Addressing the nation Tuesday night,
President Donald Trump made his case for Congress to pass a bill funding border security and a physical barrier along the southern border to reopen the government.
Trump pointedly noted that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer,
D-N.Y.,
has previously supported building a physical barrier along areas of the southern border where law enforcement officials say it is needed.
"
Democrats in Congress have refused to acknowledge the crisis.
And they have refused to provide our brave border agents with the tools they desperately need to protect our families and our nation.
The federal government remains shut down for one reason and one reason only:
because Democrats will not fund border security."
He's waiting on Democrats in Congress to vote for policies needed to secure the border.
What Trump needed to do - and what he accomplished - was to take his case to the people of the American electorate who live outside the D.C. media bubble,
who don't follow the minute-by-minute politics of the Swamp because they have lives to live.
Trump needed to go past media filters,
speak clearly,
show that illegal immigration is a problem,
show he has a solution ready,
and put the onus on the Democrats to respond.
Not only did Pelosi and Schumer look ghoulish on TV,
but they agreed to President Trump's premise that there is a need to secure the border - and then denied that Congress needs to fund the policies law enforcement is asking for.
https://www.conservativereview.com/news/trump-confronts-the-democrats-makes-the-stronger-case-for-securing-the-border/
They're trying to make out that the immigration morass which they ignored for almost four decades began with President Donald Trump's prime time Humanitarian and Security Crisis at the Southern Border address to the public last night.
Even in the face of the 63-million votes that got Trump elected president and in the reality of the best U.S. economy since Ronald Reagan,
the Democrats are trying to make the long-suffering masses believe that no one was ever murdered by migrants making it in over the southern border;
that the border continues to be the major base for drug smuggling and human trafficking;
that children and women are not the biggest victims of vicious human coyote predators.
The Democrats with a 98%
mainstream and social media approval are in Defiant Denial Extremis,
a collective state from which there is no known return.
Easy for the Dems to live in a defiant denial state when it is not one of their loved ones whose lives were robbed by migrants slipping in over an unprotected border,
or one of the 300 dying daily from the border's ongoing and disturbing drug smuggling business.
"
Our southern border is a pipeline for vast quantities of illegal drugs including meth,
heroin,
cocaine and fentanyl.
Every week,
300 citizens are killed by heroin alone,
90%
of which floods across from our southern border.
More Americans will die from drugs this year than were killed in the entire Vietnam War.".
In their lust to keep power,
the Democrats don't have a heart,
and many,
God help us,
have no soul.
In addition to having no hearts and no souls,
they have no policies,
and no platform aside from the unfeeling,
do-or-die,
undemocratic one that demands the take down of President Donald J. Trump.
https://canadafreepress.com/article/heartless-no-soul-democrats-media-label-the-president-a-liar-before-he-even
It is no stretch to argue that without his vow to build a wall on our border with Mexico,
Donald Trump would never have been elected president.
Opposition to a border wall takes the form of exasperation and snark but little in the way of argumentation.
Senator Charles Schumer,
in the Democratic response to the president,
called the wall "
Ineffective and unnecessary."
Opponents of the idea of a physical structure impeding unwanted migration claim that they support border security wholeheartedly-it's just that walls don't work.
What evidence is there that walls-for millennia the most basic unit of construction and defense-are ineffective?
A wall,
or fence,
runs along much of the border near population centers like San Diego and El Paso,
and these barriers appear to work,
to the extent that a partial wall can be said to work.
Saudi Arabia has a wall on its border with Yemen and has begun construction of a wall on its Iraq border,
too.
Once you have conceded that border security is essential,
as Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi supposedly do,
how can you oppose a wall,
when it's clear that without one,
the border will remain unsecured?
The border-protection agents already have drones,
sensors,
and other "
Smart"
technology that opponents suggest would be better than a physical structure.
If no progress is made toward an agreement,
Trump will have two options:
further temporizing of his position,
up to and including concession of defeat;
or attempt to exercise presidential authority-subject to legal review-to declare a national emergency and build the wall on his own.
https://www.city-journal.org/trump-border-wall
In return,
the NYPD did favors for the rat,
Jona Rechnitz,
and co-conspirator Jeremy Reichberg.
"
Love you brother,"
wrote de Blasio in an email to Rechnitz the day after his 2014 inauguration as mayor.
Why not?
Rechnitz himself had been showing de Blasio a lot of love,
bundling more than $
41,000 for the mayor's campaign.
The New York Post reports that Rechnitz and his allies raised upward of $
250,000 for entities linked to de Blasio.
Mayor de Blasio has spent the last two years running away from Reichberg and Rechnitz.
Last month,
the Post revealed that it had located more than twenty undisclosed emails between Rechnitz and the mayor.
The new emails show that de Blasio "
Had a much cozier relationship with Jona Rechnitz than he has admitted,"
the Post reported.
https://www.judicialwatch.org/bulletins/the-mayor-the-rat-the-nypd/
Earlier today,
Cato sued the Securities and Exchange Commission in federal court challenging the SEC's policy of imposing perpetual gag orders on settling defendants in civil enforcement actions.
The clear point of that policy is to prevent people with the best understanding of how the SEC uses its vast enforcement powers from sharing that knowledge with others.
The author now wants to tell his side of the story,
and Cato wants to publish it as a book-but both are prevented from doing so by a provision in the SEC settlement agreement that forbids the author from "
Mak[ing]
any public statement denying,
directly or indirectly,
any allegation in the [
SEC's]
complaint or creating the impression that the complaint is without factual basis."
This provision appears to be standard not only in SEC settlements,
but with the CFTC,
the CFPB,
and possibly other regulatory agencies as well.
Today 97 percent of federal criminal convictions are obtained through plea bargains,
and a similar percentage of SEC civil enforcement actions are settled instead of adjudicated.
Perpetual gag orders like the ones routinely imposed by the SEC,
CFTC,
and CFPB as a condition of settlement are utterly antithetical to principles of good government and,
not coincidentally,
to the First Amendment's protections of free speech and a free press as well.
Accordingly,
we at Cato have teamed up with our friends at the Institute for Justice,
which represents Cato in its challenge to the SEC's unconstitutional policy of demanding perpetual gag orders as a condition of settlement in civil enforcement actions.
Together,
we aim to strike down not only the specific gag order at issue in this case,
but all perpetual gag orders in all existing civil settlements with federal agencies-and to terminate the government's policy of silencing those whom it accuses of wrongdoing.
https://www.cato.org/blog/cato-sues-sec-over-gag-orders
An immigration tariff would reduce all of those burdens,
diminish the uncertainty of the legal immigration process,
and produce a fairer and more transparent immigration system for all.
An immigration tariff does not have to be a separate visa category like a gold card to improve the immigration system.
Just as an export tariff on wool was an improvement over an export ban,
an immigration tariff is an improvement over the current immigration system's caps and numerical quotas.
The immigration tariff's gold card would be a more market-based visa than any current visa because it charges a price and allows the quantity of visas to automatically adjust on the basis of domestic supply and demand.
The tariff would distort the price of the visa and create deadweight loss,
which is the value of goods and services not produced as a result of market distortions such as taxes.
Congress could decide to set different tariff rates based on the immigrant's occupation,
but such a system would eliminate many of the economic benefits of an immigration tariff.
The economic inefficiency created by an immigration tariff would be less than that created by a numerical cap,
unless the tariff rate were so high that even fewer immigrants would enter relative to the current system.
https://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/case-immigration-tariff-how-create-price-based-visa-category
California's new governor is promising the most populous state will be a "
Sanctuary to all who seek it"
in a direct affront to President Donald Trump's immigration policies.
Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom challenged the Trump administration repeatedly as he was sworn in to office Monday,
particularly on immigration.
The former San Francisco mayor became the state's 40th governor,
succeeding the term-limited Jerry Brown.
"
People's lives,
freedom,
security,
the water we drink,
the air we breathe - they all hang in the balance,"
Newsom,
51,
told a crowd of hundreds packed into a tent outside the state Capitol.
He says children should not be "
Ripped away from their parents"
at the border,
and they also shouldn't be left hungry while Trump pledges to spend billions of dollars on "
a wall that should never be built."
While he avoided referencing Trump by name,
Newsom referred to the administration as corrupt and incompetent and promised California will "
Write America's future."
Even as he needled Trump,
Newsom offered an overture to voters in rural California,
millions of whom voted for Trump and John Cox,
Newsom's Republican rival in November.
https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2019/01/07/gavin-newsom-california-governor-2/
