The political battlefield is littered with bodies of those who have underestimated President Donald John Trump.
Not just the 16 Republicans he defeated to become the Republican nominee, and Hillary Clinton who he defeated to become president, but a whole host of politicians who refused to take him seriously, political pundits who as late as the night of Nov. 8 said that he had no chance to win, and elected officials who tried to jump on the Trump bandwagon long after it had passed them by.
Trump once again Tuesday night proved his critics have no idea who they are dealing with. Trump gave a great speech. He didn’t back down. He didn’t quibble and he didn’t whine about the way the mainstream media are treating him. Trump went out and told the American people how he was going to accomplish what he had said he would do during the campaign.
For those who are Trump-deniers, he did not mention every campaign promise he made over the 16-month campaign in this one-hour long speech and he did not in detail talk about how he would accomplish each one, which would be impossible. Instead, Trump went up to the plate and knocked this one out of the park, making the liberals, including those in the mainstream media, look silly.
The rows of congresswomen sitting in their matching white outfits looked to me like a bunch of middle school girls who decide to wear pink on the same day. Really, these are the strong, intelligent, successful women that the American people have elected to represent them in Congress and the best they can do is dress alike? Maybe that appealed to their base, but they looked like rows of people who think you have to look alike to agree.
Can you imagine Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos calling Congresswoman Virginia Foxx and saying, “Let’s dress alike to show the American people what we think”?
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Trump has asked that military spending be increased and the spending in other departments decreased to provide the funding. What a novel idea? Wouldn’t it have been grand if some other elected official had come up with this startling proposal? What has always been done by both Democrats and Republicans is that an increase in spending either means an increase in taxes or, more often, an increase in the amount borrowed.
Maybe Trump will look into it, because it sure isn’t going to happen on its own, but I would imagine the federal government could easily reduce spending by 10 percent without cutting a single program or benefit.
In the world of private business – something people like Sen. Mitch McConnell have only a vague fuzzy memory of – companies have been shedding employees for years. A lot of it is due to technology, and for some it’s simply a change in the way they do business. Times change and companies change with them, but the federal government has not. If you look hard enough you can probably find buggy whip inspectors still working in the bowels of some building, or perhaps typewriter technicians.
Trump shouldn’t be bothered trying to eliminate the waste and duplication, but he should require each member of his cabinet to look, not for employees that can be eliminated but divisions. There should be wholesale layoffs in the federal government.
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What President Trump is learning is that having the White House press corps down the hall from his office is like having a room full of teenagers in your basement all the time. They don’t really do anything useful and whatever you do for them they whine and complain because it isn’t fair and it is never enough.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer held a “press gaggle” on Friday, Feb. 24, which by definition is a select group of reporters in a more informal setting. It is not a press briefing, as some mainstream media organizations have reported. Spicer invited some press organizations in addition to the pool reporters, but he didn’t invite The New York Times, CNN or Politico, who have been routinely blasting his boss, and have had far too many inaccurate news stories for it to be an accident.
Pool reporters represent the full White House press corps at events where the entire press corps can’t go, or in cases where nobody thinks there is really going to be much news out of the event and the White House press corps doesn’t want to go. The pool reporters file reports that are available to everyone else and they are usually tedious, but sometimes depending on the mood of the pool reporter they can be really funny.
The current rule of the White House press corps seems to be if someone says something nice about Trump, it has to be checked out like it was the biggest news story in history and they only go with the story if they can get three to six independent confirmations. However, if someone says something bad, they run it without verification and if it turns out to be false they may or may not run a small correction in tiny type on some inside page.
Trump during his campaign refused to give press credentials to some news organizations that he believed were treating him unfairly. The New York Times admitted that it treated Trump unfairly and, unlike any other presidential candidate it had ever covered, The New York Times itself said that it allowed reporters covering Trump to include their opinions about Trump in their news articles. Needless to say, none of those opinions were in support of Trump.
Just one example is the way The New York Times and other liberal news organizations have reported about the so-called Russian influence in the presidential election gives the impression that the Russians are suspected of hacking into the election system and either adding Trump votes or eliminating votes for Hillary Clinton. In fact, no one has made this accusation, but the way the stories are written it is clearly the impression that the liberal media wants to convey.
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The recent ruling by the Fourth District Court to uphold a ban by Maryland on guns with military style features is just plain dumb. If the judges believe that certain guns should be banned despite the Second Amendment, then they should at least do so in some logical manner. What the judges are doing is banning guns based on the way they look, not the way they operate.
It would be like trying to stop speeding on the highway by banning any car that was covered with decals like a NASCAR car, but not putting any restrictions on the size of the motor. So a car with NASCAR decals and a go-cart engine would be barred but the same car without the decals and a 400 horsepower supercharged motor would be legal.
They also ban magazines that hold over 10 shells. Really? Have any of these people ever fired a gun? Are the only guns they are familiar with the six shooters they’ve seen in old Westerns? Do they know how long it takes to change magazines? Even someone relatively inexperienced can change magazines in a couple of seconds. So if someone is shooting at a roomful of unarmed people, which seems to be what this ruling is trying to prevent, it wouldn’t make any difference whether the shooter had three 10 round magazines or one 30 round magazine – except that he would have to change the magazine twice.
If someone is shooting back it can make a difference, but the massacres that these laws are purportedly trying to prevent occur in gun-free zones.
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I think almost every number I read about illegal immigrants is wrong – from the number crossing the border, to the number in the country, to the number who are receiving financial assistance from the government. The only numbers that I believe are the number that are in jail and the number deported. Everything else is by definition made up.
Let’s just say you are a Border Patrol officer and you detain on average 20 people illegally crossing into the country a day. So how do you figure out how many crossed in your sector that you didn’t catch? How do you know whether you caught 100 percent of those crossing or 1 percent? You don’t know. You have to estimate.
So we have estimates of how many people crossed the border but who were never seen. How do we know how many illegal aliens are in the country? The figure is partially based on the estimates of how many crossed the border that nobody saw or apprehended.
How do we know how many have crossed back across the border unseen? The answer is we don’t.
Then you come to more interesting questions. How many illegal aliens are using someone else’s Social Security number to get paid and have taxes taken out of their paycheck? One would hope that if the government discovered that someone was illegally using a false Social Security number that they would at least put a stop to it, if not have the person charged with a crime. But with the Obama administration, who knows – maybe they sent them all an Obamaphone as a special prize.
How many illegal aliens with legal identification voted? We know from undercover videos that some Democratic campaign workers were telling people that they didn’t have to be a citizen to vote. If someone has lived in this country for years, has ID and knows that there is no way for the elections officials to verify that they are citizens, wouldn’t it be awfully tempting to go in and vote – particularly if the person felt strongly about the election?
What if one candidate had repeatedly said that he planned to send most of the illegal immigrants back to their home countries and the other candidate said as far as she was concerned they could stay for as long as they wanted. In that case, an illegal immigrant would have a tremendous incentive to vote, and the downside of voting illegally is practically nonexistent.
What if you add to that incentive having public officials and party members out recruiting illegal immigrants to vote and instructing them on how to register and vote without being caught?
In North Carolina, an employee of the State Board of Elections office in Raleigh was doing just that. She was caught and lost her job, but she wasn’t prosecuted for promoting voter fraud. In fact, virtually no one gets prosecuted for voter fraud in this state.
It’s hard to believe that human nature being what it is that people wouldn’t vote simply because they weren’t supposed to. If everyone simply obeyed all the laws because it was wrong not to, we wouldn’t need a police force.
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It’s seems to be a weird anomaly that everybody hates Congress but the incumbent congressmen get reelected over 90 percent of the time. It’s not really an anomaly; it’s that the wrong question is being asked.
People don’t really hate Congress, what they hate is the federal government. And Congress, sadly, has little control over the federal government. People blame Congress for the excesses of the federal government because what they really hate are the nameless, faceless career bureaucrats who run the country.
Today we still have the illusion that Congress and the president, working together or in opposition, make the decisions that determine the path the government is going to take. It’s not the case in today’s world.
The bureaucrats in Washington, DC, are the ones who are really running the country. Our system is really not a democratic republic anymore, because the elected officials have so little control over how the government operates.
If Trump can cut the number of federal employees, other than the uniformed military, by 10 percent, that would be an astounding accomplishment. If he could cut it by 20 percent that would be almost a miracle. And cutting it by any more than that would be a miracle.
DeVos didn’t get appointed by Trump because she is a big fan of the federal education bureaucracy but because she is opposed to the very department she runs. There is all this talk in the country about increasing teacher pay and there is a simple way to do it without spending a dime more in tax dollars on education. In fact, the charter schools that DeVos supports prove that education doesn’t need the vast federal, state and local education bureaucracies that eat billions of dollars in education funding.
Would Guilford County Schools suffer if there were no federal Department of Education that regulated the way the schools try to educate children? I don’t think so.
What if, instead of having this federal bureaucracy making up rules and regulations, all of those federal education bureaucrats were laid off and the money for education was handed out to the states with no strings attached, except that it be spent on public education?
Charter schools prove that children can be well educated without all of that state, federal and local bureaucracy. Some people are outraged that for-profit charter schools even exist. But think about what that means. Charter schools receive no funding for capital expenses, which means the buildings have to be built and the children educated for the per pupil operating revenue that establishment public schools receive. So the establishment public schools essentially receive all the buildings, parking lots and athletic venues for free and then receive a certain amount per pupil for education.
From that same amount of per pupil funding, charter schools have to fund all of their infrastructure needs and educate children. The for-profit charter schools do all of that and make a profit.
Plus, no one has to send their child to a charter school, yet parents all over the country have made the choice to do that because they believe that their children will receive a better education in charter schools than in the establishment schools, even though the establishment schools receive vastly more funding.
What for-profit charter schools prove is that there is so much waste in the establishment public schools that a business can take in less money, do a better job of educating children and still make a profit.
It’s no wonder they are so hated by the establishment public school system.
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OK, this one is so confusing you need a program to get it all straight. In Texas a wrestler who was a born a female, but now considers herself a male and prefers to be called Mack, was allowed to continue to wrestle as a female even though Mack is taking male hormones.
Male hormones like testosterone build muscle, which gives Mack a huge advantage over females who aren’t taking testosterone. Mack, by the way, won the state girls championship without much trouble.
Isn’t it interesting that Mack, born a female, who says that she wants to be a male, was willing to wrestle in the girl’s competition?
Of course, the reverse of this has also already caused a problem, which is athletes who were born male but now want to be females, participating in high school sports. I’m sure it makes me a misogynist for saying it, but men overall are faster and stronger than women.
The huge problem coming down the road is when some of those average male athletes decide that they are women. According to what the left is saying, they should be allowed to play on women’s teams.
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Reports are that President Trump is running the White House staff ragged because he is doing so much every day. Trump didn’t get where he is today by being a slacker. He has a tremendous amount of experience in getting things done.
But there is also a huge difference between government meetings and business meetings. Trump has been holding and running meetings for his organization for decades. He’s used to being the man at the top who makes the final decisions. But government meetings more often than not don’t accomplish anything – unless you consider holding a meeting an accomplishment. Trump is accustomed to having meetings where decisions are made. He gets the available information, which is never all the information.
It drives me crazy when elected officials put off doing anything because they don’t have all the information. They will never have all the information. You don’t need all the information to make a decision or decisions would never get made. One key to good decision-making is knowing when you have enough information to make a decision. In a lot of cases decision makers know they don’t have key pieces of information but a decision has to be made anyway, so a decision is made based on the best information available at the time. This is the way the world works and it is the way Trump works.
Think about the difference in experience between Trump and former President Barack Obama. Trump has been running a multi-national, multi-billion-dollar company for years, holding meetings with key advisors and making decisions.
Obama had been a part-time law professor, a part-time legislator, a part-time lawyer and was a junior member of the US Senate when he was elected president. In none of those positions was Obama running the show. He was a part of the operation but he wasn’t in charge. In Illinois he was just another state senator. In the US Senate, by the time he was no longer a freshman senator, he was running for president.
The American people elected Obama president, which meant he was in charge of making decisions for the most powerful nation on earth. He could have chosen to surround himself with highly experienced advisors who understood Washington and international diplomacy, but he did not. He surrounded himself with his buddies from Chicago. Either Obama decided that he wanted to insult many of this country’s longtime allies, so he did things – like send the bust of Winston Churchill back to the British and keep the prime minister of Israel cooling his heels in a conference room while Obama went off to eat dinner – or he simply didn’t have the experience to know how his actions would be perceived.
Imagine, for instance if, instead of making Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wait while Obama went upstairs to have dinner with his family, Obama had invited Netanyahu to dinner – what a different relationship they two would have had.
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The mainstream media might want to read the report from the reporter at the Independent Journal Review who was tipped off that Trump would be dining at the Trump Hotel last Saturday night and managed to reserve the table next to Trump’s table. According to his report, the crowd in the restaurant cheered when Trump entered and people went over to shake hands. Trump had photos taken with two women who each said it was their birthday.
There were no impromptu protests. If some people at the restaurant were not pleased that the president chose to dine there, they didn’t express it.
Of course, you wouldn’t expect people who hate Trump to be dining at a restaurant he owns, but then again if you’re invited to someone’s birthday dinner you don’t get to choose the restaurant.
It certainly is not an indication that everyone in the country loves Trump. We all know that they don’t. But it is an indication that the liberal mainstream media are painting an extremely one-sided picture of Trump. Nearly half of the country voted for Trump for president. If you eliminate the West Coast, over half of the rest of the country voted for Trump. By contrast it would be tough to find a reporter at The New York Times or The Washington Post who voted for Trump, and if there is one it would be nearly impossible to get them to admit it, unless you were allowed to torture them or inject them with truth serum.
What this means for the media is that even those who continue to read or hear their reports don’t believe them. The people who voted for Trump don’t believe that they have elected a madman to the White House and they like the fact that he is doing what he said he would do during the campaign. It seems to drive the mainstream media insane that Trump is actually going to do all that, in their minds, crazy stuff that he said he would do.
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Trump is talking about cutting the State Department budget and the immediate response is that they would have to cut security. I hope Trump – even though he is in his first job in government – is too smart to fall for that one.
It’s exactly like the schools where, in the enormous bureaucracy of the public school system, if funding is reduced by one dime the only thing that can possibly be cut is the kindergarten teacher for developmentally disadvantaged students.
But one of the best ever was that when the Guilford County Department of Social Services was threatened with a revenue cut, the only thing that could possibly be cut was the burial of deceased indigents.
There is no reason to cut security. There is plenty of waste in the State Department just like every other federal department.
When I lived in Portugal, I spent some time in the “Marine barracks” because they had a satellite dish and you could watch NFL games. It was called a barracks but it was not like any barracks I’d ever seen. Several Marines told me it was the nicest house they had ever lived in and was probably the nicest house they would ever live in. One thing I noticed is that all the plumbing fixtures were American. Shipping sinks and toilets around the world is not free, no matter how you do it.
Certainly American personnel should have nice places to live, but it doesn’t have to be nicer than any place they will likely ever live. And do they really have to have American made toilets? You’re not going to save billions of dollars by not building such nice housing for Marines, but then again you can save billions by changing the attitude.
The only reason the barracks was so nice is because that money was in somebody’s budget and it had to be spent.
It’s heavily related to the fact that when senators and congressmen fly on the government dime, a lot of them fly first class and stay in the very best hotels. I bet they don’t fly first class when the money is coming out of their own pockets. And if they do and they are not independently wealthy, somebody needs to check them out because on a congressman’s salary you are not going to be taking too many first class flights.
The reason the congressmen fly first class when they are on some junket is because the Department of Treasury is picking up the tab. It’s not that they aren’t paying personally, but even their congressional office isn’t paying, and it’s not coming out of Congress’ budget for itself.
If these members of Congress had to account for that spending, the reduction would be quick.
Again, billions won’t be saved by making congressmen and senators fly in coach, but there are thousands of these little perks in the federal government that do add up.
