Dec 172020
 

It was all about being a jerk. That is my summary. The Lincoln Project, formed 100% by allies of the current leadership of the California Republican Party proved beyond anything President Trump did that being a jerk is not a winner at the ballot box. In their psychotic rage against President Trump, they attempted to unseat 7 Republican Senators. Their efforts failed miserably. Priorities USA took the Lincoln Project apart piece by piece detailing the total failure of their mission.

Watching election night and realizing that President Trump’s campaign had miscalculated on a number of fronts brought me all the way back to 2015 when I was looking at working for Jeb Bush. Bush imploded because he tried to play Trump’s game. I ended up working for Dr. Ben Carson, the nicest guy in the race. When working for Carson, I could see all the people whose anger President Trump played to. I called them the “rage-based-coalition”. It was not until Dr. Carson lost, that I endorsed the President and came on board.

I am a long time GOP activist. I adhere to the axiom, fight the primary and unify in the general. I learned that those I learned it from were all the establishment squishes that usually won the primaries because they almost always had all the money with which to campaign. A whole bunch of these people went insane over the victory of President Trump in the primary. Their relevance was damaged forever. This is one thing I will always be grateful to President Trump for. His ego and presence was so gigantic that a generation of power brokers got broken. Yet despite these people not following their own axiom of support your nominees, I did.

I have no regrets for defending and towing the line for President Trump, his policies were awesome yet his personality was a constant issue.

I also take major issue with so-called Republicans that resisted the president and people that campaigned for Joe Biden while holding leadership positions within the GOP. At times of my choosing, I am going to light them up on this blog and this includes the never-trumper “Chairwoman” of the CAGOP.

President Trump also broke the national media – even as they are congratulating themselves for their part in defeating him. Trump’s own mouth and ego did far more to his re-election than their biased or flat out false reporting did. I’ve seen internal polls about the cover-up of the hunter biden stuff, there was no discernable impact. People in America know the media is biased, they did not care, they were tired of the drama. The media’s ability to impact elections has been forever decimated.

I watched President Trump make a deep, emotional connection with a group of voters that the GOP has been able to reach but for fleeting moments in history. I often wondered if it was narcissistic leadership as I would question weather the President had true empathy. The President also exhibited other classic narcissist tedencies, he is alleged to have cheated on his wives, he would incite chaos during periods of relative calm, he would pick fights with and engage with all kinds of people he should have ignored and he’d famously overhaul people leaving his administration.

Then, at the same time, he delivered a plethora of conservative policies we wished Bush and Reagan would have done. Narcissists deliver out of their own personal pride because they have to look good – you can’t honestly look at everything President Trump did and fit it in to that paradigm. (But that wall was indeed about Trump)

Then you have the anti-narcissist things, No new wars? Millions of new Republican registrations, recruiting and endorsing candidates for lower office (some of whom returned the help by betraying him), a series of policies that pulled people off of Welfare, record employment numbers, small business explosions, crime reductions, pardons, criminal justice reform are some that come to mind. A Narcissist would start wars. A Narcissist would only do things that had a direct benefit to himself.

However, the New York Asshole routine ran its’ course with many people. The election was not a repudiation of President Trump’s policies, it was a repudiation of the asshole himself. Only the nearly psychotic Lincoln Project people got lower than the president on the asshole scale on the R side. You had Antifa and BLM on the left to carry that mantle.

I heard it many times from people in various parts of the country – I like what he is doing, but I don’t like him. Just like in my insurance business, people buy insurance from people they like. An asshole with the perfect insurance policy will starve. Why would an election be different? Still others admitted they knew the media was lying but saw it is a commensurate response to trump’s behavior.

I have taken a lot of time to review the election fraud allegations. I believe some of them are true. However, this national review piece about a rejected lawsuit in Wisconsin sums up a lot of the failed legal wrangling. My hope is that the election aftermath forces election security reform in many swing states. I think Wisconsin and Georgia could have been impacted by election fraud, but the margins elsewhere were too large. Yes, Michigan and Pennsylvania violated their own election laws and I am sure they will be forced by lawsuits to clean up their act. A potential benefit of this election is to elevate the scrutiny of election fraud.

However, President Trump is not handling himself well in the aftermath of the election – taking me right back to why it was so hard to warm up to him. The same people that repulsed me in 2015 are back out in force screaming “We Wuz Robbed”. Did any of those people walk precincts or make phone calls? Nope. They were driving around with Trump flags on their cars. That is the easy feel good stuff – like posting on facebook. The democrats know this dynamic and count on it to beat us at the ballot box.

The democrats were out harvesting ballots. I also hope the election aftermath causes accountability in the post office, I’ve long believed that mail ballot elections give the postal service too much power.

Let me give some examples that have caused me to believe that President Trump really did lose:

Nevada: the amount of fraud reported is not enough to cover the deficit. They say about 4k dead people and 4k non citizens voted along with about 4k out of state voters. Find them. Find where the ballots went and prosecute the perpetrators. We know that Californians were registering in other states to vote – it should not be hard to nail them. Trump lost Nevada by 34,000 in 2020 vs 24,000 in 2016. I know firsthand that in Washoe County, people were fixated on the New York Asshole and it had nothing to do with anything else. Trump did not play well in the west. I spoke to insiders in Nevada that told me Trump was going to lose Nevada about 2 weeks out. At the same time – the GOP picked up 4 seats in the Nevada legislature…

Arizona: President Trump’s war with John McCain in addition to being a New York Asshole. John McCain is an icon out there, and President Trump never shored up his support with Mormons who are 9% of the electorate in both Arizona and Nevada. Trump barely lost Arizona, and his campaign was asleep – they should have known the President was in trouble in AZ and transferred assets there. Trump could not leave McCain alone.

Minnesota – Trump lost by 1.4% in 2016 but got hammered in 2020 by 7.5%

Colorado – Trump lost by 4.8% in 2016 but got slaughtered by 14% in 2020.

Virginia – Trump lost by 4.8% in 2016 but got decimated by 10% in 2020. The GOP gained seats in the VA legislature at the same time.

New Hampshire: Trump lost by 3,000 votes in 2016 but got obliterated by 59,000 in 2020. Yet – the GOP wiped out the dems at the state level. It was not an issue with Republicans, it was an issue with Trump.

Maine: Susan Collins won by 9 and Trump lost by 9 – an incredible spread of 18 points. Typically, the Top of the Ticket and the Senator are within 3 points of each other.

Wisconsin. 20K win turns in to a 20K loss. Ouch.

How do you lose Georgia while winning North Carolina and Florida? You Take Georgia for granted, not allocate enough resources or have some sort of issue with the voters. Trump did all three. I looked at GA-06 where the infamous (T)Ossoff vs Handel race ocurred. Handel got hammered by 10 points in 2020. This means that Trump had some major issue with suburban voters in Georgia. Trump lost Georgia by 13000 votes after winning by nearly 5 points in 2016. Yes, there are major issues with elections in Georgia but Trump should have never cut GA that close for the fraud to be a determining factor.

Yet – while the Trump campaign let Georgia go right out from under them, President Trump won North Carolina with a much smaller margin than in 2016. Where was the fraud in North Carolina?

Michigan and Pennsylvania are both complete disasters. Those two states are going to require in-depth analysis to determine what happened for sure. The margins there were larger than other areas.

Trump’s campaign was not the only campaign that miscalculated. Kevin McCarthy wrote off NV-03 yet the candidate only lost by 2.98%. CA-45 and CA-49 were also written off, yet those candidates finished within 7% despite having no money at all. With Congress at a thin margin, how big would it have been to have those three seats!

Fraud? If there was enough to matter, we certainly would have gone backwards elsewhere.

The Republicans were supposed to lose 5 seats in the Senate. It looks like one of the two in Georgia will win the runoff. If we split the Georgia senate – it will be a loss of just 2.

The Republicans were supposed to lose 10-15 seats in Congress. While the democrats are trying to steal NY-22 and IA-02 (I doubt they succeed) by appealing to congress to usurp the voters in those districts, the gain is at least 10. probably 12. This is an incredible 20-22 seat swing from predictions.

Republicans control re-districting in most of the country and gained seats in legislatures everywhere.

An honest analysis will show that millions of ballots had votes for Biden with Republicans down the rest of the ticket, or no vote for President and Republicans down the ticket. People had literally been worn out by the sideshow.

The moral of this story, if you want to be a successful politician, don’t be a jerk.

Sep 132017
 

President Trump had been on a roadshow to promote tax reform, including visiting the home states of vulnerable democrat senators. The democrats predictably tried to close ranks.

Consistent with his immigration policies, his tax policies are also polling well:

Seventy-two percent of voters say the tax code is archaic and another 71 percent say they want lower taxes for middle-class American families, according to a survey from America First Policies.

These individuals said they thought the tax code should be streamlined to make navigating taxes easier to understand. Voters who said they wanted lower taxes believe the middle class can get ahead more when they can save for things they need like clothing, medicine, and school supplies instead of paying more to the federal government.

Sixty-one percent of voters are dissatisfied with the current system and 68 percent of voters said they wished the tax code were simplified so much that they could file on a single piece of paper.

This leads us to the Trump tweets embedded in both of these posts. He has been lighting up the US Senate leadership as nearly 300 bills are stalled and stagnated in the Senate awaiting consideration.

Then President Trump did the unthinkable. He cut a deal with the democrats on the budget debt limit.

Then former Speaker Newt Gingrich weighed in on the deal that President Trump cut:

Sure. I think you set up two good questions. Would I feel a bit irritated if I was Speaker Ryan? Yes. Would I cut the deal if I were President Trump? Yes. Both are true.

I think Trump saw a situation with everything he just saw in Houston, now looking at what’s coming in Florida, and I think his feeling was, we’ve gotta get some movement in Washington. “We spent eight months and we didn’t get big things done. I’m gonna cut a deal with somebody, I’m gonna get something done this week. I’m gonna get the money to Houston, and to do that I’ve got to get the debt ceiling taken care of,” and he cut a 90-day deal. … I don’t think this is some gigantic earthquake. …

So what should we look forward to on legislation? Since Republican Leaders can not deliver the votes to pass bills, there is this:

President Trump’s breathtaking deal struck with Democratic leaders to fund the government through early December, increase government borrowing and speed relief money to the victims of Hurricane Harvey and Hurricane Irma has upended the narrative in Washington.

His own party was left reeling, while Democrats face a new world where they have been enticed to work with the man they spent the past eight months vowing to resist, labeled a racist and introduced articles of impeachment against.

The White House says it expects more such deals going forward, including a possible agreement on immigration. Mr. Trump said he is eager to legalize Dreamers and is working with “Chuck and Nancy” — Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat.

“This is where the Trump presidency begins,” said Michael McKenna, a Republican Party strategist. “We’re going to see this again on health care, on tax reform, on infrastructure, on anything you want to name. Trump is now going to go to Schumer.”

I do also take note that two of the biggest losers in Congress (on the R side) Charlie Dent and Dave Reichert, both of whom opposed the Obamacare repeal, and de-funding planned parenthood, are retiring rather than face re-election and the wrath of the Trump movement. It is clear that the President is having to deal with both political parties in order to advance his agenda.

Sep 122017
 

Many of you remember when Senator McCain joined with Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins to thwart a repeal of Obamacare. While McCain is currently involved in an effort to do just this after he got eviscerated in his home state (remember the 40% rate increase last year?), the President has had to apply himself against a feckless Republican leadership.

In the wake of the Democrats Unanimous opposition to the repeal, the bad news accelerated. It turns out that in New Hampshire, their welfare recipients are younger than the national average yet cost 26% more to provide health care for.

Despite the loss in Congress, the President has moved forward with gutting Obamacare. They cut 90% of the advertising budget from the department of Health and Human Services.

The Trump Administration also cut off a huge slush fund for Obamacare Navigators, actually requiring them to produce results versus taking checks for doing nothing.

In 2016, $62.5 million was spent on the program, which resulted in 81,426 individuals signing up for coverage, which was only 0.7 percent of total enrollees. Data finds that there were 17 navigators that only signed up 100 people, which means each enrollee cost about $5,000. There was one Navigator that only signed up one enrollee but received a grant of $200,000.

Anthem left Kentucky, leaving most of the state with only one coverage option.

This is the sixth state the health insurer has announced it will be either exiting or scaling back coverage in. Anthem has already made these announcements in regards to Indiana, Wisconsin, Missouri, Nevada, and Ohio.

Another disaster – 24.8 Million Americans are enrolled in High-Deductible Health Plans. This means most that have insurance now have inferior coverage.

Some states have seen deductibles rise at a faster rate than others. For example, average deductibles in Hawaii were only $988 compared with New Hampshire where average deductibles were $2,434. While 14 states saw significant hikes in average deductibles, only two states saw a decline.

“High-deductible health plans are increasingly becoming the norm in commercial insurance, and there is every reason to expect this trend to continue,” said Katherine Hempstead, senior advisor at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. “Deductibles rose considerably faster than premiums, and the share of health care spending made directly by consumers will continue to grow.”

On the heels of President Trump cutting a stunning, surprise deal with the Democrats on the “Debt Ceiling” (More on that in another post), we are starting to see signs of a crack in Congress related to Obamacare. The rapidity of the collapse after the failure of the first repeal attempt has to be weighing on Congress as well:

State officials sounded the alarm Wednesday on Capitol Hill about skyrocketing ObamaCare premiums as insurers across the country propose double-digit rate hikes – renewing pressure on Congress to act. Insurance commissioners and officials from Alaska, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, Oklahoma and Washington state all testified before a Senate committee on the 2018 premium hikes, which are being finalized over the next few weeks. In Alaska, premiums have increased 203 percent since 2013, according to Lori Wing-Heier, the state’s director of the Division of Insurance. “On average, the increase means that an Alaskan in the individual market who was paying a monthly premium of $344 per month in 2013 is paying $1,041 per month in 2017,” Wing-Heier told the Senate Health, Education, Labor & Pensions committee.

Oklahoma Insurance Commissioner John Doak told the panel he has been warning about “spiking rates” for too long and those warnings “have been ignored at the federal level.” “Oklahoma is facing the collapse of our individual health insurance market,” Doak said, adding that the state has seen a rise in premiums of 130 percent over the last four years. And in Tennessee, proposed 2018 premium increases are between 21 and 42 percent, according to Julie Mix McPeak, the commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Commerce and Insurance. “Tennessee consumers will have at least one option for coverage, but only one,” McPeak said, noting that “a single choice” did not represent the state’s “ideal marketplace competition.”  “Our consumers have seen premium prices skyrocket while their choices dropped substantially.” McPeak added: “The current Affordable Care Act trajectory is not sustainable.”

Got all that? State Insurance commissioners went to Washington DC pleading for help.

More than sixty thousand ObamaCare enrollees in Virginia could be without an insurer next year after Optima Health announced it was leaving many of the state’s markets, according to officials in the state. Optima said it plans to exit many of the counties that it served in 2017, after previously planning to cover nearly the entire state next year. The move would leave 63 of Virginia’s 95 counties without an insurance option for 2018…Optima also said it would be raising premiums by 81 percent for any customer who doesn’t qualify for subsidies from the federal government…Optima said some of the premium increase was due to uncertainty surrounding federal funding for ObamaCare’s cost-sharing reduction payments. It also said some of the increase was due to other national carriers leaving the state. Anthem, Aetna and UnitedHealth have already announced plans to exit Virginia’s ObamaCare markets entirely next year.

President Trump never stopped hammering Congress even after the first attempt to repeal and replace Obamacare failed. See the embedded tweets that led to a watershed moment in politics that occurred recently as we pick this up in our next post.

Sep 122017
 

First off, let’s talk strategy. Given that the left has been screaming Racism against the President since the beginning of his candidacy, that attack rings hollow. Given that corporate CEO’s who begged for DACA to be retained, just the week prior ran away from the President’s advisory committees over the false Charlottesville Canard. Finally, given the behavior of immigrant’s rights activists and their willing lackeys in the media echoing the racism charge… they all combined to make the decision easy as the President lost nothing from undoing DACA

Even at that, the final decision by the President to put DACA on a 6 month timeline to expire was merciful and reasonable. The President put the onus on Congress to do the job. The original DACA was unconstitutional as it was an executive action by the President that was designed to be an end-around congress. The President himself laid out an extremely strong case for his decision:

“As President, my highest duty is to defend the American people and the Constitution of the United States of America,” the statement begins. “At the same time, I do not favor punishing children, most of whom are now adults, for the actions of their parents. But we must also recognize that we are nation of opportunity because we are a nation of laws.”

The fundamental problem with Obama’s DACA order is that it is simply an executive order. Far-reaching decisions about who is and isn’t a citizen must be determined by the legislative branch.

“The legislative branch, not the executive branch, writes these laws — this is the bedrock of our Constitutional system, which I took a solemn oath to preserve, protect, and defend,” Trump continues. “In June of 2012, President Obama bypassed Congress to give work permits, social security numbers, and federal benefits to approximately 800,000 illegal immigrants currently between the ages of 15 and 36. The typical recipients of this executive amnesty, known as DACA, are in their twenties. Legislation offering these same benefits had been introduced in Congress on numerous occasions and rejected each time.”

So there you have it.

Back to DACA, it was a program rife with fraud.

O’Brien said that the vast majority of the 800,000 illegal immigrants now in DACA have never been interviewed by any representative of the U.S. government, either in person on over the phone.

Then there is this:

Vaughan pointed out that 5,000 illegal immigrants who were being held in detention centers and who were on track for deportation at the time DACA took effect were released and granted DACA status.

“They were considered a public safety threat,” she said. “Even under the Obama administration, they were being detained.”

Said O’Brien: “I personally witnessed an alarming number of people who had gang affiliations applying for this program.”

Most of them, he said, were approved.

Now that groups like MS-13 are being hunted, it puts this in stark relief.

There is more – a bizarre quirk in the law was covered up by Obama, and exposed by the Trump Administration:

The House and Senate Judiciary Committees revealed that more than 45,000 DACA recipients were approved for “advance parole,” which is permission to leave and reenter the U.S. despite not being in permanent legal status here.

The loophole is known among immigration activists, and public colleges in California were urged to use it to help their illegal immigrant students here under the DACA program to gain legal status.

The California-Mexico Studies Center actually advertises just such a program, charging thousands of dollars to give Dreamers a chance to travel south to Mexico to qualify for advance parole. Part of the fees the program collects help pay for “legal advice and filing assistance” in obtaining advance parole.

Predictably, democrats sued to reinstate the unconstitutional executive order, citing… you guessed it…

In a lawsuit filed in federal court in Brooklyn, New York and other states said DACA has provided important humanitarian protection for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants.

The states said that since 78 percent of DACA recipients are Mexican, revoking the policy is proof of the president’s antipathy toward Mexico, which they trace back to his campaign statements.

Got it? Trump said mean things, therefore you have to side with us. That rationale was used in the travel ban court cases. While people are being distracted by the race card, note that if the Judges set a legal precedent that campaign speech can be used to invalidate laws, then imagine the rationale that can be used to muzzle the Church or Conservatives in general.

Once again, President Trump was willing to take the savaging from the left media and the democrats to provide leadership. This caused the Speaker of the House to make bold statements about how Congress will fix DACA but any fix would be tied to border security:

P(aul)R(yan): That’s exactly my position. Look, here’s the point I keep making on this, is this DACA dilemma that we are experiencing here, why do we have it? It is a symptom of a bigger problem. And the bigger problem is we do not have control of our borders. And because we do not have control of our borders, we have this problem. So it’s just reasonable and natural that we should address the root cause of this problem, lack of control of our borders, and get border security, interior enforcement, the things that you need to do to secure your borders so that you don’t have a DACA problem 10 years from now. So we want to address the cause and the effect, the symptom and the root cause of the problem. And that is only reasonable. And that is what our point is. And so there is a compromise to be had here, and that’s what this compromise looks like, in my mind.

GB: And so there will not be a stand-alone Dream Act coming out of the House?

PR: That’s right…We cannot — because we — because we won’t fix the problem. If we just rubber-stamp a standalone Dream Act, then we’re going to have another Dream Act that we’re going to need in 10 years from now.

President Trump’s leadership is forcing Republican Leadership to plant their flag in the ground. Polls, even biased media polls show 60-70% support for various border / immigration measures. Nothing the President is doing is unpopular. This is why the left smear machine has to go in to overdrive in an attempt to stop him.

Sep 122017
 

Broward County Elections Supervisor Brenda Snipes is defending her office against a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Rights Union, a conservative legal group that contends there are more voters registered on Broward’s rolls than there are eligible voters in the county.

Those rolls are said to be inflated with not only noncitizens and felons, but also other ineligible people who have voted illegally.

On July 31, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper reported that, in court, “Snipes acknowledged the processes her office [has] been using aren’t perfect and that some noncitizens and felons have voted despite not being eligible—especially right before major elections, when groups are actively registering new voters.”

The Daily Signal covered this little gem ignored by the national media. Broward County is a key county to the democrats and is also critical to their hopes of winning the state of Florida.

Broward County’s problems reportedly included voter registration lists with 130-year-old voters (or would-be voters, if they were living), felons, duplicate registrations, and commercial addresses listed as residential addresses.

Stories have been trickling out of documented irregularities in registrations and voting. This is only happening because President Trump is the President. The odds that Mr. Trump beat in order to get elected included overcoming this as well.

I saw this article about Hillary Clinton’s Lawyer fighting a lawsuit challenging New Hampshire’s Voter ID Law. Despite the fact that 65-70% of Americans support Voter ID as a measure to ensure election integrity, there have been a slew of lawsuits from the left trying to forestall those laws.

Previous efforts launched against voter ID laws were backed by millions from liberal billionaire George Soros, who has a personal goal of enlarging the electorate by 10 million people by 2018, as documents leaked last year show.

The League of Woman Voters and three individuals are suing the state of New Hampshire in an attempt to block a law on voter registration that includes requirements such as providing a driver’s license to prove an individual’s primary residence is in the state and will be living in the state for a substantial time.

The lawsuit is supported by Priorities USA, the largest liberal super political action committee that backed Clinton’s campaign. Priorities received $9.5 million from Soros throughout the 2016 election cycle.

Marc Elias, a partner at the Washington, D.C.-based law firm Perkins Coie and Clinton’s former top campaign lawyer, is listed as an attorney on the New Hampshire lawsuit. Elias joined the board of Priorities earlier this year when the group absorbed Every Vote Counts, a nonprofit created by Clinton allies to mobilize African American and Latino voters. The group is in the process of building a “one-stop inventory” on voting measures that will be shared with other liberal groups.

Note that Wisconsin implemented a voter ID Law that stood up in court and it went Republican for the first time since 1988. I’ve read the stories of people being bussed in from Illinois to same day register, which brings us to New Hampshire.

On election day, I spoke to someone in Trump’s operation back east. They told me that they had numerous reports of people with Massachusetts license plates same-day registering and voting in New Hampshire. It appears that the stories were real.

⦁ 6,540 people registered and voted on Nov. 8, based on presenting out-of-state licenses.

⦁ As of Aug. 30, about 15 percent (1,014 of the voters) had been issued New Hampshire driver’s licenses.

⦁ Οf the remaining 5,526, barely more than 200 (3.3 percent) had registered a motor vehicle in New Hampshire.

New Hampshire law gives drivers 60 days upon establishing residence to obtain a state license.

But more than 80 percent of voters who registered on Nov. 8 using out-of-state driver’s licenses, or 5,313 of them, neither had a state license nor registered a motor vehicle almost 10 months later.

Double voting is illegal, and 196 people are being investigated for casting ballots in New Hampshire and in other states.

In the presidential race, Democrat Hillary Clinton defeated Republican Donald Trump in New Hampshire by 2,736 votes. In an even tighter race, for the Granite State’s U.S. Senate seat, Democratic challenger Maggie Hassan defeated incumbent Republican Kelly Ayotte by 1,017 votes.

President Trump alluded in February that he lost New Hampshire and former GOP Senator Kelly Ayotte lost due to voter fraud.

You tell me what happened?