The Democrats are already up in arms over President Donald John Trump’s executive orders.
Live by executive orders, die by executive orders. The Democrats thought executive orders were great when President Barack Obama was signing them, but now that it’s Trump, executive orders are awful.
My hope is that when Trump gets finished undoing the damage done by Obama’s executive orders, we will go back to the prior form of government, the government we had for the first 230 or so years of this nation, where Congress made the laws. Obama decided to do away with that long tradition, and while executive orders have been issued by other presidents, they were few and far between. Obama used executive orders regularly to bypass the legislative process, and he bragged about his power to do so.
Trump, by Wednesday in his first week, had already issued executive orders:
To cut the heart out of Obamacare, ordering agencies to waive or grant an exemption from any fee or fiscal burden on pretty much anybody.
To order a hiring freeze for federal workers, with some exceptions and excluding the military.
To withdraw from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal that Obama couldn’t get through Congress. Even Hillary Clinton opposed it.
To ban sending federal funds to international organizations that perform abortions or promote abortion.
To get starting on building the wall on the US border with Mexico
To block federal grants to “sanctuary cities,” which are cities that refuse to enforce the US immigration laws.
And to finish the Keystone and Dakota pipelines. There is no good reason not to get the pipelines in place. If pipelines run in an area, then the Greensboro area was ruined decades ago when they put the piplines through here.
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Once again National Public Radio (NPR) is over the top in its blatant liberalism. The folks on NPR can be as liberal as they want but they should not be paid to broadcast their views with my tax dollars.
Last week, before the inauguration, NPR did a report where the unmistakable implication was that because Trump was elected president there would likely be a race war. It’s worth noting that during the Obama administration we had the beginnings of a race war in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland.
The NPR coverage of the inauguration may have started the whole crowd count brouhaha. On NPR they said that thousands had gathered on the mall in Washington a few minutes before the inauguration. It is true that thousands had gathered, but a more accurate description would have been hundreds of thousands had gathered. At least NPR didn’t say dozens, which would have also been true.
The NPR announcers were quick to point out that not all of the “thousands” were Trump supporters but some were there simply because it was a historic occasion and others were protestors. The fact that that is true of every inauguration – that people attend simply because it is a historic event and that many also have protestors – was, of course, not mentioned.
It’s time for Congress to stop funding NPR. Maybe Trump can do it by executive order, but the Republicans in Congress should do it and put that money going to NPR toward something worthwhile.
Let NPR become what it claims to be – listener supported radio.
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You never know what’s going to happen when Trump takes the stage, but I thought his inauguration speech was great.
Listening to NPR the morning before the inauguration, I heard their pundits predict that it would be a conciliatory speech attempting to bind some of the wounds that the campaign had opened.
At the time I wondered if these pundits had listened to anything Trump had said during his campaign. If they had listened, they didn’t hear.
Trump knows that he got elected, not by appealing to Democrats but by appealing to what was once called the silent majority – the people who have been crushed by the loss of American manufacturing jobs and then beaten down again by the recession.
Just about the only people on the podium who were Trump supporters from the beginning were his family. And the number of Washington elites who ever supported Trump were few and far between.
Trump did what he had done all through the campaign and attacked Washington. Trump spoke to the people who put him where he was, making sure they understood that despite his new address, he was still an outsider.
Some in the mainstream media hated the speech because it wasn’t conciliatory. Trump didn’t talk about bipartisanship and making things work. He talked about ramming stuff through whether the assembled Republican and Democrat elites liked it or not.
It’s strange to have a billionaire populist but that is what Trump is, and he didn’t forget it on Inauguration Day and he didn’t allow anyone else to forget it either.
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It doesn’t look like its going to be a fair fight. Trump has completely distracted the press from what he’s doing in his first days as president because all they can do is defend their own crowd size estimates.
Does anyone really care what the crowd size was? If it was only 1 million and not 1.5 million it makes no difference. If people really cared about the official crowd size there would be one, but the National Park Service quit making official estimates in the 1990s.
The reason the National Park Service had to stop putting out official estimates is because they were caught lying through their teeth about the crowds for pro-life events. I believe at the time it was said to be a cost saving measure. Coming up with an official crowd size involved a helicopter and a photographer.
Be that as it may, it would be utterly astounding if Trump had attracted a larger crowd than Obama did in 2008.
Trump is simply another rich white guy in a long line of rich white guys, stretching back to George Washington, to get elected president. Obama was the first black man elected president, and he was inaugurated in a city that is predominately black. Of course Obama attracted a huge crowd.
But the photos of Trump’s and Obama’s inaugurations published side by side by The New York Times seem completely unfair.
According to The New York Times, the photos were not taken during the inauguration itself, but 45 minutes before the event.
One factor to consider is there were more security checkpoints in 2016 than in 2008. But even considering that, the empty areas in The New York Times’ photo were filled with people in photos by other news agencies taken during the inauguration.
It’s a little hard to believe that tens of thousands of people filled those areas in 45 minutes, but that is what The New York Times is claiming. So is the message supposed to be that the crowd for Obama arrived earlier and that is notable? Isn’t it the crowd for the inauguration that people usually count, not the crowd before the inauguration?
But no matter, Trump has all the news media up in arms about the crowd estimates while he does whatever he wants. We’ll probably find out next week that he appointed Ann Coulter to the Supreme Court while the media was looking the other way.
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At the end of her political career, Hillary Rodham Clinton was at the presidential inauguration for the same reason she attended the one in 1993, and it’s the same reason she was elected senator, and the same reason she was secretary of state – her husband, Bill Clinton, is a masterful politician.
Hillary Clinton, who should get an award for looking glum, had to sit through the inauguration of a man she hates because her husband was elected president in 1992 and again in 1996. There was no way that Bill Clinton could skip the inauguration and no way he couldn’t bring his wife along.
The truth is that Hillary Clinton’s entire political career existed because Bill Clinton was elected president. Bill Clinton got her the job as the senator from New York when she didn’t live in New York and had never lived in New York, but he was president and cleared the way for her to get the Democratic nomination.
Then she was considered the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary in 2008 because Bill Clinton was such a great politician. It turned out that as great a politician as he is, Hillary Clinton is such a horrible candidate that even he couldn’t get her through the Democratic primary the first time around.
Not only is Hillary Clinton a bad candidate, she is a lazy candidate. She allowed Obama to sneak up on her in Iowa because she believed her own press releases and thought she was so far ahead that she didn’t have to put in all that time going to coffee shops and county fairs, mingling with the common people. She evidently thought she would win on her name alone. But the common people, who in this country still get to vote, weren’t impressed and voted for a nice young man with a big smile and a funny name instead.
It’s bizarre, but she didn’t win the presidency for the same reason. She didn’t campaign much, counting on surrogates and paid advertising. She didn’t hold press conferences and would only talk to the press when they didn’t ask her anything of substance. Once a semi tough question was asked, she turned and walked away.
When left on her own without a script she said incredibly stupid things, like the Clintons were “dead broke” when they left the White House. Everybody knows they bought two houses, each worth several million dollars, when they left the White House, and to most Americans that’s not dead broke.
She is so secretive and such a control freak that she couldn’t stand the idea of anyone else controlling her government emails when she was secretary of state, so she used her own server, which she could control, and violated the law by refusing to release any emails until ordered to do so by the courts. She also refused, throughout the campaign, to tell the truth about her homebrew email server, and anyone else in the country would be in jail for what she did.
But there she was on the podium during the inauguration looking like she would rather be any place else in the world, even in a diner in Iowa, rather than have to watch Trump in person take the oath of office.
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Some supporters of Hillary Clinton and opponents of Trump are beside themselves with grief since their candidate lost. I know how they feel because that’s how I felt in 2008 when Obama won. I thought what he wanted to do was all wrong for the country. After eight years in the White House I still think his ideas were all wrong.
From the $1 trillion he spent to stimulate the economy, to pulling the troops out of Iraq, to refusing to do anything of substance in Syria, to Obamacare, to the fact that he was willing to cripple US industry because of climate change, to opening the southern border to any and all who wanted to cross it – I can’t think of a major decision Obama made during his eight years in office that I agree with.
But the country survived and now, after eight years, I think it’s back on the right track. I don’t know if Trump will want to be president for eight years, or if he could get reelected. He ran such an outsider campaign, it’s hard to imagine what his campaign would look like when he is running as the man.
I think the country will prosper under Trump. But even if I’m dead wrong, the country will survive and at the end of his time in office, if the American people decide that it was the wrong path, then someone will be elected who will promise to change everything.
Look at British Prime Minister Winston Churchill. He saved his country during World War II, and as soon as the war was over the British people unceremoniously dumped him out of office.
It’s how politics works. The US is a huge ship, and even the best captain can only turn it so much. Obama has turned the ship as far left as he could in eight years. It will be an amazing feat if Trump can just get the ship straightened out again in four years.
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The Democrats, particularly those in Congress who chose not to go to the inauguration because they didn’t like the results of the election.
But the Democrats need to look around because it isn’t just Trump who was elected in November.
The voters also elected Republican majorities in the House and Senate. The Republicans control 32 state legislatures and the Democrats 13, with the remainder split.
And the Republicans control 33 governorships.
So it’s not like Trump somehow managed to win and the people voted for the Democrats in other races. The voters decided overwhelmingly, in state after state, in race after race, that they wanted Republicans, not Democrats, to run the federal and state governments.
It’s silly to blame Trump. The Democrats have only themselves to blame. During the months that Obama had unlimited power with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a big majority in the House, he used that power to push through Obamacare without a single Republican vote.
It turned out to be a disastrous bill. The voters discovered that the Democrats, led by Obama, had lied to them to get their support. When Obamacare was launched, even the website didn’t work. The whole thing was a mess from the beginning. It was such a mess that the American people realized what a huge mistake they had made, and the Democrats took a big loss in 2010 and have been losing ever since, with the notable exception of Obama being reelected in 2012.
In other words, the Democrats made their bed. Obama vastly increased the scope and power of the federal government and the people of America didn’t like it.
Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate for a vast number of reasons, but she doubled down on her inadequacies as a candidate and promised to continue the policies of Obama. She didn’t have much choice because she didn’t have any policies of her own.
Who knows what would have happened if the Democrats had gone with the candidate that the people wanted, Sen. Bernie Sanders.
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OK, it’s time for all this talk about approval ratings to end. Obama had great approval ratings because the polling was fixed.
The country is divided. Democrats think he did a good job and Republicans think he did a terrible job. You don’t have to poll too many more Democrats to really skew the polls, and independent analysis indicates that is exactly what the pollsters did.
After a poll is taken and 1,000 people or so are contacted, the way an honest polling company deals with the results is to take that poll and then, based on demographics, adjust the polling data so that the answers that count are in accord with the country’s demographics.
In the polls that show Obama with unusually high approval ratings and Trump with unusually low approval ratings, the pollsters simply counted a much higher percentage of Democratic answers. It’s simple and it works.
What is incredible is that even moderate news organizations like Fox News are quoting those polls as if they were accurate, when they should know that they are not.
It’s no surprised that CNN, The New York Times, MSNBC, The Washington Post and other liberal news organizations would quote the polls, but the conservative news organizations need to take a stand and explain to the American people the deception behind the polls. There is a reason why the polls consistently show Democrats doing better than they do on Election Day.
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After listening to portions of Obama’s last press conference, I’d like to revise my remarks about Trump moving the press office to Idaho or Washington State. I think a more appropriate place for the White House press corps would be Nome, Alaska, or maybe Siberia, if Putin would take them.
The White House press corps fawned over Obama to the point that it was embarrassing. It was clear that, if given the chance, they would have lined up to kiss his ring or some other part of his anatomy.
This was not supposed to be a group of friends, buddies or coworkers of the president but the people who would tell the world what was really going on in the White House. It was evident from the press conference that these people weren’t very interested in writing the truth about Obama, but far more interested in writing what would make him look good.
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A huge problem – that for Trump is only going to get worse – is leaked material. The intelligence chiefs were evidently miffed that the mainstream media refused to print the information in the 35-page report about Trump and prostitutes in Russia, evidently from a former British spy of questionable character and veracity.
The result was the intelligence chiefs included the information in a briefing and then made sure it would get leaked to the press, with the added credibility that it had been included in a presidential briefing.
But this is simply the tip of the iceberg. Washington, DC, is one of the most Democratic cities in a country full of Democratic cities. A vast number of those Democrats work for the federal government, and a smaller number are in high level positions with the federal government, controlled by civil service regulations, which means they cannot be fired by Democrats or Republicans.
I was told by a high ranking government official that the only one who can get them out of office is God. There is no job security on earth like a federal civil service job. Not going to work, screaming at your boss or coworkers, not doing your job, making such big mistakes that you cost the government thousands or even millions of dollars, none of these are firing offences.
Trump can’t get rid of them and many radical leftists are in top positions just below those that Trump has appointed or will appoint. Many of these people believe it is their duty to do anything they can to discredit the Trump administration.
It’s going to be tough. Some of Trump’s appointees are going to have to lock themselves in their offices, make sure they shred every piece of paper from their office every day and never send anything by email that they don’t want to see on the front page of The New York Times.
It’s going to hamstring his administration until Trump can figure a way around having every government agency he controls full of spies for the other side.
People can’t be fired, but their jobs can be eliminated, and Trump is already talking about a 10 percent reduction in force for the federal government, with the exception of the Armed Forces.
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If the Women’s March on Washington was for women, why were pro-life women’s groups denied the right to march? Are women who are not in favor of killing unborn babies, not women?
It’s hard to imagine a men’s march on Washington where men carried around signs with giant penises on them and other men dressed up as giant penises being taken seriously.
In fact, it’s hard to imagine a men’s march at all, because it would be deemed sexist, and probably the American Civil Liberties Union or some other left-wing organization would file suit to stop it.
This was not actually a women’s march but a liberal’s march. It was a bunch of folks who don’t want to admit that the American voters rejected their chosen candidate for president.
I know that Hillary Clinton got more popular votes than Trump. But Hillary Clinton is an attorney, and some of her supporters say she is the smartest woman in the world, so she must have known how presidents get elected – and it is not through the popular vote. If she believes that the president should be elected by popular vote, she could have started the process to amend the Constitution either when she was first lady or a US senator.
But, of course, if she had done that in the Senate, it would have distracted her from getting vital legislation passed to protect women and children. Wait a minute, she never even introduced a single bill in the Senate to help women and children, so that can’t be the reason.
It’s tough to lose a hard fought campaign, but in every hard fought campaign there are winners and losers. Sooner or later all those folks who say “not my president” are going to have to admit that unless they leave the country and denounce their citizenship, he is there president. It’s how the system works.
