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President Trump talks to reporters at the White House, November 29, 2018. (Jim Young/Reuters)

The attacks on him are piffle.

National Review
by Conrad Black
12/19/2018

Excerpt:

As the year ends, the Trump legal drama winds down towards its tawdry end. The immense fraudulent fantasy of a Benedict Arnold on steroids collaborating with a foreign enemy, a Manchurian Candidate “groomed for the presidency by his Russian controllers,” has come down to a squalid dispute between the president, his crooked former lawyer, and the publisher of the National Enquirer over the nature of incentivizing the pre-electoral silence of a porn star and a former Playboy bunny.

The slab-faced, trim and grim Robert Mueller, closing in like a heat-seeking missile on the start of the third year of the most ineffective and redundant investigation in history, could be a brilliant straight man, desperately serious and purposeful as he silently marches across our television screens every night in reruns of the same old news film in the elaborate pretense that he is doing something useful and important. It is the same pattern as the Clinton investigation, which began with the financial improprieties of Whitewater and meandered around to checking the president’s semen against a White House intern’s carefully preserved dress. The lust to tear down a president leads ostensibly serious and responsible people to act contemptibly, and ultimately to become absurd.

Many of the president’s enemies do not, cannot possibly, realize what is happening to them. It was well known long before he became president of the United States that Donald Trump was, by traditional standards, a somewhat déclassé character. As an impresario, he had sheared the hair off Vince McMahon, founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, before 90,000 people at the Pontiac Silverdome (but has compensated by making the temporarily glabrous McMahon’s wife the administrator of the Small Business Administration). His divorces and courtships prior to his relationship with Melania Trump were massively and often rather tastelessly publicized, and his entire public personality intentionally offends half the people, while amusing or pleasing the other half by his irreverence and disdain for the pompous, the indecisive, and the mealy-mouthed categories that enfold the majority of politicians. As president, Donald Trump has considerably moderated his formerly outlandish behavior. He often looks and sounds more like a president than George W. Bush referring to the country of “eye-rack” (Iraq), President Carter sitting in a cardigan beside a roaring fire in the White House fireplace telling the country to turn down its thermostats in the “national malaise” speech, some of the antics of Lyndon Johnson, or even Gerald Ford falling down the steps of Air Force One.
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View the complete article including image at:

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/trump-victory-assured-robert-mueller-investigation/

Image credit — HERIKA MARTINEZ/AFP/Getty Images – https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/workers-in-el-paso-texas-in-the-us-replace-a-section-of-the-news-photo/1041385840

Breitbart
by Charlie Spiering
12/20/2018

Excerpt:

President Donald Trump vowed Thursday not to sign any Democrat funding bills unless it included money for border security.

“What they are just beginning to realize is that I will not sign any of their legislation, including infrastructure unless it has perfect Border Security,” Trump wrote on Twitter.

It is unclear whether Trump was again promising a partial government shutdown on Friday despite the Senate passing a continuing resolution on Wednesday or whether he was referring to upcoming funding battles in 2019 after Democrats take the House.

Trump accused Democrats of “putting politics over country” when it came to border security.

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View the complete article including image, links and comments at:

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/12/20/donald-trump-i-will-not-sign-democrat-legislation-without-funds-for-border-security/

….Russia, Iran, Syria & many others are not happy about the U.S. leaving, despite what the Fake News says, because now they will have to fight ISIS and others, who they hate, without us. I am building by far the most powerful military in the world. ISIS hits us they are doomed!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2018

Image source – Americans for Prosperity — https://americansforprosperity.org/

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Investors Business Daily
by Andres Malave
12/17/2018

(Malave is spokesperson at Americans for Prosperity)

Excerpt:

“There are some who say that communism is the wave of the future. Let them come to Berlin!”

That was June 1963 in West Berlin where President John F. Kennedy gave one of his most memorable addresses. The speech was a stirring defense of liberty and a pointed critique of communism.

Whether you agree with Kennedy broadly or narrowly, I’ve rediscovered that speech and find it to relate now more than ever to the unfolding drama in the country of my birth, Venezuela. My family and I left Venezuela when I was 10. We had every intention of returning. Then Hugo Chavez took power, promising to usher in shared prosperity for all with his “21st century socialism.” We never went back.

Kennedy’s words should be a wake-up call to my fellow Americans, and especially to his fellow Democrats, as I see more millennials rejecting capitalism and embracing socialism as “the wave of the future.”  So, when Teen Vogue tweeted recently, “Can’t #endpoverty without ending capitalism!” my initial reaction was, “Let them come to Venezuela.”

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View the complete article including links at:

https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/socialism-venezuela-chavez-poverty/

Canada Free Press
by Judi McLeod
12/18/2018

Excerpts:

So much for the Jan. 20, 2017, worldwide ‘goodwill’ photos of Barack and Michelle Obama on Donald Trump Inauguration Day which time proved to be a well orchestrated hoax on unsuspecting watching masses.

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The millions watching televised clips of the Inauguration getting ready to don pink pussy caps for the next day’s Big Women’s Day march, must have consoled themselves by thinking “protocol makes its own demands”.

How many knew that just as the election of Donald Trump wasn’t supposed to happen, his Inauguration wasn’t supposed to happen, and that the Obama administration was working on scrapping the historic Inauguration mere hours before it took place.

Less than 24 hours before the Trump Inauguration, this was the message sent out to the Deep State from Naz Durakoglu, the former senior advisor to the assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs: “We made the deadline! Thank you everyone for what was truly a Department-wide effort.” (bold emphasis added)
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“Judicial Watch today released two sets of heavily redacted State Department documents, 38 pages and 48 pages, showing classified information was researched and disseminated to multiple U.S. Senators by the Obama administration immediately prior to President Donald Trump’s inauguration. The documents reveal that among those receiving the classified documents were Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD), and Sen. Robert Corker (R-TN).

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“The documents reveal the Obama State Department urgently gathering classified Russia investigation information and disseminating it to members of Congress within hours of Donald Trump taking office:

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View the complete article including image, links and comments at:

https://canadafreepress.com/article/the-true-picture-of-the-real-obamas-you-were-never-supposed-to-see

The suspects hide their faces from the cameras in the courthouse on Thursday.

Suspects Thomas Massey (left) and Tom Keenan (right) in their Philadelphia Police Department mugshots.

“I could have died that day,” one of the marines told the court on Thursday morning.

Philadelphia Magazine
By Victor Fiorillo
12/13/2018

Excerpt:

Photo Credit: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

American Greatness
by Brandon J. Weichert
12/15/2018

Excerpt:

The estimated price tag on President Trump’s “big, beautiful” southern border wall is $25 billion—a paltry sum compared with the ways government otherwise fritters away taxpayers’ dollars. Yet a government shutdown looms—and Democrats can’t have that.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) paid a visit to the White House on Tuesday to make a deal with the president to pass a continuing budget resolution that would keep the government running through March. Trump said he would be more than happy to deal—as long as Congress gives him his wall.

Democrats can’t have that, either.

Pelosi, who will almost certainly be the new speaker of the House when the new Congress convenes in January, told reporters on Thursday that Trump won’t get his wall and vowed to keep the government “closed forever” if that’s what it takes.

For his part, Trump has insisted that if negotiations with Congress fail, he will simply direct the Pentagon to build the wall.

It’s strange that the president already hasn’t ordered the Pentagon to build the wall. After all, border security is a basic and vital function of the military. The military, however, has been reluctant to engage in this timeless endeavor. When President Trump in October ordered the Pentagon to deploy several thousand U.S. troops shore up the southern border against yet another caravan of illegal aliens, top brass balked. Many argued in the press that the mission was a distraction for the military’s far more important duties, like endlessly and ineffectively securing Afghanistan’s borders.

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View the complete article including image, links and comments at:

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/15/seriously-just-order-the-pentagon-to-build-the-wall/

Image credit: Pixabay – https://pixabay.com/en/graph-chart-stock-down-crash-36929/

American Thinker
by Thomas Lifson
12/16/2018

Excerpt:

Websites are not yet going the way of newspapers, but financial stringency has arrived for web-based media, including American Thinker.  The carnage extends from independent voices to the big, investor-backed sites. At the top end, the gold rush for staking claims to digital readership has gone bust, and the Big Money investors are licking their wounds after a number of changes have taken out much of money that flowed to digital publishers.

SFGate, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, presents a good overview of the forces at work that are changing the way online media struggle to survive. The focus is on the Big Money crowd:

Patrick J. Buchanan — Official Website
by Patrick J. Buchanan
12/14/2018

Excerpt:

Is it coincidence or contagion, this malady that seems to have suddenly induced paralysis in the leading nations of the West?

With lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen’s confession that he colluded with Donald Trump in making hush money payoffs to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, America’s stage is set for a play that will run two years.

As Democrats test the waters for a presidential run by savaging Trump, the establishment Trump detests and defeated in 2016 will use every weapon in its considerable arsenal to break and bring him down, as it did half a century ago to Richard Nixon.

By spring 2019, Americans will be unable to escape the vitriol on cable and social media. And the outside world will see America again as a house divided. Our politics will be even more poisonous than now, and it is not easy to see what would bring our warring tribes together again.

Consider, then, the situation of our old ally Great Britain.

Prime Minister Theresa May was just forced to pledge that she would not lead her party in the next election — to survive a no-confidence vote in Parliament. A third of all Tory members voted to throw her out.

The no-confidence vote was called after May had to cancel a vote on the Brexit plan she had negotiated with the EU, when it was evident that a coalition of Tories and Labor would vote to kill her plan.

May has been humiliated. Yet her humiliation solves nothing. The clock is running toward a March deadline for concluding a Brexit deal. And no plan acceptable to both Parliament and the EU is on the table.

The possibility exists that Britain could simply crash out of the EU, causing severe economic damage to both.

Realizing this, Brussels has left the door open if Britain should vote in a second referendum to remain in the EU. But calling and carrying out that referendum would be a betrayal of the 52 percent of the British people that voted to restore full national independence.

While London wanted to stay in the EU in 2016, England voted to leave. Northern Ireland wanted to stay, as did Scotland, though 45 percent of Scots had earlier voted to declare their own independence from Great Britain.

In France, after four Saturdays of anarchy, arson, looting and vandalism of her national monuments, President Emmanuel Macron capitulated to the rioters. He withdrew the fuel tax that triggered the uprisings. He agreed to have his government add $113 a month to those earning the minimum wage, and to let workers get overtime pay and Christmas bonuses tax-free, and to revoke higher social charges on modest pensions.

The cost of Macron’s retreat is estimated at $11 billion, 0.4 percent of France’s GDP. Saturday will tell us if his appeasement bought peace.

The political collapse of Macron has been extraordinary.

In 2017, he won almost two-thirds of the national vote, and his La Republique en Marche! won an absolute majority of the National Assembly.

Today, one poll puts Macron’s approval at 21 percent. The idea that he can replace Angela Merkel as the recognized leader of the EU seems ridiculous.

As for Merkel herself, hailed as leader of the West in the time of Trump, her party and coalition lost so much support in the recent election that she stepped down as leader of the CDU and pledged not to run for another term as chancellor.

Europe’s fourth-largest economy, Italy, is now led by a coalition of the populist-left Five Star Movement and populist-right Lega party. The coalition seeks greater freedom on spending than Brussels is willing to allow, and a halt to migration from across the Med.

With Poland and Hungary at odds with Brussels over alterations in their political systems, the EU has never seemed less united.

What are the underlying causes of these 21st-century crises of Western democracies?

Certainly, globalization, with its creation of ties among transnational elites at the expense of nation-states and their indigenous peoples is one. Capitals — Washington, London, Paris, Berlin — seem ever more distant from the countries they rule.

Then there is demography. The native-born of almost all Western nations are aging, shrinking and dying. Death rates exceed birth rates. While peoples of the West are living longer, they are producing fewer children to replace them.

At the same time, Western elites have welcomed foreign workers and left borders unsecured against mass migration. And the people coming in, almost all now from the Third World, are not assimilating as the children of 19th- and 20th-century European immigrants to the USA had largely done by 1960.

A consequence and related cause is the rise of tribalism, or ethno-nationalism, the search for identity and community with one’s own. Loyalties to family, tribe, neighborhood, culture and country appear paramount, rising above intellectual and political alignments.

The heart has reasons of which reason knows nothing, said Pascal. And so it does.

View the complete article including image and links at:

https://buchanan.org/blog/what-lies-behind-the-malaise-of-the-west-130792