90 Miles From Tyranny

Wednesday, February 6, 2019

The Carnage That Our Children Suffer From Illegal Immigration...

THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION MUST DEFEND CITIZENSHIP ON THE 2020 CENSUS, AND OPPOSE THE OVERUSE OF NATIONAL INJUNCTIONS

Conservatives support efforts by the Trump administration to include a question about citizenship on the 2020 Census. We urge the administration to actively appeal any efforts by leftist groups and others to have it removed.

Questions about citizenship have a long history on the U.S. Census, having appeared regularly from 1820 through 1950, since it was proposed by Thomas Jefferson in 1800. It also appears regularly on the American Community Survey (ACS), which is sent to one out of every 38 households on an annual basis.

Contrary to leftist claims, asking such a question will not result in a threat of deportation to respondents, or a downturn in census participation. The question is about citizenship—not legal status—and the Census Bureau is constrained by statute in sharing information about individual respondents. There is also no evidence that it will reduce the count among “had to count” populations. The ACS has asked a similar question for over a decade, which has not depressed participation; ironically, it has also not drawn any complaints from the left. Before that, the Long Form Census that preceded the ACS also asked it, without any erosion in participation.

Counting the number of citizens and non-citizens is critical for two reasons. First, it helps determine an accurate allocation of more than $800 billion in federal resources every year. Second, and more importantly, it assists in enforcing voting rights laws across the country—a policy goal the left has claimed for years it supports.

We also raise issue with the rising use of national injunctions by District courts, as was done in the most recent ruling related to the census question. These injunctions allow District courts sweeping power to bind the entire country, beyond the scope of their current jurisdiction. We echo the comments of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that they “appear inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and power of Article III courts. If their popularity continues, this court must address their legality.”

The judge’s ruling will, moreover, hand ever-increasing power to the administrative state, subtracting it from...

Every State, Ranked by How Miserable Its Winters Are

In most of America, winter sucks. It is cold out. You don’t feel like doing anything, so you get fat. Pipes freeze. Lips, noses, and cheeks get chapped and raw. Black ice kills. Polar vortex enters the lexicon. Snow hats look cool until you have to take them off indoors and then your hair looks shitty. It’s horrible.

But which state is the MOST horrible? After an intense period of research and debate with my friends and colleagues, factoring in everything from weather patterns and average temperatures to the efficacy with which state governments keep roads clear to the historical success rates of their winter-season sports teams, these are the results. This is one of those things where you probably actually want to finish last.

50. Hawaii

Aloha means hello, goodbye, and “who cares about pro sports teams when the average temperature during the winter is 81 and we’re all over here eating malasadas and making fun of you stupid cold haoles.” It IS kinda windy though?

49. Arizona

Occasionally, retired Kroger business executives from Ohio and their Pilates-instructor second wives will accidentally move to Flagstaff and get very sad and angry when they realize the average winter temperature is somewhere in the 20s. But most of Arizona offers up that dry desert day heat that is good for arthritis and any lingering guilt about leaving their first wives to deal with their delinquent teenage kids back in Indian Hill.

48. California

There is no generalizing about the climate of a state the size of Italy, except to say that SF’s weather rarely changes except during the weird time during the summer when it becomes winter and everyone misquotes Mark Twain; everyone in LA and San Diego just wear bikinis and surf to work year-round (except during Sharknado season) and they don’t have meteorologists in Fresno, so no one knows what happens there during any season, much less ONE of them, but it seems like it can't be that bad.

47. Colorado

Yes, this seems like an odd placement for a state that clearly experiences some serious snowfall, but the thing is, snowfall is a cause for celebration here. Have you ever been to Colorado in wintertime? The sun is shining, the winter sports are world class, and if people aren’t (legally) high as balls, then they’re getting into some fantastic beer. The Broncos are even good for a Super Bowl with a decent amount of regularity. Colorado has basically solved winter.

46. Florida

Seeing how it’s mostly a humid subtropical state filled with the type of people who unironically adorn their cars with statement bumper stickers and don’t blink for long periods of time, Florida’s winters tend to be mild, as if actively trying not to make any sudden moves lest their population get nervous and start throwing alligators.

45. New Mexico

Did you know that New Mexico is basically Colorado? And I don’t mean that as in they both tend to attract spiritually earnest people who value physical fitness and have weirdly nice calves and prefer to be outdoors wearing shawls with Native American symbols on them (though that is also true). I mean, in the sense of topography, New Mexico and Colorado both have high plains, mountain ranges, deserts, basins, and affiliations to green chile.

And though New Mexico gets warmer during the day, you can still see why people from these two states tend to live charmed winter lives/dislike each other, even as you struggle to tell them apart.

44. Louisiana

You think they’d have Mardi Gras in February (or early March) if that wasn’t an ideal time for a party?!?!! Wait -- what do you mean “it’s set by the church calendar to always fall the day before Ash Wednesday?” Well, you think they would’ve petitioned the pope for a change by now if that humid subtropical climate didn’t laissez les bon temps rouler?!? Yeah, I have no idea either, I guess. Point is, Louisiana is a decent state when it comes to dealing with the colder months, even when the memory of a historically bad pass interference call lingers.

43. Texas

According to a quick eyeballing of the globe I keep in my office, Texas is roughly the size of South America or something, and you can’t speak on the weather in Ecuador like it’s the same as Chile, right? West Texas is mostly arid desert where you can get the occasional blizzard that shuts down Amarillo, forcing their lauded indoor football team the Venom, to postpone games. East Texas is subtropical and humid even in the winter, and they get that cool advection fog in Galveston where you can’t see shit for days, and all of the ships carrying giant Texas belt buckles to Mexico are forced to stay put.

Sure, once in a while it will snow 4 inches in Dallas and people will be talking about killing their horses and sleeping inside of them Tauntaun style. With all that said, outside of the Northern Plains, the average temps in Texas in the winter usually stay in the mid-60s during the day, and that’s pretty damn nice.

42. Georgia

Psychologically it seems like Georgia should be safely out of the winter pain zone, and often that holds true, but freezing rain’s nothing to mess with, tornadoes somehow continue to be a thing even in February, and when snow does hit, no city does “wow, we were woefully underprepared for this” quite like Atlanta.

41. Alabama

13 Fact Checks on the State of the Union Address

President Donald Trump spoke for about one hour and 20 minutes Tuesday night in his second State of the Union address, interrupted–by Fox News Channel’s count—102 times by applause.

Trump punctuated his speech by saluting the stories of Americans in the gallery: former prison inmates, World War II soldiers, a Holocaust survivor and a hero cop, an ICE agent, and a young cancer survivor among them.

But what about the specifics Trump cited? Did the president nail the facts? We checked out some of those that stood out. Here are 13.

1. “We have created 5.3 million new jobs and importantly added 600,000 new manufacturing jobs—something which almost everyone said was impossible to do, but the fact is, we are just getting started.”

Trump touted economic growth on his watch in the White House, which began Jan. 20, 2017.

The 5.3 million number appears to be slightly higher than the official number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which says 4.9 million jobs have been created since January 2017.

However, the number of job openings across the nation has climbed, according to a Wall Street Journal report in November that said unfilled jobs in the United States exceeded the number of unemployed Americans by more than 1 million.

Citing the Labor Department, the Journal reported there was a seasonally adjusted total of 7.01 million job openings on the last business day of September. By contrast, 5.96 million Americans were unemployed.

Now below 4 percent, the unemployment rate has been the lowest in nearly five decades.

2. “Nearly 5 million Americans have been lifted off food stamps.”

A Dec. 7 report on the website of the Department of Agriculture, which operates the food stamp program, shows that the average annual participation in food stamps was 45.8 million in 2015, 44.2 million in 2016, 42.1 million in 2017, and 40.3 million in 2018.

The numbers show that the food stamp program saw a decline of participation from the end of Barack Obama’s administration to the beginning of Trump’s.

From January 2017 to September 2018, during Trump’s presidency, the food stamp program saw an approximate decrease of 4.1 million, according to the report.

It wasn’t immediately clear where the president got his “nearly 5 million” number.

3. “Tolerance for illegal immigration is not compassionate—it is cruel. One in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.”

A 2017 report from Doctors Without Borders looked at crossings into Mexico from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, which it calls the Northern Triangle of Central America. The report says that “nearly one-third of the women surveyed had been sexually abused during their journey.”

In 2014, Fusion reported:

Increasingly, Central American women crossing through Mexico to the United States become victims of sexual assault. Some women choose to sell their bodies for safe passage, but others aren’t given a choice. Migrant shelter directors told Fusion [that] 80 percent of Central American women who make the journey to the U.S. are raped in Mexico.

4. “The savage gang, MS-13, now operates in 20 different American states, and they almost all come through our southern border. Just yesterday, an MS-13 gang member was taken into custody for a fatal shooting on a subway platform in New York City.”

According to a May 2018 article from Time that cited older FBI numbers, MS-13, which originated in Central America, was operating in 42 states here.

In April, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, noted an increase of MS-13 gang members entering the United States along the southern border.

“Stunningly, and disturbingly, there’s been an increase of more than 200 percent of MS-13 coming across the border,” Abbott said.

News reports Monday, including by The New York Times, back up Trump’s reference to an MS-13 member arrested after a subway beating and fatal shooting.

“A 26-year-old man who the police said is a member of the violent MS-13 street gang was arrested Monday in connection with the brazen murder of a gang rival on a Queens subway platform the previous day,” the Times reported.

5. “San Diego used to have the most illegal border crossings in the country. In response … a strong security wall was put in place. This powerful barrier almost completely ended illegal crossings.”

The Daily Signal documented the dramatic results of this wall in a 2017 video report from Kelsey Harkness at the scene.

The barrier erected at San Diego’s border with Mexico in the 1990s“contributed to a 75 percent decline in crossings in the years immediately after fencing was installed in the 1990s, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data,” NBC News reported Friday.

NBC reported that “the sector went from being the top location for border crossings to a relative ghost town with 26,086 apprehensions in fiscal year 2017, according to the Border Patrol.”

6. “Unemployment has reached the lowest rate in half a century. African-American, Hispanic-American, and Asian-American unemployment have all reached their lowest levels ever recorded. Unemployment for Americans with disabilities has also reached an all-time low. ”

Unemployment for the three minority groups cited by Trump has been steadily falling, and hit record lows in 2018.

In May, black unemployment hit a record low of 5.9 percent, a number that was matched in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Hispanic unemployment hit 4.4 percent in December, also a record low,according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The number climbed slightly to 4.9 percent in January.

The unemployment rate for Asian-Americans fell to a record low of 2.2 percent in May, although the number climbed back up to 3.3 percent in January, according to the Bureau of labor Statistics.

Disabled Americans also have benefited from the growing economy.

The Wall Street Journal reported a “wave of disabled Americans joining or returning to the U.S. labor force, breaking a long-running trend that had pushed millions to the sidelines of work.”

The Journal added:

These workers have benefited from a tight economy with a very low overall unemployment rate—3.9 percent in December, just above lowest level since 1969—as employers in many sectors tackle a shortage of available workers by becoming more creative about whom they recruit.

7. “This new era of cooperation can start with finally confirming the more than 300 highly qualified nominees who are still stuck in the Senate—some after years and years of waiting.”

Trump pushed a theme of bipartisanship. As part of that theme, he asked the Senate to confirm more of his nominees for judicial and executive branch posts.

According to The Washington Times, Trump has “some 300 or so nominations that still languish, including more than 85 judicial picks that never saw final action.”

Senate Democrats have used procedural tactics to slow down the president’s nominations for the executive branch and the judiciary.

8. “It is unacceptable that Americans pay vastly more than people in other countries for the exact same drugs, often made in the exact same place. This is wrong, unfair, and together we can stop it. …Already, as a result of my administration’s efforts, in 2018 drug prices experienced their single largest decline in 46 years.”

That is in fact the case, according to The Washington Post, which reported that on average Americans spend about $1,200 more per person on prescription drugs than anyone else in the world. Some cancer drugs cost...

President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address Tuesday evening garnered a stunning amount of bipartisan approval and praise both during and after the event.

According to an “instant poll” conducted by CBS News following the event, a 76 percent majority of Americans who tuned in for the speech approved of the president’s message.

This included 97 percent of Republican viewers, 82 percent of Independent viewers and 30 percent of Democrat viewers. Note that the viewership tilted slightly to the right, with 43 percent of viewers being Republicans and 30 and 24 percent being Independents and Democrats, respectively.

While impressive, these post-SOTU address numbers only tell a part of the story. Far more notable is the markedly positive reaction the president’s words triggered as he spoke.

Watch below as a contingent of Democrat women dressed in white — many of them members of the antisemitic Women’s March — jumped to their feet in applause and even chanted “USA” as the president celebrated the record levels of female employment seen under his administration:

As conservative commentator Katie Pavlich noted on Twitter, “And there is your moment of unity. Trump got members of the Women’s March to loudly applaud his speech. This is actually incredible. And now they’re chanting USA! USA! #SOTU”

Incredible indeed.

She wasn’t the only one to take note of the surprising amount of applause Trump provoked. Nor was this the only moment that spurred loud clapping from both sides:

Some (not all) Democrats also stood up in applause when the president took a moment to outline the differences between legal immigration and illegal immigration.

“We have a moral duty to create an immigration system that protects the lives and jobs of our citizens. This includes our obligation to the millions of immigrants living here today who follow the rules and respected our laws. Legal immigrants enrich our nation and...