The media and those on the left were salivating going into Election Day. The so-called “blue wave” was coming, and it was going to sweep fifty seats or more into Democrat hands in the House of Representatives. Some thought the Senate could follow as well, and deliver a one-two punch to President Trump’s jaw. Not only did that NOT happen, but Trump’s efforts helped candidates get across the finish line in stunning fashion. Perhaps that was too much for the media to bear as they came out swinging in Monday’s press conference. Luckily, Trump knows how to fight back.
The Democrats and the media can’t help but feel disappointed. They lost ground in the Senate. They barely gained control of the House, and their marquee candidates like O’Rourke and Gillum lost. Perhaps this is why they were completely unhinged at President Trump’s Monday press conference. CNN’s Jim Acosta, who has no business claiming he’s an actual journalist, tried to get his facetime for the dwindling CNN audience by asking about the migrant caravan (uh, this is a post-election press conference), and he ran into a Trump buzzsaw.

1a)

Trump Derangement Syndrome Nothing New

By Steve Feinstein

 One thing everyone can agree on is that Donald Trump winning the presidency has thrown the left into a tizzy the likes of which hasn’t been seen before in American politics. In past elections, no matter how contentious and divisive the campaign, once the winner was declared, things seemed to calm down and everyone accepted the result. The opposition continued to criticize and be unhappy, but they accepted the result.
Obviously, things seem different this time. President Trump’s actual electoral legitimacy has never been accepted by the left. And the left includes not only Democratic politicians, but also the liberal mainstream media and popular culture figures in the entertainment and sports realms. We are in uncharted waters today, where entire cable news stations such as CNN and MSNBC devote virtually 100% of their programming to their mission of delegitimizing Trump’s presidency and his actual right to govern. The left is demonstrating total Trump Derangement Syndrome. They are so consumed with hatred and nonacceptance of his presidency that their entire reason for being is simply to be against anything they perceive Trump is for.
Sane, legal, orderly immigration, a strong military, respect for our law enforcement personnel, not being taken unfair advantage of in foreign trade agreements, support for the American energy and manufacturing sectors in preference to overseas competition, reduced tax and regulatory burdens on both individuals and corporations with the intent of improving the jobs/wages/hiring climate (all things with which most people would agree, if only in the privacy of their own thoughts), these are the cornerstones of President Trump’s intentions. This is what he promised to concentrate on during the 2015-2016 campaign. He has delivered on all of them, in a tangible, unarguable and quantifiable way. Trump’s indisputable success -- and by so doing, his damning exposure of the feckless, incompetent approach to these issues employed by the Obama administration -- has only served to further enrage the Left into ever-greater heights of hyperbole, vindictiveness, and denial. The more colloquial -- but just as accurate -- term for the Left’s behavior is “unhinged.”

However, as bad as President Trump’s opponents’ behavior and actions have been, they are not new, current popular opinion notwithstanding.
Certainly, no president was more lightly-regarded by his political opponents in terms of his questionable qualifications for office and his embarrassingly lightweight intellectual acumen than George W. Bush. How such an unaccomplished, insignificant man like him -- the quintessential ‘silver spoon’ child of privilege and fortuitous happenstance -- could somehow dupe enough people into electing him president over the eminently-qualified, calm, measured Al Gore remains one of the great mysteries of American history. And of course, Bush didn’t actually win the presidency in either 2000 or in 2004. The first time, he lost the popular vote and was unfairly “awarded” the election by the Supreme Court’s decision to halt the Florida recount. In 2004, well-known Ohio voting irregularities and Republican fraud cheated the highly capable, experienced John Kerry out of his well-deserved ascendance to the presidency. The country, they say, would have been far better off if either Gore or Kerry had not been unfairly denied their election wins and we’ve suffered quite badly as a result of having to endure two terms of President George “Dubya” Bush.

In fact, the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome” was popular during that timeframe, and liberal media attacks on both his legitimacy and fitness for office were unrelenting. The liberal media harped on everything he did or said, from his Southern drawl to his mispronunciation of “nu-cu-lar” as proof of his deficient mental capabilities and lack of higher-order analytical abilities. To use a well-worn cliché, the left was apoplectic over the very notion that Bush was somehow the president.
Before President Bush, President Reagan was vilified by the press and popular culture to an alarming degree. Although the nonstop Democratic criticism of his “militaristic, anti-environmental, favor the rich” policies can be written off as nothing more than the usual out-of-power party clichés, Reagan was also savaged by the news media and entertainment world as well. (With some excpetions -- one particular “Saturday Night Live” sketch portrayed him as a kind, bumbling grandfatherly type in public, showing a young girl around the White House, and then abruptly changing into a hard-driving, detail-obsessed commander behind closed doors with his staff, as he directed a complicated operation with ruthless, short-tempered precision.) The liberal media was totally obsessed with the notion of Reagan’s age, his mental competence and his conservatism, and never attributed any credit to him for anything good that happened on his watch. Although the term Reagan Derangement Syndrome wasn’t in widespread use at the time, it was evinced quite clearly by his opponents, just as plainly as with Bush II or Trump.
The mockery and lack of respect shown to President Trump is unquestionably quite severe -- magnified by the speed and impact of today’s social media platforms and multiple “television” delivery systems such as Hulu, YouTube and Netflix, communications methods that simply didn’t exist in Reagan’s or Bush’s time -- but it is nothing new. The liberal media and popular culture simply demonstrate Conservative Derangement Syndrome continually, in direct proportion to how conservative they feel any given Republican president is.
What the Republicans have to hope for is that the positive results of the President will carry the day, even in the face of nonstop mainstream media criticism, a rapidly-changing electoral demographic, and a painfully biased social media environment.
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2)  New Muslim Representatives: Sharia, Corruption & Jew-Hatred Come To The House

As expected, two Muslim women, Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, have been overwhelmingly elected to Congress. The establishment media will celebrate these victories as triumphs of America’s “diversity”; unfortunately, in reality neither one is worth celebrating. 

By Robert Spencer

As expected, two Muslim women, Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, have been overwhelmingly elected to Congress. The establishment media will celebrate these victories as triumphs of America’s “diversity”; unfortunately, in reality neither one is worth celebrating.
Tlaib is a vociferous foe of Israel. With the Democrats now regaining control of the House, Tlaib is likely to be an energetic proponent of the new majority’s vendetta against the Middle East’s only democracy. The House is likely to do all it can to roll back President Trump’s pro-Israel polices, with Tlaib as well as Omar as becoming the public faces of the effort.

According to the JTA, when Tlaib was asked if she would vote against military aid to Israel, Tlaib responded: “Absolutely, if it has something to do with inequality and not access to people having justice. For me, U.S. aid should be leverage. I will be using my position in Congress so that no country, not one, should be able to get aid from the U.S. when they still promote that kind of injustice.”
What kind of injustice? Tlaib, of course, had nothing to say about the genocidal incitement against Jews and Israel that regularly features on Palestinian television. She did say, however, that she favors a one-state, not two-state, “solution” to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: “One state. It has to be one state. Separate but equal does not work. I’m only 42 years old but my teachers were of that generation that marched with Martin Luther King. This whole idea of a two-state solution, it doesn’t work.”

Indeed it doesn’t. A Palestinian state would be a new base for renewed jihad attacks against Israel. But a “one-state solution” would be even worse, unless that state is the current State of Israel, but that is not the one state Tlaib has in mind. She is calling for an Israeli/Palestinian state that would not be a Jewish State or a homeland for the Jewish people, but a federation in which Palestinians would soon overwhelm Jews demographically. Progressive denial of their rights would soon follow: as I show in my book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, there has never been a majority Muslim nation in which Jews enjoyed equality of rights with Muslims. Tlaib’s unitary state would be no different.

The hijabed (and therefore pro-Sharia) Ilhan Omar, meanwhile, is even more hateful than Tlaib. According to the Daily Wire, in 2012 Omar tweeted: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza #Palestine #Israel.” Challenged about this tweet much more recently, she doubled down and attacked the man who called attention to the tweet: “Drawing attention to the apartheid Israeli regime is far from hating Jews. You are a hateful sad man, I pray to Allah you get the help you need and find happiness.”

There is much, much worse about Omar. David Steinberg of PJ Media has done extraordinary work in shedding light on aspects of Omar’s record that the establishment media has steadfastly ignored. Steinberg reports that Omar has “faced allegations -- soon backed by a remarkable amount of evidence -- that she had married her own brother in 2009, and was still legally his wife. They officially divorced in December 2017. The motivation for the marriage remains unclear. However, the totality of the evidence points to possible immigration fraud and student loan fraud.” What’s more, she swore to apparent falsehoods in court.

But Leftists rarely have to answer for their corruption, and in a Democrat House, Omar will much more likely be celebrated than investigated. She and Tlaib will enjoy establishment media accolades as they pursue their hard-Left, anti-American, anti-Israel agenda. Their presence in the House of Representatives may be evidence of “diversity,” but it is also a disquieting sign of the continued dominance of identity politics, and the increasing balkanization of the American body politic. Forthrightly pro-America, pro-Israel candidates would stand little to no chance in either of their districts. And that is indicative of a much larger problem.
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3)

Brian Kemp declares victory in hard-fought Georgia governor's race, but Stacey Abrams hasn't conceded


 Georgia Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp claimed victory Wednesday in his gubernatorial contest with Democrat Stacey Abrams -- but Abrams, vying to become the nation's first black female governor, is so far refusing to concede. Fox News has not yet called the race.
According to Associated Press vote totals with all precincts reporting, Kemp has 1,972,952 votes to Abrams' 1,909,730 -- giving him 50.3 percent to her 48.7 percent. The state could have had its first-ever gubernatorial runoff if neither candidate had cleared the 50 percent mark.
"Brian Kemp earned nearly two million votes on Tuesday - by far the most of any gubernatorial candidate in our state's history," Kemp press secretary Cody Hall said in a statement.
Hall continued: "Absentee ballots are counted and Kemp leads his opponent by 64,000 votes. Based on counts released by the Secretary of State's office, Brian Kemp's margin is so large that the number of provisional ballots and overseas ballots will not change his Election Day victory. Simply put, it is mathematically impossible for Stacey Abrams to win or force a run-off election."
Kemp had previously faced criticism for refusing to announce preemptively that he would recuse himself from overseeing any recount that may have occurred in the race.
"Peach State voters made a clear decision at the ballot box," Hall said. "Brian Kemp will now begin his transition as governor-elect of Georgia. He will work every day to keep our state moving in the right direction."
But early Wednesday, Abrams signaled she's ready for a fight.
"Democracy only works when we work for it, when we fight for it, when we demand it, and apparently today when we stand in line for hours to meet it at the ballot box," Abrams told supporters. "I am here today to tell you there are votes remaining to be counted. Voices are waiting to be heard."
Her campaign manager, Lauren Groh-Wargo, added: "We have three factors to be considered here: outstanding votes, absentee ballots to be counted, and provisional ballots. Given those three issues, we believe this is likely heading to a runoff."
The Georgia race was among the most closely watched gubernatorial contests nationally. Democrats seized several state governorships from Republicans on Tuesday night, but fell short in Iowa, Ohio, and Florida -- three states former President Obama won in 2012 but that President Trump carried in 2016.
Control of the nation's governor's mansions is expected to be particularly important in 2020, when states draw their new congressional district lines, which can be vetoed by the chief executives
The Georgia contest was marked with drama and intrigue long before the final votes were cast. Kemp announced on Sunday his office was investigating "possible cyber crimes" by the Georgia Democratic Party, throwing a last-minute wrench into what was already a tight race. Abrams and the state Democratic party swiftly rejected the allegations, claiming there was "never a hack" and declaring it was a feeble attempt to "suppress the vote."
Abrams was hoping to make history Tuesday night, as well as break a decades-old red streak of gubernatorial victories in the Peach State. The state hasn't elected a Democratic governor since 1998. However, Abrams previously emphasized she didn't want people to support her based solely on those reasons.
“I don’t want anyone to vote for me because I’m black. And no one on the ballot needs a vote because we’re women. And I don’t even want you to vote for us just because we’re Democrats. You need to vote for us because we’re better," she told a crowd in Savannah Monday.
Both candidates are being backed by big-name celebrities and political heavyweights: Kemp boasted the support of Heisman Trophy winner Herschel Walker, President Trump and Vice President Pence, while Abrams claimed Oprah Winfrey and former President Barack Obama among her supporters.
"Make history here in Georgia. Make things better here in Georgia," Obama urged a crowd of voters last week while endorsing Abrams at Morehouse College in Atlanta.
Meanwhile, Trump stumped for Kemp, whom he described as an "incredible fighter and tireless champion for the people."
"Stacey Abrams is one of the most extreme, far-left politicians in the entire country... You put Stacey in there, and you're gonna have Georgia turn into Venezuela. I don't think the people of Georgia like that," Trump said at an event in Macon on Sunday.
Fox News' Jennifer Earl and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

3a)The voter-suppression rap on Georgia’s Brian Kemp is unfair. 
By Mchael Warren
Brian Kemp, the Republican candidate for governor of Georgia and two-term secretary of state, is a husband and father of three, his ads never fail to emphasize. He’s also a “politically incorrect conservative,” according to a TV spot that featured him revving the engine of his pickup truck, which he might use to “round up criminal illegals and take ’em home” himself. “Yup, I just said that,” he smirked into the camera. Kemp, if you haven’t guessed, is a Trump-loving Republican, and the feeling is mutual. “He has my Strong Endorsement,” the president tweeted on October 20.
Kemp also risks being the first Republican candidate for governor to lose in Georgia since 1998. His Democratic opponent Stacey Abrams has kept the race tight, and Kemp is just two percentage points ahead in the Real Clear Politics average of polls. If she wins, Abrams would be the first black female governor in the country and the vanguard in a years-long effort by Democrats to turn Georgia blue. The closeness of the race and the conventions of contemporary politics have revealed Kemp to be a bit of a demagogue. He’s unfairly accused Abrams of voting in the state legislature to protect the ability of sex offenders to live near schools and daycare centers. He’s also uncharitably said Abrams has encouraged illegal immigrants to vote.
The Abrams camp, in return, unfairly accuses Kemp of being a racially motivated vote suppressor. At an October 23 debate, Abrams charged Kemp with creating an “atmosphere of fear” and claimed Georgia voters “have been purged, they have been suppressed, they have been scared.” On October 12, several civil rights groups sued Kemp in his capacity as secretary of state over his enforcement of the state’s voter registration laws. The same day, the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, Cedric Richmond of Louisiana, urged Attorney General Jeff Sessions to take oversight action against Kemp, saying the Republican candidate “has targeted black voters with laser precision.”
The charge has been amplified with enthusiasm in the media, but it ultimately doesn’t hold water. Let’s unpack the indictment. Kemp’s position as secretary of state makes him Georgia’s chief elections officer. Around 53,000 voter registrations have been deemed “pending” by the state, the majority of which are for African-American and other minority voters. Meanwhile, there was a purge of a large number of inactive registrations from the voter rolls last year. Both are being cited as proof minority votes are being suppressed by the state official who happens to be running for governor.
In fact, what we see in Georgia is the result of a patchwork of federal, state, and local laws governing voter registration requirements and verification. First, consider the cache of pending voter registrations. A federal law passed by Congress in 2002 requires states to maintain an official voter registration list and to regularly remove duplicate or ineligible voters. In Georgia, individual counties administer elections, including voter registration, but the secretary of state’s office manages the verification process for those registrations.
In 2010, the Department of Justice cleared Georgia’s process, which requires voters to submit either a driver’s license number that can be verified by the state or a Social Security number that can be verified by the feds. Six years later, the NAACP and other civil-rights groups sued the state over this process, arguing it was too restrictive. Kemp’s office settled, and in 2017 the Republican-controlled general assembly modified the verification process in line with the settlement. The principle remains the same: Certain relevant information (like last name, first initial of first name, and date of birth) [see correction] must match exactly with the appropriate database. If there’s a mismatch, voters are informed by their county elections officials and have 26 months to fix the incorrect information. Meanwhile, their registrations are designated “pending.”
An October report by the Associated Press found more than 53,000 voter registrations pending in Georgia, most of which are the result of a mismatch in information. The AP also reported that 70 percent of pending applications belong to African Americans. But Kemp’s campaign and the secretary of state’s office have pushed back on the idea that this means suppressing votes. A department spokeswoman, Candice Broce, notes that every eligible voter with a pending status can still vote, early or on Election Day, simply by showing up to the proper polling place and providing a driver’s license or other identifying card, as required of all voters by state law. This act alone would allow the person to vote on a regular (not provisional) ballot.

How does a “mismatch” happen? Most often, by humanerror. Perhaps a county elections official made a typo. One Georgia woman who discovered her registration was pending was featured prominently in the AP’s report. According to the secretary of state’s office, the first letter of her last name was missing in her registration form.

There might not be much to a story about sloppy data entry, but the racial disparity is arresting. Black voters make up about 30 percent of Georgia’s electorate—so how do they account for 70 percent of this pending pile? The secretary of state’s office doesn’t have a complete answer, but there is reason to think racial bias isn’t a primary factor. That’s thanks to an investigation into a nonprofit voter registration initiative called the New Georgia Project, which seeks to register minority voters. In 2014, elections officials in more than a dozen counties issued complaints about possible forged applications and other problematic practices by New Georgia Project canvassers, prompting an investigation by the state elections board (a bipartisan commission Kemp chairs). To make things more complicated, the New Georgia Project was founded by Abrams.
As part of the investigation, which ended last year with no charges against the group, the secretary of state’s office subpoenaed the New Georgia Project’s list of registrations for 2014. According to Broce, 14 percent of the state’s pending applications come from this list. One plausible explanation: The New Georgia Project uses paper forms exclusively (as opposed to online registration). That increases the opportunity for error—both on the original forms and when the information is keyed into the database.
Now what about the voter purges? An investigative piece by American Public Media reported that nearly 600,000 Georgia voters were removed from the rolls in 2017. Team Kemp has an explanation for that: A 2016 lawsuit brought by Common Cause and the NAACP over the state’s voter list temporarily halted the biennial purge of inactive voters. After the lawsuit was thrown out, Georgia had two cycles’ worth of inactive voters to remove from its list.

That tool is the “use it or lose it” law, and Georgia is one of nine states to have adopted such a law since Congress passed the National Voter Registration Act in 1993. Here’s how it works: If a registered voter does not vote in any election in Georgia for three consecutive years, he is considered to be inactive. This is a designation that’s required by the 1993 National Voter Registration Act before a state can revoke a voter’s registration. The voter is notified via a prepaid return postcard that he is inactive and can become active again in three ways: by voting again, by returning the notice, or by otherwise making contact with local elections officials. The inactive voter has an additional four years (or two federal election cycles) to reactivate his registration. The entire process takes seven consecutive years and doesn’t require a registered voter to vote at all—only make some form of contact renewing the registration.Many of these voters were dead, convicted felons, or had moved out of the state. But others—107,000, APM estimates—were kicked off “because they had not decided to vote in prior elections.” The report admitted that while purging voters for this reason is legal, “voting rights advocates say [it] is a potential tool for voter suppression.”
In June of this year, the Supreme Court overruled a lower court opinion on a similar law in Ohio and found such procedures are not unconstitutional. Justice Samuel Alito, writing the majority opinion, argued that federal law prohibits failure to vote as the “sole criterion” for revoking a registration. But Ohio’s “use it or lose it” law, like Georgia’s, includes the return notice process, which the majority concluded was fully in line with federal law. All of which is to say that the “purges” attributed to Kemp are in keeping with state and federal law, passed by duly elected representatives.
Finally, there are the numbers to consider: In Kemp’s eight years as secretary of state, black voter registration in Georgia has gone up every cycle, with an overall increase of 462,000 voters, or more than 31 percent, between 2010 and 2018. That outpaces white voter registration both in real numbers and as a percentage of all voters. Black voter turnout has been consistently around 50 percent for midterm federal elections and 70 percent during presidential years.
Kemp hasn’t helped his own case. He’s referred to critics of the state’s voter registration laws as “outside agitators”—a phrase that recalls the rhetoric of white segregationists. He has also tried to turn the tables on Abrams, arguing that a recent remark she made about the “blue wave” of Georgians, including undocumented immigrants, was a call for illegal aliens to vote in the midterm election.
The merit of Georgia’s voter registration laws is hardly beyond debate. Kemp cites concerns about voter fraud as a reason to implement tough voter maintenance, but according to the APM report, “Georgia officials have pursued 19 election fraud cases in the past two decades” and just 7 of them resulted in convictions. States have broad discretion to implement their own election laws within the federal framework, but perhaps Georgia’s “use it or lose it” and “exact match” laws are more onerous than Georgians prefer. And given that systemic suppression of black voters happened in Georgia in living memory, there’s an argument that more liberal registration laws are a corrective to perceived or real racial bias. Considering Georgia’s volatile racial history, a reasoned debate about the efficacy of the state’s laws may be in order.
But casting Kemp as an agent of blanket disenfranchisement is not only unfair but counterproductive. If Kemp edges out Abrams by just a few thousand votes—a quite plausible outcome, given the polls—the perception that Kemp suppressed more than enough minority votes to put him over the top could threaten the legitimacy of the election in the minds of many Georgia voters. Kemp’s critics argue this is precisely why a spotlight on the registration issue is so important. But without the context and with hyperbolic rhetoric, the claims of voter suppression aren’t much different from the demagoguery Democrats decry from the likes of Kemp and Donald Trump. 
Correction, October 26, 2018, 10:48 a.m.: The piece originally said that "Certain relevant information (like last name, first initial of first name, and address) must match exactly with the appropriate database." The address is not required, but the date of birth is. The article has been changed accordingly.
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