Coulter very critical of congressional Republicans in the House and Senate

Ann Coulter writes at Town Hall,

A stunning number of senators and congressmen are supported by rich wives -- Sens. John McCain, Mitch McConnell, Richard Blumenthal, John Kerry and Ron Wyden, and Reps. Michael McCaul, Scott Peters and Paul Ryan, to name a few. Is there any other profession with as high a percentage of men sponging off their wives' inheritances?

Then a self-made billionaire came along, violated all the rules they had lived by, and swept aside more than a dozen experienced politicians just like themselves! Not only did Trump make his own money, but he beat them at the one thing they thought they knew how to do.

...These useless Republicans allowed a Senate seat to be stolen from under their noses in Minnesota in 2008, giving Obama the vote he needed to pass Obamacare and destroy our health care.

...Congressional Republicans are just nincompoops. The only thing they know is: Imitate Reagan -- from 30 years ago. It would make more sense for Republicans to demand that all air traffic controllers be fired for no reason than it is for them to keep treating Putin like it's 1950 and he's Stalin. (We know Putin isn't Stalin because Democrats aren't affectionately calling him "Uncle Joe" and spying for him.)

If Republicans had an ounce of self-respect, right after repealing Obamacare and writing a bill taxing remittances to make Mexico pay for the wall, they'd be impeaching the ridiculous Judge James Robart. Even lawyers who oppose Trump's travel ban agree that Judge Robart made a complete ass of himself when he blocked the executive order.

...At least since the Chinese exclusion case of 1889, the Supreme Court has made blindingly clear that "the power of exclusion of foreigners" belongs to the political branches of government: Congress and the president -- not to the judiciary.

...There are lots of constitutional questions that reasonable people can disagree about. Whether the president can exclude foreigners from seven terror-prone countries is not one of them.

...But congressional Republicans are happy to ignore the Constitution, ignore the balance of powers, ignore written law, even to relinquish their own constitutional authority and let the courts run our foreign policy, just to be a part of the establishment's STOP TRUMP movement.

Instead of neurotically fixating on Russia in some fantasy camp imitation of Reagan, circa 1982, what we'd like these worthless Republicans to do is: Imitate Trump -- circa now.

Read more here.

"The norms and rules are void when liberals lose!".

Kurt Schlichter writes at Town Hall,

You look at the things Trump stands for and all of them are about lifting the yoke off of us – cutting taxes, slashing regulations, guaranteeing the Second Amendment, protecting our religious liberty, and safeguarding us from terrorists and illegals. But everything liberals want, everything Hillary ran on, is about clamping the yoke ever tighter around our necks – raising taxes, issuing more regulations, disarming us, limiting our religious freedom, and putting us at risk from terrorists and alien criminals. The whole leftist platform is about putting us down and keeping us down.

Read more here.

RIGHT ANGLE: A Federalist Solution?

"If it's a fascist regime, how are you on this show?"

Yes, please "stay in the streets." If he didn't have "his finger on a nuclear weapon," I hope he does now!

hat tip Bookworm

Hijab-wearing feminists

hat tip Oregon Muse

The tasks ahead for America

David Goldman writes a fabulous article at American Affairs Journal. Some excerpts:

High-tech industrial production has been shifting away from the United States since the late 1990s. Until then, America ran a substantial surplus in high-tech goods. In the early 2000s, however, that surplus turned into a deficit, which is likely to exceed $100 billion this year.

Most of America’s trade deficit in high-tech goods consists of
technologies invented in the United States, often supported by federally funded research sponsored by the Department of Defense and NASA. The seven technologies listed below constitute the basic elements of all modern electronics from computers to smart phones; in each case, their manufacture has migrated to Asia because Asian governments adopted the formerly American practice of supporting basic R&D. The economic benefits of the digital revolution that originated in the United States have shifted to Asia. America’s share in the manufacture and distribution of its own inventions is relatively small.

The core digital technologies include the following:

Liquid crystal displays, which are employed in a wide variety of products, with $100 billion in annual sales. South Korea controls 35% of the market, Taiwan 25%, and China 20%.
Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) are produced mainly in China and Taiwan.
China and Taiwan dominate the production of semiconductor lasers, the energy source for fiber optic communications.
Solid state sensors, which generate images in digital cameras and related devices, are produced mainly in Taiwan and Japan.
Flash memory is produced mainly in South Korea, Japan and China, with only 10% of world output coming from the United States.
Integrated circuits are a $270 billion global industry. Most are produced in Taiwan and South Korea, and China has undertaken an aggressive investment program in the industry. Less than a quarter of world output is produced in the United States.
Solar energy panels, a $30 billion industry, are dominated by China.

Venture capital commitments to the manufacturing industry have collapsed because American investors do not believe that American industry can stand up to Asian competition. Some of the Asian advantage is the result of the theft of intellectual property, but most of it stems from above-board collaboration of government and industry. Asian countries have licensed U.S. technologies and supported joint ventures with American companies in order to foster technology transfer, and they have made cheap capital available to their high-tech industry. Asian governments also have supported technical education. China now graduates twice as many STEM Ph.D. candidates as the United States does each year.

Is it too late for American high-tech manufacturing? No, but drastic policy changes are required. Tax incentives for exports and tax disincentives for imports may not be sufficient to turn the tide of Asian dominance. In many instances, the entire supply chain for tech projects has relocated to Asia, which leaves American manufacturers overwhelmingly dependent on Asian production for imports. The simplest and most direct response would be to require domestic production for all sensitive defense-related goods, including all computers, displays, integrated circuits, sensors, and other high-technology equipment used in defense applications. In other words, for certain important categories of security-related manufactures, the tariff should be infinite. This is the only reliable way to ensure that American manufacturers will bring production, including critical parts of the supply chain, back to the United States.

Targets for future scientific research should include (but of course are not limited to):

Defeating the current generation of Russian air defense systems
Enhanced use of drones in place of manned aircraft
Hardening of satellites against prospective enemy attack
Cyber warfare
New physical principles in computing (e.g., quantum computing)
Quantum communications and encryption
Detection of ultra-quiet submarines (the present generation of Chinese diesel-electric boats are practically undetectable, and submarine drones could be used to deliver nuclear weapons to coastal cities)
Detection and defeat of the next generation of hypersonic missiles
Countermeasures against anti-ship missiles (rail guns, laser cannon)

Read more here.

Where was our Vice President today?

Jim Hoft reports at The Gateway Pundit that Vice President Mike Pence traveled to Missouri to participate in the clean up of a Jewish Cemetery that was vandalized.

Vandals damaged dozens of headstones this week at the historic Jewish Cemetery north of St. Louis.

Read more here.

The federal budget

Sundance writes at The Last Refuge,

No single aspect to the President Trump policy agenda will more specifically, and consequentially, impact the swamp draining process than the creation of a prioritized federal budget.

The last federal budget was signed into law in September 2007 (for fiscal year 2008) by President George W. Bush. As a strategic political maneuver, since ’08 every aspect of federal spending has been by the vehicles of baseline budgeting, continuing resolution, omnibus spending bills and raises in the debt ceiling. Our nation has been through almost a decade without a federal budget.

In December of 2015 Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and a republican controlled congress eliminated the debt ceiling in a massive $2+ trillion Omnibus spending bill that carried and authorized federal spending through to April 1st of this year.

Fiscally, their decision highlighted how the DC UniParty operate. The 2015 decision by Ryan/McConnell was the final sunlight needed to prove beyond any question that Republicans never held any intention to reduce the size, scope and reach of government.

President Donald Trump has appointed, and the Senate has confirmed, Mick Mulvaney as OMB Director. The Office of Management and Budget actually creates the White House budget proposal based on the policy and instruction of the President.

Read more here.

Jihadist wannabe arrested in North Carolina

Robert Spencer writes at Jihad Watch,

“Don’t go to Cary tomorrow….For too long the kuffar [non-Muslims] have spit in our faces and trampled our rights. This cannot continue. I cannot speak of anything. Say your dua [prayers], sleep, and watch the news tomorrow. It will only be the beginning.”

For Garrett Grimsley, it looks more like the end, at least for now. But the key question is this: where did this apparent convert to Islam learn his understanding of Islam? Who taught him? Or are authorities, as also, content to wave away that uncomfortable question with the claim that he was “radicalized on the Internet”?

“Cary man accused of threatening non-Muslims, WTVD, February 21, 2017:

CARY, North Carolina (WTVD) — United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina said Tuesday it has charged a Cary, North Carolina man with communicating threats against non-Muslims.

Garrett Grimsley, 27, went before a federal magistrate Tuesday morning in Raleigh.

According to the affidavit filed with the criminal complaint, Grimsley posted an online public message earlier this month stating “don’t go to Cary tomorrow.”

In a private message to a witness, Grimsley allegedly wrote: “For too long the kuffar [non-Muslims] have spit in our faces and trampled our rights. This cannot continue. I cannot speak of anything. Say your dua [prayers], sleep, and watch the news tomorrow. It will only be the beginning . . .”

A search of Grimsley’s apartment by the FBI, SBI, and the Cary Police Department revealed an AK-47 assault rifle, four 30-round magazines, and approximately 340 rounds of 7.62 millimeter ammunition…

Go here to see the man's picture.

A virus to rid a person of "religious fundamentalism"

Scott Adams linked to this video. He does not know if it is real, but he can envision it working.

We know which parts of the brain deal with religious thoughts, and apparently we know how to make a virus that would mess with those parts of the brain.

Free will is an illusion, obviously. Otherwise, scientists couldn’t change someone’s religion with a virus. But they can.

Science keeps discovering new buttons on the user interface for humans. Many of us are already chemical cyborgs, with personalities that come from big pharma and not our own DNA.

By the way, what most defines you as an individual? It isn’t your body, because your cells have died and been replaced many times, yet you are the same person. And you aren’t the sum of your knowledge because that has changed since you were a baby, yet you are the same person. I would argue that the thing that most defines an individual is their preferences. And pharmaceuticals can change your entire set of preferences in a few hours. Just look at someone who is going on Adderall for the first time, and needs it. They have a different personality profile – literally different preferences – on the drug.

If the video I linked to is real, apparently scientists know how to create a virus that will eliminate your religious preferences. If you think the virus would only work on the terrorists, you’re wrong. I’m guessing that the Department of Defense decided against using the virus approach because it might have eliminated Christianity as well as every other religion as a side-effect. It didn’t sound as if they were working on a vaccine for this virus. That means everyone would get it eventually.

Read more here.

What do you think would happen?

Ann Althouse proposes a thought experiment.

What if there were a young, handsome, smart, funny provocateur who'd spiked into popularity spouting left-liberal politics, stirring up young people on college campuses and irking older liberals who didn't think he knew enough or had served his elders long enough to deserve his place in the spotlight? And what if then his antagonists dropped some edited audio of late-night podcasts he'd recorded some years ago in which he revealed that when he was 14 he'd had a sexual relationship with a 24-year-old priest but that he refused to think about himself as the victim and he displayed his rationalization of the victimhood experience by characterizing himself as the sexual aggressor and by claiming that the priest had actually helped him?

How would Leftist Milo be treated?

The Obama officials still have not confessed their lies to the American people about Benghazi.

At The Federalist, Julie Kelly compares the way the media treats Trump with the way the media treated Obama. Best example? Benghazi!

Denver, a proud sanctuary city

Isn't this guy a cutie? The Daily Mail reports that

Ever Valles, 19, is accused of murdering Timothy Cruz, 32, on February 7 after robbing him at a light railway station in the early hours of the morning.
The teenager had been freed by the Denver Sheriff's Department in late December after posting $5,000 bond for theft charges.
They let him go despite requests from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to keep the gangster behind bars so that they could deport him.
They flagged him as an 'immigration priority' given his ties to gang activity in the city and asked to be told by the jail when it planned to release him so that they could be there waiting to take him into federal custody.
On December 20 however, a fax notifying ICE that Valles was due to be released was only sent 30 minutes before he was back on the streets.
No one at ICE saw it in time to get to the county jail to collect him, The Denver Post reports.
Valles now faces first-degree robbery and murder charges along with Nathan Valdez, a 19-year-old US citizen who is also accused of killing Cruz.
He was arrested on February 8 after an anonymous tip led police to him.
On the day of the killing, officers shared surveillance footage of two masked suspects they believed shot Cruz.
...Valles is a known gang member whose gang history is documented in the Colorado gang database.'

Denver is considered a 'sanctuary city', a term used by Donald Trump for cities which refuse to detain illegal immigrants for deportation.

Its Mayor Michael Hancock embraced the title earlier this month despite threats from the president to cut federal funding to cities and states that don't comply with his plans for immigration and deportation.

Read more here.

"control what people think? That's our job!"

Mika Brzezinski stepped in it big time, saying Trump is trying to control exactly what people think, and that's our job!

Sinking lower and lower

How low will the Washington Post sink? Here is one of their latest headlines.

Alex Griswold comments at Twitter, asking if you think they would have printed that headline if the pastor were talking about Obama, instead of Trump.

They didn't pay him enough!

Liam Deacon reports at Breitbart,

A British Islamic State suicide bomber was freed from Guantanamo Bay after lobbying by UK’s left-wing government and paid £1 million of taxpayer’s money in compensation.

That is 1.25 million US dollars!

On his return to the UK, the then Labour party Home Secretary David Blunkett insisted: “No one who is returned… will actually be a threat to the security of the British people”.

Ronald Fiddler, known as Abu Zakariya al-Britani, blew himself up near the Iraqi city of Mosul this weekend, in an attack targeting coalition forces containing embedded British and American Special Forces advisers.

Read more here.

Capitulation

Mark Tapson writes at Truth Revolt,

In The Washington Times Monday, Wesley Pruden wrote a piece called "An expensive lesson for conservatives," in which he addressed the controversy surrounding Milo Yiannopoulos' recent podcast comments that seemed to condone gay sex between underage teen boys and older men. In the wake of that firestorm, the gay libertarian gadfly Milo posted statements unequivocally denouncing pedophilia and apologizing for treating the subject flippantly. Nonetheless, his lucrative Simon & Schuster book deal was yanked and he was disinvited from CPAC, where he was to be the keynote speaker.

In his article, Pruden approves of the disinvitation, saying "not all publicity is good publicity," and disapproves of Milo's "'gift' for saying outrageous things." He concludes the piece by saying, "The moral here for conservatives is that just because someone calls himself a conservative, claiming he is heir to carefully nourished values formed and defended by the generations, does not mean that he is one.”

In an email statement, David Horowitz, Freedom Center founder and author of Big Agenda: President Trump's Plan to Save America, responded to what he calls the Times' "disgraceful" commentary by noting that it exemplifies the right's kneejerk habit of capitulating rather than putting up a united front as the Democrats do every time:

The hateful left, whose most effective weapon is character assassination, has created a gotcha culture for conservatives, and conservatives can be counted on to fold every time. Barney Frank had a prostitution ring operating out of his house and masturbated into the president's locker in the Capitol gym. But that didn't prevent him from becoming the architect of the incredibly destructive Dodd-Frank bill and the subprime mortgage crisis, because Democrats protected him and never broke ranks.

Milo is indisputably the most effective conservative on campus battling the anti-American, identity-obsessed, racist left. He is a victim of sexual abuse himself, which entails confusion on these issues. That conservatives would abandon him - throw him to the wolves - tells you everything you need to know about why the left dominates the national culture and thus the political culture which is downstream from it.

"But, outside of the UN, there is some good news!"

Thanks to Bookworm, who provides this link to the delightful Nikki Haley in her first UN press conference.

Do go to Bookworm's site where she brilliantly exposes a Leftist hiding behind Anne Frank's skirts.

Margaret Sanger D.C.?

The satirical blog Manhattan Infidel has another inside scoop. Be the first to read it here.

Group that accused Milo of pedophilia is funded by an anti-Trump, pro-McMullin PAC

Rob Shimshock reports at the Daily Caller,

The group that accused Milo Yiannopoulos of defending pedophilia is funded by an anti-Trump, pro-McMullin PAC that once tweeted “we hate white children.”

The Reagan Battalion Facebook page, which alleged Monday that Yiannopoulos supported pedophilia, has a link under Contact Info that directs visitors to a web domain titled, “stopdonaldtrumppac.com.” The domain no longer resolves, but a screenshot of the site can be found here.

The Stop Trump PAC also has a Twitter account from which it once tweeted the phrase “we hate white children,” which has since been deleted.