Fox News:
Fox News Poll: Trump job approval ticks up, views on impeachment steady
A new high of 45 percent of independents favor impeachment, up from 38 in late October.Overall, 53 percent of voters believe Trump abused the power of his office, 48 percent think he obstructed Congress, and 45 percent say he committed bribery.
In addition, 47 percent believe Trump held up military aid to pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate his political rivals.
By a 60-24 percent margin, voters say it is generally wrong for Trump to ask leaders of foreign countries to investigate political rivals.
And the “everybody-does-it” defense falls flat: only about one in five, 22 percent, think presidents typically ask leaders of foreign countries to investigate domestic political rivals. Among Republicans, 33 percent think that is common behavior.
Philadelphia Inquirer:
South Jersey Democratic Congressman Jeff Van Drew, impeachment foe, expected to become a Republican
Van Drew in recent days asked party chairs to sign a pledge to support him, and they refused, according to Sulemain. Van Drew’s team also tried to persuade national Democratic staffers detailed to his race to continue to support him despite his switch to the GOP. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee staff balked and alerted South Jersey Democratic officials, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
Suleiman had supported Van Drew in a crowded primary in 2018 over objections from progressives, and over concerns about Van Drew’s positions on guns and other issues.
“People held their nose because they wanted to keep the seat blue,” Suleiman said. “We said, ‘He’s going to be with us on the big issues, and we need to get that seat back.’ He did have some good Democratic positions.”
Indeed, Van Drew voted with Trump only about 7% of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight, a data-focused news site. But the impeachment vote was a breaking point. Van Drew was one of two House Democrats to break ranks on opening the inquiry, and he has said he plans to vote against formal articles of impeachment against Trump next week.
…
On the Democratic side, Brigid Harrison, a Montclair State University professor and political analyst, was the early name being considered by South Jersey Democrats. Harrison said Saturday an announcement of her candidacy was “imminent.”
She had already been mulling a run against Van Drew in a primary. Reached at the Army-Navy game in Philadelphia, Harrison called Van Drew a “traitor to his party.”
She said she had spoken with the many county chairs in the district, and “they have all been quite positive and favorable.”
“He was choosing his own political career over the Constitution and the future of the country,” Harrison said.
“Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”
- Mark Twain, a Biography
Van Drew, is not only rotten, he’s, well, less than sagacious. The Democrats are not going to ‘support’ his bid for relevance. Moving to the minority party will gain him nothing should he win. And he’s now lost the bragging point that he was a Democrat voting not to impeach. He’s not a Democrat. and he was not forced out of the party, either, he left because he knew he was about to lose a primary.
He’s a NJ machine pol in a 2019 world. Good riddance.
CNN:
Former Breitbart Editor: Stephen Miller is a white supremacist. I know, I was one too.
She was already a racist when she took a publishing job in Washington, DC. But when she became a reporter for Breitbart News, Katie McHugh says she was taken to new depths of hate with the help of Stephen Miller.
Emails show the two were in frequent contact between 2015 and 2016 while he was working for then Sen. Jeff Sessions and later on the Trump presidential campaign.
McHugh says on Miller's way to the White House, where he is now a senior adviser deeply involved in shaping immigration policy in consonance with his hardline views, he was constantly sending her far-right material, encouraging her to use their arguments in her articles.
NYRB:
The Strange Death of Social-Democratic England
Corbyn was not a Trotskyist, though he opposed the party’s policy of outlawing such factions. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Corbyn pursued his dogged, hard-left politics in a marginal way, only occasionally achieving national notoriety for his public support of Sinn Féin—at a time when IRA guns and bombs were killing not only British soldiers and Northern Irish police officers, but also English civilians on the mainland. It has only been since Corbyn himself became leader, in 2015, that his record of international solidarity with other terrorist groups—those that he saw as opposed to US imperialism—came under serious scrutiny, in particular his comradely consorting with Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Contact with such groups is not automatically disqualifying, but any responsible British politician would want to take care that such initiatives in the cause of peace and dialogue did not cut across official diplomatic channels. But that was not Corbyn’s concern. He and others of his persuasion regard the US imperium as the source of all evil in the world—and in the Middle East, that means seeing Israel as America’s proxy.
This goes to the heart of the anti-Semitism issue that so bedeviled Corbyn’s leadership of Labour. Few people believe that he himself is an anti-Semite, but did he care to discipline anti-Semitism among his own leftist supporters in the party? Clearly not. Why not? Because, in his view, the real threat to progress and peace in the world is the US and its ally Israel. Ergo, anyone who supports Israel—which would encompass the majority of British Jewry—is suspect. Corbyn’s opposition to American imperialism, with its fundamentalist critique of Israel, simply overmastered the bit of his antiracism convictions that cares about anti-Semitism. Added to which, for Corbyn’s supporters, Labour’s anti-Semitism problem is nothing more than an establishment media confection turned into a cudgel by his political enemies. That denialism papers over Corbyn’s consistent refusal to deal with the toxic elements within his party, a failure that led Britain’s chief rabbi to declare during the election campaign that Corbyn was “unfit for office.”
ICYMI, supporting material on the charge that Corbyn, at the least, had a blind eye towards Labour anti-Semitism. Just add it to the reasons why he was unpopular.
WaPo:
Freshman Democrats push for Amash as impeachment manager
A group of 30 freshman Democrats, led by Rep. Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), has asked House leaders to consider the libertarian, who left the Republican Party earlier this year, for the small group tasked with arguing its case for removing Trump in the upper chamber, according to several Democratic officials.
The thinking, according to these people, is that Amash would reach conservative voters in a way Democrats can’t, potentially bolstering their case to the public. He also would provide Democrats cover from GOP accusations that they’re pursuing a partisan impeachment; Amash is one of the most conservative members of the House and a vocal Trump critic.
Not a done deal, but interesting play.
CBS:
CBS News poll: Americans remain divided on impeachment
Few of the respondents we recontacted from last month have changed their mind on this issue. Among those who expressed an opinion about whether Mr. Trump deserves to be impeached over his actions concerning Ukraine, just 4% now offer the opposite opinion.