RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/democrats-running-for-president-crowded-field/

Twenty or so are going to end this presidential-election cycle deeply disappointed.

Every presidential primary ends with one winner and a lot of losers. Some might argue that one or two once-little-known candidates who overperform low expectations get to enjoy a form of moral victory. (Ben Carson and Rick Perry might be happy how the 2016 cycle ended, with both taking roles in Trump’s cabinet. Bernie Sanders might be, too.) But running for president and flopping is a deep disappointment, and while the occasional figure can emerge from a failed bid to move on to different victories — Lamar Alexander and Elizabeth Dole became senators, Jerry Brown became governor again, Howard Dean became chair of the Democratic National Committee — a lot of failed presidential candidates fade away into the private sector and obscurity beyond occasional cable-news appearances: Bill Bradley, Tommy Thompson, Wesley Clark, Dick Gephardt, Alan Keyes, Bob Graham, Bill Richardson, Evan Bayh, Michele Bachmann.

The 2020 Democratic primary is going to end with about 23 campaigns falling short of actual victory and any moral victories. Perhaps two candidates will end up in a unity ticket, and perhaps one or two will have set themselves up for another run for another office someday. But the coming year will bring a lot of anticlimax, frustration, and disillusionment for a lot of once-promising figures in the party.

Here are the 24 Democratic presidential candidates, more or less in order of their position, although outside the top four or five, the ranking barely matters.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/21/kamalas-contradictions/

Kamala Harris, the junior U.S. senator from California who is battling among some two-dozen other candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, didn’t have much of a career before 1994. That was the year she became the new “steady” of California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, a man who is a full 30 years her senior. In a process of poontronage, Brown appointed Harris to lucrative sinecures in state government and raised money for her successful run for San Francisco district attorney.

Harris went on to win election as state attorney general in 2010, even though the Sacramento Bee endorsed her Republican rival, Steve Cooley. (So much for the power of endorsements!) In 2016, Brown urged former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to drop out of the U.S. Senate race, and his former steady went on to win the November election handily. Harris now wants to be president, but she is hardly the only Willie Brown understudy on the rise.

In 1995, a year after he met Harris, Brown encountered fundraiser Carolyn Carpeneti, an elegant blond of 32, and the two became romantically involved. In fact, the pair had a daughter in 2001, when Carpeneti was 38 and Brown 67. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted in 2003, “people familiar with her career—political professionals, city officials, her ex-husband—say Carpeneti’s success is rooted in her relationship with Brown.”

Over a five-year period, groups controlled by Brown paid $2.3 million to Carpeneti, recently granted a sweetheart no-bid deal to recruit for California’s online college project. As Dan Morain noted in CALmatters, the person who selected Carpeneti, Heather Hiles, “is connected to San Francisco politics, having overseen communications for Gov. Gavin Newsom while he was running to succeed Brown as mayor of San Francisco in 2003.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/21/democrats-bear-hug-socialism-while-biden-tries-to-win-as-a-centrist/

Joe Biden is trying to capture his party’s nomination by running as a centrist, and early polls seem to suggest that it’s working. But,
in his run for the presidency, he will face one formidable opponent — his own party.

A new Gallup Poll finds that a shockingly high 70% of Democrats say that socialism is “a good thing.” When Gallup asked about socialism just one year ago, 57% said they have a positive view of socialism. And last year’s poll was the first to find majority support for socialism among Democrats, according to Gallup’s Frank Newport.

Half of Democrats now say that government should be “primarily responsible” for the overall economy. Seventy percent say it should be primarily responsible for health care. Nearly two–thirds want higher education to be primarily the responsibility of the government.

In all of these views, Democrats are far outside the mainstream.

Support for socialism collapses outside the Democratic party bubble. Among independents, 45% think it’s a good idea, and for Republicans, it’s 13%. The only age group that embraces socialism is young people (58% of those in the 18-34 age bracket) who are too uneducated or naïve to know what socialism actually means.

When it comes to the government being responsible for the overall economy, health care, and higher education, Democrats are similarly in far left field. Just 35% of independents think government should be primarily responsible for the economy, 47% for health care, and 40% for higher education.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/20/michigans-amash-lets-the-stupid-be-the-enemy-of-the-good/

In a series of tweets on Saturday, Amash declared that “Contrary to Barr’s portrayal, Mueller’s report reveals that President Trump engaged in specific actions and a pattern of behavior that meet the threshold for impeachment.”

In opining that President Trump has committed impeachable offenses, Amash is all alone among GOP members of Congress, disgracefully echoing the very worst, most socialistic Democrats. And it gets worse, with Amash accusing Attorney General William Barr of lying to protect the President.

It’s ironic in the extreme for someone who fancies himself a purist libertarian, with an absolutist interpretation of First Amendment freedom of speech, to call a distinguished, two-time AG’s considered opinions lies, simply because it suits his purposes to disagree.

So absolutist is Amash on speech that shortly after Trump’s election he couldn’t restrain himself from responding to the President-elect’s tweet condemning flag burning. “Nobody should burn the American flag,” Amash wrote, repeating Trump’s words exactly, then adding: “but our Constitution secures our right to do so. No president is allowed to burn the First Amendment.”

The ratifiers of the Bill of Rights in 1791 would have held open the door of the prison cell as law enforcement incarcerated someone desecrating Old Glory. No doubt Amash would accuse them too of burning what they brought into being.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/mueller-report-democrats-impeachment-theater/

T he House Democrats are frustrated, very frustrated.

They’ve gotten themselves entangled in procedural disputes with the Trump administration that no one particularly cares about and that might be litigated for a very long time.

A Washington Post report over the weekend spelled out how stymied Democrats feel and that they are considering, via the power of inherent contempt, fining or arresting people who are defying their subpoenas.

This is very unlikely to happen, obviously. A New York Times report a few days ago on the Democrats’ exasperation said they might consider having hearings with empty chairs. Oh, the drama.

Jerry Nadler, per the Times, “conceded that the White House strategy had thus far succeeded in tamping down energy around the Mueller report and investigations.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/whats_mitt_romneys_problem.html

After taking President Trump’s endorsement to get himself elected senator, Mitt Romney has made quite a show of turning on Trump.

The last two incidents have been notable:

He declared GOP “maverick” congressman Justin Amash “courageous” for joining the Democrats and calling for the impeachment of President Trump in the House.

He also made this ad hominem attack on Trump over the weekend, playing Puritan for us:

On Sunday, Romney was back at it, attacking the president’s character. “I think he could substantially improve his game when it comes to helping shape the character of the country,” Romney said on CNN.

“I think young people, as well as people around the world, look at the president of the United States and say, ‘Does he exhibit the kind of qualities that we would want to emulate?’ And those are qualities of humility, of honesty, integrity, and those are things where I think there’s been some call, where the president has distanced himself from some of the best qualities of the human character.”

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/16/a-do-one-thing

Reacting to their angrily-energized and ever-leftward-moving base, congressional Democrats, with their House of Representatives majority, seek President Donald Trump’s head. But they may find themselves the victim of their own guillotine.

The 112th and 113th Congresses, convening from 2011 to 2014, saw the fewest number of laws enacted in the modern era. And it’s no mystery why: one party controlled the Executive and the House of Representatives, while the other controlled the Senate. Unlike during the Nixon and Ford era when conservatism was dormant, there lay precious little public policy common ground between Big-Government Democrats and economic growth-loving Republicans.

Compare the GOP majorities of both houses of the 115th Congress, joining with Trump to cut tax rates on personal and corporate income, reduce the regulatory burden on business, open access to new domestic energy resources in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate. The boost in economic growth and expansion in employment since make it hard to withhold credit.

Compare also the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in the 111th Congress, which with Democrats also in control of the House and the presidency enacted Obamacare, a massive fiscal stimulus, and the Dodd-Frank banking regulatory regime.

The obvious conclusion is that with such disparity in aims between a Republican Party under conservative free-market dominance and Democrats who are evermore socialist-friendly, little happens under divided rule.

This fact was never more apparent than on September 8, 2011, a low point for the Barack Obama presidency, when it was so clear that his massive fiscal stimulus was failing to turn the economy around, he arranged a special address to a Joint Session of Congress to push yet another stimulus.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/pete_buttigieg_takes_aim_at_thomas_jefferson.html

With few Confederate statues left to topple, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg thinks it’s now time to take out Thomas Jefferson.

Look at the jackassery he displays in this interview with Hugh Hewitt, reported by the Daily Caller:

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg says Americans should not be honoring Thomas Jefferson by naming events and places after the founding father.

The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” Friday and said he believes removing — not celebrating — Jefferson is “the right thing to do.”

The subject came up when Buttigieg was asked about the name of the annual Indiana Democratic dinner that used to commemorate the statues of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson within the party, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

“Well, let’s go to policy now—a very blunt question because you talk about going to every Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Indiana when you were running statewide. Should Jefferson-Jackson dinners be renamed everywhere because both were holders of slaves?” Hewitt asked.

“Yeah, we’re doing that in Indiana. I think it’s the right thing to do,” Buttigieg said. “Over time, you develop and evolve on the things you choose to honor … Jefferson is more problematic. There’s a lot of course to admire in his thinking and his philosophy, but then again if you plunge into his writings, especially the notes on the state of Virginia, you know that he knew slavery was wrong.”

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/the-coming-democrat-civil-war/

“I’m not a member of any organized political party — I’m a Democrat,” Will Rogers is supposed to have quipped nearly a century ago, but his assessment has never been truer than it is right now.

Early polls show former Vice President Joe Biden — who first ran for president when I was a freshman in college; I’m now 50 — with a commanding lead, and that has some Democrats very upset. A recent Fox News poll shows Biden up 2-to-1 over nearest rival (and fellow Old White Dude) Bernie Sanders, 35-17. That puts Biden up a couple of points and Bernie down six since March.

But is Biden really the candidate Democrats crave?

Writer and Progressive activist Touré went on quite the Twitter rant this morning, arguing that “it’s a mistake to take progressive voters for granted and think they’ll all come out based on Trump-hatred.” He’s calling for a more radical approach than Seemingly Safe Joe is willing to offer, and that the nominee needs to excite the party’s Progressive wing: “Thinking ‘the left is in the bag,’ is a path to defeat. Serving the base has got to be priority #1. Not winning over the middle.”

And Touré is hardly alone.

https://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/politics/444173-the-gops-commitment-to-electing-talented-women-can-help-party

West Virginia’s other Representatives are Republican and up for re-election in 2020 as is Rep. Miller who is in her first term. The Senators are Joe Manchin a Democrat and really good and independent person, who is up for reelection in 2024 and Shelley Capito a Republican who will be an incumbent candidate in 2020…..rsk

As the 2020 campaign season starts up, a narrative that many in the media like to discuss is a supposed problem within the Republican party with electing women. As the only new female Republican in the U.S. House of Representatives, in my experience, that couldn’t be further from the truth. During my campaign, I received support from many people. I met terrific, dynamic Republican women around the country who shared my goals – to make our country a better place to live, work, and raise a family, now and for generations to come.

The one story that has not been written, is that so many talented Republican female candidates faced unprecedented opposition in order to keep us out of Congress. The hundreds of millions of dollars spent to increase the barriers for Republican women to serve their country in the U.S. House of Representatives was very calculated and effective. It was disappointing and destructive. As liberal groups replenish their coffers to once again target Republican women, the media continues to attack and undermine those working hardest and making a real difference to elect Republican women – groups like Winning for Women. Despite the constant negativity, we remain optimistic and undeterred.