President Donald John Trump is living and working in a building filled with Barack Obama supporters.
It appears that since Trump took office there hasn’t been a single private conversation in the White House. Calling them leaks doesn’t do justice to the amount of information pouring out of the White House. It’s more like a flood.
Trump cannot effectively operate as president if he cannot have a conversation that doesn’t end up on the front page of The Washington Post or The New York Times the next day.
Trump will get reamed in the mainstream media for doing it, but he needs to clean house, and by cleaning house that means getting rid of everyone who worked in the White House during the Obama years and anyone else who he suspects is disloyal, not to Trump, but to the president of the United States.
Obama did what outgoing chief executives do. Gov. Pat McCrory did the same thing in North Carolina. He turned political appointees into civil servants so that it’s nearly impossible to fire them. So Trump also has a lot of Obama political appointees in the White House who are now civil servants. It is far too difficult to fire them, but they can be transferred. He needs to go ahead and do that.
Then he needs to be certain that none of the numerous intelligence agencies can listen in on his telephone calls. If the president cannot have a secure line, is it possible in today’s world to have a secure line?
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When Hillary Clinton and her campaign staff realized that they had managed to lose an unlosable campaign, they needed a scapegoat.
Hillary Clinton can’t even admit that using an unsecured email server in her basement for highly classified documents was a mistake. She certainly isn’t going to admit that she lost the campaign due to the fact that she didn’t campaign very hard, and when she did campaign she didn’t have a message or that she trusted her own political instincts, which are terrible.
She mainly asked people to vote for her because it was her turn, she was a woman and Donald Trump was a despicable human being. She would have been better off running on the platform of “four more years,” promising to continue the policies of the Obama administration.
Hillary Clinton is a strange individual who knows little about the lives that most Americans live. This was proven when, in a friendly interview about her book, she said that she and her husband were “dead broke” when they left the White House.
Most Americans don’t consider a couple who can buy two multimillion dollar homes as “dead broke,” but Hillary Clinton does. But considering her personal history, it’s understandable.
As a young adult she moved into the governor’s mansion in Little Rock where she had cooks, gardeners, 24-hour day care for her daughter, drivers, secretaries and every other kind of servant you can imagine, all at government expense.
She got a job with a top law firm and her promotions in that firm track her husband’s career. She was a litigator who rarely went to court; her job was to be the wife of the governor, not to practice law.
That’s not unique; law firms hire former judges, former senators, former governors and such all the time whose job is not necessarily to practice law but to bring business to the law firm.
Hillary Clinton went from there to the White House, where she had even more servants paid for by the government.
She ran for the Senate from a state where she never lived and campaigned by flying to New York on government jets. In addition, Hillary Clinton doesn’t like people or the press, so she used her Secret Service detail to keep both away from her while she wined and dined campaign donors and mingled with the voters as little as possible.
Then she was a presidential candidate, secretary of state and presidential candidate again, all the time surrounded by aides and her ever-present Secret Service detail.
One of the main reasons Hillary Clinton lost is that she is out of touch with the American people. By contrast, Bill Clinton has never lost his feel for the American people, but during her campaign, Bill Clinton was shunted over to the side and his political advice routinely ignored.
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Climate change is going to go down in history as one of the biggest hoaxes of the 20th and 21st centuries. At some point, when people can admit what they see, someone is going to ask how global warming can make it both hotter and colder.
But if you want proof that climate change is a hoax, look at the behavior of the largest proponents. If Al Gore really thought that his activities were contributing to a global disaster, would he continue to fly around on a private jet? Would he travel by limousine? Would he own huge energy eating homes?
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The Democrats are all cheering about the North Carolina legislative districts being declared unconstitutional.
The Fourth Circuit has become extremely liberal. Obama did a good job of getting like-minding judges in place and the Democrats did a good job under President George W. Bush of blocking conservative judges, so you have a mix of liberals and moderates on the federal bench. If the judges were conservatives then the districts would have been upheld.
But the courts refuse to answer the real question, so it is likely that whatever the Republican legislature draws next will also be ruled unconstitutional.
The legislature, in order to conform with the Voting Rights Act, is required to consider race when drawing legislative districts. The new districts can’t be drawn in such a way that would diminish black representation in the legislature, but what the courts have said is that the legislature considered race too much.
According to the decisions that have come down, what the state legislature is supposed to do is place enough blacks in a district that a black representative or senator will be elected, but what the legislature can’t do is place more black voters in that district than are needed to elect a black legislator.
What would be really helpful, if the courts were at all interested in the legislature drawing districts that it would find constitutional, is to have a range. The courts clearly have a certain percentage in mind that they believe is enough to elect black legislators, and to have fewer black voters than that percentage is deemed a violation of the Voting Rights Act. But to place more than that percentage of black voters is deemed unconstitutional. So why don’t the courts tell the state what that percentage of black voters is.
If the courts would simply say, if you draw minority-majority districts with a minimum of 35 percent black voters and a maximum of 45 percent black voters and that would comply with both the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution, then the districts could be drawn and everyone could go on about their business.
Or how about this? Tell the state to draw districts that don’t consider race at all. That is actually how the districts should be drawn.
Although there is a growing percentage of Hispanic voters in the state, the state isn’t required to draw Hispanic-majority districts. Why is that? Does the Constitution actually give special privileges to certain minority groups and not to others?
It would seem that is the way the Constitution is being interpreted by the courts.
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It is so entertaining that the mainstream media pretend to be righteously indignant about the president of the United States tweeting.
One of the reasons Trump was elected president is because, despite all the advice he got to the contrary, he continued to tweet all during the campaign.
The people who voted for him and who overwhelmingly still support him like the fact that on their phones they can get an unfiltered message from the president.
Remember during Obama’s first term when he wouldn’t even speak to school children without a script written by a team of speechwriters, vetted by the legal team and finally read by Obama?
Then there is Hillary, who ran every word and gesture past focus groups and had teams of speechwriters in case she ever thought of anything she wanted to say.
And you have Trump, who, completely unfiltered without consulting anyone, sends tweets out to the world at 3 a.m.
The mainstream media hate it because it completely bypasses them. And the media then parses each word of Trump’s tweets as if they were part of the State of the Union address that people had been working on for weeks.
Trump knows his audience. The tweets are not for the mainstream media and they aren’t for Hillary supporters. The tweets are Trump communicating with his base. Trump supporters know that these are tweets and give Trump leeway. They also know that Trump exaggerates, but much more importantly they know that Trump is working hard to keep his campaign promises.
The Republican Congress is trying to stop him and the courts are trying to stop him, but Trump – as he proved time and time again in the primaries and then in the general election – knows how to win.
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I am delighted that Trump announced he is getting the US out of the Paris climate agreement. The mainstream media are hysterical that Trump is doing something he said he would do all during the campaign.
It doesn’t matter what you think about climate change, much of what supporters say about it isn’t true.
For instance, it’s not true that 97 percent or 98 percent of scientists believe in climate change. The figure was largely created out of thin air, but if you give climate change operatives the benefit of the doubt, what it seems to be based on is that 98 percent of the scientists who believe in climate change said they believe in climate change. Scientists who didn’t believe in climate change weren’t allowed to vote. Evidently someone snuck in claiming that they supported climate change but then backed out, or maybe climate change disciples decided that nobody would believe that 100 percent of scientists believed anything.
It is not settled science, as supporters like to say. It is a theory that carbon made by man pollutes the air but the same gases released in nature do not. It’s a little hard to see how that can be scientific.
Earth is warming and has been since the last ice age. Some years are warmer, some are colder, but the overall trend is for temperatures to increase. Climate change fanatics say that Earth would be cooler without man’s activities, but no one can say with certainly how much cooler, or how much man’s activities have raised the temperature.
What climate change is, really, is an attack on the industrialized world in favor of the third world, emerging nations or whatever is the proper term this month. We are supposed to curb our activity and allow them to catch up. It has little to do with the climate; it is more about liberal guilt over the economic success of the first world.
If you believe the mainstream media, pulling out of the Paris Accord is a huge worldwide disaster, but rarely does anyone write about what the Paris Accord is.
The Paris Accord is classic Obama politics. The goal was to reach an agreement, regardless of what the terms of the agreement were. Each country signing the accord was allowed to set its own goals for reducing greenhouse gases.
China, for instance, promised to reach its peak production of carbon in 2030, the same year that it was predicted that China would peak. So in effect China promised to keep doing exactly what it is doing.
According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), not known as a right-wing organization, if every country kept their Paris Accord promises then, by the year 2100, the world’s temperature would be reduced by 0.2 degrees Celsius. That seems like an enormous amount of effort for extremely little gain, and some scientists termed the MIT analysis generous in its predictions.
Another factor in all of this that seems to have been forgotten by the mainstream media is that Obama never presented the Paris Accord to the Senate for ratification. The US Constitution requires treaties to be ratified by a two-thirds majority in the Senate. Obama knew that the Senate would never ratify a treaty that would be so detrimental to the US economy.
The Paris Accord also required first world nations such as the US to pay billions of dollars to emerging nations for their economic loss from following the Paris Accords, even though emerging economies such as Pakistan, which only promised to try and do better, wouldn’t necessarily have any loss.
What the Paris Accord most closely resembles in the form of international agreements is the US agreement with Iran, where Iran got everything it asked for and the US agreed to give Iran $150 billion. It’s another classic Obama agreement where he let it be known that he wanted an agreement, no matter what the terms were. It’s a terrible way to negotiate. It’s like buying a house by going to the homeowner and telling them that you want to buy the house and you don’t care what the price is.
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It seems that after the attacks in Great Britain, the wisdom of some kind of extreme vetting of those traveling to the US from states that either sponsor terrorism, or are in such turmoil that people can’t be properly vetted, is obvious.
The problem is that you can’t single out a group of people for special treatment and still be politically correct. But in the face of terrorism, political correctness should be pushed aside.
Great Britain is not and, it appears, cannot protect its people because there are too many terrorists already in the country, and it appears many of them were brought to Great Britain as children or born there to parents who were allowed in as refugees.
We are a country that has always welcomed immigrants and refugees, but we need to make certain that the people are coming here because they want to become Americans, not because they want to kill Americans. If the government cannot be certain of that then the government has an obligation to the country not to allow those people to set foot on our shores.
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I heard a number of men who fought against the London Bridge attackers interviewed. Most had been badly wounded but, according to the British, had saved many lives by slowing down the attackers and not allowing them to maim and kill people who were less able to defend themselves.
It made me think of the advice from Homeland Security on how Americans should behave during a terrorist attack. That advice is to run and hide. If these British men had taken that advice, the death toll from that attack would be much higher.
Perhaps Homeland Security needs to rethink that advice. Wouldn’t it discourage terrorist attacks if the terrorists knew that Americans would stand and fight rather than run and hide?
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The Republican Party in Washington needs to have a come-to-Jesus meeting and they need to have it soon. Time is running out for them to do something, anything, but they have to have some accomplishments to point to for the midterm elections next year.
The problem is a complete and utter lack of Republican leadership in Congress.
The Republicans need someone in leadership who knows how to get things done. What in the world has Speaker Paul Ryan ever accomplished other than get elected? It’s easy as pie to write budgets that nobody is even going to read and have no chance of passing. It’s easy to support healthcare reform bills that will never become law.
What’s difficult, and so far has proven to be too difficult for Ryan and his Republican colleagues, is to get together and pass legislation that will become law. It takes compromise and it takes leaning on people.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has been in the Senate forever, or at least he’s looking like it, and what major legislation has he shepherded through the Senate since he became majority leader? He caved in to Obama every time Obama said “boo.”
McConnell is part of the swamp that Trump said he was going to drain. He’s a career politician who has been on the government dole pretty much his entire adult life. He has no job experience outside the government and his main claim to fame is that he has won some close elections by running clever television commercials.
Where is former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich when you need him? Gingrich knew how to get things done. Agree with him, disagree with him, but he accomplished what he said he would accomplish.
The Republicans in control now appear to be afraid to do anything that might upset somebody. The truth is politics is a brutal, ugly sport, and if you’re not willing to get into the fight, you can’t accomplish anything, which is where the Republicans are right now.
Ryan finally did get some kind of Obamacare reform bill through the House, but it appears one of the reasons he was able to get the votes to pass it was that the House knew that it would get bottled up in the Senate because the Senate Republicans, with a weak kneed, milquetoast majority leader, isn’t going to pass any legislation.
The people of the US didn’t simply elect Trump president, they went to the polls in every part of the country to elect Republican majorities in the House and the Senate. They elected those Republicans because they didn’t like the way the Democrats were running the country.
But you have to give the Democrats credit; at least when they had majorities in the House and Senate they passed legislation like Obamacare. Repealing Obamacare has been the rallying cry of the Republican Party ever since it passed. Now the Republicans have the power, but not the intestinal fortitude, to do it.
Trump can’t pass legislation, but he needs to get some folks on his team who have experience dealing with Congress. It doesn’t appear that he has that now.
