Category Archives: News

News

Trump doesn’t intend to negotiate for border wall using DACA as leverage

2 Comments
Donald Trump with some of his supporters
Donald Trump, with some of his brilliant alt-right supporters

The center-left The Hill reports.

Excerpt:

White House legislative affairs director Marc Short told reporters on Tuesday that President Trump would not demand that border wall funding is tied to a legislative replacement for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Speaking at a roundtable event hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, Short said the administration didn’t want to “bind” itself by making a demand that would likely be a nonstarter for many lawmakers.

“We’re interested in getting border security and the president has made the commitment to the American people that a barrier is important to that security,” Short said. “Whether or not that is part of a DACA equation, or … another legislative vehicle, I don’t want to bind us into a construct that would make the conclusion on DACA impossible.”

There had been speculation that Trump would require any compromise on potential DACA legislation include money for a wall along the southern border.

Trump’s not going to use DACA as leverage to get us the border wall.

Trump has been awful at pressuring lawmakers in both parties into supporting conservative legislation. I can’t think of a single piece of legislation that he has even tried to be persuasive on. It’s the President’s job to drum up support for legislation that he promised during his campaign. He does this by being intelligent, informed and persuasive. Trump had a lot of confident words about his ability to make great deals during the campaign, but so far, we haven’t even seen him try to make a great deal. Everything that requires a legislative solution – from the Obamacare repeal, to the border wall, to the Iran deal, to the debt ceiling – has been a complete failure.

And now the White House is even saying that Trump has always favored amnesty.

This is from the Daily Caller.

Excerpt:

President Donald Trump’s request that Congress protect illegal immigrants is not a change of heart, but something Trump has always supported, according to White House press secretary Sarah Sanders.

Trump presented a hard-line immigration policy on the campaign trail and said during an August 2016 campaign speech that “there will be no amnesty.”

“Our message to the world will be this: you cannot obtain legal status, or become a citizen of the United States, by illegally entering our country,” he stated during the speech.

However, last week President Trump announced that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty program will be rescinded in six months and that Congress has until then to “legalize DACA,” which protects roughly 800,000 illegal immigrants from deportation.

Asked about Trump’s support of amnesty, Sanders said, “I think the president has spoken out very clearly that he wants us to make this decision based on a variety of factors. But the number one thing is that he wants responsible immigration reform and part of that is including that in the process.”

She went on to say that Trump “always wanted responsible immigration reform.”

Trump did mention immigration reform during that Arizona immigration speech in 2016, but in a much different manner.

“When politicians talk about immigration reform, they usually mean the following: amnesty, open borders, and lower wages,” Trump said in reference to politicians such as Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

800,000 people is a lot of people. Many of those people will use more in social services than they pay in, and some of them will actually be dangerous, as reported in this CNS News story:

Jamiel Shaw II (Dec. 22, 1990 — March 2, 2008) was a promising young football player at Los Angeles High School. He was being prospected by Rutgers University and Stanford University.

On his way home on March 2 after participating in a weekend football training program, Shaw was confronted by two Hispanic men who asked him in which gang was he a member. (Shaw was only several blocks from his home.)

When Shaw did not respond quickly, Pedro Espinoza, an illegal alien gang member and a DREAMer, shot Shaw in the stomach and the face. Shaw died shortly thereafter at a hospital. (Jamiel Shaw Sr. had heard the shots and discovered his dying son on the street.)

Espinoza, who had several previous arrests, including gun charges and an assault on a police officer, was convicted of first degree murder on May 9, 2012.

Wouldn’t it be great if all the people who voted for the DREAM Act were now tried as accessories to murder? I would really like to see that. But even that would not be enough to make up for the loss of a child to a repeat-criminal.

Look, I can admit that Trump made a good decision on the Supreme Court nominee. But he was elected because people thought he would repeal Obamacare and build the wall. We were told that people who had actually performed actions to achieve those ends, like Ted Cruz, were unreliable. Trump was the best candidate, because he was a tough-talking outsider who could make deals. Well, we’re still waiting for him to be persuasive to Congress on legislation. He had a big mouth, but he isn’t able to back it up. There was nothing in his background that demonstrated that he would back it up.

He used to tell us that we’d get tired of all the winning. Maybe so. But first, we have to start winning. Let’s win one time to get the winning started. Build the wall.

News

Did global warming / climate change cause hurricanes Harvey and Irma?

1 Comment
NOAA graph showing frequency of major hurricanes (1897-2017)
NOAA graph showing frequency of major hurricanes (1897-2017)

The graph above (tweeted by famous climate scientist Bjorn Lomborg) includes Harvey and Irma.

The Daily Signal takes a look at the historical record of major hurricanes that made landfall.

Excerpt:

Flooding in homes and businesses across Houston was still on the rise when Politico ran a provocative article, titled “Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like.”

Politico was not alone, as another news outlet called the one-two punch of Harvey and Irma the potential “new normal.” Brad Johnson, executive director of the advocacy group Climate Hawks Vote, says Harvey and Irma are reason to finally jail officials who “reject science.”

[…]Except they’re not telling the full story.

Consider this data from a 2012 article in the Journal of Climate, authored by climatologists Roger Pielke Jr. and Jessica Weinkle. Pielke tweeted a graph from the paper that shows no trends in global tropical cyclone landfalls over the past 46 years.

Here is the graph:

Historical graph of tropical cyclone landfalls (1970-2016)
Historical graph of tropical cyclone landfalls (1970-2016)

If global warming were a thing, then you should be able to see much lower numbers on the left, and much higher on the right. But it’s basically flat.

More from the far-left United Nations IPCC:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in its most recent scientific assessment that “[n]o robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes, and major hurricanes … have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin,” and that there are “no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency.”

Further, “confidence in large-scale changes in the intensity of extreme extratropical cyclones [such as ‘Superstorm’ Sandy] since 1900 is low.”

If even the socialist United Nations admits there’s no problem, then I’m not sure why the far-left mainstream media is trying to link global warming with hurricanes.

What about floods?

Reason.com reported on a report from the National Academies of Science on the link between global warming and floods:

The 2017 Special Report further finds that trends with respect to floods in the U.S. are a mixed: They have increased in some regions and declined in others. The draft also observes that “attribution studies have not established a robust connection between increased riverine flooding and human-induced climate change.”

A new study in the Journal of Hydrology analyzing long term flooding trends in North America and Western Europe finds no discernible increase in floods in those areas during the past 80 years. A team led U.S. Geological Survey researcher Glenn Hodgkins reported, “There was no compelling evidence for consistent changes over time in major-flood occurrence during the 80 years through 2010, using a very large dataset (>1200 gauges) of diverse but minimally altered catchments in North America and Europe.” The researchers added, “For North America and Europe, the results provide a firmer foundation for the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] finding that compelling evidence for increased flooding at a global scale is lacking.”

Floods are still happening, but at the same rate as before – it’s flat.

But these observations of flat numbers of hurricanes and floods isn’t stopping the mainstream media from being hysterical.

News

Black family sues school for refusing to protect their daughter from abuse by peers

7 Comments
Political contributions by the American Federation of Teachers union
Political contributions by the American Federation of Teachers union

I just thought the following story was astonishing. My heart really goes out to this little girl, who is just trying to work hard and make a life for herself.

This is from The State.

Excerpt:

Parents of an African-American girl at Columbia’s Hand Middle School have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against Richland School District 1, alleging school officials did little for two years while their academically advanced daughter was physically and verbally abused for “acting white.”

“Hand Middle School students called (the girl) racial slurs and physically assaulted her on numerous occasions,” says the lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Columbia by Alex Young, a soldier at Fort Jackson, and his wife, Toschia Moffett, a consultant.

“Although approximately 50 percent of the students at Hand Middle School identify as African American, (the girl) was one of the few African Americans in her honors and advanced classes during the 2015-2016 and 2016-17 school years,” the lawsuit says.

“Hand Middle School students called (the girl) racial slurs like ‘Oreo,’ ‘white girl,’ ‘wannabe white girl’ … and generally maligned her for ‘acting white,’ ” the lawsuit alleges. Both boys and girls were involved in the bullying, the lawsuit says.

During those years, she also was “repeatedly pushed, shoved and tripped in hallways and other locations around Hand Middle School … (and) suffered several notable physical assaults,” the lawsuit says.

Although the parents reported the harassment to school officials, district-level officials and school board members, little was done and the bullying continued, the lawsuit says. The parents tried numerous times to meet with Richland 1 Superintendent Craig Witherspoon, but Witherspoon told people “he was avoiding them,” the lawsuit says.

I took a quick look at the web page and found out that the Superintendent is black! Not white! Yet he still refused to have any compassion on the little girl and punish the people who were intimidating her.

The most interesting thing about this story to me, is that the racism is being committed by other black students. Why would they make life harder for someone who they ought to more empathy for?

There were some more details in a local news story from WISTV:

  • On or about February 10, 2017, a group of approximately 12 students surrounded India while she was beaten with a bottle.

  • On March 17, 2017, the same male student who shoved India in November 2016 hit her in the face with a backpack. The blow from the backpack “chip[ed] two teeth and caus[ed] her nose to gush blood. The incident was caught on video and the school promised to keep [the male student] away from India.”

  • On the same day India returned, the male student who hit her in the face with the backpack followed India to the auditorium and intimidated her during theater rehearsal.

  • The lawsuit says that India developed stress, anxiety, and self-esteem issues that affected her education and caused her to miss several days of school. So much so, India began eating her lunch over a toilet in a bathroom stall to avoid other children.

I’m sure that I don’t have to tell you that this school system is a PUBLIC school system. This is a government-run school with unionized teachers and unionized administrators. The parents of the little girl were stuck with this failing school. The money they might have used to pay for a better school, or for homeschooling, was ripped away from the parents in the form of mandatory taxation. They were forced to pay for failure, because the Democrat Party doesn’t believe that parents should have the right to choose where their children go to school. And believe me, this kind of failure by the public schools affects a lot of minority children.

We need to have a policy that allows parents to opt out of paying taxes for failing schools, and then get a refund that they can use to buy the education they want for their children. Public schools teachers and administrators are not the “customers” of the education system – they are the service providers. Children are the customers, and they ought to be able to go where the teachers and administrators serve them.