Benny Johnson was stroke shaming Fetterman on Twitter, and I called him out.
I think it's cool he's using captioning to help him communicate. And when speaking he doesn't sound like someone who's had a stroke. At the video segment below, he admits he messes up his choice words, saying "that's the stroke."
He could do a lot worse compared to Biden.
The full interview is here.
From Ed Driscoll, at Instapundit,"ROGER SIMON: COVID May Be Waning, but Will They Tell Us?."
And quoting National Review:
And it’s ending, despite Biden and Fauci’s dreams of endless lockdowns: “On Saturday in New York City you needed a vaccine passport to eat in a restaurant or grab a drink in a bar, work out in a gym, go to a movie, or attend any sporting event. Just four hours to the west nearly 110,000 maskless Penn State Nittany Lion fans who had to provide no health records to anyone to attend the game reveled in their school’s biggest football game in two years, packed as close together as possible all clad in white in one of the great football cathedrals of this country. Watch this video and tell me which America you want to live in, the one where you have freedom and embrace life or the one where you either bow down to the authoritarian whims of a group of leaders who don’t even follow their own rules or have no ability to do anything.”
R.T.W.T.
This video is incredible.
She's not about to set unrealistic expectations, and I agree that a lot of the challenges are long shots, but keep listening to the part about Joe Biden and his hilarious cluelessness and his ridiculously laughable calls for "unity."
At Newmax, which should be one of your main information pickup stations starting now.
At WSJ:
Campaign officials met w/Cipollone on Thurs to go through remaining legal options & determined they had pursued every avenue to that point.
— Rebecca Ballhaus (@rebeccaballhaus) November 6, 2020
Some advisers acknowledge there is little path forward, politically or legally, that would prevent a Trump loss.https://t.co/3cvdX3qeB4
Let the Games Begin. #RealResistance
— Sebastian Gorka DrG (@SebGorka) November 7, 2020
Think Biden has the election locked up? Travel with my friend @JAEnda1 to Northeast Pennsylvania https://t.co/ikJiyVrmo0
— Patricia Sullivan (@psullivan1) July 29, 2020
In Pennsylvania, Joe Biden is hoping to peel off just enough white, working-class voters in crucial counties to edge out the president. But the women here—waitresses, churchgoers, bingo players, lifelong Democrats—show no signs of budging, pandemic be damned. “I am 110% Trump,” says one. “I love him.”Still more.
It was a Thursday night in January, before the coronavirus shut everything down, meaning it was time for bingo at St. Andrew Parish in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Three dozen regulars—almost all of them women—filed into the church basement. Some grabbed “cuts” of pizza from the front of the room; a few lingered in the cold for one last smoke. As the clock approached 6:00, they settled into metal folding chairs, spread out their game sheets, and focused on the numbers.
The entire political world, in turn, has been focused on these women and the numbers—and potential power—they represent. The bingo players are part of the white working class, a prized group that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016. Many are Democrats who supported Barack Obama in one or both of his races and had never pulled the GOP lever before. To Republicans they represent the path to the president’s reelection. To Democrats they personify opportunity, a chance to siphon off just enough Trump votes in swing states to remove him from office. “I don’t need to win them,” said Democratic pollster Jill Normington. “I need to lose by less.”
Ever since Trump pulled off upset victories in the former Democratic strongholds of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania, both parties have viewed white women without college degrees as pivotal 2020 voters. White, working-class women and men are the nation’s largest bloc of voters, especially here in the Rust Belt, and women are considered more likely to reject Trump this time around. Polls bear this out, showing that the men in this group remain overwhelmingly behind the president, while many of the women are having second thoughts. Democrats hope that just as suburban women outside cities like Philadelphia, about two hours south of Wilkes-Barre, turned on Republicans in 2018, white, working-class women will follow suit this year.
But the bingo players at St. Andrew and their counterparts in their key region of Pennsylvania may be unexpectedly resistant. In this historically Democratic bastion, where coal once ruled and black-and-white photos of JFK still adorn walls, women who voted for Trump show few signs of wavering. They applaud his brusque demeanor, or they don’t. They support his right-wing policies, or they don’t. It doesn’t matter. They think Democrats have persecuted him without justification, believe he’s doing everything possible to combat COVID-19, and generally support his “law-and-order” response to what are likely the most pervasive protests in U.S. history. They have faith that he has the business acumen to reinvigorate the economy. Mainly, they have faith in him.
They support Trump because they like him. Actually, the word many of them use is “love.”
The reason is simple: He speaks to them, not down to them, eschewing words like “eschew.” While his life experience as a New York playboy-celebrity rich kid is wholly different from their own, they feel he’s one of them. “I am 110% Trump. I love him,” Barbara Bono said as she set up her bingo cards. “I love the way he talks. I understand him more than any other president. This whole place is Trump,” she said, sweeping her arm across the room as women around her nodded.
Bono, a 63-year-old retired Lord & Taylor warehouse worker, is precisely the kind of voter Joe Biden’s campaign hopes to win over: She’s a registered Democrat and former union member who never voted Republican before casting a ballot for Trump. She is Catholic, like so many in these parts, but supports abortion rights. She thought Bill Clinton was a “wonderful” president and didn’t care for George W. Bush. She voted for Obama in 2008, but sat out the election of 2012 because, she said, his Affordable Care Act drove up her health insurance costs. Still, she didn’t support Obama’s GOP opponent, Mitt Romney, another rich guy who, it must be noted, speaks nothing like her.
“I love the way he talks! Crazy Nancy!” Bono said, echoing the president’s nickname for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the highest-ranking elected woman officeholder in the history of the United States. “I love it. He is up early in the morning...He’s always talking to the American people. He’s all about our country.
“Pelooooski,” she continued, drawing laughs from the other bingo players. Then, in the spirit of Trump: “I can’t wait for her teeth to fall out!”
Bono is like a lot of the women I met during visits to Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties in northeastern Pennsylvania, called “NEPA” by locals, in late 2019 and early 2020. She has lived in Wilkes-Barre, the county seat of Luzerne, her entire life, though she now spends part of her winters in Valdosta, Georgia. She is a high school graduate, one of the white women without college degrees whose support Trump can’t afford to lose.
During conversations spanning seven months, the women I spoke to made plain that there is little, if anything, that would make them abandon Trump. Not the emergence of Biden, who’s fond of invoking his early childhood in nearby Scranton. Not a quarantine that has cost some of them their wages. Not the ensuing economic fallout. And certainly not the Trump detractors who say he has mishandled life-and-death issues that have consumed the nation: the coronavirus, the police killing of George Floyd, and the systemic racism it brought to the fore.
“A lot of people hate him, but I don’t get it,” said Florence “Flo” Eldredge, a waitress who missed months of work because of the pandemic. “I think he’s doing the best he can under the circumstances.”
Added her next-door neighbor Linda Stetzar: “I would give him a crown.”
It’s hard for an outsider to distinguish between Luzerne and Lackawanna Counties, which share a rolling landscape in the Appalachian Mountains and in the valleys along the Susquehanna River. Many of their towns flow smoothly into one another, their Americana displayed in street banners that celebrate their war heroes. But locals know the difference between Pittston and West Pittston, Old Forge and Forty Fort. They will tell you that the Irish settled this town, the Italians that town, the Poles moved here and the Germans there. They say it while acknowledging that influxes of immigrants weren’t always made to feel welcome. Their ancestors came from Europe to mine anthracite coal, which they did for generations until the mines closed in the middle of the last century. All these years later, they wear their heritage proudly.
Families remain close. I came across more than one pair of sisters, mothers and daughters, aunts and nieces dining or working or playing bingo together. Almost all were descendants of those early miners. But in recent years, after the mines closed and lace factories came and went, more and more residents have departed. Young people who attend college leave most frequently, unable to find white-collar jobs close to home. Those who stay are mostly white and older. They are often more conservative than their children. They still attend the churches, predominantly Catholic, that their forebears built. They are courteous and unhurried, the kind of people who call strangers like me “hon.” They work for state or local government or health care providers or a local university or, increasingly, one of the numerous warehouses and call centers that have popped up along the tangle of highways that crisscross here. They don’t expect something for nothing.
“There’s that dignity piece,” Scranton mayor Paige Cognetti told me. “If mom and dad worked in coal and lace, they worked their asses off. People don’t want programs or help. They want to earn it.”
Before the novel coronavirus, the economies in these two counties had improved considerably. Though they weren’t as strong as elsewhere in the state—the median income was lower, the unemployment rate higher—people didn’t despair. In fact, in Donald Trump, a lot of them saw hope.
Trump beat Hillary Clinton by a total of just 77,744 votes in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan, states once considered Democrats’ “blue wall.” More than half of that vote margin—44,292—came from Pennsylvania. And more than one third came from Luzerne County, a place that hadn’t voted Republican since George H.W. Bush in 1988 and that has voted for the presidential candidate who carried Pennsylvania since 1932. Trump carried Luzerne by 26,237 votes and had the biggest margin of victory there—19 points—since Richard Nixon in 1972. Next door, in Lackawanna County, Clinton won by a scant 3,599 votes even though she had personal ties to the area, having spent her childhood summers at a family cottage on Lake Winola, a short drive from her father’s hometown and final resting place, Scranton. Four years earlier Obama beat Romney there by 26,579 votes.
Theories abound as to why Trump did so well, particularly in Luzerne, which Pennsylvania pollster G. Terry Madonna told me was “a place where in my lifetime I never thought a Republican would win.” Madonna, director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll, said Trump stepped into a void created by Democrats, who essentially abandoned cultural conservatives. “As the Democrats became an urban-based party, they moved away from the working-class roots that had been a part of their constituency,” he said...
Marie Jeffries has a very firm view of Donald Trump, and she says it won’t change in the nine weeks before election day.Actually, that's a pretty good analysis. I'm convinced it's going to come down to voter turnout among all those Trump supporters in flyover country. I mean it. They've seriously got to put a dent in those turnout numbers if the Manhattan mogul's going to have a chance in the battlegrounds like the Keystone State.
“He’s a wild man. I think he might put us into a war,” said Jeffries, who was among hundreds sauntering down Main Street in this southeastern Pennsylvania town on the balmy evening that opened Labor Day weekend.
She once was intrigued by Trump, she said, but “then he started the shenanigans, and opened his trap.”
“He’s a bully,” she said. “We’re trying to get away from it in schools. Why have a bully as president?”
Her views matter. Jeffries is a 66-year-old woman who lives in the suburbs, in her case Philadelphia’s. Right now, voters like her stand to cost Trump the presidential contests in key battleground states, starting with Pennsylvania.
Trump is caught in a powerful vise of his own making, between those who find him offensive, like Jeffries, and those who find him entrancing. The things he does and says that appeal to that latter group, which is dominated by white men, often alienate the suburban voters, particularly women, he needs if he is to broaden his base enough to win.
Mark Shimp is one of those Trump voters. He owns a plumbing company in Newtown, Pa., and calls Hillary Clinton “terrible”—the only printable description he can offer, he says.
“If there is a definition in the dictionary of what is wrong in politics, Hillary Clinton is it,” he said, standing on his front porch, a Trump campaign sign on the lawn and American and Marine Corps flags flying from a pole nearby.
“How does she feel the pain of the middle class?”
In broad strokes, Trump and Clinton supporters are seldom near each other in much of the country. The Republican dominates rural, white America; the Democrat overwhelmingly wins the cities with their higher minority populations. But in this slice of Pennsylvania north and west of Philadelphia, where the suburbs meet the exurbs, the two sides collide.
Already, the campaign has left many voters wary...
Two very different visions of America emerged in the cold in downtown Lancaster Saturday afternoon over the Syrian refugee issue.It's going to get violent folks. Leftists are going to bring "some muscle" to silence the opposition.
Rallies for and against refugees ended up in a peaceful — though sometimes punctuated by loud shout-downs — face-off on busy East King Street.
At noon, a group of about 30 people gathered outside the Lancaster office of Church World Service at 308 E. King St. for a series of speakers who warned of the dangers of letting refugees from war-torn Syria into the U.S.
Church World Service is a refugee resettlement service. Three Syrian families have been relocated in Lancaster County so far with at least two others on their way.
About 250 pro-refugee men, women and children soon showed up from a counter-rally in Musser Park and formed a block-long queue just on the other side of King Street.
Leaders for both rallies urged non-confrontational behavior and for the most part that was the case as participants let their many signs do the talking.
Those who want to see more Syrian refugees come to Lancaster County carried placards with such slogans as “We Are All Refugees,” “Welcome Refugees — Proud Lancaster Tradition,” “Compassion, Not Fear, Love, Not Hate,” and “Bigots Go Home.“
Across the street, amid waving American and Tea Party flags, signs read, “Aiding A Foreign Invasion is Treason,” “Keep Syrians Out,” “Remember Paris” and “No Sharia Law In America.”
One brief moment of solidarity surfaced when the anti-refugee rally started singing “God Bless America” and refugee supporters quickly joined in.
America is not being compassionate by bringing to its shores Islamic people who are not tolerant of other religions and homosexuals, said Dan Gray, a Schuylkill County resident and rally organizer.
“Sharia law is fundamentally incompatible with the Constitutional laws of the United States,” Gray said. “Syrians are not refugees. Bad things are happening there but we don’t have the space to take in everyone who had bad things happen to them.
“You want to help Syrians? Help them over there.”
@KurtSchlichter in all the years I have been covering this stuff this is their best year
— SalenaZito (@SalenaZitoTrib) July 12, 2015Republicans held a smart, enthusiastic, well-organized leadership conference here last month that drew presidential candidates and party rock stars, plus edgy, informative panels for grassroots activists. But they will need a lot more than that to cross Pennsylvania's finish line in the 2016 presidential election.
Oddly, Republican fortunes might rest in state Democrats' hands — and the way things are going for Democrats, that just might work out.
Democrats have dominated this all-important electoral state for five presidential cycles; this is one of three states of which a candidate must win two (the others are Ohio and Florida) in order to clinch the presidency.
Former Gov. Ed Rendell's charisma and political skills are legendary among Democrats, and the party is eagerly preparing for what promises to be a premier national convention in this city next year.
Yet below the surface, the state party is in shambles. With the exception of two county officials on either side of the state — Montgomery's Commissioners Chairman Josh Shapiro, Allegheny's Chief Executive Rich Fitzgerald — the Democrats' statewide bench is weak, and so is their morale.
Consider the following four factors:
Down-ballot bench — Last year's midterms and a special state House election in the spring boosted the Republicans' lower-chamber ranks to 120, a 36-seat advantage over Democrats. Republicans also expanded their majority to 30 members in the state's 50-seat Senate.
Pennsylvania Democrats led the nation in trouncing Republicans in 2006's historic wave election, but their power didn't last long. By 2010, their majority in Pennsylvania's congressional delegation was wiped out; by 2012, Republicans held 13 seats to Democrats' five.
Scandals — Two statewide-elected Democrats, darlings of the party just 18 months ago, have fallen from grace rather abruptly.
Former state Treasurer Rob McCord pleaded guilty to extortion earlier this year in federal court; his forced resignation came less than a year after his unsuccessful campaign for his party's nomination for governor.
Then there is Attorney General Kathleen Kane.
The first Democrat and first woman to be elected as the state's top cop has run her office like a script for a really, really bad soap opera. The drama with the former political golden girl, who was carried into office by the Clinton machine, has escalated over two years, leading to a statewide grand jury recommending that she be charged with obstruction of justice, official oppression, perjury and contempt in connection with documents allegedly covered by grand jury secrecy rules being leaked to a Philadelphia newspaper.
Trouble at the top — It's not uncommon for a party chairman and a governor to not get along, but usually that only occurs between opposing parties. The fault lines between Democrats state Chairman Jim Burn and Gov. Tom Wolf are epic and reminiscent of an escalating schoolyard spat.
Wolf despised Burn so much that he created his own shadow state party when he successfully ran for governor; Burn stubbornly refused to budge, and he retained the support of state committee members.
Under Burn's leadership, the party won one presidential election but lost a U.S. Senate seat, a governor's race, historic majorities in the state Legislature and the majority in the congressional delegation.
Divisive campaign — For a guy who came within 2 percentage points of beating Republican Pat Toomey for a U.S. Senate seat in an exceptionally good year for the GOP, former Congressman Joe Sestak of Delaware County sure doesn't get much love or support from establishment Democrats, either in Washington or in the state.
If kitchen sinks could run for office, the national party probably would have asked one to do so by now; it has asked Montgomery County's Shapiro, Allegheny County's Fitzgerald, and now, Wolf's chief of staff, Katie McGinty, after Allentown Mayor Ed Pawlowski suspended his campaign for next year's U.S. Senate primary because of legal troubles...
