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https://twitter.com/BearUKnow/status/1217699011915866112
Daniel Henninger:
“…The traditional view of African-American voters supporting the Democratic Party could be upended by three recent polls, which show growing support for President Trump among black voters. What if in November enough black Americans voted for Donald Trump to re-elect him into the presidency?
This unlikely straw has been in the political winds recently because in three opinion polls—Emerson, Marist and Rasmussen—President Trump registered about 30% support among black voters.
Asked to respond by, former Hillary Clinton adviser Joel Payne said: “I have a better chance of jumping center for the Celtics tonight than Donald Trump having 30% support in the African-American community.” He may get the call.
The reason this unlikely 30% number breaks the seals in Democratic heads is that for years it has been a rule of thumb in politics that if black support for Republicans ever reached 20% of the total vote, a Democratic presidential candidate would not be able to win, ever.
A Gallup analysis of the Roper Center’s exit poll data has Republican candidates averaging about 10% of the black vote since 1976. In 2016, Mr. Trump topped out at 8%. Still, one wonders if Mr. Trump’s potential pull from black and Hispanic voters may be the sleeper issue of the 2020 campaign, the way conventional wisdom missed the 2016 Trump vote in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
One anecdote: I was walking through a neighborhood food court in Manhattan last month and noticed a new counter that sells smoked fish. Behind it, learning the operation, were five employees—all in their 20s and all black or Hispanic. A thought occurred to me: That’s the Trump economy. That is the reality behind the monthly jobs numbers. An entrepreneur got a loan to open this small business and gave these five what looked like their first jobs. Also reported in the past two years is how workers in their first or second jobs are moving up the pay scale into higher-level jobs…”
I'm a fighter pilot, I call it like it is and that's what I did today. pic.twitter.com/2PHc1fo2xo
— Martha McSally (@MarthaMcSally) January 17, 2020
Post Editorial Board:
“…Democrats’ strategy for the Senate impeachment trial is apparently to turn it into a never-ending Senate investigation — even though that was supposed to be the House’s job.
Start with the General Accounting Office opinion that Team Trump’s temporary hold on aid to Ukraine constitutes a violation of the law. Maybe — but the GAO is no kind of court or other legal authority. If this was a real issue, the House could’ve raised it long ago. “We forgot” is just an old Steve Martin joke.
Then there’s the claim that assertions by Rudy Giuliani crony — well, ex-crony — Lev Parnas just plain compel the Senate to consider “new evidence” and call witnesses to get to the bottom of the Ukraine affair.
Rudy looks pretty foolish, and sleazy, for ever associating with this guy. But Parnas is facing federal indictments and plainly figures his best bet to skip prison is to win an immunity deal by confirming every conceivable anti-Trump suspicion. His “evidence” is mainly his own handwritten notes — written when? Can he prove that?
All this is starting to seem like a farcical replay of the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, which had wrapped up until Democrats decided to play the Christine Blasey Ford card. That prompted a media furor that led to excruciating extra hearings, which changed no one’s mind. Then they pushed for more hearings about other, even less substantial charges. Even the now-disgraced Michael Avenatti got into the act.
The House is supposed to finish its investigation before sending the case to the Senate — not demand the Senate do the real work. What’s to prevent Adam Schiff & Co. from coming up with more Parnases (and Avenattis) to stretch this out for months?
As former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy notes, a regular court facing this sort of stunt would stop the trial until the prosecution actually finished its investigation.
Two months ago, Democrats insisted the president was such a danger to the country that they didn’t dare take time to build a stronger case. Now they’re eager to keep the case going … forever: Just keep building up ever more fog.
As a bonus, the strategy leaves the Senate unable to do any other work, such as confirming more judges. It also keeps Chief Justice John Roberts from doing his normal work at the Supreme Court.
The Senate must reject Democrats’ “endless overtime” approach. Either send the articles of impeachment back to the House, marked “incomplete,” or just move straight to a final vote after the opening arguments…”
F-35A Lightning IIs from the active duty 388th and Reserve 419th Fighter Wings taxi during an F-35A Combat Power Exercise at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, Jan. 6, 2020.
Senate Asks Pelosi If She Can Send Over Copy Of Impeachment Articles Without Wine Stains All Over It https://t.co/BXMmDSdVqP
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 15, 2020
Can you guess which party recently captured control of both state houses?
It looks like Trump’s policies are working.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Andrew Weissmann, one of the lead prosecutors in the special counsel’s probe, will speak at a New York University event Thursday about reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The event, called “Reforming the FISA Process: Proposals for the Future,” will address a report from the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general (IG), which found that the FBI made “significant” errors and omissions in its applications for FISA warrants against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
McCabe had a front-row seat to the FISA failures that will be discussed at the event.
He was the second-in-charge at the FBI when the bureau submitted false information to the FISA court in order to wiretap Page. He signed off on the third FISA renewal, dated June 29, 2017, when he served as acting director of the FBI.
McCabe was also briefed regularly on Crossfire Hurricane, the code name for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.
Just a reminder we live in a bubble. @RepAdamSchiff was the answer on @Jeopardy question tonight, with his picture, and no one knew who he was. pic.twitter.com/VtqHpEQfXF
— Jeremy Art (@jeremyart) January 16, 2020
Trump calls Schiff Pencil Neck, among other things.
The sound you heard after last night’s #DemDebate was the Democrat Media realizing President @realDonaldTrump will dominate any one of their candidates in November.#FourMoreYears pic.twitter.com/1KlEjTVwlq
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) January 16, 2020
Kurt Schlichter:
“…Communist curmudgeon Bernie Sanders is having his moment, threatening to actually win some of the early primaries and maybe even the nomination. This is bad, at least for the Democrats, since the idea of a weird crusty admitted socialist as their candidate is problematic – the problem being Americans aren’t insanely stupid enough to elect this guy president.
We hope.
Also note that I am excluding Vermont, New York and California from that statement, if you have somehow confused those mutant provinces with America.
But with Bernie rising in the polls, and his poisonous ideology gathering steam among the Democrat base, can we really laugh off this Soviet Union-loving crank?…”
I & I Editorial Board:
“…The left had another apoplectic fit when President Donald Trump started talking about dishwashers at his Milwaukee rally this week. How dare he focus on something so trivial when House Democrats are busy trying to remove him from office.
But Trump is on to something, and the fact that the liberal elites can’t understand what it is says more about them than it does about Trump.
“Anybody have a new dishwasher?” Trump asked the audience on Tuesday. “I’m sorry for that, it’s worthless. They give you so little water. … So what happens? You end up using it 10 times … then you take them out and do them the old fashioned way, right?”
Trump said that he’s “approving new dishwashers that give you more water so you can actually wash and rinse your dishes without having to do it 10 times.”
“It’s inelegant to talk about it, right? Right? Isn’t it inelegant? I’m talking about dishwashers.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has brought up the impact government energy efficiency mandates have had on dishwashers. But this time, the pundit class responded as if he’d just committed another impeachable offense…
…Not everybody understands that these annoyances are the result of mandates handed down by a few unelected bureaucrats sitting in cubicles in Washington, D.C. By exposing the link, Trump has a better chance of creating legions of small-government advocates than he would by lecturing audiences about Adam Smith.
Just as important, Trump’s dishwasher diatribe exposes just how out of touch today’s liberal elites are with middle America. The more they sneer about how nuts Trump is to bring dishwashers and lightbulbs up, the better Trump looks to the voters who will determine the outcome of the 2020 election…”
Steve Cortes:
“…President Trump returned to Wisconsin as a confident, even triumphal, commander-in-chief. In 2016, he worked relentlessly to flip the state and other supposedly unwinnable ones in the upper Midwest, tearing asunder the Democrats’ assumed “blue wall” of electoral fortification. Through campaign hustle and policy prescriptions that put workers first, he proved that many Obama voters in places like Wisconsin could be persuaded to join the Republican movement, so long as it championed American nationalism, particularly in the spheres of trade and jobs.
Returning to the Badger State as the sitting president — indeed, in the very city where Democrats will hold their nominating convention this summer — he powerfully made the case that the Trump Boom has delivered results to the very voters who vaulted him into the White House. Blue-collar workers thrive in America, at last. By every relevant measure, wages advance fastest now for the economic underdogs, the strivers. American workers who lagged during the tepid Obama recovery now surge to the lead with, for example, 6% wage growth for non-high school graduates, a pace of expansion three times better than during Obama’s second term. In fact, per Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s analysis, the wage growth differential for the lowest quartile of earners has exploded to relative outperformance levels unseen since the 1990s. Because of this broadening prosperity, an amazing 40 million fewer Americans no longer reside in households receiving government assistance, compared to just three years ago.
President Trump’s Midwestern audiences benefit mightily from such opportunity. Unlike the Obama years, which narrowly rewarded already-successful populations largely residing on America’s coasts, between 2016 and 2018 the number of workers earning $200,000 or more annually increased 17% in Michigan and 10% in Iowa. In addition to economic success, President Trump rightly crowed to the heartland audience about America’s new trajectory vs. enemies abroad. The surgical military strike against the terrorist menace Qassem Soleimani eliminated a deadly threat to American lives and, like the prior al-Baghdadi raid, proved that the United States stands ready to kill dangerous adversaries abroad without initiating disastrous invasions and the concomitant nation-building. The Trump Doctrine of realism and restraint abroad resonates across the war-weary Midwest. Indeed, the president’s anti-intervention stance helped secure his 2016 victory in these very states, according to a compelling statistical analysis by Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen.
As the UW-Milwaukee arena pulsed with the rock concert-like fervor unique to a Trump rally, a political wake of sorts unfolded Tuesday night at Drake University, site of the CNN Democratic debate. My CNN colleague, Democrat Van Jones, conceded that the event displayed the excitement of “cold oatmeal.” He further observed that “the Democrats are going to have to do better than what we saw tonight” and that no one on stage “would be able to take Trump out.”
Indeed, the debate revealed a party devoid of compelling ideas and a corporate media bereft of journalistic credibility. Among the candidates, the only real competition revolved around just how much federal intrusion into private health care is enough. Instead, these Democratic debates should offer serious fireworks. After all, the canyon-sized gap between the AOC “Squad” wing of the party and the establishment types like Joe Biden should produce fiercely contentious political cage matches. Instead, these snooze-fests resemble pillow fights. Such training will hardly prepare the eventual nominee to face a brawler like President Trump, who has hardened his skills versus adversaries ranging from Democrats in the House of Representatives to the Chinese Communist Party to the corporate media…”
Insightful article by Conrad Black. I agree with most of it.