PrairiePundit

PJ Media: ... However, Buttigieg was entirely off base to suggest the Founders did not understand the evils of slavery. In fact, many of them acknowledged the evils of slavery, but they compromised in order to hold the new nation together. As Matt Spalding wrote for the Heritage Foundation, "Those who founded this nation chose to make practical compromises for the sake of establishing in principle a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." Ted Cruz rebuked Buttigieg by posting a string of direct quotes from the Founders. "Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude & I am utterly averse to the admission of slavery into the Missouri Territories. It being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law," Cruz quoted from John Adams, a Founding Father and the second president. "Freedom is not a gift bestowed upon us by other men, but a right that belongs to us by the ...

Red States: The ongoing attack on the U.S. Embassy in Iraq is continuing, with 100 U.S. Marines being deployed to protect it as the impotent Iraqis sit idly. A guard shack has been torched and the rest of the staff and military members are inside letting the walls do their job. From the beginning, the aggression has been squarely pointing to Iran. The attempts to breach the embassy came in the wake of retaliatory airstrikes on Iranian backed militias. While the media have tried to white-wash what’s happening by describing the attackers as “mourners” and “protestors,” this is clearly being orchestrated by the Quds Force and blessed by the Mullahs. And ample proof of that is emerging. Mike ✔ @Doranimated  ·  9 h Replying to @Doranimated What is this anti-American protest in Baghdad about? This picture tells it all. Protesters, presumably from Kata’ib Hizballah, scrawl, "Qassem Soleimani is our leader" on the US embassy wall. Soleimani is the ...

BBC: India cold wave: Delhi reels from coldest day in more than a century Temperatures were near freezing in a city where few have central heating.  Meanwhile, Australia was having record heat and wildfires .

Matt Vespa: The Senate Republican playbook should be put House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on mute and get this trial started. Pelosi and the Democrats have no say in the matter. They don’t. And by withholding the articles of impeachment against President Trump because they know it faces certain death in the Republican Senate creates a new constitutional crisis of its own. This isn’t about a fair trial. As Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley Strassel noted, a trial would only further degrade their position in the polls on this impeachment push. It was never popular from the start, and now it’s underwater nationally. It’s especially not popular in the key swing states that Democrats have to win in 2020. I think Democrats know this is a fiasco, the smart ones at least, but they made a 2018 promise to the base to impeach the president. They have to keep it. Strassel noted that Pelosi isn’t a scrub when it comes to political strategy; she can hang in there with McConnell. But the goal of th...

Salena Zito: In a country increasingly engaged in national politics and divided, the next 12 months may feel like 12 years. Voters in both trenches are eager to vote, convinced not only of victory but also of vindication. The shocking result in 2016 wasn't a black swan, an irregular election deviating from normalcy, but instead the indicator of the realignment we describe in "The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics," now available in a new a paperback edition in time for the 2020 election season. The story of America's evolving political topography is one of tectonic plates that slowly grind against one another until a break notably alters the landscape with seismic consequences -- a sudden lurch long in development. The election of President Donald Trump cemented a realignment of the two political parties rooted in cultural and economic change years in the making. Although he has been the epicenter of all politics since his ann...

Legal Insurrection: New York’s Bail Reform Policies Are Setting Anti-Semitic Attackers Free to Attack Again This is a counterproductive policy that endangers the victims and rewards the guilty.  It is as bad as the liberal policy of reducing the penalty for shoplifting giving crooks and incentive to steal which drives up the cost of the retailer and his honest customers.

The Lid: While speaking at a campaign stop in Peterborough, New Hampshire over the weekend, Democrat White House hopeful Joe Biden suggested throwing fossil fuel executives in jail if they don’t accept responsibility for allegedly destroying the environment. Perhaps he’s saying that in case there is an investigation of Burisma and his son Hunter will need friends in prison. fossil fuel execs jail A post at Townhall noted: In order to curb the rate of pollution, Biden explained, we need to hold fossil fuel executives “liable for what they have done, particularly in those cases where there are underserved neighborhoods.” When they don’t deliver, Biden offered, “put them in jail. Some spectators noted his obliviousness. Surely he didn’t forget that his son Hunter was on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company that was being investigated for corruption? I mean, it has been in the news lately. ... Criminalizing energy production is absurd.  It is even crazie...

Sarah Lee: ... In the book, on pg. 98 in a chapter called, “The Insurance Policy,” Nunes tells Lee that the policy was a specific thing that was done to ensure that the FISA warrant was granted. And that his committee knows what it is. According to Nunes, the “insurance policy” that Strzok and Page texted about, the issue they’d discussed in McCabe’s office, was not simply the operation against Trump that they planned to roll into a coup in the event he was elected. “It has a deeper meaning, it’s more specific than that,” [Nunes] says. “It’s what else they did to get the FISA, to ensure they got the warrant on Page. It’s as bad or worse as using the dossier. It’s another thing they hid as part of a counterintelligence investigation.” What did they do? Nunes spreads his arms in the air. “Something we hope to have declassified. Something the American public should know about.” Well…that sounds downright corrupt. Since Smith’s book was published before DOJ Inspector Gene...

Red States: The Census Bureau just released national population estimates, because they reflect the population as of July 1, 2019, they give us a real insight into what will happen with decennial census that will be carried out in 2020. Here is a snapshot 42 states and the District of Columbia had fewer births in 2019 than 2018. Eight states saw increases in births – Washington (612), Utah (293), Nevada (232), Arizona (175), Idaho (166), Montana (66), Vermont (44), and Colorado (30). Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia saw increases in their number of deaths compared to the previous year. Four states had more deaths than births, also called natural decrease: West Virginia (-4,679), Maine (-2,262), New Hampshire (-121) and Vermont (-53). Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia lost population through net domestic migration between 2018 and 2019, six of which had losses over 25,000, and three of which experienced losses greater than 100,000. The top states...

Matt Margolis: Biden Blasted the 'Absolutely Irrational' Texas Law That Allowed Lawful Gun Owner to Stop Church Shooting Another irony of the events in Texas is that the killer was using Biden's weapon of choice, a shotgun.  Without the members who were armed with pistols, the killer would have had free reign until he ran out of ammo, rather than being stopped in six seconds. It was the mass murder that did not happen because Texans are smarter than Democrats in blue states.

Washington Post Editorial: China persecutes a genuine people’s leader on utterly baseless charges The Chicoms may not be engaging in mass murder on the scale of Mao, but they still will not tolerate those who don't worship communism.  Mass incarceration for those seeking freedom is still a serious problem in China.

NY Times: Inside a Texas Church, Guns, Bibles and a Spirited Firearms Debate A shooting at a church outside Fort Worth has revived the debate in Texas over whether more guns create a more dangerous environment or a safer one. I think this pretty well settles the debate in favor of allowing concealed carry and doing away with gun-free zones which insure mass murders they will not be soon interrupted.  Gun-free zones create victims and don't stop killers.  There is no evidence that they ever stopped any mass murderer.  They are one of the worst ideas ever invented.

Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel: Thanks to the Department of Justice Inspector General's report, we now know for certain what has been, for those paying attention, fairly obvious. The Steele dossier played a central role in the genesis of the Russia hoax and was used to justify extensive spying on former naval officer and Annapolis graduate Carter Page. The top two leaders of the FBI were closely involved in this fiasco. Other powerful people knew what was happening and lied to cover it up. That all was confirmed by the IG report. The report was a disaster for the credibility of top leaders in Barack Obama's FBI, and it's also a big problem for the American news media. For example, in early 2018, Washington Post intelligence and national security correspondent Shane Harris lectured Kim Strassel of The Wall Street Journal about how little she knows about the story. "Yes," he wrote, "I am telling you the dossier was not used as the basis for a FISA warra...

Zero Hedge: Russiagate Investigation Now Endangers Obama It is possible that he may be.  With the revelations about the Russian collusion hoax which appears to have animated much of his actions in the run-up to the election and to Trump's being sworn in, it has the appearance of a criminal conspiracy against Trump.

The Hill: Senate Democrats are bracing for President Trump to seize on the outcome of the upcoming impeachment trial as a source of momentum for his reelection bid. With 67 votes needed to convict and remove Trump from office, the trial’s outcome is largely pre-baked since Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the chamber. Democrats are worried that an acquittal will only embolden the president, and they feel powerless to prevent it. “No matter what we do, the president is going to say he did nothing wrong,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “We all know the president,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat. “If there are not 67 votes to convict in the Senate, he’ll claim that it was a witch hunt and that he was exonerated.” Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), when asked about the potential fallout from an acquittal, added: “I am worried about that, but I think this president feels unconstrained by anything already.” Trump became only the third U.S. president to b...

Breibart: Leftists Blame Trump for Rise in Antisemitism in Wake of Hanukkah Stabbing Attack Black anti-semitism has found a home in the party of liberal Democrats .  For those same Democrats to blame Trump who has been supportive of Jews in this country and Israel is absurd.

Tim Jones: Blue-Collar Workers are Now Solidly Republican We just saw a similar movement of blue-collar workers to the Conservative Party in the UK with the landslide election of Boris Johnson.

As long as Schiff leads this committee it should be called the unintelligence committee.

Red States: ... This attack comes in the recent wake of another deadly attack in New Jersey by extremists connected to the Black Hebrew Israelites, where a Jewish school looked to be the initial target. Four Jews were killed in the neighboring kosher market after they failed to get the door to the school open. Because none of these attacks fit the “white supremacist” narrative, they’ve been mostly ignored. While the Tree of Life shooting stayed in the news for weeks, including full reaction at the funerals, the Jersey City shooting managed about half a day in the news cycle and there was no “national conversation .” The major outlets punted on the story within hours. As news broke early this morning that police had apprehended the stabber of this newest attack and that he wasn’t a white nationalist, the hot takes from Democrat intersectionalists started to roll in and they are just disgusting. neontaster @neontaster Erin Biba had a Nuremberg Laws meltdow...