They can't even not be crazy!

At Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds introduces a story with this headline: ALL THEY HAVE TO DO IS NOT BE CRAZY, AND THEY CAN’T EVEN DO THAT! The story is in the Washington Free Beacon and is written by Jeffrey Cimmino.


The man in the photo is Lawrence Key.

A man from Stuart, Florida is in jail after being accused of threatening to harm the children of Republican Rep. Brian Mast (Fla.).

Mast, who represents the state's 18th Congressional District has three young children, all under the age of 8. The arrested man, Laurence Wayne Key, is facing federal charges for the offense of "communication of a threat to kidnap or injure a person." He threatened Mast’s children in response to the Trump administration's immigration policies, according to NBC affiliate WPTV.

A criminal complaint alleges Key called Mast’s Washington, D.C. office and told an intern he would "find the Congressman’s kids and kill them." He continued, "If you’re going to separate kids at the border, I’m going to kill his kids. Don’t try to find me because you won’t."

Read more here.

Today the public space is dominated by screaming crowds of the entitled and their cheerleaders in the media.

Gawain Towler writes at American Spectator,

...What has become the great danger is the way in which Governments are now conspiring with the big platforms to restrict information, to sanitize it and to ensure that it conforms to the current tick list of what is and isn’t acceptable.

...The list of what is and isn’t acceptable grows like knotweed in a stagnant pond. Ism’s and ’phobias proliferate and are condemned. The most obvious are racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, but now we have transgenderism, fattism, and Lord alone knows what else. All are labeled beyond the pale and all are to be driven out. All are labeled hate speech. Subtlety there is none, and freedom of speech has left the preserve of so-called fascists. Today the public space is dominated by screaming crowds of the entitled and their cheerleaders in the media.

Read more here.

Missing

hat tip The News Junkie

Another new opportunity for Trump!

Big news! Justice Kennedy is retiring next month! CNBC reports,

In a statement, the Supreme Court said the 81-year-old Kennedy will step down effective July 31. The judge called it "the greatest honor and privilege to serve our nation in the federal judiciary for 43 years, 30 of those years in the Supreme Court." Kennedy wants to spend more time with his family, even though they were content with him staying on the court.

(I found that humorous).
Read more here.

Kushner, the dealmaker

President Trump is going to Wisconsin today with his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Are you aware of Jared's accomplishments? Paul Bedard reports in the Washington Examiner,

Fresh from a whirlwind peace mission through the Middle East, the administration’s top dealmaker, Jared Kushner, is heading to Wisconsin Wednesday with President Trump to celebrate the biggest jobs deal of his young White House career, the groundbreaking of the massive Foxconn Technology Group project.

While Trump will likely be the focus of the event to highlight the $10 billion investment from FoxConn, the Taiwanese manufacturer best known for making Apple’s iPhones, it will also be a crowning moment for Kushner who helped negotiate the deal, his biggest in the U.S. and set to create 13,000 jobs.

It joins a growing list of deals administration officials credit to Trump’s son-in-law:

The emergence of a Middle East peace outline.
Work bringing the 2028 Summer Olympics back to Los Angeles.
A $110 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia.
Securing soccer’s World Cup in North America in 2026, with an expected 75 percent of the games being played in the U.S., the rest in Canada and Mexico.
Bipartisan support for criminal justice reform.
And don’t forget his behind-the-scenes role as the Trump presidential campaign’s CEO.

As with most of the projects he runs, Kushner shunned fanfair around his FoxConn efforts. But his was the operation he runs for Trump, the Office of American Innovation, that helped nail down the job to bring TV and other technology manufacturing to Racine, Wisc.

Read more here.

Supreme Court today: government workers can’t be forced to contribute to labor unions!

At AP Mark Sherman reports that the Supreme Court in a 5 to 4 decision today

that government workers can’t be forced to contribute to labor unions that represent them in collective bargaining, dealing a serious financial blow to organized labor.

The court’s conservative majority scrapped a 41-year-old decision that had allowed states to require that public employees pay some fees to unions that represent them, even if the workers choose not to join.

...More than half the states already have right-to-work laws banning mandatory fees, but most members of public-employee unions are concentrated in states that don’t, including California, New York and Illinois.

Labor leaders fear that not only will workers who don’t belong to a union stop paying fees, but that some union members might decide to stop paying dues if they could in essence get the union’s representation for free.

A recent study by Frank Manzo of the Illinois Public Policy Institute and Robert Bruno of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign estimated that public-sector unions could lose more than 700,000 members over time as a result of the ruling and that unions also could suffer a loss of political influence that could depress wages as well.

Alito acknowledged that unions could “experience unpleasant transition costs in the short term.” But he said labor’s problems pale in comparison to “the considerable windfall that unions have received...for the past 41 years.”

Billions of dollars have been taken from workers who were not union members in that time, he said.

“Those unconstitutional exactions cannot be allowed to continue indefinitely,” Alito wrote.

Read more here.

Engaging with Julian Assange

Investigative reporter John Solomon at The Hill tells us about a missed opportunity for the US government

to engage Julian Assange in a dialogue over redactions, a more responsible way to release information, and how the infamous DNC hacks occurred was lost — likely forever.

Mexico — a friend, an enemy, neither, or both?

Victor Davis Hanson writes in National Review,

...Facts are stubborn and reveal Mexico, not the United States, as a de facto aggressor and belligerent on many fronts. Mexico runs a NAFTA-protected $70 billion trade surplus with the U.S., larger than that of any other single American trade partner (including Japan and Germany) except China.

A supposedly affluent Mexico was supposed to achieve near parity with the U.S., as immigration and trade soon neutralized. Despite Mexico’s economic growth, no such symmetry has followed NAFTA. What did, however, 34 years later, was the establishment of a dysfunctional Mexican state, whose drug cartels all but run the country on the basis of their enormous profits from unfettered dope-running and human-trafficking into the United States. NAFTA certainly did not make Mexico a safer, kinder, and gentler nation.

In addition, Mexican citizens who enter and reside as illegal immigrants in the U.S. are mostly responsible for sending an approximate $30 billion in remittances home to Mexico. That sum has now surpassed oil and tourism as the largest source of Mexican foreign exchange. That huge cash influx is the concrete reality behind Obrador’s otherwise unhinged rhetoric about exercising veto power over U.S. immigration law.

What is also unsaid is that many of the millions of Mexican expatriates in the United States who send remittances home to Mexico are themselves beneficiaries of some sort of U.S. federal, state, or local support that allows them to free up cash to send back to Mexico.

Mexico plays the same role with the United States that North African countries play with Europe, except in the former’s case, it has a deliberate rather than chaotic emigration policy — and uses it as direct leverage over the U.S. Mexico’s sense of immigration entitlement is predicated on the assumption that corporate America wants cheap labor, that liberal America wants voters, that identity-politics activists need constituents, that a liberal elite expresses its abstract virtue by its patronization of the Other — and that until recently most Americans were indifferent.

Illegal immigration provides a useful and nearly perpetual demographic for Mexico inside the U.S. About 12 percent of the Mexican population now lives inside the United States, the great majority illegally. Los Angeles may be the second-largest city of Mexican nationals in the world. Of all U.S. immigrants, legal and not, it is estimated that more than 30 percent come from Mexico, and another quarter arrived from Central America through Mexico.

But most importantly, the moral calculus of illegal immigration has gone haywire and must be rebooted. It is an immoral act, not a moral one, to deliberately break the laws of a host country as one’s first act on entering it.

A million cases a year of tax fraud through the use of fake names and identification is not just an artifact of illegal immigration, but a moral crime that callously harms U.S. citizens and their institutions.

It is not ethical to cut in front of an immigration line, when millions of others abroad await, legally and with patience, their applications for U.S. residence.

It is not honorable for a foreign leader to claim that his own people are privileged immigrants who deserve, on the basis of their race or nationality, favoritism over Asian, African, or European would-be immigrants.

It is not kind to bring small children illegally into a foreign country, much less to send them ahead, unescorted, as levers for one’s own later entry.

It is an act of belligerency for a nation to undermine the laws of its neighbor — and boast that more of the same is to come.

There has been much wild talk of the “servitude” and “serfdom” of impoverished illegal aliens. But the real moral travesty is that Mexico’s entire foreign and economic policy is based on exporting its poor people abroad to scrimp and save cash to send home to provide the support their own government will not.

The United States has many enemies in the world, but it is hard to find one that deliberately is trying to undermine U.S. law by exporting its own citizens to change the demographic and politics of its supposed ally.

It is almost impossible to find enemies that can so carefully extract billions of dollars in remittances and surpluses from the U.S. economy. Most enemies do not send as many human traffickers and drugs into the U.S. as does Mexico. And does an Iran or North Korea boast that it has the right to violate U.S. law, interfere in the domestic politics of America, and vow that it will continue to do so as it pleases?

So, what, then, is the new Mexico — a friend, an enemy, neither, or both?

Read more here.

Is the Trump Justice Department protecting the corruption of the Obama Justice Department?

Paul Sperry writes at Real Clear Investigations,

The FBI had little problem leaking “unverified" dirt from Russian sources on Donald Trump and his campaign aides – and even basing FISA wiretaps on it. But according to the Justice Department’s inspector general, the bureau is refusing to allow even members of Congress with top security clearance to see intercepted material alleging political interference by President Obama’s attorney general, Loretta Lynch.

That material – which has been outlined in press reports – consists of unverified accounts intercepted from putative Russian sources in which the head of the Democratic National Committee allegedly implicates the Hillary Clinton campaign and Lynch in a secret deal to fix the Clinton email investigation.

“It is remarkable how this Justice Department is protecting the corruption of the Obama Justice Department,” said Tom Fitton, president of Washington-based watchdog Judicial Watch, which is suing for the material.

Read more here.

“Omnipotent algorithms"

At PJ Media, Nicholas Ballasy writes about the fact that the CEO of the New York times is very critical of Facebook's plan to use "trusted" news sources. I think that is hilarious! News Corporation (Wall Street Journal) is also worried. Their CEO recommends

the idea of creating an “Algorithm Review Board” to hold “omnipotent algorithms to account” and bring more “transparency” to digital techniques used at Facebook, Google, YouTube and Amazon.

“If you buy a small bar of chocolate in the U.S., you’ll be told the precise ingredients on the pack and generally how many calories per serving. There will be stark health warnings on even a low-alcohol bottle of beer,” he said. “Clothing labels are often synthetic screeds, in multiple languages, to ensure compliance. And yet the powerful, mind-altering, behavior-shifting, mood-changing algorithms are allowed to work their invisible alchemy on our personalities, on our societies and on our young people.”

...Facebook admitted to us that their practical problem was that they were under immense public pressure to label political advocacy, but that their algorithm was unable to tell the difference between advocacy and journalism. This would be the same algorithm, which will soon be given the new task of telling the world which news to trust,” he added.

Read more here.

Is it time to leave Afghanistan?

Richard A. Carrick writes in Small Wars Journal that it is time for the US to exit Afghanistan.

There are specific reasons why the latest U.S. strategy used to defeat Isis in Iraq/Syria is not transferable to the Afghan conflict. Three of the important strategic elements that made it work are missing in Afghanistan. In Iraq/Syria ISIS was defending a series of fixed positions located mostly in large cities and towns. These locations offered excellent targets for aerial attacks by U.S. planes, drones and missiles with maximum cost effectiveness. Heavy artillery directed by U.S. advisors was also successfully used against these fixed targets. Additionally, Russia periodically applied devastating aerial bombardment in Syria, although not always against ISIS.

In the Afghan war the U.S. military is in the reverse situation with the Afghan/ U.S. forces defending fixed positions in cities and bases. It is the Taliban that is effectively attacking these positions, frequently with suicide bombers. The new U.S. strategy of increasing the aerial bombardment of widely dispersed Taliban positions in rural locations cannot replicate the success of bombing ISIS held cities like Mosul and Raqqa. Although increased U.S. air attacks will reduce opium production, a source of funding to the Taliban, it will not be decisive because the lost revenue will be made up by their covert allies that are increasing their assistance.

The second missing factor is an effective ground force. No matter how destructive an air war, ground forces are needed to take and hold territory. In Iraq/Syria there were large numbers of trained and highly motived local ground forces. These included the Kurdish Peshmerga, Iraqi Shite militia and Hezbollah (with Iranian advisors) that conducted successful campaigns to recapture the cities and destroy ISIS. The presence of these forces required only limited use of U.S. troops resulting in few casualties. These local forces were motivated not by abstract Western ideas of universal values, but rather their own strong sectarian beliefs and interests.

In Afghanistan, however, after seventeen years of training and assistance by the U.S., most government troops are ineffective even when supported by U.S. advisors and air power. Except for some elite units, government forces are motivated only to collect pay checks. A similar situation existed with the Korean, Vietnamese and Iraqi armies also trained by U.S. military. Without U.S. military and financial support these forces rapidly collapsed as would the Afghan army and government. Conversely, the Taliban, even with vastly smaller resources, has proven to be a highly motived and effective fighting force with unusual resilience. The logical conclusion is this Taliban success reflects Afghan antipathy to Western military intervention.

The third missing element is lack of local regional allies. In the campaign to defeat ISIS the U.S. was part of a coalition of regional states that was crucial to success. All were committed to the defeat of ISIS along with their own agendas. In Afghanistan the situation is the exact opposite. All the regional powers to one degree or another are working against U.S. objectives. As the U.S. escalates its policies against these powers, Iran, Russia and Pakistan, they are responding by increasing their covert support to the Taliban.

...After seventeen years, the U.S. generals have again failed to find a strategy to defeat the Taliban or even to force them to negotiate. Last year President Trump gave them another chance, but after ten months there is little to show for it. Shortly this revised strategy is up for review and it is then the President must finally order the generals to bring the troops home and accept whatever the consequence including a return of Taliban rule.

Read more here.

Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers have free speech!

At PJ Media Tyler O'Neill tells about a Supreme Court decision today. PJ's headline: Supreme Court Strikes Down Law Turning Pro-Life Pregnancy Centers Into 'Abortion Referral Agencies'

...Other pro-life leaders emphasized the radical nature of the pro-abortion movement. "Today's decision protecting pregnancy centers from having to advertise or refer for abortion reveals the extremism of the abortion industry," Ashley McGuire, senior fellow at The Catholic Association, said in a statement.

"These centers exist to offer women a clear alternative to abortion and the abortion lobby bullied them all the way to the Supreme Court because they could not tolerate authentic choice for women. From the start, the case was a free-speech no-brainer," McGuire declared. "Our First Amendment right to freedom of speech not only protects the right to speak out, it protects the right not to speak. Compelled speech is the doing of authoritarian regimes, not free and flourishing democracies."

There is also an article in the New York Times about this but I don't recommend it. It is mostly just pathetic whining about McConnell holding up the appointment of Judge Garland and now we have Judge Gorsuch boo hoo!
Read more here.

Don't mess with Elaine Chao!

Mitch McConnell's wife tells Georgetown protestors to "back up" and "Leave my husband alone!"


Christina Laila reported at Gateway Pundit,

Pro-open borders protesters confronted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and his wife, US Secretary of Transportation, Elaine Chao as they were leaving a Georgetown event Monday evening.

Read more here.Two videos can be seen at the link.

China's unavoidable trade reality

Sundance writes at The Conservative Treehouse,

China is a production-based economic model, they do not have the ability, or wealth, to consume their own durable goods production; they rely on exports.

The U.S. is a more balanced economy; we consume 80% of our own production. We are self-sustaining, China is not.

Without a market to sell their products, the Chinese economy cannot survive.

Conversely, China has focused so intensely on durable-goods manufacturing, their consumable goods market (food) is dependent; they cannot feed themselves. The U.S. can survive without exporting food, China cannot survive without importing food. The U.S. economy can survive without importing durable goods; the Chinese economy cannot survive without exporting durable goods. This is the unavoidable trade reality. As a consequence, President Trump has all the factual leverage.

Again, the key dynamic: The U.S. economy can survive without importing durable goods; the Chinese economy cannot survive without exporting durable goods. This is the unavoidable trade reality.

Now, frame that in a similar way for NAFTA.

The Canadian and Mexican economy (due to NAFTA) cannot survive without importing cheap durable goods from China to use in their assembly-based economies, and then trans-ship into the U.S market. However, the U.S. economy can survive, it can actually expand BIGLY, without accepting trans-shipped assembled goods from Mexico and Canada

Put simply, without NAFTA, the assembly processes just moves INTO the U.S because the market *is* the United States. We are the $20 trillion customer. We hold the leverage.

Read more here.

Unmasked rage of American fascists

At American Spectator Jeffrey Lord takes the time to list many, many incidents promulgated by American fascists "on the loose amongst us."

... And I use the word “fascists” (as I have before) advisedly. These aren’t “bullies” — the standard “hey I’m bigger than you” tough guys encountered periodically in everyday life on schoolyards or in executive suites or labor halls. These are out-and-out Mussolini-style fascists, determined to terrorize and silence their political opponents and anyone else they see as getting in their way.

This has been a long time coming. Decades worth of leftist violence have preceded this moment — whether at the Democratic National Convention in 1968 or the window-smashing spree in Seattle when the World Trade Organization came to Seattle in 1999 or the car-burning, window smashing rage on the streets of Washington, D.C. during Trump’s 2017 inauguration — and, oh, so much more.

The central reality, as Roger Simon nails it over at PJ Media, is that the American Left , having been stymied by Donald Trump, has finally gone over the edge. Wrote Simon, bold print supplied:

The problem is that it’s not just Hollywood lamebrains and jejune social justice idiots that have been infected, it’s the entire liberal/progressive side of the country, starting with the literary/media elites who give them their marching orders.

They are all having a nervous breakdown and it keeps getting worse, because… because… because Trump.

But I have news for them. It’s not at all about Trump. It’s about them.

Trump is what the shrinks call the “presenting complaint.” The real problem, as is often the case in psychotherapy, is something entirely different. And it is this: The left is dead. It’s not only dead, it’s decomposed with no there there or anywhere.

Only dopes or con artists believe in socialism anymore (hello, Venezuela!) and identity politics has been exposed as the racist shell game it is with blacks and Latinos actually doing better than they have in decades under the current pro-capitalist administration.

So the left has nothing to say, only most of them don’t quite realize it yet. But this blockage, this reluctance and even inability to deal with what is actually happening shuts down the brain and emerges as anger, the hamster wheel of constant rage against Trump.

One only has to read the Twitter feed out there of this or that progressive — or of conservatives when progressives show up to rage — and one is struck by the mental unbalance, the raw anger, the foaming-at-the-mouth frustrated fury. Tellingly, they project on to others what is in fact true of themselves. “Fascist! Nazi! Racist!” they shriek, celebrating those who threaten or wield the clubs of verbal or physical repression not to mention the racism of identity politics. And downhill it goes from there.

The question is: what to do about the rage of now-unmasked American fascists? Before someone gets hurt?

Or, in the case of Congressman Scalise, before this unmasked rage of American fascists gets someone else hurt?

Read more here.

A sting operation intended to dirty a presidential campaign.

Ace of Spades writes,

It's almost as if there were a covert operation against Trump, directed by high partisan officials of the US government.

Here's the first approach, and the second.

I have long found it very interesting that one man with connections to Western intelligence attempted to "incept" George Papadoplous with the claim that Russia had dirt on Hillary Clinton, and then another man with connections to Western intelligence then arranged, for some reason, to meet with Papadopolous and extract this same information from him.

Then this information was fed to the US government, and used as the basis for opening an investigation.

Almost as if this was all a set-up.

Ace then links to an article in Real Clear Investigations by Lee Smith. It is a summary of what has been uncovered by investigative journalists like Smith.

No plans for winning!

Angelo Codevilla writes at the Washington Examiner,

...The Declaration of Independence set the objective: “a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth” — no more, no less — and George Washington’s Farewell Address encapsulated the meaning: “observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all.” America, John Quincy Adams wrote, “enters the lists in no cause but its own.” Theodore Roosevelt re-formulated the essence of the founding generation’s legacy: (“speak softly and carry a big stick”) as, most recently, did Jeanne Kirkpatrick (“no society exists to conduct foreign policy. Rather, foreign policy exists to allow the society to live in peace.”) Adherence to that legacy is what made America great at home and respected abroad. The American people, by and large, continue to share these views and to revere this legacy.

This view of America first, however, is alien to progressives. From Woodrow Wilson’s generation at the turn of the twentieth century to our own time, they have imagined themselves as mankind’s improvers, forcefully preparing mankind for their ministrations. Speaking big words that they hardly understand and wielding power incompetently, they squandered the founders’ legacy. Acting as sorcerers’ apprentices they gave us disdain and war instead of peace and respect.

...both parties’ progressives have spent thousands of lives and trillions of dollars replicating their failures in Vietnam: endlessly policing bad guys while trying to infuse their societies with their own evolving ideas of liberal democracy, including radical culture-war ideas on sexuality.

What can be done?

When in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. In the 2016 election, the American people ordered that, and more, by electing Donald Trump. More than any other candidate, Trump had vowed to do what is common sense to ordinary Americans, but incomprehensible to our progressive foreign policy establishment: to stop interfering in other people’s business, while preparing to defeat whoever troubles ours — thoroughly and quickly.

Doing this requires, first of all, wise decisions about what our business is around the globe, and what might interfere with it.

Trump judged that, after our own land borders, the Pacific Ocean is of the greatest importance, and that China’s military-political efforts to expel us from its western rim, and its economic challenge, are our weightiest problem. Hence he ordered major military improvements and economic countermeasures against it. His predecessors had vowed fidelity to our allies in Japan and South Korea. Trump meant to involve them in dealing with our common problem. This seems to have led them to trusting America some more.

America’s oldest allies in Europe, however, trust Trump’s America less. That is because Western Europe’s progressive ruling class is a copy (or an extension) of our own. Its rulers were the firmest of allies so long as we went along as they divested themselves of the capacity to defend themselves from invasion. They resent us as we begin to take care of our own interests. Under them, Europe no longer matters much, for good or ill. The good news for us is that they are being rejected by their own peoples, many of whom look to Trump’s America as a model.

...As ever, military power is the foundation of respect among nations. The U.S military establishment is plenty large. It has increasingly resembled a police force that tries (and fails) to police the world while neglecting its most basic tasks. Simply, our ruling class has not been serious regarding strategic weapons, especially missile defense. The American people notwithstanding, our ruling class long since decided to put no barrier to Russian or Chinese missiles striking America, that America’s intercontinental missiles must remain immobile and vulnerable, and that tactical nuclear weapons are things of the past.

The reason why no one takes seriously U.S complaints about Russia is that the U.S. has neither the equipment nor the plans that would allow for a confrontation on the European landmass with a Russia that integrates nuclear weapons into its armed forces, whose strategic missiles are mobile and invulnerable, and whose missile defense is tailored to its geography and strategy.

The same goes for China. U.S. policy is to avoid a military confrontation with it, but without plans for winning one. This is not a formula for respect, or for peace.

China’s strategy to control nearby seas from the land is designed to push U.S influence out of the Western Pacific. Its artificial islands extend its air and missile forces more than a thousand miles into the ocean. Guam is in range. Its coast bristles with medium-range missiles, covered by intercontinental ones that are mobile or otherwise invulnerable because they are based in deep tunnels. U.S. missile defense is an expensive pretense, which North Korea has just exposed.

Read more here.

Harrassers

Stephanie Wilkinson and family, owners of Red Hen restaurant.

Hat tip Sundance

The Supreme Court has upheld President Trump travel restrictions and rejected the challenge to the Trump administration’s September 2017 travel ban.

Sundance reports at The Conservative Treehouse,

The Supreme Court has upheld President Trump travel restrictions and rejected the challenge to the Trump administration’s September 2017 travel ban.

Here is the statement from President Trump.

Today’s Supreme Court ruling is a tremendous victory for the American People and the Constitution. The Supreme Court has upheld the clear authority of the President to defend the national security of the United States.

In this era of worldwide terrorism and extremist movements bent on harming innocent civilians, we must properly vet those coming into our country. This ruling is also a moment of profound vindication following months of hysterical commentary from the media and Democratic politicians who refuse to do what it takes to secure our border and our country.

As long as I am President, I will defend the sovereignty, safety, and security of the American People, and fight for an immigration system that serves the national interests of the United States and its citizens. Our country will always be safe, secure, and protected on my watch. ~ President Donald Trump

Fighting back

At the Ace of Spades blog, CBD writes,

The Left has mastered the destruction of language, and Hillary is a dedicated student of their technique. She has always parsed and edited and manipulated language for her own benefit, in this case to attack President Trump for, apparently, taking away rights that the invaders at the borders never had. What she says makes no logical sense, but it is enough for a sound-bite or a pull quote for an article or news snippet.

But don't pretend that it is benign. It is evil. It is the manipulation of the language that Orwell warned us about, and we must fight it at every opportunity.

...I am curious where in the US Constitution it says that we are to afford invaders all of the rights and privileges of citizenship. Now, I am not a Constitutional scholar like the FAB or the Chocolate Messiah, but I have read the damned thing and nowhere is it written that we must give non-citizens everything that we have fought and died for.

But to answer her question; Nobody is next. They are not citizens, they have no rights other than to be treated humanely because that's what we do as Americans. But we have every right to protect our borders and the President is doing exactly what most Americans want him to do.

The fear of a burgeoning police state is simply projection. It's what the Left would do...

...the Left's big weapons are being blunted by President Trump's rapid-fire responses, trolling the Left at every opportunity, and ability to laugh at their worst. That has emboldened some of us on the Right to fight back.

Change of heart

The Babylon Bee reports,

After a restaurant recently asked White House press secretary Sarah Sanders to leave, liberals across the country announced they were suddenly in favor of allowing businesses the right to refuse service, despite their previous insistence that everyone be served, even if a business owner has a conscientious or religious objection in a particular case.

Read more here.

Government-funded agency separates innocent children from their mothers

The Babylon Bee reports,

U.S.—The nation is growing increasingly outraged over a government-funded agency that is forcibly separating 1,000 innocent children from their mothers each and every day, sources across the country confirmed Tuesday. Although no law mandates that the agency separate the children from their mothers for the rest of their lives, the organization’s policy has been to perform the separations anyway, causing millions of Americans to begin calling for the agency to cease this cruel, barbaric practice. According to reports, the agency has been working in this same manner for decades, all while receiving federal tax dollars to continue its operations, despite the brutal, anti-child, and anti-parenthood nature of its family separation policy.

CNN hiring head fiction writer

The Babylon Bee features this job announcement from CNN.



The Bee explains,

ATLANTA, GA—Shortly after being forced to let go three journalists for their involvement in publishing a fake story regarding President Trump’s alleged connection to Russia, media and news network CNN listed a new job opening Wednesday morning for a new head fiction writer.

The network is reportedly looking for a seasoned author of thrilling fiction novels to fabricate news stories for its online and televised news coverage.

“Must have a penchant for weaving complex narratives and fabricating intricate storylines out of thin air for the sake of ratings. Experience in Cold War-era spy novels preferred, in the style of Tom Clancy, etc.,” the listing states. “Author will be responsible for making stuff up out of the blue to form the basis of 5-6 news stories per day. Full salary & benefits.”

The listing also states that “no journalism background is required.”

The network is also reportedly accepting resumes from authors in the genres of science fiction, epic fantasy, and dystopian novels in hopes of bringing well-rounded coverage of completely made-up stories to its followers.

"Why is the guy yelling "Nazi" often best at imitating one?"

Greg: "Why is the guy yelling "Nazi" often best at imitating one?"

Jesse: The Left's meltdown is helping Donald Trump succeed!

Greg: Charles Krauthammer said, "We think the Left is wrong, but they think we are evil." If you are evil, the Left feels anything they do to you is justified.

Juan twists everything negative toward Trump and Kimberlee calmly explains the truth.

Harvard's blatant discrimination against Asia-Americans, Mob violence against women, Trump will not stand down!

Should we give the employees of the Red Hen sensitivity training? Or should we just let the stinking, hate-filled restaurant die from its own stench?

Are these "troubled times?" Andrew reminds us we have seen the media this outraged at least two previous times: Reagan and Giuliani. Like Giuliani and Reagan, Trump will not stand down! The Left is bringing the full Katrina playbook. The Democrats are run by the press. The battle is between freedom loving Americans who love America and the press which hates America. The Left lost. So now they go to Plan B: bullying, mobsterism and violence.

Sanders and Nielson were not the only victims of mob violence. Pam Bondi, Florida's Attorney General, was attacked as she tried to see a show about Mr. Rogers! Yes, that Mr. Rogers! The magic of Leftism is it allows you to think you are the good guys while terrorizing a woman! Maxine Waters even gets into the act: "God is on our side!" (You remember Jesus saying "If thou seeest someone you disagree with, create a crowd, surround them, and let them know you hate them")! Andrew points out that it is us they hate. Somebody is going to get hurt. They will blame Trump!

Michael Knowles comes on the program to talk about a lawsuit against Harvard for their blatant discrimination against Asian-American students.

Has it begun?

People have been asking if we are headed for a civil war. Glenn Reynolds writes at USA Today that the Sanders and Nielson incidents reveal that it has already begun!

VDH on education, North Korea, Middle East, the Trump presidency

Producing graduates who are ignorant and arrogant.

North Korea made fools of Clinton, Bush, and Obama. Trump is trying to deal with it by pressing China to press North Korea. It is a four-party negotiation: China and North Korea versus the United States and South Korea. South Korea is incredibly naive. If the United States is removed as a guarantor, the north or China will invade and absorb South Korea!

We always had three main aims in the Middle East. One was to ensure the world's oil supply. A second was to protect Israel. A third was to contain violence in the Middle East and not let it spread into Europe. The first two are now irrelevant.

Delegitimizing Donald Trump. What they thought was going to be career-enhancing turned out to be criminal!
But Trump's enemies in the media, Hollywood, the progressives, the academy and the bureaucracy are circling him. He is going to have to be more disciplined. He is 71-years-old. How much longer will he be so energetic? It doesn't make sense to create more problems for himself.

"Art, not science"

Three New York Times reporters have written a piece about New York Times reporter Ali Watkins who had a three-year intimate relationship with James Wolfe, who has been indicted on three felony charges of making false statements to FBI agents.

In Washington, meals and late nights out with sources are part of a journalist’s job description. But becoming romantically involved is widely viewed as a conflict, opening a journalist to accusations of bias.

Read more here.

Hoax

Culpability

Victor Davis Hanson writes in American Greatness,

...Various hearings, lawsuits, and IG reports likely will confirm the Obama Administration “knew” Hillary was going to win the 2016 presidential election and therefore did not worry much about breaking the law to ensure she did. In other words, the Obama Administration systematically used the agencies of the federal government to interfere with a U.S. election campaign in order to help the candidate of its own party win. That fact marks one of the most sordid political scandals in U.S. history and explains both why these anti-Trump hysterias will continue to be contrived to deflect attention from Obama’s own culpability in such government-wide abuse, and yet why eventually the sheer magnitude of such wrongdoing will overshadow all of these melodramas.

...According to his absurd mandate, Mueller was asked to investigate a crime that did not exist, while ignoring plenty of crimes that most certainly did.

...Mexico is certainly not a sympathetic player. The likely upcoming election of Andrés Manuel López Obrador will crystalize the absurdity of a supposedly aggrieved Mexico, as the beneficiary of a $71 billion trade surplus with the United States (such imbalances were not supposed to happen according to the architects of NAFTA 34 years ago).

Americans are not in sympathy with the $30 billion in remittances sent home to Mexico by its expatriate community in the United States, knowing many of them are beneficiaries of America’s generous local, state, and federal social welfare aid that frees up such cash. Americans do not like the idea of a would-be foreign leader boasting that the United States has no rights of sovereignty inside its own country. In the midst of a contrived transit of Central Americans across Mexico to the U.S. border, Obrador is calling for more Mexican citizens to crash into the U.S. For a country, a people, and a leader who feign to dislike their neighbor to the north, they certainly do not seem to be able to live without it.

The American people know that there was not a Holocaust on their border and that their often slandered border patrol officers are not the Waffen SS, that Mexico does not act like a particularly friendly power, that illegal aliens will do almost anything to enter a country illegally, which, otherwise, many do not seem especially fond of once they make it in, and that the progressive movement must somehow abort Donald Trump’s presidency before a booming economy and a more secure world abroad make that impossible.

Read more here.

Branco is right on the money, as usual!

hat tip Lucianne

What skills and resources do you have that would be useful in an emergency?

Do you know about the Cajun Navy? Robin Burk cites their role in rescuing people in Houston during the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. A couple years later, though, systems collapsed in Puerto Rico, even though the US Navy had ships full of needed materials just off shore. What skills and resources do you have that would be useful in an emergency? The potential for system collapse is real and it is growing.

Oppressed people, Democrats, and Saul Alinsky

I usually dislike using material that is not current. This 2017 video is an exception. Dinesh D'Souza says the Democratic Party of today is not the Democratic Party of Harry Truman, JFK, or even Jimmy Carter. The Democratic Party of today supports lawlessness in public policy. It is willing to use the power of the state against its opponents. Obama and Hillary enriched themselves by figuring out how to use leverage to public power to enrich themselves. Despite being in government all their lives, Bill and Hillary have a net worth of 300 million dollars. Obama hobnobs with billionaires. At a key time of life, both Obama and Hillary imbibed the Alinsky Koolaid. So did I! Now do you see why I chose to watch this video?

Obamacare: smoke and mirrors. In bed with the insurance companies, while pretending to be on the side of the little guy. Dinesh says this was Alinsky's specialty: spewing the rhetoric of social justice while for him it was about power.

Ralph Benko is President of something called the Alinsky Center. He says the Left has appropriated Alinsky. Alinsky respected the dignity of the people and wanted them to be able to participate in the solutions to their own problems.

David Alinsky is Saul Alinsky's son and is Chairman of the Alinsky Center. Saul was a committed capitalist who believed that it was through self-interest that individuals and groups achieved anything. He said he never could be a communist or a socialist: they don't have a sense of humor, and that would be deadly. When asked, he would say, "I'm Jewish." He attended synagogue and David grew up attending. Rules for Radicals was the essence of Saul Alinsky and what he believed in and dedicated his life for. He believed in the Republic and the ability of individuals and groups to organize and gain for themselves the collective rights our country provides.

Dinesh spoke next. Obama and Hillary out-Alinskied Alinsky! They used state power against their enemies!

David: If you are being oppressed, what is the means you have to fight back, and what is the end you wish to obtain?



Here is something I wrote in 2015 about about myself and Saul Alinsky.

Debunking Leftist Memes

Clarice Feldman writes at the American Thinker,

...this administration isn't changing the rules about separating adults from children. "Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child's parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings. Once an adult is put into criminal proceedings, federal marshals must turn the children with him into the care of HHS in temporary shelters." This is not at all different from housing children of those arrested for felonies domestically. We don't leave the children unattended, nor do we jail them with their parent. At the moment – without protest, over 20,000 U.S. kids are separated from their jailed parents.

Go here to read more. Clarice Feldman is very thorough in whatever issue she is covering.

Why the UN is such a failure

At the Washington Examiner, Henry Miller explains why the UN is such a failure.

...The U.S. has long been a hugely disproportionate funder of U.N. activities — our mandatory assessment and voluntary contributions total some $8 billion — but the era of America as the U.N.’s sugar-daddy is waning. Last year, State Department staffers were instructed to find significant cuts in U.S. funding for U.N. programs (above the mandatory assessment) — the first signal of long-overdue belt-tightening.

Why are incompetence and profligacy rife within the sprawling organization? In several respects, it’s in the U.N.’s DNA.

First, the U.N. is essentially a monopoly. Inefficiency and incompetence are not punished by "consumers" of their products or services spurning the U.N. and patronizing a competitor. On the contrary, it is not uncommon in these kinds of bureaucracies for failure to be rewarded with additional resources. Unlike in business, if a program isn’t working, government bureaucrats clamor to make it bigger.

Second, U.N. officials are rewarded for making the bureaucratic machinery run — that is, for producing reports, guidelines, white papers and agreements, and for holding meetings — whether or not they are of high quality or make any sense at all. And they often don’t; the bureaucrats often sacrifice veracity for consensus — sort of like letting eight-year-olds vote on whether a whale is a fish or a mammal.

Third, there's no accountability — no U.S. Government Accountability Office, House of Lords Select Committee or parliamentary oversight, and no electorate to kick the U.N. reprobates out when they act contrary to the public interest. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that we see egregious examples of arrogance and corruption, let alone day-to-day featherbedding, laziness, and incompetence in the thousands of individual U.N. programs and projects.

Fourth, in the absence of accountability, U.N. officials feel little need for transparency; its public relations offices simply spin, spin, spin the anti-technology, anti-capitalist party line, which often fails to take into consideration that scientific progress and modernity give rise to greater prosperity and longevity.

Fifth, the pool of possible candidates for U.N. leadership positions is not a promising one. The organization is no meritocracy: The country or region of origin of a candidate seems to be more important than his credentials and qualifications. Also, if you were a head of state or government minister, would you choose to lose your best people to the U.N.? Wouldn’t you prefer to keep them close, to make you look good, and to benefit your country? It’s hardly surprising that the U.N. ends up with the least competent and most disaffected, dysfunctional, and dishonest officials.

Read more here.

Leftist cry-baby bullies

At American Thinker, Monica Showalter reports,

Leftwing protestors are blasting loud taped recordings of bawling children at the residence of Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in Alexandria, Virginia. It's an action that follows from a controversial cover of Time magazine, which ran a picture of a crying child supposedly separated from her mother at the border, which turns out to have been a false claim to support a leftist narrative. What's followed from that now is the cry-blasting from the left. They're out to disturb the peace, as they are inclined to do, to promote their real agenda, which is ending immigration enforcement at U.S. borders entirely. This time, they've really taken it to an embarrassing new level: By trying to bawl their way into getting what they want.

Go here to read some of the other tactics of Leftist cry-baby bullies.

"You are the one who is accountable for your actions!"

Media now cravenly using kids. Laura has on three guests, one of whom follows the Juan Williams model of loudly interrupting others. In this case, however, the "other" is Laura Ingraham, whom I dare say can hold her own with anyone in a debate. After his interrupting spree, the guest says he wants to do immigration policy the "mature" way. I almost fell off my chair laughing at his hypocrisy.

A border patrol agent was a guest who asked that the people who break the law be held accountable. Keeping families together will only increase the number of people escaping the Central American and Mexican hellholes. He clarifies that under Trump people are being properly cared for, which was not the case under Obama.

Harmeet Dhillon points out that the staffing at the top levels of the FBI and DOJ are tone deaf to the bias that is so evident in these investigations.

Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton bets we'll be talking about these scandals two years from now! Additionally, Fitton says the one being protected here is Mueller!

Three of the Angel Moms who were honored at the White House today were guests on the show. Michelle Root's daughter was rear-ended while stopped at a stoplight in Nebraska. The young illegal alien who killed her had a blood alcohol reading of .241. He was street racing, going 70+ mph. He came to our country illegally as an unaccompanied minor at age 16. He was taken to a sanctuary city in California. He was released on bail and never showed up for trial. ICE is looking for him "because, of course, the new administration."

Michael Denice had recently graduated from college as had Michelle's daughter. Maureen Denice explains that he was on his way home from helping a friend. He was riding his motorcycle in a downtown area that had a 20 mph speed limit. A criminal illegal alien named Nicolas Guaman had been drinking all day, ran through a stop sign and collided with Matthew's motorcycle. Matthew was flown onto the hood of Guaman's vehicle, then, surviving the collision, started to get up. Guaman ran him over as he fled the scene, dragging him a quarter of a mile to his death while witnesses were pleading with Guaman to stop! He backed over Matthew one more time and left him there to die! Guaman was convicted and is serving 12-14 years in prison.

Sabina is a legal immigrant from Germany. The man who killed her son Dominic was an illegal from Guatemala who had been deported for committing two felonies. He came back illegally, was arrested for drunk driving, got probation, got arrested again for drunk driving while on probation in Riverside, California! Dominic was on his way to work when he was hit by the illegal alien from Guatemala and killed instantly. The killer got 35 days in jail! "Trump is the only man that brought this issue to the forefront!"

Embracing the decline

Did you know that there are now more than 20 million Asian Americans? Ryan Park is a lawyer writing in the New York Times,

Today, many second-generation Americans like me are at a parenting crossroads: Do we replicate the severe, controlling parenting styles many of us were raised with — methods that we often assume shaped our own success?

... studies show that we’re largely abandoning traditional Asian parenting styles in favor of a modern, Western approach focused on developing open and warm relationships with our children.

...Like all parents, however, my failures stack up alongside my successes. And I know that the decision to abandon immigrant parenting principles could backfire. The striving immigrant mind-set, however severe, can produce results. Every time I snuggle my daughters as they back away from a challenge — when my own father would have screamed and spit and spanked until I prevailed — I wonder if I’m failing them in a very different way than he did me.

But I’m temperamentally unable to mimic my father’s succeed-at-all-costs immigrant mind-set, an instinct I share with most of my generation. And maybe that marks our immigrant parents’ ultimate triumph: We have become American. As part of the American parenting mainstream, I aim to raise children who are happy, confident and kind — and not necessarily as driven, dutiful and successful as the model Asian child. If that means the next generation will have fewer virtuoso violinists and neurosurgeons, well, I still embrace the decline.

Read more here.

Outed!

The Daily Mail has pictures of the two biased FBI employees outed by Mark Meadows in his questioning of Michael Horowitz in Congress this week. Read more here.

The importance of physical beauty, manufactured hysterias, socialism, communism, fascism, and capitalism

Manufactured hysterias! When Reagan was president "Homelessness in America" was the manufactured hysteria by the media. Kids in cages. The pictures are from the Obama years. It is only an issue when a Republican is the president. 600,000 people are seeking asylum in the United States. The press hates the current president. It loved the previous president. Though he separated children from their parents, there was no hysteria, because the press loved the president who did it!

Socialism spends the wealth created by capitalism. Dennis answers emails from viewers.

Who was Dennis's favorite guest on his radio program? His father, who died at age 96. Every July 18 Dennis plays one of the interviews with his father.

What is true beauty in a woman? Same as with a man! A beautiful character, heart, mind and they are beautiful in the way they treat people. There is also physical beauty. We are physical beings. Physical beauty matters!

Fifty years of litigation and lobbying are now reaping rewards unforeseen even by the open-borders establishment.

At City Journal Heather MacDonald explains some key points about the immigration debate.

...If an adult crosses the border alone and utters the magic asylum words—a fear of persecution in his home country—he could in theory be held in detention until his asylum claim was adjudicated. If, however, he brings a child with him and makes an asylum pitch, he puts the government to a choice: detain the adult separately until his claim is heard and release the child after 20 days, or release both adult and child together.

The Obama administration usually chose the second option. Word coursed through Mexico and Central America that taking a child across the border was a get-out-of-jail-free card that would exempt its holder from both criminal prosecution and detention. This child-release lever, coupled with Obama’s announcement in 2012 that he would grant amnesty to the so-called Dreamers, meant that Obama soon had his own family border crisis on his hands. In 2014, 70,000 adult-child units and 70,000 unaccompanied minors were apprehended illegally crossing into the U.S.

...In 2015, a federal trial judge, Holly Gee, herself appointed by Obama and the very definition of an activist jurist, vastly expanded the scope of the original decree and ordered the administration to release the detained minors. The Department of Homeland Security warned that ending family detention would trigger another border surge. Judge Gee dismissed this concern as “fear-mongering,” according to the Associated Press.

It is to Judge Gee that the Trump administration will now make its appeal to lift the 20-day confinement cap. The chance that she will agree to do so is zero. Unless that ruling is overturned on appeal or Congress changes the relevant law, the administration will have two choices: try to get asylum hearings down to 20 days, or abandon its universal prosecution policy and resume catch-and-release at the border for adults with children.

Streamlining the asylum process would require both narrowing the standard for granting asylum, pursuant to its original intent (something that Sessions has already begun to do), and increasing judicial resources. (Bizarrely, Trump has denounced such an increase in judicial manpower.) Even then, meeting a 20-day limit on asylum detentions will be a stretch. Resuming catch-and-release, of course, would violate one of Trump’s key electoral promises. Fifty years of litigation and lobbying are now reaping rewards unforeseen even by the open-borders establishment. Trump has ducked one showdown, but an even bigger one lies ahead.

...Strangely, after Trump issued his recent executive order, a few media voices tentatively raised the problem of the unintended consequences of purportedly humane rules. CNN anchor John Berman asked Schiff on Thursday morning if exempting illegal aliens with children from detention “incentivized” such illegal crossings. Schiff ducked the query: “Well, it’s not a simple question as whether somebody has a child or not.” But the problem of perverse incentives will not go away. America’s loss of sovereignty over its borders and the incursion of millions of barely literate campesinos and their progeny is the result of years of victim-favoring policies that ignore personal agency and court the consequences.

Read more here.

Truth is collateral damage!

Michelle Malkin writes at The Daily Wire,

...In her unfettered haste to condemn those with whom she disagrees, the New Yorker's professional fact-checker failed to check her own toxic biases. Lavin's act was no innocent gaffe. Like the journalists-turned-propagandists who have falsely spread Obama-era photos of immigrant detention centers to attack the Trump White House, Lavin engaged in mass manipulation under the guise of resistance journalism.

Truth is collateral damage.

Read the details here.

“a human right we will defend,”

Dominic Mancini reports at The Daily Caller,

Mexican presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) called for mass immigration to the United States during a speech Tuesday declaring it a “human right” for all North Americans.

“And soon, very soon — after the victory of our movement — we will defend all the migrants in the American continent and all the migrants in the world,” Obrador said, adding that immigrants “must leave their towns and find a life in the United States.”

He then declared it as “a human right we will defend,” eluniversal.com reports.

Go here to read more.

Conspicuous compassion

Bruce Thornton writes at Front Page Magazine,

...Our national interests are more important than people’s need to display their conspicuous compassion.

Read the whole thing here.

The man at the heart of DC investigative collapses

Sundance reports at The Conservative Treehouse,

...Yesterday it was revealed that Henry J Kerner (Henry Kerner), as a former McCain senior staff official, was part of a bipartisan DC team who constructed the IRS weaponization program to target the Tea Party. That’s bad enough. However, a little more digging, you’re not going to believe this: the same guy who was attached to the prior investigations, is now in charge of all DC “corruption” and “whistle-blowing” cases, including the current FBI and DOJ corruption.

...Now a whole bunch of things begin to make sense. From his CV summary Henry Kerner would have been in position to influence: Fast-n-furious scandal (Issa), IRS scandal (Chaffetz), Benghazi (Chaffetz, Gowdy, McCain); and now in his position in charge of the entire Office of Special Counsel he would have influence and control over Spygate etc.

Seriously, think about this example.

On April 30, 2013 – Henry Kerner is participating in a meeting with IRS officials about how to best weaponize their agency against voters:

“Henry Kerner said that maybe the solution is to audit so many that it is financially ruinous.”

...Imagine investigating yourself. That’s exactly what Kerner was doing as a member of the Permanent Subcommittee On Investigations.

And now Henry Kerner is in charge of all investigations of fraud and abuse in government, and the outcomes of whistleblowers?

No wonder the Deep State feels empowered. With DC control agents ensuring the corruption and gross misconduct remains hidden, there’s not much fear of getting caught.

Read more hereand thanks again to Judicial Watch.

Make a Commitment!

Guest post by
by Suzann Darnall

Just a few days ago my husband and I celebrated the 41st anniversary of the night we met. It was and is an important date to us. It was a turning point in our lives. One that has led to more than four decades of marriage, two daughters, two sons-in-laws, seven grandchildren, more pets than we can count, plus lots and lots of travelling.

We dated for a couple of weeks, he went home on leave for a couple of weeks, we told my folks we wanted to get married, and we got married a couple of weeks later. In all, we married seven weeks after we met. It will be 41 years in August. Not bad in this day and age. When so many things are considered disposable. Including unwanted babies and inconvenient marriages.

But, not everything should be considered disposable. Many things are worth preserving and cherishing. Just because something is inconvenient, that does not make it unimportant. I was raised by parents who were taught to cherish people, places, and things. My grandparents also were the kind of folks who persevered and preserved. I just do not have a throw it away kind og mindset. I am somewhat confused and disturbed by those who do think that way.

I collect things. People to love. Scooby Doo and John Wayne memorabilia. Pets and critters. Family and friends. Antiques. Fabric. Dishes and glassware. Vintage linens and tables to use them on. As well as a number of others things. My husband loves rocking chairs, trunks, and old clocks, plus all his military mementos. So, our home is like a mini-museum of our lives, our history, our family, our adventures, and our passions.

Part of why I collect is that I sort of make a commitment to things, including animals and people. I have a barncat right now who is a pretty useless hunter. But, we adopted him and he is a sweet love, so he will have a home until he dies. Even if he never, ever catches a single mouse. One of the dogs who lives with us actually belongs to one of our daughters, but it is impossible for him to live in her home. So, he too will have a home with us until it is time to cross the rainbow bridge.

I know that I perhaps over-commit, but I think that is better than lacking commitment in all things. I feel that one of the problems in our society today is that far too many people refuse to make commitments. They sorta start this, then move to that, kinda give up, and start something else.

Animal shelters are filled with dogs and cats who used to be the cute puppies and kitties someone took home and then dumped. Abortion clinics are far too numerous ‘cause too many parents-to-be decide babies are inconvenient. Divorce lawyers are well-employed ‘cause husbands and wives figure it is easier to just not be married anymore. Students are either dropping out of college or taking far more than four years to complete a degree ‘cause they refuse to commit to actually studying and earning their degree.

I feel that making commitments is part of taking responsibility for my life and my world. We cannot truly be responsible without making commitments and we cannot truly make commitments without taking responsibility.

Sometimes it is time to say goodbye to a beloved pet. They have grown old and ill and it is time to say goodbye. That is when we fulfill our final responsibility to the commitment we made to love and care for them. We allow them to cross the rainbow bridge, perhaps with a little help from the vet.

Sometimes we have a beloved heirloom that has been passed down through the family, but it simply can no longer be repaired. It is no longer useful, attractive, or safe. While it is heartbreaking to dispose of it, this is not a lack of commitment, this is simply another time we need to step up and say good-bye.

There will come a day when I will have to say goodbye to my husband. But, it is my sincere prayer that it will not be until the day that one of us is crossing to the other side, ‘cause when I married him it was my intention to be committed to him for time and all eternity. I think it is my responsibility to make sure that I never fall out of love with him. It is for that reason that I have commited to ever being in a state of courtship with my beloved sweetheart. To always remember to care for him. To share kisses and hugs. To laugh and smile. To make sure he always knows he is the most important person in my life. To make him feel cherished.

If your life seems a little less bright. A little less happy. A little less fulfilling. Perhaps it is time to think about how committed you are to making it brighter, happier, fulfilled. Are you taking responsibility for yourself and your life? Are you making commitments to and being responsible for those around you?

I can assure you that making a commitment to do better will make things better. We do not have to be perfect. We just have to do better. Just make a commitment. Responsibility can really be a beautiful thing!
Suzann blogs at Wooly Mammoth.org

Progressive overreach sometimes boomerangs

Robert Ehrlich writes in National Review some

vignettes wherein progressive overreaching boomerangs to the Left’s disadvantage.

...• For years, progressives have advanced man-made global warming as an article of political faith. This climate-change chorus has constantly warned of a looming environmental Armageddon. (You may remember Barack Obama’s inaugural address, wherein he observed that his arrival in the Oval Office would mark the beginning of the end for the rising oceans, etc.) Similar apocalyptic warnings are regularly issued by those emotionally and commercially invested in bringing the fossil-fuel industry to its knees.

But two California cities have been caught engaging in what we may charitably label “inconsistent statements,” in official documents no less. To wit: The municipalities of Oakland and San Francisco have famously sued various oil companies for contributing to climate change and the projected flooding of those port cities, but simultaneously have sought to minimize the threat in legal representations accompanying their issuance of municipal debt. In plain English, they’re trying to scare juries into awarding them huge judgments on the basis of apocalyptic predictions on the one hand, but reassuring the people who hold their debt on the other (“we are unable to predict if . . . impacts of climate change . . . will occur”).

• It was not so long ago (2013) that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid suspended the Senate filibuster rule of 60 votes for presidential nominees (except for the Supreme Court, but that is also now repealed) in order to secure three liberal Democrats on the powerful D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. Republicans howled; many warned the Democrats would regret this rule change when a GOP president again occupied the White House.

The post–North Korea summit coverage has set a new standard for the media.

Few human beings (and no Democrats) living outside of Trump Tower envisioned a Trump presidency at that point in time. But the unanticipated transpired, as it often does when people assume that politics is static. And the numbers are historic: 42 confirmed, 81 nominated federal judges in the administration’s first 18 months. With the Senate unlikely to flip in November, the GOP is on its way to installing multiple generations of originalists within America’s judiciary.

• Modern progressives are all about gender equality. In keeping with this belief, the Pennsylvania Democratic party has imposed gender-based quotas on their convention delegates. Here, everything must be 50/50 in the interest of “fairness” — including when it’s not so fair. To wit: You may have read about two female candidates at the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee convention who were not seated because too many women had won delegate seats. Yep, the winning female candidates were declared the losing candidates because of their gender. So much for merit; so much for fairness; so much for democracy. Presumably, said losing women will be awarded participation trophies and a safe space in which to ponder their unexpected exile. Maybe they can use the time to reread George Orwell’s 1984.

COMMENTS
• The mainstream media have suffered many low moments during the Trump era (recall their frenzied overreaction in the aftermath of the president’s annual physical exam). But the post–North Korea summit coverage has set a new standard. Six months ago, the narrative was all about the heavy-handed, war-mongering showman playing nuclear Russian roulette with an unstable dictator, a.k.a. “Little Rocket Man.” “We told you he was unfit, unstable, and dangerous” was the oft-recited refrain. Fast forward to the Left’s post-summit narrative: “A weak-kneed American president gets outplayed (and out-negotiated)” by that same Little Rocket Man. Interesting how the left-wing alphabet-soup cable-news networks have spent no time on how much safer the world is today compared with two weeks ago.

The storylines herein are endless. Perhaps you have a favorite anecdote along these lines. If you do, publish it. Such stories are educational, therapeutic, even funny. They will make you feel better during what will be an ugly summer run-up to the high stakes midterms.

Read more here.

Media lies driving the immigration debate

At The Daily Wire, Ryan Saavedra explains in detail seven recent lies perpetrated by the media to drive the debate on immigration. Read the whole thing here.

"We know how more immigration benefits big business and the Democratic Party. No one has yet convincingly explained how it benefits the American people as a whole."

Michael Anton is a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College and a former national security official in the Trump administration. In The Washington Post he writes,

...Economists in league with big business got good at torturing data to “show” that immigration benefits the economy. But as demonstrated by Harvard University’s George Borjas, one of the nation’s leading economists on the topic, immigration is a net economic benefit to immigrants and to their employers. To workers already here, not so much.

No matter, because the Democrats are no longer the party of labor. Back when they were — in the prelapsarian Clinton years — they sought tight labor markets precisely for their efficacy in boosting lower-end wages. But today’s Democrats are the party of high class, high tech and high capital.

This glamour coalition is not big enough by itself to win elections. So the left has hoodwinked some (but, as the 2016 election shows, by no means all) low-income voters into thinking that their interests align with those of Wall Street and Silicon Valley oligarchs.

It’s clear what the oligarchs get out of an endless influx of cheap labor. What the Democratic Party gets is also clear: more voters, and with them the tantalizing possibility of turning the country as irreversibly blue as Democratic policies have already done to New York, California and many other states.

...We know how more immigration benefits big business and the Democratic Party. No one has yet convincingly explained how it benefits the American people as a whole. That’s the foremost consideration that should drive our immigration debate, and that’s what should determine our immigration policy.

Read more here.

Angel moms and dads are fighting back

today President Trump and Vice President Pence met with Angel moms and dads who have lost children to illegal immigrants. At Front Page Magazine Daniel Greenfield gives multiple examples that America is full of angel dads and moms whose children were separated from them by illegal aliens. ...

The victims are all around us. These are only a handful of their stories. They are members of every race and religion.

Read more here.

Linguistic distortions

At American Greatness, Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Throughout Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s massive report on the Hillary Clinton email investigation are lots of strange things. One of the weirdest is the extent to which the FBI went to make up words and phrases to disguise reality.

An early draft of the 2016 FBI report on the email scandal was reportedly subjected to linguistic surgery to exonerate the former secretary of state, who at the time was the Democratic nominee for president. Clinton was originally found to be “grossly negligent” in using an illegal email server. That legalistic phrase is used by prosecutors to indict for violation of laws governing the wrongful transmission of confidential government documents.

Yet the very thought of a likely President Clinton in court so worried the chief investigator, FBI Director James Comey, that he watered down “grossly negligent” to the mere “extremely careless.”

FBI investigators also had concluded that it was “reasonably likely” foreign nations had read Clinton’s unsecured emails. Comey intervened to mask such a likelihood by substituting the more neutral word “possible.”

Former President Barack Obama was found to have improperly communicated with Clinton over her illegal server while she was in a foreign country. Obama had denied that fact by falsely claiming that he never knew of her server until much later, after it was publicized.

The FBI hierarchy under Comey tried to hide the embarrassing details of Obama’s conduct. As a result, the FBI deleted Obama’s name from its report. In its place, the FBI inserted the laughable “another senior government official”—as if the president of the United States was just another Washington grandee who had improperly communicated on an illicit email server.

One of the oddest mysteries of the inspector general’s report is the FBI’s delay in addressing the fact that disgraced former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) had a number of Clinton’s private emails on his unsecured laptop. They were all forwarded to him by his wife, Huma Abedin, a top aide to Clinton. Their Washington-insider marriage had been widely publicized. Yet Comey, the nation’s premier public investigator, claimed he had no idea that Weiner and Abedin were married.

...What were the common themes in the FBI’s linguistic distortions?

Two realities: One, the FBI made sure that Obama, the boss of most of the wayward FBI and DOJ officials, was not to be entangled in any scandal.

Two, seemingly everyone at the Department of Justice and FBI assumed Hillary Clinton was going to be president. They were sure Donald Trump was headed for a humiliating and well-deserved defeat. Therefore, in the heat of the 2016 campaign, the FBI and DOJ did what they could to ingratiate themselves with those they expected to be in power during a likely eight-year Clinton presidency.

The inspector general’s report on the Clinton email covers just one scandal. Presumably, the IG and other investigators will issue reports on a number of other ongoing scandals that involved the 2016 campaign.

How did government officials, by hiding information about the so-called Steele dossier, mislead the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to get warrants to spy on U.S. citizens associated with the Trump campaign?

How was it decided that the Clinton campaign would pay Christopher Steele for gathering dirt on the Trump campaign, and how did the information from the dossier get to intelligence agencies?

How was an FBI informant inserted into the Trump campaign?

How were names of U.S. citizens unmasked by Obama administration officials and leaked to the press?

If the IG report on the Clinton email scandal is any guide to these upcoming investigations, expect widespread abuse of the English language to warp reality.

The media is using the antiseptic “informant” in place of the cruder but more accurate “spy” or “mole.”

The off-putting but accurate “wiretapping” has become the more professional “surveillance.”

The sanitized “improper” always sounds cleaner than the more accurate “illegal.”

In sum, 2016 could make a logical sequel to 1984.

Read more here

Angel families, Time Magazine's embarrassing fake news, Melania's jacket, ACLU wavers

I was excited to see Candace Owens on the panel tonight. I think she should have her own show!

President Trump and Vice President Pence meet with Angel Families who have had family members killed by illegal aliens.

Time Magazine tried to create a poster child for hate. She was never separated from her mother. One of the worst examples of fake news yet!

Melania Trump wears a jacket while going to visit migrant children. The jacket says "I really don't care, do u?" Donald Trump tweeted that it was a reference to the fake news outrage media.

Is the ACLU wavering in its support for the First Amendment? Oppressor versus oppressed ideology. Getting caught up in identity politics word games. Destroying their credibility.

Don't hold your breath waiting for Bach to come back!

Every day we arrest 1000 people coming across the border illegally. Studies have found that illegal aliens are 3 to 8 times more likely to vote for Democrats. Democrats want open borders for this reason!

World War II ended Europe. Artists started mocking the beauty of old Europe with satire. Then deconstructing, then destruction.

Now we have rappers mumbling expletive-laden lyrics. Babble! Neo DaDa! We have to go through a lot of darkness before spiritual renewal happens.

Our education system has been utterly hollowed out. Our culture is in the midst of total ignorance.

Where is the "serious showdown" between Congress and the DOJ?

The first part of Laura's program is devoted to remembering Charles Krauthammer.

Then she moves on to immigration. "If the media were as interested in getting all sides of the story as they are interested in just getting Trump, maybe we could make some real progress and people could actually know things called facts!" Like little girls being given birth control pills and they are told that they need to use these pills because they may get raped along the journey.

Border Patrol agent Art Del Cueto tells us about kids being given to smugglers by their parents, put in trunks of cars, or thrown over fences. The pictures you are seeing are from the Obama administration, not from President Trump's administration. The media is twisting things around. President Trump is doing things correctly.

Where is the "serious showdown" between Congress and the DOJ? It is supposed to happen today. Has it?

Close the obstruction investigation!

Andrew McCarthy writes at National Review,

...under the rationale adopted by the IG with the implicit endorsement of the Justice Department, there is no basis for a prosecutor to investigate the president for obstruction. Even if it were the special counsel’s place to analyze the chief executive’s motivation in exercising his constitutional prerogatives (and it is not), there were patently legitimate reasons to support the president’s actions; in light of his broad discretion, the Justice Department must assume he acted on them.

So the obstruction investigation should be closed. Should Special Counsel Mueller fail to close it, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein ought to be summoned by Congress to testify, specifically on this question: If the Justice Department accepts IG Horowitz’s premise that it must not second-guess the discretionary decision-making of FBI and Department officials when there are legitimate grounds to support their decisions, on what basis may a special counsel second-guess the president’s decision-making when — as Rosenstein himself has argued with respect to Comey — there are legitimate grounds to support the president’s decisions?

Read more here.

They all thought Hillary would win

If there is a better chronicler of events than Victor Davis Hanson I would surely like to know who it is. VDH is far and away my favorite. He writes at National Review,

...Why would professionals such as the omnipresent Rod Rosenstein and the proper Sally Yates sign on to juvenile FISA-court requests for surveillance that were obviously misleading, if not constituting some sort of felonious obstruction of justice by deluding the court about the nature of the Steele dossier? (The application failed to disclose that the dossier was unverified, that the FBI had fired Steele for improper leaking, that the dossier itself was the source of circular “corroborating” news stories, and that it was paid for by Hillary Clinton.)

Answer? Again, Yates, Rosenstein, and Comey, along with other signatories of FISA requests, would now be rewarded with tenure and/or promotions for noble service to the cause. Bill might have guffawed that it all reminded him of the Marc Rich pardon caper or the minor inconvenience of being disbarred.

...nothing in the past of either Brennan or Comey, both of whom had previously lied with impunity and while under oath to Congress, gave them any reason to fear any legal consequences for either unethical or illegal behavior. Again, in careerist terms, their behavior was logical; what was abjectly illogical was that Trump won.

Read the whole thing here.

Too late to wake up the Brits?

Anne-Christine Hoff writes at American Thinker,

The British people seem to be suffering from Stockholm syndrome. I just hope it’s not too late to wake them before their country goes the way of Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Egypt, and all of the other formerly Christian lands.

Read more here.

Another FBI informant?

The first part of tonight's show celebrated the life of Charles Krauthammer. Brit Hume, Tucker Carlson and Bret Baier each fondly remembered Charles.

July 1 Mexicans will be voting in Mexico's presidential election. An elite socialist is favored to win. Twelve million Mexicans living in the United States illegally will be eligible to vote in Mexico's election.

Remember Michael Caputo? He was interviewed by the Mueller team, then did a GoFundMe campaign to pay his legal expenses. The response from viewers was terrific, enabling him to hire some investigators to check on a man calling himself Henry Greenberg. Henry Greenberg signed under oath on an immigration application that he was an FBI informant for 17 years. Trump adviser Michael Caputo and Roger Stone were approached by Mr. Greenberg who asked for $2 million dollars in exchange for dirt on Hillary Clinton. Caputo and Stone did not respond. Caputo thinks Greenberg may have been "informing" when he approached Caputo and Stone. He provided 14 FBI visas as proof, including doing FBI work in the US, North Korea, and Iran! It is available at democratdossier.org. Greenberg goes by four other names. He was in jail for ten years in Russia. He served time in prison in the US for assault with a deadly weapon in Los Angeles. The FBI deported him in 2000, but somehow he's back living under FBI visas.

I read the dossier here. Pretty fascinating stuff!

The Five 6-21-18

House Republicans did not support the Goodlatte bill on immigration enough to pass it today. The "compromise" bill offered by Ryan will be taken up tomorrow.

Does Juan Williams disagree with all the other panelists? Yes! Can he refrain from sarcasm? No!

Trump back on the offensive

Trump goes on the offensive. "The media never talks about the American victims of illegal immigration," he tells an applauding audience in Duluth, Minnesota.

James Antle is a guest. He is the Politics Editor at the Washington Examiner. In 18 of the last midterms, the president's party has lost seats. Antle does not think the Republicans will keep their majority in the House, but he does believe they will keep the Senate.

Masters degrees

At AEI, Mark Perry brings us a chart of 2016 Masters Degrees.


He writes,

1. Overall, women earned 59.2% of all master’s degrees in 2016, which means there were 145 women graduating from graduate school with a master’s degree that year for every 100 men. It also reflects a whopping 31% gender master’s degree gap for men, who earned only 320,234 master’s degrees in 2016 compared to 464,925 degrees earned by women (320,234 / 464,925 = 0.69, or 69 degrees for men per every 100 for women = gender master’s degree gap of 31% for men).

2. Although data are not yet available for master’s degrees by field and gender in 2017, the Department of Education reported last month that women earned 477,792 and 59.4% of all master’s degrees last year compared to only 326,892 degrees for men, which increases the gender master’s degree gap for men to 31.6%. Women also now have an uninterrupted 36-year record of earning the majority of master’s degrees in the US that started back in 1981. The Class of 2017 was also noteworthy for being the 13th straight graduate class that had more than 59% female representation for earning master’s degrees – a milestone first reached by the Class of 2005.

Read more here.

Get woke to the latest outrage scam!

At Town Hall Kurt Schlichter urges us to get woke and not get played by whatever is the latest outrage scam.

That’s how you deal with Outrage, Inc. You ignore it, and watch it sputter and fade away.

Read more here.

Regulating chickens and eggs: Time to reorganize the federal government

Mike Mulvaney: Businesses change all the time; government doesn't! Blend Department of Education with Department of Labor. Many other ideas to be announced this week. What you get when you hire a businessman as your president!

Master of leverage!

At The Conservative Treehouse, Sundance reports,

Canada, EU and Germany Signal Compliance With President Trump Trade Demands…

...Germany, without consulting with Emmanuel from France, just unilaterally announce the EU is willing to drop all trade tariffs against U.S. auto manufacturers as part of their strategy to fend-off steel, aluminum and crushing auto tariffs.

Read more here.