This action was a long time coming, as we have long noted the inevitable collapse of Venezuela after Hugo Chavez aggressively implemented a socialist takeover of what was at the time South America’s wealthiest country. And since Chavez’s death it has only gotten worse. As Daniel DePetris of the Washington Examiner observes, “Venezuela under Maduro’s leadership has fallen apart at the seams. Inflation surpassed 1 million percent at the end of last year (not a typo!), a figure that makes former Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe look like an economic genius. Most of Venezuela’s population is in poverty, roaming the streets for dumpsters in the hope that food may be mixed in with the rubbish. The situation has gotten so bleak that 3 million Venezuelans have fled to Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Ecuador — better to start over in a new country than stay in Venezuela and starve to death. Medicine is in extremely short supply, the murder rate was the highest in the world in 2017, and many of the crimes that have been committed are the direct result of the Latin American country’s sorry excuse for an economy.”

President Donald Trump was quick to announce his support for Guaido, stating, “The citizens of Venezuela have suffered for too long at the hands of the illegitimate Maduro regime. Today, I have officially recognized the President of the Venezuelan National Assembly, Juan Guaido, as the Interim President of Venezuela.” The U.S. joins at least 13 other nations, most of which are in South America, in recognizing Guaido as Venezuela’s legitimate president.

Obviously, dictator Maduro sees things differently, and he responded to Trump’s announcement by cutting diplomatic ties with the U.S. and ordering our diplomats to leave the country within 72 hours. This sets up an interesting showdown, since the U.S. no longer recognizes Maduro as Venezuela’s legitimate president. Sen. Marco Rubio was quick to raise the issue, declaring, “U.S. diplomats in [Venezuela] should present their credentials to President [Guaido]. Maduro has no authority to expel anyone. And trust me on this one, if Maduro is stupid enough to test [Trump] by harming any U.S. diplomat, the consequences would be swift & severe.”

Trump’s action puts pressure on Maduro. However, Maduro still has the support of his military, as every dictator does. He installed loyalists to control the military while at the same time revoking citizens’ right to bear arms so that he has control of all the guns. How long will Guaido be able to stay out of Maduro’s prisons? Is Venezuela headed toward civil war? Time will soon tell, but for the sake of Venezuelans we hope for a peaceful transition of power.  ~The Patriot Post

Sometimes, a three-point celebration is just a three-point celebration. Sometimes, a pep rally is just a pep rally. Sometimes, a smile is just a smile. And sometimes, a hat is just a hat.

Only among the most deranged partisans could a universal sports ritual, a common high school activity, a typical teen face and patriotic headgear be construed as evil symbols of patriarchal oppression.

These, however, are the soul-sapping, lunacy-inducing times in which we live.

Nobody loses their marbles when black NBA stars make the universal “OK” gesture with one hand. Or two. Or when the elite athletes hold up the sign to the sky, turn two of them into triumphant eye goggles, stir the pot, sweep the floor or dramatically holster their finger-trios like weapons.

It’s all in good fun.

But when reputation-destroying agitators plundered the photo collection of the Covington Catholic High School basketball team in search of evidence to bolster their prefabricated narrative that the white Kentucky boys must, must, must be unrepentant bigots, the three-point celebration transmogrified into menacing proof of R-A-C-I-S-M.

Liberal pot-stirrers tweeted celebrities and journalists an image purporting to show that the Covington kids — still under siege after being slandered last week at the March for Life rally by Native American agitator jerk-Nathan Phillips — had flashed white supremacy signs. The teens were pictured on the sidelines of a basketball court in their uniforms, paying tribute to a teammate who had just scored.

No, they did not hail him with Hitler salutes, but with the innocuous three-point, A-OK sign.

Undeterred by basketball fans who futilely tried to explain the actual meaning of the hand gesture, monomaniacal left-wing detectives marked all the Covington athletes’ fingers with cuckoo red-font circles and disseminated their fevered forensic analysis across social media with enraged captions, including this one sent to the pope:

“This is the All White hand sign. This is Covington Catholic school. Is this what they teach at this Catholic school? Is this how Jesus wanted it?”

Comedienne-turned-decapitation fetishist Kathy Griffin gleefully attacked the boys, tweeting “Covington’s finest throwing up the new nazi sign.”

The New York Daily News and U.K. Daily Mail compounded the delusional smear with sensational headlines claiming Covington basketball players had taunted a black opponent while in “blackface.” Quelle horreur!

In truth, internet trolls had ripped a screenshot from the team’s video montage of pep rallies — where students had dressed up as nerds, businessmen and Hawaiians or painted themselves blue, white and (gasp!) black at various competitions.

It’s not racism. It’s athletic boosterism.

An alum, Ryan Toler, tried to correct the record, pointing out that he was pictured in the seven-year-old photo: “I’m shown in the background of this image. ITS CALLED A BLACKOUT THEME. WE HAD SCHOOL SPIRIT. WE DO THIS TO EVERY SCHOOL NO MATTER THE RACE OR ETHNICITY. Stop trying to force a fake story to drive your false narrative.”

But the media manufacturers of racism won’t stop because the ideological incentives to convict first and verify later are far too strong. Time after time, liberals see racism where it doesn’t exist, fabricate it when they can’t find it and ignore it within their own ranks.

They didn’t stop after falsely accusing Zina Gelman Bash, a Jewish Mexican-American lawyer, of flashing a white supremacy sign at a Senate confirmation hearing last fall for her friend Judge Brett Kavanaugh.

They didn’t stop after the liberal white zealots of the Southern Poverty Law Center falsely labeled famed neurosurgeon and Trump Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson and anti-jihad activist Maajid Nawaz “extremists.”

They didn’t stop after hysterically spreading campus hate crime fakery cooked up at my alma mater Oberlin College, where excitable nitwits claimed a student walking around with a blanket wrapped around her was a lurking racist in a KKK hood; at Michigan State University, where a “noose” turned out to be a lost shoelace; or at Bowling Green State University, where a purported group of Klansmen turned out to be lab equipment covered with a white cloth.

They didn’t stop after attacking my Catholic high school alma mater, Holy Spirit High School in Absecon, N.J., four years ago, when a decades-old tradition of basketball fans dressing up in goofy costumes was falsely portrayed by USA Today as racism because students wore monkey pajamas and a giant banana (others wore a green ballerina tutu, a bumblebee suit, a jack-o’-lantern outfit and “Wizard of Oz” get-ups).

The Covington hoax is more than just the epitome of fake news. It’s a cultural Rorschach test that measures the impact of Trump-hating confirmation bias on the viewer’s intellectual honesty and emotional stability. Those calling to protest, dox, stalk or kill the MAGA hat-wearing Covington kids and their families over a selectively edited video planted by a foreign instigator prove, once again, that political correctness is a pathological disorder.  ~The Patriot Post

But there’s an interesting parallel that Becket Adams detects regarding the video that prompted the knee-jerk reactions. He writes:

Selectively edited videos are bad. Except when they aren’t.

That’s at least one of the big takeaways from the press’ disastrous promotion this weekend of bogus allegations of racism against teenagers at the March for Life. They were harassed by an elderly Native American protester, after being berated and abused by a hateful sect known as the Black Hebrew Israelites, but their situation got really bad only because of a single, selectively edited video of the incident that took place the day after the March for Life.

Forgive my eyerolling as I think back to the high standard of proof that the national media set in 2015 following the release of the undercover Planned Parenthood tapes. A court has since concluded that those tapes were kosher, but the media described them as “selectively edited” when they were released.

The video in this story, in contrast, actually was selectively edited.

Adams concludes by rhetorically noting, “It’s just so weird that certain newsrooms developed a standard for verification that lasted exactly as long as it took for the Planned Parenthood fetal tissue scandal to blow over. Quite a mystery.”  ~The Patriot Post

But fear not, ye masses trembling in apocalyptic fear, for Ms. commie-Ocasio-Cortez has the solution — a “Green New Deal” eliminating fossil fuels by 2030 while lowering inequality! And while “progressives” laud the Green New Deal, they are less comfortable attaching a price tag, and no wonder. Though commie-Cortez is short on details, a similar plan offered by Green Party chairman Jill Stein would cost an astronomical $700 billion to $1 trillion per year.

So how to pay for it? According to commie-Cortez, through more debt spending and raising the marginal income tax rate on high earners ($10 million/year and above) to 70%. Unfortunately, higher tax rates have historically resulted in only modest revenue gains while creating a drag on the economy.

Why? As the Tax Foundation’s Kyle Pomerleau and Huaqun Li explain, promises of increased revenue from higher tax rates “do not account for behavioral effects.” For example, “A tax rate that high could encourage individuals to shelter their income, thus reducing potential revenue from this proposal.”

In other words, those earning enough to be taxed at the 70% level have myriad ways to shelter their money from such immorally confiscatory tax rates, so the net result is that rather than investing that money and creating new jobs, the money is sheltered. Counter intuitively, historical tax records show the lower the marginal tax rate, the greater percentage of total taxes are paid by the wealthy.

Because high earners react to higher tax rates by shifting income to lower-tax uses, the Tax Foundation estimates commie-Ocasio-Cortez’s plan would only generate an additional $189 billion over 10 years. Some pro-tax-increase economists argue up to $700 billion could be raised over a decade, but they ignore the behavioral changes resulting from higher taxes. And if, as some Democrats propose, capital gains were treated as normal income and taxed at the 70% rate, government would actually lose an estimated $63.5 billion. Either way, the tax increase would not come close to funding the Left’s green-energy pipe dream unless Democrats follow historical precedent and tax the rich on the way to also hitting the middle class.

commie-Ocasio-Cortez and her socialist Myrmidons should also take a lesson from history and reject public policy driven by jealousy and envy. While “the rich” make an easy target, we should remember that the income tax itself, which now impacts most Americans and makes the IRS feared and hated, only passed because Congress claimed it would punish only the so-called rich.

After passage of the 16th Amendment, President Woodrow Wilson called a special session of Congress to pass the income tax. It started off as a 1% tax on incomes above $3,000 (roughly $76,000 in 2018 dollars) with surcharges of between 2% and 7% on incomes between $20,000 and $500,000 (between $500,000 and $12.7 million in 2018 dollars).

But the tax rates soon increased, and the threshold at which the tax kicked in decreased, until everyday Americans working hard and sacrificing to make ends meet discovered the tax man now considered them “rich” and wanted their tax money.

In 1914, the income tax generated just $28 million from a tiny handful of wealthy Americans. Two years later the rate was raised to 15%, generating $68 million from a few more workers. In 2017, nearly every working American had become subject to the income tax, and the top marginal rate had skyrocketed to 39.6%, generating a staggering $1.688 trillion.

And as bad as the income tax is for economic growth and individual prosperity, it has done far more damage to individual liberties. In 1913, Speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates Richard E. Byrd warned, “A hand from Washington will be stretched out and placed upon every man’s business. … Heavy fines imposed by distant and unfamiliar tribunals will constantly menace the taxpayer. An army of Federal officials, spies and detectives will descend upon the state.”

But alas, driven by greed and envy, Americans chose to punish their neighbors, foolishly thinking punishment would never come for them. Too many Americans are perfectly happy to raise taxes on others as long as it doesn’t impact them.

In 1965, former IRS Commissioner T. Coleman Andrews warned of the need to abolish the income tax, declaring, “Congress went beyond merely enacting an income tax law and repealed Article IV of the Bill of Rights, by empowering the tax collector to do the very things from which that article says we were to be secure. It opened up our homes, our papers and our effects to the prying eyes of government agents and set the stage for searches of our books and vaults and for inquiries into our private affairs whenever the tax men might decide. … The income tax is bad because it was conceived in class hatred [and] is an instrument of vengeance.”

With “progressives,” government is never big enough and taxes are never high enough. But maybe President Donald Trump should call out their hypocrisy by agreeing to the tax increase so long as every penny is used to pay down the national debt. It would be a poison pill for Democrats.

Better yet, we should repeal the income tax altogether and restore individual liberty.  ~The Patriot Post

Speaker Nancy Pulosi has given President Trump an opportunity to change the dynamic of the State of the Union address, an event that has become predictable and often boring. It has featured members of Congress popping up and down like whack-a-moles, interrupting the president with applause if they agree with him, or stone silence if they don’t.

Pulosi claims that because of the partial government shutdown, the security of the U.S. Capitol cannot be guaranteed. The Department of Homeland Security debunked her claim, saying that the Secret Service and Capitol Police will perform their duties whether or not they are receiving paychecks.

President Trump might consider reverting to the pattern of previous presidents, sending his address to Congress in writing. Then he might deliver the speech from the Oval Office, or at one of his rallies instead of in the Capitol Building. Democrats wouldn’t be able to instantly respond on television, as they did following the president’s border wall speech, and even if they did, they would likely look as small as Pulosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck scumbag-Schumer (D-NY) did then.

The truth is that the economic state of the union is good. According to Labor Department data, more people than ever are working and unemployment figures, especially in the African-American and Hispanic communities, are at record, or near record lows. The stock market, after a recent decline, has rebounded, for which retirees are no doubt grateful.

Unfortunately, the political state of the country is anything but unified; not even close. For decades the media and their Democrat allies have blamed Republicans for dividing the country when they stand on their principles, only praising members of the GOP when they submit to Democrat demands.

The Constitution requires a president to deliver an annual assessment of the state of the union. George Washington delivered the first one before Congress on Jan. 8, 1790 in New York City, which was the new nation’s provisional capital. In 1801, Thomas Jefferson, believing an in-person address would have made him look like a king appearing before his subjects, set the precedent of writing his state of the union address and having it delivered to Congress by a clerk.

Woodrow Wilson re-established the practice of an in-person speech, but the practice was not consistent even during the latter part of the 20th century. Jimmy Carter delivered a written report in January 1981, shortly before Ronald Reagan was inaugurated. Every president since has delivered a State of the Union address before Congress with Reagan adding a twist, the recognition of balcony guests he and his successors wished to honor.

When radio and especially television offered an opportunity for presidents to be heard and later seen, most have delivered their remarks in person. The House of Representatives offers an impressive backdrop, but shots of some members of Congress smirking, texting and otherwise not paying much attention, do not demonstrate the respect the speech deserves.

Most people who pay attention to the childish and partisan behavior that characterizes Washington these days can do their own assessment of the state of the union. If they have jobs and are prospering, they probably think it is pretty good — the pettiness in Washington notwithstanding.

Should President Trump decide to do an alternative report, either in writing, or from the White House, or even a retro address on radio, he is likely to get more attention than he would receive from delivering it in person. He could also go ahead with a speech in the House of Representatives and by doing so challenge Democrats and Pulosi’s claims of insufficient security. Maybe Pulosi and scumbag-Schumer would boycott the speech; it would certainly appeal to their liberal base. It would also demonstrate who the real culprits are when it comes to the country’s disunity.  ~The Patriot Post

             Now Texas congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who replaced Beto O'Rourke, thinks that wall should come down. “We know that walls don’t work, that they don’t stop drugs, that they don’t stop migration.” But when asked if she would tear down that wall, she responded, “You know I, I, it’s, it’s really ugly. It, it, it is I think a monument to division.” Yeah, division between violence and non-violence.
               Former Border Patrol chief Mark Morgan, who we quoted  last week as supporting the wall, lives in El Paso. “I see a lot of the pundits talking and they have never been to the border, and they never talk to the experts, and they’re absolutely dismissing the facts,” said Morgan.
               “Wall work,” he asserts. “If you saw the previous caravans, what stopped them? What stopped them was a multi-layered strategy that the Border Patrol has been using for decades, and they say they need now. And that’s that trifecta of infrastructure, technology, and personnel.”  

~The Patriot Post

VIDEO:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFUt38XwhTQ