I Fear Trump Cannot Surmount. Trump Could Be Bold and Shut Down Entire Agencies etc.

Erick Erickson feels, about what is going on regarding The Republican Party, like I do.  Just a lot of wasted air, little accomplishments.  Fear and fractious thinking rule the day.

Yes, Democrats ( read Schumer, Warren, Franken, Pelosi, Waters, Schiff et al) are throwing sand in the gears of government, and their goal is to impeach Trump and destroy any chance of governing and carrying out his agenda but the Republicans cannot claim Democrats are political IED's because they are too busy crippling their prospects with their own nonsense.

The vast majority of voters (those between California and New York) are logical, understand the game being played by Democrats and will continue to reject them at the polls but they must see something positive coming from Republicans to stay believers and faithful/loyal.  They were willing to take a chance on Trump because the alternative was more distasteful but they still need accomplishments to remain committed and to see their risk taking validated.

If the Republicans blow this opportunity they will be rejected unless the Democrats are again bent on self destruction but that is a risk not worth taking.  America needs better. We are too great a nation to be brought down by the misdeeds of welfare dependency, poor education and spending beyond our means but that is where we have been heading for decades and have only ourselves to blame for electing those we do.

The Democrats knew if they gave away the nation and created a dependent block of voters the efforts on the part of Republicans to right the ship would make them vulnerable to charges of being heartless etc.  Democrats have been effective because Republicans simply do not have a clear rebuttal message.  Why?  Do they not believe their policies are better?  Do they not have the guts to get in the gutter and fight back? Are they incapable of enduring the slings and arrows for turning America around and heading it in the direction that "Made America Great?"

Yes, we are a nation endowed with physical blessings, amazing resources, vast land in temperate zones for agriculture but we also brought to this land a can do spirit, a willingness to work hard, to be responsible, to believe in a higher being beyond self and a willingness to adhere to reasonable laws as long as government serves us and many other positive human attributes.

This is what Trump means when he says he wants to "Make America Great Again." He wants to increase the wealth so all will benefit but he also knows, like Reagan, government, self-focused politicians captives of the establishment are the enemy.  This is why he wants to drain the swamp. This is why he probably will fail because he has few political allies, has the mass media opposed to his every desire and has a self-defeating personality that proved effective for campaigning but has become questionable when it comes to governing.

He has become an easy target and the "loyal opposition" are willing to do whatever it takes to block him at every turn.  He also seems not to understand that private business and government require different management approaches.  In a self-owned business you can snap your fingers and make things happen.  In government you can snap your fingers and no one cares unless you have the accumulated power of Lyndon and even then you can fail. I fear Trump may not be capable.

Time will tell if he can surmount the ordeal.

Perhaps a better beginning might be if Trump brought Gingrich in as Chief of Staff and appointed Huckabee and Giuliani to respond to the Democrats.  (See 1 and 1a below.)

and then:

This from a fellow memo reader regarding the attack on Kushner and the effort to destroy him because of his close connection to Trump. (See 1b below.)

Finally:

This from a long time friend and fellow memo reader.  (See 1c below.)

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Memorial Day is now behind us but the reason we celebrate lingers on. (See 2 below.)
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Now for some "fing" humor. (See 3 below.)
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This is even funnier but alas, sadder.

If Trump really wanted to please American voters he would close the Dept. of Energy, Education and cut half the other bureaucrats who work in various agencies.  He would make personal tax payments so post card simple he could virtually close the IRS.

He would then put these former employees on a pension of say $50,000/year for life and they could find other work and we would save money and the government would run better and our faith in it would rise. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1) Are We Tired of Winning Yet?

By Erick Erickson 

Is the GOP good at anything other than sucking? The President is beyond his first 100 days. He and the Republican congress have, to their credit, spent a good bit of time repealing last minute regulations from the Obama administration. But what else?

They have not repealed Obamacare. Their plan does not even repeal Obamacare. They have not fixed the tax code and seem to be scaling back optimism. The congressional GOP has pronounced a very solid Presidential budget dead on arrival, but offered no alternative.

Are we tired of winning yet?

A lot of Republicans are trying to make Paul Ryan the fall guy, but the Speaker of the House can only do so much when the White House provides neither rudder nor leader. Likewise, the Speaker is balancing a fractured House Republican conference with many members scared they are about to lose in a midterm election shaping up to be a referendum on the President.

On the Senate side, McConnell and the GOP hide behind the legislative filibuster as an excuse to get anything done. But if the filibuster went away tomorrow, do we really think anything would change? Of course not. Obamacare would still be the law of the land and no sound budget would be passed.

In fact, the one major legislative initiative the President has gotten right so far is presenting a solid budgetary framework. The congressional GOP, not the Democrats, scuttled it the moment it was off the printers. But on every other issue, the President has shown little leadership and the GOP in Congress has shown very little of the entrepreneurial spirit they campaign on.

For all the talk of Never Trumpers just bashing the President, the reality is we would love to help advance a conservative agenda. The White House is consumed in perpetual crisis mostly through the self-inflicted wounds of the President and his staff. Public policy and ideas are suffering. It’d be nice to have State of the Union President Trump instead of Twitter President Trump. The former led and had great ideas. The latter is just a distraction.

Where are the big ideas? No where.

Where is the winning? I’m just not sure.

But the suckage is all over Washington.


1a) The White House Mess

A shakeup needs to start with some self-reflection at the top.

White House aides are leaking that President Trump is considering a staff shakeup to stop them from leaking, and the casualty on Monday was communications director Mike Dubke. Mr. Trump certainly needs to fix his White House mess, but staff changes won’t matter unless the President accepts that he is the root of the dysfunction.

Mr. Dubke’s departure was rumored for weeks, though he’d been on the job for only three months. He wasn’t the problem, and his replacement won’t be the solution. It’s impossible to run a communications operation, or a policy shop, if the top man prefers chaotic, make-it-up-as-you-go management.

Take two recent examples. In late April Mr. Trump decided after consulting with a couple of advisers that he wanted to unilaterally withdraw from Nafta. No staff preparation. No warning to Mexico or Canada.

As word spread that the announcement was imminent, other aides and business leaders swung into action to prevent it, including pleas to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to call the President. Mr. Trump stood down, but the result was wasted political energy and economic uncertainty.

Then there was the fire drill over Mr. Trump’s tax plan. The White House National Economic Council had been working to develop a plan to send to Congress, but suddenly the President announced publicly that he wanted it rolled out in days. The result was a one-pager that moved in the right policy direction but was easily attacked for its lack of details. Mr. Trump may have wanted to galvanize his team, but the drill wasted time and did little to build a Republican consensus in Congress.

This is apparently how Mr. Trump likes to govern, and he has built a White House tower of Babel in that image. Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, has too little power and must read constantly that his job is in jeopardy. Steve Bannon is supposed to be the keeper of the populist flame, but his coterie of allies leak relentlessly against economics aide Gary Cohn and national security adviser H.R. McMaster.

Son-in-law Jared Kushner is a loyal, calming influence, but the family tie means he is hard to fire and complicates relations with others in the Administration. Sean Spicer is supposed to explain what’s going on to a hostile press corps when he hasn’t been told the facts, which might be contradicted by Mr. Trump in any case.

General Counsel Don McGahn has been an able judge picker but on all evidence has little influence on the President’s behavior. At a minimum Mr. McGahn should have been in the room when Mr. Trump spoke privately to FBI Director James Comey in February about Michael Flynn. Mr. McGahn should be advising Mr. Trump to avoid such legal traps, and if the President is ignoring that advice Mr. McGahn should resign and tell Mr. Trump to get somebody he will heed.

On that score, it isn’t reassuring that Mr. Trump is said to have retained his longtime New York lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, to handle the Russia investigation. Mr. Kasowitz is a babe in the Beltway who has a major Russian client in OJSC Sberbank . Mr. Trump needs to hire a lawyer experienced in Washington political and legal cases and then deputize him to handle everything regarding special counsel Robert Mueller and the Russian question.

The rest of Mr. Trump’s White House reshuffle should be aimed at delivering on his campaign promise to pass reform legislation and spur faster growth. Either give Mr. Priebus the power to run the White House, or hire someone Mr. Trump will trust to impose order on competing factions.

Tell Mr. Bannon to stop the guerrilla warfare or get out. There are plenty of conservatives who can counter the liberal instincts of Mr. Kushner and Ivanka in White House councils, starting with Mike Pence. Why not give the Vice President more policy authority?

Mr. Trump also needs a formal policy process for debating legislative initiatives like health care and tax reform. Members of Congress tell us they have no clear idea whom to talk to with a question about specific policies. This compounds the internal confusion because Congress and other outsiders will bombard everyone on the senior staff. Lt. Gen. McMaster seems to have built this process on foreign policy, but it isn’t clear Mr. Cohn has the same authority on the domestic agenda.

The larger reality is that Mr. Trump is wasting the precious asset of time. He has a shortening window for legislative achievements before the 2018 election. Presidents typically get a staff who reflect their governing style, and if Mr. Trump can’t show more personal discipline, the fair conclusion will be that he likes the chaos.

1b)Of all the people who “violated” the Logan Act, John Kerry should have been prosecuted when he negotiated with the North Vietnamese in Paris in 1970, during the war. I believe he was still in the Naval Reserves.  I remember this phony, John Forbes Kerry, very well, as I studied him in preparation for a 1972 Congressional Campaign in the 5th Mass District for which I was hired as the strategist/communications director. We defeated Kerry by 18,000+ votes. Not bad.

Dick: 

Jerome Corsi was also looking into Kerry’s activities, and issued the following: “Article three: Section three [of the U.S. Constitution], which defines treason, says you cannot give support to the enemy in time of war, and here you have Kerry giving a press conference in Washington on July 22, 1971 (a year after his meeting with the communist delegations in Paris) advocating the North Vietnamese peace plan and saying that is what President Nixon ought to accept,” author Jerome Corsi explained.

“If Madam Binh had been there herself at that press conference, she would have said exactly what Kerry said. The only difference is she would not have done it with a Boston accent,” Corsi said.

Hope all is well.

L---- T-------

1c)

Coddling the Insecure Left

To indulge or not to indulge exclusionary liberals.

By NOAH ROTHMAN 

What do Democrats want? In the age of Trump, they want nothing so much as to have their assumptions validated. On the left, sermons dedicated to attacks on Donald Trump as anathema to American civic and political tradition sell. Often, the threat of impeachment is peppered into these homilies, satisfying the flock’s desire to believe the Trump era will be short-lived. Telling liberals what they want to hear can be a materially rewarding enterprise. For some Democrats, though, the endless shoulder massage has begun to yield diminishing returns.

In Hillary Clinton’s drive to seek absolution for losing the presidency to a political novice and former game show host, she has embarked on a whirlwind media tour. Clinton has demonstrated a masterful ability to manipulate the vulnerable liberal psyche. By affixing blame for her loss onto intangible factors, like American misogyny, or unquantifiable ones, like Russian interference in the election, the former first lady is doing her compatriots a disservice.

Committed liberal activists do not want to change to meet the moment. Rather, they want an excuse to view their opponents as dangerously outside the mainstream, deserving only of exile onto the fringes of acceptable American political discourse. They want their desire to retreat into ideologically homogenous bubbles deemed not only justified but righteous. Clinton is ready to deliver.

In an interview with New York Magazine, the former secretary of state went so far as to advocate biased journalism. She claimed that the impulse among journalists to present both sides of an issue irresponsibly confers legitimacy upon some points of view that don’t deserve the honor. You see, when it comes to some preferred liberal policy prescriptions, there are no two sides.

“The cable networks seem to me to be folding into a posture of, ‘Oh, we want to try to get some of those people on the right, so maybe we better be more, quote, evenhanded,’” the former secretary added. “When I mention MSNBC’s hiring of conservatives including George Will, and the New York Times’new climate-change-skeptic opinion columnist, Bret Stephens, her brow furrows. ‘Why … would … you … do … that?’”

New York Times columnist Bret Stephens appeared taken aback by his denunciation. After all, he risked his position among his fellow conservatives by openly supporting her for the presidency in 2016. Stephens and Will, who left the GOP in 2016 in protest against Trump, have long records of intellectual consistency, honesty, and of being provocative advocates of their ideas. Their crime according to the cynical opportunists who pander to the far-left is that they also hold conservative views. Liberals just don’t want to hear it.

By speculating that present climate models, which have a habit of being wrong, might, in fact, be wrong—not even by questioning the validity of the theory of anthropogenic global warming—liberals demanded Stephens’s career. Controversializing relatively common points of view is an increasingly regular phenomenon. When student activists pose scandalized and run conservative speakers are off campus, as they so frequently do, they are guilty of the same censorious fragility that led to the backlash against Stephens.

George Will is also branded a “climate denier” by those who seek to appropriate the moral righteousness of revulsion toward Holocaust denialism for global warming enthusiasts. Liberal scolds further pilloried Will for questioning the accuracy of the statistics buttressing the claim that sexual assault on campus was exploding. His concerns were validated in well-researched studies by liberals in good standing published center-left outlets.

For Clinton, this is none of her concern. The activist left wants to hear that conservative views are beyond the pale, and she is happy to oblige—even if that means attacking her own voters in the process. This constituency also demands to be told that Donald Trump isn’t a legitimate president and that his impeachment is forthcoming, as soon as Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress. Yet not every Democrat is giving in to their party’s darkest, most self-destructive impulses.

“I’m not going to rush to impeachment,” said Senator Cory Booker on Sunday. “If there are Americans that colluded with the Russians to undermine our democratic processes, they should be held to account.” Booker’s refusal to leap to the firm conclusion that the presidency has been sold to Moscow and that all that’s preventing impeachment proceedings is the congressional GOP’s cowardice is, in a way, an act of courage. There are social pressures at work here, and Booker must know there are consequences for bucking consensus. His is clearly the prudent course for those who think that the energy and enthusiasm generated by impeachment talk suffice for a set of issues.

“It’s hard to convince people around here sometimes how toxic our brand is,” said Congressman Tim Ryan of his fellow Democrats. “But, clearly the brand is damaged, and we need to see if something else can work.” A Democrat from Ohio, Ryan is acutely aware of his status as an endangered species, and he’s not shy about saying as much. He is still struggling to force a party that thinks speaking in four-letter words is an earthy enough display of populism to retake the Rust Belt.

Both men are nakedly ambitious political operators. Booker eyes the presidency and Ryan mounted a quixotic bid to unseat Nancy Pelosi as his party’s House minority leader last year. For them to gamble their stature among the progressives, upon whom they and their party depend for energy and capital, seems a dangerous bet. The riskiness of the venture betrays what they anticipate may be the size of the payoff.

Their gamble may end up being smarter than Clinton’s in the long run. Democrats can induce cohesion among their voters by constantly flogging the threat Trump poses and promising to impeach him, but one day they will have to deliver. In the interim, Clinton and those who humor the left’s crippling insecurities will only make that task harder.

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2)Considering the ‘holiday’…

DO YOU KNOW WHAT THIS IS? OR WHERE THIS IS?

This statue currently stands outside the Iraqi palace, now home to the 4th Infantry division. It will eventually be shipped home and put in the memorial museum in Fort Hood , Texas . The statue was created by an Iraqi artist named Kalat, who for years was forced by Saddam Hussein to make the many hundreds of bronze busts of Saddam that dotted Baghdad.

Kalat was so grateful for the America ‘s liberation of his country; he melted 3 of the heads of the fallen Saddam and made the statue as a memorial to the American soldiers and their fallen warriors.

Kalat worked on this memorial night and day for several months.

To the left of the kneeling soldier is a small Iraqi girl giving the soldier comfort as he mourns the loss of his comrades in arms

Do you know why we don’t hear about this in the news? The media avoids it because it does not have the shock effect. But we can do something about it.

We can pass this along to as many people as we can in honor of all our brave military who are making a difference, especially on Memorial Day weekend…

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3)There are only 11 times in history where the "F" word has been considered acceptable for use.

They are as follows:

11. "What the @#$% do you mean, we are sinking?"
  -- Capt. E.J. Smith of RMS Titanic, 1912

10. "What the @#$% was that?"
  -- Mayor of Hiroshima, 1945

9. "Where did all those @#$%ing Indians come from?"
  -- George Custer, 1877

8. "Any @#$%ing idiot could understand that."
  -- Albert Einstein, 1938

7. "It does so @#$%ing look like her!"
  -- Picasso, 1926

6. "How the @#$% did you work that out?"
  -- Pythagoras, 126 BC

5. "You want WHAT on the @#$%ing ceiling?"
  -- Michelangelo, 1566

4. "Where the @#$% are we?"
  -- Amelia Earhart, 1937

3. "Scattered @#$%ing showers, my ass!"
  -- Noah, 4314 BC

2. "Aw c’mon Monica. Who the @#$% is going to find out?"
  -- Bill Clinton, 1998

1. "There is no @#$%ing way Trump will ever become President"

-- HilaryClinton 2016

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4)THE NIGHT WATCHMAN

Once upon a time the government had a vast scrap yard in the middle of a desert. 

Democrats in Congress said, "Someone may steal from it at night."

So they created a night watchman position and hired a person for the job.

Then Congress said, "How does the watchman do his job without instruction?"

So they created a planning department and hired two people, one person to write the instructions and one person to do time studies.

Then Congress said, "How will we know the night watchman is doing the tasks correctly?"

So they created a Quality Control department and hired two people. One was to do the studies and one was to write the reports.

Then Congress said, "How are these people going to get paid?"

So they created two positions: a time keeper and a payroll officer then hired two people.

Then Congress said, "Who will be accountable for all of these people?"

So they created an administrative section and hired three people, an Administrative Officer, Assistant Administrative Officer, and a Legal Secretary.

Then Congress said, "We have had this command in operation for one year and we are $918,000 over budget, we must cut back."

So they laid off the night watchman.

NOW slowly...........let it sink in.

Quietly, we go like sheep to slaughter. Does anybody remember the reason given for the establishment of the DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY during the Carter administration?

Anybody?

Anything?

No?

Didn't think so!

Bottom line is, we've spent several hundred billion dollars in support of an agency, the reason for which very few people who read this can remember!

Ready??

It was very simple... and at the time, everybody thought it very appropriate

The Department of Energy was instituted on 8/04/1977, TO LESSEN OUR DEPENDENCE ON FOREIGN OIL.

Hey, pretty efficient, huh???

AND NOW IT'S  2017  40 YEARS LATER -- AND THE BUDGET FOR THIS "NECESSARY" DEPARTMENT IS AT $24.2 BILLION A YEAR.  IT HAS 16,000 FEDERAL EMPLOYEES AND

APPROXIMATELY 100,000 CONTRACT EMPLOYEES; AND LOOK AT THE JOB IT HAS DONE!

(THIS IS WHERE YOU SLAP YOUR FOREHEAD AND SAY, "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?")

34 years ago 30% of our oil consumption was foreign imports. Today 70% of our oil consumption is foreign imports.

More to the point, because of American petroleum ingenuity, we now are the world's largest energy producer, despite government restrictions and costly legislation, and even Trump is proposing we sell large portions of our stored energy reserves.

 Ah, yes -- good old Federal bureaucracy.

NOW, WE HAVE TURNED OVER THE BANKING SYSTEM, HEALTH CARE, AND THE AUTO INDUSTRY TO THE SAME GOVERNMENT?

What can possibly go wrong?

Hello!! Anybody Home? 'Drain the swamp'!

Signed.... The Night Watchman

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