Tag: politics

The media grades the performance to date of President Trump

Incomplete

Not doing the work: From a conservative perspective, the president had fewer wins in his sophomore years. But there were certainly some. Presidents often get credit for things they have only passing responsibility for. And if it was acceptable practice for past presidents, there’s no reason to expect differently from this White House. So they have every right to crow about great employment numbers and the like. They have a better case to boast about the continuing line of conservative judges and justices he has appointed to the bench, most significantly Kavanaugh. His foreign policy accomplishments in Year Two tend not to improve with scrutiny. The overtures to North Korea looks more like a hollow PR stunt every day, and his decision to pull out of Syria with no real plan in place could be disastrous. This points to the real reason I am giving him an incomplete. He’s not really doing the work. He’s not governing like the president of the whole country, or even making the effort to appear that way. And he faces every test like a student who prides himself on his refusal to study. Sometimes it works out for him. Sometimes it doesn’t. But for a guy called a “chessmaster” by his fans, he seems incapable of planning more than one move ahead. Which is why he stumbled into the longest government shutdown in U.S. history.

— Jonah Goldberg, National Review contributing editor

B+

Room for improvement: To get there, he’ll have to help Republicans recapture the House and hold the Senate in 2020 — and get re-elected himself. We’re at or above full employment overall, and black and Hispanic unemployment numbers are especially good. Jobs for blue-collar workers are also expanding. He has achieved a de-escalation that could lead to peace in Korea and a realignment of Middle East affairs that is in the U.S. interest, particularly with Iran being brought under pressure from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab allies. He has renegotiated the North American Free Trade Agreement that is much more favorable to the United States than the agreement it replaced. Trump stuck it out with Kavanaugh when other GOP presidents would probably have folded, and he has confirmed a lot of other judges. The tax cuts he passed have helped to fuel economic growth. Beyond that, not much. The do-nothing GOP House lost the voters’ confidence, and now Trump has to deal with an obstructionist Democratic House. The worst commentary on Paul Ryan’s Republicans is that Trump might not see much difference, except for the blizzard of subpoenas. As I commented in the early days of his administration, Trump and the congressional GOP should have had bills lined up like airplanes on a runway. Instead, they squandered a rare opportunity. You can blame Ryan if you want, but Trump was the head of the party.

— Glenn Reynolds, University of Tennessee law professor

My grade is an A-. Best U.S. president since Chester Arthur. Hasn’t fully delivered on either Build the Wall or Drain the Swamp, but kept the USA out of war with Russia over Ukraine joining NATO, kept the insane Neo-Palestinians in check, made real progress on the Korean Peninsula, defanged the globalists on the climate and trade fronts, has begun the retreat from Middle East empire, and showed the Republicans the benefits of not cucking every time the Democrats throw a media-enabled hissy fit. May not be a wartime consigliere, probably does not have the will or the understanding to save the USA intact, but don’t make the mistake of counting him entirely out yet. Weakened by his civic nationalism, his advisers, and his continued reliance on establishment figures, but his strategic instincts tend to pull him out of tactical danger time and time again.

This is to discuss the President’s announcement, whatever it might be. Initial reports are that it is an offer to trade Dreamers for the Wall. Sounds like just another cuckish compromise worthy of the Republican establishment.

President Trump plans to use remarks from the Diplomatic Reception Room on Saturday afternoon to propose a notable immigration compromise, according to sources familiar with the speech.

Details: The offer is expected to include Trump’s $5.7 billion demand for wall money in exchange for the BRIDGE Act — which would extend protections for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) — and also legislation to extend the legal status of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders, according to a source with direct knowledge.

Jared Kushner and Mike Pence have led the crafting of this deal and the negotiations with members, according to White House officials. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told reporters he had proposed the idea of a DACA-TPS swap to Trump in December, and that the president called it “interesting.”

But remember, always wait two days before leaping to any judgement.

UPDATE: It’s most likely just positioning for future action:

Top Democrats said they’ll reject an offer expected from President Donald Trump to extend protections for so-called Dreamers for three years in exchange for $5.7 billion in funds for border security as a way to reopen the federal government after almost a month.

Hey, he tried to be reasonable. And they left him no choice but to act in a unilateral manner.

“I will be making a major announcement concerning the Humanitarian Crisis on our Southern Border, and the Shutdown, tomorrow afternoon at 3 P.M., live from the @WhiteHouse.”
-Donald J. Trump

It had better be one of two things.

1. The God-Emperor is declaring martial law and Draining the Swamp.
2. The God-Emperor is announcing the Building of the Big Beautiful Wall.

The ever-treasonous Theresa May’s fake Brexit deal went down to historic defeat.

Theresa May suffered an historic landslide defeat in the Commons tonight, losing her Brexit deal by 432 to 202 – a huge majority of 230. She suffered a rebellion of 118 of her MPs – with the group including a raft of former ministers. Tom Pursglove and Eddie Hughes quit as ministerial aides tonight to join the rebels.

It was the biggest Tory rebellion for decades – worse than anything faced by David Cameron, John Major or Margaret Thatcher. The revolt includes more than a third of her entire 317-strong party and was led by ringleaders Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

What May should do is resign now and allow a strong Brexiteer lead Great Britain into a no-deal Brexit. But the EU is trying to sell the idea of a false dichotomy between the rejection of a fake deal and a nonexistent rejection of the referendum.

The EU was built upon the practice of making countries vote until they reached a result that the EU wanted, so this is the exact opposite of a surprise.

The EU has hinted that Brexit should be cancelled after Theresa May’s deal was voted down in the biggest defeat suffered by a Prime Minister in over 100 years. EU Council President Donald Tusk suggested if MPs cannot agree a deal and don’t want to crash out without one, they should consider reversing the historic vote.

While EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker warned that ‘time is almost up’ as he announced no deal planning will be ramped up in the wake of the defeat.

He made a dash back to Brussels for emergency Brexit meetings as the deal was voted down by 432 votes to 202 – meaning a staggering 230 MPs voted against her.

Mr Tusk said: ‘If a deal is impossible, and no one wants no deal, then who will finally have the courage to say what the only positive solution is?’

The truth is that many Brits want a no-deal Brexit, because it will save them billions of dollars. It was the second-most popular option in a recent poll. No one gives a damn about clarity. The important thing is to get out of the EU and reclaim British sovereignty. Everything else can be sorted from there.

I don’t disagree with what this guy is saying. But it’s a little ironic that he talks about fighting the last war, because the author himself is focused on an outdated and increasingly irrelevant ideological struggle:

History and theory don’t matter to socialists because they imagine society can be engineered. The old arguments and historical examples simply don’t apply: even human nature is malleable, and whenever our stubborn tendencies don’t comport with socialism’s grand plans a “social construct” is to blame.

These most recent spasms of support for the deadly ideology of socialism remind us that progressives aren’t kidding. They may not fully understand what socialism means, but they fully intend to bring it about. Single-payer health care, “free” education, wealth redistribution schemes, highly progressive income taxes, wealth taxes, gun bans, and radical curbs on fossil fuels are all on the immediate agenda. They will do this quickly if possible, incrementally if they have to (see, again, the 20th century). They will do it with or without popular support, using legislatures, courts and judges, supranational agencies,university indoctrination, friendly media, or whatever political, economic, or social tools it takes (including de-platforming and hate speech laws). This is not paranoia; all of this is openly discussed. And say what you will about progressivism, it does have a central if false ethos: egalitarianism.

Conservatives, by contrast, are not serious. They have no animating spirit. They don’t much talk about liberty or property or markets or opportunity. They don’t mean what they say about the Constitution, they won’t do a thing to limit government, they won’t touch entitlements or defense spending, they won’t abolish the Department of Education or a single federal agency, they won’t touch abortion laws, and they sure won’t give up their own socialist impulses. Trumpism, though not conservative and thoroughly non-intellectual, drove a final stake through the barely beating heart of Right intellectualism, from the Weekly Standard to National Review. Conservatism today is incoherent, both ideologically and tactically incapable of countering the rising tide of socialism.

The real battle is not conservatism vs socialism. First, conservatism is dead because there is nothing left in the West to conserve. Second, the real battle is nationalism vs global imperialism. The most recent offensive of the neo-liberal world order has failed, but its armies have not left the field and its leaders are actively developing new strategies, new tactics, and new false oppositions in order to attempt to pick up where the last attempt left off.

The USA has enjoyed the longest government shutdown in its history without incident:

The partial government shutdown became the longest closure in U.S. history at when the clock ticked past midnight Friday as President Donald Trump and nervous Republicans scrambled to find a way out of the mess.

A solution couldn’t come soon enough for federal workers who got pay statements Friday but no pay.

The House and Senate voted to give federal workers back pay whenever the federal government reopens and then left town for the weekend, leaving the shutdown on track to become one for the record books once the clock struck midnight and the closure entered its 22nd day.

And while Trump privately considered one dramatic escape route – declaring a national emergency to build the wall without a new stream of cash from Congress – members of his own party were fiercely debating that idea, and the president urged Congress to come up with another solution.

‘What we’re not looking to do right now is national emergency,’ Trump said. He insisted that he had the authority to do that, adding that he’s ‘not going to do it so fast’ because he’d still prefer to work a deal with Congress.

Even the black-pillers are beginning to understand that the God-Emperor is serious about building his Big Beautiful Wall. And he is serious about it because he understands that without it, there is no point in even running for re-election.

The Republican Establishment is serious about trying to primary him with Mitt Romney – last week 54 Republican Senators voted to directly attack unalienable American rights at the behest of AIPAC and other Neo-Palestinian interest groups – and President Trump will not be able to defeat that treacherous challenge if he does not deliver on his most important promise to his supporters.

Stand firm and inflexible, Mr. President. Build the Wall. Drain the Swamp. That is the road to victory in 2020.

President Trump is absolutely right to make a stand on the Wall. He’s correct to believe that he will not be re-elected in 2020 if he does not deliver on his second-most important campaign promise, to Build the Wall.

President Donald Trump has boxed himself into a situation with no endgame in his government shutdown standoff over a border wall, a new report claims.

Citing an unnamed former White House official, Vanity Fair reported on Tuesday that Trump believes he will not be reelected in 2020 if the wall is not built, and has made the issue his ‘personal Alamo’.

Trump reportedly told aides that he is prepared to make his ‘last stand’ on the wall issue, staking his entire presidency on constructing the border barrier that he called for forcefully in a Tuesday night address to the nation from the Oval Office.

‘The president put himself in a box,’ the former official in touch with the White House told the magazine. ‘The problem is there’s no endgame. Right now the White House is at a seven on the panic scale. If this thing goes on past the State of the Union they’re going to be at an 11.’

Build the Wall. Drain the Swamp. Nothing else matters. Not the stock market, not North Korea, and not tax cuts. And certainly not ending the government “shutdown”.

Build the Wall and win. Fail to build it and lose. This is not rocket science.

The Neo-Palestinian Ekaterina Jung – who calls herself “Cathy Young” now that she wants to convince everyone that she’s a Real American who loves hot dogs, apple pie, and baseball just as much as anyone else – sends a strong signal that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is in the process of being added to the Neo-Palestinian blacklist in her hit piece entitled “Solzhenitsyn: The Fall of a Prophet”:

The 100th anniversary of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s birth on December 11 was an occasion for many tributes. A decade after his death, Solzhenitsyn remains one of the past century’s towering figures in both literature and public life. His role in exposing the crimes of the Soviet regime is a historic achievement the magnitude of which can hardly be overstated. But his legacy also continues to be the subject of intense debate among people who share his loathing of that regime—and those controversies, which have to do with freedom, traditional morality, and nationalism, are strikingly relevant to our current moment.

Solzhenitsyn was once my childhood hero. Growing up in the Soviet Union in the 1970s, in a family of closet dissidents, I knew him as the man who defied the system and told the truth about its atrocities—the man idolized by my parents, especially my father, himself the son of gulag survivors. I was eleven when Solzhenitsyn was arrested and expelled from the Soviet Union; our Stalinist political instructor at school bellowed that he should have been shot as a traitor. A year or two later I heard excerpts from The Gulag Archipelago on foreign radio broadcasts; then, the coveted book appeared for a short while in our home.

Later, after my family emigrated to the United States in 1980, Solzhenitsyn’s heroic halo gradually began to lose its luster in our eyes. We were hardly alone; as the years went by, many of his erstwhile admirers came to believe, with bitter disappointment, that Solzhenitsyn could no longer be seen as a champion of freedom and justice.

The real reason for Jung’s rejection of her former hero Solzhenitsyn, of course, is that because Russia is now Hitler. The Neo-Palestinians are furious that the Russians under Vladimir Putin have managed to shake off the leash of liberal imperialism that the Neo-Palestinians, unlike their considerably more sensible nationalist cousins in Israel, so fervently support. And I suspect that this new anti-Solzhenitsyn campaign is founded in the realization that the eventual publication of Solzhenitsyn’s Two Hundred Years Together in English, whenever that finally happens, is going to completely explode the myth of the poor innocent Neo-Palestinians who never did nothing to nobody nowhere, once and for all.

This is the transcript of the President’s speech last night. – VD

Tonight, I am speaking to you because there is a growing humanitarian and security crisis at our southern border. Every day customs and border patrol agents encounter thousands of illegal immigrants trying to enter our country. We are out of space to hold them and we have no way to promptly return them back home to their country. America proudly welcomes millions of lawful immigrants who enrich our society and contribute to our nation. But, all Americans are hurt by uncontrolled illegal migration. It strains public resources and drives down jobs and wages. Among those hardest hit are African-Americans and Hispanic Americans. Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs, including meth, heroin, cocaine and fentanyl. Every week 300 of our citizens are killed by heroin alone, 90 percent of which floods across from our southern border. More Americans will die from drugs this year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.

In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes, and 4,000 violent killings. Over the years thousands of Americans have been brutally killed by those who illegally entered our country and thousands more lives will be lost if we don’t act right now. This is a humanitarian crisis, a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul.

Last month, 20,000 migrant children were illegally brought into the united States, a dramatic increase. These children are used as human pawns by vicious coyotes and ruthless gangs. One in three women are sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico. Women and children are the biggest victims by far of our broken system. This is the tragic reality of illegal immigration on our southern border. This is the cycle of human suffering that I am determined to end.

My administration has presented Congress with a detailed proposal to secure the border and stop the criminal gangs, drug smugglers and human traffickers. It’s a tremendous problem. Our proposal was developed by law enforcement professionals and border agents at the department of homeland security. These are the resources they have requested to properly perform their mission and keep America safe. In fact, safer than ever before. The proposal from Homeland Security includes cutting-edge technology for detecting drugs, weapons, illegal contraband and many other things. We have requested more agents, immigration judges, and bed space to process the sharp rise in unlawful migration fueled by our very strong economy. Our plan also contains an urgent request for humanitarian assistance and medical support. Furthermore, we have asked Congress to close border security loopholes so that illegal immigrant children can be safely and humanely returned back home. Finally, as part of an overall approach to border security, law enforcement professionals have requested $5.7 billion for a physical barrier. At the request of Democrats, it will be a steel barrier rather than a concrete wall.

This barrier is absolutely critical to border security. It’s also what our professionals at the border want and need. This is just common sense. The border wall would very quickly pay for itself. The cost of illegal drugs exceeds $500 billion a year. Vastly more than the $5.7 billion we have requested from Congress. The wall will always be paid for indirectly by the great new trade deal we have made with Mexico. Sen. Chuck Schumer, who you will be hearing from later tonight, has repeatedly supported a physical barrier in the past along with many other Democrats. They changed their mind only after I was elected president. Democrats in Congress have refused to acknowledge the crisis. And they have refused to provide our brave border agents with the tools they desperately need to protect our families and our nation. The federal government remains shut down for one reason and one reason only because Democrats will not fund border security. My administration is doing everything in our power to help those impacted by the situation. But the only solution is for Democrats to pass a spending bill that defends our borders and reopens the government. This situation could be solved in a 45-minute meeting. I have invited congressional leadership to the White House tomorrow to get this done. Hopefully, we can rise above partisan politics in order to support national security.

Some have suggested a barrier is immoral. Then why do wealthy politicians build walls, fences and gates around their homes? They don’t build walls because they hate the people on the outside, but because they love the people on the inside. The only thing that is immoral is for the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized. America’s heart broke the day after Christmas when a young police officer in California was savagely murdered in cold blood by an illegal alien who just came across the border. The life of an American hero was stolen by someone who had no right to be in our country.

Day after day, precious lives are cut short by those who have violated our borders. In California, an Air Force veteran was raped, murdered and beaten to death with a hammer by an illegal alien with a long criminal history. In Georgia, an illegal alien was recently charged with murder for killing, beheading and dismembering his neighbor. In Maryland, MS-13 gang members who arrived in the United States as unaccompanied minors were arrested and charged last year after viciously stabbing and beating a 16-year-old girl. Over the last several years, I have met with dozens of families whose loved ones were stolen by illegal immigration. I’ve held the hands of the weeping mothers and embraced the grief-stricken fathers. So sad. So terrible. I will never forget the pain in their eyes, the tremble in their voices and the sadness gripping their souls. How much more American blood must we shed before Congress does its job?

For those who refuse to compromise in the name of in the name of border security, I would ask, imagine if it was your child, your husband or your wife whose life was so cruelly shattered and totally broken. To every member of Congress, pass a bill that ends this crisis. To every citizen, call Congress and tell them to finally, after all of these decades, secure our border. This is a choice between right and wrong, justice and injustice. This is about whether we fulfill our sacred duty to the American citizens we serve. When I took the oath of office, I swore to protect our country. And that is what I will always do so help me God. Thank you and good night.

Santa is bringing us a new Supreme Court Justice in 2019:

The Supreme Court says Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is missing arguments for the first time in more than 25 years as she recuperates from cancer surgery last month. Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg said Monday the 85-year-old Ginsburg is continuing to recuperate and work from home after doctors removed two cancerous growths from her left lung on Dec. 21.

Translation: she’s in such bad shape she can’t be allowed out in public anymore.

I understand why the Left is determined to ride her into her grave, but it’s still pretty ghastly. If they had any decency, they would let the sick old woman retire already.