Mexican Journalist Takes a Close Look at Caravan, Uncovers Horrible Truths Media's Not Reporting
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https://twistedsifter.com/
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Most fair minded Americans approve of what Trump is trying to do.
They want us to be better prepared militarily, they support the idea of allowing certain incarcerated a second chance at becoming better citizens, they support our relationship with Israel, they also believe we should not allow our friends to take advantage of us in both trade and with respect to funding NATO. They obviously like our improved economy and growth but have to be concerned about our growing deficits and pleased he has lifted so much red tape and burdens on the economy is obviously working as well as allowing for the repatriation of stale dollars .
I believe most would like to see a fair and common sense approach toward solving our immigration policies and most favored de-funding programs in The U.N. that were ineffective and purely anti-Semitic. Most agree Haley was a superb representative of America.
With respect to immigration legislation: it is long overdue but it continues to be foot-balled for political reasons. Even if sensible legislation was agreed upon Democrats no longer seem to care about enforcement of so many traditional laws so it might be a waste of time and effort. Sad.
I also believe most do not consider Trump a racist and his desire to restore respect for our police is not racism.
I do, however, believe there is a difference between being tough and going out of his way to be nasty and I believe it can become his political Achilles Heel come election time if he does not mend his ways.
I also believe most Americans understand the mass media have it in for Trump and this is why their ratings are so low. Americans do not like those who pile on. Even in the brutal sport of football there are penalties for doing so and sacking the quarterback after he has thrown the ball.
All in all, Trump has been a good president but his "uge" ego under serves his ultimate objectives and accomplishments. I doubt, at his age, he can change nor desires to change. He thinks it is a winning formula which I believe is wearing thin.
Democrats can also overplay their hand. Time will tell whether they will turn on each other and allow their zeal to hate Trump dictate their actions. I suspect Pelosi will become their Speaker and she will rule with an iron fist and, in the process, make her usual number of inane comments. Apparently they first have to elect her to find out what is inside her head?
There is much to be accomplished and I have every reason to believe the man who wrote about "the art of the deal" is prepared to reach out to those on the other aisle. If they reciprocate it will strengthen their hand and if they do not it will work to their disadvantage. Time will tell. (See 1 and 1a below.)
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I hope everyone had an enjoyable and safe Thanksgiving and will also enjoy the coming Holiday Season.
While in Florida, I was able to vote six times in Broward County. No one asked me for identification and assured me my votes would be counted if they favored Democrats. I was able to do so because Brenda Snipes' term in office ends Dec 4.
She served her Party well for 15 years while making Florida appear to be a third world country. At the time of her resignation she said she was ready "to pass the torch." Floridians should be happy because she burned Broward voting booths down many times. Maybe she will move to California and flame more forests. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Thomas Sowell on Moral Bankruptcy. (See 3 below.)
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If you believe that only legal GA citizens should vote in our elections it’s important that you get out and vote in the runoff on Dec 4th.
Brad Raffenperger’s democrat opponent in the Secretary of State runoff voted twice against voter identification while he was a U. S. Congressman. Although he now says on the campaign trail that he supports Georgia’s voter ID law, I find that very troublesome.
This race will be won almost entirely on turnout….who can get their supporters to the polls. They expect only approx.. 250,000 votes to be cast statewide….which is less than 10% of the approx. 3.8 million who voted on Nov.6th.
PLEASE VOTE on DEC 4th….…….or early………early voting starts Nov. 26th………..and notify your friends and relatives to vote.
If you’d like to help and make phone calls for Brad contact Samantha Sheldon. They are making calls at Landmark 11300 Atlantis Pl in Alpharetta from 9:30 AM to 7PM Monday through Saturday except Thanksgiving. They need to fill 10 phones every hour in order to reach their call goal.
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Samantha Sheldon
Field Director
Brad For Georgia
678-577-1655
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1)President Trump’s foreign policy has passed through two stages—one restrained and one more turbulent. The third and most decisive is now beginning to take shape.
Through most of his first year in office, Mr. Trump moved cautiously on the international stage and tended to defer to mainstream advisers. Starting last spring with the departures of H.R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, Mr. Trump has been taking more radical steps, ramping up tariff wars around the world while jettisoning the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Iran nuclear deal, the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Universal Postal Union.
For Mr. Trump’s critics, this second stage has been catastrophic. American power, they argue, depends on the institutions Mr. Trump is weakening and the allies he is alienating; the president is sawing off the branch on which he sits. His defenders say he is placing American power on a sounder footing, clearing away the deadwood of the past, forcing others to pay their fair share and ensuring the U.S. benefits more from international trade.
The case against Mr. Trump’s international disruption isn’t as strong as most in the foreign-policy establishment believe. There are certainly dangers in the president’s impulsive approach—some of them grave—but Mr. Trump has one big point in his favor. The liberal-internationalist vision, which holds that the world is a kind of greater European Union, moving inexorably toward its own kind of “ever closer union” via a strengthening network of international institutions, seems to be running out of steam.
As countries like Turkey, India, China, Brazil and Nigeria develop, they are striving more to strengthen their sovereignty than to pool it. By shifting America’s stance away from the losing defense of legacy liberal internationalism that characterized the John Kerry years, the Trump disruption might, might point the way toward a more sustainable U.S. diplomatic approach.
But for Mr. Trump to be remembered as something other than a diplomatic wrecking ball, his administration will have to rapidly shift gears. Destruction ceases to be creative when it doesn’t lead to the construction of something better. After the cautious first stage and the dramatic second stage, a third stage of strategy and leadership must follow.
In the Middle East, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi and the humanitarian catastrophe in Yemen seem to be forcing the administration to review its strategic options. Simply outsourcing U.S. regional policy to Riyadh and Jerusalem won’t do. Washington needs a vision and a policy that both reassures our local allies and disciplines some of their wilder instincts. Walking away from the Iran deal was easy; implementing a new regional strategy will be hard. Like his predecessors, Mr. Trump will be judged not by his intentions but by his results.
The administration’s China policy has also reached an inflection point. The tariff card has been played. But what is the administration’s vision for the future of an economic relationship that, despite Chinese abuses, has benefited both countries and cannot be ripped apart without profound damage to many U.S. companies and industries? How will the administration balance its interest in building a strong global alliance to counter China and its efforts to extract more favorable trading terms from partners like Germany and Japan? Can the Trump administration develop an approach to China that is bipartisan enough to ensure Democrats don’t scrap it all when they return to power?
Unlike the Soviet Union, China has engaged successfully with the international market system and as a result has many more channels of influence around the world. How will the administration orchestrate a global response? This is a harder task than the Truman administration faced; is the Trump administration up to the job?
In Europe, President Trump has been blunt about the many shortcomings he sees in existing U.S. relationships with key allies. He hasn’t, however, put forward a compelling vision of the kind of trans-Atlantic relationship he would like to see instead.
It is the same on trade. We know Mr. Trump prefers bilateral deals to multilateral ones and that he sees reciprocity as the key to fairness. But what would a reformed World Trade Organization look like? How does Mr. Trump want trade disputes to be handled? Can Mr. Trump subject the international economy to an endless series of trade shocks without undermining the domestic prosperity on which his future and that of his party depend?
Donald Trump spent much of his pre-political career as a builder and a developer. President Trump has mostly been in the demolition industry where foreign policy is concerned. That will likely change in the next few months as the unrelenting pressure of world events forces the administration to define and communicate its objectives more clearly. As stage two gives way to stage three, it will become easier to see where this administration wants to take the world—and whether it is having any success.
1a) Americans Turned to Trump to Roll Back the Progressive Tide
By Joseph Epstein
To understand his appeal, look at the excesses of liberals in recent years. He’s a wall against the wave.
At lunch the other day, a friend and strong anti-Trumper wondered aloud what brought all those thousands of people out to Donald Trump’s rallies. “After all,” he said “they’re pretty much the same show.” Mr. Trump on stage, in his usual bragging mode, attacking the press, settling scores with people he feels have betrayed him, while the audience in their red hats applaud uproariously, yelling approval for 90 or so minutes. “What’s the attraction? I don’t get it.”
Not a bad question, really. As I thought it over, it occurred to me that what genuinely excites Mr. Trump’s crowds and draws them to him is their shared antiliberalism. By liberalism I do not mean liberalism of the kind that was at the center of our fathers’ Democratic Party—which supported labor unions, civil liberties, racial integration, involvement in international affairs. I refer to the liberalism now metamorphisized into progressivism, at the heart of the thinking of such Democrats as Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and others.
This is the progressivism that edges into socialism, that is said to attract the young, that promises a newer, kinder America—the progressivism that exalts identity politics and has no argument with political correctness. As one looks upon the people who attend Mr. Trump’s rallies, one sees the faces not of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables” but of the proletariat out of which Karl Marx’s dictatorship was supposed to derive. Yet these people, despite the progressives’ promises to them of free Medicare, free college tuition, and the rest, want nothing to do with Sens. Warren, Sanders, Booker & Co. Quite the reverse: They loathe them.
The man who attends a Trump rally turns on his television set and that night’s news leads off with a Black Lives Matter protest in his city. If that city is Chicago, he might recall that this year some 2,619 people have been shot, 475 shot and killed, the preponderance of these being black people shot by black youth gangs. If it is another city, there is a distinct possibility, as fairly often in the past, that the protest will lead to looting of nearby shops. Al Sharpton, nattily turned out, is likely to have flown in for the festivities to remind everyone about the world’s injustice.
Our man changes channels and is greeted by a story of a long and happy lesbian marriage. He reads in the papers that people are fired from jobs for remarks that, under the reign of political correctness, are interpreted as racist, sexist, you name it; that students feel unsafe at Yale; that a year’s tuition, room and board at Dartmouth is $74,000. Doubtless before long he will read a story about an 11-year-old who is suing his parents for not allowing him to transgender himself.
Oh God, he thinks, make America great again, make America straight again, make America anything but what it is becoming. What elected Donald Trump, and what sustains him, is not his rather dubious charisma, his ideas, his obvious jolt to the country’s earlier slow economic growth, and no, not even the wretched campaign run by Hillary Clinton. Mr. Trump was chosen as a rebuke to the progressivism that has made life in America seem chaotic, if not a touch mad, and that now threatens to take over the Democratic Party.
A number of highly intelligent Trump supporters I know are perfectly willing to acknowledge the president’s manifold flaws. They voted for him, and probably will again, because he is not Hillary or Barack Obama or Chuck Schumer. In the old Indian proverb, the enemy of their enemy is their friend; more than friend, he, Donald J. Trump, is happily their president.
After the midterm elections, Nancy Pelosi announced that she is exultant that more than 60% of the Democratic members of Congress are women, or ethic minorities, or LGBT. Some Democrats threaten to investigate President Trump’s personal finances. Others hold out the promise of impeaching Mr. Trump, Brett Kavanaugh or Matthew Whitaker. So the beat of identity politics, and progressivism generally, goes on.
The pull to the left of the Democratic Party is Donald Trump’s greatest hope for re-election, while Mr. Trump’s behavior is the greatest force pulling Democrats still further to the left. Tariffs, trade agreements, even immigration policy seem slightly beside the point when, as now, not two different parties but two radically different views of the good life dominate public discourse. And so things go, two ends without a middle. The shame is that most Americans find themselves in that missing middle, helpless without a party, hopeless without a leader. Politics has rarely seemed so dismal.
Mr. Epstein is author of “The Ideal of Culture and Other Essays” (Axios Press) and “Charm: The Elusive Enchantment” (Lyons Press).
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The resignation date likely would put responsibility for appointing a replacement in the hands of Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis, rather than outgoing Gov. Rick Scott.
DeSantis’s swearing in is Jan. 8. Scott was elected to the U.S. Senate, and the swearing-in for that job is Jan. 3. Scott hasn’t said when he’ll leave office to become a senator, but Lt. Gov. Carlos Lopez-Cantera could be the state’s chief executive for several days in January.
During the just-completed recount of the midterm election, Scott was a fierce critic of Snipes, accusing her of years of incompetence and asking the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to investigate what he said “may be rampant fraud.” Scott never offered any proof of fraud committed by Snipes.
Scott was elected to the U.S. Senate in the Nov. 6 election, in which final vote tallies were submitted by counties to the state on Sunday.
DeSantis, elected governor at the same time, didn’t join in the criticism of the election system — or Snipes — during drawn-out original vote counting or the recount period.
Broward’s vote counting was an outlier among the state’s 67 counties, taking a long time to complete. For days, Snipes wouldn’t say how many ballots were outstanding and uncounted and her office wasn’t reporting updated results as frequently as the law required.
And there were repeated hiccups during the recount period, including Snipes’ acknowledgment on Saturday that her office couldn’t find 2,040 ballots that had been included in the first vote count but not in the machine recount of state elections.
She said she was sure they were somewhere in her office, probably mixed in with other ballots.
As people grew impatient for finality in three close statewide elections — governor, U.S. Senate and agriculture commissioner — local, state and national attention focused on Snipes.
Besides Scott, she was denounced by U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and President Donald Trump. Snipes is a Democrat.
She’s been subject to waves of criticism for long lines and slow vote counts in multiple elections.
Most serious was a circuit judge’s ruling earlier this year that her office violated state and federal law by destroying ballots from the 2016 primary election too early. She authorized the ballot destruction 12 months after the primary, instead of waiting 22 months as required.
The ballot destruction took place while the ballots were the subject of a public records lawsuit from a losing candidate seeking to inspect the documents.
In 2016, four voters reported receiving ballots that didn’t contain a referendum on legalizing medical marijuana. Snipes’ office said the problem wasn’t widespread, and a circuit court judge said she was taking sufficient action to correct it.
Also in 2016, in the primary election, results were posted on the elections office website before the polls closed, a violation of state law. An outside contractor took responsibility for the mistake.
And in 2012, almost 1,000 uncounted ballots were discovered a week after the election.
She’s also been subjected to attacks that haven’t been supported by evidence, most notably the assertions from Trump, Rubio and Scott that there was fraud and, possibly, an attempt to steal elections going on under her watch.
In 2016, Trump confidante Roger Stone falsely claimed that Snipes secretly met with Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. Before the election, he promised pictures would back up his assertion; after the election, he recanted the accusation.
As the agonizingly slow vote counting continued after the Nov. 6 election, Democrats said they wanted to ensure all votes were counted, but prominent voices in her party didn’t rise to Snipes’ defense.
And as party insiders in Broward began to sense political blood in the water, they started talking behind the scenes about potential replacements.
During the final days of the recount, Snipes looked exhausted to people who have known her for years. And she foreshadowed an early departure as elections supervisor when she said last week “it is time to move on” but didn’t specify a timetable, saying she wanted to talk to her family.
Snipes was appointed supervisor of elections in 2003 by former Gov. Jeb Bush, after he removed a previous supervisor of elections for incompetence. Bush became one of her critics last week, writing on Twitter it was time for her to go.
She was elected to a full term in 2004, then re-elected in 2008, 2012 and 2016. She makes $178,865 a year after a 20 percent raise in 2016, and two smaller raises since then.
A native of Alabama, Snipes came to Broward County in 1964. She was recruited to teach in Broward schools by the legendary African-American educator, Blanche Ely. Snipes began teaching at Blanche Ely High School in Pompano Beach.
She became a principal and school administrator, retiring as an area director, responsible for supervising multiple schools.
Snipes has a doctorate in education leadership from Nova Southeastern University. She is referred to by virtually everyone — even her fiercest critics — as “Dr. Snipes.”
2a)Democracy Succeeds inGeorgia
2a)Democracy Succeeds inGeorgia
Stacey Abrams claims voter suppression despite record turnout.
By The Editorial Board
Republican Brian Kemp was declared Georgia’s Governor-elect over the weekend, yet Democrats are now trying to rob him of legitimacy by accusing him of stealing the election. Democrats hope to benefit politically by undermining faith in American democracy.
At the last tally on Sunday, Mr. Kemp led Democrat Stacey Abrams by about 55,000 votes or 1.4 percentage points. She finally acknowledged Mr. Kemp’s victory on Friday, though her non-concession concession makes Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump sound like gracious losers.
“This is not a speech of concession, because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper,” she said. As secretary of state for eight years, Mr. Kemp presided over “systemic disenfranchisement, disinvestment and incompetence,” she declared.
Leading her long list of grievances worthy of Festivus on “Seinfeld”, she has accused Mr. Kemp of “purging” some 53,000 voters—most of whom were minorities—from the rolls. Georgia’s “exact match” law enacted by the GOP Legislature last year requires information on voter registration applications to mirror the information on file at the Georgia Department of Driver Services and federal Social Security Administration. The law was intended to prevent groups from sloppily filling out applications for individuals, as Ms. Abrams’s New Georgia Project appears to have done.
Yet voters whose applications are flagged have 26 months to clear up discrepancies. They may also vote if they present a valid photo ID, as is required of all voters under Georgia law. Voters whose IDs don’t match the names on registration forms may still cast provisional ballots. In other words, nothing stopped legitimately registered voters from casting ballots—except perhaps the Democratic warnings that they may be deemed ineligible.
Democrats also howl that Mr. Kemp has cancelled some 1.4 million voter registrations since 2012. Mr. Kemp’s alleged offense: Complying with federal and state law. Under Georgia law, registered voters who haven’t voted in three years are sent notices to confirm their residency. If they don’t respond or vote in the following two general elections, they are removed from the rolls.
Georgia is merely implementing the federal 1993 National Voter Registration Act, which requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove the names” of voters who are ineligible “by reason of” death or change in residence. In 2002 Congress added that “registrants who have not responded to a notice” and “have not voted in two consecutive general elections for Federal office shall be removed.” Georgia’s registration procedures are similar to those in Ohio, which the Supreme Court upheld in June.
If Mr. Kemp was trying to suppress voters, he did a lousy job. Georgia’s voter rolls have swelled by more than 20% since 2010 amid an expansion in online registration. Voter turnout this year was up 16.4 percentage points over 2014 levels, which is even greater than the 12.6-point increase nationwide. Early voting also doubled since 2014.
By all evidence Ms. Abrams benefitted tremendously from this surge in turnout. She received 90% more votes in Atlanta’s Fulton County (45% black) than the Democratic candidate in 2014 and 62% more in neighboring DeKalb County (55% black). No Democrat running for Governor or U.S. Senate has come closer to victory in nearly two decades in the conservative state. Democrats also flipped one House seat near Atlanta and another possible House pickup is too close to call.
Ms. Abrams said she plans to bring “a major federal lawsuit against the state of Georgia for gross mismanagement of this election,” and she calls her defeat proof that “democracy failed.” No doubt she hopes that inflaming the politics of racial resentment will help stoke minority and liberal turnout during her next campaign, which could come as soon as 2020 against GOP Senator David Perdue. But the price will be an even more cynical and polarized electorate.
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3) Moral Bankruptcy
By Thomas Sowell
People who follow politics, even casually, learn not to expect high moral standards from politicians. But there are some outrages that show a new low, even for politicians.
Among the consequences of Democrats' recent election victories, especially at the state and local levels, is the election of officials who have publicly announced their opposition to charter schools, and their determination to restrict or roll back the growth of those schools.
What have the charter schools done to provoke such opposition?
Often located in low-income, minority neighborhoods, these schools have in many cases produced educational outcomes far better than the traditional public schools in such neighborhoods.
A Success Academy charter elementary school in Harlem had a higher proportion of the children in one of its classes pass the statewide math exam than in any other class at the same grade level, anywhere in the state of New York.
As a result of the charter schools' educational achievements, it is not uncommon for thousands of children to be on waiting lists to get into such schools — in New York City, tens of thousands.
This represents a huge opportunity for many low-income, minority youngsters who have very few other opportunities for a better life. But, to politicians dependent on teachers' unions for money and votes, charter schools are expendable.
In various communities around the country, charter schools are already being prevented from moving into empty school buildings, which would allow them to admit more children from waiting lists.
Denying these children what can be their one chance in life is a new low, even for politicians.
Political rhetoric can camouflage what is happening. But the arguments against charter schools are so phony that anyone with a decent education should be able to see right through them. Unfortunately, the very failure of many traditional public schools to provide a decent education enables their defenders to get away with arguments that could not survive any serious analysis.
Consider the incessantly repeated argument that charter schools are "taking money away from the public schools." Charter schools are themselves public schools, educating children who have a legal right to be educated with taxpayer money set aside for that purpose. When some fraction of children move from traditional public schools to charter schools, why should the same fraction of money not move with them?
What is the money for, if not to educate children? The amount of taxpayer money spent per child in charter schools is seldom, if ever, greater than the amount spent per child in traditional public schools. Often it is less.
Another argument used in attacking charter schools is that, despite particular charter schools with outstanding results, by and large charter school students' results on educational tests are no better than the results in traditional public schools. Even if we accept this claim, it leaves out one crucial fact.
White students and Asian students together constitute a majority of the students in traditional public schools. Black students and Hispanic students together constitute a majority of the students in charter schools.
On virtually all educational tests, black and Hispanic students score significantly lower than white and Asian students. If charter schools as a whole just produce educational results comparable to those in traditional public schools as a whole, that is a big improvement.
If you want to make a comparison of educational results with comparable students, you can look at results among children living in the same neighborhood, at the same grade levels — and with both charter school children and children in a traditional school being educated in the very same building.
Such comparisons in New York City showed, almost every time, a majority of the students in the traditional public school scoring in the bottom half in both math and English, while the percentage of charter school students scoring in the top half was some multiple of the percentage of other students scoring that high.
This is what the teachers' unions and the politicians want to put a stop to. Who will speak up for those children?
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