Well things are changing. Speaker Pelosi will be driving the House Democrats agenda. So far it sounds like investigations, impeachment and/or obstructionism.
The good news is that the membership in Congress has also changed. Maybe, just maybe, with all the new freshmen we might find some “renegades†amongst the Democrats who are actually willing to try and get something done. On the other hand, there seems to be some crazy, self proclaimed radicals that will hopefully help wake up America. One can only hope….for change!
Mr. Mueller – Wrap it Up: America is growing tired of what clearly appears to be a political witch hunt. After over two years of an investigation, there is NO collusion, NO Russian involvement with the campaign and NO big Russian deal to elect Trump President…while the DNC and Clinton campaign can NOT say the same thing (but not investigated).
At best, this is an investigation in search of a crime. An effort to destroy or hamstring a duly elected President. If you don’t like it, take it to the polls.
For the sake of our democratic system and the rule of law, wrap it up and report your findings. The Democratic House will pick up where you left off and keep harassing this President. But the country deserves to move on from this charade.
Weaponizing Government: Unfortunately, one of Obama’s lasting legacies will be the weaponization of government…the FBI, IRS etc. Now the Democrats in Congress are talking about institutionalizing that kind of activity with Congressional investigations of the President for political purposes. Their concept of “resist†is destructive and it represents the worst that politics has to offer. The Democrats view of “compromise†is “you surrender, and we can work together and compromiseâ€.
When will this ever end?!?
-Saul Anuzis
MAGA list: 205 ‘historic results’ help Trump make case for 2020 re-election
At two years into his first term, President Trump and his top White House team are turning to the 2020 re-election campaign with a new focus on the 2016 promises they have kept and the impact they have had around the country and on the world stage.
“Together, we are building a safe, strong, and proud America,†said Trump in his new list of “historic results,†provided exclusively to Washington Secrets.
It highlights 14 major issue areas and lists 205 accomplishment points and initiatives all aimed at bolstering the president’s statements and tweets that his has been a successful administration despite the recent stock market volatility, his staff shake-ups and the Russia election probe.
Sizing Up the 2020 House and Senate Landscapes
The political world will be a three-ring circus over the next two years, and while the contest for the presidency will obviously dominate, there will be plenty to watch in the House and Senate rings as well.
Democrats start out with 235 House seats to 199 for Republicans, with one vacant seat due to the disputed outcome in North Carolina’s 9th Congressional District (a special election is likely to follow). This means that the GOP will need a net gain of either 18 or 19 seats, depending upon the outcome in North Carolina.
Democrats will be defending 31 seats in districts that voted for Donald Trump in 2016, but equally important, there was about a 7-point boost for Democrats in the overall popular vote in House races from 2016 to 2018. Whether that persists is anyone’s guess. Republican pollster Glen Bolger points out that the House has now changed parties under four consecutive presidents: in 1994 under Bill Clinton, 2006 with George W. Bush, 2010 with Barack Obama, and now 2018 with Trump.
Rudy Giuliani Names Every Reason Mueller’s Doomed in Incredible Fox News Segment
President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, has issued a challenge to special counsel Robert Mueller to “put up or shut up.â€
Two years into the investigation, Mueller has yet to provide any evidence whatsoever that the president colluded with Russia.
Many Americans are tired of what they perceive as a “witch hunt†and a supreme waste of taxpayer dollars. Giuliani has been putting pressure on Mueller to wrap up the investigation, making the rounds on television to explain not only why the whole thing is a sham but also why Mueller himself should be investigated.
Once upon a time, when Schumer and Pelosi supported everything Trump wants on illegal immigration a modicum of sovereignty
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (“IIRIRA 96â€), originally the “Immigration in the National Interest Act of 1995,†was signed into law by President Clinton on September 30, 1996, after the final conference bill passed the House 370-37 and the Senate by voice vote.
This bill essentially contained all the promises Trump has made, from the wall and clamping down on visa overstays to robust interior enforcement and expedited deportations, except that it was tailored for that time period. Many of the provisions failed because they were ignored by past presidents and state and local governments and twisted by the courts. This bill was designed to fulfill the wayward promise of the 1986 amnesty and to finally fulfill the pledge to protect Americans from the cost of illegal immigration. Those promises have not been met, and millions of illegals later, millions of pounds of drugs later, and trillions in costs later, these same politicians have no interest in rectifying the promise they helped break once again.
Unlike today, Republicans actually had a vision and a sense of purpose. One of their agenda items was to cut back on legal immigration, which was a failed promise of the 1990 bill. The other was to end illegal immigration – completely. It was the former goal that Democrats opposed, which is why Republicans originally attached their legal immigration cuts to the illegal immigration bill. Democrats gutted it. But they all broadly agreed on the goal of stopping illegal immigration. To be clear, Democrats insidiously weakened some provisions and only allowed for a ban on in-state tuition for illegals, not K-12 education per the original version of the bill, but they still all agreed on the core provisions of interior enforcement we are trying to implement today.
Here Are Six Republican Women To Watch In 2019
A number of Republican female candidates enjoyed success in 2018.
Three women became the first elected female governors in their states during the 2018 midterm elections.
Members of Congress Liz Cheney and Elise Stefanik are continuing to raise their profiles in the GOP.
2018 was a year with plenty of firsts for Republican women — Marsha Blackburn became the first woman to represent Tennessee in the Senate, Kristi Noem was elected South Dakota’s first female governor and the list goes on.
Republican women will be carrying that momentum into 2019. Here are six GOP women to watch in the coming year, from the governor’s mansion to Capitol Hill.
9 lawmakers to watch in the new Congress
It’s officially the start of a new congressional term and the dawn of Democratic House control under President Donald Trump.
A historically diverse body of lawmakers are due to get sworn in on Thursday for a term that’s likely to include a rise in investigations of Trump and an ongoing reckoning among Democrats about which direction the party should go.
The new freshman class includes Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, and Lucy McBath of Georgia, all of whom are poised to push Democrats on an array of policy areas such as climate change, health care, and gun control. Additionally, longtime Democratic stalwarts like Maxine Waters and Adam Schiff of California will play a pivotal role in launching probes of the Trump administration.
On the other side of the aisle, a lot of the focus will be on Republicans like the Freedom Caucus’s Mark Meadows, who’s made it his mission to protect Trump and will likely continue doing so as Democrats take over. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York is also mounting a push to improve women’s representation in the GOP, which has taken a severe hit during the recent election.
Here are nine lawmakers, freshman and not, to watch this term.
Two reps were sworn in on the Quran. It’s a symbolic moment for Muslim Americans
The first two Muslim American women in Congress have been unapologetic about their faith from the start of their campaigns. Thursday’s swearing-in to the US House of Representatives was no different.
Rashida Tlaib, an American-born Muslim of Palestinian descent, was sworn in with her left hand on her own copy of the Quran, though she considered using a 1734 English translation that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. And Ilhan Omar, who arrived in the US 23 years ago as a refugee fleeing Somalia’s war, used the Quran of her late grandfather, who helped raise her.
New members of Congress are not required to take their oaths on the Bible or any other religious text. In fact, they need not swear on anything at all. Tlaib and Omar used the Qurans at individual, ceremonial swearings-in at the House speaker’s office after the official, en masse swearing-in on the House floor.
Both Democrats, they are part of an extraordinarily diverse class of representatives — “transformative,†as Rep. Nancy Pelosi called them in her address after being elected House speaker Thursday. For many Muslim Americans, the presence of a Quran is a symbolic moment amid a presidential administration that has seemed to wage an all-out war on the triple whammy of what Tlaib and Omar represent: immigrants, Muslims and women.
GOP confronts anxiety about Trump primary challenge
Donald Trump declared himself “the most popular president in the history of the Republican Party†on Wednesday. Yet his allies fear a primary challenge from a high-profile Republican could doom his re-election.
The concern was outlined in a private email shared among Republican National Committee members hours after the GOP’s last failed presidential nominee, Mitt Romney, lashed out at Trump’s character and global leadership in an opinion article published in The Washington Post. Romney is set to be sworn in as Utah’s junior senator on Thursday…
…Former RNC member Saul Anuzis of Michigan said Trump’s team missed an opportunity.
“Nobody wants a primary. It’s not healthy for us,†Anuzis said. “You’ll have the Democrats attacking Trump and some Republicans attacking Trump. How does that help us?â€
Trump’s New Asylum Policy Will Help Block Illegal Immigration
Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen recently announced a significant policy change to stop illegal immigration.
After years of catch and release, loopholes, and poor enforcement, the Department of Homeland Security is moving to plug the holes in the U.S. immigration system, and especially the loopholes that surround the asylum system.
One of the most serious problems the U.S. faces in its immigration system is that when illegal immigrants cross the border, they can claim asylum in order to avoid quick deportation. This is an especially common tactic with illegal immigrants from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.
Less than 10 percent of these individuals, however, will end up qualifying for asylum.
But asylum often isn’t the real objective: Those who manage to pass through the initial screening are often released into the U.S. This is made worse by various loopholes such as the Flores settlement and the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, which require unaccompanied children and adults with children to be released.
The result is that many “asylum seekers†will simply disappear, many not even bothering to apply for asylum after being released.
Exculpatory Russia evidence about Mike Flynn that US intel kept secret
Sometimes public silence can be deafening or, for that matter, misleading.
For nearly two years now, the intelligence community has kept secret evidence in the Russia collusion case that directly undercuts the portrayal of retired Army general and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn as a Russian stooge…
…Were the information Grassley requested made public, America would have learned this, according to my sources:
Before Flynn made his infamous December 2015 trip to Moscow — as a retired general and then-adviser to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign he alerted his former employer, the DIA.
He then attended a “defensive†or “protective†briefing before he ever sat alongside Vladimir Putin at the Russia Today (RT) dinner, or before he talked with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.
The briefing educated and sensitized Flynn to possible efforts by his Russian host to compromise the former high-ranking defense official and prepared him for conversations in which he could potentially extract intelligence for U.S. agencies such as the DIA.
Twenty Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Bernie Sanders
The Vermont senator’s history of taxing hospitals, getting slapped, and IRA meetings, and his “honorary woman†status.
Longtime friend and supporter Garrison Nelson, a political scientist at the University of Vermont, told The New Yorker in 2015, “Bernie’s the last person you’d want to be stuck on a desert island with. Two weeks of lectures about health care, and you’d look for a shark and dive in.â€
Bernie Sanders Has A Problem
Bernie Sanders is (almost-certainly-I-mean-let’s-be-honest-with-each-other) running for president in 2020.
Lots of people think he is a top-tier contender — and might even be sort of a co-favorite with former Vice President Joe Biden.
I am not really one of them. Or to put a finer point on it: I don’t think Sanders’ 2016 campaign — in which he quite clearly overachieved — is indicative of how he will fare in the 2020 race.
#HypocrisyALERT – The Democrats’ Super PAC Dilemma for 2020
It would be hypocritical for Democratic candidates to follow the Super PAC route to the presidential nomination.
Democrats, unlike Republicans, have never firebombed each other with unlimited Super PAC money in presidential primaries. That Democratic record of restraint owes as much to a quirk of timing as it does to party-wide opposition to whatever-it-takes fundraising…
…Any White House dreamer who deploys a Super PAC in the Democratic nomination fight is, in effect, saying, “My personal ambition is far more important than principle.” Even if such a candidate were to win the presidency, any campaign reform plans would probably be delayed until sometime after the return of Haley’s Comet in 2061…
…In the end, running for president is a character test — and Democrats who look to Super PACs to beat other Democrats will have, by definition, flunked that exam.
Congress Better Look In The Mirror Before Impeaching Trump Over Hush Money
Before Congress gets too excited about President Trump’s alleged “hush money†payments, they might want to take a long hard look in the mirror.
Democrats and the liberal media are salivating over allegations that the president paid off women with his own money to keep them from discussing alleged affairs. For decades, though, members of Congress have been using your tax dollars to buy the silence of hundreds of sexual harassment and assault victims.
Members of Congress, until earlier this week, were protected by a legal apparatus known as the Congressional Accountability Act of 1995, which protected offenders in the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House of Representatives, and other federal agencies from public scrutiny using taxpayer-funded settlements that included confidentiality provisions.
That’s right. Members of Congress used the money they take from you to hide their dirty laundry, and got away with it for decades.
The future might not belong to China
Do not extrapolate from the recent past. China has had a hugely impressive four decades. After their triumph in the cold war, both the west and the cause of liberal democracy have stumbled. Should we conclude that an autocratic China is sure to become the world’s dominant power in the next few decades? My answer is: no. That is a possible future, not a certain one.
The view widely held in the 1980s that Japan would be “number one†turned out to be badly mistaken. In 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, then first secretary of the Communist party of the Soviet Union, told the west that “We will bury you!†He proved utterly wrong. The examples of Japan and the Soviet Union highlight three frequent mistakes: extrapolating from the recent past; assuming that a period of rapid economic growth will be indefinitely sustained; and exaggerating the benefits of centralised direction over those of economic and political competition. In the long run, the former is likely to become rigid and so brittle, while the latter is likely to display flexibility and so self-renewal.
Today, the fiercest political and economic competition is between China and the US. A conventional view is that by, say, 2040, China’s economy will be far bigger than that of the US, with India far smaller still. But might this view be mistaken? Capital Economics, an independent research firm, answers “yesâ€, arguing that China’s period of stellar outperformance might be coming to an end quite soon. (See charts.)
Iranian mullahs’ lock on power is now shakier than ever
A year ago, Iranians poured into their streets to denounce ¬Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and call for an end to his brutal ¬regime. Protests have continued ¬unabated since, though these are smaller in number and less visible to foreign ¬media.
The Tehran regime’s grip on power is no firmer now than it was then. Still entrenched and viciously clinging to life, the Islamic Republic is nevertheless more vulnerable than it has ever been since the 1979 revolution.
Today, unpaid factory workers, teachers, farmers and truck drivers are some of the most organized and motivated anti-regime forces. The southwestern city of Ahvaz experienced anti-regime labor protests last month. Truck drivers were also on nationwide strikes for much of 2018, blocking major roadways and access to gas stations over low pay and rising tolls.
