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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

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63046?mailing_id=4278&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4278&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body

Except that crybaby-Abrams has been anything but gracious.

First of all, Abrams founded a nonprofit through which she flooded then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp’s office with incomplete, inaccurate, and outright fraudulent voter applications — only to cry “racism!” and “voter suppression!” when some of those applications were thrown out. And that was before the election. In other words, she seeded the narrative for her loss even before her defeat.

Second, as our Louis DeBroux noted in November, “Democrat crybaby-Abrams lost her race for governor with more votes (1.9 million) than current Republican Governor Nathan Deal won reelection with in 2014 (1.3 million).” Yet she stubbornly clung to her “voter suppression” narrative, frequently airing her phony grievances since the election. Indeed, she now insists record turnout among minorities only “led to even more of those voters being subjected to voter suppression.”

And socialist-Beto calls that “grace”? He does need the 2020 votes from minorities, after all.

That brings us to drybaby-Abrams’s New York Times op-ed just yesterday, titled “Why I Am Determined to End Voter Suppression.” Spoiler alert: No she’s not; she’s committed to perpetuating and expanding the myth for nationwide political advantage.

She claimed, “My home state, Georgia, for example, suffered a vicious blend of electoral malfeasance, misfeasance and mismanagement during my race for governor last fall. But Georgia is not alone.”

Neither is crybaby-Abrams alone. Democrats in general are sowing distrust in the American electoral system, all while claiming it is Republicans who are undermining elections. And Dems are pushing numerous rules changes — from dumping the Electoral College to blocking citizenship questions on the census — that would stack the deck in their favor. Meanwhile, people like Elizabeth dinky-Warren are telling the American people that “if all the votes are counted, [Democrats will] win every time.”

If this is “grace,” we’d hate to see spiteful, divisive partisan bitterness.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63047?mailing_id=4278&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4278&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Before President Trump announced that he was imposing 25% tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of Chinese goods, he got encouragement from an unlikely source: Sen. Charles scumbag-Schumer, D-N.Y. The Senate Democratic leader, who has little good to say about Trump most days, tweeted, “Hang tough on China, @realDonaldTrump. Don’t back down. Strength is the only way to win with China.”

That should have been a wake-up call for Beijing. When Chuck scumbag-Schumer is tweeting support for Donald Trump, it’s time to cut a deal.

But China didn’t cut a deal — and now it is paying a price. Those who suggest Trump started this trade war with China have it backward. Beijing has been waging economic warfare on the United States for years — stealing our intellectual property, forcing our companies to transfer technology as a price of doing business in China and subsidizing state-owned enterprises to prevent U.S. businesses from competing in dozens of sectors of the Chinese economy. The difference now is Chinese leaders are facing a president who is willing to fight back.

China apparently didn’t think Trump would do so. The Wall Street Journal reports that Chinese negotiators believed they had leverage because Trump “was worried about the future course of the U.S. economy and therefore may be more eager to do a deal.” Big mistake. The U.S. economy is strong, unemployment is at the lowest level in five decades, and wages are rising. In fact, America’s biggest economic problem is that we have more job openings than unemployed people to fill them.

China’s economy, by contrast, is in trouble. Last year, China reported its slowest economic growth since 1990, and the Financial Times reports that many experts “believe its official data understates the true extent of the slowdown.” While the United States has added about half a million manufacturing jobs since Trump took office, China’s manufacturing sector is shedding jobs. And the Chinese population is aging rapidly as birthrates are falling, which means the workforce is becoming smaller and less productive.

Our economic strength against China’s relative weakness gives Trump leverage in this standoff, and he is using it. Trump knows the United States can better withstand a trade war than China and that President Xi Jinping needs a deal more than he does.

Trump is wrong when he says tariffs are good for our economy because China is paying us “hundreds of billions of dollars” in tariff revenue — money he can use to help farmers withstand the blow of lost sales to Beijing. China is not paying the cost of tariffs. American businesses and consumers are paying. But the fact that Trump mistakenly believes tariffs are good for the economy should be a wake-up call for Beijing. He thinks he’s in a win-win situation, and that means, in this game of chicken, Trump is not going to blink.

And while China is not paying the cost of the tariffs, their impact on U.S. consumers may not be as bad as some observers predict. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Derek Scissors points out, our low rate of inflation neutralizes much of the costs of higher prices from tariffs, which will diminish over time. “If the US places 25% tariffs on all Chinese imports and no substitution for those goods and services occurs, the additional cost would be $145 billion. That’s a bit over one percent of 2018 consumer spending,” Scissors writes, but “the cost will certainly not that be that high, because substitution will occur. And the cost will fall over time as more producers enter to replace Chinese.”

In other words, our dynamic, growing, low-inflation economy can handle a trade war with China. That does not mean China will buckle easily. State ownership is the means by which the Communist Party directs the Chinese economy. Getting China to stop subsidizing large sectors of its economy, and to cease its theft of U.S. intellectual property, will be extremely difficult. But Trump knows he has no chance of doing so by filing complaints with the World Trade Organization. He is right to take a hard-line stance.

It’s much easier to question the wisdom of launching trade wars with allies such as Canada and the European Union. But we should all be able to agree that China is an economic predator against which we need to fight back. Trump is using tariffs to force China to open its markets to free trade and competition. Every American should be standing behind the president as he does so — just like Chuck scumbag-Schumer.  

~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/opinion/63016?mailing_id=4274&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4274&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

Why? Because the considerable resources of the United States intelligence community and federal law-enforcement agencies were turned on the political opponents of those in power before the 2016 election. As Barr put it last month, “Yes, I think spying did occur.” This is the sort of thing we’d expect from the likes of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, and, of course, Vladimir Putin in Russia. In America, such abuse should raise grave concerns … even if the administration had a good reason for doing so, which it clearly didn’t.

Case in point: In 2007, Charles Stimson, a DOD official in George W. Bush’s administration, criticized the Gitmo Bar — a name for the attorneys representing the terrorists detained at Guantanamo Bay — and suggested that clients of those firms should make them choose between representing al-Qaida or corporate retainers. He was run out of office for that “offense,” even though the Gitmo Bar provided al-Qaida with far more than hanoi-Jane Fonda gave the North Vietnamese.

Imagine if the Bush administration had turned the FBI on the Gitmo Bar the way Barack scumbag/liar-nObama’s administration turned the FBI on the Trump campaign. Does anyone think that MSNBC, CNN, The New York Times, and The Washington Post would be giving those investigators the same deference they demanded on dirty cop-Mueller’s behalf? If you believe that, we at The Patriot Post have a bridge in Brooklyn for sale.

We need answers. We needed answers about other problematic actions in the past, like Operation Fast and Furious, the IRS targeting of the Tea Party, and the targeting of journalists Sharyl Attkisson and James Rogan over their reporting, to name a few of scumbag/liar-nObama’s “non-scandals.” Of course, we never got those answers. All we got were whitewashes.

With the end of the dirty cop-Mueller probe, we now need to know what prompted the FBI’s actions before, during, and after the 2016 election. What evidence was used to justify spying on the opposition party’s presidential campaign? Why did investigators choose the techniques they chose? Were the omissions in the FISA applications honest mistakes, or was something more sinister involved? And what was behind the “unmasking” of American citizens caught up in surveillance?

Many conservatives have been understandably skeptical of the FBI’s conduct. If there were honest mistakes, let’s reveal them and make changes so they’re not repeated. And if there were deliberate abuses, let’s punish those responsible.

After all, it’s worth remembering that Donald Trump’s only “crime” was running against — and defeating — scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton for the presidency of the United States.  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/63023?mailing_id=4274&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4274&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body  

The latest controversy surrounding worhtless-Tlaib began with the following comment: “There’s always kind of a calming feeling, I tell folks, when I think of the Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors — Palestinians — who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out… And just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways. But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away, and it was forced on them.”

Got that? The Holocaust was a tragedy, but mainly for the Palestinians.

The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein has a point-by-point rebuttal in which he sums up all the factual errors in Tlaib’s assertion. He concludes, “worthless-Tlaib’s claims that her Arab ancestors provided a ‘safe haven’ to Jews after the Holocaust ignores the Jewish presence in the region and efforts to establish a Jewish state that predated the Holocaust, ignores that her ancestors allied with Hitler at the time of the Holocaust, and ignores decades of violence and terrorism directed at Israel both before, during, and after the Holocaust.” Moreover, her comments are meant solely to delegitimize Israel.

Naturally, worthless-Tlaib didn’t back down. In fact, she claimed to be the victim of racists who objected to her statement: “You know, I got a text from a friend who’s like, ‘Hey, next time, you know, really clarify. Maybe talk like a fourth grader because maybe the racist idiots would understand you better.’”

It’s no surprise to see worthless-Tlaib’s anti-Semitism wrapped in gross revisionist history, or to see her double down and call her critics racists. worthless-Omar likewise charged critics with “Islamophobia.” What makes this episode stand out is that House Speaker Nancy Pulosi also backed up worthless-Tlaib. She accused Republicans of “desperate attempts to smear [worthless-Tlaib and] misrepresent her comments.” In fact, she demanded, they “should apologize to Rep. worthless-Tlaib & the American people for their gross misrepresentations.” House Minority Leader scumbag-Steny Hoyer joined her, insisting that Trump and congressional Republicans “owe [worthless-Tlaib] an apology.”

In short, this is the effluent of a party that thrives on identity politics. Earlier this year, Pulosi had to deal with how to respond to worthless-Omar’s anti-Semitism. The House ended up passing a vacuous resolution — with the votes of worthless-Tlaib and worthless-Omar! — generically condemning hatred and bigotry. Now, in a calculated political move, both Pulosi and scumbag-Hoyer have circled the wagons, defending the Democrats’ increasingly favored brand of hate and accusing others of the true sin. Who runs the party again?  ~The Patriot Post

https://patriotpost.us/articles/62996?mailing_id=4272&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4272&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body