as the media goes wild over Mattis leaving, Byron York observes:

Mattis will have served longer than any of Barack Obama's last *three* SecDefs, Panetta, Hagel, Carter

A couple of weeks ago the dynamic dems strolled into the White House, full of win, full of power, full of themselves, and left when Trump didn't capitulate to their pressure that he'd be trashed as shutting down the government.

Now with that action, Trump (and to some extent the gofundme wall) pushed the R congress to pass the spending bill with the wall.

So it's up to the Senate, and as long as every R votes for the bill, any D that votes no is voting to shut down the Federal Government over Christmas, epic flip.

I guess we'll see if Choom Choom has the power to hold his line and shut it all down, of course the press will try and blame Trump, the the facts will show the D didn't vote to keep it open each and every one...

As an oil & gas guy, I was disappointed when Tillerson left. However, look at the immediate impact Pompeo made (eg N Korea).

I’m a fan of Mattis and like the fact that he changed the ROE against ISIS and let the military kick their ass w/o field commanders having to call the pointy heads in the DC to get approval for every little thing (ie 0bama). My liking Mattis doesn’t diminish my belief his replacement will accomplish more.

Perhaps Gen. Mathis did not realize how much time and effort(plus taking orders from the Pres.) was required to do this job.....he is not a young man. I don't see how DJT can do all that he does....the energizer bunny!!

quote:

Originally posted by Dresden:
... If you haven't noticed by now, Donald J. Trump is a Russian agent.

Do you receive your information via the brainwave signals sent to you by the Martians or do you receive it from the voices in your head? Or are you unable to tell the difference?



.

Chief Justice Roberts disappoints once again.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news...s-at-border-jpygbmcr

The U.S. Supreme Court dealt a blow to President Donald Trump on a signature issue, refusing to let him start automatically rejecting asylum bids by people who cross the Mexican border illegally.

The justices’ order, on a 5-4 vote with Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority, left in effect a lower court decision that temporarily bars the president from changing the rules for people who claim asylum after entering the country from Mexico.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh dissented.

Although the legal fight isn’t over, the high court rebuff of Trump’s request to block the order suggests skepticism about the administration’s legal case

The disputed Trump policy, designed to apply for 90 days, would effectively require all asylum claims to be made at official ports of entry. The administration is separately planning to start requiring asylum seekers to wait in Mexico while their cases are being processed.

Roberts is not a justice, he is a politician.

Just a reminder:

quote:

Originally posted by sdy:
Chief Justice Roberts disappoints once again.

In 2019, his comeuppance will arrive. He will be knitting with the other leftist justices in their sewing circle when someone like Barrett arrives.

^^^

I'll buy a nice bottle of Scotch and tilt one back for Justice Barrett when the time comes! Can't wait for the Dems to show us on the doll where she touched them during the hearing.

https://tsarizm.com/analysis/2...-commander-in-chief/

The Hi-Tech Traditionalist: Is America’s Military Loyal To Its Commander In Chief?
by Baruch Pletner,PhD,MBA
December 21, 2018

The American constitutional restoration movement known as MAGA is now entering its most crucial phase. Like all revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements, it is time for it to find out the answer to the BIG QUESTION: is the American military with all its branches of service, all its chain of command, when all the chips are down, supportive of it or not. Yes, or no. Revolutions are highly non-linear; they start slowly and develop at their own pace, but then a certain event, political, military, economic, pushes them over the edge, to success, to failure, or to a civil war the outcome of which is anyone’s guess. The 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia started on March 13, 1881, when Tsar Alexander II “The Liberator”, was blown up by the Antifa-like Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) party. Alexander, as his nickname suggests, was the most liberal of all his predecessors and successors. He freed the serfs as part of a major agrarian land reform and was well on his way to establishing in the Russian Empire a system of limited constitutional monarchy in the French style of his day. His was killed by domestic terrorists not because they feared he would fail to complete his reforms, but because they feared he would succeed. These Russian Antifa’s didn’t want a lawfully constituted rule by elected officials; they wanted a dictatorship by the “proletariat”, meaning by ruthless thugs like themselves. Thirty six years later, they got their wish. Their eventual victory, however, was never a done deal; it took a devastating defeat in the Russo – Japanese war of 1905 and a series of major blows in the first years of the First World War for Russia’s military to become sufficiently disillusioned with the Romanov rule and with Tsar Nicholas II specifically, to break their oath to the Tsar and side with the Bolshevik gang.

In America, the drive for constitutional restoration began with the Tea Party movement and culminated with the unlikely election of President Trump a decade or so later. Things move a bit faster in our hyper-connected age. Trump, a pragmatist used to cutting deals with both types of mafia: the one with .gov email addresses and the one with baseball bats in the trunk, was an unlikely revolutionary. His first instinct was to cut a deal with the establishment. He hired whomever they told him to for senior-level positions and advanced their agenda items first, postponing the implementation of many of his campaign promises. Early in the administration it appeared that the grand bargain that Trump worked so hard to strike had actually worked. Justice Gorsuch was rather easily confirmed, lower court judges too. The military got a budget increase and a few departments such as Veteran Affairs, Education, Housing, Interior, and EPA, were left alone to implement the corrective, back to baseline policies that Trump had promised. On the transformative issue of immigration, however, the deal fell apart. The establishment, all three parts of it, Democrats, Republicans, and the Civil Service was simply unwilling to give an inch; their commitment to open border migration, something entirely different from legally controlled immigration, proved to be absolute.

Trump acquiesced to losing the House with nary a fight, he played nice with the ridiculous Mueller “investigation”, hoping that the Democrats, having taken over the House, having restored some of the “face” they had lost in 2016, having regained a seat at the table, would move an inch, a millimeter, towards the expressed wishes of sixty-two million American voters. It didn’t happen. We may never know if Trump had ever thought that this policy of his had a chance, but he sure as heck gave it a try. It failed. So now it is time for Plan B: a war of annihilation. Trump’s only remaining choice is to annihilate the American Establishment and in order to do so he needs what all warlords do: an army. But does he have one? That is the big unanswered question of the day. I believe there can be little doubt that the firing of John Kelly and James Mattis, both Marine Corps generals, was done after they gave a negative answer to a simple question Trump had asked them: “are you willing to execute my order to deploy the full might of the American military, using all necessary means, to secure the Mexican border against all intruders?” Kelly’s and Mattis’s refusal to carry out this order on the grounds of its purported illegality, left them no choice but to resign and left Trump with no choice but to fire them. Trump’s recall of the American military from the Middle East is the action of a Commander In Chief who believes his country to be under attack on the homeland itself and thus in no position to project its military might abroad in support of foreign policy or humanitarian objectives.

Trump will test to the fullest the unlimited powers given him by the Constitution to command the American military forces as their Commander In Chief. To do so, he will dismiss from service any officer, any cabinet member, any staffer who opposes his order to secure the Mexican border. Will he find any who are willing to carry out his orders, even in defiance of both Congress and the Judiciary, the two branches of government that for many decades had been unconstitutionally usurping the powers of the Executive? Will the command structure of the American military withstand the enormous pressures that it will face in the upcoming days and weeks and months? Nobody knows. One things is clear, however: if a properly elected Commander In Chief cannot order his military to secure the country’s borders against invasion, America as an independent political entity in which the people are sovereign via a system of carefully crafted checks and balances in a constitutionally established federal structure of governance is finished.

If Trump wins, he will join the ranks of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, Kelly and Mattis will be remembered as the Benedict Arnold’s of the 21st Century and America will survive. If he loses, well, to quote Ann Coulter: “Adios, America!”

Pence broke the tie for the spending bill! Did we just win?!

Just got a FOX new alert.
https://www.foxnews.com/politi...shutdown-clock-ticks
Tony.

6 Senators must have already left Wachington for the holidays. The vote was 47 to 47. Those six Senators should be shamed.

quote:

Originally posted by benny6:
Pence broke the tie for the spending bill! Did we just win?!

Just got a FOX new alert.
https://www.foxnews.com/politi...shutdown-clock-ticks
Tony.

This was procedural vote, not the full vote. We shall see what the Dems do.

quote:

Originally posted by benny6:
Pence broke the tie for the spending bill! Did we just win?!

For the $5.7 billion? Not even close. Like someone said, the final vote is yet to come. The House bill as passed has no chance of passing the Senate. The question now is how much money will the dems be willing to vote towards the Wall.

That's the wrangling that's going on right now.

Okay. Got it.

Of course the swamp doesn't want this partial government shutdown.

If this drags out for a substantial amount of time, most Americans will see that a partial shutdown doesn't mean a whole lot to them personally.

That's what the swamp is afraid of.

Just how smart is President Donald J. Trump? The great outcry over his withdrawal of US troops from Syria has been that he has left the Kurds without our protection. Now-- remember his extremely unpopular support of the Saudi Crown Prince? It turns out that the Crown Prince will send Saudi troops to replace the withdrawn US troops in Syria.

I won't repeat the cliche about chess not checkers, but, man, this is some very complex analysis and execution.

https://theconservativetreehou...fend-kurds-in-syria/

Shut 'er down!

My full support is behind President Trump.

He is no dummy. He is playing the games by his rules.