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Trump years bring real hope and change, making America great again

Although former president Barack H. Obama (D) campaigned and won the presidency twice on a slogan of hope and change, he left his office leaving Americans “frustrated and angry” according to an AP survey analyzed in Fortune, full of “fear and loathing,” deemed Michael Goodwin of the New York Post — both admittedly not Obama fans.  However, even the Obama-friendly Public Broadcasting System (PBS) could only sum up the two Obama terms with “achievements and setbacks.”

That was then; this is now.  Three years into the Donald J. Trump (R) presidency, ABC News, another media outlet hostile to Trump, reports: 

US life expectancy rose in 2018 for 1st time in 4 years: Study

Drug overdose deaths are declining for the first time in decades.

Life expectancy in the U.S. rose in 2018, the first such increase in four years, according to a report the National Center for Health Statistics published on Thursday.

The average American man will live to be 76, and the average woman will live to be 81.

Those gains were driven by declines in 6 of the 10 leading causes of death between 2017 and 2018, and a notable drop in drug overdose deaths.

Overdose deaths, after increasing for decades, fell for the first time in 28 years, from 70,237 in 2017 to 67,367 in 2018, according to the report.

“It’s really the drug overdose deaths that are driving that trend,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at NCHS.

Drug overdose deaths, Anderson explained, have a profound impact on average life expectancy because many occur at younger ages than other leading causes of death — cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease.

“When folks die at younger ages, they have a disproportionate impact on life expectancy,” Anderson said. …

Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, praised the efforts individual municipalities have made to drive down drug overdose fatalities.

“These findings reflect overdose trends that we have seen in many jurisdictions in the last year, as overdose fatality rates have stabilized or declined slightly,” he said.  ”This is the result of overdose prevention efforts like naloxone distribution, and access to lifesaving medications methadone and buprenorphine, [which] are finally reaching more people.”

This is not the only instance in the Trump presidency where hope and change “are finally reaching more people.”

“Americans More Satisfied With Economy, Security, Race Relations After Three Years of Trump,” headlines PJ Media.  Yes, they’re-Trump backers there, but they were reporting the results of the more presumably neutral Gallup poll, which phrased its findings as follows:

Americans’ Take on the U.S. Is Improved, but Still Mixed

  • Most Americans satisfied with country on the economy, national security

  • Dissatisfaction still runs high on numerous domestic issues

  • Average satisfaction across 27 issues is higher than when Trump took office

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s upbeat view of the nation’s economy, military strength, economic opportunity and overall quality of life will likely resonate with Americans when he delivers his State of the Union address to Congress next week.  Most Americans say they are satisfied with each of these aspects of the country as 2020 begins.  The majority also feel positively about the positions of women and gays in society. …

At the same time, the majority of Americans are dissatisfied with a host of issues that Trump would do well to address. These include a variety of domestic issues such as public education, healthcare, abortion policies and guns — as well as the economic issues of poverty and the distribution of income and wealth.

In just three years of the Trump presidency Gallup discovered this (emphasis added):

Changes Since Trump Took Office

As Trump enters his re-election year, Americans are more positive on eight key issues than they were just before he took office in January 2017.

  • Gallup records double-digit increases in public satisfaction with the nation’s economy, security from terrorism, military strength and the state of race relations.

  • Satisfaction is also up by between six and nine points on crime, the position of blacks and other racial minorities, the distribution of income and wealth, and the opportunity for a person to get ahead through hard work.

Over the same period, Americans have grown slightly less satisfied on three issues: abortion (down 7 points), the level of immigration (-6) and the environment (-6). (snip)

Americans’ average satisfaction rating for the 27 issues Gallup has tracked consistently since 2001 is now 47%. This is up three points from a year ago and is the highest since the January 2005 poll. 

And Trump accomplished all this in spite of or because of the overwhelming negative coverage from most of the media and the farcical impeachment hearings.

Gallup summed up its findings on the current attitudes of Americans as follows:

While large majorities applaud the nation’s economy and military strength, they remain critical of the federal government on several dimensions and see room for improvement in numerous areas related to the health and wellbeing of Americans.

Well, just give Trump five more years — one year remaining in his first term and four more years of his hopefully sure to be second term — and those problems certainly be overcome.

Making America Great(er) Again!  MAGA!

Although former president Barack H. Obama (D) campaigned and won the presidency twice on a slogan of hope and change, he left his office leaving Americans “frustrated and angry” according to an AP survey analyzed in Fortune, full of “fear and loathing,” deemed Michael Goodwin of the New York Post — both admittedly not Obama fans.  However, even the Obama-friendly Public Broadcasting System (PBS) could only sum up the two Obama terms with “achievements and setbacks.”

That was then; this is now.  Three years into the Donald J. Trump (R) presidency, ABC News, another media outlet hostile to Trump, reports: 

US life expectancy rose in 2018 for 1st time in 4 years: Study

Drug overdose deaths are declining for the first time in decades.

Life expectancy in the U.S. rose in 2018, the first such increase in four years, according to a report the National Center for Health Statistics published on Thursday.

The average American man will live to be 76, and the average woman will live to be 81.

Those gains were driven by declines in 6 of the 10 leading causes of death between 2017 and 2018, and a notable drop in drug overdose deaths.

Overdose deaths, after increasing for decades, fell for the first time in 28 years, from 70,237 in 2017 to 67,367 in 2018, according to the report.

“It’s really the drug overdose deaths that are driving that trend,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at NCHS.

Drug overdose deaths, Anderson explained, have a profound impact on average life expectancy because many occur at younger ages than other leading causes of death — cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease.

“When folks die at younger ages, they have a disproportionate impact on life expectancy,” Anderson said. …

Leo Beletsky, a professor of law and health sciences at Northeastern University, praised the efforts individual municipalities have made to drive down drug overdose fatalities.

“These findings reflect overdose trends that we have seen in many jurisdictions in the last year, as overdose fatality rates have stabilized or declined slightly,” he said.  ”This is the result of overdose prevention efforts like naloxone distribution, and access to lifesaving medications methadone and buprenorphine, [which] are finally reaching more people.”

This is not the only instance in the Trump presidency where hope and change “are finally reaching more people.”

“Americans More Satisfied With Economy, Security, Race Relations After Three Years of Trump,” headlines PJ Media.  Yes, they’re-Trump backers there, but they were reporting the results of the more presumably neutral Gallup poll, which phrased its findings as follows:

Americans’ Take on the U.S. Is Improved, but Still Mixed

  • Most Americans satisfied with country on the economy, national security

  • Dissatisfaction still runs high on numerous domestic issues

  • Average satisfaction across 27 issues is higher than when Trump took office

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump’s upbeat view of the nation’s economy, military strength, economic opportunity and overall quality of life will likely resonate with Americans when he delivers his State of the Union address to Congress next week.  Most Americans say they are satisfied with each of these aspects of the country as 2020 begins.  The majority also feel positively about the positions of women and gays in society. …

At the same time, the majority of Americans are dissatisfied with a host of issues that Trump would do well to address. These include a variety of domestic issues such as public education, healthcare, abortion policies and guns — as well as the economic issues of poverty and the distribution of income and wealth.

In just three years of the Trump presidency Gallup discovered this (emphasis added):

Changes Since Trump Took Office

As Trump enters his re-election year, Americans are more positive on eight key issues than they were just before he took office in January 2017.

  • Gallup records double-digit increases in public satisfaction with the nation’s economy, security from terrorism, military strength and the state of race relations.

  • Satisfaction is also up by between six and nine points on crime, the position of blacks and other racial minorities, the distribution of income and wealth, and the opportunity for a person to get ahead through hard work.

Over the same period, Americans have grown slightly less satisfied on three issues: abortion (down 7 points), the level of immigration (-6) and the environment (-6). (snip)

Americans’ average satisfaction rating for the 27 issues Gallup has tracked consistently since 2001 is now 47%. This is up three points from a year ago and is the highest since the January 2005 poll. 

And Trump accomplished all this in spite of or because of the overwhelming negative coverage from most of the media and the farcical impeachment hearings.

Gallup summed up its findings on the current attitudes of Americans as follows:

While large majorities applaud the nation’s economy and military strength, they remain critical of the federal government on several dimensions and see room for improvement in numerous areas related to the health and wellbeing of Americans.

Well, just give Trump five more years — one year remaining in his first term and four more years of his hopefully sure to be second term — and those problems certainly be overcome.

Making America Great(er) Again!  MAGA!

via American Thinker Blog

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Happy Brexit Day! Campaigners Celebrate Leaving EU After 47 Years

Nigel Farage has hailed today as a “massive victory for the people against the establishment” as the UK prepares to leave the EU at 11 pm.

“What happens tonight at 11 o’clock, we pass the point of no return,” Mr Farage said on Good Morning Britain on Friday. “Once we’re out, there’s no way this country will ever rejoin. This is a big moment in history.”

Other leading campaigners celebrated today, including Brexit Party chairman Richard Tice.

Brexit Party MEPs Claire Fox and Belinda de Lucy thanked activists and leave voters, with Ms de Lucy saying today “feels like we’ve stood on the shoulders of so many unsung heroes. Thank you SO much to all 17.4 million.”

Journalist and keen royalist Joseph Afrane, who is often seen at pro-Brexit rallies bedecked in patriotic suits, was out in Westminster today bidding “bye-bye EU”.

The Conservative government, which finally delivered Brexit after three and a half years since the vote, also marked today on Twitter, with Number 10 releasing a video celebrating that “today is the day the UK is leaving the EU.”

Some of the media splashed their front pages with celebrations of the historic day:

While Brexit campaigners like Patrick O’Flynn criticised the left-liberal Guardian for calling Britain a “small island” on their front page this morning, by quoting George Orwell who said: “England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.”

Brexit-supporting newspaper cartoonists also took the chance to mark Brexit Day, and mock those who tried to block it since 2016.

There was also congratulations from the U.S. ambassador to the UK Woody Johnson, who said: “You have no greater friend, ally, and partner than the United States.”

via Breitbart News

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Horowitz: NY crime skyrockets, shootings up 60%, following prison reduction agenda

No ordinary citizen can legally carry a gun in New York City, yet shootings are up 59.6 percent over this time last year. On Sunday, a pregnant woman was shot while sitting in her own car in front of her home in Queens. This is becoming the new normal in New York after the memo has gone out to criminals in the city that politicians fear growing the prison population more than they fear crime.

According to NYPD crime data, in addition to the 59.6 percent spike in shootings over this time last year, robberies increased 32.8 percent and grand larceny auto crimes were up a whopping 62.8 percent. Burglaries rose by 17 percent. This is just for the first 26 days of 2020.

What gives? According to NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea, it’s no mystery. It’s all about New York’s law abolishing bail. “If you let out individuals that commit a lot of crime, that’s precision policing in reverse and we’re seeing the effects in a very quick time,” Shea said at a press conference last Friday. He decried the undeniable “correlation” between the rise in crime and the jail and prison “populations dropping significantly.”

This is the other side of the criminal justice equation that politicians, including country club Republicans, refuse to recognize. As they are focused like a laser beam on reducing the prison population, they are ignoring the human nature of violent criminals. These criminals simply see no deterrent against their destructive behavior, and for good reason. Thus, whatever form of crime it is they like to engage in, they will continue repeating it until they are locked up. One criminal in Staten Island, who had a history of vehicle theft, was arrested for breaking into vehicles three times in three weeks. He was released every time!

The backward priorities of criminal over victim inherent in criminal justice “reform” are perhaps best reflected by an anecdote told by Commissioner Shea during last week’s press conference. Last week, a drunk driver slammed his minivan into a police officer who had pulled over another driver at the side of a road, catching the officer between his car and the officer’s car. “I stopped at the hospital the next day, right before he was wheeled into surgery,” related Shea in front of reporters last Friday. “He got out of the hospital today. Individual that did it was out [of jail] before him. I mean, something’s wrong with that picture. And not his first DWI arrest.”

With a rampant drug crisis raging, the worst drug traffickers face no deterrent. This week, six fentanyl traffickers working for Dominican cartel distributors, three of whom are in the country illegally, were released without bail. Over 1,400 people have died every year over the past few years as a result of drug overdoses in the big city.

Repeat armed robbers are being let out only to rob again. Then, once the criminals are out, they have no incentive to show up for their court date, and many are just ignoring the notices to appear. After all, what are the cops going to do to them?

The fact that criminals know the entire weight of the political universe is against incarceration these days is incentivizing them to victimize with impunity. New York’s experience is demonstrating that most people locked up are dangerous to society. When they are let loose, crime will go up. This is not about nonviolent, victimless crimes, as proponents of these “reforms” repeat ad nauseum.

The truth of the “reform” movement was boldly revealed last week by Danielle Sered, the head of one of these well-monied interests seeking to abolish the concept of incarceration. In an op-ed for USA Today titled, “To end mass incarceration, U.S. needs alternatives to prison for violent crimes,” Sered concedes that the entire narrative for jailbreak is built on a fallacy.

As consensus and momentum to end mass incarceration have grown, the reform narrative, though compelling, has been based on a fallacy: that the United States can achieve large-scale, transformative change by changing responses primarily to nonviolent offenses. That is impossible in a nation where 55% of people incarcerated in state prisons in 2016 (the latest available Bureau of Justice Statistics data) were convicted of violent crimes. To truly have an impact on mass incarceration, we need to reckon with that reality.

Indeed! As I’ve noted before, there are actually very few people in prison for nonviolent offenses, and in fact, there are hundreds of thousands of violent offenders who are not locked up. Sered lives in her own alternative reality of abolishing prison even with this in mind. But for the 90 percent of the country that doesn’t want that, they are seeing the reality of violent crime, undeterred, play out every day in New York. Prison culture ain’t pretty. But turning every American city into a violent prison is not an option.

The post Horowitz: NY crime skyrockets, shootings up 60%, following prison reduction agenda appeared first on Conservative Review.

via Conservative Review

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Trump Sets up Task Force to Investigate Missing and Murdered Native Americans

President Donald Trump has tasked three members of his Cabinet to work together to investigate the high number of American Indians and Alaska Natives who have been murdered or gone missing.

The Department of the Interior, Department of Justice, and Department of Health and Human Services met as a task force for the first time on Wednesday, co-chaired by Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt and Attorney General William Barr.

The task force “is composed of federal officials charged with enhancing the criminal justice response, consulting with tribal governments on potential solutions and empowering native communities with information,” a press release announcing the new campaign said.

“President Trump is committed to addressing systemic challenges in Indian Country, and this task force will develop and implement an aggressive, government-wide strategy to combat the crisis of missing and murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives,” Bernhardt said. “By working together and listening to impacted citizens and tribal communities, we intend to tackle these complex issues.”

“The disappearance and death of American Indian and Alaska Native people, particularly women and girls, is an especially tragic chapter in a long story of marginalization and trauma suffered by native people,” Barr said. “We are committed to addressing this challenge, to reducing the violence and protecting the vulnerable from exploitation and abuse.”

“The task force is eager to get to work to address the issues that underlie this terrible problem, and work with our tribal partners to find solutions, raise awareness, and bring answers and justice to the grieving,” Barr said.

“I am grateful that President Trump has made it a priority to tackle the tragic issue of missing and murdered American Indians and Alaska Natives,” HHS Secretary Alex Azar said. “Native Americans deserve safety and security in their communities, and HHS has a vital role in helping by providing culturally appropriate prevention and trauma informed services to victims and their families.”

“I am committed to working in partnership with President Trump, Attorney General Barr, Secretary Bernhardt, and tribal leaders and members to make a positive impact on this important challenge,” Azar said.

Trump has called the high rates of violence in the Native American community “sobering and heartbreaking.” 

The task force, dubbed Operation Lady Justice, will “review Indian Country cold cases, to strengthen law enforcement protocols, and work with tribes to improve investigations, information sharing and a more seamless response to missing persons investigations.”

The announcement of the campaign detailed how the task force will address the issue:

  • Consult with tribal governments on the scope and nature of the problem and will hold regional consultations and listening sessions at several locations around the country;
  • Develop model protocols and procedures for addressing both new and unsolved cases of missing and murdered persons in tribal communities;
  • Establish a multi-disciplinary, multi-jurisdictional team, which will include tribal law enforcement, to review cold cases;
  • Address issues related to roles, authorities and jurisdiction among tribal, local, state and federal agencies; and
  • Develop and execute a public awareness, education and outreach campaign for affected communities.
  • The task force will host its first listening session at the National Congress of American Indians’ Executive Council Winter Session in Washington, D.C. on February 12.

Other members of the task force are Katharine Sullivan, principal deputy assistant attorney general; Tara Sweeney, assistant secretary for Indian Affairs at DOI; Terry Wade, executive assistant director, criminal, cyber, response and services branch at the FBI; Laura Rogers, acting director, Office on Violence Against Women; Charles Addington, deputy bureau director, Bureau of Indian Affairs, Office of Justice Services; Trent Shores, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Oklahoma and chairman of the Native American Issues Subcommittee of the Attorney General’s Advisory Committee; and Jean Hovland, deputy assistant secretary for Native American affairs and commissioner, administration for Native Americans, Department of Health and Human Services.

“This initiative’s important to Indian Country and Alaska Native communities,” Sweeney told ABC News. “And if the current practice had been effective, we wouldn’t be here today.”

“Of almost 6,000 indigenous women reported missing in 2016, only 116 were logged into the Justice Department’s missing persons database, according to a report by the Urban Indian Health Institute,” ABC News reported.

As part of Trump’s executive order, Barr named Marcia Good of the Department of Justice as the executive director of the task force.

The task force will host its first listening session at the National Congress of American Indians’ Executive Council Winter Session in Washington, DC, on February 12. 

The task force will issue a progress report to the president on Nov. 26, 2020, with a final report deadline of Nov. 26, 2021.

Follow Penny Starr on Twitter.

via Breitbart News

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