Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2017.
Reported by Eddie Zipperer | Updated 22 May 2017 at 6:31 AMURL of the original posting site: http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/hostile-media-desperate-to-derail-trumps-foreign-trip/
The logic of the previous administration went something like this: If America willfully weakened itself, the rest of the world would love us. For eight years we endured a strategy of scaling down the U.S. military, infecting it with politically correct nonsense, apologizing for America’s past, denying that America is exceptional, waffling on red lines, enabling the birth and proliferation of ISIS, and allowing rogue regimes such as Iran and North Korea to run amok.
As each “controversy” surfaces for its moment in the sun, bear in mind, these are the same outlets who thought reckless, feckless Obama could do no wrong.
Unfortunately, love — even if it were attainable — is of no geopolitical value. Only respect has value. Peace through strength is back, thanks to President Trump.
And respect was on display when King Salman of Saudi Arabia greeted President Trump at the airport in Riyadh, and he received red carpet treatment. It was a far cry from President Obama’s last visit where King Salman sent his distant nephew to pick up Obama at the airport. That disrespect was a result of President Obama’s willingness to trash our relationship with the Gulf State “sheikists” in order to make a ridiculous deal with the Shiite, death-to-America regime in Iran.
Now, President Trump is using his ambitious foreign trip — where he’ll visit the holy lands of three major world religions — to send the message that America is back and stands by its traditional allies.
But the mainstream media — the same that spent eight years enabling Obama’s 
fecklessness — aren’t having any part of the “America’s back” narrative. They’re beside themselves that the news cycle has shifted away from the anonymous source leaks they’ve been cramming down America’s throat and away from their Trump-Russia collusion fury. These are media determined to manufacture a narrative of failure regarding all aspects of Trump’s presidency.
Over the weekend, Byron York at the Washington Examiner reported on a Harvard study that quantified the anti-Trump bias of several mainstream media outlets. Of course, you don’t have to be a lab-coat-wearing, laboratory-dwelling scientist armed with an electron microscope and a mountain of grant money to figure that out. Just spend two minutes with any of those outlets, and you’ll be swimming in bias. When a supposedly objective news anchor such as CNN’s Anderson Cooper responds to contributor Jeffrey Lord by saying that if Trump “took a dump on his desk,” Lord would defend it, it’s safe to assume there’s bias at work.
Now, after all the work they’ve done for the past few days digging up anti-Trump gossip from anonymous sources, they have to switch gears and talk about a scandal-free foreign trip.
They’re framing it like it’s just halftime — an opportunity for the resistance to get up and use the bathroom while the marching band takes the field.
All they can do is lie in wait, ready to pounce on any perceived faux pas that Mr. Trump may commit. They almost certainly have an eye on Twitter awaiting any leftwing faux outrage that may surface so they can proliferate it. Already, there have been several stories about the fact that Melanina and Ivanka Trump didn’t wear headscarves. What’s the big deal about that? Well, President Trump tweeted two and a half years ago that “Mrs. Obama refused to wear a scarf” in Saudi Arabia, and the Saudis were “insulted.”
Crisis. Catastrophe. Hysteria. You’d think each individual Trump tweet is one of the nation’s founding documents and that the president himself had taken an oath to preserve, protect and defend all 35,000 of them.
Trump has tweeted 35,000 times. Anyone demanding that his presidency and the policies of his administration be consistent with all 35,000 tweets will probably be disappointed often. But that’s not what this story is about. This story is about trying to thwart the success of the American president on an overseas trip. It’s just part of a pathetic attempt to find a negative angle on everything. CNN and NBC, which — according to Harvard — spend 93 percent of their time trashing the president, both had this story featured prominently on their websites.
These news outlets go Three Mile Island every time Mr. Trump utters the words fake news, but consider the asinine assumptions a story like this rests on:
But it’s not about newsworthiness — it’s about unearthing a negative weapon to hurl at the president’s trip. After all, when Trump fired Comey, and the Left had their weekly meltdown, the MSM wasn’t at all interested in trolling through all those #FireComey tweets floating around the Twittersphere to expose Democrat hypocrisy.
So in the coming days, as the president goes about the important business of fixing all the damage President Obama did, watch for the MSM to attempt to undermine him with ridiculous controversies that are hatched from Twitter eggs or divulged by anonymous sources who probably sleep in oversized #ImWithHer t-shirts. But as each “controversy” surfaces for its moment in the sun, bear in mind, these are the same outlets who thought reckless, feckless Obama could do no wrong.
Eddie Zipperer is an assistant professor of political science at Georgia Military College and a regular LifeZette contributor.
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Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2017.
Reported By Martin Lioll | 
When The Washington Post ran a story Monday claiming that President Donald Trump had leaked classified information about the Islamic State group to Russia, the media lit up like a Christmas tree.“Finally!” an exhausted Salon.com editor no doubt exclaimed to himself through a mouthful of organic pho. “Here’s the thing we can pretend to be outraged about for the next month!” Thus began a flood of strongly worded screeds from what’s become known as the “blue feed,” accusing the president of everything from treason to really, really bad treason.
Never mind, of course, that National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster insisted the president’s discussions with the Russians were “wholly appropriate” and that the “president in no way compromised any sources or methods in the course of this conversation,” according to Fox News. The die was cast in the liberal media — and an email from John Podesta may explain why.
As you may know, the bulk of John Podesta’s email from his time with Hillary Clinton’s campaign is now in the hands of WikiLeaks for, um, certain reasons. Now, one of the messages he sent about how the left should try and capitalize on leakers is being re-examined:
The message is from the period before Clinton announced her presidential campaign. In it, he says, “I’m definitely for making an example of a suspected leaker whether or not we have any real basis for it.”
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The original email had to do with leaks within the Clinton campaign. However, the idea of “making an example of a suspected leaker” even if they hadn’t done anything is definitely an ominous one.
While the quote has been seized upon by a few conspiracy theorists in the case of murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich, it has a deeper significance — to the Clinton people and their cohort on the left, accusing people of things they didn’t really do is just another implement in the political toolbox.
We’d also like to point out that, if it turns out to be untrue, it wouldn’t be the first time a story from The Washington Post that relied on anonymous sources turned out to be fake news.
As The Federalist noted, three major WaPo “scoops” from the Trump White House that had been obtained by that method — the alleged threat of Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein to resign, an allegation that James Comey had requested more resources for the Department of Justice’s investigation into Trump’s Russia links, and a story that Steve Bannon had confronted DHS chief Gen. John Kelly — were all later denied.
That’s to be expected, but perhaps less expected is just who denied them — namely, Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, the Department of Justice and Gen. Kelly, respectively. If there was ever a time for a government official to issue a non-denial denial or simply keep quiet, those stories certainly would have fit the bill — if they were true.
Either Trump is really good at making people lie in a very public fashion or those rapscallion anonymous source types done did the media wrong again. You make the call. I think you can tell which side I’m leaning toward.
We don’t know exactly what Trump said at the White House to his Russian visitors. That puts us in the same boat as the denizens of The Washington Post and the rest of our nation’s media establishment, who are relying on the word of anonymous sources versus the word of the White House, who insist that “the premise of that (Washington Post) article is false.”
What we do know is that this story is short on specific details. We also know that it comes at a time when the left is doing everything in its power to delegitimize the Trump White House. Given those factors, perhaps it’s time to take a closer look at Podesta’s thoughts on “making an example of a suspected leaker.”
Commentary by 
Ann Coulter | URL of the original posting site: http://humanevents.com/2017/05/17/every-time-i-try-to-be-mad-at-trump-the-media-pull-me-back/
The president can’t “leak” classified information: It’s his to declassify.
The big secret Trump allegedly revealed is that Muslims might try to blow up a plane with laptops. I already knew that. I read it in The New York Times.
The New York Times, March 22, 2017:
Devices Banned on Some Planes Over ISIS Fears
“Intelligence showing that the Islamic State is developing a bomb hidden in portable electronics spurred the United States and Britain on Tuesday to bar passengers from airports in a total of 10 Muslim-majority countries from carrying laptop computers … two senior American counterterrorism officials said. …”
This totally secret, Deep Throat-level information has been widely published in thousands of news outlets throughout the civilized world. There was yet another round of stories last week with the update that the U.S. is considering a laptop ban on flights from Europe as well.
Bear with me here, I’m still working out the details, but I’m almost certain a federal judge in Hawaii can’t block a president’s temporary ban on Muslim immigration just because he’s testy with Trump over some campaign statements.
As Northwestern law professor Eugene Kontorovich explained in The Washington Post, courts have never examined a politician’s campaign statements for improper motive, because
1) campaigns are not part of the deliberative process; and
2) to start doing so would open the door to “examinations of the entire lives of political officials whose motives may be relevant to legal questions.”
Nonetheless, Kontorovich says, that is the legal argument being advanced against Trump’s travel ban: “Trump is a bigot, and thus his winning presidential campaign in fact impeaches him from exercising key constitutional and statutory powers, such as administering the immigration laws.”
To preserve their judicial coup, this Monday, the 9th Circuit sent out the geriatric ward to hear an appeal of the Hawaii judge’s absurd ruling. At their ages, there’s a good chance the judges will be dead by the time the Supreme Court overturns them.
Arguing against Trump’s exercise of his constitutional and statutory powers was first-generation American, Neal Katyal. (There are plenty of 10th-generation America-haters. You couldn’t get one of them to argue that we should end our country through mass immigration?)
At oral argument before the three wheezing gargoyles, Katyal announced that, before enforcing federal immigration laws passed by generations of Democrats and Republicans working together in Congress, the president of the United States is required to profess: “Islam is peace.”
There’s a new legal principle!
Asked by one of the crypt-keepers if Trump is the only president who would be prohibited from issuing this precise travel ban because of his statements about Muslims, the smarmy, preening, pretentious Katyal answered: “I think the most important point is, if you don’t say all these things, you never wind up with an executive order like this.”
As lawyers say: Nonresponsive!
But as long as we’re operating under these new rules for determining a U.S. president’s rights and responsibilities, how about looking at everything Trump has said about Muslims?
For example, may the courts consider this quote from September 2015?
Trump: “I love the Muslims. I think they are great people. … Would I consider putting a Muslim-American in my Cabinet? Oh, absolutely. No problem with that.”
Lawyers like Katyal aren’t telling the courts what Trump said; they’re telling courts their own crazy interpretations of what Trump said. No liberal is capable of accurately reporting Trump’s position because the left never understood his position in the first place. As Peter Thiel said, the media take Trump literally, but not seriously, while the people take him seriously, but not literally.
After the San Bernardino terrorist attacks in December 2015, Trump made the perfectly reasonable suggestion that we curtail our breakneck importation of Muslims, some of whom periodically erupt in murderous violence. The media concluded: TRUMP HATES MUSLIMS! Nothing Trump or anyone else said could persuade them otherwise.
Here’s what Trump actually said:
“What’s happened is, we’re out of control. We have no idea who’s coming into our country. We have no idea if they love us or if they hate us. … I have friends that are Muslims. They are great people. But they know we have a problem. They know we have a real problem. ‘Cause something is going on. And we can’t put up with it, folks. …
“Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on. … Where the hatred comes from and why — we’ll have to determine, we’re going to have to figure it out. We have to figure it out. We can’t live like this. It’s going to get worse and worse. You’re going to have more World Trade Centers. …”
Throughout the campaign, Trump supporters tried in vain to explain the so-called “Muslim ban” to a hostile media dead set on interpreting everything out of Trump’s mouth in the ugliest possible way. For example, our general policy on Muslim immigration would be “No, thanks!” but there would be exceptions. So Charles Krauthammer can stop worrying about King Abdullah of Jordan.
In March, Trump supporter Andy Dean told a dense CNN anchor:
“He’s talking about the culture of Islam in the Middle East. … We love Muslims in America and they love us. Why? We have a great culture that respects women’s rights. … The thing about Muslims in the Middle East is they don’t respect women’s rights. If a woman wants to get a divorce in the Middle East, that woman could be killed. If you want to leave the religion of Islam in the Middle East, you can be killed. It’s very real.”
To the same blockhead anchor, Trump supporter Kayleigh McEnany had to fill in an edited quote the network had just shown of Trump:
“It’s important to know what happened 15 seconds later. Anderson Cooper said to him, ‘Are you speaking of radical Islam or are you speaking of Islam?’ He said radical; sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference, though. So he did say radical Islam. He said it repeatedly during his campaign. He said, ‘I have Muslim friends. I love the Muslim people.’ …”
One of Trump’s vast number of African-American supporters told HLN’s Drew Pinksy:
“I love what (Trump) is doing with the Muslims getting out of the country, because if they really knew what that was about — if they knew that that was about freedom. It was about freedom versus enslavement.”
He’s right. It’s not about religion. It’s not about nationality. It’s about hitting the pause button on bringing in radical Islam’s dysfunctional, misogynist, violent, exploding-airplane culture.
The voters understood Trump. (At least some of us did — barely enough of us to elect him president!) Liberals didn’t. But now the courts are blocking Trump’s exercise of presidential powers based on the left’s own idiotic misinterpretations of what he said.
Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2017.
Reported by | Updated 09 May 2017 at 6:59 AMTrump even suggested his White House may never fill some of the top political jobs in the government, in an interview last week with the Washington Examiner.
While those posts didn’t include judicial vacancies, the remark only created more anxiety in general about unfilled positions — a problem supporters worry will undermine the ability of the White House to deliver on key agenda items. There are roughly 9,000 total positions made by presidential appointments in the federal government, but roughly 5,000 of those are typically held by career civil servants who typically continue to serve in a new administration.
That leaves roughly 4,000 positions Trump needed to fill when he took office on Jan. 20. Of those 4,000, roughly 1,200 positions require senate confirmation and 500 of those are considered “key” positions of substantial importance to the administration.
Of those 500, Trump has nominated just 41 candidates and has received senate confirmation of just 26 of those nominated, as of April 28, according to the Partnership for Public Service. That means the administration is attempting to implement the president’s agenda with just five percent of key positions filled in the federal government.
At Monday’s daily press briefing, press secretary Sean Spicer said the White House has numerous items of paperwork to fill out for every nominee, and has to do quite a bit of vetting.
Responding to a question from LifeZette, Spicer said Trump was mindful of taxpayer costs associated with paying for the positions in government, but was also mindful that the longer he waits to fill key posts, the more time and power he cedes to the liberal-leaning courts and bureaucracy.
“We have a very robust schedule of releasing names,” said Spicer. “But the president’s point that he was making in that interview was that part of the review of government is to make sure that we’re looking at these positions and figuring out whether or not the taxpayer is getting the best bang for their buck, both in terms of productivity and cost.”
Trump’s comments to the Examiner kicked off serious concern from conservatives who were worried Trump was ceding massive power to the liberal bureaucracy and the courts.
Trump told the Examiner, “We don’t want to fill all of the vacancies, we won’t fill all of the vacancies. We don’t need so many of these people.”
Experienced conservatives told LifeZette Trump must take another look at filling management positions in the federal government, positions key to implementing an agenda.
“If you don’t do that, I don’t care how many executive orders you write — they’re not going to be carried out,” Robert Moffit, a former assistant director of the Office of Personnel Management in President Ronald Reagan’s administration, told LifeZette last week.
On Monday, as if to assuage concerns, Trump named 10 judges to federal positions in what the White House called its “third wave” of judicial nominations. Reaction to the choices from conservatives was positive, but the media, predictably, said Trump was filling the courts with conservatives.
Trump’s choices are efforts to “pack the nation’s federal courts with more conservative voices,” according to Vivian Salama, White House reporter for the Associated Press.
Carrie Severino, chief counsel of the conservative-leaning Judicial Crisis Network, said Trump focused on the Supreme Court vacancy in the first weeks of his presidency. Trump filled that slot with Judge Neil Gorsuch of Colorado, who is now a justice.
On federal judges, Trump is far ahead of where President George W. Bush was in May 2001, said Severino. And Bush didn’t have a Supreme Court vacancy in his first year of office.
“It doesn’t matter it took [Trump] a little longer to get this first batch out,” said Severino. “I do think we’ll see it speed up from here on out.”
In a late Monday nominations announcement, Trump named:
Cartoon by A.F Branco ©2017.
Authored by Bryan Fischer | Monday, May 8, 2017 @ 11:31 AM
If Donald Trump could not find a way to stand up for Mark Green, he is no true defender of religious liberty. – Bryan Fischer
Donald Trump rolled out his executive order on religious liberty last week to great fanfare, with a Rose Garden 
ceremony including many evangelical luminaries in attendance. And yet his order did not touch at all on the greatest threat to religious liberty in our nation’s history, the agenda of LGBT activists to force everyone in America to accept sexual deviancy or else.
The conflict between homosexuality and religious liberty is a zero-sum game. One side wins, the other side loses. Every advance of the homosexual agenda comes at the expense of religious liberty. A pledge to protect religious liberty that does not include a pledge to protect people of Christian faith from the onslaught of the rabid homosexual activists is essentially meaningless.
At the very same time President Trump was issuing his stripped down religious liberty order (he attacked the 
Johnson Amendment, which is toothless, and the abortifacient mandate in ObamaCare, a battle that has already been fought and won), the president allowed the yammering, demanding, and hate-filled voices of homosexual activists to shred his own pick to be the next Secretary of the Army.
Mark Green, a state senator from Tennessee, has a strong military record as a war hero and a flight surgeon, and was the medic for the special operations team that captured Saddam Hussein. He is eminently qualified to lead the Army.
Except for one thing: he shares God’s view of human sexuality. And for that, Trump has allowed him to be vilified, demonized, and cashiered from public service without even a feeble attempt to come to his defense. This at a minimum raises serious questions about whether President Trump is going to be the defender of religious liberty he wants us to think he is.
The homosexual activists ran Green out of town because he believes that honest mental health professionals will tell you that transgenderism “is a disease.” This is indisputably true. Johns Hopkins, which once pioneered 
sex change operations, abandoned the practice in the 1970’s because it was doing more harm than good. A tragic 41% of individuals who go through the surgical mutilation that is required for a full transition commit suicide. Even the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association, not part of the vast right wing conspiracy, warns transvestites/transgenders that they are at elevated risk of substance abuse and depression. This is not a trend any rational nation should embrace if it cares about the mental health of its citizens.
Until 2012, the American Psychiatric Association characterized transvestism/transgenderism as a mental disorder. Because of severe political pressure, not scientific findings, the APA dropped the “disorder” nomenclature for the euphemistic “gender dysphoria” label. But the facts remain unchanged: transgenderism, from a mental health standpoint, is dangerous, harmful, and tragically results too often in self-harm. Any American who truly cares about people will oppose the normalization of this mental illness. 
Green also ran afoul of the left by giving a lecture in which he used science to defend creationism and for warning about the threat that Islam poses to the West. He should be praised for both views rather than exiled from public service. What good is it to have religious freedom if the moment you exercise it, you are punished and driven into exile?
If Donald Trump could not find a way to stand up for Mark Green, he is no true defender of religious liberty. If he will not defend his own pick for military leadership against what lesbian writer Tammy Bruce calls the Gay Gestapo, of what use will he be in the pitched battle over First Amendment civil rights for people of Christian faith?
As Martin Luther was credited with saying, “Where the battle rages, there the loyalty of the soldier is proved; and to be steady on all the battlefield besides is mere flight and disgrace if he flinches at that point.”
The bottom line: President Trump flinched. He will not be, his religious liberty order notwithstanding, America’s defender of the faith. He has chosen sides on the only religious liberty issue that matters today, and he has chosen poorly.
AUTHORED BY 
Bryan Fischer Host of “Focal Point” MORE
Reported by | Updated 08 May 2017 at 10:58 AMThese Republicans are often described as “moderates,” but in truth they are usually just ambitious politicians hoping to protect their jobs. How else could you explain why so many Republicans who had promised to repeal Obamacare over the course of the last seven years did not vote to do so? Nervous Republicans are usually afraid of the spin from the Democrats and their media allies. But why?
“There is no way Republicans are going to be punished for doing what they said they were going to do,” said Alex Conant, a GOP consultant for Marco Rubio, speaking on Fox News on Friday.
Many of these squishy Capitol Hill Republicans pose a threat to other key aspects of President Donald Trump’s agenda. The building of a border wall, reform to refugee and immigration programs, and tax reform could all be watered down or blocked if enough Republicans go weak-kneed.
Here are three GOP congressional moderates that stand out:
Hurd is trying to lead the pack of Republicans opposed to Trump’s agenda. Democrats and media are beating a path to his door to assist him.
On Friday, Politico Magazine wrote a long piece on Hurd, portraying him as “the future of the GOP.” The one problem? He may not win his next election. Hurd represents the one district in Texas, out of 36, that is competitive between the two parties. And it voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The district, in southwest Texas, is rural and includes 820 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border. Hurd doesn’t support Trump’s border wall, however, even though scores of illegal aliens pour across this very border every month.
Hurd, like most self-styled moderates hoping to win re-election, likes to nuzzle with the Democrats. Hurd and Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas) famously took a bipartisan road trip back to Washington in mid-March. Not long after the trip, O’Rourke said he would run against Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas). Hurd let himself get used by Democrats — and it likely won’t be the last time.
Yet it was Hurd’s unflinching refusal to vote for repeal that will perhaps deflate his hopes for re-election. It’s hard to win re-election in a swing year if your base abandons you; turnout in the midterms is key.
Lance losing in 2018 wouldn’t be a great loss for the GOP. Lance has a dismal 64 rating from the American Conservative Union (ACU), and only a 68 (out of a possible 100) lifetime rating — not terrible for a Northeastern Republican, but not great either. Lance is known for voting regularly to keep government programs fat and happy. He is also a big supporter of unions, voting against repeal of regulations that raise costs and benefit unions.
The ACU got so fed up with Lance in 2012 that it endorsed his opponent in the Republican primary. Lance could be the most likely Republican House incumbent to draw a well-funded GOP challenger in 2018.
Lance has also been especially aggressive in dissing Trump.
Murkowski is a moderate Republican senator under pressure now that Obamacare has passed. It’s showing. Murkowski snapped at CNN reporter Manu Raju on Friday as he pressed her to specify whether she supported the repeal legislation passed in the House.
“Will you please be respectful?” Murkowski said.
Murkowski has a 54 rating from the ACU. As an incumbent, she famously lost her Republican primary in 2010 but won the general election as a write-in. She won her 2016 race more easily.
The pressure now is understandable. There are only 52 Republicans in the Senate, out of 100. The GOP can only lose two of them in repeal.
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) commands much more power and influence of his smaller, more manageable caucus in the Senate than House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) does in the House. If McConnell wants a repeal bill, he will likely get at least 50 votes for it.
Authored by Bryan Fischer | Thursday, May 4, 2017 @ 1:45 PM
Donald Trump just issued his executive order on religious liberty with evangelical luminaries from all across the fruited plain in attendance. The order is designed to neutralize the Johnson Amendment, which on paper at least threatens churches which engage in political activity, and to prevent organizations, like The Little Sisters of the Poor, from being forced to provide abortifacients for their employees.
These are essentially hollow promises on the president’s part. No church has ever been deprived of its tax exempt status using the Johnson Amendment. In fact, conservative evangelicals have for years tried to goad the IRS into going after them for preaching political sermons, to no avail. African-American churches have utterly ignored the restrictions of the Johnson Amendment for decades, for which we can be grateful, since that’s where the civil rights movement came from. Their pulpits were used to galvanize and mobilize parishioners to engage in direct political action, with nary a peep from the IRS. So the Johnson Amendment is a toothless tiger.
With regard to the contraceptive battle, that battle has already been fought and won in the highest court in the land. The Supreme Court, in the Hobby Lobby case, has already ruled that businesses cannot be forced to violate their deeply held moral and religious principles to provide abortion-causing pills to their employees. So it was a nice gesture on the president’s part, but essentially meaningless.
Meanwhile, the gravest concern is aroused by what the president did not say. The draft of this executive order that was leaked to the liberal media in February contained robust protections for Christians engaged in business from being compelled by government to violate their own values and consciences in showdowns with the radical, vitriolic, and virulently aggressive LGBT lobby.
Our recent history is rife with Christian bakers being fined $135,000 for refusing to bow the knee to the god of Sodom, Christian florists being sued for everything they own, and Christian photographers subject to stiff fines for declining to participate in same-sex ceremonies. Christian adoption agencies specializing in hard-to-place children have been shut down. We’ve seen story after story of Christian students being expelled from counseling programs for not meekly submitting to the gay agenda, and professors being terminated or denied tenure for the same reason.
This morning’s empty and symbolic action on the president’s part most likely betrays the hidden hand of the president’s uber-liberal daughter, Ivanka, who likely leaked the February draft to a liberal rag (The Nation) in order to stir up enough intense outrage from the LGBT community to strangle this baby in the cradle. It worked. Ivanka wore out her red pencil eviscerating the original order, leaving us with today’s order which has very nice language but is virtually entirely lacking in substance.
The president’s words today were fine, and encouraging as far as they went. The problem with the president’s speech in the Rose Garden is what he did not say. There was no word of comfort, encouragement, or support for those who have been victimized by the relentless persecution of the homosexual lobby. They apparently will have to wait for another day, waiting without any assurance that this new administration will stand with them and protect their constitutional liberties. The best grade we can give the president for today’s remarks is an incomplete.
Bryan Fischer Host of “Focal Point”
Posted by GirlsJustWannaHaveGuns.com | on April 29, 2017
It was launched from a region north of the capital, Pyongyang, and appears to have been a failed test according to the Yonhap news agency.
They reported that the missile blew up a few seconds into flight. U.S. officials are saying it did not leave North Korean territory and was most likely a medium-range missile known as a KN-17.
This is now the second failed test of a ballistic missile in the last month.
North Korea is desperately trying to make its military might stronger, warning of “imminent” war against the US.
“North Korea fired an unidentified missile from a site in the vicinity of Bukchang in Pyeongannam-do (South Pyeongan Province) early this morning,” Yonhap reported, quoting a statement issued by South Korea’s military. “It is estimated to have failed.”
Donald Trump, the US president, said that North Korea “disrespected the wishes of China” with the missile test.
US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned that failure to curb North Korea’s nuclear and ballistic missile projects would lead to “catastrophic consequences”.
He is calling for greater enforcement of UN sanctions against North Korea and has requested the rest of the world put the pressure on North Korea to step down.
China stated that is was not only up to Beijing to solve the problem of North Korea.
“The key to solving the nuclear issue on the peninsula does not lie in the hands of the Chinese side,” Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister said.
North Korea’s deputy UN ambassador responded by stating US efforts to get rid of his country’s nuclear weapons through military threats and sanctions were “a wild dream”.
Trump told Reuters that a “major, major conflict” with North Korea was possible over its nuclear and ballistics program.
Maybe, he’s a better shot than Obama was.
Mr. Trump, Tear Down This Wall!
Trump Tax Plan / Cartoon A.F. Branco ©2017.
Ann Coulter At Berkeley / Political Cartoon by A.F. Branco ©2017.
Posted April 25, 2017 11:42 AM by Rob Eno URL of the original posting site: https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/use-your-mandate-and-build-the-damn-wall
Stop illegal immigration sign next to fence. / TheaDesign | Shutterstock
Central to the successful presidential campaign of Donald Trump was his promise to build a wall. It was a part of virtually every single one of his well-attended rallies. If you’ve forgotten, take a quick trip down memory lane.
Why then is Trump not fighting to ensure he receives funds to start construction on the wall as soon as possible? Here’s today’s news from the Washington Post.
But with a Friday deadline looming to pass a new spending bill, the Trump administration projected confidence that a shutdown would be avoided. In the face of fierce Democratic opposition to funding the wall’s construction, White House officials signaled Monday that the president may be open to an agreement that includes money for border security if not specifically for a wall, with an emphasis on technology and border agents rather than a structure.
Trump showed even more flexibility Monday afternoon, telling conservative journalists in a private meeting that he was open to delaying funding for wall construction until September, a White House official confirmed.
Trump, the deal maker, should know that once you give an adversary an inch, they’ll take a mile. It is time for Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to step up and give the American people what their party promised — a border wall. Not to mention the repeal of Obamacare and a whole host of other promises.
The GOP majority should not be afraid of the Democrat minority. The American people in record numbers reject Democrat ideology. Over the weekend, an ABC News/ Washington Post poll was released showing that 67 percent of American voters say that Democrats are “out of touch” with the concerns of the American people. That number is up 19 percent from a 2014 poll that asked the same question.
Over the past three years, as the Democratic Party has become more obstructionist and radical, the American people have increasingly rejected its ideology. Yes, the numbers for the GOP and Trump are high as well, but on the GOP side, their numbers have actually been improving.
The majority of people, in large swaths of this country — save California — voted for Republicans up and down their ballots last fall. Central to this vote was a promise to take border security seriously and, yes, to “build that wall.”
Robert Eno is the director of research for Conservative Review. He is a conservative from deep blue Massachusetts but now lives in Greenville, SC.
Reported by | Updated 25 Apr 2017 at 6:55 AM
But does that approach include the border-adjustment tax? Bloomberg News reported on Friday that Trump won’t include a border-adjustment tax — a duty on imports, a version of which most other nations have — in a proposed tax reform package expected to be unveiled Wednesday. Trump, in response to a question from LifeZette during a meeting with reporters in the Roosevelt Room, said he is still open to the border-adjustment tax, but suggested he will examine the policy as part of trade deals, not an initial round of tax reform.
Trump’s ambiguity was not a surprise. Earlier in the day, in his regular briefing with reporters, White House press secretary Sean Spicer said the White House is waiting until Wednesday to share tax-reform details. It’s likely a sign that Trump won’t want to entangle large-scale tax reform with the border-adjustment tax, which deeply divides Republican lawmakers.
But the delay of a border-adjustment tax push does not mean Trump will not take swift action to encourage more trade equity with regional economic partners. As for Canada, Trump is fed up and ready to act. Trump surprised a gathering of journalists from conservative-leaning outlets at the White House on Monday when he said he would place a 20 percent tariff on softwood-lumber imports from Canada.
The tariffs won’t be automatic. Wilbur Ross, secretary of the Commerce Department, said a dispute-resolution panel, mandated by NAFTA, will decide if U.S. law is being properly applied. Ross, who walked into the Roosevelt Room with Trump and Spicer, noted three of the five panelists are Canadians.
“Canada has treated us very unfairly,” said Trump, threatening to also punish Canadian dairy producers for unfairly undercutting Wisconsin farmers. Trump said the changes mean U.S. lumber producers will have a better deal.
“We can do our own lumber,” said Trump.
Trump was less specific about the border-adjustment tax proposal floated by House Speaker Paul Ryan and Rep. Kevin Brady (R-Texas), the powerful chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. But he did say the border-adjustment tax has been misunderstood, mostly because of its name.
“The word I like is reciprocal,” said Trump.
The tax would allow cuts in other areas, meaning it is “revenue-neutral.” It would also accomplish some of what Trump promised to do in the 2016 campaign — to reform trade policies.
“Generally speaking, I am in favor of it,” said Kevin L. Kearns, president of the U.S. Business and Industry Council. “We need to do something to level the playing field, since 150 of our trading partners have value-added taxes.”
Kearns said American exports get the tax added when they arrive in other nations.
Using Germany as an example, such taxes are used in most European nations. The value-added taxes are extracted from German manufacturers. But if the German manufacturers export the goods, the manufacturers get refunds, Kearns said. That gives Germans incentive to manufacture within Germany.
But the border-adjustment tax is vilified by retailers, who sell many imported goods. On Monday morning, the Koch-backed Freedom Partners held a teleconference to denounce the tax. A border-adjustment tax will hurt retailers such as Best Buy and Target, said Freedom Partners officials. Some Republicans are also afraid of border-adjustment taxes because they claim they are hidden taxes, and can be adjusted at will, said Kearns, who dismissed those claims.
Kearns told LifeZette he is worried about Trump tying trade to foreign policy “deal-making” with nations such as China.
“Let’s take a poll of Trump supporters and see who wants to lose their job to China because of North Korea,” said Kearns.
URL of the original posting site: http://comicallyincorrect.com/2017/04/24/new-sheriff-in-town/
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