Evidently Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thought President Donald Trump wouldn’t punch back. But when Trump joined with the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling and provide emergency funds for Texas, he proved that he has a powerful counterpunch.
Ryan has opposed Trump since back during the campaign when he refused to appear on the same stage with Trump. More recently Ryan was critical of Trump for the comments Trump made about Charlottesville.
Trump’s comments were accurate and made sense but were not politically correct. Instead of defending his president from unwarranted attacks, Ryan joined with the attackers.
McConnell is sneakier than Ryan, but everyone in Washington, including Trump, knows that McConnell told Republicans running last November to distance themselves from Trump.
McConnell also failed to put together the votes to pass some kind of Obamacare reform bill. If McConnell had pushed anything through the Senate, the House and Senate would be in negotiations now about how the reform bill. But because the Senate didn’t pass anything there is nothing to negotiate, and repealing Obamacare – one of Trump’s main campaign promises – is dead in the water.
Trump may have also noticed that the Republicans in Congress keep postponing funds for the wall.
Trump was consistent in his campaign. He didn’t talk about a lot of issues but he talked about the wall at every campaign stop.
Trump wants the wall funded. The Republicans control both the House and Senate, so it doesn’t seem it would be difficult; but without the cooperation of the establishment Republicans, Trump hasn’t been able to get the wall fully funded.
What Trump has done by getting the debt ceiling raised and money for Texas was prove that he doesn’t need Ryan and McConnell, who have been almost completely unproductive as Republican congressional leaders.
In the nearly eight months since Republicans have had complete control of the federal government, the team of Ryan and McConnell have been able to do exactly nothing.
McConnell did get Trump’s Supreme Court nominee through the Senate, but no bill of importance has passed the House and Senate and become law.
It’s not because there isn’t a lot to do. It’s because either Ryan and McConnell are totally incompetent as leaders or else they don’t want to see any conservative bills become law and be perceived as working with Trump.
Neither Ryan nor McConnell is a conservative, but they sure do like the benefits of being in Washington.
Trump – by making a deal with the Democrats on the debt ceiling and emergency relief – has proved that he doesn’t need Ryan or McConnell to get things done. Trump has no allegiance to the Republican establishment, which never supported him in his run for the presidency and hasn’t supported him since he became president. Why should he continue to pretend that they are his friends, allies or even political comrades?
Trump considered running as an independent but wisely chose the Republican Party as the best vehicle to get elected. He first defeated the Republican establishment and then the Democrats.
The conservatives in Congress need to at least attempt to sack Ryan and McConnell so they can elect leaders who do want to get bills passed. They may not be able to come up with the votes, but it would be a good indication of whose team the elected Republicans are on. Are they on the Trump team, or are they on the do-nothing team?
Currently the Republican representatives and senators are on the do-nothing team. But as the 2018 election gets closer, they may realize that going back to the voters and trying to explain why nothing has been accomplished is not the best way to win a ticket back to a cushy job in Washington, with more benefits than most people can imagine.
Trump has fired a warning shot over their bow, proving that he is going to get things done with or without their support.
McConnell is now gloating over some passage he snuck into the final bill, which proves he is exactly what he appears to be – a sneaky little small minded bureaucrat.
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Hillary Clinton writes in her book What Happened about her second losing attempt to be president that she was “numb” when she called Trump to concede.
She called Trump to concede at 2:40 a.m., long after even the most liberal networks had called the election for Trump, but she didn’t concede publicly until the next morning.
She writes that she couldn’t believe it was happening. If anything, that proves what a terrible candidate Hillary Clinton is and how poorly she ran her campaign.
A candidate with a competent campaign might be disappointed on election night, might even be shocked that the dire predictions she had been hearing from her campaign had turned out not to be pessimism but reality, but they should not be in a state of disbelief.
It comes from believing your own press releases. This is a trap Hillary Clinton, her campaign and her supporters – which included the media – fell into head over heels.
She was stunned and shocked because she had not been paying attention to the numbers. Trump outperformed the polls in nearly every primary; why wouldn’t he be expected to out perform the polls in the general election?
In Shattered there is some explanation of that. The Hillary Clinton campaign – against the advice of many of the experienced politicians on the staff – decided it didn’t need to waste money on running its own polls. It’s a little like deciding that you are such a good driver that you don’t need to open your eyes when behind the wheel, and she paid the price for her arrogance.
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Hillary Clinton’s latest attempt to make a huge profit off of her failed campaign is out in the form of a book she supposedly wrote about her losing campaign.
She has stated that she is through with politics and won’t run for office again. If it’s true this is good news for Democrats and bad news for Republicans. Hillary Clinton has proven to be a horrible candidate. Take a look at her record. When she has any kind of competition, she folds. Without the illicit assistance of the Democratic National Committee, Hillary Clinton might not have even won the Democratic presidential nomination.
Imagine how she would have faired in the primary and the general election if she had not had the mainstream media cheering for her at every campaign stop.
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Trump is still called a “reality TV star” by the mainstream media. Pundits say he has to realize that being the president is not being on a reality TV show. Trump is a hugely successful businessman who did a reality television show mostly for fun. He certainly didn’t need the money.
But do you remember the mainstream media talking about how President Barack Obama needed to understand he was no longer a community organizer? Conservative pundits talked about how he had been a community organizer before going to law school and going into politics, but the mainstream media rarely mentioned that it was his last full-time job before becoming a US senator.
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It seems possible that the demise of the Democratic Party will come over religion and abortion.
As long as the Democrats were mostly quiet about their pro-abortion and anti-religion stands, a lot of people who didn’t agree with those beliefs still thought that the other policies of the Democratic Party outweighed those concerns.
But as the Democratic Party becomes more tightly in the grasp of the leftwing of the party, being agnostic about abortion is not enough and not going to church regularly is not enough. True believers are being encouraged to celebrate abortion and proclaim the fact that they have no faith.
What this is likely to do is drive long-time supporters of the Democratic Party away.
The fact that 40 percent of the abortions in the US are performed on black women may not sound out of proportion, until you consider that the population of the US is slightly more than 13 percent black. So blacks make up 13 percent of the population but have 40 percent of the abortions Rev. Jesse Jackson, before he decided to run for president, called abortion “black genocide.”
The abortion issue and the anti-religious stance of the Democratic Party may be enough to cause a rift in the near total support by black voters of Democratic candidates, which is one reason the left – including the mainstream media – is working so hard at making conservatives out to be racists.
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The Senate has always baffled me because people like Sen. John McCain care much more about what their fellow senators want than what the people they went there to represent want or need.
It all started making senses when I was reading about primitive societies.
Humans are social beings. Back when men lived in caves and there were no single-bedroom caves for rent, life was much too dangerous for a single human out on his or her own.
It’s in our DNA to be social creatures and to try and get along with others in our group. People lived in tribes, and while all the ordinary arguing and fighting went on in the tribe, when the attack was from outside the tribe, then all that was forgotten and the tribe members protected each other.
What we have in the Senate right now are men and women elected from tribes all over the country, but they have been accepted into this more prestigious tribe made up of only 100 people in Washington. Apparently most of them have forgotten all about their original tribe back home. They want the acceptance and approval of their tribe in Washington.
This would explain why the Republicans have not done away with the filibuster rule, because it would hurt the feelings of their fellow tribe members who happen to be Democrats.
No one has threatened the whole tribe in a long time, so they have been able to spend their time fighting with each other; but now there is an outside threat. Trump is as powerful as they are when they band together, and he’s not one of them. He is a threat to their entire way of life and as such he must be stopped.
That is why Trump can’t get anything done in Washington. The two branches of the congressional tribe – the Senate tribe and the House tribe – see Trump as an outside threat to the entire congressional tribe, so they are joined together to fight against the outside threat.
Taking this one step further, by joining with the Democrats, Trump is working at the natural divisions in the tribe itself, playing the weaker part of the tribe against the stronger. If he can widen that gap, he can perhaps create so much infighting in the tribe that they will forget about fighting against him and go back to fighting amongst themselves. If Trump can do that, he can win.
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I’m beginning to lose faith in the man-made climate change true believers because Mexico was hit with the largest earthquake in over 100 years and I haven’t seen or heard anyone blaming the earthquake on man’s activity. If hurricanes are now caused by global warming, why aren’t earthquakes?
It is incredible. We’ve just had one of the longest runs of no major hurricanes making landfall in US history, but that doesn’t count. What counts is that large powerful hurricanes hit Texas and Florida, which proves man is responsible.
Here’s a question for man-made climate change true believers: If this climate change is science and science is factual and precise, how many miles per hour faster were the winds in Hurricane Irma than they would have been if man didn’t inhabit the earth? How long would Hurricane Harvey have stayed over Houston if man didn’t burn fossil fuels? And what caused the 12-year drought of major hurricanes making landfall in the US, if, as man burns fossil fuels, hurricanes become more common, larger and more destructive?
You can send me your answers, but please show your work.
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CBS is claiming that they didn’t use color gradients to alter the appearance of Steve Bannon when he appeared on 60 Minutes. The real question is, do they admit that they use color gradients to enhance videos or are they saying that they show all their videos exactly as they were shot, without running them through a computer program to make the images sharper and the colors pop?
I’ve never participated in the airing of a CBS video, but I can’t believe that they don’t use the technology available to make images appear better on screen. I can’t believe they don’t do it because here at the Rhino Times, we do it to every photo.
We do it because we print the paper on newsprint, and photos need to be adjusted to make allowances for the press and the paper. Back when photos were shot in black and white, photographers regularly burned in light areas and dodged dark areas to get a more consistent photo. This was done literally by hand in every darkroom I ever worked in. It was considered part of the job.
Now it can be done to color photos by computer, which is far superior to the old-fashioned method of waving your hand under the light. I simply don’t believe that CBS doesn’t use computers to enhance their videos.
If you accept the fact that – like other people presenting images to the public – computers are used to enhance the image, then what CBS is actually denying is that they purposefully made Bannon look worse and Charlie Rose look better.
It would be easy to prove, if CBS would release the original unenhanced video as it was shot and let people decide for themselves.
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Trump had promised to end the DACA program, which even President Obama, who initiated the program by executive order, said was unconstitutional. Congress is charged with making laws regarding immigration, not the president.
If Congress does get around to doing something about Dreamers, then it should consider what is fair to everyone, not simply what the Dreamers want.
Unlike what you might have read elsewhere, the Dreamers did not necessarily grow up in this country. The executive order states that they had to have illegally come to the US before they were 16 years old and no later than 2007.
Someone who was 15 years old when they arrived in the country cannot be said to have grown up in the US. Someone who is 14 or 15 years old wasn’t necessarily brought to this country by their parents. They may have chosen to come despite their parents telling them not to.
Also, there is no way to prove that they weren’t 18, 19 or 20 when they came to this country and claimed to be 15, or that they are now 20 years old and recently crossed the border illegally and are now claiming that they came here when they were 12 or 13. Since they entered this country illegally, there is no official record of when they crossed the border.
Am I implying that some illegal aliens would lie about their age or when they arrived in this country? Absolutely. If their parents brought or sent them here, by their actions they have proven that they don’t respect the laws of the US.
Dreamers say that if DACA is rescinded they will not be able to work or go to school. DACA was implemented in 2012. If they have been here most of their lives then a good part of their lives they have not been protected by DACA and presumably went to school anyway. Their parents have no DACA protection and they work or receive government subsidies without being here legally.
The DACA program as instituted by Obama did not make Dreamers legal residents; it states that the immigration laws won’t be enforced against them. So what Obama did was put Dreamers in limbo, where they are not legal residents with the rights that entails, but that the laws that should keep them from working or going to school won’t be enforced. It offers Dreamers no path to citizenship.
It also does nothing for the children who were brought or came to the US after 2007.
Why is it fair for a child who was brought to the US on Dec. 31, 2007 to receive special privileges but the child who was brought here on Jan. 1, 2008 to be deported?
What Congress has to consider is all the people who would like to come to the US but have gone through official channels to enter the US legally and have been denied. Should Dreamers who came to this country illegally be moved to the front of that line, displacing people who have been patiently waiting to enter the country legally? It doesn’t seem fair to the people who have been obeying the country’s immigration laws.
As far as the argument that Dreamers should not be held responsible for decision made by their parents: We are all held responsible for decisions made by our parents.
The decisions that parents make affect their children all their lives. Some parents make decisions based on the well-being of their children, scrimping and saving to send their children to good schools, becoming active in those schools to make certain that their children get the education that is best for them. Other parents see their children as a hindrance, pretty much ignoring them, not getting involved in their children’s lives and – as we are finding out more and more – not even bothering to feed their children. These children pay for that lack of care and concern.
Most of us grew up where we did because of the choices that our parents made. Why are Dreamers different?
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Great news from an unlikely source. Reports are that long-time Justice Department employees, including a number of attorneys, are resigning or retiring because they don’t like the policies of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Trump.
In some cases they are being asked to take apart initiatives that they created under president Obama. Rather than participate in the demise of Obama’s far-left agenda, they are choosing to leave.
What would be even better was if this movement swept through the federal government. The swamp in Washington that Trump promised to drain has all these big scary swamp creatures who are senators and representatives, but it is filled with smaller creatures who are probably even more dangerous, and those are the long-time government employees who run the government.
Every time some far-left liberal that resigns or retires from the federal government is not replaced – or is replaced with some more reasonable employee – the country gains. Because of civil service laws, most of the long-term employees cannot be fired, but they can have their jobs made so miserable that they choose to leave.
Trump’s people should be working hard at making the long-term employees carry out conservative initiatives that they find disgusting. The more that leave, the better off the country is.
Trump has said that one reason he hasn’t hired more people is that he doesn’t plan to replace many of the positions in the Obama administration, which is a step in the right direction.
I think it’s one reason Trump doesn’t fear a government shut down. The government doesn’t actually shut down.
During the Obama administration, Obama ordered actions like closing the World War II Memorial and national parks during the shutdown. The WWII Memorial doesn’t require employees to be open and most likely it took more employees to close it down than it would have taken to leave it open, but Obama was making a point.
What if the government closed down and instead of trying to inconvenience as many people as possible, Trump made certain as few people as possible were inconvenienced? The American people might realize that the federal bureaucracy has grown so huge and sluggish that most of the workers could be sent home and the government could still operate just fine.
Greensboro had a rolling hiring freeze for a while, where when someone retired or resigned there was no attempt made to fill that position for three months. The theory was that the co-workers of the former employees could fill in for a few months, and it worked pretty well. Most people in the city never noticed that the city was operating every day with fewer employees than were on the books. And in some cases, after three months the decision was made not to fill the position.
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What antifa is doing, with a fair amount of success, is what the Communist Workers’ Party (CWP) tried to do in 1979, which led to disaster in Greensboro.
The worst thing for a radical group is to be ignored. In 1979, the CWP_, which was trying to organize in North Carolina textile mills, was not having much success. So the leaders, including Nelson Johnson, decided to challenge the Ku Klux Klan.
They got some headlines when they had a confrontation with the Klan in China Grove, and then planned the “Death to the Klan” march in Greensboro, where they ended up having a shootout with the Klan and five CWP marchers were killed.
Antifa has taken a page right out of the CWP playbook and is attacking the Klan, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. It is a political move that makes sense. It isn’t being widely reported what antifa is for, but it is being widely reported what they are against – white supremacists. It is supposed to result in a favorable attitude toward antifa because they are fighting the bad guys, and all reasonable people consider white supremacists bad guys. So if antifa is fighting the bad guys, that makes them good guys, right?
Well, that is what we are supposed to believe. But in reality, antifa is as wrong as the white supremacists – just wrong in a different way. Antifa is made up of anarchists, communists and socialists and is opposed to capitalism, and government in general. It appears to have the same roots as the people that have been holding violent protests at the big international government meetings for years, wreaking as much havoc as they are allowed to by law enforcement.
Antifa is even to the left of the news media and the current Democratic Party. But they have come up with this strategy of attacking white supremacists to get mainstream support.
As evil and vile as white supremacists are, they do have a right to free speech. Antifa – with the assistance of governments like the City of Charlottesville, which allowed the antifa group to attack the white supremacists who also came to the speech ready for a fight – has been allowed to prevent white supremacists from speaking and holding rallies.
The reality is that the white supremacists, the Klan, neo-Nazis and all the rest, are a tiny portion of the population. When The Rhinoceros Times sued the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, one of the big problems we had was finding someone to sue. We finally had to sue the president of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Little Rock, Arkansas, because we couldn’t identify any local member to sue.
What we discovered is that a typical Klan meeting for most counties could be held in a phone booth and, for the state, in a normal sized living room. What the internet has done is allowed these far-flung racists to find each other and communicate their hate on the web.
