Happy Independence Day!: God Bless America! Enough said.
“Millions of ordinary Americans who tuned in to watch must have been wondering what the fuss was all about. Democrats promised they would witness a partisan address. But instead, they saw the President deliver a deeply unifying speech that celebrated America’s accomplishments and the courage of our men and women in uniform. With each passing minute, the president looked larger while his critics looked increasingly petty and small.”
P.S. Progressive Liberals are mad about “Trump’s 4th of July” celebration. Don’t worry… it’s paid for by the government – so it’s free… remember!
Our Flag: Every American should listen to the words of Johnny Cash in his ballad…
…and Robert Surgenor’s ‘Story of our National Anthem’…
Leland Michigan: I had a chance to spend the 4th of July in a quintessential “small-town America” in Leland, Michigan… before we watched the celebration of America’s exceptionalism on TV led by President Trump.
I proudly wore my ‘Trump: Make America Great Again’ T-shirt and received nothing but positive comments and thumbs up mixed in with a few glances of “not happy faces.”
The local Democratic party float came by and as they spotted my shirt started chanting “Love not hate Makes America Great” …I couldn’t agree more. If only all the progressive fascists, ANTIFA, radical resist Democrats would heed their call. I know Republicans and most Americans do!
Selective Outrage: The irony and hypocrisy by the Democrats as they complain about the detention centers for illegal immigrants today seem to be lost when it all started under the Obama Administration.
The political gamesmanship by the Democrats is pathetic and I hope the American people see through it.
Fascist Progressives: How times have changed. We remember as the Nazi’s led by Hitler pushed the world into World War II with slogans of socialism and limited free speech. Today’s resist movement lead by the Democrat’s own “black shirt” known as ANTIFA terrorize America in the streets of Portland and college campuses across the United States.
Don’t empower these people for voting for Democrats who glorify the “resist movement” and do NOTHING in Congress except oppose President Trump for the sake of petty politics.
The First Amendment is all that stands between the free world and tyranny. Please don’t let this generation of progressive fascists anywhere near it!
H/T Charlie Kirk: “You wouldn’t be celebrating today if it weren’t for a group of men who: clinged to their guns; loved God; and valued freedom over everything. All things today’s Democrats oppose.”
Happy Anniversary: On a personal note, my lovely wife Lina and I celebrated our 34th wedding anniversary yesterday. Four awesome children, two beautiful daughter-in-laws, one in waiting and our first grandchild… a gorgeous baby girl!
Life is good.
-Saul Anuzis
Trump Made his Critics Look Small During his ‘Salute to America’
The “Resistance” warned us that if we elected an authoritarian such as Donald Trump, eventually there would be tanks in the streets of our nation’s capital. Well, on Thursday, their predictions finally came true.
I’m kidding, of course, but some on the left are not. Harvard Law professor Laurence H. Tribe tweeted a photo of tanks arriving in Washington for Trump’s “Salute to America” and declared “The resemblance to days before Tiananmen Square is chilling.” At Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989, the Chinese regime broke up pro-democracy protests with tanks and troops in a military action that resulted in a still-uncertain number of deaths that is believed to range between several hundred and several thousand. Totally comparable situation.
Of all the stupid freak-outs we have experienced since Trump was elected, the hyperventilation over his Fourth of July address and celebration on the Mall may be the stupidest.
The 1776 Flag Isn’t the Problem… Anti-American Leftists Are.
Colin Kaepernick’s history teachers should be ashamed of themselves. They either failed to teach him real history, or they succeeded in indoctrinating him into a false political narrative. Either way, he was short-changed and missed out on one of history’s greatest stories. To associate the 1776 American flag with slavery is to miss the purpose and genius of the American Revolution.
The former football player turned well-paid corporate activist put the kibosh on a special edition Nike shoe because it sported the Betsy Ross flag on the heel. I’m sure you’ve heard that much. Kaepernick’s reason, which I’m sure you’ve also heard, is that in his mind the 1776-era American flag “represents an era associated with slavery.”
That’s so clueless it’s difficult to know where to start. Slavery was abhorrent and did exist in the colonial era, and for decades afterward. Slavery existed for millennia before there were any colonists in America, and unfortunately, it still exists now. Slavery did not solely exist in America in 1776. It was not uniquely American. And the American Revolution was not fought for or about slavery.
Remember the Policies Giving America Sustained and Deep Economic Growth
President Trump has now gotten the US economic expansion to outlast any other in modern history.
As of Monday, growth has rolled along for 121 months straight, starting in June 2009. The now-second-longest expansion ran from March 1991 to March 2001. The new record is also over twice the 58 months of the average expansion since 1980.
All of which means that, even with the weakness of the growth for most of the Obama era, the economy was overdue for a dip when Trump took office. Yet it has instead remained pretty strong, expanding 2.9{cf054798d99082734b20d32aeaeaeb444d97b52a8049bc7b4f3cc76462f1da40} in 2018 and at an annual 3.1{cf054798d99082734b20d32aeaeaeb444d97b52a8049bc7b4f3cc76462f1da40} for the first quarter of 2019.
Unemployment has fallen steadily, too, to its lowest level in 50 years: In May, the seasonally adjusted rate was 3.4{cf054798d99082734b20d32aeaeaeb444d97b52a8049bc7b4f3cc76462f1da40}, down from 5.1{cf054798d99082734b20d32aeaeaeb444d97b52a8049bc7b4f3cc76462f1da40} in January 2017. Job openings in April topped the number of unemployed by the widest margin ever, and the tight labor market has fueled wage hikes.
Hundreds Of Women Have Lead Roles In The Trump Administration.
45 More Await Senate Confirmation.
The media focuses on the President’s Cabinet in which women leaders include the Secretaries of Education, Transportation, and Homeland Security, as well as the first woman to head the Central Intelligence Agency. But the business of the federal government happens across many agencies, offices, and departments where women are at the helm or are second in command.
This article reviews an unofficial list of women in some 300 politically appointed roles and dozens of judges and ambassadors.
The Office of the President alone has over 100 women in politically appointed roles, many as Chief, Secretary, Director, Deputy Director, and Counselor to the President. Women also lead commissions such as Eilen Lappin Weiser, Chairman of the Commission on Presidential Scholars; Samantha Ravich, Vice Chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board; Michelle Park Steele, Co-Chair of the President’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders; and Liz Sara, Chairperson of the National Women’s Business Council.
Bernie Vs. Bernie: Who Has Improved More Lives, Marcus Or Sanders?
A pair of Bernies, one running for president, the other a wealthy corporate executive and philanthropist, are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, as well as the cultural divide. One has made life better for many. The other wants to suck the life out as many as he can.
Home Depot co-founder Bernie Marcus, now 90, recently said that Sen. Bernie Sanders, campaigning for president as a Democrat with a Socialist’s pedigree, is the “enemy of every entrepreneur.” Sanders, who represents Vermont, has made a public career out of vilifying corporations, free markets, and the wealthy.
Meet the creator. Fear the destroyer.
Marcus, with Arthur Blank and Ken Langone, started a company in 1978 that today has more than 2,200 stores across all 50 states and in Canada. When those men were putting long, grinding hours into their startup in the late 1970s, Sanders was “working” for the American People’s Historical Society. There he made a 30-minute documentary about Eugene Debs, the perpetual Socialist Party presidential candidate whom he called “the great American trade unionist, socialist and revolutionary.”
Home Depot currently employs more than 400,000. Since its inception, it has created millions of jobs. Home Depot also provided health care insurance for, again, millions of families whose husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers have worked for the company, now 27th on the Fortune 500 list, where it has been found every year for the last 25.
In addition to the jobs provided by Home Depot, vendors that depend on the company for much of their sales, many of them small businesses that have increased in value, have also created jobs as they have grown along with the chain.
Meanwhile, Sanders, who has never started a business, wants to guarantee a job to everyone through government fiat, and has overheated dreams about forcing the country into a Medicare for All system, an impossible-to-pay-for arrangement which no other nation in the world has, not even the Scandinavian countries he says are his models.
The Foreign Countries Holding the Most U.S. Debt
In the international finance system, U.S. debt can be bought and held by virtually anyone. In fact, if you hold a U.S. Treasury bond or a T-Bill in your portfolio right now, you are already a creditor to the United States government.
And as you can see in today’s chart from HowMuch.net, foreign countries like China and Japan can also accumulate large positions in U.S. Treasurys, making them significant players in the overall United States debt pie.
U.S. Debt: The Big Picture – The United States federal debt currently sits at $22 trillion, and it’s held by a range of domestic and foreign investors.
AntiFa, Terror Faction.
When I last wrote about milkshakes (urgh), Twitter torchbearers for the left remarked upon what they insisted was alarmism on my part.
When Burger King endorsed “milkshaking”, I warned it wouldn’t be long until hurling bricks soon followed. Little did I know AntiFa would turn the milkshakes themselves into bricks, as we saw this weekend in Portland, Oregon.
If Portland sounds a long way away from you, I assure you it is not.
What happened to my friend Andy Ngo in Portland is coming to a neighborhood near you, whether you’re in Poznan or Portsmouth, Rome or Reykjavík, Kansas City or Kiev. The left knows its ideas are caustic at the ballot box, so they must resort to caustic measures of their own to literally beat the right.
California and Texas have different visions for America’s future
In Texas an unexpected enemy gets a lot of attention. In a television ad for lieutenant-governor that aired last year, Dan Patrick, the winning Republican candidate, looked sternly at the camera and warned of a grave danger. “Truth is, Democrats want to turn Texas into California,” he said. “Well, I’m not about to let that happen. What about you?” United in concern is Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor. He predicts that excessive regulation could turn “the Texas dream into a California nightmare”. “Don’t California my Texas” has become a rallying cry for Republicans in the Lone Star State. You can even buy the bumper-sticker.
Some competitive jousting between the two is inevitable. California, with 40m inhabitants, and Texas, with 29m, are the states with the largest populations, with more than one-fifth of Americans claiming them as home. They also have the biggest economies. If they were countries, they would be the fifth- and tenth-largest in the world (see chart), with around $3trn and $1.8trn in GDP, respectively.
Russia Beating U.S. in Race for Global Influence, Pentagon Study Says
A divided America is failing to counter Moscow’s efforts to undermine democracy and cast doubt on U.S. alliances, says the report, which warns of a surge in ‘political warfare.’
The U.S. is ill-equipped to counter the increasingly brazen political warfare Russia is waging to undermine democracies, the Pentagon and independent strategists warn in a detailed assessment that happens to echo much bipartisan criticism of President Donald Trump’s approach to Moscow.
The more than 150-page white paper, prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and shared with POLITICO, says the U.S. is still underestimating the scope of Russia’s aggression, which includes the use of propaganda and disinformation to sway public opinion across Europe, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. The study also points to the dangers of a growing alignment between Russia and China, which share a fear of the United States’ international alliances and an affinity for “authoritarian stability.”
Its authors contend that disarray at home is hampering U.S. efforts to respond — saying America lacks the kind of compelling “story” it used to win the Cold War.
Cruz Adds ‘Context’ After Kaepernick Quotes from Frederick Douglass ‘Fourth of July’ Speech
Sen. Ted Cruz responded Thursday night after former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick posted a passage earlier on the Fourth of July from a famous speech by Civil War-era abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
The passage Kaepernick cites is from Douglass’ speech, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
Douglass delivered to the speech at a meeting of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society in Rochester, N.Y., on July 5, 1852 – nearly nine years before the Civil War began.
Kaepernick posted the following portion, without adding any comments: “What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine…There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour.”
But the former San Francisco 49ers signal-caller includes a video montage of a longer version of the speech, accompanied by drawings depicting American slaves and photos from the Civil War era. Interspersed are videos from recent years, showing police using force against people of color.
If Europe forgets Crimea, will anyone stand up to Putin?
The creeping normalization of Russia’s abhorrent behavior continues. This week, the Council of Europe, which bills itself as “the continent’s leading human rights organization,” overwhelmingly decided to reinstate Russia’s voting rights.
This decision is a mistake. Russia was stripped of its voting rights in 2014 after its forcible and illegal annexation of Crimea. Since then, circumstances have only deteriorated further. The Kremlin has consolidated its control in Crimea and last fall, Moscow also illegally detained 24 Ukrainian sailors, who remain in Russian custody today.
Crimea isn’t Moscow’s only land grab. In 2008, while the press was distracted by the Beijing Olympics, Putin invaded Georgia, seizing Abkhazia and South Ossetia, one fifth of the country’s territory. And Russia is still fighting in Luhansk and Donetsk in eastern Ukraine
Since Russia’s illegal occupations continue, so too must the sanctions designed to punish them.
Instead, the Europeans bowed to Russia’s threat to leave the Council of Europe altogether. Unfortunately, representatives from Western Europe voted overwhelmingly to carry the measure, which passed by a 118 to 62 margin. Most opposition came from former Soviet bloc countries, who know better.
Russia New Stealth Submarine Is Armed with 72 Nuclear Warheads
On May 22, 2018, the Russian submarine Yuri Dolgoruky slipped beneath the waves of the Arctic White Sea. Hatches along the submerged boat’s spine opened, flooding the capacious tubes beneath. Moments later, an undersea volcano seemingly erupted from the depths.
Amidst roiling smoke, four stubby-looking missiles measuring twelve-meters in length emerged one by one. Momentarily, they seemed on the verge of faltering backward into the sea before their solid-fuel rockets ignited, propelling them high into the stratosphere. The four missiles soared across Russia to land in a missile test range on the Kamchatka peninsula, roughly 3,500 miles away.
You can see the launch sequence in this video.
