National Security Advisor Michael Flynn resigned on Monday, and from reading about it in the mainstream media, you would think he was the most heinous criminal of modern times.
This is the work of supporters of former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who are doing everything in their power to undermine President Donald John Trump.
There is proof that this is the case because one of the key names to surface in the whole affair was then acting Attorney General Sally Yates, who has since been fired by Trump for ordering her department not to support the travel ban. It was a huge mistake by Trump to leave someone so loyal to Obama in such a position of power, and it appears he is paying for that decision and similar decisions on strong supporters of his political opponents again.
In this case they committed crimes because they leaked transcripts of Flynn’s telephone conversation with the Russian ambassador before Trump took office. And there is the question that since, at the time, Flynn was a private citizen, why was Obama’s government listening to and recording his telephone calls? It looks like a case of political espionage. Now that Trump is president, first he needs to find out who taped the phone calls and leaked them to the news media. Those folks committed serious crimes and should be prosecuted.
He also needs to make a concerted effort to get the Obama/Clinton people out of key positions. He can’t fire them and he probably can’t reduce their pay either, but he can give them miserable jobs and assignments,
Flynn did not seem particularly well suited to the job of national security advisor, so his resignation will probably work out for the best, and it’s yet another warning to Trump – who shouldn’t need any more warnings. He has a tremendous number of people working for him who will do everything in their power to undermine his presidency.
Putting Yates in such a position of authority was dumb, and Trump is paying once again for that mistake. But this gives him good reason to root out some of the other Obama/Clinton operatives in his administration and he needs to do so quickly and ferociously. The Trump administration cannot negotiate with foreign leaders if the conversations of those negotiations end up in The New York Times and The Washington Post.
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The idea that some federal District Court judge can overrule the president of the United States on immigration policy is frightening. The idea that only federal District Court judges have the authority to draw voting districts is appalling.
But what is even more appalling is that Congress has the authority and the duty to put a stop to the takeover of the legislative and executive branches by the judiciary and hasn’t done so. The Constitution – the document that the liberals think the judges have the power to change – provides Congress the power and duty to halt a runaway judiciary and it’s way past time for Congress to act.
Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution states, “In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.”
All Congress has to do to stop the takeover of the entire federal government by the federal courts is to pass a couple of laws restricting what the courts can do. A law that the courts do not have the authority to consider immigration matters would be a good start. And I would add one that said the courts could not decide redistricting cases.
If Congress doesn’t act and doesn’t act quickly, Congress is going to become like the House of Lords in Great Britain, a largely ceremonial entity. The power of both Congress and the president will be stolen by the federal courts.
Where did the courts get the power to decide that marriage should be redefined or that an unborn baby was not a human being until the mother said he or she was?
The current laws don’t even make sense. If someone kills a pregnant woman, that person can be convicted of double homicide. To be convicted of homicide it has to be proven that a human being was killed. So in that case the unborn baby is considered by the courts to be a human being. But if the mother at any point before birth decides she doesn’t want the baby and has it killed, that is her right. Where in our body of laws does it say that a mother has the right to kill her children?
Congress needs to stop playing games with the courts and pass a comprehensive court reform law. If the judges don’t like it, let them run for Congress and they can try and get it changed.
The idea that the ultimate power in our democratic republic should rest with judges appointed for life is not what the founders prescribed in the Constitution, and it’s not what the country deserves.
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It’s hilarious that the mainstream media have the gall to complain when its reporters are not called on for questions by Trump at press conferences. The mainstream media didn’t complain when former President Obama had questions planted and then called on the reporters who had agreed to ask those questions.
It’s Trump’s press conference. Trump may have some flaws but one that he doesn’t have is not saying what he means. He constantly calls the mainstream media dishonest and purveyors of fake news – which they are. Why should he give them the prestige and power of his stage?
Imagine what would have happened to a journalist who said that Michelle Obama had been a prostitute? But when a New York Times reporter publicly said that about Melania Trump, the reporter was counseled. Not fired, not suspended, not even sent home for the rest of the day. Counseled means her boss told her not to say that in public anymore, and if she were going to say it to make certain that none of Melania Trump’s friends were within hearing.
Trump doesn’t know how to play anything but hardball, and the mainstream media, unless they reinvent themselves, can count on Trump shoving them to the side at every opportunity.
According to one report, about 7 percent of the mainstream media are made up of conservatives. If The New York Times, The Washington Post and other liberal news agencies want better treatment from the Trump White House, maybe they should make a concerted effort to add some diversity of thought by doubling that number. Imagine if they increased the number of conservative reporters by 300 percent? About 80 percent of the reporters would still be liberal. It’s an amazing statistic.
I know the mainstream media cannot admit it, but Trump really was elected president of the United States by the voters, and their chosen candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost. She was a terrible candidate and deserved to lose, but that’s politics.
Maybe what the mainstream media should be working on is making the Democratic Party have primaries that mean something, instead of allowing the leadership of the Democratic Party to select their nominee.
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Recent developments at the local, state and national level prove that perhaps the most world changing event during the administration of President Obama was not Obamacare, was not the Iran nuclear deal, was not Obama’s long series of horrible decisions about the Middle East, was not doubling the national debt and, in fact, was not anything that Obama did.
The most important event was when then Majority Leader Harry Reid and the Senate Democrats invoked the nuclear option and did away with the filibuster for presidential judicial appointments. This allowed Obama to appoint a host of federal District Court judges all over the country who were far more liberal than the Senate Republicans would have ever allowed.
Now those judges, not our elected officials, are ruling the country. Federal judges have decided that they are the only ones that should redistrict a state or city. Only a federal judge can decide who can and cannot enter into our country.
One saving grace is that the Senate Republicans didn’t allow Obama to appoint a Supreme Court justice to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia. It’s interesting that the Democrats howled a little about the Republican refusal to consider Obama’s appointment, but not too much because they assumed that Hillary Clinton would be the next president and she could nominate someone even more liberal. Since the mainstream media were predicting that the Democrats would also win control of the Senate, the smart money said, let the Republicans win this round and we will hit them even harder after the election.
Of course, when you start believing your own press releases you’re always in trouble, and the election didn’t work out like the mainstream media said that it would.
The result is that President Trump, not Hillary Clinton, is making that appointment and Judge Neil Gorsuch is no liberal. The Senate Republicans need to invoke the nuclear option themselves if the Senate Democrats even hint at holding up the appointment of Gorsuch. The sooner Gorsuch can get appointed the sooner the Supreme Court can bring some sense back to this country with or without Congress restricting what it can do.
But even with Gorsuch, Congress needs to restrict the judiciary. There is no way that a federal District Court judge has any business overruling the president of the United States, regardless of what he has done.
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I recently had a conversation with a friend who is better educated than me, no doubt smarter than I am and more worldly. However, she gets most of her information about politics from National Public Radio and The New York Times. Her take on the last election is that this bumbling, temperamental, not very smart or successful semi-buffoon, through some accident, became president of the United States.
Considering the source of her information it’s not surprising, because that is the story the mainstream media are telling every day.
But to put things in a more realistic perspective, it’s like believing that the doctor who performed the first successful heart transplant had no idea what he was doing and was successful purely by accident. Or that the New England Patriots won the Super Bowl, not because they have perhaps the best coach-quarterback team that football has ever seen, but simply because no other team in the NFL was any good.
You don’t perform a successful heart transplant by accident and you don’t become the Super Bowl champion by accident. In professional football a team may win a game or two by accident, but getting to the Super Bowl involves a lot more than a game or two. First, a team has to win enough games to make the playoffs, and once in the playoffs they have to win all the remaining games; there is no room for a bad game.
In today’s world no one wins the presidency by accident. A tremendous amount of strategic planning is involved. With Hillary Clinton that extreme planning was obvious. You could almost see the strings attached to Hillary Clinton. Every statement, every appearance, every word out of her mouth was tested, debated and planned. It almost worked. But her highly professional campaign made some critical errors in its strategy. They made serious miscalculations about their opponent’s campaign and his ability to attract supporters.
Trump’s campaign was the opposite. If you believe the liberal pundits, Trump lurched from huge mistake to huge mistake, making indefensible statements and not spending nearly enough money. In fact, according to the mainstream media, Trump should not even have been taken seriously as a candidate.
Here is an alternate set of facts. Trump did not lurch from one mistake to another. When he said about Sen. John McCain, that he preferred war heroes that didn’t get captured, Trump knew exactly what he was saying and exactly what the reaction of the mainstream media would be.
When Trump said that he would ban all Muslims from entering the country he didn’t do it because he is stupid and didn’t realize it was impossible, he didn’t do it because he hates Muslims, but he did it because he knew the response that statement would get and also knew that he could walk it back to what it became – a ban on immigration from seven predominately Muslim countries.
The idea that Trump’s campaign was as calculated and well thought out as Hillary Clinton’s goes against everything the mainstream media have written about his campaign. But is it at all reasonable to believe that Trump beat 16 experienced successful Republican presidential candidates and then took on and defeated what has been one of the most successful political machines of the last 50 years by accident? Is the mainstream media’s assessment – that Trump is simply a buffoon who was not successful in business but through some strange accident of fate ended up with billions of dollars worth of property and then, through an even stranger series of accidents, became the most powerful man in the world – at all believable?
It is certainly possible for a candidate at any level to win one election by chance. But the presidential race is an over-a-year-long contest made up of numerous primaries and caucuses before the general election. Look at the presidential candidates who have started strong, been way ahead in the polls, even won a primary or two, only to fall by the wayside when the going got rough.
One problem is that The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR and other liberal news outlets have such clout. The mainstream media follow The New York Times like the kids following the Pied Piper. No one in the mainstream media questions the veracity of The New York Times, even when it has proven to be so biased that it can’t see, much less admit, its own mistakes.
Where are the news analyses of the brilliant campaign that Trump ran? Have the powerful forces in the mainstream media even attempted to figure out how they could have been so wrong about Trump from day one?
No, instead the mainstream media act like Trump didn’t really win. Fortunately for the country, the mainstream media don’t get to pick the president, and the fact that months later they haven’t bothered to go back over all their mistakes means that they are likely to be making the same mistakes today – seeing the world through liberal lenses – that they did all during Trump’s campaign that lasted over 16 months.
If the mainstream media were being at all honest with theirselves, they would be going back to Trump’s announcement that he was running for president and looking closely at why nearly everything they wrote about him was wrong.
The truth is that Trump played their liberal bias like a drum. He knew what to say to get their goat at every turn.
The result of the election is not that Trump was defeated but that people have given up on getting news from the mainstream media. The mainstream media damaged its own brand, perhaps beyond repair, and every day Trump is in office they damage their brand even more.
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It’s high time for the Republicans in Washington to stop letting Trump make all the news and make some themselves. Where is the repeal of Obamacare? For eight years the Republicans have been trying to repeal it. Now they have the votes and they are still talking about a repeal. The time for talk is over. The country expects some action.
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I think it’s time to do away with the civil service system and go back to the spoils system. Civil service was invented to avoid the the president cleaning house every time there was a political shift in power. Under the old system the newly elected president fired all of the old president’s people and hired his own people.
The result of that reform is that we have tens of thousands of federal employees who can’t be fired by anyone.
When an attorney for the Custom’s Department was told by a manager that he wanted to fire an employee, the attorney, a former FBI agent, pulled a pistol out of his desk drawer and suggested the manager go shoot the employee. He said that getting the manager off a murder charge would be simpler than going through the firing process.
It may sound like hyperbole, but people swear that it is true. Federal employees with civil service protection can’t be fired.
The result in the current administration is that Trump has a workforce that is working against him.
It is something that newly elected officials usually have to learn the hard way. Even at the local level, the staff mainly has the best interest of the staff at heart. They are not trying to help the elected officials but to preserve their own jobs, and the upper level staff always wants to add new programs and hire new people because then they have more power.
It is extremely rare for a reduction in staff levels to come from anything but attrition. People retire or resign and are not replaced, but anyone who wants to keep their job gets to keep it, regardless of their competency level and regardless of whether their job is necessary.
For Trump it will be a tough nut to crack. If the government were a business he owned, he would take it into bankruptcy so he could clean house. But that’s not possible with the federal government, so he will have to come up with another plan.
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The White House press corps is made up of mostly far leftwing liberals and they are a bunch of babies. The media doesn’t want to attend the White House press corps dinner, which has been a tradition for just shy of 100 years. Certainly in the past there have been presidents the press corps didn’t like, but the dinner was held regardless. Now the hugely spoiled brats in the White House press corps don’t want to go because Trump is rightfully critical of them.
Take this whole hullabaloo about Trump inviting Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe for a weekend at Mar-a-Lago. Trump owns the resort and he likes to go there to get away from Washington. Why shouldn’t he invite Abe, who likes to play golf, for a weekend on the links?
First the mainstream media complain that Trump doesn’t get along with other heads of state. Then, when he is getting along, they complain because he was invited to Trump’s resort in Florida.
And this trip is entirely different from former President Obama’s weekend golfing trips. For decades a lot of business has been done on the golf course. There is plenty of time to talk during a round of golf. It also gives people a chance to get to know each other in a way that isn’t possible sitting in a boardroom.
Obama usually played golf with the same group of mid-level White House employees. Obama wasn’t playing business golf, but just relaxing with some guys he liked. There’s a big difference.
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Amazon is claiming that the massive wind farm in Eastern North Carolina is going to supply electricity to its facility in Virginia.
It isn’t true. The electricity used by the Amazon facility in Virginia will use the same mix of electricity as everyone else hooked up to the grid in the area. The electricity produced by the wind farm will go into the grid, just like the electricity from nuclear power plants, coal plants, natural gas plants, solar plants and everything else.
If Amazon were actually being powered by the wind farm, then, when the wind wasn’t blowing or was too strong for the windmills to operate, Amazon would have to close down its facility for lack of electricity. To claim that it is using the electricity from the wind farm is simply a marketing ploy and is what some people would call a lie.
The actual electricity used by Amazon will be about 40 percent from nuclear power plants, about 37 percent from coal, 20 percent from natural gas and about 2 percent from all the renewables together, including the wind farm.
The idea that Amazon is powering its plant with electricity from a wind farm over 200 miles away is pure fantasy. It would be like someone putting a gallon of water in a river and someone 200 miles away claiming that they scooped that same gallon of water from the river. It is impossible to separate out where the electricity on the grid is generated. It all gets mixed in together.
Anyone who knows the least bit about how the electric grid works knows it’s a lie, but the media continue to report that Amazon is using the power as if it were true.
As Trump would say, this is fake news.
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The Washington Post, to no one’s surprise, gave presidential advisor Stephen Miller three out of four Pinocchios for his statement that 72 people from the seven countries where Trump has imposed a temporary ban on immigration have been convicted of being involved in terrorist activity.
If you use The Washington Post’s standard, then Al Capone was not a gangster and the only thing he ever did wrong was neglected to pay some taxes.
However, those of us who are a little more worldly than The Washington Post, or a lot more honest, know that the federal government often convicts people of lesser crimes because they can’t get a conviction on major crimes.
It was well known that Capone had killed more than a few people, but what they could convict him of was tax evasion, so they took what they had.
Looking at what some of the terrorists were convicted of seems pretty similar. The fact that some were convicted of money laundering doesn’t mean the money wasn’t being laundered for a terrorist group, it simply means law enforcement couldn’t prove that link to the level necessary for a conviction.
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The left is promoting this idea that Trump hates all immigrants. There is simply no evidence of that and a lot of evidence that he loves and supports legal immigrants. For example, his wife is a legal immigrant and a naturalized citizen.
Trump’s mother was a legal immigrant and a naturalized citizen. His first wife, Ivana Trump, was an immigrant and is a naturalized American citizen.
There is ample evidence that Trump has a soft place in his heart for legal immigrants and naturalized citizens, but he, along with a majority of Americans, is opposed to open borders and illegal immigration.
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It’s incredible how terrified the establishment public education system is of the new secretary of education, Betsy DeVos. But it’s also easy to see why they are terrified. DeVos believes that parents, even poor and middle-class parents, should have options in sending their children to school. The establishment hates the idea of options because they know better than anyone just how bad public schools have become.
All you have to do is listen to any teachers’ union representative to understand why the current state of the establishment public education is so bad. The union representatives talk a lot about teacher pay, teacher benefits and teacher retirement plans, but I don’t think in years of covering education I have ever heard one talk about education.
The appointment of DeVos was brilliant if you believe, as many do, that the establishment education system is broken and it can’t be fixed by people who insist that the only problem in public education is that teachers need to be paid more.
DeVos believes in working to give parents a choice for their children, particularly those who the public education establishment insists on sending to failing schools.
As has been shown time and time again, parents with the economic means to do so will move in order for their children to attend better schools. The parents who are stuck with the system are the ones who don’t have the economic means to move to a different school district.
