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Democrats have already made quite the show of trolling President Donald Trump with their announced guests. Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ) is bringing a Guatemalan woman who was fired from the Trump National Golf Club when it was discovered she was here illegally. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) welcomes a Guatemalan mother and daughter who were separated after trying to cross the border illegally. And Rep. commie-Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) invited Ana Maria Archila, the scumbag-George Soros-funded professional protester who publicly harassed Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) during the Brett Kavanaugh fiasco.

Republicans also have statement guests, including Border Patrol agents. As for Trump, he’s invited Joshua Trump, a Delaware sixth-grader regularly bullied because of his name.

But the state of our union is far more than this ridiculous tit for tat. So as we prepare for tonight’s speech, let’s review highlights from last year’s SOTU.

Trump failed to reach agreement with Congress on proposals for infrastructure spending, paid family leave, or immigration reform. (As we’ve said before, both sides view immigration less as a problem to be solved than as a useful political cudgel. Until that changes, expect the stalemate to continue.) Iran and North Korea likewise remain in flux — though the president has made strides, Congress could not come to any meaningful agreement.

On the other hand, Trump succeeded in several areas. One partial success was signing an executive order making it easier to fire bad federal employees, though it was blocked by a federal judge (as are so many of Trump’s initiatives). But on that note, Trump has won Senate approval for more circuit-court judges in his first two years than any other president, and there are more in the wings. He signed the Right to Try Act so terminal patients can seek experimental medication, and he’s eased the FDA’s approval process for drugs, bringing the price of prescriptions down for the first time in 46 years. He increased military spending to rebuild our Armed Forces and protect America. And while he was merely able to boast at having passed major tax cuts last year, 2018 showed how well those cuts are working to fuel economic growth. The CBO even now projects those cuts will recover “costs” better than previously estimated.

Finally, the only excerpt released from his speech tonight is telling: “Together we can break decades of political stalemate. We can bridge old divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions, and unlock the extraordinary promise of America’s future. The decision is ours to make.” Trump’s call for unity will probably be met with Democrats sitting on their hands. If not, Stacie Abrams will eviscerate it in her SOTU response.  ~The Patriot Post

He further added, “For arms control to effectively contribute to national security, all parties must faithfully implement their obligations. We stand ready to engage with Russia on arms control negotiations that meet these criteria, and, importantly, once that is done, develop, perhaps for the first time ever, an outstanding relationship on economic, trade, political and military levels. This would be a fantastic thing for Russia and the United States, and would also be great for the world.”

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo explained, “We provided Russia an ample window of time to mend its ways and for Russia to honor its commitment. Tomorrow that time runs out.” On Saturday, the U.S. formally notified Moscow that it is in “material breach” of the INF treaty and announced our withdrawal. Pompeo further noted that our NATO allies have “stood with us in our mission to uphold the rule of law and protect our people.”

This decision has been a long time coming, as the U.S. first accused Russia of failing to live up to the agreement in 2014 and has subsequently attempted 35 times to diplomatically encourage Moscow’s compliance — to no avail. So much for “collusion.”  ~The Patriot Post

Willing Apple iOS and Android users were paid $20 per month plus referral fees to install a virtual private network (VPN) called “Facebook Research” on their own phones, giving the tech giant root access to their devices. This allowed Facebook to view extensive data of participants’ mobile activity.

Even that wasn’t enough. Facebook also asked those users to provide a screenshot of their Amazon order history page.

The entire effort resembles Facebook’s Onavo Protect app that Apple banned last June and removed last August. That app, pitched as a way to “keep you and your data safe,” also alerted users about potentially malicious sites. In the process it gave Facebook the ability to analyze how people used their phones beyond the limits of Facebook apps. Tech Crunch noted this latest effort “sidesteps the App Store” and “may be a violation of Apple policy.”

There’s no “may” about it. As The Wall Street  Journal  reveals, Apple revoked Facebook’s permission to maintain the app, stating that it was designed to be used for internal functions within companies, not as a consumer product. Thus Facebook was in “clear breach” of Apple’s policies a statement released by the company asserted.

And in a move that caused disruption within Facebook, Apple also shut a number of internal apps used by Facebook employees, such as employee-only versions of Facebook Messenger, Workplace, and Instagram. These apps, known as “dogfood,” were heavily relied upon by company employees to communicate.

Seven hours after Tech Crunch published its story, Facebook told the website it would shut down the iOS version of the app. Yet as a little more digging by Tech Crunch revealed, Facebook failed to mention that it was being forced to do so by Apple.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg was sent out to defend the data collection. In an interview with CNBC, she insisted that those involved went through a “rigorous consent flow” prior to opting into the program. “The important thing is that the people involved in that research project knew they were involved and consented,” she stated.

An unidentified Facebook spokesperson also defended the company. “Despite early reports, there was nothing ‘secret’ about this; it was literally called the Facebook Research App,” the spokesperson asserted. “It wasn’t ‘spying’ as all of the people who signed up to participate went through a clear on-boarding process asking for their permission and were paid to participate. Finally, less than 5 percent of the people who chose to participate in this market research program were teens. All of them with signed parental consent forms.”

Tech Crunch refuted all of it. “As we wrote yesterday night, Facebook did not publicly promote the Research VPN itself and used intermediaries that often didn’t disclose Facebook’s involvement until users had begun the signup process,” the website countered. “While users were given clear instructions and warnings, the program never stresses nor mentions the full extent of the data Facebook can collect through the VPN. A small fraction of the users paid may have been teens, but we stand by the newsworthiness of its choice not to exclude minors from this data collection initiative.”

A couple of tech experts put Facebook’s efforts in the proper perspective. “I find this behavior shameful. Taking advantage of people who do not understand the value of the data they generate,” said Claudiu Musat, director of research for Data, Analytics and AI at Swisscom tweeted. David Heinemeir Hansson, a Danish programmer and partner of web application company Basecamp, upped the ante: “I used to think a reasonable response to Facebook was simple: ‘break them up.’ But maybe the real solution here is more akin to ‘shut them down.’ Their incessant preying on kids and teenagers is beyond pale.”

Indeed. Yet Apple’s stance as a paragon of virtue rings a bit hollow. Despite NBC’s characterization of the animosity between the companies as a “growing philosophical rift in the tech industry between companies that make money off personal data [Facebook], and those that do not [Apple],” the heart of the issue for most people remains privacy — and honesty about when that privacy is breached.

In that regard, Apple has some explaining of its own to do. “Last week, Turkish security researcher Melih Sevim contacted The Hacker News and claimed to have discovered a flaw in Apple services that allowed him to view partial data, especially notes, from random iCloud accounts as well as on targeted iCloud users just by knowing their associated phone numbers,” the website reported.

Sevim allegedly told Apple about this in October 2018 and the company ostensibly fixed the problem by November. But when contacted by Hacker News, Apple was less than forthcoming regarding how long the breach remained open, how many users were affected, and whether there was evidence of malicious exploitation.

Last week it was also revealed that Apple was forced to disable  its Group FaceTime feature because it allowed anyone to eavesdrop on iPhone, iPad, and Mac users via the microphone of those devices. And as the Sun reports, “Apple has come under further fire after it emerged the company may have known about the bug for an entire week before telling the world.”

In other words, there are no “good guys” here, only multinational corporations run by self-aggrandizing egotists. And while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s  arrogance makes him an easier target, Dipayan Ghosh, a former Facebook employee and a fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, notes that Apple chief Tim Cook’s own motives with regard to this story are hardly pristine. “It’s in Tim Cook’s commercial interests to make the case that the tremendous collection of data — and processing of it by machine learning for news feed tweaks and digital advertising — implicates consumer privacy,” he said.

In other words, it’s all about the money. Moreover, despite the ostensible animosity between the two companies, Apple  restored Facebook’s ability to run the iPhone apps used by the social-media giant’s employees only two days after that ability was revoked.

Nothing to see here; move along.

Except that there is. “When a handful of monopolies control your phone service, your internet and your health care, how you pay at the grocery store and where you shop, your freedoms will also be monopolized,” warns  columnist Daniel Greenfield, who further asserts that the only way to “stop the rise of Big Brother is to break up Big Data.”

As soon as possible. We’ve got nothing to lose but our increasing collectivism — and decreasing Liberty.  ~The Patriot Post

The totals arise from an investigation that lasted 11 months, and the Attorney General’s Office also pointed out that 33 people were prosecuted for voter fraud last year, and 97 were prosecuted between 2005-17. Voting illegally is a second-degree felony in the Lone Star State.

Texas has some of the nation’s most stringent voter ID laws. But as the DA’s office revealed, the opportunity to register illegally remains possible. “Texas law allows lawfully present noncitizens to obtain driver’s licenses by showing proof of lawful presence to DPS [Department of Public Safety],” the office explained in a statement. “However, only citizens are eligible to vote. And Texas law currently does not require verification of a voter’s statement that they are a citizen.”

Unsurprisingly, leftists were skeptical of the findings, and one of the Democrat Party’s most reliable media allies led the charge against them. “More than 8.3 million people voted in the Texas governor’s race last year, which means that even if all 58,000 people who voted were, in fact, found to be noncitizens and voted in 2018 — a claim that no state official has made — they would have amounted to only 0.69 percent of all votes that were cast,” The New York Times reported.

Only? The 2000 presidential election between scumbag-Al Gore and George W. Bush was ultimately determined by only 537 votes of the more than 5.8 million cast in Florida — as in “only” 0.000092% of the votes cast. And the 2008 Minnesota Senate race giving Democrat scumbag-Al Franken the nod over Republican Norm Coleman was decided by 312 votes — in a state where 1,099 felons illegally cast ballots.

Perhaps the Times could enlighten us regarding the acceptable percentage of illegal votes the American public should tolerate to avoid being subjected to the Left’s oh-so familiar charges of voter “suppression” and/or “racism.”

Cue activist Beth Stevens, voting rights legal director for the Texas Civil Rights Project. “There is no credible data that indicates illegal voting is happening in any significant numbers, and the Secretary’s statement does not change that fact,” she asserted.

Isn’t one illegal vote “significant,” Ms. Stevens? Or have we reached a level of rationale where a “little” intellectual bankruptcy — in service to one’s agenda — is acceptable?

Yet agendas cut both ways. “Despite the language of the DPS statement, an advisory to election administrators and voter registrars sent the same day, the Texas director of elections said that the 95,000 name matches between legal immigrants and voter rolls should be considered ‘WEAK,” The Resurgent’s David Thornton reported. “The capitalization of the word was used in the advisory for emphasis.”

The reason? “The flaw in the DPS report is that there was no effort to determine whether the voters who had records indicating that they were noncitizens were still noncitizens at the time they voted,” Thornton added. “Critics of the report point out that the voters could have been naturalized before they registered to vote.”

Columnist John Daniel Davidson has the numbers, revealing that nearly 180,000 noncitizens in Texas became citizens in only three years from 2015 through 2017. The records to which Paxson referred date back to 1996, and as Davidson rightly asserts, “Since then, millions of noncitizen Texas residents have become naturalized U.S. citizens.”

Chad Dunn, a Houston elections lawyer and general counsel to the Texas Democratic Party, inadvertently gets to the real story here, noting a lawsuit filed against the state’s voter ID law contained testimony asserting that voter databases “are such a mess that they couldn’t tell anything meaningful from them.”

Section 8 of the National Voting Rights Act (NRVA) mandates that states “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists.” Yet previous administrations have taken a decidedly different approach to enforcing that statute. The Bush administration’s DOJ was fairly aggressive, accusing 14 states of noncompliance, ultimately filling civil complaints against four of them along with one city. Three states, Indiana, Maine, New Jersey, and the city of Philadelphia settled with the DOJ and committed to cleaning up their rolls, while a judge ruled that Missouri had already made that effort.

By contrast, the sxumbag/liar-nObama administration took a largely see-no-evil approach, aligning itself with leftist assertions that even well-intentioned purges remove eligible voters by mistake. According to J. Christian Adams, who served in the Voting Rights Section at the DOJ, former Attorney General scumbag-Eric Holder chose to ignore the provisions laid out in Section 8 of the NRVA.

The Trump administration has reinvigorated the commitment to maintaining voter integrity — sort of. On June 28, the DOJ sent letters to state election officials requesting information related to each state’s compliance with the NRVA. The president himself also convened a commission charged with investigating claims of voter fraud during the 2016 election. Yet the move was resisted by several states and the commission was disbanded.

Moreover, the idea that the Department of Homeland Security would take up where the commission left off was shot down by DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen last January.

Thus, while Trump joined the chorus of those bemoaning the findings in Texas, his criticism must be taken with a large grain of salt.

In 2017, 11 states — Alabama, California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and Tennessee — had counties where the number of registered voters exceeds the number of voting-age citizens. In 2019, California signed a settlement agreement with Judicial Watch to clean up voter rolls — for the first time in over 20 years — in a state with a voter a registration rate of approximately 101% of age-eligible citizens.

If there’s a better way to facilitate vote fraud than maintaining indefensibly sloppy voter rolls — by accident or design — one is hard-pressed to imagine what it is, all the assertions of voter “suppression” notwithstanding.

In Texas, Paxson has vowed to investigate and prosecute illegal voting activity, and Texas Secretary of State David Whitley  insists his office is “committed to using all available tools under the law to maintain an accurate list of registered voters.”

Every state, along with an increasingly unreliable media — including some conservative sites that could have done a better job researching this story — should make the same commitment to accuracy.  ~The Patriot Post

One example of leftist policy is a report on Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s crackdown on franchising as a favor to his Big Labor pals. “A report put out by the International Franchise Association and a Chamber of Commerce found that the scumbag/liar-nObama administration provoked an ‘existential threat’ to the franchise model in which small business owners operate under the umbrella of a national corporate brand,”  reports The Washington Free Beacon. (Think McDonald’s and other fast-food chains.) “The scumbag/liar-nObama administration departed from decades of precedent when the National Labor Relations Board [NLRB] held that parent companies could be held liable for labor violations committed by franchisees. The report estimated that the new joint employer standard set curtailed expansion in the industry, leading to between 142,000 and 376,000 lost job opportunities — a 2.55 to 5 percent reduction in the workforce.” It also put a $33 billion dent in the economy each year since 2015. Thanks scumbag/liar-nObama.

The damage was already done, but at least the NLRB under Donald Trump has begun unwinding that regulation.

On the Republican side, 2017 saw the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — without a single Democrat vote. This week marked the beginning of tax-filing season for 2018 income, which means millions of Americans will be reminded just how much money they’re saving. While most of the attention was focused on corporate rate cuts, and while no tax law benefits everyone, Ryan Ellis, president of the Center for a Free Economy, reminds us “the biggest part of the tax cut by far was tax cuts for individuals.”

He explains, “To start with, tax rates for families were cut across the board — for everyone. The top rate of 39.6 percent was reduced to 37 percent. The tax rates underneath went down, too. The most common middle class marginal tax rates of 15 and 25 percent were reduced to 12 and 24 percent, respectively. The marriage penalty was eliminated in all but the top tax bracket.” Furthermore, because the standard deduction was substantially raised, nearly 30 million fewer families will waste time tracking down receipts for itemized deductions — saving both time and money by going for the standard deduction. And the child tax credit doubled to $2,000 per child.

Ellis also notes, “A median income family of four with two kids makes about $80,000 per year. Their income tax burden was reduced from about $4,600 to about $2,300, a 50 percent cut in income tax. A single parent with two kids making $60,000 per year got an even bigger tax cut, seeing her taxes reduced from $3,000 to $800. Even an individual making $35,000 got in on the fun — his taxes are cut from $3,200 to $2,600.”

Maybe the mainstream media should spend a little more time reporting that good news instead of attacking Catholic boys.  ~The Patriot Post

Nowhere is the flawed nature of the Democrats’ secularist, dehumanizing ethic more exposed than in their recent legislative efforts to legalize abortion carte blanche. Last week, Democrat  New York Gov. Andrew evil-Cuomo had the One World Trade Center spire lit up in pink to celebrate the state passing its dubiously named Reproductive Health Act, which now allows for legal abortions up until birth as well as removing abortion from the criminal code. evil-Cuomo declared it to be a “historic victory for New Yorkers and our progressive values.” New York now joins seven other states that have no gestational limits on abortion.

On Wednesday, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam revealed just how widespread this moral rot is within the Democrat Party. Seeking to defend his support for the Repeal Act, a bill defeated the day before that would have removed all state restrictions on abortion, Northam argued, “If a mother is in labor … the infant would be delivered. The infant would be kept comfortable. The infant would be resuscitated if that’s what the mother and the family desired, and then a discussion would ensue between the physician and mother.”

Northam’s shocking comments brought severe rebukes from several Republicans, including Sen. Marco Rubio, who stated, “I never thought I would see the day America had government officials who openly support legal infanticide.” Sen. Ben Sasse was more incensed, exclaiming, “This is morally repugnant. … In just a few years pro-abortion zealots went from ‘safe, legal, and rare’ to ‘keep the newborns comfortable while the doctor debates infanticide.’ I don’t care what party you’re from — if you can’t say that its wrong to leave babies to die after birth, get the hell out of public office.”

Now the Democrat-controlled state of Rhode Island is running to the front of the pro-infanticide line, with Democrat Gov. Gina Raimondo pledging to sign legislation that would make abortion legal after viability to “preserve … health.”

From a political-tactics perspective, Democrat-controlled states are engaging in these legislative actions due to their fear that the Supreme Court may overturn Roe v. Wade. However, delusional leftists who think they’re living in “The Handmaid’s Tale” are intentionally misrepresenting the impact of such a ruling, which would simply hand legislative authority back to individual states. They’re taking advantage of the population’s misunderstanding to garner votes while at the same time pushing for unlimited abortion.

The lust for power even to the point of advocating for the killing of babies is beyond despicable.  ~The Patriot Post