According to the mainstream media, the Republicans are toast in the 2018 elections, the Democrats are going to sweep into majorities in the House and Senate, impeach Donald Trump and everyone in the world will be smarter, happier and better looking with Trump no longer in the White House.
But there is a fly in the mainstream media ointment –the American people, not the mainstream media, make the ultimate political decisions.
Trump’s approval ratings have climbed to over 50 percent and he has done this in a most unusual way for a politician: Trump is keeping his campaign promises.
Presidents before Trump have whined and complained about the unfair trade practices of China and other countries but have been too timid to do anything about them.
Trump doesn’t have a timid bone in his body and he has started a trade feud. At this point the amount of trade involved is far too small to call it a trade war. A trade feud for the US is good because no other country wants to be in the position of not being able to compete in the world’s largest economy.
What Trump is requesting from other countries seems fair. It’s basically – we will treat your products the way you treat ours. What Trump says that he is not going to do is allow another country to place higher tariffs on American products than the US places on products from their country. China is a little different because it uses currency manipulation to raise the cost of American goods.
China’s economy is dependent on being able to sell its products to the US. Trump has sent a message that he is willing to take action to support American products and is willing to take some heat.
Trump is, of course, taking a lot of heat from those who believe in free trade. Trump’s argument is that the world doesn’t currently have free trade because of Chinese currency manipulation and tariffs placed on American goods by other countries. Trump has repeatedly said that what he is interested in is fair trade and creating a level playing field for American products.
*****
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king. In a land where lying, back stabbing, perjury, guilt by association, double dealing, conflicts of interest and other similar disreputable behavior is common, a man slightly above the fray might be considered trustworthy and honest, while that same man if placed in the midst of the average American small town would be considered a liar and a cheat.
This is one possible explanation for the glowing remarks made by Washington insiders about special prosecutor Bob Mueller. He sent four men to prison for life for a crime he knew they didn’t commit. Two died in prison and two were released in 2001 after the courts determined that they were framed by the FBI and the Justice Department. The government was also forced to pay them millions of dollars in a settlement for the years they spent in prison.
Isn’t it interesting that if you are an attorney in the Justice Department and you get caught using evidence you know to be false to convict men of murder, you get promoted and your reputation remains intact?
In the investigation of the anthrax attacks after 9/11, Mueller ruined the life and reputation of one scientist even though the evidence in the case indicated that scientist wasn’t involved. Again, the government had to pay out millions in a settlement. Then Mueller drove another man to suicide who most likely had nothing to do with mailing anthrax to anyone. But because he is dead, there was no settlement payment.
So if you drive one man to suicide and ruin the life of another and you’re head of the FBI, you receive honors and praise.
Mueller is not the squeaky clean man that he is purported to be by those in Washington. If he were, he never would have accepted the appointment as special prosecutor since he knew that he would be investigating his good friend and former colleague fired FBI Director Jim Comey. If someone fired a good friend of yours, do you think you could investigate that firing fairly and without letting your personal feelings get involved?
Mueller has hired a disreputable crew that also uses underhanded tactics to get convictions and have been caught doing it.
Now Mueller is up against US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, who doesn’t put up with that kind of behavior and doesn’t trust the FBI and the Justice Department any more than their behavior indicates they should be trusted.
It turns out that the entire charge against Michael Flynn was a set up. FBI agent Peter Strzok interviewed Flynn, but it was fired FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe who decided that Flynn lied in his interview with Strzok, even though Strzok reported that Flynn appeared to be telling the truth.
Then they put Flynn up in front of federal District Court Judge Rudolph Contreras, who is a friend of Strzok’s and also happens to be the judge who approved the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to allow the electronic surveillance of Flynn, which was based on the Steele Dossier paid for by the Clinton campaign – something that Contreras may have known, but evidently didn’t care about if he knew.
Sullivan has a very different idea of how a criminal case should be handled and has required the FBI to turn over all its evidence to him for him to decide what should be turned over to the defense. It’s an indication he doesn’t trust the FBI and the special prosecutor’s office to obey the law and turn over any exculpatory evidence to the defense.
*****
Roseanne Barr, as it turns out, is perhaps the smartest person in the television industry.
Over 60 million Americans voted for Donald Trump for president. It was not a majority, but it was enough to get Trump elected president. Surveys continue to show that Trump is still popular with his base and now show that he is more popular with the American people than he has ever been. So what does the television industry do? It makes fun of Trump at every opportunity. Any joke that denigrates Trump is considered a winner, and viewership is down across the board.
What is incredible is that none of these self-proclaimed geniuses in Hollywood have put two and two together and figured out that making someone that half the country supported for president the butt of all your jokes may not be the way to please an audience.
Take a look at the Oscars, where no Trump joke was too brutal or tasteless to be aired – and viewing of the Oscars was at an all time low. Is it possible that these two factors could be related?
Of course, there are a lot of other factors involved. Netflix, YouTube, Hulu and all manner of streaming video. No doubt some Trump supporters decided that rather than watch a bunch of Hollywood actors make fun of Trump, they would rather watch a video of their grandchildren, a movie on Netflix or, heaven forbid, read a book.
Roseanne comes out with a show that supports Trump and the ratings go through the roof. Is it possible that those factors are also related? Is it possible that viewers are more inclined to watch shows where their own opinions are expressed rather than a show that makes them out to be complete idiots? It seems a real possibility and something that the networks might want to consider.
It will mean that the networks will have to search high and low for some literate people who support Trump. The belief – so well expressed by liberal icon Hillary Clinton – is that Trump supporters as a group are uneducated, racist, misogynist rednecks. But if the networks search long and hard they might be able to find a couple of uneducated, racist, misogynistic rednecks who can read, write and cipher enough that with some tutoring they could be taught to write and direct television shows.
*****
Pope Francis is a strange pope. I say this as a practicing Roman Catholic for 63 years. In some ways, he’s a lot like Trump. Neither seems to quite grasp the importance of their words because of their positions.
As a real estate developer, Trump could say whatever he wanted and he would take some heat, but as president he makes statements and the stock market goes up or down and our allies cheer or jeer. His statements have worldwide impact, something that Trump appears to be learning slowly.
The question about Pope Francis is why does he keep meeting privately with Eugenio Scalfari, a proclaimed atheist who Pope Francis has said has misquoted him the past? There is no recording of the conversation and Scalfari is famous for not taking notes.
It is possible that Pope Francis uses Scalfari to float ideas out there to see what the response will be? When there is overwhelming condemnation of what he reportedly said, he denies he said it. One would hope that Pope Francis would have more honesty and integrity than that, but if he does, why meet with a man who you know will misquote you?
Why in the world would the pope get involved in an American presidential election, and if he was going to get involved, how could he condemn the candidate opposed to abortion and not condemn the candidate who is in favor of partial birth abortion? We know he made those statements because there are recordings and notes. The Vatican said that his words were misinterpreted, but that is what politicians, not religious leaders, say. When Pope Francis makes a public statement he has an obligation to make certain that his statement is clear.
The proper statement for Pope Francis when asked about the American presidential election was, “I don’t get involved in the political debates of countries.”
But then again Pope Francis has not been consistent in his statements and his actions regarding immigration. He has stated that immigrants, regardless of legal status, should be welcomed by the countries they enter.
But he is not only the pope, he is the head of state of the Vatican – a very small country, but still a country that is completely surrounded by a wall. If Pope Francis behaved as a head of state as he says other heads of state should behave, Vatican City would be overflowing with illegal immigrants. It is not. Pope Francis as a gesture did bring a handful of illegal immigrants back with him once, but he didn’t house them in his country; he found places for them in Italy. So he says that countries should welcome immigrants regardless of the social and financial cost while he lives behind a wall in a country with very few citizens and virtually no illegal immigrants.
Why isn’t St. Peter’s Square full of new modular homes for as many illegal immigrants coming to Europe as possible? It would be ugly. It would be inconvenient. But according to what Pope Francis says, it would be the right thing to do. If he truly believes that is the right thing to do, why isn’t he doing it?
*****
The federal prosecutors lost the case in Florida against Noor Salman, the wife of Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, and that’s huge news – much bigger news than the mainstream media has reported.
Federal prosecutors don’t lose cases. Even state prosecutors don’t lose many cases. Federal prosecutors don’t go to trial unless they are certain they have enough evidence to win. Some have 100 percent conviction rates.
But this case was badly bungled. The federal prosecutors withheld the information that Omar Mateen’s father, Seddique Mateen, had been an FBI informant for 11 years.
*****
According to Dick Morris, who was Bill Clinton’s political guru until they had a falling out and Morris became a conservative, Trump scored a huge win with the recently passed $1.3 trillion supplemental spending bill.
Morris says that because it is a supplemental spending bill and not a budget, the president can move money around without getting congressional approval. So Trump can use money in the defense budget to build the wall and there is plenty of extra money in the defense budget to do so.
Morris says that this is a brilliant political move and that he was shocked that Trump had the political savvy to outmaneuver House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on such a key issue.
Pelosi and Schumer have fought tooth and nail against funding the wall and would only approve $1.6 billion for the wall in the supplemental spending bill. In a $1.3 trillion spending bill, $1.6 billion doesn’t even reach the level of a drop in a bucket.
But according to Morris, with the passage of that supplemental spending bill, because the rules of a spending bill are different from those of a budget, Trump is free to move money around to fund the wall.
*****
Trump has been president and Republicans have controlled Congress for over a year and we still have the Obama “catch and release” program along the border with Mexico.
It makes you wonder what good it does to elect Republicans, if they can’t get organized enough to overturn Democratic policies.
I admit, I thought this was a policy that was abolished by the Republicans, but it hasn’t been. What’s the point in beefing up the Border Patrol if its function is to catch illegal immigrants and then give them bus tickets to wherever they want to go.
The stupidity of the catch and release program is one of the issues that got Trump elected. You don’t have to be a genius to know that catching people illegally entering the country and then helping them get settled illegally in this country is not doing anything to stop illegal immigration.
Any teenager who is thinking about coming to the US someday would be foolish not to go ahead and walk across the border, because once they get here they may be able to qualify for the DACA program, and everyone seems to agree that people who illegally immigrated as teenagers should be allowed to say.
However, the thousands of people moving toward the border in a caravan may turn out to be pushing things too far. It’s hard to imagine how even the Democrats could be in favor of mass illegal immigration. If thousands of people are allowed to cross the border at once, the US might as well not have a border.
*****
The mainstream media, which never tire of beating up on Trump, have now started beating up on his wife, Melania. According to the Chicago Tribune, it is time for Melania Trump to start doing her job.
Melania Trump has no job. She wasn’t elected by the American people to do anything. She also isn’t paid by the American people to do anything.
She is the wife of the president, which is not a job any more than Trump being husband to Melania is a job.
There is no requirement that the president be married, and America has had two presidents who weren’t married and a couple whose wives were, in technical psychological terms, crazy.
Melania’s job is whatever she and President Trump determine it to be. Because she campaigned for her husband doesn’t mean that she has to fulfill anyone’s idea of what a first lady should be.
No doubt next the mainstream media will really take the gloves off and start attacking Barron.
*****
Even conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson gets caught up in political correctness gone amuck.
Carlson called two black Mexicans deported by Mexico as African-Americans. They could be African-Mexicans but Mexicans can’t be African-Americans.
Identifying a race by naming the continent where that race predominates and the country where the people currently live doesn’t make much sense.
On National Public Radio they have referred to blacks in Great Britain as African-Americans.
*****
The mainstream media, which is totally opposed to building a wall on the southern border, point out that Trump has been in office for over a year and there is no wall.
Building a wall is a federal project, which means the paperwork alone will likely take over a year to fill out.
In the late 1980s, I worked for a consulting company that did some work for the Department of Energy. It wasn’t the major source of income for the company, but it was steady and paid their bills. It took eight hours to complete the monthly bill for Department of Energy, and I know that because the Department of Energy refused to pay the first bill because it said they weren’t charged enough and they weren’t charged for billing them. On the second try we doubled the rates we charged for every other client and added in eight hours to complete the bill and never had any trouble getting paid after that.
If you wonder how the federal government can even spend $1.3 trillion in a few months, you only need to work in Washington for a few months and it becomes obvious. The Energy Department insisted on paying more than twice what we would have billed anyone else for the same work.
But even if it were a private project, you can’t build a 1,000-mile wall in a year. Furthermore, you can’t design a 1,000-mile wall in a year. Of course there is no wall, but the work on the wall is continuing. Trump went out to look at the prototypes, but I haven’t read anywhere that a prototype has been selected.
Trump only got $1.6 billion for wall building in the supplemental spending bill and is going to use money allocated for the military in the supplemental spending bill to build the wall.
Even if Trump had gotten $100 billion up front to build the wall, it wouldn’t be built. I’d wager that the $1.6 billion hasn’t been spent yet.
It’s a massive project and is going to take time. Once it is completed it will not keep all the illegal immigrants from Mexico out of the country, any more than a prison wall keeps all the convicts in a prison. People will go over, under and around the wall, but it will make it far more difficult to get into this country, just like it is far more difficult to get out of a prison than your average office building.
