ACTION

The candidates on stage: Elizabeth dinky-Warren,  scumbag-Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro, socialist-Beto O'Rourke, scumbag-Bill de Blasio, Tulsi Gabbard, Jay Inslee, Tim Ryan, and John Delaney. Ten more will debate tonight.

As for last night, we’ll focus on three examples of the effort to push the envelope as far to the left as possible, testing messaging for the general election and bringing Democrat voters together.

Economy

dinky-Warren led the charge on this one, revealing the party’s strategy. If Democrats can’t get the recession they want, they’ll go with their bread-and-butter standby: envy.

“Who is this economy really working for?” Warren asked in a common theme for the debate. “It’s doing great for a thinner and thinner slice at the top.” Warren pointed to Big Pharma and Big Oil, as well as the prison system, as examples. She’s not entirely unfounded in diagnosing the problems, but she is grossly wrong about the solutions. “When you’ve got a government, when you’ve got an economy that does great for those with money and isn’t doing great for everyone else, that is corruption, pure and simple,” she thundered. The economy, she insists, is “rigged.” Warren’s solution? More government — telling business how and what to sell and consumers what they’re allowed to buy. Her real gripe is merely one of who’s doing the “rigging.”

scumbag-De Blasio made this plain, saying there’s “plenty of money,” but “it’s just in the wrong hands.”

In any case, it’s rather hilarious to hear Warren talking about anything being “rigged” when she parlayed her phony minority ancestry into a posh Harvard job. Moreover, she and her husband have an estimated net worth of as much as $10 million, which puts even  millionaire socialist commie-Bernie Sanders to shame. Must be hard being that “thinner slice at the top.”

Health Care

dinky-Warren and scumbag-de Blasio were the only two candidates on stage to raise their hands when asked if they’d be willing to abolish private insurance. scumbag-de Blasio, who never saw a private enterprise he didn’t want to destroy, even rebuked former Leftmedia heartthrob socialist-O'Rourke for “defending the private insurance industry.”

Again, Democrats are testing the waters to see how voters react to the idea of losing their private insurance. Medicare for All is popular … until people realize the implications.

Immigration

This time it was Castro offering up the most “progressive” proposition. He has called for repealing the federal law that makes illegally crossing the border a crime, and he demanded the others on stage line up behind him.

We’ve all seen the very real border crisis fomented by Democrats’ invasion invitation, marked by 144,000 apprehended or rejected migrants in May alone. Castro’s policy is to inject that with steroids.

Democrat pandering peaked with socialist-O'Rourke, scumbag-Booker, and Castro each breaking into Spanish.

Other Notables

Speaking of Castro, the man aiming to lead the Party of Science™ arguably had the most bizarre line of the night when he claimed he believes in “reproductive justice,” which means taxpayer-funded abortions … including for “a trans female.” Uh, that would also be known as “a man.” Do you even science, bro?

Then there was the moment when scumbag-Cory Booker  bragged about people getting shot in his neighborhood, as if that qualifies him to lead the charge on gun control. For sheer foolishness, he narrowly edged out Amy Klobuchar’s test for gun control: “Does this hurt my Uncle Dick in his deer stand?”

In summary, in addition to testing leftist messaging, every Democrat on stage, to varying degrees, thinks they can be more generous with your money, smarter with your decisions, and wiser with … well, everything than you can. Do Americans really want to put someone like that in the White House?  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63924?mailing_id=4367&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4367&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The Post reports:

Real and consequential differences separate Americans, but the more divided we get, the more mistakes we make. For example, Democrats estimate that about half of Republicans would admit that racism is still a problem in the United States, when in reality 79 percent of Republicans say so. Republicans, meanwhile, think fully half of Democrats would say that “most police are bad people.” The actual percentage is 15 percent.

Some amount of the time, we are fighting ghosts, not real people. And the more inaccurate our perceptions, the more likely we are to describe our opponents as “hateful” and “brainwashed,” the study found.

The study also found that the more news folks consume, the more distorted their views. “Media coverage is now feeding our misperceptions,” they write. What’s also fascinating is that what the authors call “the Perception Gap” is also worsened by education … but only for Democrats: “While Republicans’ misperceptions of Democrats do not improve with higher levels of education, Democrats’ understanding of Republicans actually gets worse with every additional degree they earn.” Given the gross indoctrination that takes place on American college and university campuses, this is hardly surprising.

It is human nature to identify with a “tribe” and to want to beat the other tribe. Modern mass media taps into this by highlighting the division. It gets eyeballs and … sells advertising. Remember that next time the angry, yelling pundits on your TV act like the nation faces irreconcilable differences.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63878?mailing_id=4361&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4361&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body 

But Democrats may be remiss if they think Mueller’s testimony will implicate Trump. According to The Washington Post, “Even Mueller repeating aspects of his report in a public setting could be politically damaging for Trump — exposing the findings to sections of the country that may not be aware of them, and creating a televised spectacle.” It will be a spectacle alright — but perhaps not in the way Democrats think.

Sen. Lindsey Graham hypothetically asks, “Bottom line is, after all of your looking and all the time you had and all the money you spent, did Trump collude with the Russians? ‘No.’ Do you stand by your report? ‘Yes.’” He added, “It is ‘case-closed’ for me. [Democrats] can do anything they want to in the House, and I think it will blow up in their face. … The conclusions can’t change. There is no collusion. That’s what the whole thing was about to begin with.” Moreover, Graham added, “There’s nobody on Earth who could bring an obstruction case based on these facts.”

Harvard Law School professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz echoes these sentiments. He stated, “[Mueller] can’t refuse to answer questions about the FISA application [for surveilling Trump’s campaign]. Those are the kind of questions that I think Republicans will be very well prepared to ask. Those are the kind of questions which are currently under investigation by the inspector general whose report we are waiting for. But those are not in any way precluded. So I think that [Democrats] will regret having called him.”

Time will tell. But if the Democrats’ history of overplaying their witch-hunt cards is any indication, Graham and Dershowitz are probably right. Or as Rep. Mark Meadows sums it up: “Mr. Mueller better be prepared. I mean, there’s a lot more questions that Republicans have than Democrats. This is the Democrats trying to resurrect a Russia collusion narrative that the American people are tired of. And yet, Mr. Mueller has not been subject to cross examination. He will be now.”  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63899?mailing_id=4361&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4361&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

News flash: There’s a crisis at the border.

This was discovered again over the past few days when immigration attorneys talked to reporters about appalling conditions at a Border Patrol facility detaining migrant minors in Clint, Texas.

According to the lawyers, many of the kids had to sleep on the concrete floor, failed to get proper adult supervision and didn’t routinely take showers or brush their teeth. The details were hard to read.

Assuming the account was accurate, one wonders how we could treat anyone this way, let alone children? But a lawyer who talked to The New Yorker mentioned a telling fact: The facility previously had a capacity of 104 and had never held children before. Yet it held roughly 350 children, apparently accommodated by placement of a new warehouse at the site.

All this is consistent with vast numbers of migrants, many of them families and children, flooding the border and overtaxing facilities never meant for these kinds of numbers or this demographic of migrant.

Indeed, the immigration lawyer mentioned to The New Yorker that the personnel at the Border Patrol facility were constantly receiving children and constantly transferring them over to a Health and Human Services site, and stipulated that the guards believed the children don’t belong there and should go someplace more appropriate. (Under the glare of publicity, they did.)

The broader problem is that HHS, which is supposed to get custody of migrant children from Border Patrol in short order, is itself overburdened and backed up.

Since it’s 2019, what should be properly attributed to dire circumstances and limited capacity is instead taken as evidence of President Donald Trump’s malice.

If what’s happening at the border is a product of Trump policy, it would have to involve an intricate and well-executed plan. The White House would have to convince the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security, Kevin McAleenan — who served as deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection under President Barack scumbag/liar-nObama — to send word down through the bureaucracy to treat children as callously as possible and not to leak word of this explosive guidance.

In the real world, a migrant influx will test even an administration more favorably inclined toward immigration. The reason that the left can’t keep their viral images straight — often misattributing to Trump photos of kids in steel-cage holding pens during the scumbag/liar-nObama years — is that this is a similar crisis to the one scumbag/liar-nObama faced in his second term, with similar challenges.

A viral video of a Justice Department lawyer arguing before a panel of judges last week that kids don’t need toothbrushes and soap to meet the standard for “safe and sanitary” detention under the so-called Flores settlement has caused outrage. But few have stopped to note that the underlying case had to do with a district court finding that the scumbag/liar-nObama administration in 2015 was in material breach of the Flores standard (or that the DOJ lawyer was offering a technical legal argument — not a defense of mistreating kids).

All that said, once these migrants are under our care, it is our responsibility to make sure they are treated as humanely as possible. The border needs more resources. The Trump administration has been asking Congress to pass a funding package, and it should do so forthwith. To address the root cause of the crisis, it should also change the bizarre asylum rules that have forced us to release family units from Central America into the country, creating an incentive for more to come.

As long as that’s the case, we aren’t going to be able to control the border or process people coming across it in an orderly fashion. What we’re seeing is what a border crisis looks like. If we don’t like it — and we shouldn’t — it’s time for Congress to act to begin to bring it to an end.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/63851?mailing_id=4358&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4358&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Huh? The population of the U.S. in 2018 was estimated to be just over 327 million. So, according to the leading Democrat presidential candidate, about 163 million individuals in this nation are living in poverty — in what may be one of the best economic windows of time in modern history. The U.S. currently enjoys essentially full employment, wage growth is on the upward swing, GDP growth is around 3%, and investors are loving a stock market flirting with a historic 27,000 points.

Poverty is calculated in different ways, as reported by The Washington Post’s Fact Checker that gave a bit of analysis on Uncle Joe’s tall tale. The U.S. Census Bureau reported that 12.3% of the population, not almost 50%, were below the federal poverty line back in 2017. Individuals in that slice of the demographic pie were making less than $12,060 in 2017, with families of four earning just $24,600. Even applying the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) of the Census Bureau that employs a more generous definition as to the unit of family measured, as well as lowers the reported income by removing expenses such as childcare and any medical costs, those falling below the poverty level at most totaled 13.9%.

So, Joe, where are you getting that “almost half”?

The loose lips liar-Biden campaign responded to the WaPo Fact Checker that they were using the SPM and looking at all whose incomes fell below 200% of poverty level. That does move the figure to 43.3% — which Biden then embellished even further — but it’s really not about the numbers. Focus on the tactic and message.

“It isn’t so much that liberals are ignorant,” President Ronald Reagan once said. “It’s just that they know so many things that aren’t so.”

Nowhere near half of America’s population is poor. But, in 2019, the Left’s only effective message involves the contagion of envy, not empowerment or even equality. The best way to ensure that there’s a great pandemic of resentment and discontent is to preach the hateful spew of victimhood — to half of the population.

(Conversely, remember how savagely rino-Mitt Romney was attacked for rightly noting that “47% of Americans pay no income tax” and thus would be less inclined to vote for him.)

The Poor People’s Forum was the perfect place for loose lips liar-Biden to read from the holy screed of covetousness and ill will. It makes Democrats the saviors of the malcontents who look at another’s success not with hope or inspiration but hatred and resentment. Nevertheless, Joe and the other Democrats were faithful to proselytize to their prospective campaign congregants with the prejudicial posits that the evil Republicans, led by President Donald Trump, are the real cause of their supposed victimhood status.

The “War on Poverty” through the “Great Society” began in the 1960s. Here we are 55 years later and, using 2014 figures, having spent more than $22 trillion (What was that pesky national debt figure?), we’re still hearing that government is the solution to those in need. The fire of Freedom is being snuffed out with every single entitlement, program, and agency created to stifle self-reliance and the will to be independent of a growing population.

What else did loose lips liar-Biden say at the Poor People’s Forum? He promised, “First thing I would do as president is eliminate the president’s tax cut.” Yes, your math is accurate — that means tax increases all around. This is right in line with an interview the champion of socialism held last week. commie-Bernie Sanders proclaimed, “I suspect that a lot of people in this country would be delighted to pay more in taxes if they had comprehensive health care as a human right.”

Let’s correct that, commie-Bernie. There are a lot of people who’d like other peoples’ taxes to go up to pay for health insurance that they currently may not have, along with any other goodie from the list of freebies coming from the Democrats. commie-Sanders himself pays only “the taxes I owe” — not what he demands of others.

If loose lips liar-Biden and commie-Bernie, along with the rest of the field of Democratic Socialists, get their way, the elimination of Republican tax reform will mean that a single parent will “be delighted” to pay $1,300 more in taxes and a family of four having a combined income of $73,000 will boost their patriotism, as loose lips liar-Biden declared in 2008, by paying $2,000 more to Uncle Sam.

loose lips liar-Joe, it just ain’t so that almost half of Americans are living in poverty. Even an article at the leftist rag Vox challenges the premise that millions of Americans are destitute. The writer, Ryan Briggs of Virginia Tech, flatly noted, “Don’t believe it.” Citing the measurements for the poor globally reflect consumption as compared to the U.S. metric of income and a study  establishing that “very few Americans are deprived of their most basic material needs,” the Vox analysis contradicts loose lips liar-Joe, commie-Bernie, and the gang attempting to win the hearts and minds of the disgruntled.

There is poverty. There are inequities. But the correction is not to take from those who are productive in some faux philanthropy to boost voter rolls. The playbook of the Democrats for this election cycle is exactly the same: lie, preach victimhood, and grow the government to plunder from those who are law-abiding and productive to sustain the malcontents, not just those in true need.

Don’t be ignorant; see through the things that just aren’t so.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63848?mailing_id=4358&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4358&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

After decades of warnings about impending disaster over the national debt, you’d expect the political parties to have coalesced around a plan by now. There are several reasons why this has not happened.

For one thing, conservative versus leftist views of the country and what it should be are so diametrically opposed that there is little room for agreement on anything.

Additionally, in tough economic times, politicians don’t like to cut spending because it seems hard-hearted to the needs of the poor. In good economic times, nobody ever thinks that the party will end, so no emphasis is put on setting aside something for tomorrow. And in the swamp, there is no such thing as a tomorrow beyond the next election.

It would be foolish to think that our current economic position will guard against the hazards of enormous debt. The national debt erodes public confidence in the economy and hampers the government’s ability to respond in times of economic crisis. The trouble is, we cannot predict with much certainty when that fateful moment will come when the national debt finally pushes us over the fiscal cliff.

Annual trillion-dollar deficits are not helping the case. Neither are the approaching twin calamities of Social Security and Medicare [bankruptcy](https://patriotpost.us/articles/56448-crying-wolf-on-entitlements. A spike in interest rates could shock the bond market, creating a major crisis worse than the Great Recession, sending investors worldwide running for cover.

For their part, Democrats don’t seem concerned. True to their belief that the Swamp has a revenue problem, not a spending problem, House Dems issued a $1 trillion spending bill to partially fund the government for the next fiscal year.

The bill is essentially an anti-Trump wish list, seeking ways to reverse the president’s decision on a number of items, including eliminating the Mexico City policy, the withdrawal from the Paris climate deal, the transgender military service ban, and actions taken to combat illegal immigration. The package passed 226-203, with seven Democrats joining every House Republican in voting against the measure.

Separately, the House Ways and Means Committee approved bills to extend expired and expiring tax credits for workers and families, and some corporate sweeteners like those earmarked for the renewable-energy industry. How will they make us pay for it? Roll back estate-tax cuts for one quarter of the cost, with the rest “covered” by deficit spending.

The spending bill is mostly political theater, and it doesn’t have much chance of making it through the Senate. But it positions Democrats for a fight over spending in the fall just when a debt-ceiling hike must be considered.

There is no answer as to how far Democrats will go to defeat Trump, but they are not above tanking the economy to make it happen just as they did in 2008. And a healthy dose of fiscal chaos would give them the cover they need to push us even closer toward their socialist worker paradise where we can all enjoy equality … of misery.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63847?mailing_id=4358&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4358&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

In the president’s words: “[Yesterday’s] action follows a series of aggressive behaviors by the Iranian regime in recent weeks. The Supreme Leader of Iran is [the] one who ultimately is responsible for the hostile conduct of the regime. … His office oversees the regime’s most brutal instruments, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.”

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Abbas Mousavi bellowed in rebuttal, “Imposing useless sanctions … is the permanent closure of the path of diplomacy.” He added, “Trump’s desperate administration is destroying the established international mechanisms for maintaining world peace and security.”

Some hardcore interventionists disagree, but the leveling of additional sanctions is a balanced countermeasure. National Review’s David French explains one critical reason why that’s the case: “A small attack on three targets is a pinprick strike. The mullahs don’t care about [150] casualties, and a small attack does not materially impair Iranian striking power. Pinprick strikes are often seen as displays of weakness, not strength. A small attack would, however, grant the pretext for yet another Iranian escalation — perhaps one that would claim American lives, thus generating a much larger American response.”

Iran is no Libya or even Syria — its technology and military capabilities are far more sophisticated. So airstrikes should be reserved for extreme cases. Sanctions, on the other hand, are demonstrably effective. CNBC reports that the pressure placed on Iran’s oil exports from previous sanctions has pushed that nation’s economy onto a precipice. Any further reduction in this revenue source would likely result in a complete economic meltdown.

Columnist Ken Blackwell also suggests engaging the Iranian resistance. “The Iranian regime itself is clearly well aware of the potential for its own overthrow and is reacting with the expected sense of panic,” writes Blackwell, who concludes, “There is perhaps no greater threat to the Iranian regime’s hold on power than policies which make it clear that pressure from the international community and from Iran’s democratic resistance are one and the same.”

On that note, The Wall Street Journal observes, “Now would be a good moment for Europe to get off the fence and join the U.S. pressure campaign. … The same goes for the many Democratic presidential candidates who keep saying they’ll return without conditions to the 2015 nuclear deal.” Iran will continue to provoke, but its ability to do so without shooting itself in the foot is getting harder by the day — and will get even harder if global powers coalesce around the right pressure tactics.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63864?mailing_id=4358&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4358&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

commie-Sanders is conjuring up a scheme “that would eliminate all $1.6 trillion of American student debt,” according to Fox News, which adds, “The proposal package also includes making public universities, community colleges and trade schools tuition-free.” Recall that Warren recently outlined her own scheme. As the Associated Press explains, “The key difference is that Warren’s plan considers the income of the borrowers, canceling $50,000 in debt for those earning less than $100,000 per year and affecting an estimated 42 million people in the U.S.” In other words, Sanders is attempting to one-up his colleague, who is a legitimate threat, if polling is to be believed.

This is clearly frustrating Sanders, who still believes the Democrat Party overlords are conspiring against him. Last week, Politico ran a headline titled, “Centrists are coming around to Elizabeth dinky-Warren as an alternative to commie-Bernie Sanders,” to which commie-Sanders responded, “The cat is out of the bag. The corporate wing of the Democratic Party is publicly ‘anybody but commie-Bernie.’”

Of course, “commie-Sanders reportedly plans to pay for the lofty proposal with a tax on Wall Street, which his campaign says will generate more than $2 trillion over 10 years,” Fox News notes. Right. Just like students loans were predicted to be “profitable.”

As we reported last month, “In 2017, the CBO … stated that the government-managed student-loan program would garner a respectable $114 billion in revenue over the ensuing 10 years. Then, in 2018, that revenue estimate nosedived to just $8.7 billion. … Now, the CBO is calculating a $31 billion deficit over the next 10 years. A Bloomberg Government report parsed this development as ‘a shift from past CBO forecasts that the government would profit from the program.’ That’s not merely a shift. That’s a deviation of epic proportions.”

This is par for the course when it comes to government-funded programs. Regardless of whether commie-Sanders’s or Warren’s plans prevail, the fact of the matter is that student-loan forgiveness is a nonstarter. As Frank J. Fleming aptly notes, “The problem is that college costs have skyrocketed versus inflation due to government interference in loans, and the solution people are proposing is to have the government pay off those loans, giving colleges even less incentive to cut costs. There would be no student debt crisis if colleges hadn’t been fueled into an inflation of costs. If you’re talking about loans and nothing about making colleges reduce costs, despite all you posturing about caring about students, you are … making things worse.”  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63841?mailing_id=4354&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4354&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body