Senator Marco Rubiobot reappeared for his first “on camera” interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper since dropping out of the presidential primary race.

[In an effort to recapture some conservative relevancy/credibility, Senator Rubio met with strategic war advocate Mark Levin prior to Jake Tapper]

Delivering and repeating his scripted and well-rehearsed talking points, a trademark of his political career, Rubio dismissed any notion that he would be a vice-presidential pick for Donald Trump and quixotically obfuscated away from any endorsement; preferring instead to repeat the ‘I-signed-a-pledge’ meme ad nauseam.
In essence the former presidential candidate proved in a post-election interview why he never stood a chance in the pre-interview election race.  Some things never change.

The best part of the interview was toward the end.  After Rubio praised NATO and the United Nations Jake Tapper correctly pointed out that Marco Rubio’s foreign policy, and global world view, is essentially identical to Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
The interview became funny because Rubio responded: “but I wanted earlier intervention in Syria”, which left Tapper open to affirm his original framework with the bulls-eye retort: “well, um, so did she” DUH.
After stuttering, Rubiobot quickly moved on…
(more…)

A brand new series of Quinnipiac Swing State Polls (full pdf below) shows Donald Trump beating Hillary Clinton in Ohio (43-39), and a virtual tie in Florida and Pennsylvania with Hillary Clinton attaining a one point lead in each (43-42).

(Via Quinnipiac University) Clinton and Trump both have negative favorability ratings among voters in each state, compared to Sanders’ split score, the independent Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pe-ack) University Poll finds. The Swing State Poll focuses on Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania because since 1960 no candidate has won the presidential race without taking at least two of these three states.
The presidential matchups show: (more…)

House Speaker Paul Ryan gave an interview today to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in Janesville Wisconsin. – AUDIO HERE – One of the interesting and revealing aspects was how Ryan framed the questioning of his visible/pubic opposition toward Donald Trump:

…”We have right now a disunified Republican Party. We shouldn’t sweep it under the rug without addressing it. That would be to our detriment in the fall”…

What’s interesting about that statement is the fact Mitt Romney had stronger opposition in early May 2012 than Donald Trump holds at the same point in the nomination process four years later.
Paul Ryan never spoke of “disunity” amid the party apparatus until 2016 and nominee Donald Trump.
Through May 5th 2012 Mitt Romney was opposed by 62.5% of the republican electorate with 37.5% support (Data Here). By comparison through the same period 2016 Trump was opposed by 59.8% with 40.2% support (Data Here).
When you add up Paul Ryan asking CNN’s Jake Tapper for the interview last week (where he publicly announced his concerns about Donald Trump), together with several statements today in retreat, what you begin to see is Ryan was setting up the framework of opposition – then encountered a backlash he did not expect. (more…)

When contemplating the “inevitability threshold” we anticipated last year the Wall Street power brokers would switch to supporting Hillary Clinton if Donald Trump became inevitable. 

[…]  The Tripwire we identified back in July 2015 remains today.  If Wall Street (writ large) views Donald Trump as inevitable, they will re-evaluate –QUICKLY– the opposite side of their controllable coin.  Meaning they will evaluate Hillary Clinton.
Wall Street (The U.S. CoC, Tom Donohue, and all varied interests, DNC/RNC et al) set this up as a win/win. A Clinton/Bush strategy.  If Trump is believed to be inevitable in victory over Bush, they need to re-evaluate the Clinton side STAT.

Today that outcome begins:

(Via The Observer) Renaissance Technologies, a hedge fund founded by billionaire James Simons, donated over $13 million to Sen. Ted Cruz’s failed presidential campaign. For a guy who’s supposed to be pretty smart with his money, the ROI on that one has got to sting. (more…)

A poll of active military personnel conducted by Military Times shows Donald Trump with more than a 2-to-1 lead within the military service community.  We actually saw the first statistical evidence of this surface in the Virginia Republican Primary:

(Via Military Times) In a new survey of American military personnel, Donald Trump emerged as active-duty service members’ preference to become the next U.S. president, topping Hillary Clinton by more than a 2-to-1 margin. However, in the latest Military Times election survey, more than one in five troops said they’d rather not vote in November if they have to choose between just those two candidates. (more…)

Last year Matt Drudge warned of this activity, asserting that corporate and SJW interests were going to manipulate the news content feed on platformed social media in an effort to advance a false impression of support.  Looks like he was right as whistle-blowers now tell how Facebook is manipulating content.
(Via Daily Caller) Facebook staff manually inserted the “Black Lives Matter” topic into its trending news feed in order to artificially boost the movement’s popularity and in turn boost the Facebook brand, according to a former employee who curated news for the site.

“Facebook got a lot of pressure about not having a trending topic for Black Lives Matter,” the former curator told Gizmodo. “They realized it was a problem, and they boosted it in the ordering. They gave it preference over other topics.” (more…)

Update to THIS STORY – Nero is also anticipated to request a bench trial, without jury.

BALTIMORE SUN – Baltimore prosecutors have asked that the trial of Officer Edward Nero be pushed back one day after their offices were shut down for utility work over the weekend.
Nero is the second officer to go to trial in the arrest and death of Freddie Gray, and proceedings are slated to begin Tuesday with pre-trial motions. His trial is scheduled to begin Wednesday.
Prosecutors said in a motion filed Friday that they were told by BGE that their offices at 120 E. Baltimore St. would be shut down and without power from 6 a.m. until 6 p.m. on Saturday. The work would also prevent the trial team from remotely accessing files, “effectively and unexpectedly halting final case preparations during the important last days before trial.” (read more)

CNN – New Day:

FNB W/ Maria Bartiromo: (more…)

In 2014 when we first wrote about the GOPe road map, the prediction of 15 republican candidates and the “splitter strategy”, many political followers said we were engaged in speculative nuttery.
In 2015 when we first wrote about the roles of each of the “splitter strategy” participants, many more political followers said we were engaged in conspiracy theory.
In hindsight, both of those previous sets of predictions were entirely accurate.
However, in December ’15, and January ’16 we predicted something else, something even more radical.  We predicted record-breaking voter turnout in the primary and general election of 2016.
In November 2015 a blogger named Citizen Dale coined the phrase “The Monster Vote“.  We agreed with the underlying premise, and we predicted specific statistics that, if achieved, would prove if the Monster Vote was real.
However, because there are so many naysayers, we asked for independent review of our predictions and analysis.  Many of you will remember – Nick H, a statistician by trade, took on the challenge and expanded on our theory.   In February, we developed a few simple predictions for the primary and general election.
We can now look at the 2016 voter results and compare them to our tripwire predictions. (more…)

Anyone else noticing how the political media and #NeverTrump camps are shifting the “conservative” litmus goalposts to circle the wagons around Paul Omnibus Ryan?
The larger Vichy Republican Tribe is being resoundingly defeated by the Monster Vote, the broad-based Trump Coalition.  There’s a particular humor in noting there’s more of us holding the whack-a-mole hammers than the popping up heads of the failing punditry.

The same thing happened in 2009/2010 when the Tea Party coalesced fiscal conservatives.  If you can generate a large enough movement, in this case the Trump Coalition, each person carrying a thimble full of water can fill a swimming pool containing all the politicos just by the sheer numbers within the assembly.
When a magnitude of the electorate begin focusing on a single objective, the DC snorkels begin taking on water, they can’t breathe, they need: A) the water to stop; and, B.) Snorkel extensions.
Team Trump is currently thumping the professional political class. They are simply being defeated. Historically, whenever this happens the GOPe begin looking for something ideological and political they can frame as a win to preserve the morale of the usurping agents.
By all accounts it appears they’re looking at “Saving Paul Ryan” to be that “shiny thing”.
Here’s Palin: (more…)