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POLITICS

LOL! Liz Warren’s 2018 Competition, Shiva Ayyadurai: ‘Takes Real Indian to Beat Fake One’ Trey Sanchez

Take down the name Shiva Ayyadurai. You’re going to want to keep your eye on him. This successful entrepreneur would like to throw his hat in the ring in 2018 and defeat Sen. Elizabeth Warren. During his appearance on Varney & Co. on Fox Business, Ayyadurai might have come up with the best campaign slogan of all time.

“I think only a real Indian can defeat a fake Indian,” Ayyadurai told Stuart Varney. “You know, I sent her a DNA test kit for her birthday and I was very sad that she returned it.”

He then got serious:

“Because the issue of real Indian and fake Indian; there’s a truth there, because here’s a woman who actually checked off the box saying she was a Native American. I mean, this foretells a person who’s basically a self-serving elitist; is willing to cut in line as she needs; is willing to promote policies, for example, illegal immigration, so others can cut in line. I came in as a legal immigrant… So, there’s essentially a disrespect for the laws and a disrespect for the country.”

Ayyadurai was born in Mumbai but moved to the U.S. when he was seven. He said his dad came first and they had to wait a year. Ayyadurai holds four degrees from MIT and has a Ph.D. in biological engineering.

“I love Donald Trump,” Ayyadurai said. “I think he’s doing a great job. He’s my hero and I’m very fortunate, again, to be a part of this moment in history.”

“I’m looking forward to going against Warren,” he said. “I know how these elites work. I know I can defeat her.”

Adam “Pathfinder” Schiff: Stalking the Kremlin or the Chupacabra? By Thaddeus G. McCotter

My radio colleague John Batchelor has pegged U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-NY) as “the Pathfinder.” The reason being that, as ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Schiff has been most vocal and visible in trying to divine the truth behind the alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia—and, in a fortuitous confluence of circumstances for Schiff, find a path to taking Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat.

Whether the truth will out and the Pathfinder will oust Feinstein remains to be seen, as does any evidence the Pathfinder insinuates exists to prove the Trump-Putin collusion allegation.

Thanks to the tender mercies of his friends in the media elite, Schiff’s failure to produce any shred of evidence regarding collusion—let alone a crime—has not proven problematic for the Pathfinder. Obviously, the media elite dislikes the president and will brook no facts—or the absence thereof—from getting in the way of a good smearing. The Pathfinder facilitates this mutually advantageous, tawdry political theater by ascribing the “appearance” of the most insidious motivations and actions to President Trump and his campaign in relation to Putin’s Russia; then artfully dodging his lack of evidence with the limp two-step, “I’d love to tell you more, but it’s classified.”

And how the Left-wing applauds and approves! For the media elite, ratings, circulation and “clicks” soar; and the Pathfinder treks ever closer to his coveted senate seat. Yes, their off-Broadway/on-Beltway production of “Trump Done It (Whatever It Was)?” is the smash hit of the post-Obama season.

But what of the country’s sane center praying its president didn’t commit treason by colluding with a foreign power to attain his office? Yes, they realize that sometimes where there’s smoke there’s fire. But they also know that when dealing with the Left, oft times where there’s smoke there’s reefer.

Thus, fair minded citizens respectfully ask for evidence before impeaching a president for “high crimes and misdemeanors” and withhold their judgement of the Pathfinder and media elite’s anti-Trump production, despite the Pathfinder and the media elite’s self-bestowed rave reviews.

In sum, in terms of “Russia-gate”, the disconnect between the nonpartisan public and the Pathfinder and his media cohorts is this: the former don’t want to believe it; the latter need to believe it. Or as one character memorably put it in Werner Herzog’s “Incident at Loch Ness,” when asked if the monster was real: “They say show me the evidence. I say show me the non-evidence.”

Certain President Trump is a monster capable of monstrous deeds, for months Pathfinder Schiff has been parading across the media stage dolloping out his Russia-gate non-evidence to Democrats howling for more. Yet, one of the things nonpartisan Americans find off-putting about politics is how normal rules of reason are abrogated for political gain. Perhaps then, to accommodate their wish to find our own path the truth about Russia-gate, let us depoliticize the discourse in order to objectively assess the veracity of Pathfinder Schiff’s schtick.

But how? One can take a contested debate between two apolitical camps, such as scientists and cryptozoologists, and endeavor to settle it to one’s satisfaction. Thus, what if Pathfinder Schiff was alleging collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin but, instead, was alleging the existence of the chupacabra—the bloodsucking critter alleged to feast upon livestock in the Americas? Hmm…

On the March 5, 2017 episode of “Meet the Press” came this statement from…

Former National Security Advisor James “The” Clapper: “We did not include any evidence in our report, and I say ‘our,’ that’s NSA, FBI, and CIA, with my office, the Director of National Intelligence, that had any reflection of the chupacabra. There was no evidence of the chupacabra included in our report.”

Moderator: “I understand, but does it exist?”

“The” Clapper: “Not to my knowledge.”

The Curious Case of Ben Sasse By Mike Sabo

Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska has become something of a lightning rod on the Right.https://amgreatness.com/2017/07/10/curious-case-ben-sasse/

Many movement conservatives are drawn to his erudite and scholarly manner and see him as a principled statesman in contrast to Donald Trump who, they argue—and quite rightly I might add—has abandoned what has come to be called conservatism. Those inclined to support Trump instead, tend to view Sasse as part of the problem due to his vocal rejection of much of the Trump agenda—and thereby the views of the tens of millions of people who voted to implement that agenda. They see Sasse as possessing utopian political sensibilities combined with an overly moralistic view of politics that lacks a spirited defense of the people’s right to rule themselves—even if ruling themselves may mean, occasionally, getting it wrong.

Stepping back and viewing Sasse’s positives and negatives in a clear light can help us see the truth contained in these conflicting portrayals.

Sasse is obviously a good family man and understands the devastating impact of fatherlessness on our culture, as is attested by his recent Father’s Day message. His advocacy of recovering liberal education is very important in light of the intellectual rot to which most, if not all, of our public universities have succumbed. And his absolute hatred of the worst Canadian export of all-time—the rock band Nickelback—should have all Americans nodding their heads in agreement.

His recent book, The Vanishing American Adult, has garnered much acclaim and deserves to be read. In the book, Sasse explores how younger generations are increasingly ill-prepared to thrive in the world and form stable families of their own. By teaching the importance of reading, hard manual labor, and learning from individuals who have significant life experiences, Sasse charts out a path that he hopes will lead younger generations to live better lives and, ultimately, to help form a healthier civic culture.

That the book’s teachings are laudable is virtually unquestionable. But doesn’t Sasse, who has only been in the Senate for two-and-a-half years, have better things to do? It’s surely true that the decline in the American character is worthy of contemplation and exploration. But Sasse is supposed to be a full-time legislator.

What Does a Senator Do, Anyway?

The Real Lesson from Last Week’s Two Special Elections for Congress By Richard Baehr

There has been no shortage of effort by pundits and big data analysts to try to draw conclusions on whether the results of the two special elections for open House seats in Georgia and and South Carolina last week meant that Democrats or Republicans had (choose one) underperformed or overperformed, as compared to the recent district votes for President and Congress in 2016. Similar analyses followed the special elections in Kansas and Montana earlier.

In all four cases, new Trump administration Cabinet members who had won their district races comfortably in 2016 were replaced by Republicans who won the open seat races far less comfortably. In 3 of the 4 races, the margin for the winning Republican in the special election was narrower than Trump’s margin of victory in the district in the Presidential race last year (Georgia 6 the exception — Trump won by a smaller percentage margin than Karen Handel).

It is highly likely, however, that if the four new Cabinet members — Tom Price, Mike Pompeo, Ryan Zinke and Mick Mulvaney — had stayed in the House and would run again in 2018, they all would win easily. In essence, special elections are a lot different than races where incumbents are running for re-election in regular cycles, especially from generally safe districts.

Special elections are open seat races, meaning there is no incumbent. Normally, they are held on a day when this race is the only contested one. Turnout is usually far lower than the turnout in a normal midterm, much less a presidential year. In the two contests last week, in districts with the same approximate population, 260,000 votes were cast for the candidates in Georgia and 87,000 for the two candidates in South Carolina. The difference is accounted for by the amount of fundraising and media attention lavished on the Georgia, but not on the South Carolina race. Each race however wound up with a margin of victory of between 3% and 4%.

In regular election cycles, there is a big advantage to incumbency. When House seats turn over, the percentage of open seats that shift between the parties is usually far higher than the percentage of seats that turn over among the incumbents running for re-election. If you were running the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for 2018, a district where the incumbent Republican is retiring and which provided a 55% to 45% margin in the last cycle, would be a far better target than a seat in which the incumbent Republican is running for re-election and also won by that same margin last time around.

The major impact of the races last week for the GOP, particularly the closely followed Georgia election, is that it may encourage more Republicans who may have thought of retiring to stick around (They told potential candidates that the world is not ending, yet), and may slightly discourage some Democrats from thinking 2018 is a sure thing to win a Republican-held seat, damaging the party’s candidate recruitment efforts.

Politics: Are you tired of it too? M. Mobley, M.D.

Day in and day out, one cannot pick up a newspaper or tune-in to TV news without reading or hearing about the latest effort by Democrats to bring down our duly-elected 45th president, Donald Trump. The vitriol that accompanies their efforts shows a level of incivility I haven’t seen before in my eight decades of life.

It was well established by many writers, yours truly included, that on Election Day, November 8, 2016, voters would uncomfortably choose between two seriously flawed candidates for president – Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – and one of them would win.

Looking back at Ronald Reagan’s campaign against Jimmy Carter, a sitting president in his fourth year presiding over the government of a country in economic straits worsened by high inflation, Reagan asked the voting public, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” There was general agreement that folks weren’t any better off and Carter was limited to one term.

Once the 2016 GOP and Democratic Conventions were over and presidential campaigns begun in earnest, the Reagan question resurfaced, highlighting President Obama’s 8 years in office, during which he had been unable to turn around high unemployment and the wretched economy he had inherited, despite Democratic control of both Houses of Congress augmented by a filibuster-proof Senate during his first two years. He did manage to double our nation’s debt, however. Hillary Clinton, a flawed candidate to begin with, chose a flawed platform to run on, which amounted to four more years of the Obama administration.

While Hillary was in essence saying that our country’s stagnation was the “new normal,” Trump, also a flawed candidate but a successful business man not of the Washington elites, was vowing to “Make America Great Again” by increasing jobs, restoring the economy, and resurrecting the American way. It was a winning platform.

In the short time Trump has been in the White House, he has had moderate success making good on some of his campaign promises. In addition to improving the economy and gaining jobs, the Trump agenda is also aimed at restoring the vision of the Founding Fathers, guaranteeing individual freedom and rights under a non-intrusive government while requiring individual responsibility under government that is protective of rights and fiscally responsible. And that is what the Democrats are up in arms about.

Democrats seem to see our future being assured by greater government dependency, bigger government and America being more like Western Europe. Under both Democratic and Republican administrations our country has been on a slow slide down that slippery slope. The Trump agenda seeks to put on the brakes, and the electorate appears to agree with him if recent special Congressional elections to fill empty seats are a yardstick.

How the Dems Burned $40 Mil to Lose 4 Elections and Scam Supporters $30 million for 1%. Daniel Greenfield

“It’s a bellwether for what the Democratic Party is going to be about,” Democratic National Committee boss Tom Perez boasted.

That was back in March and the Dems had just begun their frantic spending spree in Georgia’s Sixth. By the time it was over, Jon Ossoff, an awkward immature hipster who didn’t even live in the district, had raised $23.6 million and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee had burned through another $5 million. Other groups threw in around $2.6 million to achieve absolutely nothing.

$31 million had been spent and wasted on history’s most expensive congressional election. And the Dem experts congratulated themselves that they had lost by a smaller margin than in the past.

They had spent $30 million more than in their first special election in Kansas to gain a whole 1%.

Just as after their previous special election defeats, the charts and graphs came out comparing their performance to those of previous elections. Never mind that turnout differs dramatically during presidential and special elections. Or that spending $31 million to lose by 6 percent is a disaster.

What the Democrat Party really was going to be about was setting piles of money on fire.

In Montana, a quixotic bid by Rob Quist had garnered $5 million in donations and another $1 million in outside spending. Even after a stunt by a Guardian reporter caused the Republican candidate to lose many of his newspaper endorsements, Quist barely ended up with 44 percent.

The special election frenzy began in Kansas when the left decided that Rep. Mike Pompeo’s open seat might be winnable. After Trump’s victory, angry Dems decided to pour money into the campaign. Democrat James Thompson raised around $832,000, but Republican Ron Estes won by 7 percent.

Or single digits.

And the gold rush was on. The special election margin was compared to Trump’s margin of victory. The entrails and tea leaves were read. And the consultants declared it a referendum on Trump.

Millions from blue states flowed into special elections in red states to prove that Trump had lost public support. The deeper theory behind this spending spree was that setbacks in safe districts would lead the GOP to abandon Trump. And that played into feverish conspiracy theories about the 25th Amendment or Senate Republicans turning on Trump in time for impeachment that had gone mainstream on the left.

Losing Again, For the Same Reason Jon Ossoff’s loss in Georgia shows that the Democrats have failed to broaden their appeal. Henry Olsen

Democrats are despondent over Tuesday’s loss in the special election for Georgia’s sixth congressional district seat. Though this part of metro Atlanta is historically Republican, the national Democratic leadership had convinced itself that voter dislike of President Trump was enough to pull normally loyal Republicans into the Democratic column. They were wrong, and until they learn the error of their ways, they will continue to lose.

Winning the sixth congressional district was always going to be an uphill climb for Democrats because of the district’s strong GOP tilt. While Trump received a much lower share of the vote there than did 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney, he still beat Hillary Clinton, 48.3 percent to 46.8 percent; most of the remaining votes came from disaffected Republicans and independents who supported Libertarian Gary Johnson or wrote in other candidates, such as conservative Evan McMullin. Getting those voters to support a Democrat was a major challenge.

Democratic nominee Jon Ossoff had to do three things to win: mobilize and turn out Clinton voters; convince some Trump-voting Republicans either to back him or, more plausibly, stay home out of distaste for GOP nominee Karen Handel; and win about 60 percent of voters who had gone for Johnson or McMullin last year. Ossoff clearly accomplished his first task of motivating the Democratic base. Turnout was extraordinarily high for a special election: more than 259,000 people voted, compared with the 331,000 who voted in the presidential election. Ossoff’s 48.1 percent take was higher than Clinton’s showing. Voter apathy was not a problem for Democrats.

Ossoff clearly failed, though, to convince Trump voters to cross over or stay home. One reason Ossoff came so close to winning the district in the first round is that many Republicans, perhaps baffled by the dozen or so candidates, didn’t vote. But in the runoff, motivated by a clear choice between just two candidates and buoyed by millions of dollars in party get-out-the-vote money, GOP voters showed up: turnout in rock-ribbed Republican Cobb County was 79 percent of the proportion in November 2016, on par with turnout in DeKalb County, the bluest part of the district. Though Handel had barely made it to the runoff by winning just 20 percent of the vote in the first round, she easily consolidated her base when the choice came down to “R” or “D.”

Ossoff’s loss ultimately stemmed from his failure at the third task: persuading independents and never-Trumpers that he was the better choice. Third-party voters cast 4.9 percent of the vote in 2016, but Ossoff outperformed Clinton by only 1.3 percent. Since partisan turnout seems to have been about equal, this implies that Ossoff won by only about a quarter of the third-party supporters’ votes. Democrats hoped that he would do better, based on polls showing Trump’s low approval rating (less than 40 percent) among voters in the district. But Trump’s approval ratings were no better last November, and he still won because people who did not like either Trump or Clinton voted for him by a large margin. Apparently these mostly Republican voters remain willing to choose the Trump-backing GOP devil they know over the Democratic devil they don’t, even if they don’t like Trump himself.

The Real Georgia Lesson GOP success in Congress can overcome liberal Trump loathing.

Democrats thought they could pick up a GOP-leaning House seat by turning Tuesday’s special election in Georgia’s sixth congressional district into a referendum on the Trump Presidency. The lesson of the GOP’s four-percentage-point victory is that Republicans can preserve their congressional majority despite doubts about Donald Trump—if they deliver on their agenda.

Republicans staved off what the press would have portrayed as a catastrophe and portent of a GOP wipeout in next year’s midterm elections. And they did so with a weak candidate in Karen Handel, a former Georgia secretary of state who lost bids for Governor in 2010 and U.S. Senate in 2014.

Democrats thought they could steal the seat because it is full of the upscale, college-educated Republicans who dislike Mr. Trump. While Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price was re-elected last November by 23 points, Hillary Clinton came within two points of beating Mr. Trump. Democrats—who, by the way, favor limits on campaign spending—poured $31 million into the district to turn out liberal voters.

Yet Republicans managed to turn out their voters by portraying Jon Ossoff, a 30-year-old former congressional aide who doesn’t live in the district, as a foot soldier for Nancy Pelosi. Conservative voters showed they aren’t ready to hand the House back to Mrs. Pelosi whatever their doubts about Mr. Trump.

One immediate benefit is that the victory might deter some Republican retirements that would create more open seats in 2018 if they fear a Democratic wave. But Democrats are still likely to turn out in big numbers next year. The challenge for Republicans will be to give their voters a reason to match that liberal enthusiasm. That’s all the more reason to put accomplishments on the board that voters can see on health care, taxes and more.

As for Democrats, the defeat underlies the contradiction between the total resistance to Mr. Trump needed to win a primary and the centrist coloration needed to flip a GOP-leaning seat in areas like northern Virginia (held by Barbara Comstock ) and Upper Hudson Valley New York ( John Faso ). Mr. Ossoff energized progressives by promising “to make Trump furious.” After the primary he tacked to the middle by running as a fiscal conservative and against tax increases on the rich.

But by then Republicans were already defining him as a Pelosi pawn. It didn’t help that so much of his cash came from liberal redoubts like San Francisco or that he was endorsed by Bernie Sanders. Some groups on the left like MoveOn.org are now saying that the lesson from Mr. Ossoff’s defeat is that Democrats need to run as pure left-wing populists in 2018.

This left-center tension in the Democratic Party is likely to intensify, especially if the GOP racks up some policy victories, which could propel Democrats to nominate candidates who are too far left for the districts they need to win in 2018. But Republicans can’t afford complacency, and their best defense against an anti-Trump wave is legislative success.

Is Kamala Harris the Future of American Politics? We should all hope not. By Jonathan S. Tobin

Democrats may not have gotten everything they wanted out of a series of recent televised Senate Intelligence Committee hearings that ostensibly concerning Russian interference in the 2016 election. But as the party of the ‘resistance’ shifted its focus from alleged collusion between Moscow and Republicans to President Trump’s alleged obstruction of justice, the hearings also produced a new heroine for the anti-Trump Left.

Senator Kamala Harris emerged from confrontations with the three national intelligence chiefs and Attorney General Jeff Sessions with her reputation enhanced. Her manner of attack was praised and she was acclaimed as a victim of sexism on the part of her colleagues. Harris may lack the talent to fulfill her not-so-secret desire to emulate Barack Obama by parlaying a single unfinished term in the Senate into a successful presidential bid. But there’s no question that on the strength of these hearings, she can lay claim to a style that is the future of American politics: Her combination of incivility, bullying, and victimhood makes her the perfect reflection of our current moment.

Harris’s new celebrity stems from two incidents in which Republicans criticized her manner of questioning witnesses during an Intelligence Committee hearing. Her rapid-fire interrogation of Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein prompted Senator John McCain and then committee chair Richard Burr to reproofs in which she was cautioned to allow the witnesses to answer her questions. Harris clearly tried to bully both Sessions and Rosenstein, cutting them off as they spoke and not giving them a chance to speak before she moved on to a new insinuation. But you wouldn’t know it from reading the mainstream media or the liberal Twittersphere. As the New York Times headline on the incidents put it: “Kamala Harris Is (Again) Interrupted While Pressing a Senate Witness.”

The essence of the surge in support for Harris was not so much that she had scored points at the expense of either Rosenstein or Sessions as that she had been a victim of sexism if not racism. The headline of another, later Times article proclaimed that what had happened illustrated, “The Universal Phenomenon of Men Interrupting Women.” The intervention of Senators McCain and Burr was said to betray male contempt for women. Others, noting Harris’ multi-racial heritage, characterized the senators’ pushback as a defense of white privilege against the heroic efforts of minorities to be heard.

The exchanges turned Harris into a liberal star on Twitter, where an avalanche of support for her as a black women assailed by white men came crashing down in the days that followed. Sessions’s simpering confession that she was making him nervous was the icing on the cake; to her fans, it made her the newest “nasty woman,” a cause célèbre. Before the day was done, she was sending out a fundraising appeal to supporters that grandiloquently promised, “The women of the United States Senate will not be silenced when seeking the truth.”

Counter-terror Lessons from America’s Civil War By David P. Goldman

The essay below first appeared a year ago in The Asia Times, under the headline, “Why the terrorists are winning the intelligence war.” There’s a tried and true American approach to suppressing terrorism, and it worked quite well during Gen. Sherman’s 1863 Kentucky campaign and Gen. Phil Sheridan’s subsequent reduction of the Shenandoah Valley. We don’t have to be particularly smart; we merely have to do some disgusting things. Sherman and Sheridan suppressed sniping at Union soldiers by Confederate civilians by burning the towns (just the towns, not the townsfolk) that sheltered them. In other words, they forced collective responsibility upon a hostile population, a doctrine that in peacetime is entirely repugnant, but that in wartime becomes unavoidable. By contrast, the peacetime procedure of turning petty criminals into police snitches has backfired terribly. No doubt we will learn that the perpetrators of tonight’s horror at London Bridge were known to police, like the Manchester Arena suicide bomber and most of the perpetrators of large-scale terrorist acts in Europe during the past several years. (Update: “At Least One London Bridge Terrorist Was a ‘Known Wolf'”) The remedy is time-tested and straightforward. We merely require the will to apply it.

Why the terrorists are winning the intelligence war

Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.

The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015.
The terrorists, in other words, are adding insult to injury. By deploying police snitches as suicide attackers, terrorists assert their moral superiority and power over western governments. The message may be lost on the western public, whose security agencies and media do their best to obscure it, but it is well understood among the core constituencies of the terrorist groups: the superiority of Islam turns around the depraved criminals whom the western police send to spy on us, and persuades them to become martyrs for the cause of Islam.

These attacks, in other words, are designed to impress the Muslim public as much as they are intended to horrify the western public. In so many words, the terrorists tell Muslims that western police agencies cannot protect them. If they cooperate with the police they will be found out and punished. The West fears the power of Islam: it evinces such fear by praising Islam as a religion of peace, by squelching dissent in the name of fighting supposed Islamophobia, and by offering concessions and apologies to Muslims. Ordinary Muslims live in fear of the terror networks, which have infiltrated their communities and proven their ability to turn the efforts of western security services against them. They are less likely to inform on prospective terrorists and more likely to aid them by inaction.

The terrorists, in short, are winning the intelligence war, because they have shaped the environment in which intelligence is gathered and traded. But that is how intelligence wars always proceed: spies switch sides and tell their stories because they want to be with the winner. ISIS and al-Qaeda look like winners in the eyes of western Muslim populations after humiliating the security services of the West.

As a result, western European Muslims fear the terrorists more than they fear the police. The West will remain vulnerable to mass terror attacks until the balance of fear shifts in the other direction.