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November 2018

A Green Ballot Trouncing Voters reject a carbon tax, energy mandates and drilling restrictions.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-green-ballot-trouncing-1541719310?cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=cx&cx_artPos=2&cx_tag=collabctx&cx_navSource=newsReel#cxrecs_s

Tuesday’s election highlighted that more voters like Donald Trump’s policies than like him. Consider this week’s voter embrace of Mr. Trump’s pro-growth energy positions, via nationwide rejection of initiatives to raise energy costs.

Most notable was Washington State’s defeat of a carbon tax for the second time in two years. Climate activists designed the 2016 measure to be “revenue neutral” in hopes of masking the costs but still lost big. This time they aimed to win over progressives by promising to earmark carbon tax revenue for green subsidies and other spending.

The tax would have raised gas prices by 13 cents a gallon in 2020 and 59 cents a gallon by 2035—in a state that already has some of the highest gas prices in the country. While Seattle residents bought it, suburban and rural voters killed the measure 56%-44%.

Colorado voters rejected (57%-43%) a ballot measure that would have shut down most new oil and gas exploration. Proposition 112 would have banned such exploration within 2,500 feet of any structure deemed a “vulnerable area” by the state or local government—which would have meant most of the state.

A Common Sense Policy Roundtable analysis estimated a $218 billion hit to Colorado’s GDP from 2018-2030, and Democratic Governor John Hickenlooper warned that strangling an industry that accounts for 15% to 20% of the state economy could trigger a recession. Democratic Gov.-elect Jared Polis has supported drilling limits in the past, though even he opposed Prop 112. We’ll see if he and the all-Democratic state Legislature continue to heed voters.

Jeff Sessions’ Successor Firing Robert Mueller would be a political mistake.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-sessions-successor-1541635200

EXCERPT

Mr. Trump does have a point that Mr. Sessions’ recusal compromised his leadership of the department and made it harder to exert supervision over the FBI.

Mr. Sessions’ temporary successor will be the AG’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, who presumably will hold the job until a successor is nominated. It is important that the White House get this one right.

The Attorney General shouldn’t fire Mr. Mueller, as the President essentially said himself at his Wednesday news conference. Mr. Trump needs an individual of stature and judgment who will have the trust of the department’s lawyers, who is capable of independence, but who also understands that the Justice Department is part of the executive branch and not a law unto itself.

We are former attorneys general. We salute Jeff Sessions.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/jeff-sessions-can-look-back-on-a-job-well-done/2018/11/07/527e5830-e2cf-11e8-8f5f-a55347f48762_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.893959254b9d

By William P. Barr ,
Edwin Meese III and
Michael B. Mukasey

William P. Barr was attorney general from 1991 to 1993. Edwin Meese III was attorney general from 1985 to 1988. Michael B. Mukasey was U.S. attorney general from 2007 to 2009.

Serving as U.S. attorney general is the honor and the challenge of a lifetime.

We are three former attorneys general who served in Republican administrations — from different backgrounds, with different perspectives and who took different actions while in office.

But we share the view that Jeff Sessions, who resigned at President Trump’s request on Wednesday, has been an outstanding attorney general.

Each of us has known Sessions over many years. All of us thought his record — as a U.S. attorney for 12 years, as a state attorney general, as a respected U.S. senator for 20 years — made him a nominee of unexcelled experience. As important, his deep commitment to the Justice Department and its mission made him a nominee of unexcelled temperament.

By any measure, he has fulfilled the promise of those qualifications.

Sessions took office after the previous administration’s policies had undermined police morale, with the spreading “Ferguson effect” causing officers to shy away from proactive policing out of fear of prosecution. Steep declines in the rate of violent crime from 1992 to 2014 were reversed in the last administration’s final two years, with violent crime generally up 7 percent, assault 10 percent, rape nearly 11 percent and murder 21 percent. Opioid abuse skyrocketed. Many people were concerned that the hard-won progress of earlier years would be lost.

Sessions made sure that didn’t happen. He reinstituted the charging practices that had been used against drug dealers before 2008. He leveraged the power of big data to locate those who were stealing taxpayer dollars and flooding the streets with opioids and other painkillers.

Casting Out a Man of Honor and Achievement By firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, President Trump puts his own agenda at risk. Heather Mac Donald

https://www.city-journal.org/

President Donald Trump has finally sacked Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The only upside to this development is that it ends the grotesque public humiliation of a man of honor and courage. Trump persuaded himself that Sessions was fungible, in order to justify scapegoating him for the special counsel investigation into alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump presidential campaign. Trump was wrong about Sessions’s disposability, and wrong to blame him for the appointment of a special counsel, which was triggered by Trump’s own impetuous firing of FBI director James Comey. Now that same willfulness threatens the Trump agenda and, possibly, the integrity of the justice system itself.

Trump won the presidency by promising to restore the rule of immigration law after decades of bipartisan neglect. Sessions, serving as a senator from Alabama in 2016, was uniquely positioned to do so. No politician had devoted as much time to documenting the corrosive effects of low-skilled mass immigration on the country’s working class. Sessions was a nationalist long before Trump came on the scene. He knew the myriad tactics through which the nation’s career bureaucrats and immigration advocates had abetted mass illegal entry, and set out to block them. As attorney general, he used every lawful tool available to his office to fight the sanctuary-city movement, whereby local jurisdictions openly defy the federal government’s efforts to protect the public from illegal-alien criminals. Scofflaw cities and states across the country responded with a spate of lawsuits against Sessions; left-wing judges slapped the Justice Department with questionable nationwide injunctions to protect the sanctuary jurisdictions. Sessions sued right back. Sheriffs, the closest to the ground when it comes to public sentiment about law enforcement, understood what was at stake. “Jeff Sessions has probably been the most effective attorney general in the eyes of law enforcement in our nation’s history,” National Sheriffs’ Association executive director Jonathan Thompson told the Huffington Post in August 2018.

Christopher Carr A Famously Qualified ‘Victory’

http://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2018/11/famously-qualified-victory/

“In the aftermath of the downfall of the Soviet empire, it was said that the last refuge of Marxism were the universities’ sociology departments. The leftist messianic impulse soon revived and cultural Marxism has become entrenched in universities in the US, here and elsewhere. White middle class millennials have been infected. In the United States and elsewhere, we have an increased voting bloc of the supposedly educated who are oblivious to history and yet to be mugged by reality.”

Trump hailed the midterm results as a triumph, which perhaps better reflects his tendency to exaggerate than the fact of the matter. Yes, the GOP picked up Senate seats, but the loss of women and suburban voters, combined with the Democrats’ swing to the hard left, does not auger well.

After my misplaced forecast of a Romney win in the 2012 U.S. presidential election, I have studiously avoided political prognostications. However a couple of reflections seem appropriate in the aftermath of the 2018 mid- terms.

Greg Sheridan, along with a number of others, has credited President Donald Trump with a political victory. On the raw figures, compared with Bill Clinton in 1994, and Barack Obama in 2010 and 2014, the President’s party only suffered moderate losses in the House of Representatives, and made almost unprecedented gains in the Senate. Indeed, over the longer term, the swing against the Republicans in 2018 was below average.

Yet a note of caution is warranted. The Democrats of yesterday were not, as they are today, the party of an extreme left wing “resistance”. We may accuse Trump of verbal excesses and vulgarity, but much of the Democrat leadership seemed only too happy to foment harassment of their Republican opponents, and reluctant to condemn the violence of Antifa and other extremists groups and individuals who serve as the Left’s skirmishers and auxiliaries.

If the Democrats had emphasised civility and adhered to a centrist position, they would likely have made far more significant gains in the House, possibly even gained a majority in the Senate. Yes, on the raw figures, Trump did relatively well. But in terms of political cultur, we should be concerned that a very leftist Democrat Party was still able to capture a majority in the House.

A Mob Showed Up Outside Tucker Carlson’s House And Ordered Him To ‘Leave Town’

https://dailycaller.com/2018/11/07/protesters-tucker-carlson-house/

A left-wing mob showed up outside Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s house Wednesday evening, posted pictures of his address online and demanded that he flee the city of Washington, D.C.

Carlson, a co-founder of The Daily Caller and host of “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” was at the Fox News studio when the angry crowd showed up outside of his house…

Video the group, “Smash Racism DC,” posted to Twitter shows one of the mob’s ringleaders leading the crowd in chants of “racist scumbag, leave town!” and “Tucker Carlson, we will fight! We know where you sleep at night!”

Here are a few of the tweets and the video that Smash Racism DC posted to Twitter before their account was suspended:

Twitter Suspends ‘Smash Racism’ Account After Tucker Protest, But What About ‘Antifa Prof.’ Mike Isaacson? By Debra Heine

https://pjmedia.com/trending/twitter-suspends-smash-racism-account-after-tucker-protest-but-what-about-antifa-prof-mike-isaacson/

He tweeted: “Kill your local politicians.”

Twitter finally suspended the violent antifa group Smash Racism after it organized a mob to terrorize the home of Fox News host Tucker Carlson, forcing his wife, who was home alone at the time, to hide in a pantry until police arrived.

Oddly enough, a Washington, DC area Episcopal church apparently has no problem with violent antifa groups meeting in their church basement to organize their activities.

Smash Racism held three “From Resistance to Revolution” conferences at St. Stephen & the Incarnation Episcopal Church in November and December of last year. For a house of God to be hosting these domestic terrorists, seems weirdly incongruous to say the least.

Meanwhile, former John Jay economics professor and (former?) Smash Racism co-founder Mike Isaacson (@VulgarEconomics) continues to have a Twitter account where he is allowed to threaten law enforcement and political figures on a regular basis.
Far Left Watch @FarLeftWatch
· Sep 25, 2018

Democrat Rashida Tlaib Dances with Palestinian Flag at Victory Party

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/11/07/democrat-rashida-tlaib-dances-with-palestinian-flag-at-victory-party/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+breitbart+%28Breitbart+News%29
Video of Democrat Rashida Tlaib dancing wearing the Palestinian flag at a victory party emerged Tuesday evening, after she won a largely uncontested race for the open seat in Michigan’s heavily Democratic 13th congressional district.

Tlaib is one of two Muslim women elected to Congress on Tuesday, along with Ilhan Omar, who replaced outgoing Rep. Keith Ellison in Minnesota’s 5th congressional district. Ellison was the first Muslim elected to Congress. Both Tlaib and Omar have extreme anti-Israel views. Tlaib is the first Palestinian-American elected to Congress.In the video, Tlaib delivered a victory speech in which she acknowledged her family watching from abroad in the Palestinian Authority-administered West Bank. She dedicated her victory, in part, to the Palestinian cause: “A lot of my strength comes from being Palestinian,” she said.

After Tlaib won her primary race in August, she published several anti-Israel tweets, and re-tweeted a fan who declared that Tlaib’s “first fight was for Palestine, always Palestine.”

Tlaib explicitly supports the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel and its replacement of a unitary Palestinian state. That position caused her to lose the endorsement of the far-left group J Street — which, while often adopting anti-Israel positions, nominally supports a two-state solution.

One other Palestinian-American was on the ballot on Tuesday: Ammar Campa-Najjar, the grandson of a Palestinian terrorist who was Yasser Arafat’s deputy and was involved in the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, Germany, lost in California’s 50th congressional district.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

Still the Smartest Guy in the Room By Joan Swirsky *****

https://canadafreepress.com/article/still-the-smartest-guy-in-the-room

Well, whaddaya know? In the midterm elections of November 6, 2018, the American people rewarded the president—for only the third time in almost a hundred years—with a net gain of three and possibly four Senate seats, lost half the House seats that his predecessor lost, and left the radical leftwing Democrats not rejoicing at their meager gains, but still chomping at the bit to bring down the president who has effectively destroyed everything they believed in, worked for, and thought they achieved over the past 75 years.

The Blue Wave that the leftist media has been predicting for a year now turned out to be a blue puddle, with even their most aggressive spokesperson, former House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, making nice and wanting to make deals with the man who sits in the Oval Office. And Republicans still control the Senate and can still boast that President Trump is solely responsible for:

Two rock-ribbed conservative justices on the Supreme Court (for the next 40 years!),
A booming economy,
Sky-high employment of women, blacks, Hispanics, and young people,
A significantly strengthened military,
Equitable foreign-trade deals,
And the beginning of The Wall, which promises to stop the rising tide of illegal aliens and sanctuary cities and the punishing price they cost hard-working Americans.

PLOTTING ANOTHER COUP

After President Trump’s annihilating defeat of Hillary Clinton in the November 2016 election—306 decisive Electoral votes to Hillary’s paltry 232—Americans witnessed an unprecedented reaction from what used to be called the loyal opposition. It was not the requisite graciousness of the disappointed loser. Nor was it the anticipated anger and frustration of those who knew their political philosophy and programs were about to be overturned.

Instead, when the new president was elected—and even before that, on the very day in June of 2015 that he announced his candidacy—the Grand Poobahs of D.C. who always considered themselves the smartest guys in the room by virtue of their educations, lofty positions, fancy credentials, grandiose senses of entitlement, and vaunted self-regard, got together and decided that:

They reviled the results of the election and the loss of the prestigious jobs they believed they’d maintain under a Democrat chief executive,
They feared that a Trump administration would discover the vast corruption of the previous Obama regime and act to prosecute the criminals involved,
They believed it was the job of these far-left socialists, communists, and jihadist sympathizers from Obama’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, Obama’s Department of Justice, Obama’s Central Intelligence Agency, Obama’s National Security Council, et al, to destroy the Trump candidacy and, failing that, his presidency.
They resolved to put their brain trust together, their collective professional experiences, and do anything and everything in their power to depose or criminalize or impeach a duly elected President Trump.

And they fervently believed in their ability to actualize this plan because they had already successfully executed a coup d’√©tat only eight years before, ferreting Barack Obama—of dubious American citizenship and the paltriest of credentials—into the core of America’s body politic, concealing his past history, enlisting their reliable media whores to savage anyone who questioned his eligibility and even his very competence, and counting on their Hollywood stooges to use their vaseline camera trick to give the Obama persona a gorgeous glow.

The plot was hatched, and as Rudy Giuliani, one of the president’s lawyers, told TV host Sean Hannity in mid-August, ex-CIA director John Brennan was behind the entire bogus investigation into the alleged collusion of the Trump presidential campaign with Russian operatives.

The Resistance Factory House Judiciary’s top Democrat reportedly lays out impeachment strategies; search for evidence may follow. By James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-resistance-factory-1541700256

Count Rep. Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) among those who seem to have learned nothing from Tuesday’s election results. In a series of conversations on an Acela train ride from New York to Washington, the ranking member of the House Judiciary committee reportedly discussed the aggressive use of congressional investigatory powers against both President Trump and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Mr. Nadler, likely to be the new chairman of House Judiciary come January, seems not to have noticed that radicalism didn’t sell on Tuesday. Democrats gained a House majority by running impressive candidates who presented themselves to suburban voters as professional and moderate. As the Journal’s William McGurn has noted, one of the winning Democrats in a New Jersey swing district even positioned herself as an anti-tax candidate by pretending that the 2017 Trump tax cuts were actually tax hikes. In time we’ll know by their voting records whether the new suburban representatives really are moderates, but the strategy certainly worked on Tuesday.

Meanwhile the candidates who presented themselves as unapologetic leftists didn’t fare so well. The Journal’s Allysia Finley notes the gubernatorial campaign losses suffered by Andrew Gillum in Florida and Richard Cordray in Ohio, as well as the likely defeat of Stacey Abrams in Georgia. Ms. Finley adds:

In places where progressive candidates won, they tacked to the center. In Colorado, Rep. Jared Polis, who had backed “Medicare for all” legislation, modulated his politics by opposing state referendums that would raise taxes on high earners and limit fracking. During one debate, he described himself as a “convener in chief” who would work with both parties.