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I hate to ruin anybody's dinner but…
Michelle Obama already facing calls to run in 2028 - here’s why she never tried before
It hasn’t even been a week since Donald Trump won the election, but politicos are already dreaming about who should run in 2028, and former First Lady Michelle Obama’s name keeps cropping up.
When the Obamas issued their statement on the election results, social media users deluged them with comments calling for the former first lady to run.
Oddsmakers already have her as the number two choice next cycle, behind Vice President-elect JD Vance. Even Joe Rogan, the Trump-supporting apostle of male opinion this election, said this week Obama would win “in a landslide“ if she ran.
While Obama has never expressed public interest in running for president, it’s easy to see why so many want her to: she remains extremely popular.
Back when Joe Biden was still the struggling Democratic choice for 2024, an Ipsos poll from July showed that Michelle Obama was the only Democrat who could beat Donald Trump in a hypothetical matchup.
When the Obamas left the White House in 2016, the outgoing first lady was more popular than the president.
Speculation, or perhaps wishful thinking, was so intense that Michelle Obama would swoop in and rescue the Democrats this election that the first lady’s office was compelled in March to announce she was not going to run.
“As former first lady Michelle Obama has expressed several times over the years, she will not be running for president,” Crystal Carson, director of communications for her office, said at the time.
Michelle Obama has long made it clear she doesn’t have aspirations for political office herself.
“Politics is hard,” she told Oprah in 2023. “And the people who get into it … you’ve got to want it. It’s got to be in your soul, because it is so important. It is not in my soul.”
She “detests” questions about running for the White House, Obama told the BBC in 2022.
Those around the former first lady have been similarly clear.
“She has said over and over again, this is not her world. She’s not going to do it,” her biographer Peter Slevin told NewsNation.
Obama has long talked about the challenging impact of entering politics on her own life and family.
“Politics felt mean,” she told NPR in 2018, “and I could see how disruptive it could be to family life, how all consuming it could be.”
“Politics was never ever anything I would have chosen for myself. … It was very difficult being married to a man that felt like politics was his destiny,” Obama added.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/michelle-obama-president-2028-why-b2643964.html
Sorry, Soros — even Democratic voters rejected soft-on-crime district attorneys
Vice President Kamala Harris frequently touted her prosecutorial bona fides on the campaign trail, probably sensing political peril in boosting her prior support for soft-on-crime policies.
Yet she refused to say how she voted on California’s Proposition 36 to restore tough penalties for drugs and theft, despite its overwhelming backing in public surveys. (The measure sailed through with 70% support — the highest margin for any contested referendum in recent California history.)
Harris hedged because she was stuck between a rock (public opinion) and a hard place (her political benefactors including leftist billionaire George Soros).
The results in prosecutor races across the country — particularly in Harris’ home state and across the battleground states — demonstrate even Democratic voters are done with the soft-on-crime experiment.
The progressive “reform” candidate lost in 13 of last week’s top 25 district-attorney races — even in liberal bastions.
In California, justice reformers were trounced by double digits in three pivotal races even as Harris herself posted huge margins.
San Francisco DA Brooke Jenkins, the tough-on-crime replacement for recalled Chesa Boudin, beat Boudin’s handpicked candidate two-to-one despite Harris winning the city by a 65-point margin.
Across the bay in Alameda County, home to Oakland and Berkeley, voters recalled the Soros-financed DA Pamela Price by a nearly two-to-one margin while Harris clinched the county 74% to 26%.
Harris won Los Angeles County by 30 points yet DA George Gascón lost by 23 points — meaning more of her voters backed his tough-on-crime opponent, Nathan Hochman.
Notably, more than half of Harris voters backed Prop 36, which repealed laws Gascón bragged he authored.
Tough-on-crime candidates, despite being outspent by outside advocacy groups often financed by lefty moneymen like Soros, won more often than not across the 25 most-contested elections.
And the voter backlash against soft-on-crime policies was especially acute in the battleground states.
In Georgia, Deborah Gonzalez, the DA where a recently arrested but released illegal alien allegedly killed nursing student Laken Riley, lost by 20 points — running 16 points behind Harris, who carried those counties with 56.5% to President-elect Donald Trump’s 43.5%.
While Savannah’s progressive prosecutor Shalena Cook Jones held on to her seat, she ran behind the Democratic ticket by 5.5 points.
Traditional prosecutors in Arizona’s Maricopa County and Michigan’s Macomb County overperformed Trump’s margins and beat back leftist challengers.
Across deep-blue counties in both red and blue states, the tough-on-crime prosecutors consistently received a greater share of the vote than Trump, suggesting their message resonated with a broad electorate.
Conversely, progressive candidates received an 8-point-smaller share of the two-way vote than Harris did at the top of the ballot.
In other words, Harris voters — both liberals in California and independents in the swing states — chose the traditional approach to prosecution. That does not even account for the voters who were chose Trump as a rejection of the wave of progressive prosecutors in big cities and their unpopular policies.
A decade ago, the average voter would have been stumped if asked to name a district attorney 1,000 miles away, but today, Soros prosecutors like Larry Krasner, Alvin Bragg, Kim Foxx and others are household names after drawing national attention — but not in a good way.
more…
https://nypost.com/2024/11/13/opinion/even-democratic-voters-rejected-george-soros-linked-soft-on-crime-district-attorneys/
Polymarket users are betting on Scott Bessent to be Trump’s treasury secretary
The prediction market Polymarket had Donald Trump favored to win the presidential election, and then he became the president-elect, again. Now people are betting on who will be his pick for secretary of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, and Polymarket shows Scott Bessent’s odds of securing that nomination at 67%, at the moment. Obviously, there is no guarantee; Janet Yellen has served as the Treasury’s secretary since January 2021.
Bessent is the founder and chief executive of Key Square Group, a hedge fund, and formerly the chief investment officer of Soros Fund Management, founded by prolific Democratic Party donor George Soros. Bessent’s name has been floated for days, pretty much since Trump’s victory. Trump recently described Bessent as “one of the most brilliant men on Wall Street,” who is “respected by everybody,” and a “nice-looking guy, too,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Bessent reportedly helped Trump on the campaign trail, beyond his very generous contributions; Trump’s key advisors are reportedly backing Bessent, per Bloomberg.
Data from the Federal Election Commission shows Bessent shelled out $500,000 to the Trump 47 Committee and other joint fundraising accounts; and $750,000 to the Make America Great Again super PAC. There were of course other contributions, too, including $413,000 to various Republican National Committee and related accounts, and donations to individual candidates.
Recently when asked if he’d be a part of the second Trump administration on CNBC, Bessent said, “I’m going to do whatever President Trump asks.” Not to mention, he just wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, praising the former and future president—and criticizing not only Trump’s predecessor, but maybe his, too, if he actually becomes treasury secretary.
“Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has distorted Treasury markets by borrowing more than $1 trillion in more-expensive shorter-term debt compared with historical norms,” he wrote. Followed by, shortly after: “The failure of Bidenomics is clear. But Mr. Trump has turned around the economy before, and he is ready to do so again. Twenty-three Nobel laureates might not understand this, but the financial markets have clearly spoken,” he wrote, in reference to the economists who warned against another Trump presidency. Yet when Trump won, markets seemed to immediately respond otherwise.
There are other contenders for treasury secretary people are betting on (and who are mentioned in the chatter), such as Howard Lutnick, the chairman and chief executive of Cantor Fitzgerald, a financial services firm. Polymarket puts his chances at 30%, at the moment. Lutnick is the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, basically responsible for filling the spots in his next administration. FOX Business reported Lutnick is “campaigning hard” for the role. Bessent and Lutnick pretty much took centerstage once John Paulson, who helms a family office by the same name, took his hat out of the treasury secretary ring because of what he called his “complex financial obligations.”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/polymarket-users-betting-scott-bessent-181021260.html
Trump picks Matt Gaetz, who called ADL ‘racist’ and invited Holocaust denier to SOTU, for attorney general
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Matt Gaetz as his nominee for attorney general, putting forward a firebrand who has tussled with Jewish groups, embraced an antisemitic conspiracy theory and associated with a Holocaust denier.
Gaetz, 42, was elected to Congress in 2016, where he has represented a district in the Florida Panhandle and has gained a reputation as one of Trump’s most vocal supporters. Senators from both parties appeared surprised by the nomination, potentially imperiling Gaetz’s chances of securing the job. If he is confirmed to the role by the Senate, he would succeed Merrick Garland, a former federal judge who is Jewish.
Since taking office, Gaetz has made headlines for sparring with Jews and Jewish organizations. He has also been investigated for sex trafficking.
In 2018, the Republican Jewish Coalition and the Anti-Defamation League both criticized Gaetz, then in his first term, for inviting a Holocaust denier as his guest at the State of the Union address. The guest, Charles Johnson, had publicly doubted that 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust and suggested falsely that only 250,000 had died of illness.
“This organization is deeply troubled by the comments from Charles C. Johnson, and it is incredibly important for the congressman to acknowledge he is a Holocaust denier and has extensive writings that attest to that and that it was wrong to bring him to the State of the Union,” RJC Executive Director Matt Brooks told BuzzFeed at the time.
The ADL also called on Gaetz to repudiate Johnson’s extremist views, writing in a letter to the representative that inviting Johnson was “an insult to the memories of those killed in the Holocaust, to their families, and to the Jewish community.”
Gaetz denied that Johnson was a Holocaust denier. He told BuzzFeed that Johnson “is not a Holocaust denier and he’s not an anti-Semite. He’s a provoker, I should’ve vetted him better before inviting him to the State of the Union, I regret that I didn’t. That’s my fault. I take responsibility for it. But he is not a Holocaust denier.”
more (if ya care to read it…)
https://www.jta.org/2024/11/13/politics/trump-picks-matt-gaetz-who-called-adl-racist-and-invited-holocaust-denier-to-sotu-for-attorney-general