quote:

Originally posted by sjtill:
sdy, Thank you for posting the link to Mike Pompeo's speech.

I agree. Thanks sdy

I hope he declares an emergency - not a new concept.

The borders were sealed right after 9-11 - no one in or out. We did it once, we can do it again.

The emergency is for the safety of the citizens, not the welfare and prestige of the democrat obstructionists

time to ram this up their collective asses and make them all gag

they may run the House, but they're still just obstructionist assholes and need to be treated as such

Buchanan: Memo to Trump: Declare an Emergency

By Patrick J. Buchanan

In the long run, history will validate Donald Trump’s stand on a border wall to defend the sovereignty and security of the United States.

Why? Because mass migration from the global South, not climate change, is the real existential crisis of the West.

The American people know this, and even the elites sense it.

Think not? Well, check out the leading liberal newspapers Thursday.

The Washington Post and The New York Times each had two front-page stories about the president’s battle with Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer on funding the border wall.

Inside the first section, the Post had more stories, including one describing walls in history from China’s Great Wall to the Berlin Wall to the Israeli West Bank wall to the wall separating Hungary from Serbia.

Inside the Times was a story on a new anti-immigration party, Vox, surging in Andalusia in Spain, and a story about African migrants being welcomed in Malta after being denied entry into Europe.

Another Times story related how the new president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, has pulled out of a U.N. pact on migration, declaring, “Brazil has a sovereign right to decide whether or not it accepts immigrants.”

Half the columns on the op-ed pages of the papers dealt with Trump, immigration and the wall. And there was nothing significant in either on the Democrats’ hot new issue, a Green New Deal.

Consider. In 1992, this writer’s presidential campaign had to fight to have inserted in the GOP platform a call for “structures” on the border.

Now, the whole Western world is worried about its borders as issues of immigration and identity convulse almost every country.

Looking ahead, does anyone think Americans in 2030 are going to be more concerned about the border between North Korea and South Korea, or Turkey and Syria, or Kuwait and Iraq, or Russia and Ukraine, than about the 2,000-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico?

Does anyone think Pelosi’s position that a wall is immoral will not be regarded as absurd?

Have something to say about this column?
Visit Pat’s FaceBook page and post your comments….

America’s southern border is eventually going to be militarized and defended or the United States, as we have known it, is going to cease to exist. And Americans will not go gentle into that good night.

Whatever one may think of the face-off Tuesday with “Chuck and Nancy,” Trump’s portrait of an unsustainable border crisis is dead on: “In the last two years, ICE officers made 266,000 arrests of aliens with criminal records, including those charged or convicted of 100,000 assaults, 30,000 sex crimes and 4,000 violent killings.”

The Democrats routine retort, that native-born Americans have a higher crime rate, will not suffice as new atrocities, like those Trump related, are reported and repeated before November 2020.

What should Trump do now? Act. He cannot lose this battle with Pelosi without demoralizing his people and imperiling his presidency.

Since FDR, we have had presidential government. And when U.S. presidents have been decisive activists, history has rewarded their actions.

Lincoln suspended habeas corpus. On taking office, FDR declared a bank holiday. When Britain was barely hanging on in World War II, he swapped 50 destroyers for British bases. He ordered U.S. ships to chase down German submarines and lied about it. Truman fired General MacArthur.

Reagan fired the striking air controllers and ordered the military to occupy Grenada to stop Marxist thugs who had taken over in a coup from taking 500 U.S. medical students hostage.

Critics raged: Reagan had no right to invade. But the American people rewarded Reagan with a 49-state landslide.

Trump should declare a national emergency, shift funds out of the Pentagon, build his wall, open the government and charge Democrats with finding excuses not to secure our border because they have a demographic and ideological interest in changing the face of the nation.

For the larger the share of the U.S. population that requires welfare, the greater the need for more social workers, and the more voters there will be to vote to further grow the liberal welfare state.

The more multiracial, multiethnic, multicultural, multilingual America becomes — the less it looks like Ronald Reagan’s America — the more dependably Democratic it will become.

The Democratic Party is hostile to white men, because the smaller the share of the U.S. population that white men become, the sooner that Democrats inherit the national estate.

The only way to greater “diversity,” the golden calf of the Democratic Party, is to increase the number of women, African-Americans, Asians and Hispanics, and thereby reduce the number of white men.

The decisive issues on which Trump was elected were not the old Republican litany of tax cuts, conservative judges and increased defense spending.

They were securing the borders, extricating America from foolish wars, eliminating trade deficits with NAFTA nations, the EU and China, making allies pay their fair share of the common defense, resurrecting our manufacturing base, and getting along with Russia.

“America First!” is still a winning hand.

https://buchanan.org/blog/memo...-an-emergency-135677

chellim:

quote:

"To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the law abiding that their rights depend not on their own conduct but, on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless."
- Lysander Spooner

This didn't sound right to me- the term "ban guns"- Lysander Spooner died in the 19th century. Upon further investigation, sure enough, this is a quote from 1994:

Jeffrey Snyder "Who's Under Assault in the 'Assault Weapon' Ban?", American Rifleman, October 1994, p. 53; excerpted from the Washington Times, August 25, 1994

Huh... thanks for pointing that out to me.
I'll have to fix it.

Done:

quote:

Originally posted by DennisM:

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:

quote:

Originally posted by Rightwire:
I'm trying to figure out how I'm supposed to believe that every federal employee has already depleted all of their savings and if they miss this paycheck they'll lose everything.

I'd bet 1/2 can't make next months rent.

quote:

The shocking number of Americans who can’t cover a $400 expense

"About 46 percent of Americans said they did not have enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense."
https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.0b95e2e9f08d

Guidance received this week:
- The Thrift Savings Plan (our version of a 401k) is processing loan applications irrespective of the shutdown. This is a relaxation of the usual rule that prohibits taking a loan from your account if you're in "non-pay" status. No repayments will be due until appropriations are passed. Yes, you're paying interest on the loan, but you're paying the interest back into your own account.
- Health benefits continue in force. We'll need to "pay up" our accrued share when we're back to work, but we still have our usual coverage.
- Had zero savings despite all the warnings, have nothing in TSP despite having been told as a puppy to max your contributions from Day One, and have no other contingency plans because you lack the survival instinct of the average gerbil? Furloughed workers are eligible for unemployment benefits.

I am sympathetic to the very new workers in entry-level grades. Everyone else: Please.

An individual's inability to adequately manage their finances or living beyond their means while working a job funded by Congress is not this or any other President's fault. Sure, entry level, recent unexpected financial hardship and you have my 100% sympathy. If you're 40+ and making over $60K a year and only have $200 in savings you're doing it wrong.

quote:

Originally posted by Rightwire:

quote:

Originally posted by DennisM:

quote:

Originally posted by braillediver:

quote:

Originally posted by Rightwire:
I'm trying to figure out how I'm supposed to believe that every federal employee has already depleted all of their savings and if they miss this paycheck they'll lose everything.

I'd bet 1/2 can't make next months rent.

quote:

The shocking number of Americans who can’t cover a $400 expense

"About 46 percent of Americans said they did not have enough money to cover a $400 emergency expense."
https://www.washingtonpost.com...m_term=.0b95e2e9f08d

Guidance received this week:
- The Thrift Savings Plan (our version of a 401k) is processing loan applications irrespective of the shutdown. This is a relaxation of the usual rule that prohibits taking a loan from your account if you're in "non-pay" status. No repayments will be due until appropriations are passed. Yes, you're paying interest on the loan, but you're paying the interest back into your own account.
- Health benefits continue in force. We'll need to "pay up" our accrued share when we're back to work, but we still have our usual coverage.
- Had zero savings despite all the warnings, have nothing in TSP despite having been told as a puppy to max your contributions from Day One, and have no other contingency plans because you lack the survival instinct of the average gerbil? Furloughed workers are eligible for unemployment benefits.

I am sympathetic to the very new workers in entry-level grades. Everyone else: Please.

An individual's inability to adequately manage their finances or living beyond their means while working a job funded by Congress is not this or any other President's fault. Sure, entry level, recent unexpected financial hardship and you have my 100% sympathy. If you're 40+ and making over $60K a year and only have $200 in savings you're doing it wrong.

TO be clear, I'm with you on that.

The most junior person in my shop has six years on, and knew enough to plan. Surprisingly, the ones screaming loudest across the hall (same parent agency, different bureau) have 20+ years on, make close to $100K, and are in complete vapor lock over missing a single check.

In an actual disaster, 72 hours after the interruption of "essential services" these same folks would be beginning to decompose.

What needs to be repeated is- If anyone has a problem with the Government Shutdown= Contact your Congress Critter.

A Canadian editorial about Trump and the Press:

Rex Murphy: The American press should be grateful to Trump

https://nationalpost.com/opini...be-grateful-to-trump


The U.S. media owes what audience it may claim, more to the president, and its bitter, bent coverage of him, than to any other factor

Rex Murphy
Rex Murphy
January 11, 2019
2:13 PM EST

One of the delights of living in Canada is that we have the best seats to the drama of our friends to the south. Considered merely as spectacle, American politics is now perhaps the most diverting in all the world. America’s president is the greatest showman since P.T. Barnum, and his talent is a little like Falstaff’s, the latter having observed that he “was not only witty in (himself), but the cause of wit in other men.” With Mr. Trump we may say, to take merely a neutral descriptive, he is not only interesting in himself, but is the cause of some extremely dull people being interesting, too.

I cannot imagine another incumbency that would exert a magnetism on behalf of CNN’s Jim Acosta for example, yet under Mr. Trump’s baton the rude and frequently obnoxious Acosta, whining perpetually at presidential press conferences, has built himself something of a profile, albeit a demeaning and trivial one. Extending this notion, one of Mr. Trump’s many claims is that a goodly portion of the American press, however much it exerts itself in contempt and hostility towards his person, actually owes him a great deal. From The New York Times, to the desperately woeful Huffington Post — the journalistic wormhole to infinities of mediocrity — the American press owes what audience it may claim, more to Trump, and their bitter, bent, interminable coverage of him, than to any other factor.

They could not function or exist without Trump as their obsessive, singular, manic focus


Mainstream media is dependent on Trump, but for the raucous cable channels, he is their very lifeline. They could not function or exist without Trump as their obsessive, singular, manic focus.

There might be some virtue, however petty, in their stalker-like attentions, if all the panels and specials and “breaking news” marathons offered some glimpse or glimmer of insight, freshness of observation, coherence of interpretation or solid analysis. But all is channelled through an outraged filter of shallow contempt and a haze of intellectual and moral condescension toward their target, the American president.


U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as a reporter asks a question on the South Lawn of the White House on Jan. 10, 2019. Jacquelyn Martin/AP
Where the anchors of CNN and CNBC, their lemming panellists and their house partisan “experts” got the sense that they are superior of the person they are covering, where they discovered that they are the anointed arbiters to deliver minute-by-minute judgment on Trump’s fitness for office, his intellect and his executive skills, is a riddle never to be unravelled.


This struck me with the greatest force this week after President Trump revealed he was asking the networks and cable for eight minutes of broadcast time to speak to Americans on the decades-long border crisis.

Now he wasn’t, like the freshly interred Fidel Castro was wont to do, commandeering the public airwaves for some 10-hour marathon eructation. Considering it has only been weeks since an invasion of thousands of migrants was threatening the territorial sovereignty of the United States, and considering there is talk now of other “caravans,” surely a president could legitimately ask for a mere eight minutes of air time to speak to his own citizens on this topic — a subject that has also occasioned a government shutdown.


U.S. President Donald Trump appears on a television screen in the press briefing room of the White House as he delivers a presidential address about the government shutdown and border security from the Oval Office on Jan. 8, 2019. Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
The main networks’ initial response was to ponder in public whether they’d give him the eight minutes at all. Not being completely unhinged, they eventually saw that they would have to. But it was the voices of the cable world, one of which stood out in its obstinacy and sheer thickness from all the others — that of CNN’s Don Lemon — that were astonishing in their pontifications.

Anchor Lemon gave himself over to a discussion as to whether Trump’s talk should be put on delay and whether if could be “fact-checked” prior to or during delivery, suggesting that if CNN did not indulge in some pre-delivery censorious scrutiny it would be facilitating “propaganda.”


“Do you think there should be — I don’t know, a delay of some sort? And then you can — because people believe, the president will say what he has to say, people will believe it whether the facts are true or not,” Lemon said Monday. ““And then, by the times the rebuttals come on, we’ve (CNN) already promoted propaganda …”

At CNN, irony is dead and the dust blows over its bones.

Lemon and his cable-mate panellists and fellow anchors actually see themselves as democracy’s monitors, overseers and judges over how and what news the American public should receive from their president — a development even the wise and prescient Thomas Jefferson did not envisage. There are now FOUR branches of the American government: executive, legislative, judiciary and, overseeing them all, the Assembly of Cable News Anchors and (if there’s a difference) Late-Nite Comics.

At CNN, irony is dead and the dust blows over its bones


Personally, I think Mr. Lemon would out of his depth judging a pie contest in a one-baker town fair. Much of the media have in this age of Trump forgotten their function, what they are. They are no longer, as their Latin name signifies, in the neutralist middle; rather, they appear committed, in something like a half-frenzy, to imposing their unexamined reading of the world on a public more and more reluctant to give them heed. It does make for interesting times, but the drama is purchased at a very sad price.

[Spock]Fascinating![/Spock] A brilliant exposé of our MSM.

flashguy

Yesterday, I met with President Trump and his team at the White House.

The President is right. We need to secure our Southern Border.

I'm flabbergasted to hear from my Democratic colleagues that border security is a "manufactured" crisis.

Was it "manufactured" when EVERY SINGLE DEMOCRATIC SENATOR voted to spend over $40 billion for hundreds of miles of border fencing during President Obama's administration? No.

What's the real issue here?

Democrats hate President Trump more than they want to fix problems – even problems THEY have acknowledged to be real and serious in the past! They don't want to give him a win here as they gear up for the presidential election next year.

How many caravans need to rush the border before Democrats realize we have a problem?

It's clear to President Trump and me that Democrats don't want to make a deal and will never again support the border wall/barriers.

I'm standing with President Trump to fund the wall. If necessary, he should declare a national emergency to get it done.

Will you stand with us?

Thanks,

Lindsey Graham

It is past the time to quit playing patty cake with these anti-American assholes!

Declare the emergency and get on with the business of restoring AMERICA to its place as the free-est, wealthiest nation in the word today, or in world history!

These democraPs will cheerfully destroy this country if they can lay it on Trump!

I hope the boreder wall security plan includes UAV coverage 24/7 on every mile. I would GLADLY donate time to fly a UAV for a few hours on my [limited] number of days off...for the good of MY country.

I found this at reason.com, now home of volokh conspiracy.
https://reason.com/volokh/2019...ecognize-the-risks-o

It offers some compelling reasons for Pres. Trump not to use the emergency powers act to build/fund the wall. I was all for it until I read this. What's next. At any rate I hope our Pres. sticks to his guns and makes the commies eat shit and die.

It's so obvious, I have contempt for the citizens who can't won't see it:

1.) If the wall is built under Trump's watch, he'll get credit for it while the Democrats will not. In other words, the Democrats are willing to sacrifice the welfare of their constituents in order to not be shown for the inept assholes they really are.

2.) Illegal immigrants almost always vote Democrat. The Democrat Party desperately NEEDS these votes. The Democrats are willing to sacrifice the welfare of their constituents in order to secure votes for themselves.

quote:

Originally posted by clipper1:
I found this at reason.com, now home of volokh conspiracy.
https://reason.com/volokh/2019...ecognize-the-risks-o

It offers some compelling reasons for Pres. Trump not to use the emergency powers act to build/fund the wall. I was all for it until I read this. What's next. At any rate I hope our Pres. sticks to his guns and makes the commies eat shit and die.

It is folly to believe that just because the Republicans show restraint, that the Democrats will too. They are communists that have no respect for anything or any argument you or anyone else would set forth as a compelling reason to not use any and all powers under the light of the sun to close our borders.

They would use any power they see fit to do anything they see fit, up to and including using the Federal Government to their nefarious ends. Spying on the GOP candidate? Done. Prosecuting conservative orgs? Done. Prosecuting religious freedom? Done. Doing everything but open hostility towards gun owners? Done.

The only reason they're trying to be sneaky about it now is because we still have the 2A and they don't own the Federal Government in total. Yet.

While President Trump is on the job,

https://www.washingtonexaminer...end-despite-shutdown

30 Democrats in Puerto Rico with 109 lobbyists for weekend despite shutdown

Some 30 Democratic lawmakers left the government shutdown behind Friday on a chartered flight to Puerto Rico for a winter retreat with 109 lobbyists and corporate executives during which they planned to see the hit Broadway show “Hamilton” and attend three parties including one with the show’s cast.

Those attending the Congressional Hispanic Caucus BOLD PAC winter retreat in San Juan planned to meet with key officials to discuss the cleanup after Hurricane Maria at a roundtable Saturday.

Some 109 lobbyists and corporate executives are named in the memo, a rate of 3.6 lobbyists for every member. They include those from several big K Street firms, R.J. Reynolds, Facebook, Comcast, Amazon, PhRMA, Microsoft, Intel, Verizon, and unions like the National Education Association.

I wish the Comet would come......and land right on those leftist miscreants.

The Bola never occurs in Puerto Rico......does it? Regards 18DAI