107 Democrats to Launch ‘Medicare for All’ Bill; Eliminates Private Health Insurance; No Funding Plan

Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) and 106 other Democrats will launch a “Medicare for All” bill on Wednesday that will shift every American to government health insurance and eliminate private insurance — with no funding plan.

Politico reported Tuesday:

The bill, co-sponsored by 107 House Democrats, doesn’t include a price tag or specific proposals for financing the new system, which analysts estimate would cost tens of trillions of dollars over a decade.

The proposal calls for a two-year transformation of Medicare into a universal single-payer system, eliminating nearly all private health plans. It would also expand Medicare coverage to include prescription drugs, dental and vision services, and long-term care, without charging co-pays, premiums or deductibles — and would provide federal funding for abortions. It would also potentially pave a path for a future Democratic administration to extend coverage to undocumented immigrants.

A few states have tried similar proposals, with no success. Vermont, the home state of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders — who is running on a “Medicare for All” platform for president again — abandoned a similar single-payer health care plan several years ago: “[W]hen you just see the price tag, it’s very shocking,” one expert told NPR.

California’s State Senate passed a similar bill in 2017, but the speaker of the State Assembly refused to allow the measure to come to a vote, pointing out that legislators had made no plans to pay for the cost of covering everyone in the state, estimated at two to three times the entire current state budget. (He received death threats as a result.)

When Obamacare was proposed in 2009, Republicans objected, many arguing that the doomed-to-fail design was just a “Trojan horse” for a completely socialist medical system. Democrats and the media protested otherwise.

Another sweeping recent Democratic plan, the “Green New Deal,” likewise fails to include any funding proposals.

House Democratic leadership has avoided explicitly backing either of these two plans, though sympathetic to both.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

via Breitbart News

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.breitbart.com

House Democrats Pass Bill Nullifying Trump National Emergency with Less Than Veto-Proof Majority

The House passed a resolution Tuesday that would nullify President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration that would allow him to build a wall along America’s southern border. The House passed the bill with less than a two-third’s majority, which would not override a potential veto.

The House passed H.J.Res. 46, 245-182, a resolution that would terminate Trump’s national emergency declaration on February 15. The vote featured strong Democrat support for the bill and little Republican support for the resolution.

The Democrat resolution passed; however, it did not obtain enough votes to potentially override Trump’s veto of the resolution, should it also pass through the Senate.

Only 13 Republicans defected and voted with Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX) introduced the resolution last Friday and quickly gained more than 200 cosponsors. Few House Republicans came out in support of the House resolution to nullify the national emergency; however, Rep. Justin Amash (R-MI) quickly came out in favor of the Democrat resolution. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also voted for the resolution, contending that only Congress has the power to appropriate money.

Reps. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) and Dusty Johnson (R-SD) also voted for the Democrat resolution.

Congressman Massie tweeted in a thread here.

The Senate will likely take up the resolution in the next few weeks, where it appears that the bill may pass with some Republican support. Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Susan Collins (R-ME), and Tom Tillis (R-NC) have already voiced their support for the legislation, meaning that if all 47 Senate Democrats vote for the resolution, they would only need one more Republican defector for the resolution to pass. However, it remains unclear whether Sens. Doug Jones (D-AL) or Joe Manchin (D-WV) will vote for the bill, given that they have voted for wall funding in the past.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who chairs the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, said in February that a “handful” of Republicans will back the resolution; however, not Republicans will defect to override a veto.

“A handful. … [But] there will be enough [left] to sustain a veto,” Graham said.

Trump’s national emergency serves as a rallying cry for Republicans, as a poll in February found that 85 percent of Republicans approve of Trump’s use of national emergency powers to build the wall along the southern border. The national emergency also bodes well for Trump as 80 percent of GOP voters said that Trump’s national emergency would make it more likely for them to vote for the president in 2020.

Trump has already signaled that he will veto the Democrat resolution should it pass through Congress and Democrats, and recalcitrant Republicans would need a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress to override the president’s veto.

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.

via Breitbart News

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.breitbart.com

Cross Case Before SCOTUS

Cross Case Before SCOTUSWASHINGTON, D.C.—The U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case tomorrow involving the Bladensburg Peace Cross, a 40-foot cross in the median on a Maryland highway honoring those who died during World War I.

The challenge to the 93-year-old cross began with The American Humanist Association which filed a 2014 lawsuit against Maryland officials, which argued that the cross “discriminates against patriotic soldiers who are not Christian.” Both lower court decisions ruled that the cross violated the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

via CanadaFreePress.Com

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://canadafreepress.com/

House votes to block Trump’s declaration of national emergency at the border, 245-182

The vote was academic, as there would obviously be enough support in a Democratic House to pass a resolution rebuking Trump and nowhere near the dozens of Republican crossovers needed to override his eventual veto.

Pelosi wanted a few GOPers to support the resolution, though, so that she could say that opposition to the emergency decree was bipartisan. She got 13.

That’s a mix of Republicans who have cultivated their own brands independent of Trump for different reasons — moderates like Stefanik, principled small-government ideologues like Amash, and members who represent border districts and/or districts with large Latino populations like Hurd. Pelosi’s more than 30 votes short of what she’d need for a veto-proof majority so the fate of this congressional effort to stop Trump is already sealed.

But that doesn’t mean there’s not still intrigue in the Senate. It’s almost certain that Schumer will have the 51 votes he needs to pass the House resolution (McConnell can’t block a floor vote in this case, remember) but he’s been stuck at 50 for the past day or so. Collins, Murkowski, and Thom Tillis are all on board and Politico claims that the caucus let Mike Pence have it during their lunch with him today when he tried to sell them on supporting Trump’s order. “I didn’t think his argument was very good. ‘We’ve got a crisis, that means the president can do this.’ That’s essentially the argument,” said one senator who was there. But that fateful 51st vote is proving stubborn, as no Senate Republican wants to be known as the person that put Democrats over the top. The state of play as of this afternoon:

Gardner’s facing a tough reelection in a Hillary state and Alexander is retiring and has slammed the emergency decree as an affront to separation of powers so I assume both votes are a done deal. How about Mr. Constitutional Conservative, Ted Cruz, though? Is he still worried about executive overreach like he was from, say, 2013 through early 2017?

He is. Sort of.

There’s a little wiggle room at the end there inasmuch as Cruz might decide Trump’s actions are constitutional and therefore this particular overreach is OK. Having just won reelection in November and knowing that there’s no chance of Trump’s veto being overridden, he’s basically free to vote his conscience here. It’ll say a lot about him if he can’t muster the nerve to cross Trump even when there’s effectively no penalty for doing so — until 2024, I mean, when he runs for president again and Tom Cotton clobbers him for having opposed the royal decree of a border emergency.

Cruz’s home state, where much of the wall is slated to be built, isn’t crazy about this whole process, by the way. New from Quinnipiac:

Note the independent numbers there. Again, this isn’t a poll of the U.S. population, this is Texas. Texans are deadlocked 48/48 on the wall and 45/52 on whether there’s an emergency at the border or not. Trump’s job approval is 47/50. If not for his presidential ambitions, this vote would be a no-brainer for Cruz. As it is, what odds can I get that he votes no on the Democratic resolution?

Here’s Bill Kristol’s group, Republicans for the Rule of Law, reminding Cruz and others that they once opposed DACA on grounds of overreach. That’s a different issue with a different legal posture, but yes, a constitutional conservative should be skeptical of emergency power grabs by the executive, especially when that emergency didn’t seem to be urgent enough for the president to act until Congress refused to appropriate what he was demanding. By the way, one interesting idea stirring in the House tonight is to change the law after this such that national emergencies *automatically* expire in 60 days after the president has declared them unless Congress passes a resolution extending them. I wonder how many very serious proponents of Article I prerogatives will wimp out and vote no on that one too.

The post House votes to block Trump’s declaration of national emergency at the border, 245-182 appeared first on Hot Air.

via Hot Air

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://hotair.com

No One Is Safe in Maduro’s Venezuela

Univision news anchor Jorge
Ramos and his team were detained in
the presidential palace of Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela on Monday evening.

After Ramos inquired about electoral
fraud and human rights abuses, and played a video of
hungry Venezuelans rummaging through garbage, Maduro’s thugs confiscated their
equipment and apprehended the journalists.

They were released and later expelled from the country, but without their equipment and footage from the interview. In efforts to deflect blame, Maduro’s propaganda minister ludicrously claimed that Univision and U.S. President Donald Trump’s State Department staged the detention.

Ramos and members of his crew
are American citizens and for the regime to detain them demonstrates a new
level of recklessness. 

Even with international attention now focused on Venezuela, Maduro and his thugs continue to behave with impunity.

Ramos isn’t the only American
who Maduro has detained. For more than a year, six Americans who are employees of
Citgo have been unlawfully incarcerated in Venezuela.

The arrest of the Citgo 6 was a power move by Maduro to appoint the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez’s cousin as president of the company.

Maduro’s sadism extends even to
his own people. Interim Venezuelan President Juan Guaido requested critically needed humanitarian assistance from the U.S. and other
foreign donors. Guaido and his supporters planned to peacefully import the
shipments of food and medicine into the country.

Instead, the border region descended into chaos. Maduro blocked various bridges and severed diplomatic relations with neighboring Colombia, where the aid convoys were staged.

Paramilitaries loyal to Maduro known as “colectivos” and Venezuelan armed forces reportedly burned trucks filled with much-needed supplies.

A U.S.-flagged ship from Puerto Rico carrying American citizens also was threatened by Maduro’s military. The colectivos and armed forces ended up wounding 287 people, detaining more than 50, and killing 14 during the skirmishes.

Following the events at the
border, the U.S. Treasury Department implemented targeted sanctions against four Maduro-aligned governors for not permitting the entry of
humanitarian assistance.

For the U.S., the Maduro regime is not just a threat to Venezuelans, but also a threat to our regional allies and to U.S. interests. The situation is particularly tense with neighboring Colombia. Venezuela’s longest border is with Colombia, the U.S.’ largest foreign-aid recipient in Latin America.

Maduro’s destruction of the
Venezuelan economy has produced a dire humanitarian crisis. That in turn has
created Latin America’s worst migration crisis, with more than 3.3 million Venezuelans fleeing their country. Colombia has already taken in
1.5 million Venezuelans. Without a democratic transition in Venezuela, the
conditions driving the migration exodus will most likely worsen.

As unpopular as Maduro may
be, the regime controls many levers of power within the country. Also, his made-in-Havana police state is the envy of dictators around the world.

Maduro cannot be allowed to remain in power. The U.S. and 50-plus countries that recognize Guaido as the country’s legitimate leader must maintain a strategy of ramping up pressure.

Coalition partners should reciprocate the U.S.’ targeted sanctions against officials of the Maduro regime. They are criminals and not politicians, and they should be treated as such. The international community cannot let freedom-deprived Venezuelans down.

The post No One Is Safe in Maduro’s Venezuela appeared first on The Daily Signal.

via The Daily Signal

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.dailysignal.com/

GOP Leadership Punks Trump — Now Unsure About Supporting Trump’s Emergency Declaration on Border Wall

Earlier this month Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made a deal with Republican President Trump.
McConnell promised to support the President’s emergency declaration on the southern border if President Trump would sign another bloated spending bill that included little to no money for a border barrier.

The Washington Post reported:

Congress on Thursday approved a massive budget deal to avert an impending government shutdown, and President Trump promised to sign it, but only after announcing he would also declare a national emergency so he can get more money for a border wall.

Moments after Trump disclosed his intentions in a phone call with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), McConnell announced the news on the Senate floor, ending days of uncertainty over whether the president would support the $333 billion spending deal, which includes less than a quarter of the money he’s sought for a steel wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Senate swiftly passed the legislation on an 83-to-16 vote, and the House followed suit hours later, approving the bill 300 to 128.

President Trump signed the bloated spending bill — got no money for a wall and little money for border barriers but now Republican Senators are balking on their promise to the Republican President.

They punked him.
Republicans are backing away from their latest promise to President Trump.

Via Columbia Bugle:

The post GOP Leadership Punks Trump — Now Unsure About Supporting Trump’s Emergency Declaration on Border Wall appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

via The Gateway Pundit

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com

Donald Trump Jr.: Democrats Are Trying to Distract Trump in Vietnam Talks – They Hate President Trump more Than They Love America (VIDEO)

Donald Trump Jr. joined Tucker Carlson on Tuesday to censorship by the social media giants against conservative users.

Donald Trump Jr. was asked about the Democrat plan to hold public testimony with former Trump attorney Michael Cohen at the same time as the Trump nuclear talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un.

Don Jr. unloaded on the Democrats and their disgusting tactics against the American people.

Donald Trump Jr.: I have my father. I know he’s in Vietnam right now trying to negotiate a peace settlement with nuclear North Korea after 60 years of failed attempts, trying to end the war, trying to end nuclear proliferation on the Korean peninsula. You have finally a president who’s willing to do it… And for the Democrats to try to counter-program that kind of progress, trying perhaps to try to distract him with this nonsense with a convicted felon whose been lying to those same committees, it just goes to show you how much those Democrats really disdain Trump but also America. I mean who wants to try to stymie that process? Who doesn’t want peace in the Korean peninsula?… It’s crazy but they show you that they really hate Trump much more than they like America. Because I get nothing from counter-programming those kind of peace talks with this nonsense that’s been proven with a convicted felon other than they just want Trump to fail even if it means America fails.

Via Tucker Carlson Tonight:

The post Donald Trump Jr.: Democrats Are Trying to Distract Trump in Vietnam Talks – They Hate President Trump more Than They Love America (VIDEO) appeared first on The Gateway Pundit.

via The Gateway Pundit

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com

Angel Father: ‘I Am Living Proof of What Permanent Separation Is’

September 12, 2014 … I let my 13-year-old daughter Chrishia spend the night at a friend’s house. The friend’s mom allowed her daughter and my daughter to walk to the grocery store to buy some soda pop. On the way, my daughter and her crossed the street at a non-crosswalk and dropped her cellphone. She ran back on the road to grab her cellphone. The side of the traffic that she was on was able to stop. They slammed on the brakes and stopped about 20 feet short of her. The opposite side of the road was a man driving a truck, a white 2004 Nissan Titan.

He’d been in the country for 15 years illegally. He had no license. The man who killed my daughter had two warrants. One was for driving without a license, and one was for speeding. [The warrants] were four years old. He hit my daughter and he killed her. When I got to the emergency room, they told me that they believed that she died instantly. But her death certificate said that she took minutes to die. She died from severe head and neck trauma. Part of her head was basically crushed in.

When they arrested him, he didn’t run. He didn’t flee. He just pulled over and he stopped. When they arrested him they took him to jail. They gave him a blood and urine test to test for drugs and alcohol. According to the county arrest records, he was booked in at 1:00 a.m. He was released at 1:36 a.m. for his bonds. Because he didn’t commit a violent felony, as they put it, they didn’t charge him with any crimes. They didn’t report him to [ICE].

I had to push the issue with my lawyers to get it to go to a grand jury to even consider charging him with anything beyond getting a ticket. But the grand jury, as I was told, said that because he had no drugs or alcohol in his system, there was no proof of negligence in his ability to operate the truck that he was driving, therefore he wouldn’t be charged with any felonies. The city said that unless you commit a violent felony, they wouldn’t even check someone’s citizenship status, even though they already knew he was in the country illegally. So they didn’t report him to immigration. That’s what a sanctuary city is.

It took two years of fighting, and I finally chose to settle out of court with my lawyer from the accident I had trying to get to my daughter before I was allowed to speak out. I started writing to politicians, trying to get someone to get involved and help me find some sort of justice for my little girl. Congressman Michael Burgess, from my district, was the only one that responded. I met with him at his office, and he opened a congressional inquiry, contacted DHS and wanted to know why they didn’t go after this man, and they told him … they were never notified of the incident.

So they arrested him in January of 2016 for his immigration status. I was contacted and told that he was considered a flight risk and said they had requested he not be given bail, and his warrant came from DHS headquarters here in D.C. So I spent all of 2017 and 2018 understanding that he was in jail, but I found out last year that wasn’t the case. Apparently someone decided —  a federal judge in Dallas — that is wasn’t necessary to hold him even though he was stated as a flight risk. And they gave him bail when he was bonded out a month after he was arrested. He also got a letter at the beginning of September of [2018] telling him that he had 30 days to turn himself in [and] that he had lost his immigration battle.

At the end of that 30 days, they sent him a letter and said they had misspelled his name, so they added an additional 30 days to turn himself in. He didn’t turn himself in, so they went to arrest him at the end of October, and they found that he was gone. He ran with his illegal wife. So now he’s a fugitive somewhere in the U.S. ICE is actively looking for him, and as they explained to me, they’re overwhelmed with the amount of illegals they have to find. They’re undermanned. So essentially, he has to commit a crime again in an unsympathetic city to be captured just to be deported. Doesn’t count for the fact that he’s never been charged with killing my daughter.

My daughter would have turned 18 on the 12th of February. She never got to graduate high school. She was extremely gifted. She had just started high school when she was 13. She didn’t even get to go to college like she wanted. I didn’t get to help her finish learning how to drive. I’m never going to see my grandchildren. I’m never going to get to enjoy watching her get married. The permanent separation that I have to endure, the lack of justice for my daughter’s death, I cannot comprehend how anyone can say it’s unfair to separate a person who negligently brings their child across the border into the U.S. illegally — through deserts, harming their family members — and then complains about being separated by due process. I am living proof of what permanent separation is, not some illegal who brings their kids irresponsibly here.

The argument about building a wall; I spent 12 years in the military, and my first job was combat engineer. A combat engineer’s job is mobility and countermobility; placing mines, and clearing minefields. [It] forces the enemy to go in the direction you want them to go or waste time trying to clear an area so you can actually capture them. A wall is no different. If you build a wall, then the person trying to cross it has to waste time trying to get over that wall, or go under that wall, or go around that wall, and that gives us more time to put resources in the area to capture him.

If they choose to go around the wall, it funnels them in to an area where we can actually capture them effectively. I find it really weird that the government can tell our president that he can’t have the money he asked for to build a wall, yet they’re willing to give money to other countries to better their development.

People want to come here and claim asylum. I don’t understand why they can’t use asylum claims in the embassies in their own countries. It makes no sense that the illegals have more privacy and protection in our country than we do as citizens. I’m not allowed to know the federal ID number that an illegal alien killing my daughter is issued because he has privacy. You can’t do anything other than know their name and know the status of where they are being processed in immigration, but I can’t know that.

It makes no sense to me that we have politicians that have spent their careers — 20, 30, 40 years — solely protecting illegals when we have American citizens being killed by illegals, and there’s no protection for that.

The argument about there being less crime by illegal aliens is false on its head because the crimes aren’t being reported. If [the crimes] are reported then they actually have to report them to immigration. If you commit a felony, you have to go into a database. In that database, they get flagged. They’re here illegally. So you think what is put out in the news, what President Trump talked about earlier this month about 4,000 people — U.S. citizens — being killed by illegal aliens; they’re sitting in federal jail. That’s 4,000 people that they knew of being charged with a crime. That doesn’t count all the American citizens like my daughter that was killed by an illegal alien and never charged. So that number is much bigger. The crime rate by illegals in this country is much bigger.

When you come to this country, you have to patriate. You have to learn the language. You have to learn the laws, understand the Constitution and American history so you have more invested in being here and following the laws. When you come here illegally, you have no reason to know any of that stuff. You don’t follow it. You don’t learn the language. You don’t become a part of the society. As a result, you don’t care about the laws. You come here illegally, you’ve already committed one crime coming here illegally. To get around, you either have to drive a vehicle or you have to get somebody to carry you around. Driving around, you’re committing another crime. And then you take the chance on killing somebody driving that vehicle that you’re not licensed for.

Laws need to be enforced. Immigration law states that if you’re caught here in the U.S. illegally, the first offense is to be a fine or possible deportation. Multiple offences, you get immediately deported. But it also states that if you’re here illegally and you kill or severely injure a U.S. citizen, you’re supposed to be held in jail for an undetermined amount of time. You’re also supposed to have your property taken from you. The guy that killed my daughter had the vehicle he drove — that he killed my daughter with — not even a month after my daughter’s death. He already had it in his possession. They knew he wasn’t legally allowed to have the vehicle. He had no license for it. They told me that the night of the accident, he told the police that he was borrowing the vehicle going to a soccer game. Two months later they tell me that they basically know he owned the truck, but because he didn’t have a license, he couldn’t put it in his name. But nobody charges the guy that basically sold him the vehicle a year before. They didn’t charge him for aiding him. And he still ended up with the vehicle again, committing the same damn crime, all over again driving without a license.

I had a surgery after my daughter’s funeral. While I was lying in bed trying to recover from that surgery, my sister took the accident report and drove over to the house — the address showing where he was living — what she found, she took a picture of that truck, and that picture happened to show a bump —  a dent on the bumper — that dent matched the bruise that was on my daughter’s body as she was being taken in for her cremation. He was working on that truck to drive it again after killing my daughter.

The prosecutors knew. I told them that he was driving that vehicle again, and they told me they had to catch him in the act. He’s committed a crime. They won’t charge him with a felony. They don’t report him to [ICE]. Nobody knew anything about it. That is a sanctuary city.

In my job, I travel all over the U.S., and it blows my mind how I keep hearing from people saying, “Oh, I’ve never heard of a sanctuary city.” How do you not know what a sanctuary city is? How do you not hear [about them]? And the crazy part is, you find that a lot in Oregon, Washington, [and] California. I don’t understand how you can’t know what that is. Laws have to be enforced, and if the laws can’t be enforced, then there needs to be laws written to enforce them.

This wall needs to be built. Government has ways of funding stuff. Speaker Pelosi says walls are immoral, and then votes for a bill to give the president $1.3 billion. So, either she’s confused or she’s a liar. She lives in a house that has walls around it, but walls are immoral in her opinion. I asked Breitbart News when I tried catching her, and I sent her Twitter messages asking her to talk to me. I want to know if walls are immoral and if she’s willing to tear down her own walls around her house. I want to know if she wants to put in laws and legislation to tear down the walls that are currently existing. It doesn’t make any sense. How are they immoral? Her family’s protected. She’s not trying to keep anybody out any different than she’s trying to protect her own family. She voted years and years and years for adding more and more money to build walls, but as soon the president [is elected] — this president, the only president that’s had the fortitude to take this head-on — [walls are] suddenly immoral.

When he got elected, and he had his inaugural speech, I cried again because he’s the first president that I’ve heard in my lifetime speak as openly about his faith in God for this country. I can’t remember ever hearing any other president talk about it. The previous president, within the first year of his office, chose to stop having fighter jet aircraft fly over a parade because he was concerned about how it would look. The National Prayer Breakfast, his concern about the way it would look if he was there for Christians. He didn’t want to seem like he was taking sides in faith. This president has taken a stand on faith. He’s taken a stand on life. He’s taken a stand on borders. He’s taken a stand on fixing our financial system. This is the only president that I’ve seen in my lifetime who’s actually done everything he said he has. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a president that has taken more heat and more negative press than this president, and he does everything he says he’s going to do, while you’ve got these poor politicians complaining about him doing what he says he’s going to do.

This country needs a whole lot of prayer. God truly; this country was made because of God. This president needs prayer because he has so many corrupt and bad people that are doing everything to tear him down.

A point about Kamala Harris and about Cory Booker, these people will say anything that they can because it’s politically efficient to get what they want. But they don’t really care about the people. They don’t care about the citizens. If you listen to Cory Booker, you’d swear he’s actually running for some sort of movie. He’s trying to get into a movie so he can give these amazing speeches, but it’s just flapping his teeth, air passing his mouth. It doesn’t mean anything. Kamala Harris, she’s another charlatan. Everything that comes out of her mouth is a lie. Nancy Pelosi doesn’t even have the fortitude to look Angel Families in the face and talk to us. But she doesn’t mind welcoming illegals.

If you’re here on a visa overstay, get the hell out. Go to jail and get the hell out. If you’re coming here illegally, you’re telling every legal person that’s come here and migrated here legally, you’re telling them that what they did didn’t matter. Why are you going to spend thousands of dollars paying some Coyote or paying a drug cartel when you could have simply used that money and followed the normal process? Anyone who comes here illegally, they don’t really care about this country. They’re telling you they’re coming here for a better way of life. They’re lying. They’re not coming here for a better way of life. They’re coming here for an easier way of life.

We shouldn’t have people living on the street homeless. We shouldn’t have people suffering and going without food while we have illegal aliens being given all the social benefits by our taxpayer dollars. I don’t understand why the government can take money out of my check each week, [and] I can’t say where that money gets spent. It makes no sense. It’s not fair. The only way you’re going to get rid of these politicians that don’t do anything is vote them out. Educate yourself. Don’t vote party line, but educate yourself and find out what the politicians are doing.

We need justice for all Angel Families.

via Breitbart News

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.breitbart.com

Is it Noriega Time for Venezuela’s drug-linked, Hezb’allahed-up dictator Maduro?

Up until now, I’ve been pretty happy with the U.S. approach to Venezuela. The Venezuelans call the shots, setting up the legal infrastructure for transition rule (based on Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez’s own constitution no less), the international community supports them, the Citgo oil earnings are transferred to the legitimate leaders, the sanctions flow on the remaining dictatorship, the pressure is quite open for the Venezuelan military to defect, and the humanitarian aid for the starving flows. Venezuelans themselves (in their millions, as the street protests show) are in the driver’s seat. The picture is one of them taking back their country, their once-great democracy, and it’s a great example for all nations under detestable socialist dictatorships to follow.


But the dictatorship’s vicious burning of humanitarian aid trucks full of food and medicine, as hungry Venezuelans ran into the burning trucks to try to claw it back, and dictator Nicolas Maduro’s grotesque crowing about the whole specter, has left even the legitimate government of President Juan Guaido declaring “all options are on the table.” 



Maybe the aid can get in through air drops. Maybe it can get in through in smaller batches less likely to be noticed by the border goons determined to make sure Venezuelans stay hungry.


But Guaido seems more open to cutting to the chase, and just getting the dictatorship out of there. He’s meeting with Vice President Mike Pence in Colombia today, and Pence says there will be some “concrete actions.” In other words, there won’t be “stern warnings.” Maybe that means more sanctions, maybe air drops, or, the hot one, U.S. military intervention.


Which rather raises the point that it might just be Noreiga Time for Maduro.


Would the U.S. yank him out of there as it did for the former Panamanian dictator, back in 1989?


Well, if you remember the story, Noriega was taken out by U.S. Marines precisely because he was a drug dealer. 


Panamanians that I spoke with a few years later on a trip there – and these were people from the leftist party there – said they were happy it happened, even though there had been local casualties - which they said numbered more than a hundred deaths. That was because Noriega was running a reign of terror on Panamanian activists in the neighborhoods, killing many of them, as well as using drug-dealing during the crack epidemic as his money stream. He got extricated by the U.S. Marines and Panamanians said they were better off for it. Today, Panama is one of Latin America’s leading success stories, with the highest (or one of the highest, depending on the data) per capita incomes in the hemisphere. You never hear about Panamanian illegal immigrants in the U.S.


Scroll over to Venezuela and look at the drug dealing details there:


Former head of Venezuela’s intelligence services Hugo Carvajal revealed powerful ties between the administration of President Nicolás Maduro and the Hezbollah terrorist group, as well as wide-spread corruption and drug activity, the New York Times reported on Thursday. 


The nefarious activities were directed by Maduro himself as well as Interior Minister Néstor Reverol and former vice-president Tareck El Aissami.


Allegedly, those who were meant to combat drugs were engaged in trafficking them,  Carvajal said. 


El Aissami was not only a drug kingpin, said Carvajal, but also had connections to Hezbollah, and attempted to arrange Hezbollah terrorists to work with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] through Venezuela. 


In a meeting that took place in 2009 Hezbollah terrorists met El Aissami and Carvajal in Syria and gave the two Venezuelan state representatives three assault rifles as gifts. 


Whatever this is, it’s a helluva lot more than what we took Noriega out for. Noriega was a threat.


Maduro? He sounds like a mega-threat. And don’t forget that Maduro’s wife also has two household relatives sitting in a U.S. prison for actual drug dealing, picked up by the DEA in Haiti in the act of transporting actual drugs. The drug involvement is thick with the Maduros.


And surprise, surprise, the guy who designed the take-out-Noreiga plan just happens to be the same guy who’s serving as special representative for Venezuela at the State Department these days, none other than Elliott Abrams.


Whether we take out Maduro in the Noriega-style or not, one thing is for sure – we have a guy at the helm who knows exactly how to do it.


What’s interesting is that Abrams is a neo-con, and in the collective mind of the left, this story of Venezuelan government drug-dealing and Hezb’allah-allying is now coming out in the Jerusalem Post. The left insists that neo-cons are all in bed with Israel, and the story picked up is a couple days old, which raises the possibility that it was put there, maybe by an Abrams ally, just to make Maduro more paranoid.


If so, very clever to play on their prejudices.


But one also hopes it’s a warning to Maduro to just get the heck out and save us the trip. Mexico or Cuba should be glad to take him. That said, the freakish Maduro may just get his Noriega time anyway if the Venezuelans want it. If he does, the justification and timing are more than perfect.


 


 


Image credit: Camera screen shot from NBC News.


Up until now, I’ve been pretty happy with the U.S. approach to Venezuela. The Venezuelans call the shots, setting up the legal infrastructure for transition rule (based on Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez’s own constitution no less), the international community supports them, the Citgo oil earnings are transferred to the legitimate leaders, the sanctions flow on the remaining dictatorship, the pressure is quite open for the Venezuelan military to defect, and the humanitarian aid for the starving flows. Venezuelans themselves (in their millions, as the street protests show) are in the driver’s seat. The picture is one of them taking back their country, their once-great democracy, and it’s a great example for all nations under detestable socialist dictatorships to follow.


But the dictatorship’s vicious burning of humanitarian aid trucks full of food and medicine, as hungry Venezuelans ran into the burning trucks to try to claw it back, and dictator Nicolas Maduro’s grotesque crowing about the whole specter, has left even the legitimate government of President Juan Guaido declaring “all options are on the table.” 


Maybe the aid can get in through air drops. Maybe it can get in through in smaller batches less likely to be noticed by the border goons determined to make sure Venezuelans stay hungry.


But Guaido seems more open to cutting to the chase, and just getting the dictatorship out of there. He’s meeting with Vice President Mike Pence in Colombia today, and Pence says there will be some “concrete actions.” In other words, there won’t be “stern warnings.” Maybe that means more sanctions, maybe air drops, or, the hot one, U.S. military intervention.


Which rather raises the point that it might just be Noreiga Time for Maduro.


Would the U.S. yank him out of there as it did for the former Panamanian dictator, back in 1989?


Well, if you remember the story, Noriega was taken out by U.S. Marines precisely because he was a drug dealer. 


Panamanians that I spoke with a few years later on a trip there – and these were people from the leftist party there – said they were happy it happened, even though there had been local casualties - which they said numbered more than a hundred deaths. That was because Noriega was running a reign of terror on Panamanian activists in the neighborhoods, killing many of them, as well as using drug-dealing during the crack epidemic as his money stream. He got extricated by the U.S. Marines and Panamanians said they were better off for it. Today, Panama is one of Latin America’s leading success stories, with the highest (or one of the highest, depending on the data) per capita incomes in the hemisphere. You never hear about Panamanian illegal immigrants in the U.S.


Scroll over to Venezuela and look at the drug dealing details there:


Former head of Venezuela’s intelligence services Hugo Carvajal revealed powerful ties between the administration of President Nicolás Maduro and the Hezbollah terrorist group, as well as wide-spread corruption and drug activity, the New York Times reported on Thursday. 


The nefarious activities were directed by Maduro himself as well as Interior Minister Néstor Reverol and former vice-president Tareck El Aissami.


Allegedly, those who were meant to combat drugs were engaged in trafficking them,  Carvajal said. 


El Aissami was not only a drug kingpin, said Carvajal, but also had connections to Hezbollah, and attempted to arrange Hezbollah terrorists to work with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia [FARC] through Venezuela. 


In a meeting that took place in 2009 Hezbollah terrorists met El Aissami and Carvajal in Syria and gave the two Venezuelan state representatives three assault rifles as gifts. 


Whatever this is, it’s a helluva lot more than what we took Noriega out for. Noriega was a threat.


Maduro? He sounds like a mega-threat. And don’t forget that Maduro’s wife also has two household relatives sitting in a U.S. prison for actual drug dealing, picked up by the DEA in Haiti in the act of transporting actual drugs. The drug involvement is thick with the Maduros.


And surprise, surprise, the guy who designed the take-out-Noreiga plan just happens to be the same guy who’s serving as special representative for Venezuela at the State Department these days, none other than Elliott Abrams.


Whether we take out Maduro in the Noriega-style or not, one thing is for sure – we have a guy at the helm who knows exactly how to do it.


What’s interesting is that Abrams is a neo-con, and in the collective mind of the left, this story of Venezuelan government drug-dealing and Hezb’allah-allying is now coming out in the Jerusalem Post. The left insists that neo-cons are all in bed with Israel, and the story picked up is a couple days old, which raises the possibility that it was put there, maybe by an Abrams ally, just to make Maduro more paranoid.


If so, very clever to play on their prejudices.


But one also hopes it’s a warning to Maduro to just get the heck out and save us the trip. Mexico or Cuba should be glad to take him. That said, the freakish Maduro may just get his Noriega time anyway if the Venezuelans want it. If he does, the justification and timing are more than perfect.


 


 


Image credit: Camera screen shot from NBC News.




via American Thinker Blog

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/

PC Police Now Want John Wayne’s Name Removed from Airport

Most of the people who care about John Wayne Airport at all are either residents of Orange County, California, or parsimonious travelers looking for deals that can make it cheaper than flying into LAX. That, regrettably, is about to change.

A Los Angeles Times piece from last week has urged the community to take the actor’s name off of the airport because of comments Wayne made in a 1971 interview with Playboy magazine.

Let’s be clear about the remarks Wayne made: They’re highly inappropriate in 2019. They weren’t even appropriate in 1971. They sound like what someone talking extremely coarsely about race and homosexuality a half-century ago would have said. Which is exactly what they are: Someone talking extremely coarsely about race and homosexuality to a porno mag nearly a half-century ago.

Take this comment about black civic involvement, which — like everything else Wayne said — hasn’t aged well:

“With a lot of blacks, there’s quite a bit of resentment along with their dissent, and possibly rightfully so,” Wayne said. “But we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks. I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”

TRENDING: ‘Remarkable’ Poll Shows Trump Gaining Ground Among the Groups He Supposedly ‘Hates’

Or on so-called “New Hollywood” films he considered “perverted”: “Oh, ‘Easy Rider,’ ‘Midnight Cowboy’ — that kind of thing. Wouldn’t you say that the wonderful love of those two men in ‘Midnight Cowboy,’ a story about two f**s, qualifies?”

Or on Native Americans: “I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them, if that’s what you’re asking. Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

To be fair, Wayne was an active and identifiable conservative, so it’s not like we can say his remarks were coming from a wholly apolitical individual. However, this is still an actor talking nearly 50 years ago during a much different time from our own. And that, to the Los Angeles Times’ Michael Hiltzik, is the point — he says that since Southern California, in particular Orange County, is becoming more liberal, it’s time to expunge Wayne’s legacy.

“This wouldn’t be the first time that the airport’s name has been the subject of debate. Orange County Supervisors pondered the issue in 2008, when local tourism officials expressed concern that the name failed to convey exactly where the airport is located. There may have been other occasions since 1979, when the supervisors christened the airport at the urging of Supervisor Thomas F. Riley,” Hiltzik wrote.

Do you think that John Wayne’s name should be taken off John Wayne Airport?

“Riley was an ex-Marine, but his rationale is lost in the mists of time. It may have had something to do with Wayne’s status as a rock-ribbed Republican conservative, which was Orange County’s self-image in that period.

“But that Orange County no longer exists. That should be evident from the results of November’s election, in which voters turfed out the county’s last remaining GOP members of Congress — some of whom had embraced Donald Trump in a fruitless effort to save their careers — and elected an all-Democratic congressional delegation. Orange County today is such an economically and ethnically diverse community that it’s hard to justify asking any member of that community to board planes at an airport named after an outspoken racist and homophobe, with his strutting statue occupying a central niche in front of the concourse.”

Writing for the Washington Examiner, however, Madeline Fry says that “(i)t’s too late to blacklist John Wayne, and it’s too illegal to ban his films, so critics are going after the only emblem they can: John Wayne Airport.”

“The actor’s opinions have been in print for almost 50 years and, contrary to what some may think, they were problematic back then, too. Removing his name from Orange County’s airport now only validates what many Americans are coming to believe: You can’t say anything anymore, darn it, without being discovered and punished by the mob,” she writes.

And that’s certainly one of the takeaways here: That taking Wayne’s name off the airport validates those who would say this is all about political correctness and about Donald Trump. That’s because it is.

RELATED: Lib-Loving Facebook Runs Interference for Smollett, Bans Post Talking About ‘Hate Hoax’: Report

Perhaps it’s worth noting, too, that the PC police only seem to get themselves worked up about the imprecations of individuals who happen to be conservative.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, considering the prospects of a political run by the quarter-Jewish wife of then-Tennessee Sen. Cordell Hull, infamously told another politician, “You and I, Burt, are old English and Dutch stock. We know who our ancestors are. We know there is no Jewish blood in our veins, but a lot of these people do not know whether there is Jewish blood in their veins or not.”

Nor was this a one-off. During the Second World War, the Roosevelt administration carried out a study about the resettlement of European Jewry after the conflict was over. Roosevelt told Winston Churchill the aim of the plan was “essentially is to spread the Jews thin all over the world” as opposed to letting them agglomerate themselves in one place.

John F. Kennedy, meanwhile, was fond of calling the gay African-American literary figure James Baldwin “Martin Luther Queen.”

In America’s largest city, FDR and JFK adorn the names of many institutions, not the least of which are a major highway and the primary international airport.

No, what they said wasn’t quite as problematic (or as late) as what Wayne said. However, these were men who got things named after them because of their political careers.

Wayne’s image as a conservative in conservative-ish Orange County, California, may have had something to do with naming the airport after him, but it probably had just as much to do with the fact that he was one of the most recognizable movie stars in the world.

That doesn’t make one interview he gave half a century ago all right, nor does it validate the comments. But it’s important to understand that they came in a different era from a man who didn’t live to see the changes of the past 50 years, doesn’t have the chance to defend himself and wasn’t given the honor because of his views on minorities.

“Don’t, like Wayne, become a reactionary,” Fry said in concluding her piece.

We agree.

We are committed to truth and accuracy in all of our journalism. Read our editorial standards.

via Conservative Tribune

Enjoy this article? Read the full version at the authors website: https://www.westernjournal.com/ct