Month: June 2018

National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) Chairman Cory Gardner announced that the official campaign arm of Republicans in the senate would not endorse Virginia’s controversial senate nominee Corey Stewart, nor would they give the candidate any funds.

The Hill:

Gardner’s decision is a break with President Trump, who tweeted his congratulations to Stewart on Wednesday morning.

“Congratulations to Corey Stewart for his great victory for Senator from Virginia. Now he runs against a total stiff, Tim Kaine, who is weak on crime and borders, and wants to raise your taxes through the roof. Don’t underestimate Corey, a major chance of winning!” Trump wrote on Twitter.

It’s not the first time Gardner has decided to not endorse a candidate who has received Trump’s backing. The committee, under Gardner’s leadership, refused to back controversial Alabama GOP Senate nominee Roy Moore last year.

Even when Trump endorsed Moore a month after the first allegations of sexual misconduct by women who were underage at the time surfaced against the candidate, Gardner refused to follow Trump’s endorsement. That put the NRSC at odds with both the White House and the Republican National Committee, which also backed Moore. 

Following his win Tuesday, Stewart is now set to face off against Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) in November.

Stewart, who was endorsed by white supremacist Jason Kessler (support he disavowed) and Paul Nehlen, who gained fame as a challenger to Speaker Paul Ryan and is known for posting racist, and anti-Semitic tweets, made a name for himself defending Confederate monuments from being torn down. He fancies himself a Trump mini-me – insulting his opponents and making wild, unsubstantiated claims. 

Senate Republicans are at a loss about how to deal with his candidacy.

Politico:

“At the senatorial committee we’re focusing on Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota, Montana, West Virginia and Florida. There are great races around the country. [Virginia] is not the map,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Cory Gardner (R-Colo.). “We have a big map this year, and what I’ve laid out in races that I’ve talked about, Virginia’s not on it.”

“Sometimes in the primary process, the thing we try and get done is get the most electable candidate on the ballot in the fall. And that doesn’t always happen,” conceded Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), the No. 3 GOP leader.

And Thune, like other Republicans expressed ignorance of Stewart despite his affinity for earning press with stunts like protesting outside the RNC in 2016, which got him ousted from Trump’s official campaign apparatus. Stewart also drew criticism for refusing to condemn white nationalists after last year’s violent rally in Charlottesville.

Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), said he has “no idea who he is. Not at all.”

See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil.

Pretending they don’t know what Stewart is all about won’t save them. Stewart is, by himself, is a target rich environment. Kaine will have so many lines of attack he won’t know what to do.

If he’s smart, he will ignore him. Stewart doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of beating Kaine and the NRSC knows it, which is why they won’t spend a dime in Virginia. But Stewart has tarred the GOP as the party of white supremacists and the damage has already been done.

The New Yorker broke the story deep into a long, long article (“Donald Trump’s New World Order”) that in January President Trump called out Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for his public disparagement of Jewish history:

…at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council in late April, in Ramallah, he declared that Ashkenazi Jews came not from the Biblical holy lands but from the Turkic empire of Khazaria, and that the Nazi slaughter of European Jews was the result not of anti-Semitism but of their financial activities—“usury and banking and such.”

This is a discredited (by DNA!) attempt to claim that Jews have no right to Israel because they are imposters posing as the people of the Bible. It enjoyed some popularity among anti-Semites for a number of years, but has faded thanks to scientific refutation. Except, apparently, among the Palestinian leadership.

Trump’s response:

On January 17th, the New York Post published a column by Michael Goodwin, a Trump partisan, with the headline “abbas’ jew hatred exposed.” The column described a speech in which Abbas had made comments disparaging Jewish history. It featured a photograph of Abbas waving two clenched fists. On a copy of the article, Trump wrote a note in large black script, “Mahmoud, Wow—This is the real you?” He signed it, “Best Wishes, Donald Trump.” Some of his aides argued that it would be undiplomatic to send the message. Kushner loved it. “That was the President being the President,” he told aides. The White House sent Trump’s message to Donald Blome, the consul-general in Jerusalem, who had it delivered to Abbas at his headquarters in Ramallah. Kushner told aides that Trump was challenging Abbas, saying, in effect, “I want to know, are you a great leader or are you a terrorist? You show me. It’s your choice.”

Here is a photo of the message that has appeared in a few places.

Breitbart News claims that it received a leaked draft of Paul Ryan’s immigration bill to be voted on before the House’ recess. I have my fingers crossed that this is not the bill that will be introduced, but rather a preliminary wish-list version. The excerpts posted by Breitbart indicate a complete sell-out of the base in favor of the corporate donors wanting cheap labor.

According to a leaked draft of the amnesty deal, obtained by Breitbart News, Ryan’s plan would allow the entire “DACA population” to be eligible for amnesty so long as they meet low educational, work and criminal requirements, prompting the amnesty to explode in size.

That DACA population could include the nearly 3.5 million DACA-enrolled and DACA-eligible illegal aliens, and even more illegal aliens who arrive in the U.S. to fraudulently obtain the amnesty. (snip)

A second amnesty is included in the leaked draft, one that would allow the children of temporary foreign guest workers and “anyone who has a ‘contingent nonimmigrant status’” to apply for the amnesty.

This amnesty for the children of temporary foreign workers does not have a numerical cap, allowing for an endless amount of foreign nationals to obtain amnesty through this avenue known as “Pathway Concept B.”

“The winners are the DREAMers cause they get their amnesty, Democrats because they don’t have to concede much to get the amnesty and donor-class Republicans who are interested in perpetuating the current system,” Center for Immigration Studies Director of Policy Jessica Vaughan told Breitbart News of Ryan’s leaked amnesty deal.

This sounds like a plan to keep the GOP base at home on November 8 and hand over the speaker’s gavel to Nancy Pelosi.

photo: Wikimedia Commons

Paul Ryan by then will be a lobbyist, of course, and (if this bill passes) very popular with the US Chamber of Commerce.

The GOP establishment remains wedded to the concept that it can bamboozle the base and prosper. That worked well on illegal immigration for a long time, but we have a president that ran on controlling the uncontrolled entry of people by the millions. I don’t think they understand the reaction that will ensue if they pass this. 

Investor’s Business Daily has a good one today about a little-noted snippet from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) in her interview with The Intercept, who said:

“Until we have all the Democrats who are willing to take on the billionaire class, until we have all the Democrats who are willing to fight for the American people and not for a handful of billionaires and giant corporations, then it’s going to stay an uphill fight.”

Yup. Billionaires, those dreadful tubby white men on the Monopoly Chance and Community Chest cards we’re all supposed to rise up against.

Feel the urge?

Actually, it’s such bull hockey.

Investor’s Business Daily makes mincemeat of Warren’s red-flag-waving call to comradely action, by citing who today’s billionaires are, going down the full list – from the always well-meaning liberal Howie Schultz of Starbucks, to the obsessive environmental wacko Tom Steyer, to the horrible stateless statesman with big designs for wrecking America, George Soros. They have a monster list, and they’ve gone through the whole 500-plus compiliation from the Forbes billionaires list.

Maybe she should have consulted the Forbes billionaire list before declaring that this group is the enemy of the state. After all, the billionaire club — all 585 of them — includes people like George Soros, Warren Buffett, Howard Schultz, Oprah Winfrey — who’ve not only given $140+ million to her party, but support a wide array of liberal causes.

Liz Warren is exposing her fake-Indian roots by once again, speaking with forked tongue.

 

Image Credit: Tim Pierce, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0