Happy New Year ~ 2018

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from the Cleveland Tea Party

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Rep. Dave Brat on immigration – THE issue in 2018

R McKee cartoon credit: teapartyamerica.blogspot.com

Rep. Dave Brat spoke to Breitbart about the immigration issues ahead of us in 2018. Brat (R-VA) is the one who beat Eric Cantor, then the House Majority Leader, in the primary – and his upset victory put the amnesty bill on hold. But amnesty is the creature that wouldn't die.

Brat discussed Congress’s considerations to codify the Obama administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy into federal law.

Congress must prioritize four repairs for the immigration system before contemplating any DACA-style amnesty negotiation, said Brat: 1. Ending chain migration and the visa lottery; 2. Mandating employer use of E-Verify; 3. Construction of a southern border wall; and 4. Interior enforcement of immigration law.

The four aforementioned “permanent fixes” must precede any DACA negotiation regarding amnesty for illegal immigrants, said Brat: “It shouldn’t be about trusting or hoping, the permanent part has to come first, you see in that place and then you negotiate later.”

The rest of the report is here.

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Mark Steyn on illegal immigration

We can expect a lot of work in 2018 to do what we can to block the passage of DACA, start building the wall, and end chain migration. My fave, Mark Steyn, guest hosted for Rush Limbaugh yesterday, and his segment on illegal immigration and The Wall were reported at both Breitbart (“Mark Steyn: In the End, Trump Presidency ‘Will Stand or Fall on How He Tackles Immigration’”) and on Steyn’s blog page (“The Wall Is All”). The transcript report by Jeff Poor at Breitbart is below.

“[T]here’s a lobby — there’s lobbies for everything in this country,” Steyn said. “And there’s a strong lobby for illegal immigration. There’s a strong lobby for refugees, which again is a completely fraudulent operation by and large. Trump won because a significant [number of voters] were serious about building a wall, about ending illegal immigration and about doing something about people who walk into this country illegally, stay here illegally, take jobs illegally, get driver’s licenses illegally, use Social Security numbers illegally. And at some point … I would have liked him to hold the inauguration ceremony on the southern border and for it to culminate after the oath of office with him ceremonially laying the brick in the wall. But in the end, his presidency will stand or fall on how he tackles immigration.”

Steyn pointed to how low-skilled mass immigration has impacted the American economy, and there is a demand for low-skilled workers. He added that it isn’t just policy for Trump that is important [but] shifting “attitudes” as well.

“In the end, the Trump presidency I believe will stand or fall on how permanently he manages to shift not just the number of people coming into the country, but how he manages to shift attitudes towards remorseless unskilled mass immigration,” Steyn added. “That’s what got him elected, and that’s what [will] actually be the basis on which his presidency is judged.”

Steyn’s page is here. Ann Coulter recently published an article along the same lines, at Townhall and Human Events here. Her take is that if the United States does not stop illegal immigration, then all other issues are essentially academic. 

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Serious course correction on the S.S. Trump

Ben Garrison cartoon credit: governmentpropaganda.net

Kurt Schlichter does not take prisoners. He does not mince words. His latest column at Townhall, titled “Trump Ends 2017 Residing In His Enemies’ Heads” is an optimistic preview for what’s to come in the New Year:

Slowly, it’s dawning on Trump’s enemies – on our enemies – that this isn’t just an unfortunate, temporary bump in the road to the Californiaization of America, but a U-turn. The people who elected Donald Trump were something his allegedly conservative Never Trump opponents never were: serious about being conservative.

It’s easy to grift the donors with big talk about culture wars and policy initiatives when you never expect to be in a position to actually pull them off. But the Normals finally got sick of election year bomb-throwers morphing into pliable puffboys once their reps crossed into the Beltway. And that’s how you got Trump.

Schlichter’s description of Trump’s election as “a U-turn” reminded me of Mark Steyn’s reaction when Barack Obama was re-elected, since it suggested that the American electorate lacked the will to effect a “serious course correction.” And that is surely because the GOPe ran another RINO candidate, in that instance, Mitt Romney. A lot of conservatives stayed home on Election Day. 

Now here we are on board with President Trump, making the U-turn, making the serious course correction. The rest of Schlichter’s column is here.  

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Mr Speaker on Fake News

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Speaker Newt Gingrich’s latest emailing is titled “The Republican 2018 Surprise: Victory.” A short extract:

[Scott] Adams, the author of Dilbert, has a list of 20 political opinions and predictions made about President Trump and his Administration, which were just plain wrong. He suggests if you were wrong about 15 or more of these assertions, you might quit talking about politics while Trump is in the White House. By Adams’s standard, most elite "analysts" would have to be quiet, because they have been so consistently wrong about Trump.

As I listened to the end of the year "analysts," I was struck by how little they know, how little they have questioned their own mistakes, and how mutually reinforcing their false information has been.

These are not analysts. These are liberal propagandists. Much of what they assert is just plain wrong. Fake news is, sadly, an accurate term. And the topic about which they have been the most fake is the GOP’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

Newt predicts a GOP win in the midterms. But that would not be enough. I can’t help but hope that in the process of draining the swamp, members of the UniParty, including those with an (R) after their name, are exposed as the corruptocrats that they are. 

Newt’s column is online here.

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Three on the Fox bench

art credit: worldartsme.com

Subtitle: Hosts who don’t interrupt

Over the Christmas break, the pinch-hitters are guest hosting most of the prime time news and opinion broadcasts at Fox. In some cases, the bench team outperforms the regular hosts.

Guest host for Sean Hannity is David Webb. He is intelligent, he listens, and he asks follow-up questions. Webb is calm and collected and measured, never strident or frenetic.

Guest host for Tucker Carlson is Mark Steyn. Disclosure: Mark Steyn is my favorite online commentator/blogger. But Steyn as host, even when saddled with a ghastly line-up of guest talking heads, is informed, incisive, and FUNNY. (And when he is a guest on Carlson's show, he usually has Tucker in stitches).

Daytime host Brian Kilmeade subbed for Hannity or maybe it was Laura Ingraham, and not once did I reach for the mute button. He also has co-written a book about Andrew Jackson and The Battle of New Orleans and hosted a recent Sunday night special on the subject. It was excellent, and I hope Fox re-runs it.

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Handy tax chart from Powerline

Steven Hayward at the Powerline blog just published a “handy tax chart to annoy your liberal friends”; it highlights provisions in the recent GOP tax reform bill compared to the previous tax code.

If you have trouble embiggening the chart with a click, just go to the Powerline blogpost here and scroll halfway down.

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Merry Christmas from the Cleveland Tea Party

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Conrad Black on “Trump’s Whirlwind Year”

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Conrad Black has a great wrap-up of Trump’s presidential campaign, election and first year as POTUS. He begins with Trump’s candidacy:

Trump was attacking the entire political establishment, the whole Washington sleaze factory, all factions of both parties, all the Bushes, Clintons, and Obama, the national media, the lobbyists, Wall Street, Hollywood, and the limousine Left from the Hamptons to Silicon Valley. Of course the Trump campaign was insane and impossible, and was doomed to be a ludicrous fiasco, a gigantic, comical clown act that misfired horribly.

On Election Night, Nobel prize–winning (for economics) New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said the stock market would “never recover” from the Trump victory. (It has set a new all-time high more than 90 times since.) . . .

This year [Trump] has won over the congressional Republican party, which had almost entirely opposed him, to toil in the enactment of his program. Together they have achieved the greatest tax reform and reduction in over 30 years, largely emasculated Obamacare, put a rod on the backs of those states that elect incompetents like Jerry Brown and the Cuomos and lay the resulting state income taxes off on the whole country, repatriated trillions of dollars of corporate profit, exonerated over half the people from personal income taxes, reduced the return of 80 percent of taxpayers to a postcard, and produced conditions for 4 percent GDP growth next year. . . .

Considering the sustained assault of 90 percent of the media, in which the normal honeymoon for a new president has been replaced by a daily media assassination squad, he has done well. 

The article is at the National Review website here.

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The final tax bill

cartoon by Nate Beeler at the Columbus Dispatch

Help for the middle class or Armageddon and lots of dead people? I found a concise summary of what's in the bill at Reuters; click here.

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