Patterico's Pontifications

1/25/2017

Bad Lip Reading: Inauguration Day

Filed under: General — Dana @ 8:49 pm



[guest post by Dana]

Absolutely hilarious!

–Dana

President Trump Takes Steps To “Enforce Strongly” The Laws Of The United States

Filed under: General — Dana @ 6:26 pm



[guest post by Dana]

As we all know, Donald Trump’s presidential campaign drew huge numbers of voters who were elated by his promise to reform immigration in our country and to “Build that Wall!” Today he took steps to move on that promise:

President Trump signed a pair of executive actions Wednesday to begin ramping up immigration enforcement, including a new border wall with Mexico, vowing that construction on his chief campaign pledge would begin in months.

The presidential directives signed Wednesday aim to create more detention centers, add more federal border control agents and withhold federal funds to cities that do not comply with federal immigration laws. One order calls for the “immediate construction of a physical wall.”

“I’m asking all of you to enforce the laws of the United States. They will be enforced and enforced strongly.”

“We’re going to restore the rule of law in the United States…A nation without borders is not a nation. Beginning today, the United States of America gets back control of its borders. You guys are about to be very, very busy doing your job [as] you want to.”

Excellent!

According to President Trump, the planning is starting immediately, and construction will begin as soon as it is feasible.

Significant provisions in the order include, but are not limited to: broadening enforcement policies, allow States to “perform the functions of immigration officers in relation to investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States,” enable the hiring of 10,000 law enforcement officers with current allocations and make declared sanctuary cities ineligible to receive federal grants. Further, “the initial work of planning construction will be covered by $100 million in appropriations left over in a DHS account.”

While a whole lot of Americans will no doubt support these steps to enforce our immigration laws and protect our boundaries, there are those who are flipping out – embarrassingly so:

Untitled

Oh, really????

As a result of today’s actions by President Trump, President Nieto of Mexico, who was scheduled to make a visit to the U.S. next week, is reconsidering whether he will grace our nation with his presence.

And, in a bit of irony, in related news concerning national security, immigrants entering the U.S., and protecting Americans, there was this report today :

Federal agents are reinvestigating the backgrounds of dozens of Syrian refugees already in the United States after discovering a lapse in vetting that allowed some who had potentially negative information in their files to enter the country, two U.S. law enforcement officials said.

Agents have not concluded that any of the refugees should have been rejected for entry, but the apparent glitch — which was discovered in late 2015 and corrected last year — prevented U.S. officials who conducted background checks on the refugees from learning about possible “derogatory” information about them, the two officials said. At a minimum, the intelligence would have triggered further investigation that could have led some asylum applications to be rejected.

The refugees whose cases are under review include one who failed a polygraph test when he applied to work at a U.S. military installation overseas and another who may have been in communication with an Islamic State leader, according to the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the matter.

Amusingly, this is how the LAT spins reports the numbers because they assume you couldn’t figure out the counter of them:

The vast majority pose no threat, officials say. Nearly half of the Syrians admitted since 2011 were under the age of 14, and more than half are female.

–Dana

Deadspin Editor Melts Down After Cruz Owns Him

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 11:00 am



Today, I leave discussion about Trump’s obsession with the popular vote, his threatening to “send in the Feds” to Chicago, or the upcoming week of “Celebrity Apprentice: The Supreme Court” in the capable hands of others. This post is going to be about making fun of a snarky lefty.

You have likely heard about the little Twitter interchange between Deadspin and Ted Cruz. If you missed it, you can see the embeds at Mickey White’s post. The executive summary is: Deadspin’s Ashley Feinberg tweeted out a request for pictures of Ted Cruz playing basketball (after Politico reported that Cruz is playing basketball as part of a new collegiality campaign). Cruz tweeted out a picture of Grayson Allen, a Duke basketball player who looks so much like Cruz it’s a meme. Deadspin responded with humorless profanity, and Cruz responded humorously with the Ron Burgundy “that escalated quickly” meme. All good, fun stuff.

Then it got even better. (This post is about to go all Twitchy on your backside, with a lot of Twitter embeds — but hey, this is a Twitter-centric mockfest.) Deadspin editor Tim Marchman got busy:

But don’t email him. Tweet him. Trust me. It upsets him a lot more.

DO YOU HAVE THE BRASS TO EMAIL TIM MARCHMAN?? WELL, DO YOU?

I’m not sure if the reference to the “UFC octagon” was a reference to an actual physical fight, or just the hardscrabble manly testosterone-infused brawling that is an email exchange with Tim Marchman.

Anyway, it’s not a real big surprise that the ridicule kicked into high gear right about then. Here’s one example:

Sounds like the email thing isn’t working out for old Tim though.

[Cross-posted at RedState and The Jury Talks Back.]

Exit Bubba

Filed under: General — JVW @ 6:50 am



[guest post by JVW]

No matter how you feel about the new President, one thing we all (well, most of us anyway) can agree upon is that the marginalization of the Clinton Family is a most welcome development. The restoration of the House of Clinton, which came ever so close to being realized, is now permanently on hold, and despite the fondest wishes of their last remaining sycophants (Hello Sid Blumenthal! Hello David Brock!) it seems to be inconceivable that Hillary! will upset the Big Applecart (I promise I don’t have too many of these bad puns in me) and take on incumbent mayor Bill de Blasio, no matter how wretched his management of the city may be. Meanwhile, daughter Chelsea shows no inclination to give up the posh life as an independently-wealthy part-time college administrator to enter the grubby political scene, especially the sewer of Democrat politics in New York. Thus, the Clintons appear to be for all practical purposes over and done with.

I had been meaning to put up a post on an interesting development from last week, namely the announcement of the imminent shuttering of the Clinton Global Initiative. I guess it turns out that once you have no more influence to trade, donations from foreign sources have a way of drying up. Oh sure, the Clintons can plausibly claim that they had stopped raising money from overseas sources last summer when confidence of Hillary!’s certain election victory was at its peak, so this development was in the works all along. But given that neither she nor Bubba really have anything to do these days it is kind of hard to imagine why they wouldn’t throw themselves into — ahem, ahem — all the valuable work that the Clinton Global Initiative does unless this is a case where no one any longer wants to buy what they have to sell.

And that of course brings us to Bill, our forty-second President and almost our first First Gentleman (yeah, I involuntarily shudder too). It’s hard not to imagine the mixed emotions that must be swirling through the ol’ lyin’ horndog’s mind, at once lamenting his blown opportunity to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue while at the same time no doubt being relieved that he is free to return to his usual trashy ways. Geoffrey Norman has a terrific essay at The American Spectator on Bubba’s descent into irrelevancy:

It can’t be easy for any ex-president, the exile from the stage. The world of politics and celebrity has been to Bill Clinton as the oceans are to a great shark. If he stops swimming, the shark dies. But there will be another big fish swimming the same waters, and Barack Obama is now a far brighter and newer star than Clinton, with minimal ethical baggage and no lost elections on his résumé. He will be in much hotter demand than a man who has been out of the White House for 16 years.

Quite right. Bill’s brand of whatever-55%-of-the-country-is-for-is-exactly-what-I-am-for politics which served him so well in an era of post-Cold War peace and dot-com-boom prosperity has been eclipsed by Barack Obama’s dammit-we’re-on-the-right-side-of-history brand of ideological purity filtered through he noxious dual-valve carburetor of grievance politics and faculty-lounge groupthink. Obama, who expressed a backhanded contempt for Clinton’s largely risk-adverse agenda after the Democrats’ inglorious defeat in the 1994 midterm elections, may not have had much success in imposing his will on the country after the GOP ended Nancy Pelosi’s speakership in the 2010 midterms, but he leaves office with the party pretty much coalesced around his basic notions of a large and powerful bureaucracy emboldened by copious intrusive legislation managing virtually aspect of a citizen’s day-to-day life. The idea of a white male from the South ever rising to the upper echelon of the Democrat machine seems so farfetched these days that even after Hillary’s tough loss there is pretty much no one who expects Tim Kaine to be a serious candidate for the party’s Presidential nomination in 2020.

So goodbye, Bubba. You were crass, crude, craven, and corrupt, but you always made it interesting. Once upon a time you were even considered to be the first black President, but in the end your inauthenticity and artifice not to mention your insistence on feeding your own inflated ego before deigning to serve others, will probably render you just another footnote to history.

[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]

– JVW


Powered by WordPress.

Page loaded in: 0.1034 secs.