While many Americans were focused on Washington this week, I was paying special attention to Fort Bend County, Texas. What took place in that Houston suburb may reveal more about the 2020 election than the impeachment trial in the Senate does.
Fort Bend held a special runoff election to fill a vacant state House seat left open by the resignation of the Republican incumbent, who took a job with the University of Texas. Sensing an opening, state and national Democrats decided a win in House District 28 would give them a head start on flipping the nine seats they’d need to control the Texas House and boost their efforts to overturn GOP state legislative majorities from Arizona to Florida, Wisconsin to Pennsylvania and a dozen states in between.
The reason for this intense Democratic interest in state politics is redistricting.Democrats saw how Republican state legislative majorities affected the composition of the U.S. House after the 2010 census. Democrats want to do in more states what they did back then in drawing congressional lines favorable to their party in California, Illinois, Maryland and other blue bastions. The 2020 census gives them the opportunity, but only if they control at least one chamber of a state’s legislature.
Democrats, eager to set the tone for 2020, piled into the race with money, endorsements, technology, lists and volunteers to help Elizabeth Markowitz defeat her Republican opponent. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Mike Bloomberg all endorsed Ms. Markowitz. Mr. Bloomberg even carved out time from his presidential campaign to go door-to-door with her. Former presidential candidates Julián Castro and Robert Francis O’Rourke also canvassed neighborhoods, Mr. O’Rourke so frequently that it looked as if he was trying to establish residency.
Calling the race “the most important election (yet) in 2020,” the former El Paso congressman said a victory could help turn Texas blue and “build momentum” in the state for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee echoed Mr. O’Rourke’s enthusiasm, saying that flipping the district would be “earth-shattering.” The Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee called the race “a dead heat” in the campaign’s final week.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said if Ms. Markowitz was elected, she’d be “a key voice in fixing our broken political system.” His praise was accompanied by $50,000 in contributions, part of the nearly $1.3 million from national and state Democratic groups. More than 70% of Ms. Markowitz’s contributors were from outside Texas, and more than 94% from outside her district, according to Texas Ethics Commission campaign reports.
All these hopes of a Democratic victory were shattered Tuesday. In the biggest turnout in history for a Texas House special runoff, Republican Gary Gates walloped Ms. Markowitz 58% to 42%. His 16-point margin of victory was more than twice the Republican incumbent’s in 2018 and larger than the district margins for President Trump in 2016 (10 points) and Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 (three).
Georgetown Law students shamed the university last semester when they exercised a heckler’s veto against a Trump Administration official. Now they’re claiming that disciplining those who disrupted the event “would have a chilling effect on free speech and expression across campus.”
The controversy began last fall when Georgetown Law invited Kevin McAleenan, then the acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to speak on immigration law and policy. Hundreds of law students signed a petition accusing Mr. McAleenan of implementing a “white nationalist-inspired” agenda and demanding his disinvitation. When the event proceeded anyway, student protesters prevented Mr. McAleenan from speaking.
Georgetown’s speech and expression policy states that students can face discipline for “disrupting events to prohibit other students from hearing the views of an invited speaker,” but the law school won’t say whether the hecklers were punished.
Instead the law school has convened an advisory committee to consider, among other things, the “response to disruptive protests during an event, and follow-up disciplinary or other administrative actions,” the school said in a statement. Georgetown University Law Center Dean William Treanor also asked the committee to consider whether there should be “any constraints on which outside speakers may be invited to speak on the Law Center campus,” the co-chairs wrote in an email to students.
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, and I’m Jan Jekielek. In this episode, we’ll sit down with Diana West, a journalist and author of “The Red Thread: A Search for Ideological Drivers Inside the Anti-Trump Conspiracy.”
www.wsj.com/articles/soleimanis-latin-america-terror-11578863631
The death of Iranian Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani is a blow to the theocracy’s efforts to assert its power across the Middle East. By taking out Soleimani, President Trump also did Latin America a big favor.
As if to make the point, Cuba’s military dictatorship quickly condemned the U.S. action. The dead general was also mourned by the drug-trafficking terrorist group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, members of the Venezuelan dictatorship, and Iranian proxy networks in Brazil, Peru, Argentina, El Salvador and Mexico.
A hero of hemispheric criminality has been lost, and the gangsters are sad. They may also be worried. It has been a mistake to let Iran’s incursions into the region during the last two decades go unanswered. If the end of Soleimani is the beginning of a more muscular U.S. policy toward Tehran, it’s good news for Latin America.
Iran plays the long game in its effort to undermine U.S. leadership and expand its influence around the world. In the Western Hemisphere, the regime’s Ministry of Intelligence has taken the lead by establishing “cultural centers” in many urban areas, from which it can spread propaganda, proselytize, radicalize converts and recruit locals as spies.
But intelligence gathering has a deeper purpose, which is to support operations that follow. This is where Soleimani, the head of Iran’s Quds Force, came in.
The force handles foreign assignments for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, engaging in asymmetric warfare through weapons trafficking as well as assassinations and attacks on enemy targets. In other words, it exports terrorism.
EDITORIAL – The ongoing attacks by the political establishment on President Donald Trump –which began even before he was elected – are without parallel in history. The savagery, frenzy, and outright hysteria displayed by the President’s enemies within the Democrat Party, the media, and the various power centers of the globalist elites have no prior precedent.
This President has been spied on, lied about, made the subject of phony foreign dossiers, insulted, ridiculed, scorned, mocked and threatened. We have witnessed Hollyweird celebrities advocate for blowing up the White House, demand the President be beaten, jailed or even assassinated, and his children tortured and sexually abused.
We have seen politicians in Washington try to convict the President of non-existent crimes, investigate him and his family members for everything from tax returns to guests at his hotels, project on to him crimes that they themselves have committed, and seed his Administration with leakers and double-agents.
No other President in American history has been treated in such a shameful manner. Not Lincoln. Not FDR. Not Nixon. Not Reagan.
What is it about this President that has roused such demons in his political foes? What is it about this President that drives his opponents to the brink of insanity? What is it about this President that so terrifies and terrorizes the Pelosis, Schiffs, Schumers and the George Soroses?
Is it simply that he is not part of the club, a brash outsider with a different style? Is it merely because he’s outspoken and tramples on political correctness? Is it because he’s sometimes unpresidential in his demeanor ( at least in their minds )?
Not at all. After all, aren’t these the same folks who loved Bill Clinton whose extracurricular activities involved cigars and staining blue dresses in the Oval Office?
The following is an abridged version of a talk delivered at Hillsdale College on October 2, 2019, during the College’s 175th anniversary gala. Videos of this and other speeches delivered during the gala are available at fourpillars.hillsdale.edu.
Today many condemn the idea of nationalism by connecting it to race hatred (e.g., white nationalism). But historically, the modern nation-state has proven uniquely suitable to preserving individual rights. The American nation in particular was successful in uniting individuals of different races, ethnic backgrounds, and creeds into one people based on shared principles, a unique physical space, and a common national story. Our nation is the best example in human history of positive nationalism.
The key to this benign nationalism is American citizenship, based on an understanding of American exceptionalism and formed by the American melting pot. But today, our citizenship is eroding and, along with it, American nationalism in the positive sense is disappearing.
American citizenship is eroding in three ways.
First, we are blurring the line between mere residents and citizens. We have between 45-50 million non-native-born residents in the U.S. today—the largest absolute number we’ve ever had. There’s no legal problem with the 30 million of them who have green cards or have acquired citizenship—although even 30 million is a challenge for the American melting pot to assimilate and integrate.
But we also have, according to a recent Yale and MIT study, about 20 million people who are here illegally. In regard to them, the classical ingredients of American citizenship—the right to leave or enter the country as one pleases, for example, or to vote in elections, or to reside here as long as one pleases—are being blurred.
VIDEO – 1992 MARGARET THATCHER PREDICTING CHAOS IN THE EUROPEAN UNION – SHE WAS AN AMAZINGLY INSIGHTFUL WOMAN
Scary how accurate she is. Margaret Thatcher predicts the mess of the EU. This was 1992. Thatcher in 1992 addressing CNN World Economic Development Conference
Tribune Papers
George Soros and the Remaking of American Values
The Challenge to America’s Churches
By Mike Scruggs December 2019
www.thetribunepapers.com/2019/12/04/george-soros-and-the-remaking-of-american-
values/
By Mike Scruggs- George Soros was born in 1930 in Budapest, Hungary, to a nominally Jewish family and was educated at the London School of Economics, where he received BA, MA, and Ph.D. degrees.
George SorosHe became an American citizen in 1961 and celebrated his 89th birthday in August of this year. Before he donated $18 billion to his Open Society Foundations (OSF) in 2018, he was the 19th richest person in the world.
His major breakthrough to immense wealth came in 1992, when he shorted the British currency in a financial crisis, netting himself over $1.0 billion, and nearly breaking the Bank of England in its support for the European Union. Soros claims to have a system of identifying undervalued and overvalued bubbles in various markets.
Perhaps so, but the French government convicted him of insider trading in 2002, and fined him 2.2 million Euros, but this was a drop in the bucket for him. Counting the Foundations he controls his net worth is over $25 billion. By profession he is an investor and hedge fund manager. He is also widely known as an author and philanthropist. Soros created the OSF in 1979, which has contributed over $1.5 billion to 199 organizations in the United States alone. He has funded many others overseas.
Soros and his OSF organizations contribute mainly to left-wing organizations that oppose conservative Western values including traditional and evangelical forms of Christianity. He is good at deception and at making social chaos and ruthless politics sound as American as apple pie.
He is good at seducing religious leaders through misinformation, heretical Bible interpretations, and financial grants. He frequently uses immigration and racial issues to manipulate and mislead poorly informed Christians eager to embrace anything that makes them feel good and facilitates virtue-signaling. Soros is an atheist and elitist globalist.