele Malpass –

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/10/17/with_fl_ia_races_in_play_ryans_pac_ponies_up_138374.html

House Speaker Paul Ryan’s super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, announced Tuesday that it reserved $1 million in television ads in Cedar Rapids, Iowa for two-term incumbent Rep. Rod Blum and a mid-six-figure amount for Maria Salazar, who is running against former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala in South Florida’s 27th Congressional District. Just a few months ago, these seats had been written off as flipping from red to blue; however, the combination of strengthening poll results in both districts and a narrowing of the overall enthusiasm gap has put them back into play.

Miami-based FL-27 was supposed to be an easy pickup for the Democrats after 15-term Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen announced her retirement. This is a district that Hillary Clinton won by almost 20 percentage points and is nearly 57 percent Hispanic. Throughout the campaign, Shalala, 77, has been criticized for her low-energy campaign style — with even Democrats complaining that she was in “sleep-mode.” Salazar, 56, is a well-known Spanish-language TV newswoman and a native of the district. She’s effectively landed punches on her opponent as being a carpetbagger who doesn’t speak Spanish and who won’t be effective in Washington. In an Oct. 6 Mason-Dixon Telemundo 51 poll, Salazar had a two-point lead, which is well within the survey’s four-point margin of error. RealClearPolitics rates the race as a toss-up.

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: FLORIDA: MARIA SALAZAR (R) FOR CONGRESS DISTRICT 27

She is running against Clinton clone Donna Shalala….rsk

After graduating the University of Miami with a B.A. in Communications, Maria Elvira acquired a Master’s in Public Administration from Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Maria Elvira’s passion for promoting news transparency and communicating salient national affairs continued as she served as Miami’s local reporter for Univision Network’s flagship station, Channel 23. With 35 years of experience of breaking-news coverage under her belt, Maria Elvira has now become one of the nation’s most recognized Latin American political affairs journalists for the U.S. Hispanic community. Her established reputation as a leading television news reporter comes from a culmination of accomplishments and awards throughout her career, including:

Winner of 5 Emmy Awards in broadcast journalism
News Anchor – MEGA TV, Telemundo, CNN español
Host – Maria Elvira Live TV Show
Senior Political Correspondent – Telemundo
Central American Bureau Chief – Univision
White House and Pentagon Correspondent – Univision
First and only U.S. Spanish-language T.V. journalist to interview Fidel Castro one-on-one
Bestselling Author – “If God is With You, Who Could be Against You?”

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: ARIZONA-MARTHA McSALLY FOR SENATE

Kyrsten Sinema Promoted a Terrorist Lawyer By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/kyrsten-sinema-promoted-a-terrorist-lawyer/

Don’t buy the Arizona Senate candidate’s excuses.

Last week it emerged that, in 2003, Democratic Senate hopeful Kyrsten Sinema had promoted campus appearances by Lynne Stewart, a radical lawyer, while Stewart was being prosecuted for providing material support to terrorism. Having been called out on this, Sinema has distorted basic facts of the case.

Sinema represents Arizona’s 9th district in the House and is locked in a tight race against Martha McSally, who represents the state’s 2nd district, for the Senate seat being vacated by Republican Jeff Flake.

As it happens, Ms. Stewart, who died in 2017, was my main adversary in the 1995 terrorism prosecution of her client, Omar Abdel Rahman, better known as the “Blind Sheikh.” Abdel Rahman (who also died in 2017, just a few weeks before Stewart) was the jihadist whom Stewart was convicted of abetting; she helped him communicate with his murderous Egyptian terrorist organization from the American prison where he was serving a life sentence.

I am thus in a position to counter Representative Sinema’s misrepresentations about her advocacy on Stewart’s behalf.

A leading light of the notoriously jihadist-friendly lawyer left, Sinema now portrays herself as a moderate progressive. To the contrary, her political activism began when she co-founded a “social justice” organization, Local to Global Justice, while studying law at Arizona State University. In that connection, Sinema urged people in what Fox News describes as a “now-closed Yahoo group” to attend two 2003 events at which Stewart was the featured speaker.