RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/mike-pence-deep-state-patsy/

Former President Donald Trump was a wrecking ball — that’s what people like me voted for in 2016. We recognized the existence of an unelected deep state, composed mostly of Democrats and their shills. And, we understood instinctively that we needed an outsider to demolish the accretions of tyranny.

Trump delivered in spades. He was the first real threat to the bureaucratic state since Nixon.

But, wrecking balls aren’t precision instruments. They’re crass, blunt force trauma, kinetic energy mechanisms of destruction that lay waste. The destructive energy released is the precursor to creation, renewal, and resurrection. But, if you need something deconstructed in quick order, there’s nothing else suited to the job. Trump tore down and built over the rubble, just as he’d done countless times through the decades while building a real estate empire.

President Donald Trump’s accomplishments will leave you gobsmacked when they’re stacked one on top of the other — a magic beanstalk of wins whose terminus is lost in a nimbus of high-flying cirrus clouds. Here’s a list. Grab a cup of coffee and settle in, it’ll take you a while to get through all fourteen pages.

Trump wasn’t perfect. He broke some china. For the snowflakes, feelings got hurt. Trump tweeted harshly. He emoted often — a bunch of highly entertaining, but impolite thoughts. He insulted people, generally, the ones who richly deserved it. In a manlier age, no one would have cared. I certainly didn’t, and don’t.

However, his appointments left a great deal to be desired. At the top of my “wish he’d picked someone else list” are current FBI Director Chris Wray and former Vice President Mike Pence.

https://thespectator.com/topic/ron-desantis-ready-face-donald-trump-2024/?utm_source=

When Donald Trump ran for the presidency in 2016, he took on a very well-funded politician who had been a successful governor of Florida. And he destroyed him. Trump humiliated “low-energy” Jeb Bush, son of one president and brother of another, and trashed his family’s legacy so comprehensively that the Bush-era Republican party is now widely regarded as a disaster.

Jeb messed up again last week. Speaking to Fox News, he semi-endorsed Ron DeSantis, the current Florida governor and Trump’s strongest challenger for the 2024 Republican nomination. “I think we’re on the verge of a generational change, kind of hope so,” said Jeb. “Who better to do it than someone who’s been outside of Washington, who’s governed effectively, who I think has shown that Florida can be a model for the future of our country?”

Talk about the kiss of death. Jeb soon clarified that he was “praising, not endorsing” DeSantis — too late. Trump’s fanatical army had the line they wanted: the old rotten establishment want Trump out and DeSantis in. “Generational change” actually means the elite taking the party back to the pre-Trump era of politics-as-normal. No chance.

How will DeSantis cope with the barrage of abuse he’s about to receive? He may be punchier than “please clap” Jeb, but he appears to suffer from a similar inability to exude charisma. He is just under six foot and has been mocked for wearing cowboy heels to make himself appear taller. “Tiny D” is reportedly one of the nicknames Trump has been “workshopping” — whatever that means — along with “Ron DisHonest” and “Ron DeEstablishment.” He tried “Ron DeSanctimonious,” but keen students of Trump’s nominative determinism considered that diss sub-par. Still, you get the gist. Don makes people laugh; Ron, not so much. Some sources suggest he has a touch of Asperger’s.

“DeSantis is an introvert in an extrovert’s world” is how Roger Stone, the Trump ally who knows Floridian politics inside out, puts it. “He gets irritated whenever faced with a difficult question or situation.” “He’s good company,” adds Nigel Farage, another Trump confidant. “But you know when Donald Trump walks into a room. I’m not sure the same could be said of DeSantis.”

https://pjmedia.com/columns/paula-bolyard/2023/02/27/we-need-to-talk-about-mark-levins-interview-with-ron-desantis-last-night-n1674153

On Sunday night, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis appeared on “Life, Liberty, and Levin” on Fox News, purportedly to promote his new book, The Courage to Be Free, which comes out this week.

While DeSantis has not yet declared that he’s running for president, he certainly sounded like a man who’s making the case for his candidacy. Or, if not, he’s making a case for conservatism as the path to American success and prosperity— the subtitle of the book is “Florida’s Blueprint for America’s Revival.”

As my colleague Stephen Green pointed out earlier today:

DeSantis isn’t traveling to early presidential primary states like Iowa or New Hamphire, at least not yet. Instead, his most recent tour was through three struggling Deep Blue cities to tout what he’s done differently in Florida… DeSantis is calmly but quite publicly holding up his state as a model for the nation, just like a governor running for president would do. Except that he has yet to announce that he’s running. He hasn’t even formed one of those exploratory committees that allows a not-yet candidate to fundraise.

I don’t see how it’s a bad thing for DeSantis to wait to announce, if he does indeed plan to run. Does anyone really think the primary season is too short and needs to be lengthened? The 2016 primary seemed like it would never end—and the personal attacks and circular firing squad did nothing to help spread the message about the benefits of conservatism.

We’re still more than a year out from the primaries. What’s the rush? If DeSantis can run a soft campaign, while continuing to notch more conservative wins on his Florida belt, he can stay above the fray and avoid some of the pitfalls that early announcers often run into, including candidate fatigue. Remember how sick to death we all were of hearing from the 2016 candidates, many of whom we previously liked? For what that’s worth, a lot of formerly vociferous Trump supporters are sick of his bellyaching on social media day and night and his silly attacks on DeSantis, who is one of the few Republicans actually getting anything meaningful done.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/the_solution_to_ballot_fraud.html

The irresistible force is mail-in ballots, nonexistent signature verification, phantom voter rolls, a feckless Republican Party, Republican governors donating tax money to a George Soros–funded entity to clean voter rolls — election commissions changing ZIP codes so mail-in ballots stack up — courts refusing to remove dead people from voter rolls unless they miss two consecutive elections, and a Republican presidential candidate who thinks he can win with ballot-harvesting.

What could go wrong in 2024?

In 2000, the national realization was that election fraud is industrial-scale, committed by election commissions or with their acquiescence.  It is a sovereign crime.

The 2020 realization is that voter integrity teams cannot remove phantoms from voter rolls — even with death certificates.

This irresistible force will not dissipate.

Wisconsin advanced the state-of-the-scam to further flood voter rolls with anyone claiming existence. 

Forty years of Republican acquiescence and temerity brought us here — the end of free and fair elections.  Election fraud is baked into every state’s voter rolls — protected by government.

This week, we demonstrated a solution.

We sent an open letter to ERIC, the organization, ostensibly founded with help from George Soros, managing voter rolls for almost 30 states — many Republican.  We sent George a copy.

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/02/27/voters-want-a-trump-desantis-primary-battle-in-2024-ii-tipp/

If you’re wondering who Republican voters want to see square off in next year’s presidential primaries, it’s probably no big secret. As the latest polling data from I&I/TIPP show, a solid majority of registered GOP voters and independents who lean Republican, or Republican primary voters, say they want to see former President Donald Trump and current Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis duke it out on the primary trail.

In the latest poll, taken of 1,155 registered voters from Feb. 1-3, 397 were identified as GOP primary voters. They were asked to respond to the following statement: “I would like to see a primary contest between Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis.” They were given a choice to “agree strongly,” “agree somewhat,” “disagree somewhat,” “disagree strongly,” and “not sure.”

The margin of error for the sub-sample is +/-5 percentage points.

The answer that came back: an emphatic “yes.” By 61% to 23%, voters said they’d like to see DeSantis and Trump joust in the campaign, with 26% saying they agree “strongly” while 35% saying they agree “somewhat” strongly.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2023/02/why_the_2020_election_was_unverifiable.html

Joe Biden acquired his job through a legal process. However, he did not earn enough verifiable votes to justify the certifications in six key swing states. This issue is addressed in my new book, but here is some of my reasoning. I have limited myself to one example of unverifiable votes for each of those swing states.

Arizona

At an Arizona Senate Committee hearing on January 24, 2022, we learned that precisely 95 percent of Maricopa County overseas military members (and their families) voted for Joe Biden. That is an amazing (as in phony) percentage, given that the overall county-wide vote was fairly even between Biden and Trump (51 to 49%). Winning the military vote in Maricopa County with a 90 percent margin strongly suggests the likelihood of fraud.

The findings were presented at the Committee hearing by Paul Harris, a corporate executive who had been asked to conduct the review during the Cyber Ninjas audit. These are key points from the presentation. (See video @ 1:53.)

The “ballots” were simply unsourced sheets of copy paper.
The number of ballots had jumped dramatically, from 1,600 in 2016 to 9,600 in 2020.
Exactly 95 percent of the votes were for Joe Biden. Harris estimated that these copy paper ballots provided 8,000 net votes to Biden, who ostensibly won the state by just over 10,000 votes.

Paul Harris analyzed just one county. In Pima County, a witness named Kathleen Alby testified that “thousands” of “military faxes” were processed: “At one point that’s all that they were processing were the faxed ones.” And, as in Maricopa County, there was no chain-of-custody documentation. (See video at 8:32.)

Georgia

Garland Favorito is the head of VoterGA.org, and has a forty-year background in information technology. In a detailed press conference, Favorito and his cyber experts itemized fifteen categories of ballot irregularities found during their analysis of ballot images acquired from Fulton County, Georgia. (See video @ 27:00.)

https://thespectator.com/topic/thunderdome-2024-here-come-the-republican-hopefuls/?utm_

Over Presidents Day weekend, Donald J. Trump, our most beloved former president — according to him anyway — posted the following to his Truth Social account: “Ron DeSanctimonious wants to cut your Social Security and Medicare, closed up Florida & its beaches, loves RINOS Paul Ryan, Jeb Bush, and Karl Rove (disasters ALL!), is backed by Globalist’s Club for NO Growth, Lincoln Pervert Project, & ‘Uninspired’ Koch — And it only gets worse from there. He is a RINO in disguise!, whose Poll numbers are dropping like a rock. Good luck Ron!”

This is as good a point as any for the launch of Thunderdome 2024, a Republican presidential primary that has all the signs of being even bloodier and more acrimonious than the 2016 contest. Just look at the stakes, the positioning of donors and activists, and — after three cruel rounds of electoral failure — a former president turned red in tooth and claw.

For the dispassionate viewer, it presents a gladiator match for the prize of running against Joe Biden. The field is strikingly different than it was eight years ago, when the money and assumptions were behind the likes of Jeb Bush and Wisconsin’s Scott Walker, and a bevy of senators and governors fought among themselves in an attempt to set up a mano-a-mano showdown with Trump — a strategy that totally backfired.

Smart Republicans have learned a lot since then. But they’re also taking on a former president who occupies a very different space than he once did: Trump and his supporters are the new GOP establishment, even as he maintains his position as its constant critic. This gives him enormous advantages, and makes Trump, despite what you may have heard, still the likeliest candidate for the Republican nomination. For those who aspire to replace him atop the ticket, it’s wise to remember that the same abiding rule that undid Hillary Clinton and aided Joe Biden is still in place: you can say anything you want about the candidates, but don’t speak poorly of their voters.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/vivek-ramaswamy-running-for-president-gop-donald-trump-primary-338c0737?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Donald Trump proved that you don’t need to hold elective office before you try for the Oval Office, and entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is taking that as inspiration as he announced Tuesday that he’s running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. He has a chance to make a contribution to the race even if he is a long shot.

The 37-year-old Ohio native attended Harvard and earned a law degree from Yale, but don’t hold that against him. In 2014 he also founded a biotechnology firm, Roivant Sciences, and served as CEO until 2021. We’ve come to know him over the years through his contributions to these pages, which are provocative and well-wrought even if we disagree.

Mr. Ramaswamy has preternatural energy and can argue his brief with the best of them. He’ll be formidable if he can marshal the polling support to make it onto a debate stage. He was early in campaigning against the woke infection in American business with his 2021 book, “Woke, Inc.”

He’s also been a stalwart voice for free speech against the censorship of the tech giants. His enthusiasms sometimes get carried away, as with his proposal to make political beliefs a legally protected characteristic, like race or religion. If you think companies are woke now, wait until employees can’t be fired for attacking their employers.

Nikki Haley’s chances of becoming President are really very slim to zero. She knows it but wants to be the Veep. So she’s putting herself out there hoping to stay the course in the forthcoming debates.

Kamala Harris who never made it beyond December 3, 2019, was chosen because a woman was deemed critical for winning.

That may well be the case for the GOP in 2024, but there are many male contenders who are very qualified.  Stay tuned! rsk