Maybe This Is Why Hillary Clinton Thinks She Has Another Shot at the Democratic Nomination

When it comes down to any contest, you size up the competition. So, given all of the negatives Hillary Clinton has right now, why is she possibly thinking about running again? Yes, Democrats like her, but I think if you were to ask a follow-up question concerning her running for president…again, the poll numbers would not be stellar. The progressive base of the Democratic Party, which isn’t small, wants her gone. A lot of the big wigs want a fresh start as well.

Hillary comes off as inauthentic, not trustworthy, and someone who plays by their own rules. Worse, the Clintons come off as a couple that thinks the rules don’t apply to them. As many have noted during the 2016 election, all of these criticisms from their days in the White House, and on the campaign trail, were resurrected by the email fiasco Hillary failed miserably to downplay. Rural voters probably won’t listen to her either, and if she tries, the issue of trust comes into play. No one outside of the Acela Corridor seems to think she’s playing with a full deck. These are the same areas that voted against her and made Donald Trump our president. . .

Via The Hill [emphasis mine]:

With the 2018 midterms in the rearview mirror, several Democrats are gearing up for the 2020 presidential contest. But so far, no Democrat has attracted broad support from the party’s base, according to a new Hill.TV American Barometer poll.

The survey, conducted among 680 registered voters who identified themselves as Democrats or independents, found that “none of the above” was the most popular choice among potential 2020 challengers to President Trump.

(Read more from “Maybe This Is Why Hillary Clinton Thinks She Has Another Shot at the Democratic Nomination” HERE)

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Veterans Day 2018: Never Forget Our Common Bond

By The Blaze. Monday, November 12th, Veterans Day will be observed here in the United States, which happens when the actual date (the 11th) falls on a weekend. This year it marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War One, and follows the 243rd Marine Corps birthday. That’s quite a weekend line-up.

Over the weekend and into Monday there are, of course, many memorials, ceremonies, and dedications. There’s a new museum in Ohio. There are discounts and special special deals for vets at establishments across the country. There was even a pretty great reconciliation on Saturday Night Live, which included advice from newly elected member of Congress Dan Crenshaw to tell a vet “Never Forget” — it’s good advice.

Veterans Day grew from Armistice Day, that aforementioned celebration of the end of the Great War, the War to End All Wars, which is now one hundred years, and many more wars in the past. Now it is the day to celebrate those who fought in all wars, in all actions and engagements, who served around the world and over the decades.

Distinct from Memorial Day, it’s a day to remember, honor, help, or just celebrate American military members and veterans who are here with us still, as well as those who are gone. . .

What the members of our military do every day, what they did at home and abroad, in war and in peace, hardly requires explaining here. You probably know a veteran. Many of you are related to one ore more. We know what a veteran is, and we know why to celebrate their day. The stories are all around us. (Read more from “Veterans Day 2018: Never Forget Our Common Bond” HERE)

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Veterans Day: By the Time I Saw My VA Doctor, He Said It Was Too Late

By Fox News. I was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer. Had I been seen by a doctor sooner, my cancer could have been detected before it had progressed so far. Now it was too late. My cancer was so advanced the VA wouldn’t even offer me a treatment option.

I had joined the U.S. Army in 1989 as a young, ambitious kid. I honorably served my country for 18 years in the infantry and military police. When I took off the uniform, I relied on the promise I would be cared for as one who “shall have borne the battle.” But that promise was broken.

I was let down by government, the country that I served and loved. That hurt worse than my diagnosis. . .

Today, my cancer is in remission, thanks to the willingness of my non-VA doctors to fight for me. I still struggle and endure regular physical pain, but I’ve overcome far more than I or the VA expected.

Unfortunately, I am not the only veteran who has been denied the care they earned. Thousands of others wait months and even years for medical care and have to endure the bureaucratic red tape of the VA’s health care system every day. They do this because, until recently, it was the only option. (Read more from “Veterans Day: By the Time I Saw My VA Doctor, He Said It Was Too Late” HERE)

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According to WSJ, Hillary Will Run Again

Hillary Rodham Clinton will run for president again in 2020, and she has reinvented herself in order to do it.

At least, that is what is online Sunday afternoon at the Wall Street Journal. The headline reads “Hillary Will Run Again”, the subhead reads “Reinventing herself as a liberal firebrand, Mrs. Clinton will easily capture the 2020 nomination,” the authors are Mark Penn and Andrew Stein, and it runs in print on Monday.

“Get ready for Hillary Clinton 4.0. More than 30 years in the making, this new version of Mrs. Clinton, when she runs for president in 2020, will come full circle—back to the universal-health-care-promoting progressive firebrand of 1994,” it begins. “True to her name, Mrs. Clinton will fight this out until the last dog dies. She won’t let a little thing like two stunning defeats stand in the way of her claim to the White House.”

Warning their excited target audience — who are already dancing in the virtual streets on social media — not to “pay much attention to the ‘I won’t run’ declarations,” they argue that the generation of Democrats who have been salivating over a power vacuum after the reign of the Clintons have proved too incompetent to take the reins. . .

The piece runs through a brief history of slime, covering Hillary classics from “It Takes a Village” through the Hope and Change desert (with a brief layover in “she won more delegates than him” land), and on into the Bernie Sanders doldrums. (You know, doldrums in the oceanic sense, not the hum-drummery sense.) Eventually it moves into newer songs like losing the midwest. Then finally to the crescendo. (Read more from “According to WSJ, Hillary Will Run Again” HERE)

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Californians and Their Animals Are Flooding Zuma Beach to Escape Wildfires

Californians living near Malibu began evacuating their animals to Zuma Beach Friday as the Woolsey Fire threatened thousands of homes and other structures, the Los Angeles Times reports.

People filled the beach with horses, alpacas, dogs and other animals to sit and wait until they could return home. The beach, though safer than other areas, was covered in smoke carried by strong winds that fueled the fire’s rapid expanse. The Woolsey Fire consumed 83,000 acres from Thursday to Sunday. . .

California fire officials expect conditions to worsen as winds pick up again Sunday. Santa Ana winds are expected to blow between 30 and 50 miles per hour later Sunday and continue through Tuesday, according to AccuWeather. . .

Two other large fires, the Camp Fire burning north of Sacramento and the Hill Fire burning near Los Angeles, have burned an additional 110,000 acres. The Camp Fire has killed at least 23 people who lived in or near Paradise. The fire swept through the town Friday morning, catching many by surprise. The Camp Fire has destroyed nearly 6,500 buildings, CBS News reports.

(Read more from “Californians and Their Animals Are Flooding Zuma Beach to Escape Wildfires” HERE)

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American Flag Sellers Violating Rules to Trick Buyers

Prominent sellers of American flags are peddling U.S. flags that are made in China while misrepresenting and mislabeling their wares, according to laboratory test results and other research.

A trade association said the flags are being sold illegally and has requested the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) launch an investigation.

Take VSVO Flag Company, whose website says, “We believe in selling only the highest quality American made flags … Many of our best customers are military men.” It encourages Americans to “support our troops” by buying from the company.

“The inspiration behind our flag company is my father,” its Amazon listing says. “He is a veteran and growing up as a child I looked up at him with pride for what he did for our country. I created this company to honor him and, people like him who love and serve their country.” . . .

Two textile manufacturers, Glaser Mills and Schneider Mills, separately conducted tests on flags from VSVO, Jetlifee and G128, and both concluded that the material was not nylon, but 200 denier, 60-by-60 thread count polyester that typically comes from China. TheDCNF also examined the flags after they were tested, and none had the required tags on them. (Read more from “American Flag Sellers Violating Rules to Trick Buyers” HERE)

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Judge Rules for Rick Scott. Florida Supervisor Must Release Public Records.

On Friday, Florida Judge Carol-Lisa Phillips ruled in favor of Florida Governor Rick Scott, who was ahead in votes in his race for the Senate seat held by incumbent Democratic Senator Bill Nelson when the polls closed Tuesday night, and had filed suit along with the National Republican Senatorial Committee against Broward County election supervisor Brenda Snipes in order to force her to release public records surrounding the votes in Broward County. The lawsuit stated that Snipes was “unwilling to disclose records revealing how many electors voted, how many ballots have been canvassed, and how many ballots remain to be canvassed.”

The lawsuit stated:

Voting in the 2018 General Election concluded November 6, 2018. Two days after voting has concluded, the Supervisor Of Elections is unwilling to disclose records revealing how many electors voted, how many ballots have been canvassed, and how many ballots remain to be canvassed. The lack of transparency raises substantial concerns about the validity of the election process. An emergency hearing is necessary as the Canvassing Board is obligated to submit the unofficial elections results to the Division of Elections by noon November 10, 2018. A recount in at least two, possibly three, of the statewide races appears likely. Plaintiffs seek an immediate, emergency hearing of this matter pursuant to section 119.11, Florida Statutes; an Order from this Court declaring Defendants to be in breach of their constitutional and statutory duties to permit access to public records; and an Order from this Court compelling Defendants to provide Plaintiffs with access to those records.

The judge found that Snipes, the Broward Supervisor of Elections, violated public records act and the Florida constitution, and must provide public records requested by Scott and NRSC. (Read more from “Judge Rules for Rick Scott. Florida Supervisor Must Release Public Records.” HERE)

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Liberal Gun Reporter Reveals Something Terrifying About Gun Control Solutions

. . .Yet, there are some reporters writing for left-leaning publications, like The Guardian, who are actually very good on this issue. Yeah, believe it or not, the Left has a couple, not many of course; dedicated reporters who follow the gun beat. The Washington Free Beacon’s Stephen Gutowski is one of the best for conservative media. Lois Beckett is one on the Left who you should follow. You may not always agree, but she’s fair. She wrote in The New York Times about the myth that the 1994 assault weapons ban was effective, while also dispelling the liberal lie that banning AR-15 rifles would reduce crime. Handguns commit the most gun violence, but there is zero political support for that initiative. . .

Yet, Beckett is more concerned about the media’s lack of coverage in the solutions to these types of horrible events. Gutowski has also commented about the media’s poor grasp of gun policy is probably because there is no dedicated staff tasked with reporting and researching at major newspapers and news organizations. Beckett added that Long could have been subjected to a gun violence restraining order law, which was passed in California, but no one knows it exists, not even law enforcement. . .

Beckett added that these horrible incidents never happen out of the blue. No one ever snaps; there is a trail of red flags. She also said that there are research-driven solutions that gun rights advocates do support, which coupled with some of the ones on the Left, that don’t veer into ‘take all the guns’ territory, there has to be solutions both sides can agree on to at least provide some framework to prevent more tragedies like Sandy Hook, Borderline, and Marjory Stoneman Douglas. For now, the aftermath is the same: mourn the dead for two seconds, blame the NRA, blame Trump, recycle straight trash reporting on gun laws that have been on the books since Kennedy was in office, and repeat. I don’t mind having conservations with pro-gun control, folks, but when they say I’m evil for supporting the Second Amendment, the conversation ends…quickly. (Read more from “Liberal Gun Reporter Reveals Something Terrifying About Gun Control Solutions” HERE)

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CNN Prepares to Sue the White House

The rumor mill is swirling. Reports are coming in that CNN and their Chief White House Correspondent, Jim Acosta, are preparing to sue the Trump administration over the revocation of Acosta’s permanent press credentials, commonly referred to as a “hard pass.”

Former ABC News reporter and anchor Sam Donaldson appeared Sunday on CNN’s “Reliable Sources” with Brian Stetler and said he believed a lawsuit had already been filed, The Washington Examiner reported. . .

According to Floyd Abrams, a constitutional law expert who appeared on Stetler’s show, CNN should sue the Trump administration over the issue.

“I think it’s a really strong lawsuit. I can understand CNN being reluctant to sue because the president keeps saying CNN is the enemy of me, and CNN might have reluctance to have a lawsuit titled ‘CNN vs. Donald Trump.’ That said, yes, I think they should sue,” Abrams said. “This is going to happen again. It’s likely to happen again. So whether it’s CNN suing or the next company suing, someone is going to have to bring a lawsuit. And whoever does is going to win unless there’s some sort of reason.”

The alleged lawsuit is the latest in a string of incidents involving CNN’s Jim Acosta. On Wednesday, the White House pulled his permanent press pass after determining that he was inappropriate during a press conference earlier in the day. Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the Trump administration won’t stand for “a reporter placing his hands on a young woman just trying to do her job as a White House intern.” (Read more from “CNN Prepares to Sue the White House” HERE)

The 2018 Midterm Results Leave Democrats Without a Roadmap for 2020

By The Federalist. Trying to project lessons from a midterm election for the next general election is risky business for many reasons. Yet no one may be more interested in trying to tease lessons out of 2018 than the Democrats seeking the presidency in 2020. For them, the results must range somewhere between confounding and disappointing.

Like any party out of the White House, today’s Democrats are groping for an identity. In particular, they are searching for the type of candidate who can beat the Republican––presumably President Trump––in a national contest.

The prospective candidates appear to be trying to fit themselves into various templates to please certain factions of their base, or fit certain theories about how to win in the Electoral College. A number of Democrats running statewide campaigns in 2018 tested these various approaches, but the results are hardly encouraging.

One Democratic faction is interested in a campaign involving identity politics––or, to put it less pejoratively, representational politics. They are shopping for the next Barack Obama, a candidate who inspires minorities and younger voters to flock to the polls. . .

Presidential wannabes like senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker (or former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick) probably watched gubernatorial candidates like Florida’s Andrew Gillum and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams with great interest. Gillum and Abrams both ran on solidly progressive platforms, and neither was afraid to make race and racism issues in their campaigns. (Read more from “The 2018 Midterm Results Leave Democrats Without a Roadmap for 2020” HERE)

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What the midterm election results mean for your taxes

By Market Watch. The 2018 midterm elections are over, and we will have a divided government through at least 2020. Here are the possible federal income tax implications for individual taxpayers:

With the Democrats now in control of the House and the Republicans still in control of the Senate, we have the classic recipe for tax gridlock. That’s because any tax legislation must originate in the House and then pass both the House and the Senate before being signed by the president. The Democrats want to roll back most or all of the taxpayer-friendly changes included in the 2017 Tax Reform and Jobs Act (TCJA), but there is no way the Republicans will allow that to happen.

The main idea of so-called Tax Reform 2.0 was to make permanent the TCJA’s temporary federal income tax rate cuts for individual taxpayers, the doubled child-tax credit, and the deduction for up to 20% of qualified business income (QBI) from pass-through entities (sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, and S corporations). These pro-taxpayer changes are scheduled to expire at the end of 2025. (Read more from “Triple Murder Suspect Is an Illegal Immigrant Released Despite Detainer Request” HERE)

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The Courts Are out of Control: Stealing Elections

Those of you who are reeling from the election loss and the potential theft of more congressional seats in the election “postgame show” should take heart in the fact that elections evidently don’t matter. Nor do the branches of government that are determined by elections seem to matter; namely, the states, Congress, and the president do not matter. We have one branch of government controlled by the unaccountable legal profession, and it not only determines the outcome of every broad policy issue but the outcome of elections themselves.

Imagine if someone concocted a system whereby any one of the 535 senators or congressmen can unilaterally decide a broad public policy issue or direction of the country at any moment. Moreover, that the determination over which one of those members could unilaterally rule and the rules of construction governing the precedent and proceedings of such tribunals were set by an insular profession, say, Hollywood Thus, Hollywood can concoct a scheme to tee up tribunal outcomes of every policy issue before incoming Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar and have that deemed as “the law of the land.”

If this sounds like a despotic scheme more corrupt than North Korea, it’s actually more democratic than the corrupt system our political elites now use to subvert our constitutional republic. At least under this hypothetical scheme, voters could still remove the tribunal via the ballot box. Under the one-directional progressive scheme of court-shopping judicial supremacy controlled by the legal profession, there are no elections.

There is no low to which the lower courts won’t go

Let’s review some of the recent news from the courts.

Yesterday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a district judge’s opinion that not only can a president violate American sovereignty and immigration law by unilaterally making legal permanent residents out of those here illegally and offering them Social Security cards and refundable tax cuts, but a new president must follow that edict instead of our statutes. While the Supreme Court will likely take it up soon and overturn this decision, it has repeatedly rebuffed requests to do so in a timely fashion, even though this is sheer lunacy. If a lower court issued an insane opinion on the Right, such as mandating that a president pays for everyone to buy a gun, you better believe SCOTUS wouldn’t wait a full year to let this program continue. This is one of the many examples of why a conservative Supreme Court will not help us.

The rules of the judicial supremacy game set forth by the legal profession dictate that a lower court can always be more progressive than existing Supreme Court precedent, statute, and the Constitution, but can never test the limits of liberal Supreme Court precedent. This is why the lower courts keep coming back for more, even after the Supreme Court finally takes up the case and reverses the opinion. We saw this with Trump v. Hawaii and the president’s power to exclude aliens. Despite the categorical opinion of the court, several lower courts have ignored the decision in a number of immigration cases and are continuing to challenge our sovereignty, 130 years of the most settled plenary power doctrine in the court system, and the plain meaning of the statute. Heck, some of these judges are overturning immigration statute itself for the first time in American history. They have said laws against sanctuary cities are invalid. They have said you can’t deport an illegal alien who is an “immigration rights activist” or a “pizza delivery man.” And by the way, the pizza delivery man was arrested for beating his wife just weeks after ICE absurdly released him after listening to this illegal court order. He is still in the country because a district judge said he doesn’t believe in deportations, and the other branches are stupid enough to listen.

This won’t end. If you think the radical district judges in California, New York, and the Ninth Circuit won’t grant an order to allow the caravan to invade our border, you aren’t paying attention. The Supreme Court only hears a few of these cases, and even when it does, the lower courts turn around and continue to violate the principle of the decision and the rules of standing by finding one tiny difference in the facts of the case. We have seen this continuously with lower court injunctions against public prayer, even after the Supreme Court ruled properly. Yet only Thomas and Gorsuch agreed to take up the appeal.

Then there is the global warming lawsuit. In a decision that rivals only the DACA case in terms of sheer insanity, Oregon District Judge Ann Aiken gave standing to teenagers to sue the weather. The judge is putting the climate and the government on trial and demanding that DOJ present evidence debunking global warming, or she’ll side with the kids to order the government to turn down God’s thermostat, aka shut down capitalism. This lawsuit violates every legal norm and rule of standing for a court, but the Ninth Circuit, of course, has rebuffed any attempt to stop this lawsuit.

What about SCOTUS? Once again, it is continuing to allow this insanity to stand rather than rip it out at its roots. Only Justices Thomas and Gorsuch would have granted the emergency motion to the government. The rest absurdly contended that “adequate relief may be available in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.”

Then there is the Keystone Pipeline. Construction of the pipeline is one of the few good domestic policy victories we achieved out of this presidency, thanks to a comatose Republican Congress. Now, a district judge has unilaterally halted its construction. Judge Brian Morris of Montana said Trump didn’t offer sufficient justification for changing Obama’s decision to halt the pipeline!

In August, I compiled a list of 13 times courts said Trump must continue Obama’s discretionary or lawless executive actions. I could add at least another 13 to that list.

Judicial supremacism is ensuring that only Democrats win elections

Finally, there is election law itself. The Constitution gives states full authority to set the time, methods, and procedures of elections. Only Congress, not the federal courts, can get involved in extenuating circumstances. Yet, we have allowed federal judges to control every process of election law. There are dozens of very close races and we are now seeing that Democrats win all of them based on provisional and certain types of mail-in ballots that are problematic and often, pursuant to state law, are downright invalid. Yet the federal courts, from Georgia and North Carolina to Ohio, have forced election officials to violate state laws and count these ballots.

They are literally determining the outcome of elections. They are mandating all forms of early voting, registration and voting anomalies, voting without photo ID, and blocking all forms of regulations to clamp down on non-citizens voting, fraud, and incompetence in the electoral process. What you are seeing play out this week in all these states, with Democrats overturning election results, is due to courts having blocked states from fixing these problems for years. There’s no greater form of voter suppression than voter fraud, yet the federal courts have codified the Democrats’ insidious racial agenda into the Constitution and statutes and have ensured that any effort to conduct free and fair elections will be legally deemed racist.

What about the Supreme Court? Ironically, we haven’t lost an election law case in years. In fact, we’ve won every photo ID case and achieved a landmark victory just a few months ago in the case of Ohio’s secretary of state using the lawful procedures of the motor-voter law to clean the state’s rolls of dead voters. Yet just weeks before the election, the Sixth Circuit, which is not even one of the worst panels, came back for more and issued another injunction on Ohio’s law!

Conservatives who think that we can accede to this game of judicial supremacy but are putting faith into a “conservative” Supreme Court and Trump’s lower court picks are missing a number of points:

1) Before Trump, there was a supermajority of leftists on the lower courts thanks to Democrats batting .1000 and Republicans picking leftists half the time. Thus, even with Trump filling vacancies at a rapid pace, it’s not making a dent in most circuits, most of the vacancies are the best conservative judges retiring, and Democrats only need a few avenues to forum-shop and shut down our Constitution. Their biggest avenues, the Ninth, Fourth, and D.C. circuits, are gone for a lifetime.

2) The legal profession controls the “culture” of the court system and the arc of litigation. That will not change.

3) The Supreme Court is not categorically ripping out this judicial cancer, and even when it tries, the Left comes back for more. Death by one thousand lawsuits.

4) John Roberts and several of the other conservatives are being extra careful not to appear “political” and are doing everything they can to avoid overturning bad lower court cases.

If conservatives think they could walk blindly into the legal profession’s haunted house of judicial supremacy and win, they are seriously not paying attention. There is only one rule of engagement for progressives in the judicial casino they created: “We win, you lose.” For 60 years, the Supreme Court was the primary organ for their social transformation without representation. Now that they achieved all they needed to set the baseline precedents on the 14th Amendment and rules of standing (precedent that the conservative legal eagles have agreed to), they no longer need a Supreme Court. They can expand on the 60-year baseline with forum-shopped lower courts buttressed by the ACLU, NAACP, National Immigrant Law Center, and the law schools themselves.

The answer to this is to stop acceding to judicial supremacy. As I’ve explained ad nauseam, when courts grant standing to a straw-man plaintiff to decide a broadly consequential political question, the other branches of government have equal authority and greater power to push back. And in fact, when they know the courts are wrong, they have an obligation to interpret the Constitution properly. See my articles here, here, here, and here and listen to my podcasts here, here, here, and here.

Until or unless the issue of judicial supremacism is brought to a fight, no other issue, including elections, matters. (For more from the author of “The Courts Are out of Control: Stealing Elections” please click HERE)

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