53percenter's Blog

Trump was effusive about updates to the budget supporting the Special Olympics, and a return to space “in a BIG WAY.”

Today, I officially updated my budget to include $18 million for our GREAT @SpecialOlympics,” Trump tweeted, “whose athletes inspire us and make our Nation so PROUD!”

Today, I officially updated my budget to include $18 million for our GREAT @SpecialOlympics, whose athletes inspire us and make our Nation so PROUD!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019

“Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars,” the President also said. “I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!”

Under my Administration, we are restoring @NASA to greatness and we are going back to the Moon, then Mars. I am updating my budget to include an additional $1.6 billion so that we can return to Space in a BIG WAY!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019

And despite an original proposal that cut the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative budget by 90%, the President included a half billion for environmental restoration projects: $300 million in funding for the aforementioned initiative, and another $200 million for the Army Corps Everglades restoration work.

We must protect our Great Lakes, keeping them clean and beautiful for future generations. That’s why I am fighting for $300 million in my updated budget for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019

My Administration will be fighting for $200 million for the Army Corps Everglades restoration work this year. Congress needs to help us complete the world’s largest intergovernmental watershed restoration project ASAP! Good for Florida and good for the environment.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 13, 2019

“We must protect our Great Lakes, keeping them clean and beautiful for future generations,” the President said in regard to the former. “Congress needs to help us complete the world’s largest intergovernmental watershed restoration project ASAP,” he added regarding the latter. “Good for Florida and good for the environment.”

Still, despite these updates, Trump’s budget looks to spend significantly more outside the United States than in it. “America is roaring back, and now is the time to invest in the future of America,” Trump said at the budget’s March release. Whether it will actually pass in the current divisive climate remains to be seen.

Disgraced former Congressman Anthony Weiner is finally free after serving 21 months in prison and an additional several months in a halfway house in New York City for sending lewd photos to a minor across state lines, a federal crime.

Weiner walked out of his Manhattan halfway house early Tuesday morning, to a gaggle of reporters.

“It’s good to be out,” he said. “I hope to be able to live a life of integrity and service. I’m glad this chapter of my life is behind me.”

Weiner has been in jail since late 2017, after he pleaded guilty to “one charge of transferring obscene material to a minor,” according to CNN, stemming from a sexting incident — the third such incident for Weiner, who lost both his job in Congress and his campaign to become mayor of New York City because he was unable to resist the urge to court women using private messaging services.

Weiner resigned in disgrace from Congress in 2011, after he was discovered to have engaged in “inappropriate, extramarital relationships with several women he met online” — relationships which involved sending lewd photos of himself to the women using Twitter’s private direct messaging service. After making a mistake and posting one photo publicly, Weiner’s habit of conducting affairs using the social media platform was revealed.

In 2013, after hiding out for two years, Weiner tried to re-enter politics, this time running for mayor of New York City. His campaign was widely considered a “test balloon” for then-Senator Hillary Clinton’s potential 2016 presidential run. The effort allowed Weiner’s wife, close Clinton aide Huma Abedin, to get a sense of donor availability in NYC and compile a list of potential Clinton supporters.

But Weiner eventually ruined that effort, too, sending a series of racy texts to a Democratic aide in Indiana named Sydney Leathers, using the moniker “Carlos Danger.”

Although both incidents were clearly inappropriate and unethical, Weiner escaped criminal prosecution until 2017, when federal agents discovered he had again been texting with a female, but this time, she was a minor in Kentucky, and Weiner’s sexually aggressive texts — which included photos — ran afoul of federal laws against sending salacious material across state lines.

Weiner pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a term of around two years in federal prison. He served 21 months in a minimum-security federal facility in Massachusetts and was then transfered, for the final three months of his sentence, to a halfway house, where he was expected to abide by house rules, find a job, and work on re-entering public life.

Weiner has been mum on his future plans — it certainly wouldn’t be beyond belief for him to make a third run at a political career, even this late in the game — but the New York Post reported last month that Weiner has been shopping around a book proposal, likely a memoir of his life.

No one has bitten.

“Every Simon & Schuster imprint has passed,” a source told the Post. “The project is being repped by the hot downtown boutique agency Foundry Literary + Media — which was behind nonfiction best-sellers by ‘Daily Show’ host Trevor Noah, New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton and ‘Jersey Shore’ star Vinny Guadagnino.”

Here is one more staggering number to put into perspective the all-encompassing crisis currently transpiring at our beleaguered southern border: According to Texas-based border agents, an astonishing 5,500 illegal aliens cross the border every day in South Texas alone.

Fox News reports:

New Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan toured the border in South Texas on Saturday with Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan.

“We’re not going to leave until the border is secure,” said Shanahan, who is trying to transfer $1.5 billion from numerous defense projects to secure the Southwest border.

In South Texas, border agents the last several days apprehended 229 migrants an hour, or 5,500 a day, forcing the agency to set up tents in parking lots and hiring jets at $16,000 a flight to send adults to nearby Del Rio just for processing.

Pictures released by the Rio Grande Valley sector show migrants piling up in makeshift tents in parking lots as agents struggle to handle the surge

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) numbers continue to show the inundated migrant influx affecting America’s 1,900-mile-long border with Mexico. The Daily Wire reported last week on CBP’s April border numbers:

Per CBP’s official data release, total border apprehensions between points of entry in April rose 6.62% over March’s already-record-shattering pace. Astoundingly, April’s apprehension total of 98,977 is a full 94.04% higher than the monthly total from the beginning of the federal government’s fiscal year, in October 2018. In other words, apprehensions between points of entry along the border have nearly doubled in just the first seven months of the current fiscal year. As Daniel Horowitz observes, the combined total for points of entry inadmissibles and apprehensions between points of entry is 109,144, which is the highest monthly total since the second term of the George W. Bush administration. Furthermore, as Horowitz states, “it is very likely the highest number of unique individuals of all time, given that many in the past were the same individuals deported multiple times within the same week, while almost all of these are first-timers.”

As The Daily Wire has also noted before, part of the reason for the influx is the dissemination in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” region of transparently false claims pertaining to America’s asylum statute. Our asylum statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1158(b)(1)(B)(i), is operative for those who are persecuted in their native countries for “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” For instance, ethnic Yazidis persecuted in Islamic State-overrun Iraq should qualify — but purely economically motivated migrants simply hoping to “seek a better life,” in the abstract, should not.

CBP has sounded the alarm on Twitter, tweeting last week: “#CBP is experiencing an unprecedented and unsustainable situation at the Southwest border. In April, CBP apprehended or deemed inadmissible 109,144 individuals along the SWB.”

One unanswered question is why the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has aborted its unilateral rewriting of the much-ballyhooed and highly flawed Flores consent decree, which the Trump administration cites as hamstringing much of its detention and enforcement efforts at the border.

CNN senior political commentator and former Obama adviser David Axelrod on Tuesday reacted to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) going after former Vice President Joe Biden over climate policy.

According to Axelrod, the far left, anti-establishment taking on the traditional centrists  “is a fundamental fissure in the Democratic Party.”

“[T]his is a fundamental fissure in the Democratic Party and Biden is squarely on one side of the line, Sanders squarely on the other,” he outlined on “New Day.”

Axelrod went on to predict the battle between the two sides of the Democratic Party could look much like it did in 2016 when Hillary Clinton and Sanders faced off for the Democratic presidential nomination.

“It’s a debate we saw unfold in the 2016 race. It is likely to unfold again in 2020 and [Ocasio-Cortez] will be someone everybody is watching because she is sort of captured the imagination of the media as a spokesperson for that point of view,” he explained.

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent

On Fox News Sunday, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) gave Donald Trump Jr. the advice of ignoring the recent subpoena issued by Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr (R-NC) to come and testify, again, regarding the fake news Russian collusion investigation. Senator Graham is not the only one of Senator Burr’s colleagues who has been critical of the subpoena.

Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has been dismissive of Burr’s efforts and has said that Don Jr. and the President “shouldn’t worry.” That’s in advance of any testimony.

So why has Senator Burr decided to stand against his colleagues and subpoena Don Jr.? I’m afraid the reason is clear and the motivation as flawed as it is dated. Senator Burr wants to have his Sally Field moment with Democrat colleagues, the liberal press, and progressive activists.

Ms. Field famously made her declaration at the 1985 Oscars that the award she just received meant, “You like me. You really like me.” When you watch the old video clip you can see the sheer joy in her face in believing that a room filled with peers had just made her feel like she was one of them.

Senator Burr wants to be liked. He wants to feel accepted by the very people with whom he feigns to fight over policy on the Senate floor. This is common with conservatives in general, but especially with Republican politicians. It is worth asking why? Why do Republicans do things that contradict their own belief system and alienate their own party members and voters? The Bible tells us to love our enemy, but it is silent on the idea of making our enemy love us.

I believe we can find at least part of the answer if we go back to the Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With FDR leading the rhetorical and legislative way, the Democrats became the party wanting to use government to do good things to help people in real need. They became the party of compassion. These ideas are usually associated with the New Deal which FDR pledged to America in his 1932 nomination acceptance speech. It was 12 years later, however, that he made the speech that turned Richard Burr into Sally Field 75 years later.

It was January 11, 1944 in his State of the Union Speech to Congress that FDR suggested that the United States had now accepted “so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all — regardless of station, race, or creed.” Roosevelt went on to enumerate these new “rights” which were, unlike the original Bill of Rights which proscribed activities of government, a list of prescribed duties of government. They were:

• The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
• The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
• The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
• The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
• The right of every family to a decent home;
• The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
• The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
• The right to a good education.

This speech, which doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves today, is the one that truly began not the shift in government policy; that started a decade earlier. It is what codified what it meant to be a both a good person and a good politician at the same time. It was term-setting. Forget the values and ideas upon which our nation was founded, these were enlightened ideas and to argue against them made you cold, heartless, even inhumane.

Over time the press, celebrities, and activists have come to champion these ideas.

Recently, we have seen Republican Presidential nominees like George Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney embrace the ideas of FDR’s Second Bill of Rights. On some level, it is hard to blame them. Read the list above and see how difficult it is in short soundbites to argue against any of what FDR positioned.

The problem is that appeasement doesn’t really work. George Bush never got the love he desired from the other side, despite a massive prescription drug entitlement program. John McCain and Mitt Romney were skewered during their Presidential runs by the same media that has been nicer to them recently because of their opposition to President Trump.

Ah, President Trump. The one who would not pander. The one who did not care if he was “liked” by all the right people. The Democrats, the press, liberals in general really hate him for not making the effort.

Senator Burr calculates that if he gives the appearance of going after the First Family then he might be liked by the “virtuous people.” Maybe they will write something nice? Maybe they will commend his character?

Or maybe they will simply see him as what Ludwig von Mises called a “useful idiot,” unwittingly helping them on their way to a more collectivist society?