90 Miles From Tyranny

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Heritage Report Ranking Trump Above Reagan Again Exposes #NeverTrump Grifters

For a year now, all you have heard from our provincial #NeverTrump tribalists is how those of us who backed Trump were duped into supporting a secret Democrat, a lefty, a guy who could not wait to sell us out. Well, once again, these narcissistic #NeverTrump grifters have been exposed by reality, this time in the form of a Heritage Foundation report that ranks President Donald Trump above Ronald Reagan.

According to the Heritage Foundation, a widely-respected conservative think tank, during his first year in office, Trump adopted nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of Heritage’s agenda. By comparison, Heritage says that former President Reagan enacted only 49 percent of its policy prescriptions.

“There is so much noise in this town that I think it obscures the real work that’s being done,” Heritage president Kay Coles James told the New York Times. “This administration is doing quite well in terms of advancing a conservative agenda — clearly, quite well.”

In 2016, Heritage came up with 334 conservative policies, a wish-list of sorts, for a new Republican administration. Trump has enacted 64 percent of those items. In 1981, his first year in office, Reagan scratched off only 49 percent of the items on that year’s Heritage list.

Some of those on the right who opposed Trump have been gracious enough to admit they were wrong. The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway took a look back at Trump’s first year and wrote last week:

Ironically, the very lack of conservative bona fides that worried me two years ago means he’s less beholden to a conservative establishment that had grown alienated from the people it is supposed to serve and from the principles it ostensibly exists to promote. His surprising conservatism might also be the result of the absolutism and extremism of his critics, whether among the media, traditional Democratic activists or the anti-Trump right. If Trump were ever inclined to indulge his liberal tendencies after winning the election, the stridency and spite of his opponents have provided him with no incentives to do so.

On his radio show Thursday, Dennis Prager, who was not a #NeverTrumper but supported Trump as a dead-last choice in the 16 person GOP primary, was just as gracious and insightful:

I was wrong. My opposition to Donald Trump was wrong, in retrospect. I was wrong. I had friends who supported him, and I didn’t ...

With the stock market booming and consumer confidence brightening, prospects for a sustained period of growth look solid

When President Donald Trump told the Davos World Economic Forum that America is “once again experiencing strong economic growth,” the Associated Press hurried to publish a “fact check” contradicting the chief executive.

“The economy is doing better by some measures but data released just as Trump finished speaking shows it hasn’t yet accelerated meaningfully since his inauguration,” AP said, referring to the Department of Commerce Bureau of Economic Analysis report that the gross domestic product grew 2.6 percent during the fourth quarter of 2017.

“Hasn’t yet accelerated meaningfully”? It was as if AP’s editors couldn’t bear to look at the whole picture of U.S. economic growth in the past year, a picture Trump was eager to share with the assembled world leaders in the Swiss Alps.

“After years of stagnation the nation is once again experiencing strong economic growth. The stock market is smashing one record after another, and has added more than $7 trillion in new wealth since my election. Consumer confidence, business confidence, and manufacturing confidence are the highest that they have been in many decades.

“Since my election, we’ve created 2.4 million jobs, and that number is going up very, very substantially. Small-business optimism is at an all-time high. New unemployment claims are near the lowest we’ve seen in almost half a century. African-American unemployment reached the lowest rate ever recorded in the United States, and so has unemployment among Hispanic-Americans.”

So who presented the most accurate picture of the state of the U.S. economy? The numbers strongly point to the president, relying on the facts AP preferred to shuffle to the back of the bus, especially when compared to...

In any criminal investigation where the suspect is not immediately known, the first question usually asked is who would have the most to gain? As we follow the bread crumbs of the text messages of Peter Strzok and Lisa Page and await release of the House Intelligence Committee’s memo regarding the collusion between the DNC, the Hillary Clinton campaign, the DOJ, and FBI to interfere with the 2016, ensure the election of Hillary, and the defeat or impeachment of Donald Trump, the answer to that question is clear -- one Barack Hussein Obama.

Can it be believed that as key players in the Obama administration like Strzok and Page, as well as FBI Director James Comey, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, number 4 at Justice Bruce Ohr, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and many others were linked in a vast criminal conspiracy to keep Hillary Clinton out of prison and Donald Trump out of the White House, that Barack Obama was blissfully unaware of all this? Rather, it can be plausibly argued that he was orchestrating it.

Perhaps not directly or by explicit orders, but rather by discussing the threat to his legacy Trump represented with his progressive minions and then simply saying, as crime bosses throughout history have done, “You know what needs to be done. Do it.”

This scandal did not occur in a vacuum any more than did the weaponizing of the IRS to target the Tea Party and other conservative groups before Obama’s 2012 reelection campaign occured in a vacuum. The agencies under Obama’s control have been politicized before and used to intimidate and destroy his political opponents

Last September, I argued that Comey had the fix in for Hillary and we now know that he began writing his exoneration memo significantly before interviewing Hillary and other key witnesses. The exoneration memo underwent key edits in which Strzok, who interviewed Hillary and those witnesses, some of whom were granted immunity, was involved. But now, as the layers of this rotting onion are peeled away, it has become clearer that Comey did not act on his own...

President Donald Trump’s administration will not be making changes to the 2020 U.S. census recommended by President Barack Obama’s administration, the U.S. Census Bureau announced Friday.

“The Census Bureau will continue to use two separate questions for collecting data on race and ethnicity in the 2018 End-to-End Census Test, and as the proposed format for the 2020 Census,” read the announcement.

“The Census Bureau will not use a combined question format for collecting race and ethnicity; or a separate ‘Middle Eastern or North African’ category on the census form,” noted the announcement.

The changes recommended by the Obama administration included giving Hispanics one single category, diminishing their options to identify themselves as a race identified by anthropologists (such as white or black) and creating a brand new pan-ethnic category for people of Middle Eastern heritage, according to a commentary from Heritage Foundation’s Mike Gonzalez.

The designation for those of Middle Eastern descent would be “MENA,” for Middle East and North Africa, and the new Hispanic designation “would make it harder for Americans who originate in Latin America to identify themselves as black, white or some other race,” according to Gonzalez.

Gonzalez, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and a widely experienced international correspondent, commentator, and editor who has reported from Asia, Europe, and Latin America, told The Daily Signal in an email that the development is good news for U.S. citizens.

“This is a victory for the American people, who have demonstrated again and again that they’ve had it with balkanization,” Gonzalez said. “Creating yet one more pan-ethnic category, for MENA, and cementing an older one, Hispanics, would have taken the country further down the road of division.”

The National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, which seeks to increase the...

“My opposition to Donald Trump was wrong,” said Dennis Prager, describing Donald Trump as a “great president” whose political successes are connected to a disregard for the left-wing and partisan Democrat news media narratives.

Prager’s comments came during Thursday’s episode of his eponymous radio show. While Prager has said that Trump was his last choice during the Republican primaries, he supported him vigorously in the general election against Hillary Clinton.

“The only way to govern [while advancing] the principles of conservatism,” said Prager, was to disregard left-wing and partisan Democrat agitation pushed across the news media landscape. Prager said:

I was wrong. My opposition to Donald Trump was wrong, in retrospect. I was wrong. I had friends who supported him, and I didn’t understand them. I said, “Are you not aware of what he said about John McCain? Isn’t that enough to disqualify the guy?” They perceived in him what I did not perceive in him, that these over-the-top statements – as objectionable as the statements themselves may be, and none of them defended the statements – nevertheless, what they perceived was accurate: a man who doesn’t give a damn about what the press says about him. That is the only way to govern. It is the only way to advance the principles of conservatism in...

Conservative author, filmmaker, and proud Indian-American, Dinesh D’Souza, who was among the most vocal in warning America about the rampant abuses by the Obama government, was then sentenced to prison for what amounted to a relatively minor political contribution violation. D’Souza claimed Barack Obama had deep-rooted fascist leanings. (Where was ANTIFA then to go to war against Mr. Obama?) Soon after, the Obama government proved those fascist leanings by allocating $100,000 dollars to investigate and ultimately charge D’Souza for an alleged $20,000 campaign contribution violation.

And get this – the Obama government had likely been surveilling D’Souza for months and months. The Obama IRS did the same thing to multiple private groups who opposed his socialist version of America. The Obama FBI did it to the Trump campaign. And chances are, if you are conservative and you have shared conservative/libertarian/small government/freedom and liberty/pro-America articles via social media, the Obama government was surveilling you as well.

Would President Obama have been that petty to target a critic for draconian law enforcement over a movie? The way the Soviet KGB might have targeted a dissident?
Well, given the common thread of socialism in both, it shouldn’t be a big surprise that he would.

It now comes to light that apparently, yes, he did. Dinesh D’Souza reports that he seems to have been in that unlucky category, targeted for any violation however minor, after making a couple of richly textured, artistically good and very popular critical movies about Obama. When a minor campaign finance violation was finally found after all that looking, D’Souza got the book thrown at him.

He now tweets that there is evidence for it:

My file—obtained by the House Oversight Committee—shows FBI red-flagged me as an Obama critic & allocated $100 K to investigate a $20 K case
— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) January 24, 2018

And that quite a few government resources went into ensuring he got arrested for something, anything. Here’s what he thinks might have been done, given the taxpayer cash that went into pinning something, anything, on him :

If Obama ordered surveillance on @realDonaldTrump in 2016, I wonder if he ordered it on me in 2012, leading to my selective prosecution
— Dinesh D’Souza (@DineshDSouza) January 24, 2018

It’s creepy to think there are lawmen with that little integrity out there to have not spoken out about such a blatant abuse of police power for political purposes. And it suggests that law enforcement agencies are shot through with leftists, which would mean no diversity of thought in the ranks, same as welfare, public defender, and other leftwing agencies.

What this vast expansion of resources – $100,000 for a $20,000 at most violation – also shows that Obama’s claims to “prioritization of resources” such as he claimed when he enabled the open border and its “child migrants” – was spoken with a forked tongue.

There was prioritization all right and it had nothing to do with best use of resources. It had everything to do with what was politically best for himself.

And lastly, it validates the truth about D’Souza’s claims made in his movies that Obma had a fascistic streak. He was not only like Benito Mussolini, he acted like Mussolini, given his...