The liberal media talks about Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients as if enforcing the laws of this country is wrong.
President Barack Obama was in office for eight years, and for months he had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate and a majority in the House. The Democrats could have passed any immigration reform bill they wanted and the Republicans would have been unable to stop it.
Obama and the Democrats didn’t pass any meaningful immigration legislation. What did they do about the Dreamers when they had complete control of the government? Nothing.
This whole DACA mess was caused by Obama because he put in a temporary measure that gave these young people a special status for a limited amount of time. It is always more difficult to take a privilege away from people than it is to have never given it.
DACA went into effect in 2012; before that the young people now protected by DACA were no different from any other illegal immigrants. But if the Republicans don’t renew this special status given to them by Obama on a temporary basis, then, according to the liberal media, they are evil and uncaring.
If that is true, wasn’t Obama evil and uncaring for not making sure they received their special status on a permanent basis? Why didn’t Obama give the DACA recipients a path to citizenship if that is the only humane thing to do?
What the Republicans need to make certain they don’t do is what Obama did, which is handle immigration issues in a piecemeal fashion. What this country needs is comprehensive immigration reform, and giving people who broke the country’s immigration laws a reward for breaking those laws is wrong.
If the people who broke the law and came into this country illegally are going to receive special status because they violated the laws of this country, all of those people who have applied to legally immigrate to the US and been denied should also receive special status for obeying the laws. It doesn’t make any sense to reward the lawbreakers and punish the law abiders.
It is unfortunate that some people who grew up in this country will have to move to a country that they don’t know, but isn’t that exactly what their parents chose to do when they moved to the US illegally – move them to a country where many, if not most of them, did not speak the language and where many left the protection of their friends and family behind?
*****
The mainstream media said President Donald J. Trump was crazy to call Korean strongman Kim Jong Un “little rocket man” and make fun of him in the media. The liberal pundits said that Trump was going to start a war by sending aircraft carriers to sit within striking distance of North Korea.
But look at the result of not backing down. North Korea is now talking to South Korea for the first time in two years.
Rather than bringing about war, as the mainstream media said Trump’s attitude toward North Korea would do, Trump brought North Korea back to the negotiating table.
It is always wise to negotiate from strength, and what Trump made abundantly clear is that North Korea could not survive a fight with the US. Kim evidently got the message and is now willing to negotiate.
*****
Here is yet another example of why Trump has to drain the swamp.
During the administration of President George W. Bush, the Clinton Foundation was investigated. The person in charge of the investigation was Bob Mueller, the director of the FBI. The person overseeing the investigation for the Justice Department was Jim Comey.
Trump fired Comey as FBI director. Comey then leaked memos to The New York Times, at least one of which was classified, in order to get a special prosecutor appointed to investigate the Trump campaign.
Who did Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein hire to be the special prosecutor? Mueller. So Rosenstein hired Mueller to vindicate their friend Comey who had been fired. Is that not incredibly incestuous? Is it even possible that Mueller could investigate Trump, who fired his good friend Comey, in a fair and unbiased manner?
So Mueller is essentially investigating allegations made by his friend Comey about Trump, apparently based on a report paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign.
By the way, when Mueller and Comey investigated the Clinton Foundation, they didn’t find anything amiss.
Could it possibly be true that Mueller was the best man for the job of special prosecutor? Wouldn’t it have been far better for everyone if Rosenstein had hired a prosecutor who was not good friends with several of the people involved?
To get a job at the Department of Justice these days, do you have to have worked for Obama and made contributions to the Hillary Clinton campaign?
This whole thing is beyond absurd. It’s time for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to step in and tell Mueller to bring his investigation to a close. Mueller’s been going at it since May and he has, according to all reports, found zero evidence that there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. Despite what the mainstream media would have the American people believe, there is no law against someone involved in a presidential campaign speaking to a Russian.
What the American people need to know is if the Trump dossier, paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, was used in anyway to get Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants to wiretap the Trump campaign. If that was done then we have evidence of an attempted palace coup by the FBI and people need to be fired. Some of those people, and it appears that Comey may be one of them, need to go to jail.
If Comey’s decision on the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails was made with political considerations then he needs to go to prison for a long time because it is not the job of the FBI to use its immense power to influence political campaigns.
Such action tears at the very fabric of this nation. And if it is found that the director of the FBI was involved in such tactics that put our entire form of government in danger, then the FBI needs to be destroyed and put back together again. The people who worked with Comey who knew what he was doing need to be gone from any position in government.
If that is the case, then an independent investigation will need to be done to determine if the Justice Department prosecuted some people and didn’t prosecute others based on their political beliefs.
And, of course, along with all of this, someone needs to not only complete the investigation of the Clinton Foundation but find out how an organization that appears to have violated many, most or perhaps all of the laws governing foundations and charitable giving operated so long without being investigated by any of the numerous enforcement agencies that govern such organizations.
*****
Most people would not call themselves a genius. But then again, Trump may be a lot of things but he is definitely not most people. According to the standard definition of genius, I don’t see any reason why Trump doesn’t qualify as both a political genius and a financial genius.
Trump, with no experience and little political advice, took on the best the Republican Party could throw at him and beat them all.
The political experts were consistently wrong about Trump.
They said he was a flash in the pan who would quickly fade once the voters became more serious about the election. They said that as soon as the field narrowed, Trump would start losing because he had about 30 percent of the voters but would never attract any more.
After Trump won enough delegates for the nomination, the experts said he would never win the nomination because he had not spent enough time organizing at the precinct and state level.
Once he had the nomination, they said that Hillary Clinton would beat him by a significant margin.
As late as Election Day, some were predicting a Hillary Clinton landslide and discussing how long her coattails would be. They predicted that because of Trump the Democrats would win a majority in the Senate and possibly the House.
Trump continued throughout it all to do what he had been doing from the beginning – campaigning like a madman and getting in front of as many people everyday as possible.
It turned out Trump was the political genius and all of the high paid political pundits didn’t know half as much about politics as Trump. I don’t see why that wouldn’t qualify him as a political genius.
Trump was not born poor. His father was a successful real estate developer. But Trump turned millions into billions, and if that were easy then there would be a lot more billionaires.
Trump is worth $3 billion, $5 billion, maybe $8 billion. But if real estate prices keep going up, he’s going to be worth a lot more when he leaves the White House than when he entered.
I would certainly appear that his financial success qualifies him to be called a financial genius.
Trump, like former President Obama before him, could be considered insane except they were both right.
For someone who in 2004 was a little known state senator in Illinois to think that in 2008 he could be president of the United States and the most powerful man in the world would be insane, except that it was true.
Trump could be placed in the same category. For a real estate developer and reality television show star to think he could parlay that into being president of the United States would be insane, except it also turned out to be true.
*****
An Associated Press article last weekend was critical of Trump for the high turnover rate at the White House and in the upper levels of his government.
Didn’t they listen to what Trump said when he was running for office? He said he was going to “drain the swamp.”
Evidently the folks in the mainstream media didn’t understand what Trump meant. Trump was not talking about a land reclamation project when he said drain the swamp. He was talking about getting rid of the entrenched government in Washington, DC.
I can see how it could be confusing because what is now Washington, DC, was originally a swamp. There is a reason that the Capitol Building is on a hill.
The people who actually run the government are not the elected officials who come and go at the whims of their constituents. The government is run by long-time bureaucrats who go to Washington as young bright professionals and leave 30 years later, often as embittered people who know how the government actually works, and it isn’t a pretty sight.
I heard a former State Department employee talking about how Trump was destroying the State Department. Good. The State Department needs to be shaken up. I’m sure there are a lot of fine, hardworking people in the State Department, but there are also a lot of people who don’t do the country credit when they represent the US to the world.
*****
With the Republicans in control of the government, the mainstream media are constantly trashing partisanship. The mainstream media didn’t have a problem with partisanship when Obamacare was passed without a single Republican vote, but today it is terrible.
There is nothing wrong with partisanship; in fact, it’s hard to see how the government would function without it.
Imagine if all 435 members of the House of Representatives were unaffiliated and had no political ties to each other, and there was no national organization recruiting and funding candidates who agreed with its political views.
If everyone in Congress were elected in a completely independent election, how would anyone ever get a bill through Congress? Electing leadership would be difficult enough. To be elected speaker, a member of Congress would have to convince the majority that they were better than everyone else. You’d probably start with 100 people running for speaker.
And once a bill was drafted, there would be no natural constituency. Once a bill passed the House, there would be no one to push it through the Senate. The Senate, being smaller, would be a little easier to manage, but without political parties it would still be mass confusion.
If a bill did make it through the House and Senate, the president would have no political capital invested in the bill and no pressure to sign it.
Partisanship is, for all its faults, what makes the government operate.
*****
I don’t think there’s much doubt that Jared Kushner is in over his head, but I admire both him and his father-in-law for what they are trying to do.
Trump was elected president without the support of the usual suspects. What has traditionally happened in years when the new president is in the opposing party is the new president gets rid of everyone who is there and then fills the Cabinet and top positions with experienced politicians who helped him get elected, and with people who had worked for the last president of his party.
Trump had little support among top level Republicans. Jeb Bush was still pouting about the beating Trump gave him in the primary and his big brother George W. Bush took his side, which ruled out most of those loyal to the former president.
Trump found himself in alien territory with no one he could trust, so he did what many people do, he turned to his family for help. I think it’s admirable that Trump would ask for the help of his son-in-law, and that his son-in-law would say yes.
Trump was also in the unique position of knowing that he couldn’t trust the intelligence agencies to give him good information since, as we all know now, they were working hard to keep him from being elected.
*****
The goal is to be a nation of laws, which means everyone in the eyes of the law is treated the same. It’s the reason Lady Justice wears a blindfold. It is not supposed to matter who you are, who you know or how much money you have. The law is supposed to be enforced uniformly.
That is the goal and a goal that is not often reached. We all know that wealthy, influential people are not treated the same as poor people who don’t personally know any powerful people.
But the goal remains the same, which means the legal system has to constantly be striving for the goal.
In the case of the FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s emails, the FBI leadership completely lost sight of the goal and treated Hillary Clinton and her aides with deference, as if we were not a nation of laws and they were royalty.
The investigation wasn’t run by the FBI agents that normally run investigations. It was controlled out of FBI headquarters. The decision on what the investigation would determine – that no laws were broken – was decided by Comey before the investigation was complete.
Law enforcement is supposed to follow the facts in an investigation, not determine what the results are before the investigation and then pick and choose the facts that fit the predetermined result.
We know that is what Comey did in this investigation.
No one was charged with destroying evidence, or even charged with destroying government property, although the investigation proved both were done.
No one was charged with violation of the laws concerning the handling of classified information, although Hillary Clinton and her aides ignored the laws and the investigation showed they treated classified documents no differently than non-classified documents.
Other people in the government have been prosecuted, convicted and sent to prison for far less grievous violations of the classified document laws than committed by Hillary Clinton and her staff.
There is absolute proof that people working for Hillary Clinton lied to the FBI when they were interviewed, but no one was charged with lying to the FBI, which is a felony.
Perhaps Hillary Clinton was telling the truth when she reportedly testified that she didn’t understand the different levels of classified documents and was not aware of the markings that indicated a document was classified. Perhaps she was telling the truth, but it is difficult to believe that this woman who is supposed to be the smartest woman in the world and served in the US Senate and as secretary of state didn’t know what a classified document was.
We don’t know what Hillary Clinton actually said to the FBI investigators because there is no record of her testimony – a sure sign that the FBI had no intention of prosecuting her. Whoever heard of interrogating someone suspected of committing a crime and not keeping a record of that interrogation?
*****
According to The New York Times, the current investigation by a special prosecutor of the collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin came about because an unpaid volunteer in the Trump campaign got drunk and was spouting off in a bar to a diplomat from Australia. This diplomat then went to the FBI with this bar gossip and, according to the narrative, the result is a special prosecutor investigating everybody and everything that has anything to do with the current president.
Is this a believable story? Does the FBI really devote enormous resources to investigating bar rumors?
I wasted much of my youth in bars and know from long experience that around closing time you can hear the most unbelievable tales imaginable. If the FBI is going to start investigating every allegation made by drunks in bars we are going to need a whole lot more FBI agents.
Maybe the FBI should keep a couple agents at Bullfeathers on Capitol Hill where a lot of congressional staffers hang out and see what they hear around closing. I would imagine after a couple of Fridays they would have enough for 20 FISA warrants and a host of special prosecutors.
*****
The 2016 election is still under investigation and if someone doesn’t step in to bring some sanity to the investigation it will still be going on when the country is preparing to choose Trump’s successor in 2024.
As it’s 2018, an election year for Congress, predictions are flying around about how the Democrats are going to win back the Senate and the House.
It’s too early for sensible people to make predictions, since nobody even knows who the candidates will be, but that doesn’t stop mainstream media pundits from making their predictions because they don’t need any facts.
The predictions are pretty similar election after election, and like an economist who predicts a huge recession every year, sometimes they are right.
The predictions are that the Democrats are going to have a great year and win back the Senate and possibly the House. This was the same prediction that the mainstream media pundits made in 2016 and in 2014.
But the Democrats have cut their own throats as far as 2018 is concerned.
The Republican tax reform – which was passed in the House and Senate without a single Democratic vote – is already having an effect on the economy and it hasn’t gone into effect yet. The effect it is having now is based on what business owners believe it will do.
This tax reform – which amounts to allowing people to keep and spend more of the money they earn – is going to boost the economy because people who have more are going to spend more, invest more, give more to charity and generally put that money into the economy.
A few people are going to hide more money under their mattresses, which won’t help anybody and probably ruin their backs, but the overwhelming majority of people are going to do something with that money.
As the economy picks up, wages will increase the way they should – not because the government decides that they should, but because employers will have to pay more to hire good workers. During the Obama years, jobs were scarce. People who had jobs were scared they would lose them and employers knew that they could fill any vacancy they had easily and probably be able to pay a new worker less. They didn’t give raises because so many businesses were struggling to stay afloat and because they didn’t need to raise wages to hire employees.
When the economy picks up, all that reverses and it becomes an employees’ market where employees know they can go out and get another job that might pay more than where they are. Employers give raises to keep good employees because they know how hard it is to hire new employees.
The result is that next fall more people are going to be employed and more people are going to be making more money. The Republicans will get all the credit for the economic improvement.
What is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi going to say?
I believe it will prove to be a major political blunder. People rarely vote against their pocketbooks. Trump has already made a considerable improvement to the economy by removing thousands of the burdensome regulations that the Obama administration had placed on businesses.
With fewer regulations and lower taxes, the economy is set to take off and it will be clear to everyone except possibly Pelosi that the economic boom is due to the Republicans.
*****
Attorney General Sessions says that the Justice Department will enforce federal laws concerning marijuana. It’s his job to enforce federal law, not to make the law, so this is something Congress is going to have to work out.
Prohibition, which required a constitutional amendment to make alcohol sales illegal, didn’t work and the laws prohibiting marijuana haven’t worked either. The federal government should get out of the marijuana ban enforcement business and leave it entirely up to the states.
If states want to make marijuana legal – as Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Nevada have done – they should be allowed to do so. If it leads to more drug addiction and bigger drug problems those states may reverse course, but it’s hard to see how it will.
Marijuana is readily available everywhere in the country whether it is legal or not. Certainly making it legal will lead to increased use, but will middle-aged people who decide to smoke some pot on the weekends suddenly decide to start using harder drugs?
What seems likely to happen is that those states that have legalized marijuana are going to start bringing in so much revenue from taxes that other states will follow suit. It seems likely this will be like the state lottery business, where even states with a majority against a lottery like North Carolina found a way to legalize the lottery because they couldn’t stand to see so much of their money going to neighboring states.
The first state on the East Coast to legalize marijuana is likely to make a fortune in taxes as folks from nearby states, or those just passing through, decide to make a legal purchase and figure the odds of getting caught with a small amount of marijuana in their home state is nearly none.
