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POLITICS

Stacey Abrams Will Keep Running for Things Until the Money Runs Out “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again.” Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/stacey-abrams-will-keep-running-for-things-until-the-money-runs-out/

Everyone will have Stacey Abrams to kick around some more.

Democrat Stacey Abrams, the two-time failed candidate for governor in Georgia and a renowned voting rights activist, says she will “likely” run for office again but did not specify for which position.

Abrams, who lost her second bid for Georgia governor in November to incumbent Gov. Brian Kemp (R), made the comment in an interview with actress Drew Barrymore on her daytime television show broadcast Monday.

“I will likely run again,” Abrams said. “If at first you don’t succeed, try try again. If it doesn’t work, you try again.”

How do you lose 53% to 45% in the same state that Warnock won 51% to 48% and then talk glibly about running again?

In the end stages, Stacey Abrams was blaming black men.

Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams believes misinformation “targeted” at Black men is the reason she experienced a decline in support from Black voters in a new Marist poll.

Our Current House Fight Doesn’t Hold a Candle to the 1855-56 Speaker Vote By Chris Queen

https://pjmedia.com/columns/chris-queen/2023/01/05/our-current-speaker-fight-doesnt-hold-a-candle-to-the-1855-56-speaker-vote-n1658942

As I’m writing this, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) just lost his eighth vote to fulfill his lifelong dream of becoming speaker of the House. For all of the weeping and gnashing of teeth, the whole situation is kind of funny — as long as your name isn’t Kevin McCarthy.

It’s been a heck of a week for Congress, and it’s the first time in a century that the vote for speaker went beyond one ballot. But if these folks want to set a record, they have a long way to go.

A lot of the one-and-done nature of selecting a speaker over the past few decades has much to do with the dominant two-party system, but before the 1860s, multiple ballots were common. History shows us that eight votes for speaker went more rounds than this one has gone so far. Six contests went into the double digits, but the longest fight for speaker went a whopping 133 rounds and took about two months.

It all started with the disintegration of the Whig party in 1855, which left no single dominant party in the House. The country was starting to splinter over the issue of slavery, and factions in favor and against slavery in Congress tussled for control. When the House convened on Dec. 3, 1855, to choose a speaker, 21 candidates from several parties put their names into the mix.

Pro-slavery Rep. William Richardson (D-Ill.) was the early leader, but he couldn’t muster a majority of votes. Anti-slavery members began to coalesce around Rep. Nathaniel “Bobbin Boy” Banks (American Party-Mass.), a young teetotaler who started his career in the textile industry, where he earned his nickname.

(Side note: we don’t give our representatives nicknames like “Bobbin Boy” anymore. Maybe that’s the problem, and doing so would make them more humble.)

As the votes continued, Banks began to garner more votes than Richardson, but neither one of them could summon a majority of votes. By the 33rd vote, Banks had 100 of the 113 he needed to secure the speakership.

A Partisan Thumbs Down for Sinema’s Verity She seemed like a radical in 2002. The Democrats changed more than she did.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-partisan-thumbs-down-for-sinemas-verity-kyrsten-arizona-independent-democratic-party-intimidation-11670763136

Kyrsten Sinema didn’t always seem like a moderate. She ran for the Arizona House in 2002 as a member of the Green Party calling herself a “Prada socialist.” The next year she spoke at an antiwar rally clad in a pink tutu. Now she has left the Democratic Party to become an independent, complaining that “payback against the opposition party has replaced thoughtful legislation.”

Yet ideologically she hasn’t changed much. FiveThirtyEight.com notes that she has voted with President Biden 93% of the time. Where she departs from today’s Democratic Party is over its intolerant domination by progressives. In her 2009 book, “Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last,” she describes how as a state legislator she came to believe that reform will stick only if it’s incremental and bipartisan. She said progressives had caught “the dread disease” of “identity politics” and wrapped themselves in the “mantle of victimhood.”

To the far left, that makes her the enemy. Last year protesters harassed her in a public rest room, and her fellow Democrats shrugged. Mr. Biden said, “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody. . . . It’s part of the process.”

She’s being vilified again. A headline on the leftist Daily Kos website calls her an “isolated weirdo.” The Atlantic describes her as “ideologically unpredictable and erratic.” She replies by recalling her promise to voters that “I would not demonize people I disagreed with, engage in name-calling, or get distracted by political drama.”

Everybody Hates Liz Cheney Pimped by Democrats, used by the news media, abandoned by Republicans, and disliked by the public, Cheney, like her father, might have managed to tick off almost everyone on her way out the door. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/11/28/everybody-hates-liz-cheney/

It wasn’t supposed to end this way.

After successfully winning the affection and approval of political enemies who, not so long ago, considered her father a war criminal, Representative Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) will leave Congress in about 30 days to much greener, so to speak, pastures. (Ironically—or not—Cheney’s effort to indict Trump related to the events of January 6 will continue under Special Counsel Jack Smith, fresh off the heels of prosecuting Kosovo government officials at The Hague, the very place many of Cheney’s new admirers wanted former Vice President Dick Cheney to face trial.)

Democrats, however, may not give the doyenne of NeverTrump Republicans the grateful send-off she undoubtedly believes she earned during her brief tenure in Congress. Cheney, according to news reports, is as popular with the staff of the January 6 select committee as she is with Republicans in Wyoming, who voted her out of office by a nearly 2-1 margin in August. 

Her obsessive fixation with Donald Trump—a personal vendetta in retaliation for Trump’s denunciation of the Iraq War and her father’s lies about weapons of mass destruction—is backfiring as the committee’s work concludes. And like all things Cheney, the end is fraught with internal drama, delusions of grandeur, personal score-settling, private bullying, and growing disaffection among those who trusted her to act in good faith.

The release of the official report has been delayed four times; it’s now scheduled for December 20, just two weeks before Republicans take control of the House with no time to pass any legislation to prevent a future “insurrection,” a major selling point to the public. Cheney, apparently, is to blame. “[Less] than six weeks before the conclusion of the committee’s work, Cheney’s influence over the committee’s final report has rankled many current and former committee staff,” the Washington Post reported last week. “They are angered and disillusioned by Cheney’s push to focus the report primarily on former president Donald Trump, and have bristled at the committee morphing into what they have come to view as the vehicle for the outgoing Wyoming lawmaker’s political future.”

More than a dozen former and current committee investigators spoke anonymously to the Post; some have quit in protest of Cheney’s focus on Trump. “[It’s] long been clear that Cheney deprioritized findings that didn’t fit a specific narrative about Trump’s efforts to foment the insurrection,” the Post revealed. One former staffer complained that the committee had morphed into a “Cheney 2024 campaign.”

NO POSTING TODAY OCTOBER 30

DeSantis Shows Republicans the Way to Win Refusing to retreat. by Jeff Crouere

https://www.frontpagemag.com/desantis-shows-republicans-the-way-to-win/

Over the past few decades, very few real fighters have been in positions of power in the Republican Party. Exceptions to this rule were tremendous leaders such as Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Donald Trump who were accomplished and effective in their roles.

As both a candidate and President, Trump was especially successful as a counter puncher, responding in kind when he was attacked. Unfortunately, for President Trump, the attacks never ended, and he rarely received the support he needed in the United States Congress.

Today, the GOP is saddled with unimpressive and docile leadership in Congress, considering the massive problems that are facing our country. In the United States Senate, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) is a deal maker who is constantly abandoning conservative legislation to please his friends on the “other side of the aisle.”

In the U.S. House of Representatives, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is more conservative than McConnell, but he is not as aggressive as needed to combat the horrific agenda of the Democratic Party. He should take lessons from the stalwart members of the House Freedom Caucus.

“A Politician’s True Beliefs” Disclosure by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18598/politicians-beliefs

Ever look at a sausage package?How about baby formula?A candy bar? Yogurt? Cereal?

Virtually everything you consume is obligated to have an ingredients label on it that tells you what’s inside. After all, you are putting it in your body. Accordingly, long ago, Washington rightfully decreed that food processors had to truthfully and factually label their products’ ingredients.

This requirement by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, however, does not extend to politics.

A politician’s true political beliefs are often hidden beneath the rhetoric of a campaign. Speech is tailored to what the crowd wants to hear rather than what the candidate truly believes. Sadly, the truth that we demand from the food on our dining room table is absent in Washington and our nation’s democracy suffers as a result

The Progressive Left’s Latest Shining Star Delivering the same woke snake oil in a new bottle. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/06/progressive-lefts-latest-shining-star-joseph-klein/

The progressive Left movement has a new shining star. Her name is Mallory McMorrow, a young Democrat Michigan State Senator, whose fiery speech earlier this spring on the floor of the State Senate chamber denouncing conservative Republicans has gone viral. She is enjoying her 15 minutes of fame with interviews on liberal media broadcast outlets, a personal call from President Biden praising her speech, and a New Yorker article calling Ms. McMorrow a “role model for the midterms.”

The New York Times exulted: “If Democrats could bottle Mallory McMorrow … they would do it.” The Nation, a leading progressive publication, lauded McMorrow for providing “Democrats with a cogent example of how best to respond to the GOP’s cultural warfare.”

Ms. McMorrow has indeed done something novel for a progressive politician. Rather than coming across as the usual secularist critic of religious faith, McMorrow has embraced Christianity as she understands it and weaponized religion against her political adversaries. She has cleverly positioned herself as “a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom” who is mortified by what she considers to be Republicans’ hateful “fearmongering” against “marginalized” groups such as blacks, gays, and transgenders.

Biden’s Handlers Are Preparing to Eject Him (and Kamala) They must replace him, otherwise they themselves risk being replaced, which would be intolerable. By Roger Kimball

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/19/bidens-handlers-are-preparing-to-eject-him-and-kamala/

I sense a disturbance in the force. In fact, I’ve been feeling the tremors for a while. Back in January, I wrote a column for American Greatness called “The Coming Dethronement of Joe Biden.” In it, I noted that Biden’s appalling performance as president would sooner or later—and probably sooner, given the ostentatious nature of his multifaceted failure—lead to his removal as president. 

I should have added that it wasn’t Biden’s performance per se that would lead to his downfall. The problem, rather, was the way his performance was undermining his—and therefore his minders’ and puppetmasters’—political power. As Saul Alinsky, community organizer to the stars, noted, the “issue is never the issue.” Accordingly, the people who put Joe Biden in power—I cannot name them, but I know they are the same people who keep him in power—do not care about inflation, rising gas and food prices, COVID lockdowns or mask mandates, the porousness of our Southern border, the threat of war with Russia, or the myriad other issues that worry ordinary voters. I am quite certain, in fact, that the word “voters” brings a vaguely contemptuous smile to their faces. 

They are not troubled by the suffering of the people, indeed, they approve of a certain amount of suffering. Suffering produces dependency; and dependency, in turn, is like an insurance policy for those who cater to it: the bureaucrats who fill the troughs that feed the populace. The point, of course, was never to end the dependency but to manage in such a way as to perpetuate and expand it. Joe Biden is an errand boy, a figurehead, in the metabolism of this great (not to say Great Society) act of political legerdemain. 

Back in January, I compared the conundrum that Joe Biden presented to The Committee that keeps him in power with the conundrum that Richard Nixon presented to the elites of his day. Nixon was hated by all the beautiful people of his day, but before he could be disposed of the elites had to address the problem of Spiro Agnew, who in his own way was nearly as preposterous as Kamala Harris. Fortunately for the anti-Nixon forces, Agnew was also corrupt in a pedestrian, easy-to-demonstrate sort of way. So all that the forces of light and virtue had to do was produce evidence of his glomming on to paper bags full of pelf in exchange for favors rendered and, presto, Agnew was history. 

Kamala Harris is more of a problem. She is at least as appallingly incompetent as her boss, and no less challenged rhetorically, as her alarming performance in Poland and Romania a week or two back demonstrated. But Harris will not be as easy to shift as was Agnew. I have heard nothing about actual bribery, and acting as the warm bun for Willie Brown’s bratwurst may be in dubious taste but is not actionable.

NEW POLL: Biden In Trouble With Voters On Job Approval, Inflation, Ukraine By American Greatness

https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/15/new-poll-biden-in-trouble-with-voters-on-job-approval-inflation-ukraine/

A new poll conducted by Insider Advantage for the Center for American Greatness shows Biden in big trouble with voters. 54% of likely voters disapprove of Biden’s job approval versus 42% who approve. Worse, this survey shows that only 36% approve of his handling of Ukraine. Other highlights from the survey are the 64% of people who believe high gas prices should be solved by eliminating Biden’s restrictions on pumping American oil and gas.

Perhaps most troubling, and portending more difficulty in the future for the country is the question that asked, “How much is rising inflation in the cost of goods and services impacting you and your family?” 85% of respondents said that inflation is having a “significant” impact on them and their families. Inflation, of course, is bad for the country, especially the middle class. But the politics of it spell trouble for Democrats whose policies have increased and accelerated the inflation currently beggaring the nation.

There is bad news for Democrats ahead of the midterm elections too. 48% of respondents support a Republican controlled Congress versus 40% backing Democrats. That’s an ominous sign pointing towards a Republican sweep.

What’s more with inflation already causing tangible pain for nearly all Americans and with Biden’s sanctions regime ensuring that inflation will accelerate and last longer, the current administration looks to have a rocky road ahead.

The poll results can be found here: Insider Advantage – Center for American Greatness National Poll.