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U.S. Marine Corps Bell AH-1Z Viper aircraft maneuver towards a target in support of the culminating event of the Tactical Air Control Party course 1-20 at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, Twentynine Palms, Calif., Dec. 18.
.@AOC on America’s rags-to-riches ideal: “It’s a physical impossibility to lift yourself up by a bootstrap, by your shoelaces? It’s physically impossible. The whole thing is a joke.” pic.twitter.com/9WNf8UE06T
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) February 6, 2020
Dumb. She is an elected official making laws for the American citizens. She reminds me of Hank Johnson:
Could not happen soon enough. This should be followed with a thorough cleansing of Obama holdovers.
Washington Examiner Editorial:
“…more ominous for Democrats is the mediocre turnout in the first nomination battle, which took place before anybody knew of the counting nightmare to come.
Back in 2008, Democrats were desperate to retake the White House after two terms of President George W. Bush, and they were inspired by Barack Obama’s message of hope and change. That year, 240,000 Iowans came out to caucus as Obama bested Hillary Clinton and John Edwards en route to the presidency. Going into 2020, Democrats thought they had a chance to challenge that turnout record. All over the sate, they prepared for turnout that would meet or exceed the 2008 numbers. Instead, the turnout was in line with the tepid 170,000 number from 2016.
But that alone understates the problem. For in 2016, there were effectively only two competitive candidates, and the contest took place the eighth and final year of a Democratic presidency. Partisans should have, in theory, been less energized than they are now, given that they have a hated Republican president to remove.
Yet turnout proved disappointing — despite the urgency of defeating Trump; despite dozens of Democratic candidates crisscrossing Iowa; despite tens of millions of dollars spent to drive turnout; despite saturation media coverage of the caucuses in the state. Consider that Pete Buttigieg’s final rally before voting attracted 400 members of the media. Also, for the first time, the Democratic Party allowed Iowans temporarily living in other states or abroad to participate in “satellite caucuses.” It wasn’t enough to increase turnout over 2016…
…Trump packed in more than 7,000 people in at his Des Moines event ahead of the caucus, with an overflow crowd watching his rally on a big screen outside the arena. Without any serious challenger, he still got 31,000 Iowans to show up and vote for him in the Republican caucus, winning a stunning 97% of the vote. That significantly outpaces the 25,000 people who turned out when Obama ran uncontested for reelection in 2012…”
ICYMI…pic.twitter.com/QLrN8Tlj1h
— Liz Harrington (@realLizUSA) February 6, 2020
— KidRock (@KidRock) February 5, 2020
Conrad Black:
“…Though we are all unlicensed psychiatrists, I will not try to read Romney’s mind on this one. He may have managed the complicated procedure of convincing himself that an innocuous conversation with the president of Ukraine was a breach of President Trump’s constitutional duties on a scale that justified his removal from office. If so, he is a mentally disturbed person doubtfully qualified even to sit alone as a pariah in the Senate, like Joseph R. McCarthy after he was censured in 1954.
From February 5, 2020, onward, Romney is a political outcast—a briefly useful idiot for the defeated Democrats and a traitor to the party he once led in a presidential election…
…Romney is too intelligent to believe that his vote would influence anyone or lead to anything but a political death sentence from the president who commands the support of over 90 percent of Republicans. His awkward, tortuous, drenchingly pious delivery, with frequent references to his religiosity and to God directly, convey what an apotheosis he went through to produce this preposterous vote. It was a gratuitously politically self-destructive act, for no apparent purpose, except to get something off his chest that he could no longer withhold: his hatred of Donald Trump…
…Romney has walked out the portals of political relevance on a lost cause that had no business coming to a vote at all, for reasons of hatred he has tried to disguise as righteousness, and in the company of unmitigated scoundrels and liars in the opposing party who cooked up this phony impeachment. Most people could respect Romney committing an act of hate and calling it that; I am not qualified to advise Senator Romney on the Scriptures, but Ecclesiastes does state “There is a time to hate.” Many would consider him entitled to it. But to swaddle himself in godliness while committing such a vile, false, and futile act, makes no sense, and is, in addition, profoundly dishonest…”
More @Gallup #MAGA: Record economic optimism under @realDonaldTrump, better than Reagan, Clinton, Obama, at a 44-year high — and economic gloom a record low — in the latest survey that shows Americans are cheering their best personal economy in decades. https://t.co/3SRUbeEnvn pic.twitter.com/HWo6dXZu1T
— Paul Bedard (@SecretsBedard) February 5, 2020
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2020
“…Twitter has locked the account of conservative journalist James O’Keefe for publishing publicly available evidence that a pair of radical leftists with violent fantasies work for the Bernie Sanders campaign. While O’Keefe’s tweets are still visible, he can’t publish anything new on the platform until he deletes a post which violates Twitter’s rules against “posting private information.”…”
Hat tip to Kane
As the presiding officer, it was my duty to instruct the Sergeant at Arms to usher the House Impeachment Managers out of the Senate chamber. 👋 👋 pic.twitter.com/ucdd4fRnD8
— Sen. Marsha Blackburn (@MarshaBlackburn) February 5, 2020
Don’t act like Democrats
.@RepMattGaetz says he will be filing ethics charges against Speaker Pelosi for destroying “official records” when she tore up Pres. Trump’s #SOTU speech
pic.twitter.com/xurHHsERbI— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 6, 2020
Washington Examiner:
“…President Trump is absolutely sitting on top of the world. This is the highest point of his presidency so far.
Consider what has happened in the last four days, and the reasons become clear. On Saturday, Republican senators stuck together. In voting not to prolong a farcical Senate trial with a predetermined outcome, they refused to honor the politically motivated impeachment that House Democrats brought on a flimsy pretext.
On Sunday, the Trump campaign aired ads during the Super Bowl. He advertised to a politically mixed sports crowd, but the point of the ads was not to rile up his base the way most candidates do during primary season. No, he was doing something Republicans so often talk about and so seldom do: He was reaching out to black voters, just as he would do later in his State of the Union speech, and he was doing it for real, based on actual legislative accomplishments in the area of criminal justice reform.
On Monday night, in Iowa, Trump’s political rivals fumbled away one of the best public relations moments they built into their election calendar. Given the chance to emerge from the first-in-the-nation caucuses with a front-runner and momentum enough to consolidate their party, Democrats instead failed to produce a numerical result for at least 24 hours. The results from their unexpectedly low-turnout contest are still being tallied, but the moment is now gone. Their nominating field is in chaos, and only one thing seems certain: Joe Biden, supposedly the strongest candidate to take on Trump in 2020, is wounded, perhaps mortally, by what is looking like a distant fourth-place finish.
On the same night, Trump won the Iowa Republican caucuses with more than 97% of the vote. This demonstrated emphatically that there exists no serious opposition to his candidacy within the Republican Party. If Democrats are divided, Republicans have never been so united.
As if to underscore this fact, Gallup released a poll on Tuesday showing Trump with a 94% job approval rating among Republican respondents, but, even more importantly, the survey showed him with a 49% rating among all voters, the highest of his presidency, and a 63% approval rating for his handling of the economy, up 6 points since November. A majority approved of his recent action against top Iranian terrorists in Iraq, and the share of people “satisfied with the way things are going in the U.S.” is at its highest point since 2005.
Mind you, this poll was taken during Trump’s impeachment trial and before his State of the Union speech.
Then, on Tuesday night, Trump delivered the speech. From the dais, he looked down on the very House Democrats who impeached him frivolously. He addressed the very Democratic senators who will vote out of partisan loyalty to remove him from office.
“Jobs are booming, incomes are soaring, poverty is plummeting, crime is falling, confidence is surging, and our country is thriving and highly respected again,” he said. “The years of economic decay are over,” he said. “Our economy is the best it’s ever been.”
Trump described his agenda as “relentlessly pro-worker, pro-family, pro-growth, and, most of all, pro-American.” He recited one economic accomplishment after another: the lifting of 10 million people out of welfare, the record low levels of black poverty and unemployment, the surge in job creation far over and above all projections made during the Obama era, etc. It’s as if he were saying to those Democrats, “Go ahead. Impeach this. Vote to remove this from office. I dare you.”
Tomorrow, Trump will be acquitted in the Senate impeachment trial, which is what a majority wants, again, according to Gallup’s poll. For the next nine months, he will boast that the vote to acquit him constitutes his exoneration. He will argue that Democrats’ socialist policies threaten to plunge the nation back into economic weakness and foreign policy chaos.
Trump has never had it better. His approval rating was at its highest point before the speech. It may rise yet afterward. His opponents are divided and confused, and the economy continues to run strong. As long as it does so, it will be making the best possible case for his reelection.
Did Democrats ever expect impeachment to turn out like this?…”