Category: US Politics

Matt Rosendale, fresh off his GOP U.S. Senate primary victory in Montana, launched his general election campaign in earnest Tuesday with a strong push on immigration.

The Rosendale campaign released a television ad attacking incumbent Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) on his immigration record and positioning Rosendale in President Donald Trump’s camp on the issue in a state Trump won by 20 points in 2016:

“Jon Tester had a chance to stop sanctuary cities, but he voted with them,” Rosendale says in the ad. “I’ll stand with President Trump. We’ll get tough, and we’ll build that wall.”

An accompanying Rosendale campaign press release cites Tester’s immigration record, including his opposition to defunding so-called “sanctuary cities” and his vote against “Kate’s Law.” The latter bill, named after Kate Steinle, who was killed by a bullet a five-time deported illegal alien multiple felon fired, would have imposed mandatory minimums on felons who illegally re-enter the U.S.

“While Jon Tester and the liberal coastal elites fight President Trump to protect illegal immigrants,” the release states, “Matt Rosendale is committed to standing with President Trump to crack down on illegal immigration and see to it that we finally build the wall.”

Rosendale, the sitting Montana state auditor, secured the Republican nomination to challenge Tester in last week’s primary, triumphing over former Montana judge Russell Fagg.

Jon Tester, whom Rosendale hopes to unseat is a quintessential red state Democrat and a top target for Republicans in 2018. Rosendale and others on the right have sought to portray him as a “swamp”-aligned politician out of step with Montana’s overwhelmingly conservative electorate.

Rosendale has, since the start of his campaign, run as a conservative populist in the Trump vein. In his primary campaign, he received the endorsement of sitting conservatives Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Ted Cruz (R-TX).

Early polling puts a “generic Republican” well ahead of Tester in March, further highlighting the Montana race’s status as a Republican target for November. In April, the race also attracted the personal interest of the president after Tester’s office promoted a two-page dossier collecting accusations against White House physician Dr. Ronny Jackson, who was a potential Veterans Affairs nominee.

A common refrain heard from the anti-gun left is that the scourge of gun violence would be reduced or disappear if only the nation would agree to the imposition of stricter gun control laws.

Pro-gun folks typically counter that argument by pointing to the plethora of gun control laws already on the books, many of which fail to do anything to reduce gun violence or are ineffective because they aren’t adequately enforced.

A prime example of this was recently seen in Florida, where a bureaucratic mistake ultimately resulted in hundreds of concealed carry permits being revoked after it was discovered the applicants were never submitted for FBI background checks, according to Fox News.

This happened because a state government employee who was tasked with submitting concealed carry permit applicants through the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System allegedly failed to do so for about a year as she claimed she was unable to log in to the system.

The Tampa Bay Times reported that the gross oversight that could have allowed felons, drug addicts, domestic abusers and other prohibited persons to obtain a concealed carry permit was discovered by another employee in March 2017 and ultimately uncovered by an inspector general investigation.

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The employee, who has since been fired, claimed to have initially reported to superiors that she was unable to log in to the NICS system in April 2016, but never heard anything back and never followed up on the matter herself.

Instead, she proceeded to process applications using only the Florida Crime Information Center database and National Crime Information Center database, which could have missed “non-criminal disqualifying offenses” that would likely have been reported by the NICS system, according to Aaron Keller, spokesman for the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, which oversees the concealed weapons permitting process.

This came at a time when Florida was flooded by a surge of applications for concealed carry permits, and the employee claimed she felt under pressure to quickly approve applications to prevent a massive backlog.

“The integrity of our department’s licensing program is our highest priority,” Keller said.

“As soon as we learned that one employee failed to review applicants’ non-criminal disqualifying information, we immediately terminated the employee, thoroughly reviewed every application potentially impacted, and implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again,” he added.

The scandalous development has not been a good look for Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam, who is running for governor as a Republican in part on his strong support of the Second Amendment, which includes streamlining the process for obtaining a concealed carry permit.

According to WKMG, Putnam released a statement making it clear that all applications that were processed during the time in question underwent some form of criminal background check, and noted that the ones which hadn’t been processed through NICS had been re-checked, which resulted in hundreds of revocations.

“It was the responsibility of this employee to review the 365 applications that did not pass the NICS system and the Inspector General’s investigation determined she failed to do her job,” said Putnam, who called the responsible employee “deceitful.”

“Upon discovery of this former employee’s negligence in March of 2017, the department immediately launched an audit of the 365 applications she failed to review.”

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“When the department completed the full background checks with information from the NICS system on the 365 applications she failed to review, 291 licenses were ultimately revoked,” he added. “While the Office of Inspector General’s investigation was ongoing, the department adopted safeguards into the application review process to ensure this never happens again.”

This incident is further proof that all of the laws in the world matter little if they are not properly enforced by government bureaucrats and employees.

Thankfully this oversight was caught and corrected and the responsible individuals are being held accountable, because despite the rhetoric from the left, gun rights proponents don’t want those who are federally prohibited from owning weapons to be approved for concealed carry permits.

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James Woods was steamed, and it showed.

The conservative actor, who represents one of the few truly sane voices among Hollywood celebrities, has long been known for delivering Twitter burns to pontificating liberals.

But the Twitter strike he delivered to Obama sycophant/White House memoirist Ben Rhodes was a scorcher that should be leaving cyber-scars.

Woods was responding to a Rhodes tweet published last week on the eve of President Donald Trump’s participation in the G-7 summit meeting of the world’s most economically advanced countries in Quebec, Canada.

“The pathetic and embarrassing thing is that Trump’s approach will end up hurting our farmers, workers & companies while also surrendering our global leadership,” Rhodes wrote, declaring Trump’s trip a failure before it even began.

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The pathetic and embarrassing thing is that Trump’s approach will end up hurting our farmers, workers & companies while also surrendering our global leadership. https://t.co/vevS6Cpd7v

— Ben Rhodes (@brhodes) June 8, 2018

Failure is in the eye of the beholder, of course. And for many millions of Americans, Trump’s decision over the weekend to make a public statement about putting America’s interests first – even at the price of discomfiting longtime allies — showed he’s serious about carrying out the platform that won him the presidency.

More to the point, that summit was a run-up to a far more epochal event – Trump’s summit meeting in Singapore with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, a meeting that highlighted just how much Trump is pushing the kind of American “global leadership” that really matters.

Rhodes’ boss during his White House days, then-President Barack Obama, excelled at social chitchat with American allies, of course. But when it comes to projecting American power and protecting American interests the way Trump has, from the Middle East to Afghanistan to the Korean Peninsula, Obama isn’t even in the running.

And Woods’ tweet made that viciously clear.

“Your old boss would bow to a fire hydrant,” he wrote. “Don’t talk about surrendering global leadership. In fact don’t talk at all.”

Your old boss would bow to a fire hydrant. Don’t talk about surrendering global leadership. In fact don’t talk at all. https://t.co/D59VJbACcW

— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) June 11, 2018

The fire hydrant part might have been a little exaggerated, but Rhodes and other Obama bootlickers have trouble denying that Obama had bowed to foreign royalty – to the emperor of Japan in 2009, as even ABC admits, and to then-King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2012. (In the Saudi case, the Obama-ites claimed the president was just bending over to greet a shorter man.)

The image of an American president bowing to the kind of royal figure the Revolution was fought to free the rebellious American colonists from outraged conservatives. That might be why Woods’ tweet struck such a nerve.

Check out some of the responses:

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LOL! Your brilliant retort to this minion is worthy of inspiring a cartoonist to create a visual work of art. @GrrrGraphics Thank you @RealJamesWoods for the laugh on this rainy day Monday.

— charlino (@charlino) June 11, 2018

These lefties always have the greatest advice yet when they are in power do nothing

— Gregory Smith (@GregSmithFLA) June 11, 2018

It’s astonishing these people can still talk with all the egg on their face.

— ??? ????? (@realnicemills) June 11, 2018

And that last one sums it up.

Rhodes and his memoir “The World as It Is” will never admit it (National Review has a great takedown here), but the Obama administration spent eight years apologizing for the United States’ history, and bowing and scraping – whether literally or figuratively – to tinpot dictators like the murderous mullahs in Tehran or wannabe dictators like the Islamic State group terrorists.

Trump is a different breed of president, and every step he takes to re-establish the “global leadership” that was frittered away in Obama’s eight feckless years in power just embarrasses Obama’s followers even more.

Woods’ tweet pointed that out — with an intensity that should burn.

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One interesting consequence of the left’s “Trump Derangement Syndrome” is that their reflexive opposition to all things related to President Donald Trump can sometimes result in them doing damage to their own causes, whether that damage be financial or merely among public perception.

One such example recently occurred in Sacramento County, California, which will now forgo millions of dollars per year in federal funds in order to send a message to the White House regarding to illegal immigration policies.

According to KOVR, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors voted by a margin of 3-2 last week to cancel a contract the county had with the Department of Homeland Security which gave it millions of federal dollars in exchange for the detention of illegal immigrants awaiting deportation.

That contract with DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been in effect since 2013, earned the county $6 million annually for the simple task of housing federal detainees in cells at the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center.

Most of those detainees come from the Northern California region and the facility is currently holding 82 such individuals, the vast majority of whom had a prior criminal history and are waiting to be deported.

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Since the county supervisors no longer want to detain those criminal illegal immigrants in exchange for millions of federal dollars, the detainees will simply be moved to other correctional facilities to await deportation, perhaps even out of state, meaning they will be placed even further away from their families and friends … which is pretty much the opposite of what the liberal supervisors wanted.

While the supervisors that voted for the change can virtue signal and crow about their “values,” the ones who voted against the move are now scrambling to figure out how they will replace the gaping $6 million hole in the county budget.

“We’ll have to look into our discretionary funds and into our other programs to see what we have to cut to figure out how we’re going to pay for that,” District 4 Supervisor Sue Frost said.

“It’s completely symbolic in nature. It doesn’t solve any part of the problem at all,” she added in regard to the cancellation of the contract with ICE.

The cancellation had been spurred on by a 2015 federal audit of the prison which alleged that some illegal immigrants were being treated inhumanely while detained.

Sacramento County Sheriff Scott Jones has tangled with the board of supervisors in the past with regard to immigration policies, but he nevertheless issued a statement that expressed “respect” for the decision and vowed to ensure a “smooth facilitation” for the detainees out of his jurisdiction, which is to be completed by the end of June.

We conservatives often lament that the federal government has its hands in too many pies and does far more than it was constitutionally intended to do, but enforcement of immigration laws is widely viewed as one of the few legitimate purposes they are responsible for.

This move by Sacramento County, intended to be a slap in the face of the Trump administration, will likely make the jobs of the federal ICE agents a bit more difficult.

More so than that, though, is the fact that the county just sacrificed a significant portion of its annual budget in order to send a message to Trump, one which will hurt the county far more than it hurts the feds.

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This was a rather foolish move by Sacramento County that will ultimately hurt themselves financially and hurt their perception among the public, as they have sided with illegal immigrants against the federal government and law-abiding American citizens.

Alas, much of what the left does due to their “TDS” is foolish and backfires on them, so this idiotic symbolic gesture is really just par for the course where California’s anti-Trump progressives are concerned.

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Farmer Jeffrey Scott Kirschenmann tried to register an AR-15 with the state per California’s latest “assault weapons” ban requirements and ended up having his home raided, firearms confiscated, and faces 12 felony counts.

Kirschermann was trying to comply with the June 30, 2018, deadline to register all “assault weapons” in the state and became snared by the flurry of laws instituted by CA Democrats over the past few years.

KGET reports that Kischermann tried to register a firearm online and that firearm allegedly turned out to be “illegally modified” in light of recent laws. As a result, his home in Northwest Bakersfield was raided and “a dozen guns, 230 rounds of ammunition and two silencers [were] seized.”

Kischermann was arraigned on 12 charges at the state level and released on $150,000 bond.

The NRA-ILA observes:

Many gun owners are already reluctant to comply with registration laws, as such schemes are quite accurately viewed as a means to facilitate firearms confiscation. Moreover, Kirschenmann isn’t alone in his alleged failure to conform to Sacramento’s mandates. As history shows, when faced with California’s increasingly onerous and byzantine gun laws, many decent folks have unwittingly broken the law, ignored new restrictions, or opted for civil disobedience.

KGET quoted Retired Kern County Sheriff’s Office commander Joe Pilkington saying, “Just in the last few years, there have been lots of changes in gun laws. Making an effort, a good faith effort to comply with these really complicated laws, should count for something.”

Pilkington noted that Kischermann’s experience is a reminder that state residents who have questions about registering their guns ought to go through an FFL instead of the California Department of Justice website.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News, the host of the Breitbart podcast Bullets with AWR Hawkins, and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.

Overall enrollment in the nation’s food stamp program has dipped to its lowest level in eight years, according to the latest statistics released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

The latest USDA data reveals that enrollment in the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP)—the federal government program that administers food stamps—dropped to 40,083,954 in March 2018.

The last time enrollment in the food stamp program reached that level was February 2010, when 39,588,993 people participated in the nation’s food stamp program.

Although overall enrollment has reached its lowest point in eight years, food stamp enrollment has been declining steadily since 2013 and has only continued throughout President Trump’s first year in office.

Under Trump, 2.2 million fewer people have discontinued their participation in SNAP, mainly due to the Trump administration’s attempts to reform SNAP by controlling program costs at the federal and state levels.

The USDA announced in March that it hired an “integrity officer” to bolster the administration’s efforts to prevent fraud in the country’s SNAP program and announced in February the rollout of its “Harvest Box” program to give food stamp recipients a box of food as part of their monthly benefits package.

Trump also released an executive order on welfare reform in April that would require the USDA to issue updated rules for those receiving benefits such as food stamps, and invest in workforce development programs.

The House and Senate are also working on an updated Farm Bill that would include an expansion of workforce-development programs designed to bolster job-training. The House version of the bill includes a provision that would require able-bodied adults ages 18 to 59 who receive food stamp benefits to work, enroll in job training, or look for work under the supervision of a case manager.

The most up-to-date version of the Senate bill, however, does not include these work requirements.

The Trump administration’s latest effort to reform SNAP may change how the federal government administers welfare programs, which in turn, may affect how many people stay enrolled in food stamps.  A report released Wednesday revealed that the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is seeking to move welfare programs such as SNAP and other safety-net programs under the umbrella of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).