PrairiePundit

PJ Media: The Blexit movement seems to really have an impact among the African American community. We now have three polls showing high approval numbers for President Donald Trump among ethnic minorities: Rasmussen, Emerson and Marist. A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist Poll concludes that 33 percent of non-white voters approve of Donald J. Trump's performance as president. 57 percent of non-white voters supposedly disapprove of his performance. Although these would be horrendous approval ratings for a Democrat, they're actually very good for a Republican. For example, back in 2005, African American approval of then President George W. Bush was a mere 16 percent . As we reported on Monday, both a Rasmussen poll and a poll by Emerson show 34 percent approval for President Trump among African Americans. These poll results were, of course, blasted by liberals who just couldn't believe that black Americans would think positively of a man they, know-it-all leftwingers, hate so muc...

Forbes: Environmental journalists and advocates have in recent weeks made a number of apocalyptic predictions about the impact of climate change. Bill McKibben suggested climate-driven fires in Australia had made koalas “functionally extinct.” Extinction Rebellion said “Billions will die” and “Life on Earth is dying.” Vice claimed the “collapse of civilization may have already begun.” Few have underscored the threat more than student climate activist Greta Thunberg and Green New Deal sponsor Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The latter said, “The world is going to end in 12 years if we don't address climate change.” Says Thunberg in her new book, “Around 2030 we will be in a position to set off an irreversible chain reaction beyond human control that will lead to the end of our civilization as we know it.” Sometimes, scientists themselves make apocalyptic claims. “It’s difficult to see how we could accommodate a billion people or even half of that,” if Earth warms four degrees, ...

James Pierson: The answer to that question is—probably not, absent truly egregious conduct, such as the president shooting someone at midday on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. With regard to anything short of that, such as muddled and contradictory accusations about presidential phone calls to a leader of a foreign country few Americans know about (Where is Ukraine, anyway?), voted through on a narrowly partisan basis—well, the majority of voters cannot be blamed if they tune out on the entire show, which they appear to have done. That makes a lot of sense from their point of view. After all, they have jobs, they are getting raises and bonuses (it’s that time of year), their sons and daughters, nieces and nephews are working too, and so are their neighbors. Their 401(k)s are growing nicely. Business is good, the mood is upbeat, which is important moving into the Christmas (buying) season. Why rock the boat? Besides, there’s an election coming up. If we want to get rid of the president, ...

Daniel Sobieski: Media Hypes Fusion GPS Founders as Victims It is a long piece that discloses some of the allegations against Fusion and its clients.

Matthew Continetti: ... Hong Kong is the most visible reminder of the tenuous nature of Communist rule. The city has become a postmodern battleground where masked protesters wield social media and lasers to avoid armor-clad police and facial recognition technology powered by artificial intelligence. When one looks at Hong Kong one sees a possible future where champions of freedom the world over employ desperate measures against the overwhelming resources of a mechanized Leviathan. One also sees the brittleness, confusion, and embarrassment of despotism when challenged by subjects assumed to be grateful for growth and security and immune to the will to freedom. What is happening in Hong Kong is not isolated. The China model of authoritarian development is damaged and scarred. What seemed as sturdy and invulnerable as a Borg Cube looks more like a fragile and wobbly mobile by Alexander Calder. The regime of Xi Jinping is under economic and political and diplomatic pressure that it i...

Power Line: Lee Smith is the author of  The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in US History . Lee’s book is an invaluable companion to Andrew McCarthy’s  Ball of Collusion: The Plot to Rig an Election and Destroy a Presidency ; it adds to and amplifies the case McCarthy makes. One of Lee’s principal themes is the role played by the media peddling the Russia hoax. The passage below from pages 119-121 is illustrative of the theme. In this passage Lee discusses the January 10, 2017 CNN story  “Intel chiefs presented Trump with claims of Russian efforts to compromise him.”  Running under the byline of Evan Perez, Jim Sciutto, Jake Tapper and Carl Bernstein, the story peddled the Russia hoax based on the patently absurd Steele Dossier, which had not yet been made public. Lee notes that the story referred to the dossier’s most serious charge, “allegations that there was a continuing excha...

Elizabeth Vaughn: In an appearance on CNN this week, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign manager, Kevin Sheekey, said : “The impeachment proceedings are making the president’s reelection more likely.” CNN host Christiane Amanpour remarked that “many Democrats are not going to like to hear that.” Here’s something else the Democrats won’t want to hear. President Trump’s campaign manager, Brad Parscale, released some very surprising data gathered from attendees at his Tuesday night rally in Broward, FL, which is guaranteed to send a shiver up Adam Schiff’s spine. Of the 31,177 voters who provided data, 24% were Democrats. The significance of this is monumental. I wonder what the percentage of Republicans attending Democratic rallies is. I imagine it would be low to nil. This tells us that a sizable percentage of Democrats are looking at the weak field of candidates and are searching for an alternative. I would guess many of them are turned off by the injustice of the current impeachment inqui...

Washington Post: A strong leader emerges in Mexico. Some say he’s too strong. In his first year as president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador has won the loyalty of the poor, and his approval ratings regularly top 60 percent. But critics are concerned the veteran leftist is concentrating power and weakening institutions that safeguard human rights and clean elections. Mexico is not a safe country for its citizens or visitors.  I grew up on the border when it was safe to go across the river for dinner.  It would be a risky business today.  It is even risky to go to resorts. Too many of the Mexican law enforcement agencies have been compromised by corruption.  The Mexican Marines appear to be one of the few that have not been corrupted by the cartels.  If AMLO is doing anything about the situation it is not obvious. AMLO has entered into a new trade deal with Trump but the Democrats would rather stall that then approve something that would benefit both countrie...

NY Times: Students Fainting From Hunger in Venezuela’s Failing School System Children ask teachers at the entrance of one struggling primary school if there is food before deciding whether to come in. OK, Bernie, tells us what Venezuela has done wrong before you try to foist socialism in the US.

NY Times: A Census Whodunit: Why Was the Citizenship Question Added? New documents hint at partisan politics in the attempt to add the question to the 2020 census and in the failure to turn over materials when the plan was challenged in court. The process of assigning House seats should be for citizens only.  Knowing the number of illegals is also important for setting other policy considerations.   Stopping Democrat cheating is an important consideration for the Census.

Stephen Presser: There Is No Good Case for Impeachment Unless the deep state wants to further its own demise, however, and unless the Democrat candidates for president want to spend a good deal of the campaign season off the hustings and in a Senate proceeding they will lose, we are probably witnessing the beginning of the end of the Trump impeachment. The Democrats' irrational hatred for President Trump is really the only basis they have for impeachment.  If they go forward with it the will be guilty of a suicidal political move and deserve their defeat.

Sharyl Attkisson: Timeline of Alleged Ukrainian-Democrat Meddling in 2016 Presidential Election ... According to reporting by Politico in January 2017, efforts by Democrats and Ukraine to “sabotage” the Trump campaign in 2016 did impact the race, even though Trump won in the end. Both Politico and Yahoo News interviewed a key player in the controversy, Democratic National Committee (DNC) consultant Alexandra Chalupa, who previously worked under the Clinton administration. Chalupa reportedly acknowledged in her 2017 interview with Politico that she worked as a consultant for the DNC during the 2016 campaign with the goal of publicly exposing Trump campaign aide Paul Manafort’s links to pro-Russian politicians in Ukraine. Chalupa admitted coordinating with the Ukrainian Embassy, and with Ukrainian and U.S. news reporters. ... Attkisson's piece is worth reading in full.  It is pretty clear that Chalupa who is of Ukrainian origin even though her name sounds like a Mexican fo...

Thomas Lifson: The New York Times is operating in a pure propaganda mode, attempting to minimize the impact of the forthcoming (Dec. 9) report of the Department of Justice Inspector General, Michael Horowitz.  Sundance, of  The Conservative Treehouse , calls his  article  on leaks from the report,  “highly structured obfuscation,” doing justice to the careful and artful misleading of readers. Keep in mind in understanding these leaks that principals named in an IG report are afforded an opportunity to comment on sections of the report that mention them prior to publication of the report. They don’t see the entire report, only those sections directly involving them. The IG is also able to write a rebuttal to those comments. This means that nobody leaking is likely to have seen the full report, and thus the leakers do not grasp the entire context of the portions they have been given to review.  But that doesn’t stop the Times from headlining this ridicul...

Legal Insurrection: Anti-regime protesters torched around 731 banks in nationwide unrest that began two weeks ago, Iran’s top leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei admitted. The demonstrations against the Shi’a Islamic regime started on November 15 after Tehran announced the rationing of gasoline and a sharp hike in fuel prices. Protesters also turned their anger at symbols of the regime, setting fire to banners and billboards depicting Ayatollah Khamenei and Islamic propaganda. As many as 200 demonstrators have been killed so far and more than 4,000 arrested, dissident Iranian groups said . Besides police, the regime deployed Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and Shi’a Basij militia against unarmed protesters. Forces loyal to the regime were using live ammunition against unarmed demonstrators, several video footage show. “Verified video footage show snipers shooting at people from rooftops,” German newspaper Bild confirmed . “In at least one instance, a helicopter had been used fo...

Chuck Devore: It wasn’t supposed to be this way. Georgetown, Texas – population 75,000 – was to be the new poster child of the green movement . Environmental interest i n Georgetown’s big push to generate all of its electricity from wind and solar power was amplified by three factors: the town and its mayor were nominally Republican; Georgetown is in an oil- and natural gas-rich state; and that state is deep-red Texas. Former Vice President Al Gore and other climate change luminaries feted Georgetown Mayor Dale Ross, and Ross was featured prominently at renewable energy conventions. Last October, while the green dream was still in full flower, the city applied for a $1 million grant from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nonprofit, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and won it. Ostensibly to be used for energy storage innovation in batteries, the grant’s only real requirement was that the city serve as a public relations platform in Bloomberg’s push to convince Americas...

Washington Post: Susan Rice’s memoir prompts nostalgia for the Obama years By David Ignatius I think a lot of liberals at the Post must miss him, but in the real world, the US is much better off with Trump.  Trump has gotten the economy expanded at rates that eluded Obama over his eight years in the White House and he has gotten the US out of loser deals like the Iran fiasco and the Paris climate change one-sided deal which did little to stop the real polluters and would have punished successful countries like the US. I do get the impression that at the Washington Post the staff comes in every day looking for ways to be critical of the President.  On most days it is hard to find an article that is not critical of the President.  This is not surprising from a paper that decided early on that it did not have to be fair to Trump.  It is a paper that still has not apologized sufficiently for pushing the Russian collusion hoax.  It has just moved on to the Uk...

Washington Post: Locked up naked on a soiled mattress: Venezuela’s mental health nightmare Years of failed socialist policies, economic mismanagement and corruption have exacted a heavy toll across Venezuelan society. For the mentally ill, the lack of medicine, treatment and safe facilities has had devastating effects. But California's "remedy" is just as crazy.  There the mentally ill live and poop on the streets rather than being institutionalized.  Both systems are cruel and unusual.  I blame Hollywood for California's mess.  They demonized mental health facilities and that had the effect of pushing these people out on the streets.  In Venezuela, it is socialism that causes the problem for both the sane and the insane.

NY Times: Suddenly, the Chinese Threat to Australia Seems Very Real After a businessman said Chinese agents sought to implant him in Parliament, that revelation and other espionage cases have finally signaled the end of a “let’s get rich together” era.   Could Australia become the next Hong Kong where China attempts to dominate the country?  Are they invested in creeping imperialism?  They are a country with leaders that are ambitious beyond reason.  Australia is smart to be wary.

NY Times: Warren Wealth Tax Has Wide Support, Except Among One Group Most college-educated Republican men oppose the plan, which otherwise finds wide backing. On Medicare for all, divisions are more starkly partisan. In the real world what she is calling wealth is the equivalent of capital.  It is money used to invest in business enterprises that is used to grow the economy and not put into a sinkhole of government healthcare and peed away.  It can be used to build hospitals and invest in new medicine.  It can be used to build new technology and create jobs.  The government is awful at doing that sort of thing and government healthcare is notorious for rationing care rather than developing new cures.  Medicare for all is one of the dumber ideas proposed by politicians.  The market is much better at picking winners and losers than the government is.  Free healthcare in Venezuela and Cuba is a disaster and the people are worse off than they were bef...

Fox News: Cuccinelli fires back at O'Malley, calls behavior 'sad' and 'shocking' O'Malley spews hatred against the rule of law when it comes to immigration.

David Limbaugh: Is it just me, or has it also occurred to you that Democrats, in this all-important year leading up to the 2020 election, rarely talk about policy issues? They are exclusively focused on removing President Donald Trump, and they only discuss policy during their somniferous debates. In the Democrats' defense, their mainstream media bosses cover nothing but Trump and Trump crucified. Also, some Democratic Party leaders probably realize that their ideas don't fully resonate with the people and so it is in their interests to keep the focus on Trump. But to their surprise, it seems they have made a grave tactical error in putting all their rotten eggs in the impeachment basket. Polls indicate their strategy has backfired, especially among independents and particularly in the swing states. Perhaps people are sensing that the Democrats are focused more on Trump than on solving the nation's problems. Only if you believe -- as do the Democrats' leftist ba...

NY Times: Navy Drops Effort to Expel From SEALs 3 Officers Linked to Gallagher After President Trump intervened to stop the Navy from disciplining Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, the service called off reviews of three SEAL officers who were the chief’s superiors in Iraq. Chief Gallagher's brother says the Navy was pushing a false narrative about his brother: In this partisan environment, people were quick to judge President Donald J. Trump’s reinstatement of anchors to my brother, Special Warfare Operator Chief Edward “Eddie” Gallagher. Out of the woodwork came former military attorneys, indignant Pentagon officials and your typical Washington establishment types. Their views were mainly the same. The president’s actions were a moral hazard ! What message will it send our troops? What of good order and discipline? I have one question for these people: Where in the hell were you the past year and a half? Eddie’s case and court-martial trial revealed a massive cancer...