The Cult Leader is really frustrated that he can’t just use all federal employees to harass his enemies and create diversions to take the focus off the messes created largely by his prior idiocy.
Like the WSJ and Rand Paul, call me unimpressed. Tax reform shouldn’t be a case of 3 Card Monty. All they did for the middle class is move taxes around. They’re doing a big favor for big business, and the poor who already pay no taxes, but not so much for the rest of us.
“The dispiriting news is on the individual side. The House would double the standard deduction to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for married couples. This would improve simplicity for millions, and it compensates for the bill’s elimination of the personal exemption. But nearly half of American filers already owe no income taxes, and the larger deduction would make the federal fisc even more dependent on a smaller pool of taxpayers.
This is far better than the House bill’s new “family credit,” which increases the child credit to $1,600 from $1,000 in a forlorn attempt to appease the income redistributionists of the right like Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio. The credit would also offer an additional $300 for each parent and another $300 for each “non-child dependent.” The credits would phase out for married couples at $230,000 of income. Does anyone think a mid-level manager at J.P. Morgan deserves a subsidy to raise children?
The House also gradually makes more of the $1,600 credit refundable. In other words, this will be a check in the mail for those who owe nothing in taxes, which discourages work. The family credits cost $640 billion over 10 years in lost revenue with zero growth payoff. To make up the difference, the House keeps the top personal rate at 39.6%, on top of the 3.8% ObamaCare surcharge that Republicans failed to repeal. This would become the fourth tax bracket and kick in at $1 million for couples—half that for individuals—with 12%, 25% and 35% brackets below.
This top rate is a surrender to Democratic class warriors, though Republicans also fear that President Trump would sandbag them. No Members want to vote for a lower top rate and then have Mr. Trump tweet that they’re “mean,” as he did on health care. This is where presidential flightiness and lack of principle have a policy cost. Ideological surrender also gets Republicans nothing politically as Democrats are still attacking the House plan as a sop to the rich.
Here and there the House plan includes some good news on individual loopholes, such as eliminating the state and local deduction. The bill carves out an exception for property taxes, capped at $10,000, to win over New York and California Republicans, if the House can hold that cap. Another good move is a $500,000 cap on mortgage interest for new homes, and no more tax breaks for second residences. The Realtors will go thermonuclear, but then they refused to support the House blueprint that left the deduction untouched.
The overall impact of the individual tax changes is little reform but more income redistribution. The long-term damage to the tax-cutting cause will also be considerable. Adding credits and deductions for individuals makes rate-cutting that much harder since the affluent pay the vast bulk of all income taxes. The divorce of “pass through” and personal income rates will also make it even harder to reduce individual tax rates below 39.6%—ever.”
————————-
“Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Thursday on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that the House’s tax plan will deliver economic growth, although it doesn’t really constitute “a significant tax cut” as President Donald Trump said it would.
The House’s watered-down Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, released Thursday, would reduce the number of income tax brackets to four, with rates of zero percent, 12 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent. In addition, the corporate tax rate drops from 35 percent to 20 percent — short of the 15 percent tax rate Trump championed on the campaign trail, but still a significant change.
Although Paul applauded some aspects of the bill’s content, he expressed disappointment, saying the proposed legislation as it now stands wouldn’t deliver the “significant tax cut” Trump and Republicans promised.
“If you don’t cut the top 1 percent, you don’t really have a significant tax cut,” Paul told LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham. “What they’ve done is, they’ve bought into the class warfare on the individual side.”
“So at the top, there’s not going to be much of a tax cut. There will be some. And in the middle, there’s going to be a little bit — there’s mostly going to be eliminating deductions. And at the bottom, the bottom already don’t pay much income tax and will continue not to pay much income tax,” Paul added.”
Why is it that all the breaks that benefit the middle class and lower income expire in as soon as 5 years, yet those for big business don’t? It almost seems like they’re favoring the rich corporate donor class over the rest of us.
“In light of the newest charge that the DNC and the Clinton campaign may have broken a dozen federal election laws with the document, special counsel Robert Mueller has no choice but to dismiss the Trump investigation.
To fully understand how the partisan hit piece fueled Mueller’s Russian investigation, one must remember how it all began.
It was John Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama, who accepted the now-debunked document and infused it into the bloodstream of the U.S. intelligence community. By acknowledging the document and logging it in his files, Brennan inadvertently gave the document a “Classified” rating, along with some hefty credence. The presumption among the intelligence community was that if the document was good enough for Brennan to believe, then it must have merit.
Now, although no one in the Democratic Party will take responsibility for it and Fusion GPS’s co-founders refuse to testify for fear of incriminating themselves, some legitimate questions remain.
First, who gave Brennan the dossier?
Second, was he aware that the information was paid political fodder intended to damage the opposing party’s candidate? Or, as no fan of Trump himself, did he even care?
Lastly, it appears that Democrats were willing to use their contacts within the Deep State to accomplish their mission to smear Trump. It raises the question: Was Brennan aware that he might have been used as a tool of the DNC in infusing the document into the bloodstream of the intelligence community, where it would then take on a life of its own?
These questions remain, and Brennan should now be called to answer them.”
————————–
“In the wake of recent revelations proving the now-debunked “Trump dossier” was crafted by Democratic opposition research firm Fusion GPS, paid for the Democratic National Committee and also funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, many people still aren’t aware of precisely how a political document made it onto the radar of the intelligence community.
To fully understand it, one must look no further than John Brennan – the man who voted for the Communist Party candidate in the presidential election of 1976, briefed in 2008 then-Senator Barack Obama for his presidential bid, and later went on to become President Barack Obama’s director of the CIA.
It was Brennan who first accepted Fusion GPS’ dossier at the CIA, and “the Obama loyalist drove the FBI to investigate Trump” as early as summer 2016.
From Brennan’s desk the salacious document, which alluded to golden showers and other nefarious rumors, gained traction throughout the intelligence community like a dirty comic book being passed around a seventh-grade locker room.
The presumption amongst the rank and file was that if the document was sufficient enough to merit the attention of the CIA director, it was important enough to be seen as serious intelligence.
There’s one serious problem with this: Brennan’s past is checkered with intelligence mishaps. In fact, his past track record nearly prevented him from becoming CIA director under Obama.
As CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1996, Brennan missed intelligence that could have prevented the bombing of the Khobar Towers that killed 19 American servicemembers and injured nearly 500 others. Brennan’s team came under “heavy criticism for their lack of preparation and foresight for what was considered an intelligence failure.” According to the New York Times, “significant shortcomings in planning, intelligence, and basic security left American forces in Saudi Arabia vulnerable.”
That wasn’t Brennan’s only intelligence misstep.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11 it was Brennan who, as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, advised President George W. Bush to escalate the terror alert warning to an “orange terror alert” during Christmas 2003.
That intelligence was later proven false. In fact, it was called “bogus intel.”
And after the 2009 attempted Christmas Day underwear bombing of a Northwest Airlines passenger jet as it was landing in Detroit, Brennan “confessed” he had “let the President down by underestimating a small group of Yemeni terrorists and not connecting them to the attempted bomber.” Had the bomber been successful, it would have been a terrible tragedy on Christmas Day.
Now, that brings us to the Fusion GPS debacle.”
———————-
For months we have known that “the dossier” was paid for, at least in part, by a Democratic entity or person. In the last two weeks it was disclosed that the Hillary campaign and the DNC were those two entities. No surprise. I am interested to hear what Mueller says about the dossier, its funding and its accuracy.
“A group of conservative Republican lawmakers introduced a resolution on Friday calling for Robert Mueller to recuse himself as the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election and whether President Donald Trump’s campaign team colluded with Moscow.
Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Andy Biggs of Arizona, and Louie Gohmert of Texas say Mueller should step down because he was the FBI director in 2010 when US government agencies approved the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian energy company, to a Russian nuclear-energy firm. The deal required approval because Uranium One had mining operations in the US.
Gaetz says the issue is that Mueller’s FBI had found evidence of criminal activity that may have been relevant to the deal but did not bring any charges, and that Mueller therefore should recuse himself from the current investigation.
“These deeply troubling events took place when Mr. Mueller was the Director of the FBI. As such, his impartiality is hopelessly compromised,” Gaetz said in a statement. “He must step down immediately.”
Mueller fell for the fake dossier, just like the rest of them, because it’s what they wanted to believe. None of the outrageous and false allegations in it have been proven true. But you keep hoping Ricky.
“After a year of investigation, there is nothing substantive to demonstrate that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Kremlin. Yet the political impetus for initiating the Mueller investigation was based on the initial wave of mostly false information.
The most important compendium of weaponized falsehoods is the “Trump dossier,” the 35-page Russian-sourced opposition research report assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier claimed to prove that Trump was an active agent of Russian influence. It was recently revealed that the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign had funded Steele’s effort through the political research firm Fusion GPS — this after top Democrats claimed they had nothing to do with it, according to CNN.
The Trump dossier might have simply gone down in history as another in the long line of failed political dirty tricks. But it played a much more significant role when it became part of the Obama administration’s effort to investigate the Trump campaign before and after the election. Elements of the dossier were included in the Obama administration’s official assessment of Russian influence on the election. The FBI reportedly used the dossier as evidence to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to investigate former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. This or another FISA warrant was reportedly used to surveil Manafort as well. Since a previous attempt by the FBI to obtain such a warrant had failed, it is reasonable to ask to what extent the bureau used the information in the Trump dossier to sway the court.
If the Democrat-funded Steele memos were central to the various moves first by the Obama administration and now by Mueller to investigate people connected to the Trump campaign and administration, the effort takes on a “fruit of the poison tree” flavor. The Steele memos were political hit pieces based on unverified foreign sources and paid for by Democrats and the Clinton campaign. For it to then be accepted by the government’s legal apparatus and used as part of the investigative process taints the entire enterprise. It mixes the political and governmental in a way that compromises the methods and motives of everyone involved. It is a case study in subverting democracy.
This should be the real focus of the investigation. At least it has something to do with the election.”
Old James Brown’s raid might have succeeded except the whole town of Harpers Ferry was awakened when they heard him shouting, “I Feel Good” as he strutted across the bridge over the Potomac.
Mueller hasn’t fallen for anything. He still has a functioning brain. He is neither a Trump cultist nor a member of the anti-Trump mob. Trumpkin Newt Gingrich praised Mueller when he was appointed. Trumpkin Carter Page praised Mueller’s professionalism today in an interview. We must be patient. Let Mueller complete his work, and he will tell us what happened.
Trump will keep us entertained with his daily antics until Mueller finishes.
Wandering Views 
Here is an article that explains the tax proposal:
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The Cult Leader is really frustrated that he can’t just use all federal employees to harass his enemies and create diversions to take the focus off the messes created largely by his prior idiocy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/11/03/trump-pressures-justice-department-to-investigate-crooked-hillary/?utm_term=.63d340b1f566
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He wasn’t done:
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Like the WSJ and Rand Paul, call me unimpressed. Tax reform shouldn’t be a case of 3 Card Monty. All they did for the middle class is move taxes around. They’re doing a big favor for big business, and the poor who already pay no taxes, but not so much for the rest of us.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/half-a-tax-reform-1509663296
“The dispiriting news is on the individual side. The House would double the standard deduction to $12,000 for individuals and $24,000 for married couples. This would improve simplicity for millions, and it compensates for the bill’s elimination of the personal exemption. But nearly half of American filers already owe no income taxes, and the larger deduction would make the federal fisc even more dependent on a smaller pool of taxpayers.
This is far better than the House bill’s new “family credit,” which increases the child credit to $1,600 from $1,000 in a forlorn attempt to appease the income redistributionists of the right like Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio. The credit would also offer an additional $300 for each parent and another $300 for each “non-child dependent.” The credits would phase out for married couples at $230,000 of income. Does anyone think a mid-level manager at J.P. Morgan deserves a subsidy to raise children?
The House also gradually makes more of the $1,600 credit refundable. In other words, this will be a check in the mail for those who owe nothing in taxes, which discourages work. The family credits cost $640 billion over 10 years in lost revenue with zero growth payoff. To make up the difference, the House keeps the top personal rate at 39.6%, on top of the 3.8% ObamaCare surcharge that Republicans failed to repeal. This would become the fourth tax bracket and kick in at $1 million for couples—half that for individuals—with 12%, 25% and 35% brackets below.
This top rate is a surrender to Democratic class warriors, though Republicans also fear that President Trump would sandbag them. No Members want to vote for a lower top rate and then have Mr. Trump tweet that they’re “mean,” as he did on health care. This is where presidential flightiness and lack of principle have a policy cost. Ideological surrender also gets Republicans nothing politically as Democrats are still attacking the House plan as a sop to the rich.
Here and there the House plan includes some good news on individual loopholes, such as eliminating the state and local deduction. The bill carves out an exception for property taxes, capped at $10,000, to win over New York and California Republicans, if the House can hold that cap. Another good move is a $500,000 cap on mortgage interest for new homes, and no more tax breaks for second residences. The Realtors will go thermonuclear, but then they refused to support the House blueprint that left the deduction untouched.
The overall impact of the individual tax changes is little reform but more income redistribution. The long-term damage to the tax-cutting cause will also be considerable. Adding credits and deductions for individuals makes rate-cutting that much harder since the affluent pay the vast bulk of all income taxes. The divorce of “pass through” and personal income rates will also make it even harder to reduce individual tax rates below 39.6%—ever.”
————————-
http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/rand-paul-well-see-growth-but-this-isnt-asignificant-tax-cut/
“Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said Thursday on “The Laura Ingraham Show” that the House’s tax plan will deliver economic growth, although it doesn’t really constitute “a significant tax cut” as President Donald Trump said it would.
The House’s watered-down Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, released Thursday, would reduce the number of income tax brackets to four, with rates of zero percent, 12 percent, 25 percent and 35 percent. In addition, the corporate tax rate drops from 35 percent to 20 percent — short of the 15 percent tax rate Trump championed on the campaign trail, but still a significant change.
Although Paul applauded some aspects of the bill’s content, he expressed disappointment, saying the proposed legislation as it now stands wouldn’t deliver the “significant tax cut” Trump and Republicans promised.
“If you don’t cut the top 1 percent, you don’t really have a significant tax cut,” Paul told LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham. “What they’ve done is, they’ve bought into the class warfare on the individual side.”
“So at the top, there’s not going to be much of a tax cut. There will be some. And in the middle, there’s going to be a little bit — there’s mostly going to be eliminating deductions. And at the bottom, the bottom already don’t pay much income tax and will continue not to pay much income tax,” Paul added.”
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https://twitter.com/jaketapper/status/926492373496074248
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That tweet was a comment on this one:
https://twitter.com/TVNewsHQ/status/926483206781767686
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And on the tax code thing…..
Why is it that all the breaks that benefit the middle class and lower income expire in as soon as 5 years, yet those for big business don’t? It almost seems like they’re favoring the rich corporate donor class over the rest of us.
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So is this one of Trump’s “distractions” Ricky?
Sure seems like something that needs investigating, and should be more of a priority than decade old crimes.
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/thanks-to-the-clintondnc-revelation-about-the-trump-dossier-robert-mueller-can-stop-investigating-trump/article/2638794
“In light of the newest charge that the DNC and the Clinton campaign may have broken a dozen federal election laws with the document, special counsel Robert Mueller has no choice but to dismiss the Trump investigation.
To fully understand how the partisan hit piece fueled Mueller’s Russian investigation, one must remember how it all began.
It was John Brennan, director of the Central Intelligence Agency under President Barack Obama, who accepted the now-debunked document and infused it into the bloodstream of the U.S. intelligence community. By acknowledging the document and logging it in his files, Brennan inadvertently gave the document a “Classified” rating, along with some hefty credence. The presumption among the intelligence community was that if the document was good enough for Brennan to believe, then it must have merit.
Now, although no one in the Democratic Party will take responsibility for it and Fusion GPS’s co-founders refuse to testify for fear of incriminating themselves, some legitimate questions remain.
First, who gave Brennan the dossier?
Second, was he aware that the information was paid political fodder intended to damage the opposing party’s candidate? Or, as no fan of Trump himself, did he even care?
Lastly, it appears that Democrats were willing to use their contacts within the Deep State to accomplish their mission to smear Trump. It raises the question: Was Brennan aware that he might have been used as a tool of the DNC in infusing the document into the bloodstream of the intelligence community, where it would then take on a life of its own?
These questions remain, and Brennan should now be called to answer them.”
————————–
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/john-brennans-intelligence-failures-have-hurt-our-security-and-our-democracy/article/2639397
“In the wake of recent revelations proving the now-debunked “Trump dossier” was crafted by Democratic opposition research firm Fusion GPS, paid for the Democratic National Committee and also funded by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, many people still aren’t aware of precisely how a political document made it onto the radar of the intelligence community.
To fully understand it, one must look no further than John Brennan – the man who voted for the Communist Party candidate in the presidential election of 1976, briefed in 2008 then-Senator Barack Obama for his presidential bid, and later went on to become President Barack Obama’s director of the CIA.
It was Brennan who first accepted Fusion GPS’ dossier at the CIA, and “the Obama loyalist drove the FBI to investigate Trump” as early as summer 2016.
From Brennan’s desk the salacious document, which alluded to golden showers and other nefarious rumors, gained traction throughout the intelligence community like a dirty comic book being passed around a seventh-grade locker room.
The presumption amongst the rank and file was that if the document was sufficient enough to merit the attention of the CIA director, it was important enough to be seen as serious intelligence.
There’s one serious problem with this: Brennan’s past is checkered with intelligence mishaps. In fact, his past track record nearly prevented him from becoming CIA director under Obama.
As CIA station chief in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in 1996, Brennan missed intelligence that could have prevented the bombing of the Khobar Towers that killed 19 American servicemembers and injured nearly 500 others. Brennan’s team came under “heavy criticism for their lack of preparation and foresight for what was considered an intelligence failure.” According to the New York Times, “significant shortcomings in planning, intelligence, and basic security left American forces in Saudi Arabia vulnerable.”
That wasn’t Brennan’s only intelligence misstep.
In the aftermath of Sept. 11 it was Brennan who, as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, advised President George W. Bush to escalate the terror alert warning to an “orange terror alert” during Christmas 2003.
That intelligence was later proven false. In fact, it was called “bogus intel.”
And after the 2009 attempted Christmas Day underwear bombing of a Northwest Airlines passenger jet as it was landing in Detroit, Brennan “confessed” he had “let the President down by underestimating a small group of Yemeni terrorists and not connecting them to the attempted bomber.” Had the bomber been successful, it would have been a terrible tragedy on Christmas Day.
Now, that brings us to the Fusion GPS debacle.”
———————-
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Yep.
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For months we have known that “the dossier” was paid for, at least in part, by a Democratic entity or person. In the last two weeks it was disclosed that the Hillary campaign and the DNC were those two entities. No surprise. I am interested to hear what Mueller says about the dossier, its funding and its accuracy.
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About time someone points out the obvious.
http://www.businessinsider.com/republicans-introduce-bill-to-remove-bob-mueller-from-special-counsel-2017-11
“A group of conservative Republican lawmakers introduced a resolution on Friday calling for Robert Mueller to recuse himself as the special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 US election and whether President Donald Trump’s campaign team colluded with Moscow.
Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Andy Biggs of Arizona, and Louie Gohmert of Texas say Mueller should step down because he was the FBI director in 2010 when US government agencies approved the sale of Uranium One, a Canadian energy company, to a Russian nuclear-energy firm. The deal required approval because Uranium One had mining operations in the US.
Gaetz says the issue is that Mueller’s FBI had found evidence of criminal activity that may have been relevant to the deal but did not bring any charges, and that Mueller therefore should recuse himself from the current investigation.
“These deeply troubling events took place when Mr. Mueller was the Director of the FBI. As such, his impartiality is hopelessly compromised,” Gaetz said in a statement. “He must step down immediately.”
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Mueller fell for the fake dossier, just like the rest of them, because it’s what they wanted to believe. None of the outrageous and false allegations in it have been proven true. But you keep hoping Ricky.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/10/30/manafort-nothingburger-focus-real-election-meddling-like-trump-dossier-james-robbins/813620001/
“After a year of investigation, there is nothing substantive to demonstrate that the Trump campaign was in cahoots with the Kremlin. Yet the political impetus for initiating the Mueller investigation was based on the initial wave of mostly false information.
The most important compendium of weaponized falsehoods is the “Trump dossier,” the 35-page Russian-sourced opposition research report assembled by former British spy Christopher Steele. The dossier claimed to prove that Trump was an active agent of Russian influence. It was recently revealed that the Democratic National Committee and the Clinton campaign had funded Steele’s effort through the political research firm Fusion GPS — this after top Democrats claimed they had nothing to do with it, according to CNN.
The Trump dossier might have simply gone down in history as another in the long line of failed political dirty tricks. But it played a much more significant role when it became part of the Obama administration’s effort to investigate the Trump campaign before and after the election. Elements of the dossier were included in the Obama administration’s official assessment of Russian influence on the election. The FBI reportedly used the dossier as evidence to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court to investigate former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. This or another FISA warrant was reportedly used to surveil Manafort as well. Since a previous attempt by the FBI to obtain such a warrant had failed, it is reasonable to ask to what extent the bureau used the information in the Trump dossier to sway the court.
If the Democrat-funded Steele memos were central to the various moves first by the Obama administration and now by Mueller to investigate people connected to the Trump campaign and administration, the effort takes on a “fruit of the poison tree” flavor. The Steele memos were political hit pieces based on unverified foreign sources and paid for by Democrats and the Clinton campaign. For it to then be accepted by the government’s legal apparatus and used as part of the investigative process taints the entire enterprise. It mixes the political and governmental in a way that compromises the methods and motives of everyone involved. It is a case study in subverting democracy.
This should be the real focus of the investigation. At least it has something to do with the election.”
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DJ,
Old James Brown’s raid might have succeeded except the whole town of Harpers Ferry was awakened when they heard him shouting, “I Feel Good” as he strutted across the bridge over the Potomac.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Mueller hasn’t fallen for anything. He still has a functioning brain. He is neither a Trump cultist nor a member of the anti-Trump mob. Trumpkin Newt Gingrich praised Mueller when he was appointed. Trumpkin Carter Page praised Mueller’s professionalism today in an interview. We must be patient. Let Mueller complete his work, and he will tell us what happened.
Trump will keep us entertained with his daily antics until Mueller finishes.
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Gillespie has pulled even in the Governor’s race in Virginia. He is an old Dick Armey aide and is not running as a Trumper.
LikeLiked by 1 person
LikeLiked by 1 person