The most controversial of Trump’s proposed pardons are for a sailor and soldier, both special operators, accused of killing prisoners.

The case against MAJ Matthew Golsteyn is based on his own admission — once during a polygraph for a CIA position and once on a Fox News show — that he killed an unarmed Afghan who posed no immediate threat to Golsteyn or his U.S. or Afghan military teammates.

Chief Petty Officer Eddie Gallagher’s case is more complex, in part because it involves multiple unrelated events during a 2017 deployment, and because he has strongly denied the charges. He is accused of killing multiple Iraqi noncombatants, including women and children, while operating as a sniper, and stabbing an incapacitated prisoner being treated on a coalition base for wounds sustained during an earlier engagement. The recent charges have also renewed interest in previously inconclusive allegations that he shot and killed a noncombatant during a 2010 deployment in Afghanistan. Most of the evidence that has been made public in Gallagher’s case centers on remarks he made to fellow SEALs following the incidents in question. As outlined by our Harold Hutchison earlier this week, however, the waters in both cases have been further muddied by questionable actions by prosecutors.

Yet it’s ironic that many of the same folks who are most vocal about the pardons seem to believe that the only honorable people in the military are those currently facing charges. According to this logic, anyone above the accused in the chain of command who allowed the investigation to proceed or is part of prosecuting the case is a political hack whose primary concern is with securing a promotion, while any other operator who substantiates the charges — as several SEALs have done against Gallagher — are “weak” and trying to get back at someone whose standards and tactical prowess they could never match. Their advocates would have us believe that any action taken by “operators” like Gallagher and Golsteyn can’t be questioned simply because they occurred in a combat zone.

But the charges discussed here don’t involve acts committed “in the heat of battle,” where time-sensitive decisions are made with incomplete or muddled information and wide discretion is warranted. Both Golsteyn and Gallagher face prosecution for deliberate acts taken after some consideration and calculation.

Aside from the inappropriateness of using Memorial Day as prop, President Trump should not short circuit the process by granting pardons before the courts-martial have run their course. The cases mentioned for pardons revolve around extra-judicial killing, an extreme example of the rule of man supplanting the Rule of Law. While a presidential pardon is indeed legal — within the bounds of the Rule of Law — it would subvert the process that gives Rule of Law its legitimacy and send the message that the rule of man is the standard for the U.S. military. The military legal system — much like its civilian counterpart — isn’t perfect, but the charges in these cases are serious and credible and we owe it to the accused and their accusers to let a jury of peers hear the evidence and render a verdict.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63224?mailing_id=4290&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4290&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Now, it appears the constant Democrat drumbeat for impeachment in order to undermine Trump’s successful agenda, has reached a fever pitch as House Speaker Nancy Pulosi, who has long resisted taking any actual action on impeachment, held a meeting with House Democrats this morning. For political veterans like Pulosi, the goal is to push the negative narrative of Trump supposedly obstructing justice in order to keep a cloud over his presidency, while at the same time avoiding too much political fallout from these clearly partisan allegations. Calling Trump a criminal is a lot easier than proving he is one.

As predicted, following the meeting, Pulosi once again trumpeted the narrative while refusing to initiate impeachment proceedings. “We do believe that it’s important to follow the facts,” she bloviated. “We believe that no one is above the law, including the president of the United States. And we believe that the president of the United States is engaged in a cover-up. And that was the nature of the meeting.”

Pulosi knows that following through on impeachment proceedings without having any obvious and clear illegal action with which to charge the president is a recipe for disaster. Acting on the real reason behind their obstruction allegations — “Trump is a bad guy because we don’t like him, so therefore he must be impeached” — won’t fly with the vast majority of Americans.

Ironically, California Democrat Jackie Speier unwittingly admitted as much, stating, “Let me be clear: I don’t believe that in the end we will do any more than lay out for the American people the articles of impeachment and then, rather than send it to the Senate where he would be tried, I think the trial will be the 2020 election and the American people can convict him.” It’s all about partisan politics. And it’s a cynical political play Democrats have repeatedly used for decades.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63174?mailing_id=4289&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4289&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of over 50 members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced Resolution 374, highlighting the Iranian regime’s persistent support for terrorism. The resolution expresses “support for the Iranian people’s desire for a democratic, secular, and non-nuclear republic of Iran.”

It “calls on relevant … agencies to work with European allies” and to help “prevent the malign activities of the Iranian regime’s diplomatic missions, with the goal of closing them down, including the Iranian embassy in Albania.”

As justification for this goal, it cites three of the several Iranian terror plots that were discovered and foiled by Western authorities over the course of last year across Europe and North America. These plots have been reliably identified as part of an escalating pattern of provocation by the Iranian regime, and they certainly call for a proportional response from the U.S.

The White House has acted accordingly, with the repeated imposition of new sanctions, as well as the unprecedented designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. The listing may set the stage for Washington to take relevant action against the additional infrastructure of Tehran’s terrorism.

President Trump and his national-security team, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, have done a superb job in holding Iranian rulers accountable for their outlaw behavior and should advance the same path as the only effective way to end the Iran threat.

H.Res.374 also emphasizes the role that the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) in the pursuit of terrorist actions such as the attempted bombing of the main opposition’s Free Iran gathering in Paris on June 30 of last year. That event was attended by dozens of high-profile dignitaries from the United States and Europe, among many other counties around the world. The thwarted plot served to expose the willingness of the MOIS not only to target Iranian dissidents on foreign soil but to also attack Western citizens directly. A recent detailed report, “Iran’s Emissaries of Terror,” published by the U.S. representative office of the main opposition National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI-US) in Washington, clearly shows that MOIS terror plots enjoy the full collaboration of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Tehran’s foreign minister, Javad Zarif.

Under Zarif’s watch, in 2018 alone, five Iranian diplomats were expelled by France, the Netherlands, and Albania for harming European security. Another high-ranking diplomat is currently in jail in Belgium for allegedly delivering a powerful bomb to two other MOIS culprits to bomb an opposition rally in Paris. Several other Iranian agents who worked with diplomatic missions have been imprisoned, including two in the United States.

Despite such mind-boggling terrorist intervention in Europe and the U.S., Zarif travels to New York and Europe posing as a victim of U.S. policy of firmness. So much for hypocrisy! If Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, President Hassan Rouhani, and Zarif want to see an end to Tehran’s international isolation, the path is clear: Abide by the 12 points announced by the United States and act like a normal government instead of a pathological theocracy bent on using terrorism as the primary instrument of statecraft.

The EU has finally acted by including the MOIS Internal Security Division and two of its known operatives on the multinational body’s list of terrorist organizations.

Many advocates of the status quo have argued that the IRGC blacklisting and other sanctions have increased the potential for war (an argument that Zarif has borrowed). But it is far more likely that these actions have prevented successful attacks on Western personnel, to say nothing of Iranian activists pushing for a democratic future in their homeland.

In the long run, it is these activists alone, backed by the Iranian people, who will provide a guarantee for peace. The Paris bomb plot and other recent plans by the MOIS and the IRGC make it clear that the existing dictatorship is committed to terrorism. The answer is democratic change by the Iranian people.

The recent House resolution reflects growing confidence among Western lawmakers and Iranian activists that such change is forthcoming. It points, for instance, to a mass uprising, which began at the end of 2017 and spawned countless protests across Iran throughout 2018. In many cases, those demonstrations showcased the widespread and growing support for Iran’s organized democratic movement.

As Resolution 374 explains, opposition leader Maryam Rajavi’s 10-point plan “calls for the universal right to vote, free elections, and a market economy, and advocates gender, religious, and ethnic equality, a foreign policy based on peaceful coexistence, and a non-nuclear Iran.”

The U.S. must make the MOIS subject to the same blacklist as the IRGC, and Tehran must be compelled to cease using diplomatic institutions as cover for terrorism.

Diplomatic and economic pressure on the regime will indeed serve to manage components of the regime’s terrorism. Iran’s people, however, led by their organized opposition, can eliminate it once and for all.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/63133?mailing_id=4287&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4287&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Indeed, what actual crime or criminal behavior are the Democrats seeking to investigate? It would seem the only real answer is the “crime” of defeating scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton. But the Democrats bloviate about Congress’s oversight authority, as if this grants them carte blanche authority over the executive branch.

However, the Democrats’ vacuous justifications for targeting Trump have been rewarded by Judge Amit Mehta, appointed by Barack scumbag/liar-nObama, to whom Mehta also donated. The scumbag/liar-nObama judge ruled against Trump’s refusal to submit to the Democrats’ subpoena, writing, “Congress plainly views itself as having sweeping authority to investigate illegal conduct of a President, before and after taking office. This court is not prepared to roll back the tide of history.”

Mehta further argued, “It is simply not fathomable that a Constitution that grants Congress the power to remove a President for reasons including criminal behavior would deny Congress the power to investigate him for unlawful conduct — past or present — even without formally opening an impeachment inquiry.” But the question remains, what criminal behavior or unlawful conduct is alleged? There needs to be the existence of an actual crime before one can be accused of being a criminal.

But House Democrats, who have labeled Trump a criminal, lack any evidence to support their fallacious narrative, and so they point to his refusal to go along with their fishing expedition as proof of his guilt. Rep. Jim Jordan observed that the subpoenas are “an unprecedented abuse of the Committee’s subpoena authority to target and expose the private financial information of the President of the United States.” Indeed, it could not be more clear what the Democrats’ motives are.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63141?mailing_id=4287&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4287&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

I am watching Washington and thinking this: We have reached a new crisis point in Donald Trump vs. the Democrats. They are speaking of contempt citations, subpoenas, executive privilege, hearings. It’s a daily barrage. The Democrats are inching closer to impeachment, at least rhetorically, perhaps actually. We’ll see how well Speaker Nancy Pulosi can dance right up to the edge to appease some in her caucus, and not over it.

But there is such a thing as context, and the Democrats seem to be ignoring it. This is a country divided.

Almost half the country is for Mr. Trump — truly, madly, deeply. Half is against him — unequivocally, unchangeably. There is no resolving this. Or rather to the extent it can be resolved, it will be resolved at the ballot box. The presidential election is 18 months from now, on Nov. 3, 2020.

Until then, people are where they are and hold the views they hold, and don’t push them too hard.

Democrats unveil charges and accusations — the president is a liar, he’s a tax dodger, an obstructor of justice. But in a way Mr. Trump’s supporters accounted for all this before they elected him. They are not shocked. They didn’t hire him to be a good man. Their politics are post-heroic. They sometimes tell reporters he’s a man of high character but mostly to drive the reporters crazy. I have never talked to a Trump supporter, and my world is thick with them, who thought he had a high personal character. On the other hand they sincerely believe he has a high political character, in that he pursues the issues he campaigned on. They hired him as an insult to the political class, as a Hail Mary pass — we’ve tried everything else, maybe this will work — and because he agreed with them on the issues.

Supporters give him high marks for not looking down on them as they believe most members of the media, who are always trying to “understand” them, do. Their attitude is: “Don’t try to understand me, like you’re the anthropologist and we’re the savages. I’m an American, what are you?” They factor the cultural animosity in. When they jeer the press during rallies at the president’s direction, they don’t really mean it. They’re having fun and talking back. They’d be happy if their kids became reporters — an affluent profession, and half of them are famous. The president doesn’t really hate the press either, he wants their love and admiration. You don’t need the admiration of people you truly disdain.

Trump supporters now are looking around and thinking: Things are looking up. The economy is gangbusters, everyone can get a job, good people are on the courts. Something good is happening with China — it’s unclear what, but at least he’s pushing back. As for illegal immigration, he at least cares about it and means to make it better, though no, it doesn’t seem improved.

To take all Congress’s time right now and devote it to attacking the president, or impeaching him, will be experienced as a vast, disheartening insult by half the country, and disheartening. It will simply damage the country and be seen as extreme and destructive. It will keep good things, such as an infrastructure bill, from happening.

As a purely political calculation it will do the Democrats no good. Nonstop scandal theater starring the theatrically indignant will only make people who hate Mr. Trump hate him a little more, and people who support Mr. Trump hate his foes a little more. It will not move any needle.

dirty cop-Robert Mueller, often praised in this space, didn’t resolve anything, did he? People wanted clarity, not subtlety and indirection. So yes, as a last hurrah let him speak. What did he think his report was saying and implying? What in his view would be a just outcome to the story of Mr. Trump and the Russians and 2016?

Beyond that, enough already. We have to have a greater appreciation for how split we are as a nation, and how delicate this all is. And we have to remember we’re not only split, we’re conjoined. We share this country.

We are like Chang and Eng, the 19th century Siamese Twin brothers who worked for P.T. Barnum. They could not be separated and went through their long lives together, married to different women, living in different houses — a few days a week in this one, a few in another.

It wasn’t easy for them to walk through life together, but they did. We have to, too.

Now I wish to switch subjects. Don’t you?

“How to do it” is the hardest question in life after “what to do.” It’s hard enough to make the decision. Then you have to execute. A right decision poorly executed might as well be a wrong one. This is in a way the subject of a small book called “Kissinger on Kissinger” by Winston Lord. It is composed of transcripts of Henry Kissinger’s first and only oral history, based on six interviews conducted by Mr. Lord, President Reagan’s ambassador to China, and K.T. McFarland, who served as Mr. Trump’s deputy national security adviser.

“Like all oral histories, this is a brief for my case,” Mr. Kissinger writes in the introduction. “I did not go out of my way to be self-critical.” He doesn’t. But there is a lot of how-to for diplomats — how the opening with China occurred and was made to occur, how the Soviets were handled as that breakthrough became real, what drove Nixon-era Mideast shuttle diplomacy.

I should note here that Mr. Kissinger is always called “deeply controversial” because he is, that his diplomatic efforts with and under President Nixon were often bold and creative, certainly deeply consequential, and that one of the most remarkable things about him is that he is 95 and has, for 50 years, remained a major public figure and retained his status as a major thinker. Foreign leaders treat him with the gravest respect. Mr. Lord calls this “a remarkable performance of savvy, stamina and sway.”

At his 90th-birthday party, which I attended as a friend, former secretaries of state of both parties lined up to thank him for his advice, wisdom and encouragement. I admit I cannot see his public self without thinking of the 16-year-old immigrant who worked in a shaving-brush factory in New York. The tough Italian-American men he worked with teased the German refugee and took him to Yankee Stadium to learn to be an American. There he first saw the man who years later on meeting him struck him dumb: Joe DiMaggio.

But I’ve gotten away from the book.

It has many good things. In the formation of foreign policy successful international negotiations, “everything depends … on some conception of the future.” The bias of bureaucracy is toward dailiness: there are communiqués to answer, immediate decisions that require response. In this atmosphere a leader must develop an overall sense of where he wants to go and how to get there.

Every diplomatic effort must begin with an articulated intention. He and Nixon “spent hours together asking ‘What are we trying to do, what are we trying to achieve, what are we trying to prevent?’” The “end state” is the goal, not the process.

In a way it is a tribute to order. Oh, I miss that.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/63096?mailing_id=4285&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4285&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The CDC also noted that this is the fourth straight year of declines. That’s because slight gains made by women in their late 30s and early 40s, were more than offset by record-low birth rates for women in their teens and 20s. More ominously, the total fertility rate also hit a record low of 1.728 births per woman — meaning there aren’t enough babies being born to maintain current population levels.

Why does this matter? “A country’s birthrate is among the most important measures of demographic health,” columnist Ariana Eunjung Cha explains. “The number needs to be within a certain range, called the ‘replacement level,’ to keep a population stable so that it neither grows nor shrinks. If too low, there’s a danger that we wouldn’t be able to replace the aging workforce and have enough tax revenue to keep the economy stable.”

Those who responded to the report cited obstacles to child-bearing that included a lack of child care and parental leave, high insurance costs and job instability, as well as a lack of other policies to help younger adults cope with student-loan debt and housing costs.

University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers believes those obstacles reflect an overall feeling of hopelessness. “The birthrate is a barometer of despair,” Myers asserts, explaining that people don’t have children unless they’re optimistic about the future.

No doubt, but quite likely something more insidious is in play here. Previous generations of Americans have coped with similarly pressing problems, yet continued to have children and raise families.

So what’s changed? While the opposite of optimism is pessimism, the bet here is young Americans have heartily embraced nihilism: Traditional values and beliefs are unfounded, and existence itself is both senseless and useless.

That’s not hard to understand, since they’ve been fed a steady diet of nihilism beginning as early as kindergarten. That’s where they begin learning that America is an inherently flawed, hopelessly bigoted nation in need of “fundamental transformation.” Transformation that wholly embraces the nihilistic dogma that men are “toxic,” whites are “privileged,” minorities and women are “victims,” gender is “fluid,” Christians are “bitter clingers,” the rich are “greedy and selfish,” certain speech is “hateful,” and social justice must transcend the Rule of Law.

More telling, as one moves up the educational ladder, the level of infantilism increases, as students become coddled by “trigger warnings,” attuned to “micro aggressions” and comfortable with safe spaces — replete with Play-Doh, therapy dogs, and coloring books.

Unfortunately for many young Americans, it’s a seamless transition from their “helicopter parents,” who are firmly convinced that even the slightest dent in their child’s self-esteem has the makings of life-long catastrophe — especially in a world where everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. This one-two punch has produced a generation of Millennials that considers itself the most stressed generation in history.

Thus, growing up — as in the primary prerequisite for responsible child-bearing — is to be feared.

Yet the most nihilist agenda force-fed to America’s youth is global warming. “It is not an easy time for people to feel hopeful, with the effects of global warming no longer theoretical, projections becoming more dire and governmental action lagging,” The New York Times  reports. “And while few, if any, studies have examined how large a role climate change plays in people’s childbearing decisions, it loomed large in interviews with more than a dozen people ages 18 to 43.”

Those interviewees felt “saddled with painful ethical questions that previous generations did not have to confront,” the Times adds.

Really? Wholly inaccurate doom-and-gloom predictions have been an integral part of the leftist agenda for decades. In 1970, Nobel laureate and Harvard biology professor George Wald insisted the world “will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” The same year Population Bomb author Paul Erlich declared that the “death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next 10 years.” Erlich further insisted “all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.”

In 1975, British science writer Nigel Calder warned that the world will endure a new ice age, a threat that “must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind.”

And who can possibly forget the pronouncements of scumbag-Al Gore and commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who predicted the end of polar ice caps by 2014, and the end of the civilized world itself in 12 years, respectively?

Independent Women’s Forum senior policy analyst Patrice Onwuka views such rhetoric as counterproductive. “I would love to see a national campaign that says, ‘If you want to have kids, you should,’” she stated. “What we should not be hearing particularly from the far left is, ‘No, don’t have children right now because they are going to die in 12 years.’ And unfortunately, that’s what is picking up steam.”

What else is counterproductive? The Left’s ongoing love affair with abortion on demand right up to — and on occasion, beyond — the moment of birth. Since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling in 1973, this nation has endured 60 million abortions.

Coupled with declining birth rates, that genocidal level of carnage ought to elicit a slew of proposals regarding ways to incentivize child-rearing and the moral responsibility necessary to undertake it properly. Instead, exactly like the EU, America’s Ruling Class has a “better” idea: incentivize a wholesale invasion of the nation by illegal aliens, coupled with it unsupportable levels of legal immigration — and tell Americans it’s all for their own “demographic good.”

What are they really saying? Americans must sell out their culture, customs, language, and borders to maintain the solvency of Social Security and Medicare.

Does it get more cynical? The Trump administration has announced a comprehensive plan to deal with illegals, but every sentient American knows it’s a non-starter, because every sentient American knows that when each party had two years of unassailable control of Congress and the White House, the border remained wide open, and visas continued being overstayed with impunity. Moreover, the cap on H-1B visas for legal immigrants has already been filled — for the year 2020.

“Getting married, raising families, staying in one place, still working with our hands, and postponing gratification may be seen as boring and out of date,” writes Victor Davis Hanson. “But nearly 2,000 years later, all of that is what still keeps civilization alive.”

Not without hope. And for an American Left that embraces the institutionalization of victimhood and the grievance culture that sustains it, the choice between keeping civilization alive and “saving the planet” is becoming irreconcilable.

That’s the essence of nihilism. And unless Americans become willing to reject the intellectual and moral bankruptcy that sustains it, expect the “birth dearth” to continue.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63106?mailing_id=4285&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4285&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Not that he’s calling for some sort of renewed constitutional view of federal involvement in education, mind you. According to Vox, “He wants to triple federal Title I funding for schools that serve a large number of low-income students, set a national salary floor for teachers of $60,000, and provide universal school meals: breakfast, lunch, and snacks for every student year-round.” It’s part of commie-Sanders’s 10-point plan to address K-12 education nationwide. We’re shocked — shocked — to note that all 10 points increase federal involvement, including the 10th plank that serves as a catch-all for immigration, gun control, and the Rainbow Mafia’s “equality” agenda.

But if you’re wondering how curtailing choices and market function helps children in failing schools, well, you’re not alone. Nevertheless, in a Saturday speech timed to coincide with the 65th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling — which, if you’re keeping score, was a good example of overturning precedent — commie-Sanders argued that charter schools and for-profit models are “exacerbating educational segregations.” Furthermore, he insists, “We do not need two schools [sic] systems; we need to invest in our public schools [sic] system.” And how many billions of additional dollars have we thrown at the Education Dept. with nothing to show for it but lower test scores and learning?

His race-based appeal isn’t entirely convincing, however. Amy Wilkins, senior vice president of advocacy at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, says, “commie-Sanders’s call is out of touch — as usual — with what African Americans want. More disturbing, the senator — for personal political gain — would literally lock African-American students into schools that have failed them for generations.”

That’s exactly the point. commie-Sanders and other socialists vehemently oppose any competition for government schools run by the powerful National Education Association. That’s because they want all of America’s children to undergo a centralized indoctrination agenda that will train tomorrow’s Democrat voters.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63112?mailing_id=4285&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4285&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy also decried the bill, saying, “The Democrats’ latest piece of legislation is another mirage, packaged with a deceiving title, that ultimately chips away at our religious freedoms, would jeopardize Title IX sports programs, and puts our children at risk by eliminating parental consent in life-altering medical procedures.”

What does the Equality Act do? It updates the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” to the list of protected characteristics. But McCarthy is exactly right about its effects.

Religious liberty would suffer greatly. The Heritage Foundation’s Ryan Anderson lists several ways this would happen. For example, “The Equality Act would force employers to pay for sex ‘reassignment’ procedures in their health insurance plans, and require medical professionals to perform them.” That goes for the military, too. Anderson adds that it would “force all schools and businesses to open their women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and sports teams to boys who ‘identify as’ girls and to men who ‘identify as’ women.” Faith-based adoption agencies would be forced to place children in homes they deem unfit. The alternative will be to shut down entirely.

As for women’s sports programs, they’re already in jeopardy because of the participation of biological males. And we’ve documented numerous tragic cases of child abuse over supposed gender dysphoria. Instead of getting help, these children are being subjected to life-altering hormone manipulation and even physical mutilation — and then given “reality” TV shows, to boot. The Equality Act could end up taking away the rights of parents who want to stop this insanity. Think that won’t happen? Look to Canada.

On a final note, amidst the nationwide fight over state abortion laws, the Equality Act would aim to trump them all. It does this by adding “pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition” to the aforementioned list of protected characteristics. Thus, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins warns, “The Equality Act doesn’t just torch religious freedom and the First Amendment, it guts every pro-life protection ever passed into law.”

The good news is that the Equality Act won’t get a vote in the Senate and President Donald Trump has indicated he would veto it in any case. The bad news is that Democrats will campaign on it for years to come in their ongoing bid to dupe more women voters with appeals to emotion.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63081?mailing_id=4280&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4280&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Introducing his plan, Trump stated, “We are proposing an immigration plan that puts the jobs, wages, and safety of American workers first. Our proposal is pro-America, pro-immigrant and pro-worker. It’s just common sense.”

The Washington Examiner reports, “Under the Trump plan, the share of legal immigrants permitted entry based on job skills would rise from 12% to 57%. Family bonds as a justification for legal entry would fall from 66% to 33%. Asylum and diversity admissions would fall from 22% to 10%.” Trump also noted, “Future immigrants will be required to learn English and to pass a civics exam prior to admission. Through these steps we will deliver an immigration system that respects and even strengthens our future, our traditions, and our values.”

A senior administration official offered an olive branch: “[The plan] can be what [Democrats] want it to be. If [Democrats] don’t want to engage, then it will be part of the election. If they want to engage, then it could be part of a negotiation. That’s going to be up to them.” Trump hopes his proposal will help to unite congressional Republicans and in so doing pressure Democrats into serious policy engagement.

And make no mistake, “This is his proposal,” the official added. “[President Trump has] been intimately involved in crafting it. We’ve shown him kind of where some of the criticism might come from on the Right, and his response is, ‘I’m happy to talk to them and I’ll convince them of why this is the right thing.’”

Predictably, House Speaker Nancy Pulosi declared Trump’s plan to be “dead-on-arrival” because … it’s Trump’s. In a complete about-face from her own advocacy for a merit-based immigration system back in 2013, Pulosi fallaciously blasted Trump’s plan as “greenlighting the Administration’s barbaric family detention policies, reviving the President’s ineffective and wasteful wall, completely abandoning our patriotic and determined Dreamers and gutting our asylum and refugee protections, which the evangelical community has called the ‘crown jewel of American humanitarianism.’” Pelosi then sought to spin her own past support for merit-based immigration, insisting, “To say that this plan’s application criteria are ‘merit-based’ is the height of condescension.”

Clearly, Democrats have no intention of taking up the issue, as they’d rather divide Americans with their “Hate Trump” agenda. That’s why this is effectively Trump setting up a prominent issue on which to campaign in 2020.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63061?mailing_id=4280&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4280&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

In fact, in a Trump-bashing Washington Post column  advocating for an atheist in the White House, Max Boot asks if there’s “any reason to believe that China is a less moral place than the United States.” In a devastating  response, columnist Ben Weingarten explains that Boot’s contemptible assertion of moral equivalency is belied by “the 1.4 billion Chinese citizens living in the world’s leading surveillance state,” as well as “the 1 to 2 million Uighurs currently imprisoned in ‘re-education camps’ or countless others held captive for challenging the Party line.” Above it all is Mao Zedong, whose policies killed between 40 and 70 million people — more than Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin combined.

Unfortunately, if we’re restricted to talking about members of the Ruling Class in both countries, Boot has a point. No doubt there are as many Chinese leaders as their American counterparts talking about the net plus of international trade — as in a net plus that benefits the few at the expense of many.

Ordinary Americans? Buy your cheap consumer goods and shut up. If tainted pet food kills Americans’ pets, or defective drywall poses risks to American homes and their owners’ health? “It’s overwhelmingly in our interests that China prosper, that Mongolia prosper, that nations big and large, east and west, in Latin America and in Africa prosper,” said Joe Biden in 2013. “We want everyone to have a little money to make sure they can buy American products.”

Really? Here’s a chart of our trade balance with China from 1985 through March 2019. Note there isn’t a single year where America broke even, much less ran a trade surplus. Thus, it’s Americans who are doing the lion’s share of the buying, while many of the countries to which Biden refers, including China, still pay what amounts to slave wages to their workers. Workers with whom Americans must nonetheless compete to serve the globalist economic agenda. Americans, who as a result, suffered decades of wage stagnation, while the wealth gap between them and the country’s richest people has become so wide, an argument could be made that we’re already living in a plutocracy.

And in line with globalist ambitions, it’s a plutocracy where multinational giants like Google were perfectly willing to collaborate with the Chinese government’s oppression of its own people, until a huge backlash from both inside and outside the company dissuaded them. It’s a plutocracy where hand-writing elitists wonder what kind of hit Apple stock will have to endure because it sells and manufactures iPhones in the Communist gulag.

Ordinary Americans might ask themselves if they’re equally willing to abet the nation a 2018 State Department report on Chinese human rights referred to as one where there are “arbitrary or unlawful killings by the government; forced disappearances by the government; torture by the government; arbitrary detention by the government; harsh and life-threatening prison and detention conditions; political prisoners; arbitrary interference with privacy; physical attacks on and criminal prosecution of journalists, lawyers, writers, bloggers, dissidents, petitioners, and others as well as their family members.”

Our elitists certainly are. In 2010, hack New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wistfully wished we could emulate China “for a day” to “you know, authorize the right solutions” to our problems. As Victor Davis Hanson  explains, Thomas and his fellow elitists assumed all Chinese improprieties were “just speed bumps on the eventual Chinese freeway to liberalism. Supposedly the richer China got, the more progressive it would become.” Along the way, the “now-worrisome huge trade deficits and Chinese cheating were further contextualized as ‘our fault,’” Hanson adds.

Thus, the long-held elitist position that American values, often framed as “jingoistic” patriotism, should have no bearing on the free exchange of goods between nations — or worse, that those values are inimical to such exchanges — took hold among those who further insisted that free trade is far more often exercised between consenting non-government actors who shouldn’t be inhibited from pursuing their economic dreams.

Yet does anyone seriously believe anyone in China could trade with anyone else without government approval? As Weingarten reminds us, “The Chinese regime is the dominant force in Chinese society, pervading every aspect of its citizens’ lives.”

Moreover, China’s ambitions couldn’t be clearer. “The U.S. no longer possesses clear military-technical dominance, and China is rapidly emerging as a would-be superpower in science and technology,” said Elsa B. Kania, an adjunct fellow at the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, in 2018. She further asserted that Chinese People’s Liberation Army “might even cut ahead of the U.S. in new frontiers of military power.”

Those advances were powered by a military budget that “grew at an average annual rate of 10 percent from 2000 to 2016,” according to a 2019 report published by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

More to the point, Americans financed every bit of it — more than twice over. In 2018, China’s entire military  budget was $175 billion. The same year, our trade deficit with China reached $419 billion.

Are cheap consumer goods more important than national security?

It seems the Trump administration knows the answer. As ConservativeTreehouse columnist Sundance explains, the president has been laying the groundwork for “multiple trade alternatives to China” since 2017. “Long before media pundits starting noticing/considering how serious President Trump was about structurally resetting the entire landscape of a U.S-China trade relationship, President Trump quietly and methodically laid the groundwork with personal visits to: Prime Minister Shinzo Abe (Japan); President Moon Jae-in (S-Korea); President Tran Dai Quang (Vietnam); and President Rodrigo Duerte (Philippines),” he writes.

In other words, an American public told they would be irreparably harmed by a trade war with China will be able to purchase similar products from other nations. Nations with no ambitions to completely rearrange the world order — on totalitarian terms.

It’s about time. Ever since President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China, Americans have been assured by administrations from both parties that it’s only a matter of time before China’s emulation of capitalist economics evolved into democratic governance.

It was a mistake then. Forty-seven years and trillions of dollars in deficits later, it’s devolved into self-serving, elitist propaganda.

“Once a nation is hooked on the cheap goods that are the narcotic free trade provides, it is rarely able to break free,” argues Pat Buchanan. “The loss of its economic independence is followed by the loss of its political independence, the loss of its greatness and, ultimately, the loss of its national identity.”

That’s the disease. “Make America Great Again” is the antidote.  

~The Patriot Post

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