It’s Friday, July 28th, 2017…but before we begin, here’s a little 411 for the Dimocrats, assuming (which is a stretch) any frequent our offerings: if a certain one-term President is for it…
…depend on the rest of America to oppose it! Hells bells, given the opportunity, even a vast majority of Dimocrats wouldn’t commit to it. They know a sure loser when they see it.
And if anyone needed yet another reason to wish John McCain never returned to the Senate…besides blocking the repeal of Obamacare…he was more than happy to provide it:
“There is no reason to force service members who are able to fight, train and deploy to leave the military — regardless of their gender identity,” said Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He called Mr. Trump’s move “yet another example of why major policy announcements should not be made via Twitter.”
McCain would evidently prefer major policy announcements just be made via…
…twits!
Oh,…and if you thought the appointment of Anthony Scaramucci was going to right Trump’s capsizing ship of state, this item from Townhall.com‘s Christine Rousselle should give you pause for thought…unless of course you’re into the Trump Kool-Aid deeper than the MSM was into The Obama’s brew:
Here’s but a few of Scaramucci’s Greatest Hits…thus far!
“Reince is a f-cking paranoid schizophrenic, a paranoiac.”
“I’m not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own c-ck. I’m not trying to build my own brand off the fucking strength of the President. I’m here to serve the country.”
“What I want to do is I want to f-cking kill all the leakers and I want to get the President’s agenda on track so we can succeed for the American people.”
And he’s only been The Donald’s Director of Communications six days!!! Something tells us the Trumps and Scaramuccis of the world live in a universe just as alternate as the Power Elite in Washington…only the rules are different.
P.S. Here’s yet another story you won’t catch in the MSM:
Now, here’s The Gouge!
We lead off the last edition of the week with two items from the Washington Examiner which tell you all you need to know about the Party of Stupid. First, Jim Antle relates how, despite having helped them regain power…
Why would he need to when the GOP is doing it for him?!?
“Even when Republicans control the White House and both houses of Congress, liberalism remains the default ideology of the federal government.
A Republican Senate could not muster even 50 votes for the full repeal of Obamacare’s taxes and spending. Six Republican senators who had voted for repeal in 2015, when the party was merely pretending it was possible, flipped on Wednesday rather than deliver.
Five of the six represent states President Trump won in November. The sixth hails from a state Trump lost by less than 3 points.
An argument can be made that repealing these parts of Obamacare while leaving its regulatory structure largely in place is a bad idea. But we are discussing a law that Republicans spent seven years campaigning against. Every GOP senator except one either voted for repeal in the past or campaigned on it in a recent election cycle. Their leader was said to have a “secret plan” to repeal Obamacare “root and branch.”
There was ample time for a contingency plan or even a better approach to replacing the healthcare law.
No amount of time ever seems to be enough. Not 1 inch of ground gained by liberalism is ever ceded without a fight. Republicans can campaign against those gains. They can now tweet about them. But when it comes to action, Republicans can seldom do more than nibble around the edges. The slightest retrenchment of a healthcare law that did not even exist a decade ago is portrayed as a mass casualty event.
Perhaps the most enduring conservative domestic policy gain is keeping marginal tax rates below 40 percent for the past 30 years. (Oops!)
After Mitt Romney, Republicans were supposed to have learned how to do healthcare policy. After the Tea Party, they were supposed to have become more serious about contesting big-government liberalism. After Trump, they were supposed to have learned how to fight Democrats and the media.
The score as of Thursday morning: 0 for 3…”
Second, Sarah Westwood records that…
“President Trump’s unexpected announcement Wednesday that the military would no longer accept transgender service members left many in the administration wondering why he had suddenly arrived at such a conclusion and how he planned to implement such a consequential policy. (We can think of millions reasons!)
Republicans on Capitol Hill acknowledged Wednesday that the White House had been reviewing whether taxpayers should fund gender reassignment treatments as GOP lawmakers in the House debated a provision in their spending bill that would block the Pentagon from paying for the surgeries.
But none said they expected the president to come out so forcefully against all transgender military service, and many publicly expressed dismay at the way Trump handled the sensitive political issue. (Sensitive to who…other than Liberal Dimocrats and the LGBQTWXYZ grievance industry?!?)
As much as we appreciate this bleeding heart’s point…
…it’s also true the U.S. Military is a war machine designed to ensure victory over any foe, NOT a petrie dish for Progressive social engineering experiments.
Here’s the juice: it’s about time!
And one more step in the right direction.
In summary, if (or perhaps more accurately, when!) the Republican Party finally goes the way of the Whigs, it won’t be due to Conservatives abandoning the GOP; it will rather be because so many Republicans not only abandoned Conservatism…
…but the ultimate interests of America in pursuit of their own personal political and pecuniary profit.
Oh, and…
Next up, as Michael Paulsen writing at NRO confirms, while…
“You know,…as a favor!”
“Donald Trump is right, or more precisely, his lawyers are: The president’s constitutional power to grant pardons for violations of federal law is absolute.
Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution grants the president the unqualified power to “grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” Legally, the president may pardon whomever he wants, whenever he wants, for whatever reason he wants, for any and all violations of federal law. (He has no power to grant pardons for state-law violations.) He may pardon crooks, cronies, and co-conspirators in his own corruption.
And, though it goes against every principle of natural justice and the traditions of the law, he may even pardon himself. The only limitation set forth in the Constitution is that the president cannot pardon an impeachment conviction.
But there’s the catch. The impeachment power is, essentially, plenary too. It is not limited to cases of commission of an ordinary federal crime, though it certainly can include those. Rather, the House’s ability to impeach, and the Senate’s to convict, for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” commits to the political judgment of Congress whether a high government official has so misused official power, violated the public trust, or abused the Constitution as to warrant removal from office.
…Constitutionally, if a majority of the House of Representatives (voting to bring charges) and a two-thirds majority of the Senate (sitting as a “court of impeachment”) agree that an official has sufficiently misused his power or misbehaved — literally “misdemeaned” in 18th-century American English — that person can be removed by impeachment, whether or not what he has done is also subject to federal criminal prosecution.
…This balance of strong constitutional powers, held by different branches of the national government, is exactly what the framers of the Constitution sought to achieve. President Trump can do whatever he likes with his pardon power. But if Congress decides that he has abused that power — or any other — it has absolute authority to impeach him.“
Since we’re on the subject of Constitutional limits to a President’s power, writing at his Morning Jolt, Jim Geraghty reminds us of another:
Senate Judiciary Chairman: Sorry, We Don’t Have Time to Replace Sessions
Obviously a man unhappy about what he’s hearing.
Washington continues to spin off its axis: Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa is more or less telling President Trump that he and his committee doesn’t have time to replace Jeff Sessions as Attorney General if Trump fires him: “Everybody in D.C. [should be] warned that the agenda for the Judiciary Committee is set for rest of 2017. Judges first, subcabinet second/AG no way.”
It sounds like everyone around the president is telling him to stop publicly antagonizing his own attorney general, but the president won’t listen. (See our comment about the Trumps and Scaramuccis of the world at the end of our intro above.) In today’s Wall Street Journal: “Privately, friends and White House aides have urged Mr. Trump to back off, but he has shown no sign of letting up, and he and Mr. Sessions haven’t yet met to see if they can resolve differences.” (Something tells us this isn’t because of Jeff Sessions refusal to meet.)
The chaos of this White House is increasingly predictable and boring:
Does the president walk around the White House, wondering why all these bad things keep happening to him through no fault of his own? Does he see himself as a lone, tortured strategic genius constantly held back by the incompetent staff around him? Or can he realize that some (if not MOST!) of the problems of his White House stem from his own behavior and decision-making?
If President Trump wants the rest of his presidency to be better and more productive than the first six months, he will have to make some changes — not to his staff, and not to his policies, but to himself.
It’s the sort of thing that everyone from therapists to friends to addiction counselors encounter all the time. “If you keep doing what you’re doing, you’ll keep getting what you’re getting.” If you want different results, you have to change yourself, your decisions, and your actions. But is the president capable of change? (B. Hussein sure as hell wasn’t!) And if he is, is he willing to try a more disciplined approach to the presidency?
Speaking of those in need of a more disciplined approach to the presidency, courtesy of Townhall.com, we’re with Bernie Goldberg, an old-school journalist with a penchant for honesty, as he opines…
But the way many American “journalists” propagandize instead of report, perhaps it should be!
“No matter what he says, no matter what he does, no matter what he tweets — Donald Trump doesn’t surprise me anymore. Nothing he states as fact, no matter how demonstrably untrue, rattles me anymore. No amount of humiliation he publicly heaps on loyalists like Jeff Sessions, shocks me anymore. After six months of this president, I’m suffering from Trump fatigue. And I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.
But I’m also suffering from Trump-bashing fatigue, the nonstop drumbeat of negative news about the president; the crazy speculation about whether he’ll be impeached for high crimes including treason. This isn’t honest journalism. It’s wishful thinking.
If Donald Trump didn’t exist, the liberal pundits on MSNBC and CNN would have nothing to talk about. If he’s unhinged, as they so often tell us, then so are they. If you don’t believe me, just tune in to “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. It’s a three-hour orgy of unbridled mockery and hate aimed at the president. Or try Don Lemon on CNN, a supposed journalist who gives the word smug a bad name. Or those CNN panels loaded with liberals who detest the president and one lonely Trump supporter who serves as a convenient conservative prop.
And even when I agree with liberal journalists who point out the president’s defects, I find myself thinking that I don’t want to be on their team anymore. As much as I dislike President Trump’s demeanor, I dislike their demeanors at least as much. They’re smug. And if arrogance were a crime, they wouldn’t be on TV or writing op-eds; they’d be behind bars.
…It’s not good that Donald Trump too often has a long-distance relationship with the truth. And when the press points that out, it’s not “fake news” — it’s real, legitimate news.
But when so much of the hard news coverage and opinion journalism is overwhelmingly negative, and often laced with hatred for the president, this isn’t honest journalism — even when they get the facts right (which they don’t always do). It’s the ugly work of a lynch mob.
And even though Donald Trump brings so much of this on himself, no president deserves this nonstop snarky onslaught — no matter how convinced journalists are that he should never have been elected in the first place.“
Which brings us to the Environmental Moment, and NRO‘s Kyle Smith speaking actual truth to power as he reports on…
“There’s a lot of information in Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. There’s also a lot of information that isn’t in the film. Viewers who watch with a curious mind rather than a hushed awe for His Goreness might have a few questions.
For instance: Did a firm called SolarCity really save the Paris Climate Accord with a dramatic last-minute gift, as the film tells us? And what ties does Gore have to this company that his film portrays as beyond wonderful? (The answers are no, and significant ones.)
Gore shows us footage of storms, and commiserates with people who lost loved ones in them. But are these scenes illustrative of data points, or mere anecdotes that would be just as easy to gather even if the climate suddenly turned chilly? In other words, are there more storms than usual lately, or more people dying in them than usually do? (No, and no.)
Did Hurricane Sandy, as Gore claims, really back up a key prediction he made in An Inconvenient Truth? (No.) As for the Paris Climate Accord, which Gore trumpets in An Inconvenient Sequel (followed by lamentation when President Trump withdraws us from it), will it make much of a difference, and does it much matter that America is planning to get out of it? (Not necessarily, given that it’s non-binding, and probably not.)
Why should the sequel be any more accurate?!?
…It isn’t the only time in An Inconvenient Sequel that Gore proves disingenuous. Throughout the film, he never hints that he has a financial interest in the technologies he’s promoting. A firm he co-founded, Generation Investment Management, was a very early investor in Elon Musk’s company SolarCity and held an $80 million stake in it as of 2013, according to the finance site Insider Monkey. Gore portrays SolarCity as a first-rate outfit, both in itself and because the company supposedly pushed the Paris Climate Accord over the top with a bold, philanthropic decision to share its solar-panel technology with India, which then withdrew its objections and signed the agreement. (Earlier Gore is seen browbeating India’s energy minister, who, not without wit, tells Gore to get back to him in 150 years, when the coal-powered country can afford the luxury of renewable energy.)
Gore doesn’t tell us that SolarCity ate up billions of dollars in taxpayer-funded subsidies before its stock price tanked, at which point Musk folded the company into Tesla in an all-stock deal, meaning any shares Generation had in SolarCity stock turned into Tesla stock. Oh, and Gore’s only son, Albert Gore III, served as deputy director, policy and electricity markets–finance for SolarCity and now works in Washington for Tesla, according to LinkedIn. If you’re wondering why Tesla requires a Washington office, or why it might enjoy having politically connected people working for it, there are about 4.9 billion reasons why. It’s hard to imagine Tesla (in which, Gore told Insider Monkey in 2015, he personally held shares) would even exist today without its ability to transmute climate-change hysteria into government subsidies.
Gore is the machine through which the conversion happen. It’s quite a racket, being the Goracle…”
It’s not just a racket; it’s utter, complete and obscene hypocrisy. Then again, why should Al Gore be any different from the rest of The Left?!?
Finally, on The Lighter Side…
Magoo
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