Trump Offers Amnesty Deal; Democrats Immediately Reject ‘Hardline’ Proposal

Posted on | January 26, 2018 | 1 Comment

When the news first leaked out that President Trump was offering Democrats an immigration deal with amnesty for 1.8 million “Dreamers,” conservatives reacted with dismay, because we had once again underestimated Trump’s political genius. As Ed Driscoll has remarked, “Trump’s ability to drive his opponents round the bend is one of his best assets,” and the Democrats responded predictably:

Democrats and outside progressive groups are quickly panning an immigration framework from President Trump as a nonstarter on Capitol Hill.
The White House’s proposal would provide a pathway to citizenship for up to 1.8 million “Dreamers” in exchange for $25 billion for the U.S.-Mexico border wall and other security measures, as well as sweeping changes to the legal immigration system.
But progressive Democrats and their allies are ripping the suggested framework, arguing the administration is trying to hold Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients “hostage” for changes to legal immigration.
Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) called the proposal a “ransom” that “doesn’t pass the laugh test.” . . .
Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.), the chairwoman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, added that the White House proposal is “shameful” and using the DACA program as a “bargaining chip.”
“President Trump is not just trying to shakedown Congressional Democrats; he is trying to shakedown the American people,” she said. . . .
Sen. Dick Durbin (Ill.), the No. 2 Senate Democrat, said the proposal puts a “hardline immigration agenda … on the backs of these young people.”
“Dreamers should not be held hostage to President Trump’s crusade to tear families apart and waste billions of American tax dollars on an ineffective wall,” he said. . . .
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) called it a “compromise between the far right and the alt-right” that is “dead on arrival.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), considered a potential 2020 White House contender, said Trump is trying to hold immigrants “hostage to Steven [sic] Miller’s anti-immigrant wish list.”
Stephen Miller, a conservative White House aide known for his hardline immigration views, has been at the center of the debate.

Notice something? Illinois, New Mexico, New Jersey, Massachusetts — the Democrats complaining about this “hardline immigration agenda” are from blue states that Hillary Clinton won in 2016. However, this fall’s midterm elections won’t be decided in Massachusetts or Illinois, but in Missouri, West Virginia and other states where Democrats will be defending vulnerable Senate seats while the GOP defends its House seats.

‘DOA’: Immigration Activists Say the Only
Ones Who Benefit From Trump’s Latest
DACA Offer Are White Supremacists

This extremist rhetoric, comparing Trump’s offer to a KKK cross-burning, shows how out-of-touch the Democrats are with the middle- and working-class white voters who rejected Hillary in the 2016 election. However much Dick Durbin’s constituents in Chicago or Elizabeth Warren’s constituents in Boston may embrace this rhetoric, it just sounds crazy to retirees in Florida or coal miners in West Virginia.

Trump makes a proposal most Americans will view as extraordinarily generous — amnesty for 1.8 million illegal immigrants is no small thing — and Democrats respond by parroting the left-wing activists who denounce this as a “white supremacist” plan? That’s perfect.

Especially after the Schumer shutdown, it’s now obvious that Democrats are the ones whose extremist agenda is preventing any resolution to the DACA controversy. Trump has shrewdly positioned himself as the reasonable proponent of compromise, and Democrats look like a bunch of radical kooks, shrieking about KKK cross-burnings.

Never underestimate the “very stable genius.”

Category: Democrats, Donald Trump, Immigration

Late Night With In The Mailbox: 01.25.18

Posted on | January 26, 2018 | Comments Off on Late Night With In The Mailbox: 01.25.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: President Trump, A Bit Of Advice…
Twitchy: More Texts Released – Were FBI Agents Pulling Their Punches On The Hillary Investigation?
Louder With Crowder: Ben Shapiro Nails Abortion “Identity Politics” Question At UConn
Americans For Tax Reform: Enviros Push Meat Tax (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Podcast #72 – The Driving Edition, also, You Hit Back Hard The Very First Time Or Not At All
American Power: America’s Extreme Poverty
American Thinker: The Schiff Hits The Fan
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Imperial Enclosures News
BattleSwarm: Feminist Of Hearing
CDR Salamander: Diversity Thursday
Da Tech Guy: John Kerry* Tells The Palestinians “Don’t Negotiate”
Don Surber: The Norks Get Trumped
Dustbury: You Deserve To Hurt
Fred On Everything:
The Geller Report: Muslim Photographer, Nation of Islam Hid Photos Of Obama With Louis Farrakhan From 2008, also, Trump Slaps Globalists With “America First” Speech At Davos
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: Talking Points Alert – Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson Is The New Joe McCarthy
Joe For America: WWE Owner Vince McMahon Bringing Back The XFL In 2020
JustOneMinute: Trump Happy To Speak “Under Oath”?
Legal Insurrection: DOJ Reports Missing Texts From FBI Agents Found, also, California Toys With $1000 Fine, Jail Time For Waiters Who Offer Plastic Straws
Power Line: Hawaiian Who Sent False Missile Alert Not Cooperating With Investigation, also, Facebook Censorship Of Conservatives (Updated)
Shark Tank: Florida Could Still Be Open For Offshore Drilling – Rubio, Nelson Not Happy
Shot In The Dark: State Of The World
STUMP: Around The World In pensions – Brazil, The EU, And More
The Jawa Report: Sandcrawler PSA – Coming Soon
The Political Hat: Queering Of White Supremacy
This Ain’t Hell: John Kerry* Should Shut Up, also, Lt. Cmdr. Erika Schilling Saving The World
Victory Girls: Point – Judge Aquilinia Was Not Grandstanding During Dr. Nassar Sentencing, also, Counterpoint – Judge Aquilina’s Showboat Performance Detracts From The Job Of Justice
Weasel Zippers: Steyer Says He Won’t Donate To Democrats After Shutdown Cave, also, Soros Attacks Google & Facebook In Davos Speech
Megan McArdle: Why Democrats Won’t Get Their Way On Immigration
Mark Steyn: Happy Australia Day!

*Who, I am reliably informed, served in Vietnam

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Category: Linkagery

Defamation by Impersonation

Posted on | January 25, 2018 | Comments Off on Defamation by Impersonation

Jack Posobiec is a conservative activist with more than 250,000 followers on Twitter. A woman claimed to have discovered that Posobiec had a profile on the feminist dating app Bumble, and BuzzFeed claimed that Bumble verified this was actually Posobiec’s account. Posobiec is married and his wife is pregnant, and he has threatened legal action against those he says have defamed and harassed him by “criminal fraud.”

Of course, the difficulty of proving a negative means we cannot know that the accusation that Posobiec had a Bumble account is false, except that the charge is absurd on its face. Posobiec abhors feminists, so why would he be attempting to date them? While we might imagine, just hypothetically, that an anti-feminist could create such an account as a joke, to troll Bumble users, Posobiec denies that he had anything to do with this account and a far more likely scenario is that it was an attack by a hacker who targeted Posobiec in order to manufacture a phony “scandal” against someone they deem an associate of the “alt-right.”

In the past, I’ve been the target of such harassment tactics by the Left (remember, someone went to prison for a SWATting against my family) and some of the methods used by my enemies included using impersonation accounts to send offensive messages to my friends. (You can ask Wombat and the Lonely Conservative about one such incident.) Because I am personally familiar with the Left’s amoral scorched-earth, by-any-means-necessary tactics, I am inclined to believe that Jack Posobiec has been similarly attacked, and that BuzzFeed, by publishing an article about this, is dishonestly attempting to “verify” this smear.

This is also a familiar tactic. In 2010, Democrat operative Neal Rauhauser was caught red-handed organizing a Twitter harassment campaign against Tea Party activists. Rauhauser then persuaded Adrian Chen of Gawker to publish an article explaining this away as an innocent “prank.” Left-wing journalists are willing enablers of this kind of harassment, even while they claim that conservatives are perpetrators of harassment. This was the liberal media’s narrative of #GamerGate, after all — supposedly, Anita Sarkeesian and others were victims of right-wing “harassment,” which became a pretext for Twitter’s shutting down the accounts of various conservatives (myself included), but no one at Twitter ever took action against Neal Rauhauser or any of the left-wing trolls who participated in his anti-Tea Party harassment campaign.

So now are expected to swallow a “just-so” story: A feminist claims that an “alt-right” guy had an account on a feminist dating app, BuzzFeed then gets an official at Bumble to “confirm” the authenticity of the account, and this is supposed to be accepted as factual proof.

Bullshit. This has all the hallmarks of a frame-up, a hoax, with no more credibility than Rolling Stone‘s UVA gang-rape hoax.

“Haven Monahan” could not be reached for comment.

P.S.: Jack Posobiec denies being “alt-right,” at least in the sense intended by liberals who use this term as a synonym for “neo-Nazi.” What has happened, during the past year or so, is that Democrats and their media allies have played their customary connect-the-dots guilt-by-association game. It works like this: Person A (e.g., Richard Spencer) becomes notorious, and then everyone on the Right is expected to denounce Person A. Prior to becoming a notorious symbol of “hate,” however, Person A had some association with Person B, Person C and Person D. These three persons who were in some way associated with Person A are now deemed “radioactive,” and everyone associated with them falls under the penumbra of suspicion, even if there is no actual evidence that they share the “hate” that made Person A notorious. This is how the left-wing media turned the so-called “alt-right” into a weapon to smear Trump supporters as crypto-Nazis, especially after the gaudy debacle at Charlottesville. Some 20-year-old dimwit rams his car into a crowd, and we are supposed to believe this proves that everyone who voted for Trump is a goose-stepping Jew-hater. Conservatives have to learn to fight effectively against these guilt-by-association tactics. Don’t be defensive. Don’t join in on the dogpile of denunciation against whoever the Left is targeting as a “hate” symbol. Remember that you have the right to remain silent, and you don’t have to comment every time someone on the Right says something deemed “controversial.” Most importantly, use these situations to educate your fellow conservatives about the Left’s propaganda tactics. Being able to recognize such tactics is the only way to avoid being influenced by the Left’s disinformation operations.

Category: Media Bias

In The Mailbox, 01.24.18

Posted on | January 24, 2018 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox, 01.24.18

— compiled by Wombat-socho

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Fish Rot From The Head, And So Does The FBI
Twitchy: Politico Says Dems Willing To Drop DREAMers From Budget Agreement
Louder With Crowder: Scared? Cecile Richards Leaves Planned Parenthood As FBI Closes In
Quillette: Privilege-Checking The Privilege Checkers (h/t NeoWayland)

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Leg Cutting Soars Amongst Millenial Youth, also, What Women Want
American Power: Border Patrol Arrests Radical “No More Deaths” Activists, also, The Prosperity Paradox
American Thinker: The Sinking Of The FBI
Animal Magnetism: Road Trip Totty III
BattleSwarm: FBI Amazing Coincidence Theater
CDR Salamander: A Slippery Toehold In Syria
Da Tech Guy: NFL – Let’s Listen Together, Except For AMVETS, also, Who Can Investigate The Investigators?
Don Surber: What We Saw In Trump That They Didn’t See
Dustbury: One Apple, Polished
The Geller Report: Unsealed FISA Court Ruling Shows 85% Of CErtain Obama-Era FBI/DOJ Searches Were Illegal, also, In Canada, Accused Terrorists Hired As “Anti-Radicalism Consultants”
Hogewash: I’m So Old…, also, Team Kimberlin Post of The Day
Jammie Wearing Fools: FBI Blames Samsung For Losing Conspirators’ Texts; Media Attacks Trump For Pointing This Out
Joe For America: Judge Sentences Dr. Nassar To 175 Years For Sexual Assault On Olympic Gymnasts
JustOneMinute: If You’re Having Trouble Becoming Alarmed…
Legal Insurrection: Will Giving Ex-Con Felons The Vote Turn Florida Blue? also, Trump Reminds “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” DACA Negotiations Must Include A Wall
Michelle Malkin: Home Schooling Is Not A Crime
Power Line: Today’s Classroom Lesson – Demystifying Opinion Polls, also, The Clinton Investigation Revisited
Shark Tank: Tax Reform Working – Disney To Hand Out $125 Million In Employee Bonuses
Shot In The Dark: Dave’s Not Here
STUMP: Taxing Tuesday – Checking In With Worried States
The Jawa Report: Who’s Interests?
The Political Hat: Tech’s Convenient Double Standard Of Employee Behavior
This Ain’t Hell: The News You’ve Been Waiting For, also, Camels Disqualified From Saudi Beauty Pageant
Victory Girls: Oscar Nominations Are Here – Movies Glorifying Statutory Rape, Anti-Trump Media Nominated
Weasel Zippers: Trump “Looking Forward” To Interview With Mueller, also, Democratic Mayors Defend Sanctuary Cities
Megan McArdle: We Get It, Netflix, You’re Big. But Don’t Be Bad.
Mark Steyn: Hump Day

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Category: Linkagery

Ursula LeGuin, RIP

Posted on | January 24, 2018 | Comments Off on Ursula LeGuin, RIP

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Not going to lie: I didn’t care much for Ursula LeGuin’s writing. Had to read The Left Hand of Darkness in college, and it was okay, but “The Word For World Is Forest” was crap, and “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” was vile. After that, none of what she wrote looked interesting to me, so I missed out on the Earthsea books. Still, she was a good writer, and won some awards back when those awards meant something, and if she wasn’t to my taste, well, neither were Hemingway and Waugh, and that’s just the way it is.
In other news, Jon Del Arroz got blacklisted from Worldcon this year for…well, the reasons kept changing and finally wound up being “‘Shut up’ they explained,” as is usual with SJWs. At this point, any conservative or libertarian going to Worldcon should really reconsider. Why are you giving money to people who -at the very least- don’t respect you? As if that wasn’t enough, SFWA promptly shot themselves in the foot by rejecting Jon’s membership application, for no better (apparent) reason than “He’s a meanie and he says bad things!” Well, as our Supreme Dark Lord has observed, SFWA is fully converged, infested with crazy cat ladies, and not doing anything to help actual authors. Richard Paolinelli is starting a new organization, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Creators’ Guild as an alternative to SFWA, and I wish him well.
While we’re on the topic of alternatives, if you haven’t signed up with the National Fantasy Fan Federation yet, why not? Public (non-voting) memberships are free!

So much for the news – on to the books!

Speaking of Jon Del Arroz, I picked up For Steam And Country during my spring semester book-buying binge, and a nice little adventure it is. Airships! Magic! Cute (and not so cute) little Ruritanian kingdoms! Last but not least, a (sometimes) heroic farm girl who discovers her swashbuckling destiny and the wild family history she never knew. It’s a fun little romp, and I am waiting to see what trouble Baroness von Monocle gets into next.

Marko Kloos’ Points of Impact, the sixth book in the chronicles of the Lanky War, brings us into a new phase of that war. Humanity has new ships and new weapons, good enough to beat the aliens in space – but as our hero Andrew Grayson and his hot pilot wife find out in a return to the icy colony of New Svalbard, that may not be enough to win the war, or even force a stalemate. Good story, and I’m looking forward to the next one.

Robert Heinlein’s classic Starship Troopers was on sale for $1.99 on the Kindle, and I snapped it up. Yes, I have several paperback copies, but I’m not sure where those are, and I wanted to read it again now. It hasn’t lost anything with age, and is still driving ignorant leftists crazy.

Something I haven’t been able to bring myself to finish is The Girl With Seven Names by Hyeonseo Lee. It’s the biography of a young woman who grows up in North Korea, and while it starts off pleasantly enough, as she gets older she becomes more aware of the ongoing horror story she’s living in. I read books like The Theory And Practice Of Hell and The GULAG Archipelago when I was younger with great avidity, but now I find myself unwilling to slog through the descriptions of real-life horror.

On a much more cheerful note, there is Marie Kondo’s The Life-Changing Manga Of Tidying Up, which is just what it says on the label. There are parts of the method I’m not totally on board with, which mainly have to do with the Japanese Shinto belief that everything, even inanimate objects like books and clothes, has a spirit, and one should express gratitude toward those books and clothes before putting them out of your life. If nothing else, it’s inspired me to get going on cleaning up my apartment, which badly needs it.

What are you reading that’s good?

Category: Books

Democrats in Disarray and Denial as Schumer Shutdown Exposes Weakness

Posted on | January 24, 2018 | 2 Comments

Rich Lowry analyzes Sen. Schumer’s miscalculations:

The press wasn’t hostile to the Democrats over the shutdown, but it wasn’t uniformly compliant, either. The Left objected to a headline on a New York Times news alert right after the shutdown vote on Friday night: “Senate Democrats blocked passage of a stopgap spending bill to keep the government open.” It’s not clear how a remotely honest news writer could have described it any other way.
If the media couldn’t be counted on to be on board, neither could everyone in the party. In what is a persistent temptation for Democrats, Schumer forgot that the rest of the country doesn’t regard Trump with the deep disdain and abiding alarm of the coasts and the major metropolitan areas. The party still has senators in red states that the president won handily who can’t afford to indulge in anti-Trump flights of fancy. Five of them defected on the initial shutdown vote and more would have broken with Schumer if the shutdown had endured.

(Via Hot Air; hat-tip: Instapundit.)

Democrats are so accustomed to “uniformly compliant” media coverage that they don’t realize how little support they have outside the deep-blue zones of “deep disdain” for President Trump. As a result of Schumer’s disastrous miscalculation, conservatives now have “momentum” on immigration, and the Democrats’ failed shutdown strategy may have paved the way for the enactment of Trump’s “get-tough” border agenda.

Even Crazy Jim Acosta of Fake News CNN agrees: “Trump World and WH sources dancing in end zone: Trump wins again…Schumer and Dems caved…gambled and lost.” Thank you for your honesty Jim!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 23, 2018

Remember just a couple of weeks ago, a Yale University “expert” was claiming Trump was suffering from dementia, but who is really demented, Trump or the left-wing kooks who obsessively hate him? Trump has repeatedly outwitted his Democrat opponents, defeating Hillary despite all the “experts” who said he couldn’t win, producing an enormous surge in the economy (the exact opposite of what Paul Krugman predicted), pushing through tax cuts (from which more than 70% of Americans will see lower federal taxes) and now humiliating Senate Democrats over the DACA shutdown. Predictably, the losers are playing the blame game, further proving how out of touch they are:

The shutdown is over, and the consensus is emerging. The Democrats lost. They capitulated after getting little more than carefully worded promises from Mitch McConnell. The progressive blame game is under way, complete with accusations of cowardice that read very much like the recriminations following the GOP’s last shutdown in 2013. But there’s one explanation I’d like to discuss — not because it’s necessarily the consensus view but because it echoes sentiments I hear all the time. Believe it or not, there are those on the left who tell themselves that they lose because they’re just too darn nice. . . .
Progressives see themselves as tolerant, open-minded, and eager to engage with critics. . . .
Yet this is precisely the opposite of the way conservatives experience and perceive progressive culture. Yes, of course there are progressives who “yearn for inclusion, civility, and dialogue,” but there are also progressives who despise conservatives, attempt to silence conservative voices, and systematically exclude conservatives from the “dialogue” they allegedly crave. . . .
No, Democrats aren’t losing because they’re “too nice” or because they yearn for dialogue. The better explanation is that they’re losing in part because their own incivility and rage drive millions of Americans to the polls to vote in perceived self-defense. Their own incivility and rage falsely escalate too many political disputes to matters of life and death. What’s the argument after claiming that Republicans are intentionally killing people? Is there a rhetorical step beyond that?

Democrats don’t want “dialogue.” Democrats want power. They will tell any lie necessary to obtain that power, and their constant demonization of their scapegoated enemies — “sexist! racist! homophobe!” — is just partisan propaganda. The Democrat Party’s rhetoric of deranged hatred deceives their ignorant followers, but they eventually alienate everyone honest enough to look at the actual facts, and intelligent enough to perceive the likely result of Democrat policies. Americans do not want their country to become an impoverished socialist nightmare like Venezuela. Americans can see how the Democrats have wrecked California by providing sanctuary to millions of illegal aliens. Everyone can see what Democrats want to do to the rest of America, which is why Donald Trump won by standing up to tell the Democrats, “No.”

This is what the Left cannot bring itself to admit, that they have been weighed in the balance and found wanting. Their friends in the media are trying desperately to conceal this failure, to distract Americans from the reality of (and reasons for) the Democrats’ shutdown debacle. But dishonesty is not good policy, and denial is not wise strategy.

Category: Budget, Congress, Democrats, Donald Trump, Immigration

Deborah Frisch Yelled Anti-Asian Insults During Arrest, According to Police Report

Posted on | January 24, 2018 | Comments Off on Deborah Frisch Yelled Anti-Asian Insults During Arrest, According to Police Report

Deborah Ellen Frisch, Ph.D., after her Jan. 5 arrest in Bend, Oregon.

Deborah Frisch was “uncooperative” and shouted racial slurs when she was arrested in Oregon earlier this month, according to a police report. Frisch, a former university professor who was wanted on a fugitive warrant from Colorado, became “extremely hostile and belligerent” when police confronted her at Bend City Hall.

“I had prior knowledge that Frisch had an outstanding warrant (full extradition) out of Colorado and that she had been uncooperative with police officers in the past,” Officer Cynthia Ksenzulak wrote in her Jan. 5 report. Frisch, 56, is a former psychology professor charged with two felonies in Colorado related to her harassment of conservative blogger Jeff Goldstein. Frisch was already on probation in Oregon for prior crimes in Colorado when she fled to Oregon after failing to appear at a scheduled hearing for charges of stalking and attempted bribery. She was arrested in November in Bend, but released from custody in December.

According to Officer Ksenzulak’s report, Frisch “referred to me as ‘Kung Pao Cunt’ and kept saying that she was going to resist and that we were going to have to use force on her”:

Frisch used a lot of racial epithets towards the Asian culture and called assisting officers, “Pork chops and pigs.” She screamed at the top of her lungs and then tried to fall to her back. I held her upright so that she did not lay directly onto her handcuffed hands.
Frisch continued to scream and yell. Due to her assaultive and threatening behavior, we placed her in a [restraining harness] without incident. I assisted in escorting her to a patrol vehicle by holding onto and lifting her left side upper body. During this entire time, Frisch did not stop yelling racial epithets toward me.

So much for Frisch’s “progressive” politics, eh? She faces an extradition hearing Thursday on the Colorado charges and another hearing Jan. 30 on misdemeanor charges related to the arrest incident.

(Hat-tip: @tehdailysqueak on Twitter.)