RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-dreamer-pawns-11548103367

Democrats rejected Donald Trump’s compromise on immigration even before it was offered on Saturday, and that by itself should be instructive for the American public. Do Democrats want a deal to reopen the government and offer new security for more than a million immigrants, or do they want to use them as pawns against Mr. Trump?

On the evidence so far, the answer is the latter. Mr. Trump’s offer of extended legal status for young adults brought to the U.S. illegally as children, as well as to Central Americans and others with expiring visas, would provide relief against deportation for hundreds of thousands.

Isn’t this something Democrats want, or at least profess to? Democrats have sent a million press releases claiming to care about the Dreamers, Haitians, and those fleeing violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua. It’s true Mr. Trump has held out this offer before only to renege. But here’s a new chance to get Mr. Trump’s signature on a legislative fix, at least for some years, without relying on the vagaries of courts and executive orders.

In return Mr. Trump wants money for border security and his wall, but political compromise means both sides get something. The wall may be a poisonous word for Democrats, but the President has already walked back his original demands. He is now talking about “steel barriers at high-priority locations,” not across all 2,000 miles. A fence of some kind already exists across 700 or so miles, the Administration is building another 115, and Mr. Trump wants to build another 230.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272623/trumps-border-wall-deal-rebuffed-dems-matthew-vadum

President Donald J. Trump extended an olive branch to Democrats on the weekend, conceding much of their immigration policy agenda in a bold longshot bid to move forward with building a southern border wall and ending the nearly month-long partial government shutdown but left-wing lawmakers rejected his overture even before he addressed the nation on TV on Saturday.

Trump’s address came after a particularly frosty week in Washington.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) informed the president he would be unable to deliver a State of the Union Address in Congress because the money wasn’t there to provide security. Trump countered by canceling a decadent junket Pelosi and other fat cat lawmakers had been planning overseas. At the eleventh-hour, while lawmakers and their guests were en route to a military airport to fly away, the president deprived them of the use of U.S. military aircraft.

Anticipating Democrat criticism, Trump said on TV, “walls are not immoral,” adding that a wall “will save many lives and stop drugs from pouring into our country.”

“This is not a concrete structure from sea to sea,” he said. “These are steel barriers in high-priority locations.”

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

On Friday, June 12th, 1987, President Reagan visited West Berlin.

Standing upon a platform, overlooking the wall which the Soviets had built to keep East Germans from escaping to freedom in the West, President Reagan chose to utter words that electrified the world. Addressing Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, he said: Mr. President, “Tear down this Wall.”

Here was a wall which, since 1951, had kept hapless souls from escaping Soviet occupied East Germany. But today there is an urgent need to build up a wall on America’s southern border – not to keep people in but to keep trespassers, drug traffickers, dangerous terrorists and violent gang members from illegally infiltrating into the United States of America.

President Trump has outlined the danger that stalks the southern border and imperils America’s very sovereignty as an independent nation state. He has praised the border agents who hourly face violence from brutal criminals as they repeatedly and illegally cross the unprotected border. But this alarming fact does not phase the likes of Pelosi and Schumer or of the growing extremists within the ranks of the Democrat party. The Democrats simply will not work with President Trump and they are willing to ignore the humanitarian and national security crisis that exists and grows daily.

President Trump has stressed again and again the towering need for a wall on the southern border to prevent a tide of illegal aliens from imperiling U.S. sovereignty and bringing with it misery, violence and death.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272576/congress-earns-nero-award-fiddling-while-america-michael-cutler

President Trump has decided to not sign off on the federal budget until it includes money for a physical barrier to finally secure the dangerous and highly porous U.S./Mexican border from the un-inspected entry of aliens and cargo.

That tough decision has been a long time coming.

With no budget, nonessential sections of the government have been shut down and some federal employees deemed “essential” are working without pay.

As a former federal employee I can certainly empathize with those federal employees. I recall working without pay when prior partial government shutdowns occurred.

Many pundits and “political analysts” have said that the administration should compromise. As things now stand, there is nothing to compromise about. Any “compromise” with Pelosi and company would only compromise national security. That “compromise” has been ongoing for decades and we have all too many dead bodies that prove how dangerous open borders are.

The media is focused on how many days federal employees have gone without pay, but no one is keeping track of how many years our borders have failed to prevent the entry of narcotics, weapons, criminals, terrorists and foreign workers who displace hard-working Americans and drive down the wages of those who are fortunate to keep their jobs.

The mainstream media has reported, as part of coverage about the impact of the partial government shutdown, that some TSA employees have failed to report for duty, thereby causing delays at airports as long lines of travelers wait to be screened by the diminished workforce.

Certainly there is not much that can be done when TSA personnel don’t show up for work. After all, no one would want to board an airliner unless all passengers and their luggage are carefully screened.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/realities-on-the-border-demand-a-reality-check-by-our-politicians/

Karen Vaughn is a Gold Star mother and advisory board member for Mom’s March for America, a project of Moms for America.

This past November Moms for America went “boots on the ground” in Hidalgo, Texas. Thirty-five women from across the nation left the comfort of our homes and chose to see for ourselves if the border crisis was manufactured or real. And trust me…it is very real.

What we saw and experienced was astoundingly difficult to take in. The first-hand accounts from mothers who actually live on the border not only made my skin crawl but stirred in me a righteous indignation for all who oppose helping those American families – women and children who’ve now been abandoned to be America’s first line of defense … women who sleep with shotguns in their bed and pistols in their nightstands because their lives have been threatened so many times by illegals congregating in their yard or attempting to enter the sanctity of their home.

At Moms for America, we stand with our president and urge him to never back down. Building the wall is the right thing to do. While we honor our brave and fearless border security agents, personal conversations with them revealed the truth that they can only do so much, and THEY NEED HELP.

During President Trump’s trip last week to McAllen, Texas, he spoke with a Border Patrol officer who offered a very chilling insight into the realities of apprehensions on the southern border. He explained that their sector alone had apprehended individuals from 41 different countries — 41! In fact, in just in one day (Monday of last week) there were 450 apprehensions on the border in south Texas… 133 of which were people from countries other than Central America and Mexico.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272553/2000-muslim-child-marriage-immigration-cases-10-daniel-greenfield

Naila Amin was only thirteen years old when she was married off to her Pakistani first cousin twice her age who beat and raped her. “He dragged me about twenty feet – the whole length of the house – by my hair,” she relates. “He began kicking me in the head and it was so hard I saw stars.”

She described how, “My mother would watch my husband and my father kick me together in the head.”

Even though Nalia was a United States citizen, she was engaged to be married when she was eight years old. And at thirteen, her application to bring her rapist to the United States was approved by USCIS.

By the age of fifteen, she was being raped and beaten in Pakistan.

While Nalia is the youngest of the “child brides” in the Senate report, “How the U.S. Immigration System Encourages Child Marriages”, the young abused American citizen is one of thousands of young girls who are either trafficked into this country or who are used to bring their older “husbands” to America.

Between 2007 and 2017, there were 8,686 petitions for spousal or fiancé visas for or on behalf of minors. And during that same period, 4,749 minors on spousal or fiancé visas got green cards. Even while the United States was claiming to fight sex trafficking in underage girls, our own immigration system was rewarding and promoting the sexual trafficking of girls as young as thirteen.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272539/secure-borders-protect-immigrant-communities-michael-cutler

The Democrats are determined to block the essential construction of a secure barrier on the dangerous U.S./Mexican border that would insure that all who enter the United States are vetted and that records of their entry into the United States are created.

Nancy Pelosi has declared that such a fortification would be “immoral” while her cohort Chuck Schumer stated that the symbol of America should not be a “Thirty foot wall, but the Statue of Liberty.”

Clearly there is a crisis on that border (along with other elements of the immigration system) but for the Democrats, the entry of millions of illegal aliens and tons of narcotics and other contraband is not a crisis but evidence of a success. For them, the entry of those aliens is the fruition of their policies’ goals.

As I have noted in several recent articles, there is certainly nothing immoral about preventing alien criminals and terrorists from entering the United States. There is nothing immoral about protecting American and lawful immigrant workers from being displaced by foreign workers or in having them suffer wage suppression because of the tsunami of a massive illegal alien Third World workforce.

New York State’s Governor Cuomo, who unbelievably referred to ICE agents as “Thugs,” decided to be publicly sworn in at Ellis Island to begin his third term in office. He selected Ellis Island to further his fraudulent claim that he is “pro-immigrant.” In reality, he is a staunch advocate for immigration anarchy and illegal immigration that most endangers the immigrant communities in his state.

President Trump has been accused of being “anti-immigrant” when, in point of fact, his actions and policies are the most “pro-immigrant” we have seen in many, many years.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-migrant-caravan-heads-north-from-honduras-to-the-border/

A new caravan of more than 500 migrants gathered at a bus station in a Honduran city Monday night to begin the perilous trek to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Members of the caravan, which left from the city of San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras, begged local shop keepers for food and water for their journey on their way out of town, Fox News reported.

President Trump cited the formation of new migrant caravans on Thursday to illustrate the necessity of the $5.7 billion in funding he has demanded Congress provide for the construction of a border wall.

“There is another major caravan forming right now in Honduras, and so far we’re trying to break it up, but so far it’s bigger than anything we’ve seen,” Trump said. “And a drone isn’t going to stop it and a sensor isn’t going to stop it, but you know what’s going to stop it in its tracks? A nice, powerful wall.”

The 6,000-person caravan that arrived in Tijuana, Mexico in the fall was organized by a number of pro-immigration activist groups but it remains unclear which, if any, organization orchestrated the latest mass movement. Many members of the last caravan are still waiting in Tijuana for their asylum claims to be processed.

The Mexican government recently vowed to work with the U.S. to ensure more migrants can claim asylum and find work in Mexico in order to reduce the burden on the overwhelmed U.S. asylum system. Mexican officials have announced that those migrants who enter Mexico lawfully will be allowed to keep traveling toward to the U.S. border while those that enter illegally will be deported.

More than 300,000 Central Americans entered Mexico illegally last year, 80 percent of whom were headed for the U.S. border, according to Mexico’s interior minister, Olga Sánchez Cordero.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/13/do-the

Scott Adams, the creator of the popular cartoon “Dilbert,” transformed himself into a persona non grata in 2016 by exposing how Donald Trump manipulated the media by using sophisticated persuasion techniques. History proved Adams was correct and Trump won the election. As it turns out, Trump was not the bumbling blowhard of CNN’s fever dreams. He was a marketing mastermind whose words went far beyond “resonating” with ordinary Americans—they stuck. Epithets like crooked, lyin’, and low-energy were not just insults, they were silver bullets spoken by a silver tongue. Hillary, Ted, and Jeb didn’t know what hit ’em.

Two years on and Trump’s word-wizardry is as potent as ever—Pocahontas‘s racial fraud is now common knowledge, and Trump’s little rocket man jab arguably set the stage for North Korea’s denuclearization summit. At this point, Trump’s language is indistinguishable from political magic. For example, Trump’s push for “the wall” has turned ardent socialists into laissez-faire economists on the issue of illegal immigration—who cares if migration hurts America’s most vulnerable? We need aliens to grow the economy!

This flip-flop has made it clear to ordinary Americans: the Democratic Party cares more about illegal aliens than it does the common citizen.

Another Brick in the Wall
The Democratic Party shut down the government to avoid funding President Trump’s border wall with Mexico. In the meantime, the media has harped incessantly on the wall’s futility. The wall is too expensive, they claim. And in any event, the wall won’t work!

Nonsense. Illegal aliens cost American citizens more in three months than the wall will cost to build in its entirety. What’s more, the available evidence suggests that walls are fantastically effective at arresting migrant flows.

To begin with: how much will Trump’s wall cost to build?

In her informative piece, statistician Liberty Vittert estimates that Trump’s wall will cost some $25 billion to build. Vittert breaks her estimate down as follows:

Size of the wall: 1,150 miles long; 40 feet high; 10 feet deep into the ground; 1 foot wide

Total volume of material: 11.2 million cubic yards

Materials: Approximately $8.7 billion in concrete (97 percent of the materials); approximately $3.6 billion in steel (3 percent of the materials)

Labor: Approximately $12.3 billion (given the labor costs on the original 654 miles of barriers we can assume a conservative 1:1 ratio of materials to labor)

Land acquisition: About 60 percent of the border is privately owned land. While the federal government has the power to take privately owned property for public purposes, it must provide “just compensation.” Based on previous purchases from the 2006-2009 wall construction, the cost at most would be $300,000 per mile acquired, or approximately $200 million altogether.

In total, the actual physical cost of the wall would be about $25 billion.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/01/12/dump-the-nationa

One of the more revelatory aspects of the Trump era is how the national media, after taking an extended nap between 2009 and 2017, now are very worried about constitutional overreach by the executive branch. Presidential power-grabs—which were super cool just five years ago when Barack Obama threatened to use “a pen and a phone” to work around a Republican-controlled legislative branch—suddenly went out of style in January 2017. Obama needed to take unilateral action as a last resort, the media argued, because of those big, bad Republicans.

“Blocked for most of his presidency by Congress, Obama has sought to act however he could,” lamented the New York Times in August 2016. “In the process he created the kind of government neither he nor the Republicans wanted—one that depended on bureaucratic bulldozing rather than legislative transparency.”

But it was for our own good, insisted the Times. “An army of lawyers working under Obama’s authority has sought to restructure the nation’s health care and financial industries, limit pollution, bolster workplace protections and extend equal rights to minorities. Under Obama, the government has literally placed a higher value on human life.”

Thanks, Obama!

The former president often defended himself to sympathetic journalists. “I am not going to apologize for trying to do something while they’re doing nothing,” he boasted to George Stephanopoulos in a June 2014 interview on ABC News.

To what was Obama referring? Immigration. “The majority of the American people want to see immigration reform done. We had a bipartisan bill through the Senate, and you’re going to squawk if I try to fix some parts of it administratively that are within my authority while you are not doing anything?”