Today’s Poser

How come ‘virtually’ all the speakers at the Democrat Nomination Convention have not touched on our China challenge, the riots in our streets, “redirecting”  police funding, soaring US crime rates, homelessness in blue cities, Middle East peace progress, ISIS destruction, Iran sanctions, the Afghanistan pullout and our military’s rebuilding? All that we have heard is how evil Trump is ... and what a visionary Biden is.  Are none of these other things worth talking about?


STAND UP FOR AMERICA!

Headlines

Warren stumbles with 'Native American' rollout

Google's YouTube suffers a major outage

Dens eye 'Internet Bill of Rights' if win House ...

... Largest truck company predicts 20 percent wage raise

Ex-sheriff Joe Arpaio files libel suit against NYT

Supreme Court will hear case that could decide whether Facebook, Twitter can censure  users

Trump: Don't blame me if Dems take House!

Graham: Mohammad bin Salman 'has got to go'

World Economic Forum study: U.S. ranks closest to 'ideal state'

IMF's Christine Lagafde will postpone trip to Middle East

Mueller said ready to deliver findings in Trump probe ...

Mexico vows to stop migrant caravan if it disobeys immigration laws

Full Plate

President Trump has a full plate of problems ... mostly because of other presidents ignoring them. But he seems to recognize most of them and is willing to try to fix things.  Here are some:

- Our broken immigration system

- Our porous southern border

- The political mare's nest in the Middle East

- Our enormous negative balance of trade with China and the EU (read Germany)

- The burdensome cost of being the world's police force

- An economy burdened by regulation and a counter-productive taxing system

- Constitutional-guaranteed freedoms under constant assault

- A military unprepared for its looming challenges ... particularly from China

- The North Korean and Iranian nuclear threats

- The constant menace of Islam-inspired terrorism

- Soaring medical costs not matched by results (particularly for veterans)

- A growing national debt driven largely by feel-good entitlements

- Restoring the national dream of equal opportunity for all

You get the picture ... the list goes on and on. And, in most cases, Trump is fixing things ... or , at least, trying to. This is not something that could be said for our previous three prexies.

Will he remedy them all? Probably not ... but enough of them to be called very consequential and to MAGA. That is enough for me and most attentive Americans (maybe not Mueller).

Headlines

Sessions orders review of abandoned Hezbollah-linked drug prosecutions

9th Circuit deals another blow to Trump's travel ban

Mattis: 'Storm clouds gathering' over Korean peninsula ...

FBI arrests man for planning [Frisco] Christmas jihadi attack with truck, guns, bomb

Democrats block dozens of Trump nominees

Trump approves weapons sales to Ukraine, Russian collusion theorists hardest hit

NBA enjoys ratings renaissance as NFL flounders ...

Winning: Consumer sentiment highest since 2000

Cochran's future in the Senate in doubt

Bitcoin plunges as low as $10,400 in volatile trading on Coinbase: now sown 27 percent from record

Rasmussen: [Trump] Approval 44% ...

Trump: $7 trillion 'foolishly' spent in the Middle East

Reverse Midas Touch

Manure is flying all over the place and the fan has not even been turned on yet. FBI Director James Comey is being besmirched by many for his letter to Congress last week reversing his decision on Servergate. However, what is forgotten is that Attorney General Loretta Lynch had told Comey that this Hellary Clinton e-mail issue was his to decide because she had been compromised. What would normally be a Justice Deptartment prerogative was shifted to the FBI. And why was this? The Arizona airport meeting between Lynch and Bill Clinton basically soured the normal process and put the weight of the world on Comey's shoulders.

So the real source of this shit storm is Bill Clinton for his out-of-bounds meeting with our Attorney General just days before her decision was to be made on Hellary's e-mail server fecal faux pas. So we now see that the Clinton couple has once again tarnished two major American institutions. This couple has an alchemist knack for turning gold into baby poop ... a reverse Midas touch if you will.

Starting over 40 years ago with Hellary being tossed off of the Watergate Committee for untrustworthiness ... through her dangerous screwing around with our health-care system ... then including Bill Clinton's amoral sullying of the White House ... to SecState Hillary's feckless destruction of the Middle East ... through many other doo-doo details that the Clintons have left in their wake as they have defiled individual and institution after individual and institution.

Basically just about anything that this evil couple touches turns to excrement ... and yet millions of Americans want to put them back into the White House! Go figure?!

Bag Job

I just listened to (not watched) the first presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hellary Clinton and I think I will try to capture my thoughts before I am barraged by the spin from both sides. First let me compare this debate to a tennis match. Trump was playing singles and Hellary and the moderator, Lester Holt, were playing doubles. So naturally the twosome had the advantage. I guess that this was what Trump anticipated and he thought he could handle it. He almost did. But he was on defense pretty much the entire debate ... on the trumped-up birther issue, on his taxes, on his bankruptcies, on his NATO comments, on his supposed misogyny, on his thoughts about Japan and South Korea getting nuclear weapons, on his cozying up to Putin, on Hellary's lack of a presidential "look", etc. He did a pretty good job in returning these drop shots but they kept coming ... served up by the moderator or Clinton as a result of her softball (set-up?) questions.

Hellary Clinton was never once put on the spot by the moderator ... not on her private e-mail server, not on her Clinton Foundation's pay for play, not on Benghazi massacre, not on her health issues, not on her Middle East and Russia screw-ups, really not on anything. The only time she was ever challenged was when Trump himself brought up things ... like the fact that, given all our current problems in the world, how come she never did anything to fix them? Even at that Trump didn't point out her hypocrisy in saying that we needed to get the guns out of the hands of inner-city criminals but wouldn't support "stop and frisk."

Also Holt never tried to fact-check Clinton ... whereas he did to Trump multiple times ... usually unsuccessfully. Add to this the fact that the student audience was, not surprisingly, clearly on Hellary's side ... and Trump had a slight case of the sniffles ... while Hellary never coughed once ... makes me believe that although she didn't score a KO, but will tomorrow be declared the slight winner on points. Whether this will slow down Trump's surge in the polls, I can't predict. This depends on how perceptive the viewing public is to how one-sided this tennis match really was.

Blood on Our Hands

The Senate Democrats are in high dudgeon ... they just had a 15 hour filibuster demanding that our government should get tougher on our immigration enforcement so that Muslim  terrorists cannot slip into our country among the thousands of unvetted migrants from the strife-ridden Middle East ... and kill dozens of innocent Americans.

They didn't do this? ... What? They instead were jumping and screaming about what these terrorists were using to kill Americans ... the so-called  Rambo-style weapons ... or the weapons of war ... or the assault rifles ... or "guns designed to kill people". (Don't liberals really manipulate language well?) See: New York Times Story. Now assault rifles are semi-automatic (each shot takes a finger-pull) but both Bernie Sanders and The View's Joy Behar have called them "automatic" weapons or machine guns (a single finger pull dispenses dozens of bullets). And, according to our professed American Indian Senator from Massachusetts, Elizabeth Warren, if we don't outlaw these evil guns, we "will have blood on our hands."

This anger is clearly misplaced ... it's like blaming the big scary automobile if its drunk driver kills someone.

OK ... but  if the media won't stop exorcising and Democrat Senators won't listen to reason, Therefore, I think that Republicans should bend and pass this Democrat's feel-good legislation. However, there should be a number of Republican provisos attached to this Second Amendment stricture. They are:

- The guns to be outlawed MUST be actual military weapons of war using military ammunition which are actually designed to kill people.

- All current gun laws MUST be fully enforced. Obummer and Hellery cannot wave away any statute that offends them or for their political advantage. And absolutely no existing compulsory gun charges can be plea-bargained out of any felony prosecution.

- If any government lists are used to exclude the purchase of any such firearms, such persons excluded MUST have the right of judicial appeal of their placement on such a list. This due process MUST be concluded within 30 days.

- The vetting process for Muslim immigrants MUST be at least as vigorous as the vetting process for such gun purchasers ... and any BS statements by Obummer about how this process now takes six months needs to be independently verified. If this turns out not to be the case, then this law is automatically null and void.

Then, if another Islamic terrorist finds it necessary in Allah's name to kill multiple Americans, I would hope that the main stream media will point out those who really have blood on THEIR hands ... Obummer and Hellery.

Scrambled Eggs

The United States' policy in the Middle East is a plate of scrambled eggs. We have been launching air strikes against the ISIS powers (partly Sunni Muslims) in Tikrit, Iraq along side the Iranian-backed Shia Muslim militias ... which were not gaining an edge and are now pulling back ... see: Powerline Blog Comments. In Yemen we are encouraging the Saudis (Sunnis) to attack the Iranian-backed Houthi Shia rebels with both air power and soon possibly with ground troops ... see: Al Jazeera Story. So we are helping Iran with one hand while slapping it down with the other.

The situation is somewhat duplicated in Libya where Egypt (Sunni) is bombing the ISIS forces there ... see: BBC Story. Simultaneously, we are grabbing our ankles in order to close the nuclear deal with Shia Iran. What a mishmash!

And all the while, President Obama (a Shia sympathiser IMHO) is playing golf in Florida ... see: Washington Times Story.

He Ain’t Heavy …

He’s my Brotherhood.  The Obama administration, with Hillary Clinton’s, John Kerry’s, and Chuck Hagel’s assent, has been a much too ardent supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, that extremist group that almost sunk Egyptian “democracy” in the name of democracy… and has been behind much of the bloody fulmination of the Arab Spring.  From the day Obama was first inaugurated he has shown a tilt toward this dangerous sharia-law, caliphate-driven Islamist organization. 

Now that the Egyptian military has realized the danger of Morsi and the Brotherhood running things and managed to reverse the tide … yes, unfortunately, at the cost of much blood … our Islamist-sympathizing President has chosen, in the slimy-secret way that is his wont, to cut off aid to the Egyptian military (see: The Daily Beast Story).  This fortunately will be of little consequence because Saudi Arabia, UAE, and other Gulf States have stepped up with monetary offers that dwarf our puny leverage … see: NY Times Story.

It is clear why the twenty-two million Egyptian rioters, who presaged this military takeover, felt that the U.S. and the Obama administration had betrayed them … we had.  Now we are trying to twist the knife.  Rather than standing on that phony shibboleth of “democracy” which meant nothing to the Muslim Brotherhood, the U.S. foreign policy should propound modernity and freedom from the chains of a theocracy.  We certainly support the notion of separation of church and state here at home … why not for the Arab world?  And it seems that even some mush-brained Republicans such as John McCain and Lindsey Graham are supporting Obama’s wrong-headedness.  This is unfortunate ... for it gives Obama cover for his perfidy.

The U.S. foreign policy is on the wrong track in many ways, but especially because of our support for the Muslim Brotherhood and, by proxy, for the Islamists.  The irony of this posture is that, even though we may be alienating much of the more moderate Middle East, the consequences of this bull-headed support of Islamists might be the continued undermining of Muslim theocracies and wanna-bes around the region (Iran, Turkey, etc.).  Egypt’s near-death experience has been an object lesson for these countries and I pray they may take it to heart.

Head in the Clouds

William Bigelow, writing for the Breitbart news blog. has pretty much dissected John Kerry’s recent “head in the clouds” comments about the Israel-Palestine conflict.  In essence Kerry, while visiting Turkey,  nonsensically said that fixing this festering decades-long Middle East conflict is a precursor to solving the growing world-wide Islamic extremism issue. Read Bigelow’s reasoning here in this Breitbart Posting.  

In his typical pontificating manner, our Secretary of State has re-iterated what is essentially the Obama administration’s implicit policy toward Israel (despite his protestations to the contrary when Obama recently visited there.)  This policy (as demonstrated by the President’s actions and not his words) is, “Israel is the roadblock to peace there and will need to relent and retreat if a “two-state solution” is ever to occur between Israel and the Palestine Authority.”

Kerry is extending this naive and simplistic solution outward to what is the very complicated and grave problem … that of Islam’s reawakened quest for a world-wide caliphate.  Unfortunately, this is the kind of simplistic thinking in which our State Department all too often dabbles.  But then, what can we expect from a man who has repeatedly condemned his own country on the world stage.

Pot Boiler

The Middle East is in disarray with insurrections the theme of the day. Egypt has already capitulated to the rioters (whoever they are). Syria is shooting its own citizens pall mall. Libya is in full civil war with air cover provided by the United States and some Piper Cubs from the European Union. Bahrain has been taken under the wing of the benevolent (hah!) Saudi Arabia. Iran, we think, is also experiencing street demonstrations … diminished daily by those demonstrators who were not smart enough to hide their faces from the ever-preset I-Phones. (I say “we think” for less real news leaks out of Tehran than Roentgens from the Fukushima nuclear plant.) Yemen is a turkey shoot with tribe against tribe, North against South, Shia against Sunni, and the government sparing with its own shadow. Israel stands ready to punish the Gaza Strip militants for their indiscriminate shelling of southern Israel. And what about Tunisia where this whole thing started ... are street vendors there now allowed to ply their trades?

How will this all resolve itself? Who knows … certainly not our ever-alert intelligence agencies? (Perhaps Jamie Gorelick, if she takes over the FBI, will fix things by decreeing that intelligence agents can no longer talk to each other.) However, I am not afraid to step into this Muslim morass and sort things out with some intrepid predictions:

- Yemen will detach itself from Saudi Arabia and float out to sea, never to be seen again.

- The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood will change its name to The Faithful Friends of ElBaradei.

- Muammar Qadaffi (and his family) will flee to Venezuela where he will be given the Universal Freedom Medal by Hugo Chavez.

- Bahrain will be annexed by Saudi Arabia as a “protectorate.”

- Shi'ites will kill lots of Sunnis and Sunnis will kill lots of Shi'ites

- In the midst of all of this, President Obama will embark on a five-week “trade-mission” trip to China with 50 close-friends, his family … and a shipping container full of dollars.

- Israel will be chastised by the U.N. for not allowing more of its citizens to be killed by Hezbollah.

- The Main Stream Media will determine that this was all George Bush’s fault.