Trump the Builder

Karin McQuillan at American Greatness has what I nominate as a Must Read – and a real pick-me-up, about Trump's formula for success. Here’s her closing:

Trump the builder is all about getting things done. He has delivered the best job numbers in history for the very minorities Democrats claim to champion.

Trump has the confidence, energy, and aggression to take on every challenge and move toward victory. Democrats don’t even believe in victory.

President Trump earns his bragging rights. If he then enjoys bragging with gusto, so what? His supporters share his happiness in all he has accomplished for them as individuals, and for the country. They are richer, freer, and more secure because of his capable leadership, and they are grateful, even giddy.

Democrats think they can smear, bribe, bully and cheat their way to the White House. Their voters like the hate, the bull, and the promises of free stuff, and they did very well with those weapons in the midterms. But nothing the Democrats warn about or promise is real. In 2020, they will be coming up directly against President Trump, a master of reality. Reality is a stronger hand.

Read the whole thing here.

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Census citizenship question

image credit: wprl.org

The Trump administration’s proposed question asks, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” That’s it. 

It’s an important question. In his report “The Census Should Ask About Citizenship to Keep House Representation of Citizens Fair,” Bryan Preston at PJ Media concludes:

The census is at the heart of representation in our republic. The Constitution explicitly connects the census to representation of citizens. Citizenship has been a routine part of the census for most of our national existence, and resuming capturing this data ought not be controversial. Objections to the citizenship question are speculative at best, disingenuous at worst. The citizenship question is only controversial because like nearly everything else in American life, some want to use the census to serve their own political power plays.

I’m no lawyer, but I don't understand why President Trump would need to issue an Executive Order to restore the citizenship question to the census form. The Supreme Court lobbed the issue back to the Commerce Dept. Doesn’t that put the question back on the desk of the Secretary of Commerce? And Trump's administration has precedence on its side.

Here's Amy Howe at the SCOTUS blog:

Although the Trump administration had hoped that the Supreme Court would clear the way for it to include such a question, the justices instead sent the issue back to the Department of Commerce. In a deeply fractured opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts joined the court’s four liberal justices in ruling that the justification that the government offered at the time for including the citizenship question was just a pretext. The decision left open the possibility that the Trump administration could try again to add the citizenship question, but the clock is ticking. . . 

“Pretext” doesn’t seem to square with the history of the census citizenship question that dates back to Thomas Jefferson (see Preston’s full article here). But in any event, if the issue is now back at the Commerce Dept., why doesn’t Secy. Wilbur Ross just restore the question on the census form? Just asking . . .

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Tall Ships parade into Cleveland

Coming to Cleveland on Thursday, July 11 -- TODAY!. Tall Ships info is here.

These photos, taken a few years ago, are by 

pat dooley photography.

Facts vs propaganda

image credit: legalzoom.com

New York Times, Washington Post, 

Wikipedia, Facebook, etc., etc.

I’m linking to this report by Monica Showalter at American Thinker – not because it’s about the Jeff Epstein-Bill Clinton scandal, but because it shows the blatant corruption in media and information platforms:

With the bust of longtime Democratic donor and Bill Clinton buddy Jeffrey Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, it's pretty amazing, the scope of the Left's effort to pin the whole thing on President Trump.

It's going on all over, as if directed by some Mighty Integral from far above, to borrow a phrase from Tom Wolfe from The Right Stuff.  It's orchestrated.  It's universal.  It's big.  And it's about as honest and fact-filled as the Russian collusion narrative.

Here are the top three areas, and these aren't the only ones:

One, the press. 

The New York Times, the Washington Post, and other media outlets have attempted to pin the matter on President Trump as a matter of his knowing Epstein in the past and saying nice things about him, and the bum deal cut with Epstein earlier in Miami, which involved Trump's now–labor secretary, Alexander Acosta.

. . .

Meanwhile, over at the Wikipedia desk, item two, the second front on pinning-Trump has leftists are beavering away, eliminating all evidence of Democrats involved in the Epstein case, too.

And, three, at Facebook, posts are being censored for references to Democrats, particularly Bill Clinton, regarding the Epstein case.

The effort is strikingly global. Anything to protect Democrats, just as the original bad plea deal in Miami was a deal to protect Democrats (and their campaign money supply) by letting Epstein off.

One can only suppose that it's going to get worse as all the names of the Democrat "faves" start to roll out.

Full article with chapter-and-verse plus links is here.

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Steve Wozniak’s advice for Facebook users

image credit: wsj.com

David Solway at American Thinker asks the question:

Should First Amendment rights be extended to Big Tech corporations to publish and censor as they please?  This is a question that has agitated the discussion on whether antitrust legislation should be applied to infogiants such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Pinterest and many others that have cornered the market on a public resource, information, and an essential human activity, the consumption of information. A solution to the problem of data sequestration and restricted access practiced by these companies is to rebadge them either as publishers or, alternatively, as public utilities.

Meanwhile, TMZ via Fox News reports:

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has some advice for most Facebook users: Delete your account.

The millionaire, who co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs, recently said that a lack of privacy is his main concern regarding the Menlo Park, Calif. company and Big Tech in general.

“There are many different kinds of people, and some [of] the benefits of Facebook are worth the loss of privacy,” Wozniak told TMZ, which spoke with the tech mogul at Reagan National Airport in D.C. “But to many like myself, my recommendation is – to most people – you should figure out a way to get off Facebook.”

Wozniak deleted his Facebook account back in March 2018, shortly after news broke about the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which revealed that the private data of millions of Facebook users was being harnessed by the firm that worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The United Kingdom's top data watchdog group concluded that Cambridge Analytica's use of Facebook's data was illegal under British law.

Full report is here. Some related info from Business Insider:

Deactivating your Facebook account does not delete your information from Facebook's servers. It's hidden from other users, unavailable to the public, but it continues to live on in Facebook's vast digital-storage vaults. If you're ever interested in revisiting the photos you posted to Facebook way back when, or getting back in touch with that long-lost friend, you may want to deactivate your Facebook page instead of outright deleting it.

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Free Men or Free Things

Image credit: farmboxford.com

Daniel Greenfield publishes at FrontPage and at his own website, Sultan Knish. His article “A Nation of Free Men or Free Things” ponders the meaning of Independence Day, and he starts off:

The 2020 Democrat primaries are underway with candidate after candidate promising a nation, not of free people, but of free things.

Free college, free health care and free everything else. Even for illegal aliens.

Of course there's a price to pay.

You get free health care by giving up the freedom to pick your own health care. You get free education, but the indoctrination is the price.

The Fourth to many is Fireworks Day. Every country has its fireworks days and this is the day that this one chooses to light up the night sky. The day means nothing to them because though they are surrounded by free things, they aren’t free. 

The difference between freedom and free things has been progressively erased so that many think that the American Revolution was fought because the British weren’t providing affordable health coverage to the colonies. If only they knew about the NHS, they would vote to go back.

All that the Crown really wanted was for the colonists to pay their “fair share”, a share that was determined thousands of miles away. All that the colonists wanted was the rights of Englishmen that they believed they were entitled to. After a great deal of bloodshed, the colonists won the right to be Americans instead—an odd series of consonants and vowels having to do with an Italian explorer but meaning free and limited government.

There is a big difference between a free country and a country of free things. You can have one or the other, but you can’t have both.  . . .

Mr. Greenfield’s full article is here. Recommended.

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Fake News misreports Salute to America

The headline: FAKE NEWS Caught AGAIN As They Attempt To Spin Yesterday’s D.C. Celebration As “Small”. DCWhispers reports -- and has photographic proof of Fake News (read: outright lies):

Despite a bit of damp and humid weather, tens of thousands cheered the President Trump-led Fourth of July celebration in Washington D.C. yesterday. It was a patriotic event enjoyed by young and old alike but clearly out of favor with the Trump-hating/America-hating, far-left media which is now once again spreading their own altered version of reality:

Many networks refused to cover the live event. Clearly, that makes lying about it to the American people even easier.

More here. Related: As Trump Salutes Air Force Flyover, CNN Cuts to Commercial.

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