Tag: politics

Elizabeth Warren tosses her headdress in the ring:

With a mere 673 days until the 2020 US presidential election, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren has announced the formation of an “exploratory committee” to consider a run for the highest office in the land.

In American politics jargon, this means the Democratic senator is most definitely running for president. Warren had repeatedly been named as a possible 2020 candidate since 2016 and even earlier, so her candidacy has come as no surprise to pundits.

(sniff, sniff)

Do you smell that? That’s what TRUMPSLIDE 2020 smells like!

The God-Emperor is serious about the shutdown:

President Donald Trump returned Friday to a threat to close the nation’s southern border if he doesn’t get his wall money from Congress.

Trump warned as the weekend began that he’ll close every port of entry, if he doesn’t see progress not only on his wall, but on a total immigration overhaul.

‘We build a Wall or close the Southern Border,’ he declared.

He claimed in tweets in the last day that Democratic opposition to his wall is totally political in nature and is untethered from their assertions that his desired border barrier would be impractical. The president said they should work harder to end the current shutdown, because it mainly affects their voters.

Trump also said once more that he could cut off aid to Central America as he raged about the formation of a new caravan.

It’s particularly interesting to note that he understands that running a massive trade deficit means there is no reason to fear a border closure for the nation in deficit.

The United States looses soooo much money on Trade with Mexico under NAFTA, over 75 Billion Dollars a year (not including Drug Money which would be many times that amount), that I would consider closing the Southern Border a “profit making operation.”

Donald Trump may be the first President who understands that having nothing to lose means the freedom to do as you please. Shutting down foreign trade is by definition good for the economy whenever you’re trading at a net loss. As we’ve already seen in the earlier tariff battles, the less trade, the more GDP, whenever (X-M) is negative.

When the president demands to know why Israel has a wall, if he needs to pull out that rhetorical weapon, then he has the ability to say, “how can you say that a wall is immoral for Americans but is moral for Israelis?” And if walls are immoral, if we cannot fund a wall for moral reasons, then how can we send any money at all to a immoral state, an immoral state maintaining an immoral wall? So what he’s doing by linking Israel’s wall to the big, beautiful wall that he’s going to build, that he intends to build, and that I believe that he will go ahead and leave the government shut down until he gets what he demands in order to build it, he’s set the stage rhetorically to put very, very intense pressure on the Democrats who of course are trying to put pressure on him through the shutdown.

And so as with all of these things it requires discipline and determination to see the matter through. If Trump backs down on this he is going to have very, very little credibility with his backers, with his supporters, with the people that he meets. Here’s an interesting fact from Chicago Typewriter author Brandon Fiadino, Israel had more than 10,000 crossings prior to 2013. The number of crossings went down to less than 200 when the wall first began going up, and there were next to none in 2017. So walls work.

Roger Kimball has correctly identified the government shutdown over the wall as the key nexus of Donald Trump’s presidency:

George Bush was a gentleman. He didn’t like it when people called him mean names. He was offended when the media ganged up on him and said he was a terrible person. So he caved. He didn’t want to. He said he didn’t want to. He probably thought about saying he did it only as a “last resort.” Doubtless the memory of politicians checking into that resort stopped him.

There is a lesson in Bush’s pursed lips for President Trump. Bush was elected in large part because of his promise not to raise taxes. Similarly, a major reason that Donald Trump was elected was his promise to build a wall on our southern border. The wall was just a synecdoche for border security and an America-first immigration policy. But it was a vivid, concrete (no pun intended) manifestation of that determination. It was, politically, the sine qua non of that policy.

President Trump has kept an astonishing number of his campaign promises, from his Scalia-like judicial nominations to moving our Israeli embassy to Jerusalem. He has begun hacking away at the stifling regulatory environment built up by the administrative state and he has inaugurated a much-needed renovation of the United States military. He has cut taxes (though not enough) and eviscerated Obamacare. He has, just a few days ago, announced that the United States would be pulling out of Syria and there are plans, at long last, to bring our troops home from Afghanistan. Promises made, promises kept.

But there is one critical promise he has, so far, been unable to keep. The wall. He has to build the wall. It was the cornerstone of his campaign.

Again, the wall, like lines in the Constitution if you are a left-wing jurist, has plenty of emanations and penumbras. It means robust border control. It means an America-first immigration policy. It means lots of things.

But the wall is the indispensable objective correlative of those things. Donald Trump has to build the wall, and he has to be seen to have built the wall. If not, he will lose in 2020.

It’s very simple and straightforward. If the God-Emperor builds the wall, he will win in a Trumpslide. If he does not, he will probably lose despite all the advantages enjoyed by an incumbent President. This should not be a difficult decision for him, no matter what pressure is directed at him by the media, by the Democrats, or by the Republican Party establishment.

Build the wall and win, fail to build the wall and lose. This isn’t something that can be finessed, negotiated, or explained away. Build the wall or lose like a bitch named Bush.

Trump supporters care about two things. Build the Wall and Drain the Swamp. Everything else – literally everything else – is tertiary at best. It’s time to focus, Mr. President. Nothing else matters.

Democrats are modifying the order of their state primaries in order to serve up Kamala Harris to the God-Emperor in 2020:

The nation’s most populous liberal state has moved its presidential nominating contest to early in the 2020 calendar, a shift its leaders hope will give it maximum impact on the selection of a Democratic nominee and push candidates to address progressive issues such as climate change.

Selling white Democrat disenfranchisement as a way to “address progressive issues such as climate change” that only white Democrats care about is a nice touch.

With Deval Patrick out and Cory Booker too weird to pose a real threat, Kamala’s biggest obstacle in winning the nomination is a structural one. At 86{1e4fb04660a0d5c7eb0b5578ca8a14dd083925bced8a27d4ec023ed63b264fe5} and 91{1e4fb04660a0d5c7eb0b5578ca8a14dd083925bced8a27d4ec023ed63b264fe5}, Iowa and New Hampshire are far whiter than the country as a whole, at 61{1e4fb04660a0d5c7eb0b5578ca8a14dd083925bced8a27d4ec023ed63b264fe5}, is. Not since Bill Clinton in 1992 has the eventual Democrat nominee failed to win at least one of those first two states.

If Kamala wins either one, the nomination is almost certainly hers. Nevada and South Carolina will have non-white majorities among their Democrat primary-goers so she will easily win contests #3 and #4. With the huge California prize now part of Super Tuesday–as opposed to being an irrelevant afterthought as was the case in 2016–a day that already includes Texas, where non-whites will make up three-fourths Democrat primary-goers, it’s conceivable she will have effectively clinched the nomination by the first week of March.

The Democrats desperately want to run “a woman of color” for President, but they know perfectly well that doing so would be electoral suicide. So, they’ll run her in 2020, when they know no one is going to beat an ascendant Donald Trump who will have put the Mueller probe behind him by then. Trump will also be in good form in 2020, as he will likely be stimulated in a productive manner by the replacement of the back-stabbing of the Establishment Republican House with the open opposition of the Democratic House.

The serious candidates are Beto and Garcetti, both of whom will be given dry runs to prep them for 2024. I think Beto is more serious, as Jewish influence in the Democratic Party is clearly fading.

So not meeting the fake demands of the fake protest leaders didn’t resolve the situation?

Anticipating a fifth straight weekend of violent protests, Paris’ police chief said Friday that armored vehicles and thousands of officers will be deployed again in the French capital this weekend.

Michel Delpuech told RTL radio that security services intend to deploy the same numbers and strength as last weekend, with about 8,000 officers and 14 armored vehicles again in Paris. Delpuech said the biggest difference will be the deployment of more groups of patrol officers to catch vandals, who last weekend roamed streets around the Champs Elysees, causing damage and looting. Police arrested more than 1,000 people in Paris last weekend and 135 people were injured, including 17 police officers

A sixth “yellow vest” protester was killed this week, hit by a truck at a protest roadblock. Despite calls from authorities urging protesters — who wear the fluorescent safety vests that France requires drivers to keep in their cars — to stop the protests, the movement rocking the country has showed no signs of abating.

It will be informative to see who cracks first, the globalist government or the nationalist protesters. It’s pretty clear that the latter aren’t inclined to follow their government-appointed leadership.

French Interior minister Christophe Castaner urged protesters to express themselves peacefully in the wake of a two-day manhunt for a man suspected of killing three people in the eastern city of Strasbourg that mobilized hundreds of police.

I tend to doubt that a series of murders by a second-generation immigrant is going to reduce the intensity of the nationalist protests.

The Tories are holding a no-confidence vote in the traitorous Remainer Theresa May tonight:

Theresa May vowed to fight with ‘everything I’ve got’ today after a Tory no-confidence vote was dramatically triggered – and will be held within hours.

The PM said she would not give up after Eurosceptics secured the 48 letters from MPs needed to force a ballot that could end the PM’s time as leader.

In a defiant speech on the steps of Downing Street, she warned Brexit would need to be delayed beyond March 29 if she loses and Jeremy Corbyn might end up in power.

‘I have devoted myself unsparingly since I became Prime Minister… and I stand ready to finish the job,’ she said. ‘A change of leadership in the Conservative party now will put our country’s future at risk, and create uncertainty when we can least afford it.

‘The new leader wouldn’t have time to renegotiate a new Withdrawal Agreement and get the legislation through parliament by March 29, so one of their first acts would have to be extending or rescinding Article 50, delaying or even stopping Brexit when people want us to get on with it.’

Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the powerful 1922 committee, emerged this morning to announce the threshold of 48 letters had been ‘exceeded’ and Mrs May was eager to resolve the issue ‘rapidly’.

He said the PM’s reaction when he notified her last night had been ‘business like’ and she will deliver a make-or-break speech to MPs at 5pm before voting begins an hour later. The crucial result will be declared as soon as counting finishes.

More fake news. The best result is a no-confidence vote, a new Tory leader, and a no-deal Brexit. It’s shameful, but entirely predictable, that May refuses to resign. The woman has no honor; even David Cameron looks like a statesman in comparison.

No new Withdrawal Agreement is going to be agreed, nor is parliament going to vote for her terrible Brexit deal anyhow.

The God-Emperor is liberating men from their ill-considered marriages to angry, batshit-crazy women:

“Shortly after the election is when I became aware of it,” says Lois Brenner, a New York–based divorce attorney. “People were thinking about splitting up their marriages because of political differences.” She’d never encountered this before, but she’s since found herself litigating two such divorces. “After people got over their shock,” she says, “they started arguing.”

By now it’s a truism to point out that the election of Donald Trump and the #MeToo movement have prompted a wholesale realignment of American politics. But it’s also sent shock waves through heterosexual romance.

Donald Trump and the Republican Party have plenty of female supporters, of course, especially among white women. But politically speaking, as evidenced by the recent midterms, there is an undeniable, and growing, gender divide in American politics: In 2018, almost 60 percent of female voters supported Democrats, compared to 47 percent of male voters — outpacing the gap in other recent elections. What can make matters unworkable for couples whose viewpoints aren’t aligned, says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of family studies at Evergreen State College, is that Americans have become increasingly contemptuous of those who hold different positions on divisive political issues — and contempt is singularly destructive for long-term relationships. “Mary Matalin and James Carville,” says Coontz. “How the hell do they make it work?”       

Many people with divergent perspectives from their partners have not been able to make it work in the Trump era. A Reuters/Ipsos poll completed in early 2017 found that in the months following Trump’s election win, 13 percent of 6,426 participants had cut ties with a friend or family member over political differences. This past summer, another survey of 1,000 people found that a third declared the same. More generally, 29 percent of respondents to a May 2017 survey said their romantic relationship had been negatively affected by Trump’s presidency. And even people ostensibly on the same side of the issues as their partner have run into challenges, with the climate exacerbating or revealing new fault lines. Herewith, two couples, and four individual women — all except the final pair using pseudonyms — talk about how conflict over politics is testing, or even ending, their relationships.

This is what software engineers describe as “a feature, not a bug.” It’s also Exhibit 47,339 in Why Female Suffrage was a Cataclysmic Mistake.

In fairness, losing graciously is exactly what a good Republican is supposed to do:

Are you disgusted like I am that Martha McSally capitulated — smiling on her couch with her dog, conceding the election to a lying, cheating code-pink pinko who deceived the voters into thinking she was a moderate when, in fact, she is about as far to the left as Medea Benjamin?  McSally not only let down supporters who stuffed envelopes, volunteered for and made contributions to her during the campaign, but people like me who made a last minute tiny donation to help her fight the recount only to see that money swirl down the toilet two days later when she gave up the recount fight she didn’t even fight.

Meanwhile, we have rabid leftists in Florida and Georgia trying to wrest Republican victories from the jaws of defeat in their own technicolor moment.

Well, color me red — and not for conservatism and the GOP, but for seething anger.

I’d actually prefer to see a Democrat in the Senate than a Never-Trumper like McSally. This election was lost at the primary stage.