PrairiePundit

Judi McLeod: Venezuelan President Juan Guaido issued them a personal invite on Fox Business Network’s Trish Regan Show on Monday. Pulling AOC, Omar et al from their cotton batten-fortified lives as coddled Congress members and forcing them into reality is the best anyone could ever do for them. It’s an obscenity to allow the “Socialist Democrats”, who are really propped-up “Justice Democrats,” to continue spouting their socialist ideals on society as long as the good citizens of Venezuela are having to rummage, dog-like, through street garbage for scraps to eat and collecting sewer water for their children. AOC, Omar and company are equivalent to the socialist Venezuelan politicians who converge nightly in Caracas steak houses while the people they were elected to serve slowly starve to death in the dark. If these Justice Democrats dared try to extoll the virtues of socialism in the streets of Venezuela the way they do in America, they’d be torn apart limb by limb. ... On...

Jazz Shaw: It’s beyond question that sanctuary state/city policies have hindered the ability of federal immigration enforcement officials to do their jobs. Too many criminal illegal aliens are still being released back onto the streets because ICE isn’t informed and given enough time to pick them up. But all the news isn’t bad. As it turns out, in many cities and counties with these so-called sanctuary laws in place, the local cops have continued working with ICE in more “unofficial” ways, maintaining long-standing personal relationships and using those connections to get the job done. And there are plenty of Democrats that are simply furious over this . (Associated Press) Two years after New Mexico’s largest county barred local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration authorities, its leaders learned that the policy was being subverted from within. Staff members at the Bernalillo County jail in Albuquerque were still granting immigration authorities access to its dat...

Victor Davis Hanson: The 21st century is in danger of becoming an era of statue smashing and historical erasure. Not since the iconoclasts of the Byzantine Empire or the epidemic of statue destruction during the French Revolution has the world seen anything like the current war on the past. In 2001, the primeval Taliban blew up two ancient Buddha statues in Afghanistan on grounds that their very existence was sacrilegious to Islam. In 2015, ISIS militants entered a museum in Mosul, Iraq, and destroyed ancient, pre-Islamic statues and idols. Their mute crime? These artifacts predated the prophet Muhammad. The West prides itself in the idea that liberal societies would never descend into such nihilism. Think again. In the last two years there has been a rash of statue toppling throughout the American South, aimed at wiping out memorialization of Confederate heroes. The pretense is that the Civil War can only be regarded as tragic in terms of the present oppression of the descen...

George Bardmesser: Every Time Democrats Talk, I Want To Vote For Trump Twice I am a highly motivated Trump voter because the Democrats have motivated me up to my eyeballs. I have never been more motivated in my life, because the Democrats are terrifying me. ... I am a middle-of-the-road Republican who voted for Trump with the utmost reluctance in 2016. He sure wasn’t perfect. He was no Cicero, either––though he can give a decent speech when the chips are down. He had a few extra skeletons rattling in his closet, especially compared to colorless non-entities like Jeb. So yeah, I was queasy about voting for an ex-registered-Democrat-from-New-York-and-possible-liberal-now-turned-Republican. Was I worried? Hell, yeah! Was I depressed? You bet. But, really, what options were there? Hillary? Jill Stein? Seriously? Trump wasn’t my first choice or my second choice or my third choice, but by the time November 2016 rolled around, Trump was the only choice on the menu. So I swallowed ha...

Michael Anton: Over the last three evenings, Americans watched Tucker Carlson refuse to be cowed by the sophisticated, well-funded, coordinated information operation designed to chase him off the air and make him unemployable for life. One of the points he’s raised, not so much in his own defense, but rather as a counteroffensive against his enemies, is that Media Matters for America (MMfA)—his primary tormenter—enjoys a symbiotic relationship with the corporate Left media (CLM), to whom it can feed propaganda with the assurance that it will be regurgitated verbatim. “Symbiotic” because they need and feed off one another. MMfA lacks a sufficiently large megaphone to broadcast its message. The CLM, by contrast, not only has such a megaphone; fundamentally it is a megaphone. It’s lazy and so relies on others to feed it stories, which MMfA is only too happy to do. As if to prove Carlson right, the Washington Post on Thursday published an embarrassingly spoon-fed story from (you gue...

Nicholas Waddy: Political commentator Steve Cortes suggested recently that President Trump should declare a second national emergency on our southern border. The first such emergency was designed to divert funds towards wall construction, but Cortes argues that by itself won’t deter the current wave of migrants, mostly from Central America. This is because they know that our immigration system is broken. They know that, if they make it to the U.S. border, and if they bring their children with them and make an asylum claim, Customs and Border Protection officials will have no choice, given recent judicial rulings, but to release them into the U.S. population. Moreover, because of the current backlog in asylum cases, these migrants will wait (comfortably) in the United States anywhere from three to five years before a judge can hear their cases. They may or may not show up for their hearings. Trump may or may not be president in five years. Instead, an open-borders socialist may occu...

Fuel Fix: Enterprise Products Partners CEO Jim Teague said Wednesday that a flood of oil, natural gas and other petroleum products could soon overwhelm ports in Houston and Corpus Christi. Speaking at the CERAWeek by IHS Markit conference, the pipeline CEO said the volumes of product moving to the Gulf Coast for export were increasing at a fast clip. "Corpus Christi can't handle what's coming, and Houston can't handle whats coming," he said. "It's not just crude. It's not just LNG. It's all of the above." Teague recounted how on a recent trip to China he was inundated with buyers for ethane, as the energy sector there seeks to expand its petrochemical manufacturing capacity. ... Natural gas that is now being flared in the Permian Basin will soon be transported by pipeline and converted to LNG for export . The liquefied natural gas industry wants to become an outlet for the record amount of methane being produced in the Permian Bas...

Daily Mail: REVEALED: How Russia sank billions of dollars into Venezuela's failing oil industry in an attempt to prop up Maduro's socialist government Rosneft, Russia's state-owned oil firm, invested an estimated $9billion in its South American counterpart PDVSA but mismanagement means it now has almost no chance of getting the money back. Maduro is the former bus diver who has driven Venezuela off an economic cliff.  Russia should have known better.  Will they be able to recoup the money with gold shipments Maduro took from the central bank?

Daily Mail: We're doomed! Beto O'Rourke starts presidential campaign by claiming the world faces 'catastrophe' and warns 'hundreds of millions' of climate refugees will overwhelm borders and humanity could go EXTINCT unless we fix the planet in 12 years Former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke warned Thursday in his first presidential campaign stop that parts of the planet will soon become uninhabitable, driving a massive wave of climate 'refugees' across the U.S. border, if America's government doesn't adopt emergency measures within the next 12 years. O'Rourke, 46, had formally announced an hour earlier that he will seek the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, ending months of speculation over whether he would try to translate his newfound political celebrity into a White House bid. In the southwestern Iowa town of Keokuk, a sweater-clad Beto told a smallish crowd that by the time his 12-year-old son is his age 'we may not be able...

Washington Post: Families of Sandy Hook shooting victims can sue gunmaker, court says Connecticut’s Supreme Court ruled that Remington can be sued over its marketing of the Bushmaster rifle, which was used to kill 20 children and six educators in 2012.  This ruling should be reversed by the US Supreme Court.  It has 2nd Amendment implications that would allow states to infringe on the rights granted by that amendment.  It is a decision that appears to be based more on anger about the actions of a guy with a psychological disorder who used a gun to kill innocent people.  Guns have become an emotional issue for some on the left whose first impulse when there is a shooting like this one is to disarm the innocent.  They are implying vicarious liability to people who had nothing to do with the crime.  If a homicidal maniac loaded a Chevy pickup with explosives and drove it into a classroom of kids and exploded it would the ...

NY Times: ‘What Does It Take?’: Admissions Scandal Is a Harsh Lesson in Racial Disparities For students of color who have long had to justify their presence on campus, the federal fraud case was a reminder of deep inequalities in admissions. I put three children through college without paying a bribe or benefiting from quotas.  I let them choose where they wanted to go but told them they needed to find a place we could afford.  They all did well in college and they all worked some to help pay their way.  They all eventually got Masters degrees on their own. They all have successful careers even though none of them went to Ivy League schools.  The admission scandal is sad on many levels.  It appears to be the result of an artificial barrier to entry which has been manipulated to put some groups ahead of others.  This aspect leads to parents of underachievers trying to manipulate the system and the institutions...

Raphael Benaroya: Americans are locked in a fierce debate: to build or not to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. And what’s in a wall? Israel’s experience with the barriers separating it from its many contentious neighbors offers some answers. Look first at Israel’s 290-mile border with the West Bank, where the main goals are stopping terrorism and deterring entry of illegal labor. The barrier includes razor wire, electronic intrusion-detection fences, anti-vehicle ditches, footprint detection technology, aerial surveillance, and more. In urban areas, there are true walls more than 25 feet high, with cameras, listening devices, and other sensors. Control rooms monitor activity 24/7, and rapid-response teams deploy against every incursion. All this is similar to the purposes and plans for the U.S. wall. How effective has the West Bank barrier been? Attacks and resulting casualties fell 80 percent almost instantly after the wall went up, according to Israel’s Foreign Minis...

Nicholas Sandman has found a good lawyer to bring his claim and the case will be tried in Kentucky where he lives.

Washington Free Beacon: A group of pro-life Republicans in the House gathered Wednesday to ask the question: Why are Democrats fighting so hard to stop born infants from getting medical care? House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R., Calif.), Whip Steve Scalise (R., La.), and Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney (R., Wyo.), and others lambasted Democrats for blocking legislation requiring doctors to treat babies born after failed abortions. The Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act would legally cover infants who are still alive after botched abortions with "the same claim to the protection of the law that would arise for any newborn, or for any person who comes to a hospital, clinic, or other facility for screening and treatment or otherwise becomes a patient within its care." With the words "end infanticide" emblazoned on the lectern at which they spoke, the GOP members of Congress emphasized their pro-life principles but also asked why even pr...

Frank Hawkins: Meet Saikat Chakrabarti, the Rasputin of the 14th Congressional District and arguably the real brains behind the bright new shiny Democrat bauble of Congress now famously branded by the media as AOC, joining the exclusive club (JFK, LBJ, RFK, HRC) of politicians widely referred to by three initials. In the space of just a few short months, Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, with fewer than 16,000 votes in a primary election, went from the role of obscure bartender to perhaps the most famous and powerful freshman member of Congress ever. She instantly became a media darling who drives ratings and Internet clicks. Senior Democrats such as Sen. Ed Markey gush over her and edge in to get their picture taken with her as they appear to hang on her every word. Ocasio-Cortez was given a plum seat on the House Financial Services Committee. Her placement on the exclusive House Banking Committee, as well as the appointments of other newbie progressives to top committees was part of a large...

Andrew Cunningham: How does one reconcile the Left's preaching of civility with its penchant for bigotry? If there is one topic that the Left loves to talk about, it is tolerance, particularly on college campuses. However, in the real world, this topic is not leftists' strong suit. In reality, the Left has proven that it cares little about civility, especially on college campuses. It is the conservatives on campus who are pleading for their First Amendment rights and simply asking to be left alone. Intolerance against conservatives has been on the rise over the past three years. The dedicated students of U.C. Berkeley proved time and time again in 2017 and beyond that there is no place for Republicans or conservatives on their campus. Antifa members on multiple occasions disrupted peaceful right-wing rallies by hurling offensive epithets, making threats of violence, and using actual violence to achieve their goal of stifling free speech. Across the nation, right-leaning ...

Michael Walsh: Sometimes you wonder whether the New York Times' editorial page ever reads its own newspaper's reporting. A dedicated institutional foe of President Trump, the Times scoffs at the need for an executive order to address the dangerous chaos at the border . Then again, it makes a weird kind of sense: the worse things get at the Mexican border the better, because then they can demand even more services for the sick, the halt, the lame, the blind, the drug dealers, the rapists, the drunk drivers and all the other criminals -- not just from Mexico but from Central America as well -- who are invading our country. And things are bad: The number of migrant families crossing the southwest border has once again broken records, with unauthorized entries nearly double what they were a year ago, suggesting that the Trump administration’s aggressive policies have not discouraged new migration to the United States. More than 76,000 migrants crossed the border without au...

Victor Davis Hanson: I wrote a book, The Case for Trump, in an effort — as an outsider who has no career investment in Trump and has never met him or visited the Trump White House — to analyze how and why Donald J. Trump was elected president and why his agenda so far has been successful. One Gabriel Schoenfeld has just published a hysterical attack on that effort in the Bill Kristol–Charles Sykes new Bulwark , and it is emblematic of that venue’s promised Never Trump ad hominem assault on individual supporters of the president. A writer for The Atlantic recently interviewed Sykes, noting: But in the coming months, he [Sykes] tells me, The Bulwark will home in on a specific class of “grifters and trolls” — those opportunistic Trump enablers who still get invited on Meet the Press and write for prestigious newspapers. To Sykes, these are the true sellouts, and he wants to ensure that their public flirtations with Trumpism leave a stench on them. Though wishing to leave “a stench ...

David Harsanyi: In the 2004 comedy “Team America: World Police” a squad of terror-fighting marionettes lands in Paris to subdue a small group of terrorist infiltrators. To head off the presumed coming carnage, the Americans unleash an array of destructive weaponry without any regard for the civilian life or the city itself, destroying the Eiffel Tower and leaving central Paris a smoldering, hollowed-out war zone. “Bonjour, everyone!” one of the puppet warriors tells the surviving denizens, “Don’t worry, everything is bon. We stopped the terrorists!” This scene, from this delightfully absurd movie, is the most fitting analogy I can think of to describe the Democrats’ efforts to save democracy from the presidency of Donald Trump. For over two years, resisting Trump has been a moral imperative, an all-consuming preoccupation, a zero-sum struggle that supersedes every constitutional and civic norm of American life. One Politico columnist compared the 2016 presidential election to Pearl...

Dov Fischer: Remember when the Left tried to drive Rush Limbaugh off the air seven years ago after he called Sandra Fluke a “slut”? Oh my, how they salivated as they got some advertisers to withdraw ads from Rush’s show! They thought they had Rush off the air. They really did. Carbonite, the computer-data back-up company, made a big splash when they announced they were pulling their ads off Rush. But Rush stuck it out. He stayed strong. And, like the Energizer Bunny, all these years later he still is going and going and going, while history records that Fluke was a fluke. And Carbonite’s stock value nose-dived. Yes, it was right for Fox to dissociate from Bill O’Reilly. What can one say? All those many high-ticket legal settlements with women — too many. That was not about politics or about left-wing pressure, even though the revelations emanated from the New York Times Left. Our society just cannot abide that. But then the Left came after Sean Hannity. Remember that one, when he...