This blog will deal with large things and little things: spiritual truths, politics and economy, news, comment, food and the State of Texas. Oh, and my poetry and pictures. Enjoy.
Five things happened this week that have outsize importance and four has to do with the Supreme Court.
1. The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that the Travel Ban instituted by Pres Trump is constitutional and within the scope of his authority. This ruling does not set new precedent, but it knocks out the assertion of the Leftist States that Trump is doing something new, something illegal, something that the laws do not allow him to do.
2. The Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 that homosexuals can not force a flower shop to produce flowers for a homosexual wedding, if the owners refuse to participate in a homosexual wedding on the grounds that such violates their religious beliefs. This reinforces their ruling on the 'wedding cake' ruling. This ruling is very important. The blue states were about to proceed against Conservative churches to force them to perform homosexual weddings. This ruling blocks that approach of the Left.
3. Also in a 5 to 4 ruling the Supremes ruled that unions can not force members to contribute to political causes that they do not support. Unlike the hysterical blatherings of the 'wise latina', this will not end leftist control of unions but reduce their effectiveness to support the Dem Party.
The rulings happened because Justice Kennedy had a stroke of clear thinking.
4. Justice Kennedy announced his retirement. Leftist heads are exploding that Trump will appoint another Gorsuch. The Dems are coming up some interesting arguments as to why Trump should not be allowed another pick. More on this later.
5. Republican Cabinet members will get some Secret Service protection in the face of Leftists harassment.
Mueller's team leaks at strategic times when it wants the Media to change the subject.
This is one of those times. Personal attacks on Trump and attacks on members of his administration are backfiring as the Democrats lost another two points in the generic preference poll. So, Mueller's shadow team signals the Media to change subject. The message gets put out this time by the Bloomberg group:
Mueller Poised to Zero In on Trump-Russia Collusion Allegations
Following a No Confidence vote against PM Rajoy's Conservatives (for a conviction of running a slush fund) the Socialists executed a coup with 84 out of 350 members of the Spanish Parliament. The new PM is supported by members of the far left Podemos, Catalan Separatists and Basque nationalists. It is a minority government and is one No Confidence away from starting a civil war.
Why such dire predictions? Because the Socialists were explicitly rejected in previous elections and the Socialists want to follow politics that have a minority of support. Specifically, Pedro Sanchez wants more migrants, punish countries that resist the Islamization of Europe and by busting the budget, put Spain's banks into jeopardy again.
Sanchez is a tall, former basketball player, but unlike Obama is not a Muslim. Like Obama, he can be expected to load the government with Leftists who will operate outside the Law.
Time magazine decided to take “fake” news to new levels ofjaw-cropping falsitywith theirlatest storyof a Honduran toddler crying while accompanying her mother into the U.S.
Dozens of newspapers and magazines around the globe published a picture of a little girl and her mother Sandra Sanchez trying to get into the U.S., but everything about the story is false.
The two-year old and her mother were never separated; additionally, Mrs. Sandra Sanchez waspreviously deportedfor illegal border crossing. This is the second time Sandra Sanchez was stopped attempting to gain entry, making her effort a felony under U.S. law.
The father of the child has told media and government officials,and the Honduran government confirms, the toddler’s mom abandoned her other three children in Honduras and there was no economic hardship. Everything about this story is fabricated; however, that didn’t stop the media and politicians from attempting to exploit the narrative.
Washington– […] As more information comes out about the situation of Sandra Sanchez and her 2-year-old daughter, ICE confirmed on Friday that Sanchez was previously deported in 2013. (read more)
Reutersis reportingafter contact with the child’s father:
“My daughter has become a symbol of the … separation of children at the U.S. border. She may have even touched President Trump’s heart,” Denis Valera told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Valera said the little girl and her mother, Sandra Sanchez, have been detained together in the Texas border town of McAllen, where Sanchez has applied for asylum, and they were not separated after being detained near the border. Honduran deputy foreign minister Nelly Jerez confirmed Valera’s version of events.
Varela said he was awestruck and pained when he first saw the photo of his crying daughter on TV. “Seeing what was happening to her in that moment breaks anyone’s heart,” he said.
The photo was used on a Facebook fundraiser that drew more than $17 million dollars in donations from close to half a million people for the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas-based nonprofit that provides legal defense services to immigrants and refugees.
[…] Sanchez and her daughter had left Puerto Cortes, a major Honduran port north of the capital city, Tegucigalpa, without telling Valera or the couple’s three other children, he said.
He said he imagined that Sanchez left with the little girl for the United States, where she has family, in search of better economic opportunities.
“If they are deported, that is OK as long as they do not leave the child without her mother,” Valera said. “I am waiting to see what happens with them.” (read more)
Time Magazineissues a correction, but will not retract the story despite the entire claim surrounding the narrative being entirely manufactured:
Today on the floor of the Senate Democrats use the picture to continue a false immigration enforcement narrative:
Democrat politicians and their media enablers are willing to fabricate any story in order to advance political goals. This is the essence of “FAKE NEWS”:
There was a time when even Democrats wanted America to do better. Such a Democrat was Dr Charles Krauthammer. We honor his memory on his passing from this life. Charles was right about most things, but he was wrong about Trump. Donald Trump has been President for a little over 500 days but he has already left his stamp on the country. The Leftist ideas of the Democrats are being repudiated and consequently, the country is doing better. And Pres Trump is eating the political lunch of the Democrats and the Media. The latest example of this is the Executive order to keep illegal immigrant families together until they are either given asylum or are deported. The Democrats already are attacking this order, because they are not really for keeping illegal alien families together, they want illegals released into the population. The immigration ploy of the Dems/Media has failed as failed other attempts trying to undermine Trump.
Concert tickets. Expensive private dinners. NFL tickets. Parties on booze cruises. Discounts on travel.
FBI insiders said more than 60 agents in D.C. alone have been nailed for taking gifts from the news media. Inspector General Michael Horowitz said earlier this week about 50 FBI agents took 300 free gifts from news media.
However, Horowitz failed to stipulate that number is ONLY in Washington D.C. which covers one field office and FBI headquarters. The Inspector General did not examine the FBI’s other field offices, officials said. And the problem of taking free gifts for Intel is rampant, officials said.
New York. Los Angeles. New Haven. Philadelphia. The list goes on in the FBI’s 55 other field offices.
And so does the corruption. Outright bribery.
FBI sources who spoke to True Pundit divulged the names of three media outlets: NY Times, CNN and NBC News as having surfaced in recent external investigations. But there are dozens more, large and small.
FBI Director Christopher Wray wants this the issue of bribery and the FBI to disappear from news headlines, yet he has not launched an internal review nationwide to determine how rampant this problem is inside the FBI, sources said.
Why no national review by the Inspector General’s office?
Wray doesn’t want to go there, officials said.
In fact, high-ranking FBI officials do not want the list of FBI agents and news media divulged publicly either.
Wray and Horowitz are protecting the agents who took bribes, as well as their media enablers.
Just business as usual in The Swamp.
If Wray cared, he would find thousands of bribes and favors changing hands inside the FBI across the country.
But that would likely include FBI brass who may make a nice dime on the side selling access to FBI Intel and policy outright as well. Agents like Robert Hanssen. Or like a deputy director’s wife getting $1.25 million in campaign contributions while her husband was investigating — and clearing — the source of the funds from a criminal investigation. Rigging an investigation for cash.Is that considered a gift? Or is that a new category?
And Wray certainly recognizes that is a place he does not want to venture.
It is ugly and Wray — as he has done since taking office — wants to pretend it’s not an epidemic.
And what would Wray do if some of the involved media organizations turned around and said the payoffs for Intel were a trade off for placing stories the FBI wanted in their publications and newscasts?
Just the price of doing business behind the curtain with the FBI.
The FBI doesn’t want to lose its ability to smear its political enemies and access to the enablers — its media partners — who make it possible.
And Big Media doesn’t want to lose it’s pipeline to free Intel.
AJ begins: Why is this a crisis all of a sudden and why are Democrats screaming at the top of their lungs about the 'heartless Republicans? The answer is simple. The Democrats and allied Media want to keep silent about the roaring economy and the OIG report about the Inner State.
Here is the truth about the treatment of illegal aliens at the border.
U.S. Border Patrol agents with illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border near McAllen, Texas, May 9, 2018. (Loren Elliott/Reuters)Some economic migrants are using children as chits, but the problem is fixable — if Congress acts.
The latest furor over Trump immigration policy involves the separation of children from parents at the border.
As usual, the outrage obscures more than it illuminates, so it’s worth walking through what’s happening here.
For the longest time, illegal immigration was driven by single males from Mexico. Over the last decade, the flow has shifted to women, children, and family units from Central America. This poses challenges we haven’t confronted before and has made what once were relatively minor wrinkles in the law loom very large.
The Trump administration isn’t changing the rules that pertain to separating an adult from the child. Those remain the same. Separation happens only if officials find that the adult is falsely claiming to be the child’s parent, or is a threat to the child, or is put into criminal proceedings.
It’s the last that is operative here. The past practice had been to give a free pass to an adult who is part of a family unit. The new Trump policy is to prosecute all adults. The idea is to send a signal that we are serious about our laws and to create a deterrent against re-entry. (Illegal entry is a misdemeanor, illegal re-entry a felony.)
When a migrant is prosecuted for illegal entry, he or she is taken into custody by the U.S. Marshals. In no circumstance anywhere in the U.S. do the marshals care for the children of people they take into custody. The child is taken into the custody of HHS, who cares for them at temporary shelters.
The criminal proceedings are exceptionally short, assuming there is no aggravating factor such as a prior illegal entity or another crime. The migrants generally plead guilty, and they are then sentenced to time served, typically all in the same day, although practices vary along the border. After this, they are returned to the custody of ICE.
If the adult then wants to go home, in keeping with the expedited order of removal that is issued as a matter of course, it’s relatively simple. The adult should be reunited quickly with his or her child, and the family returned home as a unit. In this scenario, there’s only a very brief separation.
Where it becomes much more of an issue is if the adult files an asylum claim. In that scenario, the adults are almost certainly going to be detained longer than the government is allowed to hold their children.
That’s because of something called the Flores Consent Decree from 1997. It says that unaccompanied children can be held only 20 days. A ruling by the Ninth Circuit extended this 20-day limit to children who come as part of family units. So even if we want to hold a family unit together, we are forbidden from doing so.
The clock ticking on the time the government can hold a child will almost always run out before an asylum claim is settled. The migrant is allowed ten days to seek an attorney, and there may be continuances or other complications.
This creates the choice of either releasing the adults and children together into the country pending the ajudication of the asylum claim, or holding the adults and releasing the children. If the adult is held, HHS places the child with a responsible party in the U.S., ideally a relative (migrants are likely to have family and friends here).
Even if Flores didn’t exist, the government would be very constrained in how many family units it can accommodate. ICE has only about 3,000 family spaces in shelters. It is also limited in its overall space at the border, which is overwhelmed by the ongoing influx. This means that — whatever the Trump administration would prefer to do — many adults are still swiftly released.
Why try to hold adults at all? First of all, if an asylum-seeker is detained, it means that the claim goes through the process much more quickly, a couple of months or less rather than years. Second, if an adult is released while the claim is pending, the chances of ever finding that person again once he or she is in the country are dicey, to say the least. It is tantamount to allowing the migrant to live here, no matter what the merits of the case.
A few points about all this:
1)Family units can go home quickly.The option that both honors our laws and keeps family units together is a swift return home after prosecution. But immigrant advocates hate it because they want the migrants to stay in the United States. How you view this question will depend a lot on how you view the motivation of the migrants (and how seriously you take our laws and our border).
2)There’s a better way to claim asylum.Every indication is that the migrant flow to the United States is discretionary. It nearly dried up at the beginning of the Trump administration when migrants believed that they had no chance of getting into the United States. Now, it is going in earnest again because the message got out that, despite the rhetoric, the policy at the border hasn’t changed. This strongly suggests that the flow overwhelmingly consists of economic migrants who would prefer to live in the United States, rather than victims of persecution in their home country who have no option but to get out.
Children should not be making this journey that is fraught with peril. But there is now a premium on bringing children because of how we have handled these cases.
Even if a migrant does have a credible fear of persecution, there is a legitimate way to pursue that claim, and it does not involve entering the United States illegally. First, such people should make their asylum claim in the first country where they feel safe, i.e., Mexico or some other country they are traversing to get here. Second, if for some reason they are threatened everywhere but the United States, they should show up at a port of entry and make their claim there rather than crossing the border illegally.
3)There is a significant moral cost to not enforcing the border.There is obviously a moral cost to separating a parent from a child and almost everyone would prefer not to do it. But, under current policy and with the current resources, the only practical alternative is letting family units who show up at the border live in the country for the duration. Not only does this make a mockery of our laws, it creates an incentive for people to keep bringing children with them.
Needless to say, children should not be making this journey that is fraught with peril. But there is now a premium on bringing children because of how we have handled these cases. They are considered chits.
Some migrants have admitted they brought their children not only to remove them from danger in such places as Central America and Africa, but because they believed it would cause the authorities to release them from custody sooner.
Others have admitted to posing falsely with children who are not their own, and Border Patrol officials say that such instances of fraud are increasing.
If someone is determined to come here illegally, the decent and safest thing would be to leave the child at home with a relative and send money back home. Because we favor family units over single adults, we are creating an incentive to do the opposite and use children to cut deals with smugglers.
4)Congress can fix this.Congress can change the rules so the Flores consent decree will no longer apply, and it can appropriate more money for family shelters at the border. This is an obvious thing to do that would eliminate the tension between enforcing our laws and keeping family units together. The Trump administration is throwing as many resources as it can at the border to expedite the process, and it desperately wants the Flores consent decree reversed. Despite some mixed messages, if the administration had its druthers, family units would be kept together and their cases settled quickly.
The missing piece here is Congress, but little outrage will be directed at it, and probably nothing will be done. And so our perverse system will remain in place and the crisis at the border will rumble on.
Multiculturalism had been invented by the European Elites. It basically meant that all cultures are equivalent and, therefore, they are interchangeable. This is the official policy of the EU. Under this policy it is not the immigrants that had to accept the culture of the host country, but the host country had to change in order to be acceptable to the immigrants.
In practice this meant the imposition of Islam, the abandonment of equal rights for women and the abandonment of democratic form of government.
It is this multiculturalism of the Elites that Europe is rebelling against.
Hungary has already closed its border to Islamic invasion and is now joined by Austria in rejecting Islam. Austria has closed mosques run by extremists and is deporting the extremists. The invasion route to Western Europe ran through Austria and Hungary. The latest to join the restoration of national culture is Italy that will soon start to deport Muslims. Even Germany and France are fighting to regain their national identity.
There is a long road to travel, but N Korea agreed to complete denuclearization. That is the biggie.
For now both sides agreed to stop what irritates the other side the most:
1. Us will stop war games;
2. N. Korea will stop testing and shooting off rockets.
Yes, the Chines are a bit miffed that their contribution was ignored. They will get over it. For them and everybody else it's back to business. It may be a long road to peace. But, they are talking about it. Will Kim Yong Un survive his own generals?
According to his official itinerary, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is taking a ‘personal’ day off today, and fun that it’s been, you can bet the farm that it’s not to find a more reliable glue to make his eyebrows stick.
Trudeau, who blew a whopping600-millionCanadian taxpayer dollars creating a still raging firestorm at the weekend’s G-7 summit in rural Quebec, is more than likely looking for ways to cover the deceit of what White House Trade Advisor Peter Navarro called his end-of-summit “stunt press conference”.
G-7 Summit 2018 should be called ‘G-7et al’—because while the mainstream media left the impression that leaders flew back to their home countries on Saturday night— it wasstill underway on Sunday night.
A photo (above) with bigwig G-7 players depicting Trudeau, French President Emanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel lined up in the front row, is proof.
Sunday’s gathering at Manoir Richelieu Hotel in La Malbaie, Quebec was called “the outreach session” of G-7 Summit 2018, in which Trudeau invited 12 world leaders to take part.
The special outreach session focused on healthy oceans and resilient coastal communities.
“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door,” Trump trade adviser Peter Navarro said in an interview nationally broadcast Sunday in the United States. (Fox News, June 10, 2018)
“Canada’s foreign minister, Chrystia Freeland, said her country “does not conduct its diplomacy through ad hominem attacks.”
Don’t know what Freeland would call Trudeau’s ad hominem attack on Trump the minute his back was turned.
Interesting to note that by Sunday Trudeau was already mum and not taking questions about the perception that he had stabbed U.S. President Trump in the back:
“Trudeau, who had said at the news conference that Canada would retaliate for new U.S. tariffs, didn’t respond to questions about Trump when the prime minister arrived at a Quebec City hotel Sunday for meetings with other world leaders. Freeland later told reporters that “we don’t think that’s a useful or productive way to do business.”(NY Times, June 11, 2018)
It should have surprised no one that Trudeau, who hosted G-7 2018, came to the summit as a Barack Obama-appointed activist.
The timing was right for the Canadian prime minister to join in on the Donald Trump free for all.
It was exactly one year ago that the former US President, now Leader of the Resistance and Canadian Prime Minister dined together after Mr Obama gave a talk organised by the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal, during which he said the Paris climate accord still has a chance despite the “temporary absence of American leadership.” (Independent, June 7, 2017)
Continued below...
“Obviously I’m disappointed with the current American administration decision to put (sic) out of Paris,” Mr Obama said according to an ABC News report.
“We’re going to have to act with more urgency. I’m looking forward to the United States being a leader and not just on the sidelines going forward.”
There is no getting around the fact that Trudeau joined Obama’s Resistance Agenda on June 7, 2017:
“Mr Obama and Mr Trudeau met to discuss “their shared commitment to developing the next generation of leaders,” the Obama Foundation said in a tweet. (Independent)
“How do we get young leaders to take action in their communities?” Mr Trudeau asked in a tweet.
“Thanks @BarackObama for your visit & insights tonight in my hometown.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau set a trap for President Donald Trump at the G-7 2018 Summit, hoping its fallout would advance the lib-left’s agenda to Impeach Trump.
The only hope of taking Liberal Trudeau off track from fulling his covert Obama agenda is that he lost the entire province of Ontario one day before the G-7 summit, when the Liberal Party of his close friend Kathleen Wynne lost its official party status in an election that gave a 76-seat majority landslide election to Doug Ford’s Progressive Conservative party still being celebrated here.
The same conservative voters fed up with a Liberal Party that raised theirhydro bills by 71%will get their chance to vote against Wynne’s friend Trudeau in 2019.
Anti-Trump Trudeau will be too busy trying to save his own hide to do Obama’s dirty work for him.
