BREAKING: Obama Judge Follows Constitution on Fracking Regulation!

Color me shocked, stunned, flabbergasted, discombobulated and utterly, completely agog:  A federal judge appointed by our current President issued a decision yesterday that - be sure you are sitting down before you go on - actually follows the legislative and regulatory process as the founding fathers and Constitution envisioned it ought to work.

I know that's hard to believe - trust me, upon reading the article, I did a double take and went over to snopes.com and The Onion to make sure it wasn't an urban legend or a prank - but it's true.  It actually did happen.

Here are the high points:

• Federal Judge Scott Skavdahl is a federal district court judge in Wyoming, appointed by Barack Obama;

• His ruling, for once, exactly follows the intent of the legislative/regulatory process, i.e., he rules that DOI cannot regulate hydraulic fracturing because Congress has not given that power to DOI.  What a concept!;

• Key passage from the decision:  "Congress' inability or unwillingness to pass a law desired by the executive branch does not default authority to the executive branch to act independently, regardless of whether hydraulic fracturing is good or bad for the environment or the citizens of the United States.”

·        If upheld through the appellate process, the reasoning behind this decision could have wide-reaching impacts on other major Obama Administration environment-related regulatory actions, such as the Waters of the U.S. and methane emissions regulations, given that all of those actions also vastly exceed the authority granted to the regulators by congress.

DOI will of course appeal this decision, but at least for this morning, justice has actually prevailed.

Somebody pinch me and make sure I'm not just dreaming this...

Another Ghoulish Administration Lie

Attorney General Loretta Lynch is going to appear on every Sunday morning news program today. Her focus will not be Islamic Terrorism as it should be. Nor will her focus be the seemingly interminable FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton's serial selling of U.S. national security interests for personal gain, as it ought to be.

The Attorney General's focus will be to attempt to shift attention away from those real issues by demagoging the fake "gun control" issue.

This should really come as no surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the activities of the President and the Democrat presumptive nominee since the latest Islamic Terrorist atrocity took place in Orlando last week.

They are laying the foundation for the President to issue yet another in a long line of blatantly unconstitutional executive orders relating to gun control, most likely an order that would pretend to outlaw "assault weapons".

You can expect such an order to come as early as this week. These people always strike while the iron is hot, and as they like to say, they never want to let a good crisis - like 49 dead Americans - go to waste.

It's important to remember that the last time a major administration official appeared on every Sunday morning news program was when the UN Ambassador, Susan Rice, took to the air to blame the Benghazi attacks on a video, another blatant, disgraceful lie which Hillary Clinton fully supported.

These people are ghouls. They really, really are.

Political Correctness IS The Problem

[Today a friend put up a Facebook post that said "I'm tired of moments of silence.  I want a voice who takes action and creates change."  The following was my reply to her.]

I completely agree.  I'm tired of moments of silence, too, and want a voice who takes action and creates change.

The people currently running our government - Democrat and Republican alike - rely on the complacency of the masses. They rely on the people out in flyover country to believe that, by having moments of silence, sending out images of ribbons in rainbow colors, or changing our avatars to an image of the French or Belgian flags, we have accomplished something real, and can now go back to our daily lives feeling better about ourselves.

The truth, of course, is that such feel-good gestures accomplish nothing. Nothing at all, other than, as previously mentioned, making us feel better about ourselves for having done the politically correct thing.

The problem here is that Political Correctness IS THE PROBLEM. By doing nothing other than the politically correct thing, and nothing more, all we are doing is facilitating the maintenance of the status quo.

That's exactly what the people in Washington, R and D alike, want us to do. If you wonder why everyone whose livelihoods and bases of power lay in our nation's capitol have reacted with such hate and anger towards the candidacy of Donald Trump, and why even many Rs are likely going to support Hillary Clinton over their own nominee, you need to understand it is precisely because he threatens to upset the status quo that feathers all of their respective beds.

PC IS the problem. PC is the reason why 49 good Americans died in Orlando last weekend. PC is the reason why the FBI was aware of this terrorist and could do nothing to stop him. PC is why they actually interviewed the guy three times but had no choice but to let him go. PC is why a known terrorist threat was able to hold down a job for years which required a federal background check.

PC is the problem. It is our enemy. And if we all do nothing in response to Orlando and Paris and Brussels and San Bernadino but the PC thing, then we become part of the problem, too.

Connecting the Terrorism Dots

Our CIA Director is telling a congressional committee this morning that ISIS is working to send many more jihadists to the United States.  One of the main ways they plan to do that is by embedding them among the thousands of Syrian refugees that President Obama has already begun to bring into this country.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton recently doubled down on her pledge to continue and even increase the President’s policy towards giving these refugees asylum in this country, rather than find ways to provide them safety in their own country.

Progressives and our fake national news media appear to be incapable of making any connection between these realities and the constantly growing incidence rate of Islamic terrorist atrocities in the United States.

Connecting dots in a logical manner has never been a strong point for “progressives”.

Also this week, as the nation reels and mourns in the wake of 49 Americans murdered by a rampaging Islamic terrorist, President Obama quietly named a woman who is pretty much unquestionably a radical Islamist to his Council on Homeland Security.  I’m not making this up, promise.

Laila Alawa is a 25 year-old Syrian immigrant who has publicly praised the 9/11 attacks as having made the world a better place.  Although she immigrated to this country at the age of 10, she has publicly renounced any intention of ever becoming an assimilated American citizen.  Her Twitter feed is full of hate-filled, racist tweets towards America and Americans.

This is who our President wants on his Homeland Security Advisory Council.

Progressives and our fake national news media are incapable of making any connection between this sort of insanity and the constantly growing incidence rate of Islamic terrorist atrocities on U.S. soil.

Speaking of our President, today is Thursday, four full days after the Islamic terrorist committed his atrocity in Orlando, and he still hasn’t managed to find a moment to make a phone call to the Governor of Florida.  True, the Governor of Florida, Rick Scott, is a Republican, and we all know that this President considers Republicans to be his only true enemies, but every other president since the invention of the telephone would have put in a call to the governor of any state suffering such an attack within a few hours of its happening.

Again, there is no depth to which this President will not stoop in order to divide this country.

Progressives and our fake national news media are incapable of making any connection between this sort of intentionally divisive behavior in the White House and the constantly growing incidence rate of Islamic terrorist atrocities on U.S. soil.

Yesterday I mentioned that the FBI had interviewed the Orlando Islamic terrorist twice and had let him go free both times.  I was wrong:  it is reported today that the FBI actually had interviewed this obvious radical Islamist THREE times and had let him go free every time.  Not only that, but he was not placed on the FBI watch list – contrary to Hillary Clinton’s claims – and he was allowed to maintain his job as a security agent, a job which required a Homeland Security background check.

To understand why he was able to pass that background check and retain that job and avoid being placed on the FBI’s terrorist watch list, go back up and read who it is that our President appoints to his Homeland Security Advisory Board.

Progressives and our fake national news media are incapable of connecting any of these dots. 

They are, however, capable of inventing false connections between this religiously-motivated act and the need for “gun control”, because, you know, inanimate objects are the real issue here.

Hillary Clinton announced that the only things she would change to the current Obama policies would be to institute the following gun control measures:

·         Remove the “gun show loophole” in the background check laws;

·         Reinstate the “assault weapons” ban; and

·         Make sure that no one under FBI investigation could go out and buy firearms.

Here are the problems with these proposals:

·         There is no such thing as a “gun show loophole” – it hasn’t existed for years now.  She is relying on the ignorance and stupidity of average Americans in continuing to advocate eliminating something that does not exist;

·         The “assault weapons” ban existed in the law for many years, and never prevented any criminal from obtaining an “assault weapon”.  The policy was repealed because it made absolutely no difference whatsoever;

·         Preventing those under FBI investigation from purchasing guns would of course prevent Mrs. Clinton and all of her top advisors from being able to buy guns, because they are all under FBI investigation as of today.

But seriously, it would make sense for the government to make it illegal for anyone who is on the FBI terrorist watch list to obtain any sort of firearm.  It makes so much sense that Donald Trump met with the leaders of the NRA yesterday to try to convince them to support this change.

If the leaders of the NRA are smart, they will decide to support that change to the law.  It would be great publicity for them, and show they do understand that every right in the Bill of Rights is subject to certain limitations.

Of course, what Mrs. Clinton, her fellow progressives, and our fake national news media studiously ignore is that the Orlando Islamic terrorist was not on the FBI’s watch list, and thus, this change in policy would have – like every other gun control proposal they support – made no difference at all in what took place in Orlando.

All of those people would still be dead, the nation would still be in mourning, and our country would still be less safe, all because progressives and our fake national news media insist upon ignoring and distracting attention away from the real root cause of the problem.

Speaking the Name That Shall Not be Spoken, at Last

Well, if nothing else positive comes out of this horrific atrocity in Orlando, Donald Trump did manage to finally, after 7-1/2 long years, get both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to utter the words “Radical Islam”.  This is a breakthrough that no establishment Republican, no conservative critic, no member of our fake national “news” media had ever been able to accomplish with these two uniformly dishonest and politically correct politicians.

Both Hillary and Obama naturally pooh-pooed the notion that their willingness to actually utter the true name of the real existential threat to American democracy was in any way important, and in doing that they were both entirely incorrect.

This is a big deal.  Really, it is.

It’s a big deal because the Clinton/Obama policy of attempting to fight Islamic terrorism in a squeamish, politically correct way has been woefully inadequate, and has gotten thousands of Americans needlessly killed both here in the U.S., and abroad in the myriad Middle Eastern conflicts in which our military has been ineffectually engaged during this presidency.  One truly cannot effectively fight an enemy if one is not just unable, but unwilling to accurately name who that enemy happens to be.

The result of such an approach is that we force the FBI and other federal, state and local law enforcement agencies to spend days and weeks following an obvious case of Islamic terrorism wasting precious resources speculating about what, oh, what might his motivation have actually been?  The result is we have 49 dead Americans shot up in a club by an obvious Islamic terrorist who had been under FBI surveillance for more than two years, who was known to be violent, was a known wife-beater, had a father who was apparently a CIA asset, had regularly associated with radical jihadists, had openly and loudly proclaimed his support for ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and who had, despite all of this, somehow been able to not only obtain firearms, but also managed to – unbelievably! – hold down a job as a security agent, a job that required a background check by the Department of Homeland Security.

Folks, this makes the background story of the government’s awareness and surveillance of Lee Harvey Oswald prior to the Kennedy Assassination look positively sane by comparison.

But don’t blame the FBI and other law enforcement/Intelligence agencies.  The Obama/Clinton policy of attacking Islamic terrorism through the lens of political correctness requires that the FBI – which interviewed this terrorist twice but let him go both times – pretend that such a person is just another ordinary American.  Mustn’t “profile” him based on his associations and obviously violent intention, oh, no. Why, that would be “racist” (even though Islam is not a “race”) or even worse, “Islamophobic” (even though most adherents to Islam in the U.S. do not openly associate with or proclaim allegiance to ISIS, Al Qaeda and the Taliban, and thus do not require monitoring by law enforcement).  Why, that might harm this poor man’s sense of self-esteem, and we mustn’t do that, because the #1 job of the federal government in this administration is the maintenance of everyone’s self-esteem, isn’t it?

But because Trump aggressively condemned this Clinton/Obama policy of forced national insanity in his speech on Monday afternoon, both felt compelled to actually utter the words the next day, Hillary in yet another puff interview on one of the lapdog networks and the President in an extraordinarily petulant and thin-skinned “press conference”, during which he naturally took ZERO questions from the uncomplaining mannequins who make up our fake press corps.

Of course, other than this far overdue actual naming of the real, true enemy, the Democrat strategy was, as it always is, to distract, shift the subject and attempt to blame this latest Islamic Terrorist act on Christians and guns.  They’re so focused now on denying you your rights under the 2^nd Amendment that they now have Jeh Johnson, Director of Homeland Security, out there saying that gun control is now a key national security objective.

You should really pay attention to that new reality, because it is not just a new talking point.  These people do not say things like that just for fun.  What it means is that this administration – and, God help us all if it comes about – a Hillary Clinton administration will now begin finding ways to subvert the 2^nd Amendment under the Patriot Act and other homeland security measures passed following 9/11.

Don’t believe me?  Read the Tuesday New York Times editorial advocating that DHS establish a new “secret court” that would have as its mission the steadily-increasing undermining of 2^nd Amendment gun ownership rights.  In case you hadn’t figured this out by now, the New York Times is the official mouthpiece of this Administration, and quite often takes its cues and talking points directly from Obama officials.  If you think this editorial coming simultaneously with Mr. Johnson’s new talking point is a coincidence, check back in with me a year from now.

What this latest incidence of Islamic terrorism should bring home to any thoughtful American is how critical it is for November’s election to produce a real change in direction for our policy towards the threat.  The only real change of direction available to voters is Donald Trump.

But at least the country’s two leading Democrats have finally been forced to utter the threat’s real name.  As sad and tragically hilarious as it is to say it, that’s progress.

Trump's Wasted Week that Was - Or Was it?

During the second half of March, Donald Trump pretty much unarguably had the worst two weeks any presidential candidate in modern times has ever had.  He was completely off-message, focused on the wrong things, constantly under fire from the mainstream [fake] news media, and just generally looked lost.  The "Trump is Hitler", "Trump is a racist", "Trump is a misogynist" memes were ubiquitous on all the talking head shows and across all social media.

The result of those two weeks came with a big-time loss to Ted Cruz in the Wisconsin primary.  This led all the "smart" people in Washington - like Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer and George Will and all the pinheads who write for The National Review these days - to declare Trump dead as a doornail, proclaiming with certainty that Trump could never, never, ever even hope to get to the 1237 delegate needed to win the nomination, and that the GOP would end up having a brokered convention out of which Ted Cruz would emerge victorious.

Remember all of that?  If you don't, go back and do a little review, 'cuz that's exactly what happened during that period of time.

So what happened next?  What happened next was Ted Cruz never won another contested primary.  What happened next was Ted Cruz and the crazy party guest who just won't leave, John Kasich, finally dropped out of the race following Trump's huge win in the Indiana primary.  What happened next was Trump ran his delegate total all the way to 1542 as of this writing, with still more on the way.  What happened next was Bill Kristol made a clown of himself by pushing some blogger no one had ever heard of as his own stellar independent candidate.  What happened next was Trump already consolidating support in the GOP to the same level Mitt Romney managed to put together in the 2012 race.  What happened next was Trump taking a temporary polling lead over Hillary Clinton, something none of the "smart" people thought could ever happen in a million years.

That's what happened next, all of it after Trump had experienced the most god-awful two week period in the history of American politics in March.

And now we sit here at the end of another lost week for Donald Trump.  He was focused on the wrong things, completely off-message, creating controversy where none needed to exist, pounded 24 hours a day by the [fake] news media, needlessly giving rise again to the "Trump is a racist" meme.  His lead over Hillary is now a thing of the past, his campaign is supposedly out of money, and his millions of dollars worth of free weekly airtime on the 24 hour cable networks has all but disappeared.

So now what's happening?  Why, all the same "smart" people who declared him dead in early April are now declaring him dead in early June.  Bill Kristol and his gang of #NeverTrump circus clowns are busy huddling with Mitt Romney concocting yet another scheme to steal the nomination from Trump at the convention in July.  Normal people who see Hillary Clinton as the personification of evil in our time and want desperately to support Trump as the only viable alternative to four or eight years of resident evil in the White House are walking around with their heads down, despairing that Trump is blowing this thing.

That's what's happening now.  Everything is right back where it was in early April.

Given what has happened during the course of this campaign season to this point, what do you think is the most likely thing to start happening next?

Get your heads up, Trump fans.  It's a long way to November.

Right About Trump, Wrong About Bernie

Honestly, I ought to know better than to try to predict what any Democrat/Socialist/Commie candidate like Bernie Sanders will do.  Monday, I predicted he would probably abandon the race after a loss to Hillary Clinton in California ensured he has no means of actually becoming the Democratic Party's presidential nominee.

Obviously, he didn't do that, although we did see a report this morning that he's jettisoned about 75% of his campaign staff and is beginning to wind things down.  I made the terrible mistake of assuming the man might show a little class in defeat, forgetting that he's a commie, and thus has no class at all.

Ah, well, live and learn.

On the other side of the ledger, Donald Trump firmly and irrevocably clinched the GOP nomination, for better or worse, running his total of committed delegates up over 1400, far more than the 1237 he will need to prevail at the convention on the first ballot.  Those of you who have been reading first my Facebook feed and later this blog know I've been predicting this would be the case since December for three main reasons:

• Trump understands the crucial role that communications and persuasion play in a political campaign far better than any of the actual politicians who ran for the office this go-round;
• Trump understands how concerned most of the U.S. population is with the unfettered refusal of the Obama administration to enforce our country's immigration laws and has owned that issue throughout the campaign; and
• Trump was the clear leader in the polls in December, and the GOP has always, in every election cycle since 1952, ended up nominating the candidate who led in the national polling data in December.

So, despite all of the hyper-emotional rhetoric and goofy schemes that came out of the #neverTrump crowd, despite all of the efforts of Trump's 16 primary opponents, despite all of the myriad efforts by the establishment news media to kill his candidacy, this day when Trump irrevocably clinches the party's nomination has been a foregone conclusion since about December 15.

Below I have cut and pasted a piece I posted to my Facebook page on January 13 of this year.  While I failed then to foresee the refusal of John Kasich to give up the ghost when it was obvious he had no chance at all, it turned out to otherwise be a pretty accurate projection of how the race would ultimately go.

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Doing the Math on the GOP Race

I see a lot of discussion among the DC punditry and around the Interwebs about the theory that, once Iowa and New Hampshire have come and gone, the GOP Establishment will consolidate around a single candidate and that person will then be highly competitive with Trump for the nomination. Let's take a look at the current numbers, using the RealClearPolitics average of recent public polls, and see how the math works:

Current National RCP Average:

Trump 35
Cruz 19
Rubio 11
Carson 8
Bush 5
Christie 3
Fiorina 3
Huckabee 2
Kasich 2
Paul 2

So, between Trump/Cruz/Carson, you have - honestly amazingly - the magic 62% of GOP voters supporting a non-establishment candidate. (The support for those three candidates has for the last four months totaled up to within a percentage point or two of that 62% number in almost every poll take – it’s astonishingly consistent, and frankly spooky.) Add in Fiorina, Huckabee and Paul, none of whom are establishment favorites, and you are at 69%. The total for the other, establishment candidates comes to 21%. 10% remain undecided.

Let's say that, after New Hampshire, Christie and Kasich get out because they didn't do well (Jeb! will stick it out through March or until his super pac runs out of money). And let's give 100% of their votes to Rubio. That gets Rubio to all of 16%.

Let's also say that, after NH, Carson, Fiorina, Huckabee and Paul all finally get out. Let's be generous and split their votes 1/3 each between Trump, Cruz and Rubio, basically 4% each.

Now, after all of that, you have:

Trump 39
Cruz 23
Rubio 20
Bush 5

So you get to the end of March, and Bush is finally, at long last, out of money and has to do what he needed to do in December. If you give every single one of his votes to Rubio, you now have:

Trump 39
Cruz 23
Rubio 25

The math simply never works for Rubio, barring some magical event that causes Trump to finally fade.

The truth is - and I pointed this out a couple of times back in October and November - that the Party leadership needed to go to Jeb! over the Christmas holiday season and convince him to get out then. Even that timing was extremely late for it to make enough of a difference.

Barring some miracle finish in NH by one of the establishment guys who are engaged in their own circular firing squad right now in that state, this is over. And, to be fair, such miracles have happened in New Hampshire at times in the past.

But barring that, this is a Trump/Cruz race.