Democrats Threaten To Shut Down Government Because They Need Illegal Alien Votes

January 10th, 2018

The most recent U.S. temporary funding bill runs out on January 19, and Democrats are making noises that they’ll force a shutdown if they don’t get illegal alien amnesty for Obama’s “Dreamers.”

If memory serves, Republicans didn’t particularly achieve much or come out smelling like a rose for their temporary shutdown gamesmanship under Obama.

A recent memo co-authored by former Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri confirms what everyone already knew: Democrats want to legalize “Dreamers” not because of any high moral principles, but because they need their votes:

The Center For American Progress (CAP) Action Fund circulated a memo on Monday calling illegal immigrants brought here at a young age — so-called “Dreamers” — a “critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success.”

The memo, co-authored by former Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri, was sent around to allies calling on Democrats to “refuse to offer any votes for Republican spending bills that do not offer a fix for Dreamers and instead appropriate funds to deport them.”

President Donald Trump’s administration moved to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy in September, which former President Barack Obama instituted through executive order to keep immigrants who came here as children from being deported.

Trump called on Congress to find a legislative fix for young immigrants, or “Dreamers,” facing deportation. House lawmakers recently put forward a bipartisan DACA compromise bill that also claims to address worries over chain migration. However, it’s unclear if the bill will pass.

CAP Action’s memo says protecting DACA is not only a “moral imperative” for Democrats, it also key to getting votes.

“The fight to protect Dreamers is not only a moral imperative, it is also a critical component of the Democratic Party’s future electoral success,” reads Palmieri’s memo, obtained by The Daily Caller News Foundation.

“If Democrats don’t try to do everything in their power to defend Dreamers, that will jeopardize Democrats’ electoral chances in 2018 and beyond,” reads the memo. “In short, the next few weeks will tell us a lot about the Democratic Party and its long-term electoral prospects.”

(Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ. )

President Donald Trump has been making noises about a “grand compromise” on immigration that will include an end to chain migration, an end to the visa lottery, and building the border wall. Democrats are having none of that, insisting they want a clean “Dreamer” amnesty in exchange for generously allowing the federal government to continue spending insanely more money than it actually has. RINOS are scurrying around wondering how they can sneak amnesty into a bill and not get primaried into oblivion. Conservative are saying a “Dreamer” amnesty will fracture the Trump coalition.

My guess is that this is all much ado about nothing, and that Democrats will cave on forcing a shutdown due to midterm election backlash fear. But #TheResistance has so deranged them you never know, and the Trump Russia Fantasy clearly isn’t getting the job done.

Tune in 9 days from now for another exciting episode of As the Amnesty Turns…

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Posted in Border Control, Democrats | No Comments »

David Brooks Finds Half A Box Of Clues

January 9th, 2018

Hey, remember David Brooks, the New York Times “conservative” columnist who gushed about Obama’s creased pants leg? Conservatives pretty much stopped paying attention to him then, be he went on to be (naturally) a #NeverTrumper.

So it’s interesting to find Brooks debunking the excesses of #NeverTrump:

People who go into the White House to have a meeting with President Trump usually leave pleasantly surprised. They find that Trump is not the raving madman they expected from his tweetstorms or the media coverage. They generally say that he is affable, if repetitive. He runs a normal, good meeting and seems well-informed enough to get by.

For “repetitive,” I direct people to read (yet again) Scott Adams explaining how Trump uses standard persuasion techniques, including, yes, repetition.

The White House is getting more professional. Imagine if Trump didn’t tweet.

Imagine if Trump didn’t keep pantsing our intellectual class by trolling them into overreacting and letting him dominate the news cycle.

The craziness of the past weeks would be out of the way, and we’d see a White House that is briskly pursuing its goals: the shift in our Pakistan policy, the shift in our offshore drilling policy, the fruition of our ISIS policy, the nomination for judgeships and the formation of policies on infrastructure, DACA, North Korea and trade.

It’s almost as if there are two White Houses. There’s the Potemkin White House, which we tend to focus on: Trump berserk in front of the TV, the lawyers working the Russian investigation and the press operation. Then there is the Invisible White House that you never hear about, which is getting more effective at managing around the distracted boss.

I sometimes wonder if the Invisible White House has learned to use the Potemkin White House to deke us while it changes the country.

“Learn.” As if this wasn’t part of Trump’s strategy from the git-go.

I mention these inconvenient observations because the anti-Trump movement, of which I’m a proud member, seems to be getting dumber. It seems to be settling into a smug, fairy tale version of reality that filters out discordant information. More anti-Trumpers seem to be telling themselves a “Madness of King George” narrative: Trump is a semiliterate madman surrounded by sycophants who are morally, intellectually and psychologically inferior to people like us.

You know #NeverTrumper has reached an apex of arrogance when David Brooks calls them smug. It’s like having Liberace declare that someone is “way too gay.” And believing that people whose politics differ from yours are “morally, intellectually and psychologically inferior to people like us” is pretty much the 21st Century’s Democratic Party platform.

The anti-Trump movement suffers from insularity. Most of the people who detest Trump don’t know anybody who works with him or supports him. And if they do have friends and family members who admire Trump, they’ve learned not to talk about this subject. So they get most of their information about Trumpism from others who also detest Trumpism, which is always a recipe for epistemic closure.

“Epistemic closure” seems to be the motto of our entire anti-Trump chattering classes these days.

To be sure, much of the rest of the piece is the usual elite disdain for those uncouth ruffians Trump has empowered:

There’s a hierarchy of excellence in every sphere. There’s a huge difference between William F. Buckley and Sean Hannity, between the reporters at this newspaper and a rumor-spreader. Part of this struggle is to maintain those distinctions, not to contribute to their evisceration.

“Never forget that we cultural elites are your betters! Your betters!”

There remains a huge difference between William F. Buckley, Jr. and David Brooks.

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Liberals And Trump’s Twitter Traps

January 8th, 2018

I’ve written before about how how President Donald Trump uses his Twitter account to dominate the news cycle. After more than two years of Trump using the same techniques over and over again, you’d think liberals would learn not to fall for it.

You’d be wrong.

Today’s case in point:

“Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart.”

That’s some God Mode-level trolling right there. Liberals keep complaining about how the media pay too much attention to Trump’s tweets…and then go on to react to Trump’s tweets, because they can’t help themselves.

One of the animating reasons behind #TheResistance and #NeverTrump is an absolute bedrock convictions that they, being smart and sophisticated, are ever-so much smarter than that bumbling doofus Trump. By offering up “being, like, really smart,” Trump once again baits liberals into responding to him, dominating yet another news cycle. One wonders if he does this instinctively, or if he spends time editing them for maximum troll effect. Maybe he had “I’m really smart” then threw in the “like, really” for maximum troll effect.

He’s like a bored teenager dangling a bit of yarn in front of a kitten, knowing that there’s no way it can resist the lure…

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Posted in Democrats | No Comments »

Pat Condell on Britain’s Hate Speech Police

January 7th, 2018

“Hate speech is free speech that hurts people’s feelings. It’s illegal in Britain because we don’t have a First Amendment to protect us from this kind of arbitrary police state law and the police, for reasons best known to themselves, pay special attention to Internet hate speech. They’re always telling us how seriously they take it. It’s almost as if they prioritize it over real crime for some kind of ideological reason, because it seems they’re all over social media combing out thought criminals like head lice.”

“It seems that you’re as likely to be arrested in Britain today for being abusive on Twitter as you are for gang raping a child. Maybe even more so.”

Also this:

“Recently on Channel 4 News we heard that the grooming gangs in Rotherham are still operating openly for all to see, including the police. And they wonder why they’re losing trust and respect.”

The Religion of Peace and the UK progressive thought police organization “Common Purpose” puts in an appearance as well.

Condell also has a rant called “A Word To The Criminal Migrant.” Unfortunately, due to the oppressive atmosphere of progressive censorship, YouTube has made it so that I can no longer embed it here, so click on that as well.

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Posted in Crime, Jihad, video | 1 Comment »

Monkey Business

January 6th, 2018

Heh:

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Posted in Media Watch, Uncategorized | No Comments »

LinkSwarm for January 5, 2018

January 5th, 2018

Happy New Year!

  • How Donald Trump is restoring the S-curve.
  • What it’s like to be a New York Times reporter during the war on terror:

    Success as a reporter on the CIA beat inevitably meant finding out government secrets, and that meant plunging headlong into the classified side of Washington, which had its own strange dynamics.

    I discovered that there was, in effect, a marketplace of secrets in Washington, in which White House officials and other current and former bureaucrats, contractors, members of Congress, their staffers, and journalists all traded information. This informal black market helped keep the national security apparatus running smoothly, limiting nasty surprises for all involved. The revelation that this secretive subculture existed, and that it allowed a reporter to glimpse the government’s dark side, was jarring. It felt a bit like being in the Matrix.

    It’s a long and informative piece, even if you don’t accept all of reporter James Risen’s analysis. And it really does show how badly our national security agencies leak…

  • The recently discovered vulnerability in Intel chips is really, really bad. And fixing it requires about a 5-30% performance hit on every OS that runs atop Intel processors. (Here’s a nice layman description).
  • More on the same topic from Borepatch.
  • “Crazy” like a fox: “The tougher the sanctions and rhetoric from the United States, the more flexible North Korea is becoming.”
  • 40 companies offer Trump Tax Cut bonuses. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Germany outsources censorship. Evidently you’re not allowed to say anything critical of Muslims or “Muslim refugees,” ever. “How the Germans can’t see that such a law, in the hands of the wrong party, could be devastating is a mystery. I can only conclude such occurrences have no precedent in their country from which they could draw obvious lessons.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Scott Adams enumerates all the things President Donald Trump broke that needed breaking.
  • DACA isn’t what Democrats say it is.
  • Attorney General Jeff Sessions rescinds Obama-era memorandums on state-level legalized marijuana. Popehat thinks this is, at present, mostly cosmetic due to the Rohrabacher-Farr Amendment. I oppose federal marijuana prohibition on constitutional grounds: Regulating marijuana is not an enumerated power of the federal government, regulation is neither necessary nor proper (thus no 9th Amendment justification), and thus a matter entirely for the states absent any interstate commerce under the 10th Amendment.
  • “Mayor Sylvester Turner’s press secretary was suspended for two weeks without pay after she failed to turn over thousands of documents required to be released under Texas law. Darian Ward was asked to turn over emails relating to her work on non-city related projects, including a private side business called ‘Joy in Motion Productions.'” She must have gone to the Hillary Clinton School of Email FOIA compliance…
  • Dave Chappelle has a point. As gross, disgusting and socially unacceptable as having Louis C.K. masturbate on the phone with you is, if you let that dissuade you from pursuing a career in a field as hotly competitive as standup comedy, that’s on you. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • “Genetic Study Supports Carbohydrate-Insulin Model of Obesity.”
  • Perfect season.
  • Dibs.

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    Posted in Border Control, Crime, Democrats, Texas, unions | 2 Comments »

    Did Charlie Geren Operative File a False CPS Report Against Primary Opponent?

    January 4th, 2018

    This lawsuit alleges that an operative of Joe Straus ally Rep. Charlie Geren carried out one of the nastiest dirty campaign tricks of recent memory against primary opponent Bo French:

    Today Bo and Sheridan French filed suit against Charlie’s campaign staffer and well known democrat, David Sorensen, in a story that is very disturbing and challenges our sense of decency.

    On Friday February 26, 2016, 4 Days before the primary, CPS, along with a FTW police officer, showed up at the French residence with a complaint that their son had suffered a broken rib and allegations of physical abuse from Bo against the children. This was followed by repeat visits to the home on Saturday and Sunday. Oddly, once the election was over on that Tuesday, they never showed back up.

    The Frenches have filed a civil suit against Sorensen, claiming he filed the report with CPS, with the intent to gain an unfair advantage for the Charlie Geren campaign in the final days of the primary. The suit claims: Defamation/Libel; Business Disparagement; Intrusion of Seclusion; Invasion of Privacy; and Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress.

    According to the filing, Sorensen put his scheme into effect by supplying a false report to CPS claiming Mr. French’s youngest son had suffered broken ribs and that the son was not provided adequate medical care. It was further falsely reported that the police had responded to domestic abuse calls at the French residence in the past. CPS’s internal investigation found that the Frenches’ son never had any broken ribs and that the police had never at any time been called to the French residence. After nearly a year the CPS proceeding was closed without any further investigation of the Frenches, but not until after Mr. French lost to Sorensen’s employer in the primary election.

    Geren vehemently denies the charges:

    The Forth Worth Star-Telegram has more on the story, including that Sorensen worked for the political consulting firm Murphy Nasica.

    Geren has also criticized a Facebook page French put up mocking former Dalworthington Gardens Police Chief Bill Waybourn.

    French and Geren are fighting a rematch in this year’s District 99 Republican Primary.

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    Posted in Elections, Republicans, Texas | 1 Comment »

    Bosch Fawstin Suspended by Twitter

    January 3rd, 2018

    Artist Bosch Fawstin, the winner of the Draw Mohammed Contest in Garland (over which two jihadis managed to dirtnap themselves) has been suspended by Twitter.

    Says Fawstin:

    Twitter just suspended my account this morning, with no specific reason given to me besides their claim that I violated their rules for “hateful conduct”. I have been on twitter for a number of years, and I was able to earn the following of 13, 500 people. I really enjoy the platform and the interaction I get on it, outside of the death threats, which I’ve received over the years on Twitter, but which Twitter didn’t always deem objectionable, after I reported them. There are at least two individuals who’ve threatened me on Twitter who still have active Twitter accounts.

    I followed Fawstin on Twitter, and I never saw him post anything that could be construed as “hate speech” by a rational, neutral observer. An ex-Muslim, Fawstin was extremely critical of Islam, and it’s hard to believe that he wasn’t suspended merely for being critical of Islam, or for expressing his free speech rights in drawing Mohammed.

    Once again, Twitter appears to be using the fig leaf of “hate speech” to purge conservatives.

    Edited to Add:

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    Posted in Jihad, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

    Iran Roundup for January 2, 2018

    January 2nd, 2018

    Widespread protests against the corrupt theocratic regime continue across Iran, so here’s a roundup of news. Here’s a liveblog on the protests, courtesy of Austin Bay at Instapundit.

  • This piece makes the case that Iran’s corrupt theocratic government has used up all its remaining legitimacy:

    As with the Soviet Union in its last days, the Islamic Republic can no longer appeal to its ideals; it relies only on its security services for survival. That is deadly for a theocracy, by definition an ideological construct. Ideological authoritarian states need a vision of the future by which their enforcers can condone their own violence. The theocracy’s vast patronage system will not cure this crisis of legitimacy. In many ways, Mr. Rouhani was the ruling clergy’s last gasp, a beguiling mullah who could enchant Westerners while offering Iranians some hope. That hope has vanished.

  • “US gives Israel go-ahead to kill powerful Iranian general.” The would be the same Quds force commander Qassem Soleimani Obama saved three years ago in pursuit of his precious, asinine Iran deal. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • How President Donald Trump saw the Iranian protests coming. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Some pessimism about protestor’s chances:

    In Iran, the obstacles to success are daunting. Whereas most Middle Eastern countries are ruled by secular autocrats focused on repressing primarily Islamist opposition, Iran is an Islamist autocracy focused on repressing secular opposition. This dynamic—unarmed, unorganized, leaderless citizens seeking economic dignity and pluralism, versus a heavily armed, organized, rapacious ruling theocracy that espouses martyrdom—is not a recipe for success.

    And yet, against this inauspicious backdrop, Iran’s mushrooming anti-government protests—although so far much smaller in scale than the country’s 2009 uprising—have been unprecedented in their geographic scope and intensity. They began December 28 in Mashhad, a Shiite pilgrimage city often considered a regime stronghold, with protesters chanting slogans like “leave Syria alone, think about us.” They soon spread to Qom, Iran’s holiest city, where protesters expressed nostalgia for Reza Shah, the 20th-century modernizing autocrat who ruthlessly repressed the clergy. They continued in provincial towns, with thousands chanting, “we don’t want an Islamic Republic” in Najafabad, “death to the revolutionary guards” in Rasht, and “death to the dictator” in Khoramabad. They’ve since spread to Tehran, and hundreds have been arrested, the BBC reported, citing Iranian officials.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Iran Charges Russia With Selling Out its Air Defense Secrets to Israel. The Islamic Republic says Russia sold codes to Israel that neutralize its air defenses.” Attacking your primary arms supplier, and your ally Syria’s effective air force, is a pretty desperate look. If true, it also means that America (and probably Saudi Arabia) have those codes as well… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Obama toadies vs the Iranian people:

    In the US, former members of the Obama administration and the liberal media have determinedly downplayed the importance of the protests. They have insisted that President Donald Trump should stop openly supporting the protesters and so adopt former president Barack Obama’s policy of effectively siding with the Iranian regime against the Iranian people who seek its overthrow.

    These talking points have been pushed out into the media echo chamber by Obama’s former deputy national security adviser and strategic communications chief Ben Rhodes, his former national security adviser Susan Rice and former secretary of state John Kerry.

    Obama’s Middle East coordinator Philip Gordon stated them outright in an op-ed in The New York Times on Saturday. Gordon called on Trump “to keep quiet and do nothing” in response to the protests.

    In Gordon’s view, no matter how big their beef with the regime, the protesters hate the US more. And they really hate Trump.

    Gordon wrote, “Whatever Iranians think of their own government, they are unlikely to want as a voice for their grievances an American president who has relentlessly opposed economic relief for their country and banned them from traveling to the United States.”

    Just as Obama’s surrogates have repeated Gordon’s claims, so the Obama-supporting liberal media have gone out of their way to diminish the importance of the protests in their coverage of them and use Obama’s surrogates as their “expert” analysts to explain what is happening (or rather, distort what is happening) to their audiences.

    Obama administration officials have been so outspoken in their defense of the Iranian regime because they rightly view the prospect that the protesters will succeed in overthrowing the regime as a mortal threat to their legacy.

    Obama’s foreign policy rested on the assumption that the US was a colonialist, aggressive and immoral superpower. By their telling, the Iranians – like the Cubans and the Russians – were right to oppose the US due to its legacy of meddling in the internal affairs of other countries. This anti-American worldview informed the Obama administration’s conviction that it was incumbent on the US to make amends for its previous decades of foreign policy.

    Hence, Obama traveled the globe in 2009 and 2010 apologizing for the policies of his predecessors. Hence, Obama believed that the US had no moral right to stand with the Iranian people against the regime in the 2009 Green Revolution. As he saw it, anyone who stood with the US was no better than an Uncle Tom. Truly authentic foreign regimes were be definition anti-American. Since the Green Revolutionaries were begging for his support, by definition, they didn’t deserve it.

    Since the current wave on anti-regime protests began last Thursday, the liberal media have parroted the Obama alumni’s talking points because they feel that their war against Trump requires them to embrace Obama’s legacy just as they embraced his talking points and policies for eight years.

    After all, if Obama is not entirely infallible, then Trump cannot be entirely fallible. And if Trump may be partially right and Obama partially wrong, then their dispute may be a substantive rather than existential one. And so, the New York Times’ coverage of the most significant story in the world has deliberately distorted and downplayed events on the ground in Iran.

  • A relevant Twitter thread:

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad | No Comments »

    The Deafening Feminist Silence on Iran Protests

    January 1st, 2018

    Having implemented Sharia law, Theocratic Iran is one of the most repressive regimes in the world when it comes to women’s rights, and a wide variety of activities are prohibited to women simply because they are women.

    Now that widespread protests have broken out In Iran over the rejection of the Islamic Republic and greater rights for women, you might think that feminists organizations would be in the forefront of those clamoring for greater women’s rights.

    You would be wrong. They are, as usual, nattering on about the standard array of far-left causes having nothing to do with women’s rights.

    To drill down even further, I thought I would check the Twitter feeds of several prominent feminists. They too are silent on Iran:

    Once again, the unwillingness to speak out on Islam’s demonstrable treatment of women as second-class citizens has left American feminists with nothing to say about the most important woman’s rights struggle of the day. (That, and the Democratic Party’s insistence on defending Obama’s disasterous (and unconstitutional) Iran deal.)

    Feminism is only about “women’s rights” when they align with a far-left agenda.

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    Posted in Foreign Policy, Jihad, Social Justice Warriors | No Comments »

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