op ed review 7/22
Border Patrol union chief praises 'miraculous' drop in
illegal immigration under Trump
Morale among U.S. Border Patrol agents is at an all-time
high …..”agents felt hamstrung for years under the Obama administration´s
catch-and-release policies at the border. "
President Trump has cancelled the Obama covert CIA program
giving weapons to ISIS and al-Qaeda in Syria.
Food Stamp Use Falls to Lowest Level in Seven Years
President Trump´s top legislative priority was dealt a
potentially fatal blow Monday night as two more Republican senators announced
their opposition to the party´s health care overhaul. Trump quickly called on
Republicans to simply repeal Obamacare and begin work on a new health care
plan, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announced he would try to do
so.
The Senate Republican effort to repeal ObamaCare is the victim
of a seriously flawed report saying it would have cost 22 million people their
health insurance.
Gloats the New York Times:
“Republicans relearned a lesson that has bedeviled them since the New
Deal: An American entitlement, once established, can almost never be retracted.”
The Republican Party in Congress could be on the verge of
losing the 2018 midterm elections…..The GOP crowd now looks like that little
circus car disgorging clown after clown after clown, each one honking his horn
and offering a personal version of Obamacare repeal.
Senior GOP officials spent much of Tuesday surveying the
anger and frustration within their own party and taking calls from bitterly
disappointed contributors, some of whom threatened to turn off the cash spigot.
Democrats have their own problems: Under the leadership of former Obama official
Tom Perez, a new FEC report reveals the DNC finished the month of June $3.3
million in debt. They’re broke.
Texas Republicans take aim at liberal cities
In a hard-hitting essay, Philadelphia Archbishop Charles
Chaput has joined the dozens of Christian leaders who have denounced the
ignorant and insulting article published last week by the Vatican-vetted
journal, La Civiltà Cattolica. The essay paints an offensive caricature of
conservative Christians in the United States as politically ambitious racists
who promote an “ecumenism of hate” and long to impose a theocratic state.
The Catholic Church is a boat “on the verge of capsizing,” said
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
Sen. McCain diagnosed with brain tumor
Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Thursday that he did not
plan to step down after a public rebuke by President Trump, saying he continued
to carry out the president’s directives as the country’s top law enforcement
officer.
The group behind last week´s protest against the National
Rifle Association over rhetoric it claimed was a "direct endorsement of
violence" wished a convicted cop killer and fugitive a happy birthday on
Monday.
"Loretta Lynch Ordered Illegal Wiretap Against Trump
Campaign." The irony of last week´s Big Leak on Don Jr. (likely by Robert
Mueller) is that it is helping reveal that the real criminal activity was by
the Democratic Party.
___________________________________________________________________
COLUMN OF THE WEEK
William Murchison
7/18
John McCain’s blood clot, which caused Republican Senate
leadership to suspend formal consideration of Obamacare replacement, isn’t by
far the Grand Old Party’s gravest malady. Nothing in the diagnostic manual of
political afflictions compares with the near-complete disappearance of the
party’s backbone.
If it’s not one thing causing GOP senators and governors to
equivocate on the repeal and replacement of Obamacare, it’s something else:
Medicaid expansion vs. Medicaid contraction; cheaper vs. costlier insurance
policies; eligibility for coverage of pre-existing conditions; contraception
coverage; etc.
Meanwhile a united Democratic Senate bloc watches with
ill-disguised amusement. This is how you get things done in an age of political
acrimony — you just do ’em. Good things, bad things, it doesn’t matter. You do
’em and wait to see what happens. Such was Democratic strategy when Obamacare
was enacted — everything rolled together in a package under Harry Reid’s and,
especially, Nancy Pelosi’s tutelage. Collaboration with the Enemy — Republicans
— was a hanging offense. No Democrat opted for the discipline of Nancy’s noose.
Obamacare passed without a single Republican vote cast in its favor, or even
one Democratic vote cast against it.
The circumstances of Obamacare’s birth indicated both the
strength of the opposition to repeal and the necessity of Republican unity in
overcoming that opposition. Alas, Democrats have proved to love Obamacare more
than Republicans, as a body, detest it.
The likelihood swells daily that the whole repeal-replace movement, once
instrumental to the Republican political recovery of 2010-16, is a thing of hot
air; an exercise in breast-beating and theoretical thinking. It becomes
obvious, once again, that Republicans and Democrats are two parties — separate
and distinct, with different drive wheels, different motives. They play
different games.
Democrats are naturals when it comes to offense; they love
to batter down doors and burn down barns to get done those things they have
decided for one reason or another need doing, such as the creation of a program
of federally subsidized health care.
Republicans by temperament play defense; they hold that line
— or fail to hold it — and then fall back to work out terms that might make the
situation a little less disagreeable than it was before. Republicans are never
entirely unhappy with half a loaf. They think on how much less than half they
could have gotten. The notion of wrestling away the whole loaf and digesting it
happily in front of the Democrats inspires comparatively few Republicans.
They’d rather deal — a preference that comes naturally to the business,
front-office types who make the party their home.
Here’s the problem with that preference. Rather, I should
say there are two problems. The first is short-term. The GOP swore in blood to
get rid of Obamacare. It starts to look as if a number of the oath-takers had
their fingers crossed behind their backs. They didn’t mean make the blasted
thing vanish; they meant get rid of the bad parts and keep the good ones
(assuming any can be found). Which isn’t what they, or most of them, said. They
should have interesting explanations to make at election time to customers —
i.e., voters — who feel double-crossed. We can henceforth trust the GOP to — do
what? Make more promises? With what effects?
The second problem is that Obamacare is correctly understood
as a Lamborghini ordered for a McDonald’s worker. The country can’t afford it;
witness the retreat from the insurance marketplace of companies unable to make
a profit by selling Obamacare policies. The remedy for which is, as always,
more federal borrowing and higher federal taxes to subsidize these unaffordable
policies: with the predictable result of helping Democrats whip up demand for a
so-called “single payer” system, with all medical expenses — all — paid by the
government.
Toward that gruesome, essentially un-American outcome we
will start tilting just as soon as enough backboneless Republicans sabotage the
unrecoverable chance to follow through with what they promised — the repeal and
replacement of Obamacare. Of course that was then, and this is now — right,
ladies and gentlemen of the Republican Senate majority? And could you speak a
little louder? It’s getting hard to hear.
____________________________________________________________________
OTHER COLUMNS
“On the cusp of a historic failure, the [GOP] has begun the
finger-pointing, and it’s hard to argue with any of it. The establishment is
right that Trump is incapable of true legislative leadership. The Trumpists are
right that the establishment is ineffectual. Conservatives are right that
moderates don’t really want to repeal Obamacare, whatever they’ve said in the
past. And pragmatists are right that a few conservatives are beholden to a
self-defeating purity.”
-Rich
Lowry
___________________________________________________________________
LEFTIST WATCH
It’s spelled out as clearly as can be. The decimation of the
Western World via a global immigration plan.”
NAACP leader Rev. Barber says praying
for President Trump 'borders on heresy'...
Imagine what this will do for race relations: HBO is
planning a series “Confederate” which imagines slavery as a modern-day
institution.
Sen. Kamala Harris, a potential 2020 Democratic presidential
candidate, met with top Clinton donors in the Hamptons. Harris’ meetings with
Clinton’s donors signal that they are rallying behind her as the 2020
Democratic presidential nominee.
__________________________________________________________________
GLOBALONEY
A new paper analyzing government temperature data says the
Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST) data published by NASA and NOAA are
"not a valid representation of reality." In fact, the three respected
scientists who published the paper hint strongly that the data may have been
fudged.
Scaremongering is what Gore does best, and fear is the
business model that has made him rich, though his every apocalyptic scenario
has failed to materialise.
___________________________________________________________
ARTICLES
Republicans may be consolidating behind President Donald
Trump—and against the legacy media—the more the establishment press
sensationalize their Russia coverage. Despite the legacy media’s wall-to-wall
coverage of various Russia-related “scandals” involving President Donald
Trump’s associates since April, “the number of Republicans and
Republican-leaning independents who think that the Russians sought to influence
the election, and that the Trump team intentionally helped them,” has plummeted
from 18 percent in April to nine percent today.
The lawyers arguing for criminalizing Donald Trump Jr.’s
meeting with a foreign national who wanted to volunteer information do not
realize just who they would have criminalized — every exchange of information
concerning a campaign involving any illegal immigrant in the country
(“undocumented” immigrant in media-speak) or foreign national around the world.
If these Trump bashing lawyers were right, they have just allowed the mass
indictment and incarceration of most politically active Dreamers, as well as all
the political groups that solicit their campaign involvement, even if merely
for information.
_____________________________________________________________________
WISE WORDS
“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the
germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”
-Thomas Jefferson
posted by gary at
8:40 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home