Tucker Carlson: Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it's infuriating

Newly-elected Utah senator Mitt Romney kicked off 2019 with an op-ed in the Washington Post that savaged Donald Trump’s character and leadership. Romney’s attack and Trump’s response Wednesday morning on Twitter are the latest salvos in a longstanding personal feud between the two men. It’s even possible that Romney is planning to challenge Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020. We’ll see.
But for now, Romney’s piece is fascinating on its own terms. It’s well-worth reading. It’s a window into how the people in charge, in both parties, see our country.
Romney’s main complaint in the piece is that Donald Trump is a mercurial and divisive leader. That’s true, of course. But beneath the personal slights, Romney has a policy critique of Trump. He seems genuinely angry that Trump might pull American troops out of the Syrian civil war. Romney doesn’t explain how staying in Syria would benefit America. He doesn’t appear to consider that a relevant question. More policing in the Middle East is always better. We know that. Virtually everyone in Washington agrees.
That’s not surprising. Romney spent the bulk of his business career at a firm called Bain Capital. Bain Capital all but invented what is now a familiar business strategy: Take over an existing company for a short period of time, cut costs by firing employees, run up the debt, extract the wealth, and move on, sometimes leaving retirees without their earned pensions. Romney became fantastically rich doing this.
Meanwhile, a remarkable number of the companies are now bankrupt or extinct. This is the private equity model. Our ruling class sees nothing wrong with it. It’s how they run the country.
Mitt Romney refers to unwavering support for a finance-based economy and an internationalist foreign policy as the “mainstream Republican” view. And he’s right about that. For generations, Republicans have considered it their duty to make the world safe for banking, while simultaneously prosecuting ever more foreign wars. Modern Democrats generally support those goals enthusiastically.
There are signs, however, that most people do not support this, and not just in America. In countries around the world — France, Brazil, Sweden, the Philippines, Germany, and many others — voters are suddenly backing candidates and ideas that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. These are not isolated events. What you’re watching is entire populations revolting against leaders who refuse to improve their lives.
Something like this has been in happening in our country for three years. Donald Trump rode a surge of popular discontent all the way to the White House. Does he understand the political revolution that he harnessed? Can he reverse the economic and cultural trends that are destroying America? Those are open questions.
But they’re less relevant than we think. At some point, Donald Trump will be gone. The rest of us will be gone, too. The country will remain. What kind of country will be it be then? How do we want our grandchildren to live? These are the only questions that matter.
The answer used to be obvious. The overriding goal for America is more prosperity, meaning cheaper consumer goods. But is that still true? Does anyone still believe that cheaper iPhones, or more Amazon deliveries of plastic garbage from China are going to make us happy? They haven’t so far. A lot of Americans are drowning in stuff. And yet drug addiction and suicide are depopulating large parts of the country. Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.
The goal for America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness. There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control. Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want for us, and would want if they cared.
But our leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows. They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our problems.
One of the biggest lies our leaders tell us that you can separate economics from everything else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. Family and faith and culture, meanwhile, those are personal matters. Both parties believe this.

Members of our educated upper-middle-classes are now the backbone of the Democratic Party who usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible and socially moderate. In other words, functionally libertarian. They don’t care how you live, as long as the bills are paid and the markets function. Somehow, they don’t see a connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy, or for that matter, the country’s ability to pay its bills. As far as they’re concerned, these are two totally separate categories.
  Social conservatives, meanwhile, come to the debate from the opposite perspective, and yet reach a strikingly similar conclusion. The real problem, you’ll hear them say, is that the American family is collapsing. Nothing can be fixed before we fix that. Yet, like the libertarians they claim to oppose, many social conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct. The idea that families are being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy.

Both sides miss the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined. Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make market economies possible. You can’t separate the two. It used to be possible to deny this. Not anymore. The evidence is now overwhelming. How do we know? Consider the inner cities.
Thirty years ago, conservatives looked at Detroit or Newark and many other places and were horrified by what they saw. Conventional families had all but disappeared in poor neighborhoods. The majority of children were born out of wedlock. Single mothers were the rule. Crime and drugs and disorder became universal.
What caused this nightmare? Liberals didn’t even want to acknowledge the question. They were benefiting from the disaster, in the form of reliable votes. Conservatives, though, had a ready explanation for inner-city dysfunction and it made sense: big government. Decades of badly-designed social programs had driven fathers from the home and created what conservatives called a “culture of poverty” that trapped people in generational decline.
There was truth in this. But it wasn’t the whole story. How do we know? Because virtually the same thing has happened decades later to an entirely different population. In many ways, rural America now looks a lot like Detroit.
This is striking because rural Americans wouldn’t seem to have much in common with anyone from the inner city. These groups have different cultures, different traditions and political beliefs. Usually they have different skin colors. Rural people are white conservatives, mostly.
Yet, the pathologies of modern rural America are familiar to anyone who visited downtown Baltimore in the 1980s: Stunning out of wedlock birthrates. High male unemployment. A terrifying drug epidemic. Two different worlds. Similar outcomes. How did this happen? You’d think our ruling class would be interested in knowing the answer. But mostly they’re not. They don’t have to be interested. It’s easier to import foreign labor to take the place of native-born Americans who are slipping behind.
But Republicans now represent rural voters. They ought to be interested. Here’s a big part of the answer: male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated industry, all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained in many places were the schools and the hospitals, both traditional employers of women. In many places, women suddenly made more than men.
Now, before you applaud this as a victory for feminism, consider the effects. Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t. Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births, and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow -- more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.
This isn’t speculation. This is not propaganda from the evangelicals. It’s social science. We know it’s true. Rich people know it best of all. That’s why they get married before they have kids. That model works. But increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in America can afford.
And yet, and here’s the bewildering and infuriating part, those very same affluent married people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the people below them get and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight malaria in Congo. But working to raise men’s wages in Dayton or Detroit? That’s crazy.
This is negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the crisis in marriage. Our mindless cultural leaders act like it’s still 1961, and the biggest problem American families face is that sexism is preventing millions of housewives from becoming investment bankers or Facebook executives.
For our ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer. They teach us it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.
Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook wrote an entire book about this. Sandberg explained that our first duty is to shareholders, above our own children. No surprise there. Sandberg herself is one of America’s biggest shareholders. Propaganda like this has made her rich.

We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows.

What’s remarkable is how the rest of us responded to it. We didn’t question why Sandberg was saying this. We didn’t laugh in her face at the pure absurdity of it. Our corporate media celebrated Sandberg as the leader of a liberation movement. Her book became a bestseller: "Lean In." As if putting a corporation first is empowerment. It is not. It is bondage. Republicans should say so.
  They should also speak out against the ugliest parts of our financial system. Not all commerce is good. Why is it defensible to loan people money they can’t possibly repay? Or charge them interest that impoverishes them? Payday loan outlets in poor neighborhoods collect 400 percent annual interest.

We’re OK with that? We shouldn’t be. Libertarians tell us that’s how markets work -- consenting adults making voluntary decisions about how to live their lives. OK. But it’s also disgusting. If you care about America, you ought to oppose the exploitation of Americans, whether it’s happening in the inner city or on Wall Street.
  And by the way, if you really loved your fellow Americans, as our leaders should, if it would break your heart to see them high all the time. Which they are. A huge number of our kids, especially our boys, are smoking weed constantly. You may not realize that, because new technology has made it odorless. But it’s everywhere.

And that’s not an accident. Once our leaders understood they could get rich from marijuana, marijuana became ubiquitous. In many places, tax-hungry politicians have legalized or decriminalized it. Former Speaker of the House John Boehner now lobbies for the marijuana industry. His fellow Republicans seem fine with that. “Oh, but it’s better for you than alcohol,” they tell us.
Maybe. Who cares? Talk about missing the point. Try having dinner with a 19-year-old who’s been smoking weed. The life is gone. Passive, flat, trapped in their own heads. Do you want that for your kids? Of course not. Then why are our leaders pushing it on us? You know the reason. Because they don’t care about us.
When you care about people, you do your best to treat them fairly. Our leaders don’t even try. They hand out jobs and contracts and scholarships and slots at prestigious universities based purely on how we look. There’s nothing less fair than that, though our tax code comes close.
Under our current system, an American who works for a salary pays about twice the tax rate as someone who’s living off inherited money and doesn’t work at all. We tax capital at half of what we tax labor. It’s a sweet deal if you work in finance, as many of our rich people do.
In 2010, for example, Mitt Romney made about $22 million dollars in investment income. He paid an effective federal tax rate of 14 percent. For normal upper-middle-class wage earners, the federal tax rate is nearly 40 percent. No wonder Mitt Romney supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it’s infuriating.
Our leaders rarely mention any of this. They tell us our multi-tiered tax code is based on the principles of the free market. Please. It’s based on laws that the Congress passed, laws that companies lobbied for in order to increase their economic advantage. It worked well for those people. They did increase their economic advantage. But for everyone else, it came at a big cost. Unfairness is profoundly divisive. When you favor one child over another, your kids don’t hate you. They hate each other.

That happens in countries,  too. It’s happening in ours, probably by design. Divided countries are easier to rule. And nothing divides us like the perception that some people are getting special treatment. In our country, some people definitely are getting special treatment. Republicans should oppose that with everything they have.
  What kind of country do you want to live in? A fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement. A country you might recognize when you’re old.

A country that listens to young people who don’t live in Brooklyn. A country where you can make a solid living outside of the big cities. A country where Lewiston, Maine seems almost as important as the west side of Los Angeles. A country where environmentalism means getting outside and picking up the trash. A clean, orderly, stable country that respects itself. And above all, a country where normal people with an average education who grew up in no place special can get married, and have happy kids, and repeat unto the generations. A country that actually cares about families, the building block of everything.

What will it take a get a country like that? Leaders who want it. For now, those leaders will have to be Republicans. There’s no option at this point.

But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.
  Internalizing all this will not be easy for Republican leaders. They’ll have to unlearn decades of bumper sticker-talking points and corporate propaganda. They’ll likely lose donors in the process. They’ll be criticized. Libertarians are sure to call any deviation from market fundamentalism a form of socialism.

That’s a lie. Socialism is a disaster. It doesn’t work. It’s what we should be working desperately to avoid. But socialism is exactly what we’re going to get, and very soon unless a group of responsible people in our political system reforms the American economy in a way that protects normal people.
  If you want to put America first, you’ve got to put its families first.

Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on January 2, 2019.

Socialism Rising: Dems take House pushing massive government expansion, as party lurches left

The growing socialist wing of the Democratic Party will flex its muscle Thursday with the seating of the new Congress, as more self-described Democratic Socialists join the ranks and dozens of sitting and incoming members – including likely 2020 hopefuls – embrace a massive government expansion that would make FDR look like a penny pincher.
The party agenda is increasingly embracing big-government policies like “Medicare-for-all” and guaranteed jobs programs -- as well as an aggressive “Green New Deal” that would include all this and more as part of a fundamental overhaul to America’s economy and specifically its energy sector.
It’s unclear when and if any of them will make it to the floor, let alone pass the House. But their growing support marks an astonishing rise for socialist-leaning policies in just a few years, and reflects a shift in the party itself. A stunning Gallup poll last summer showed Democrats view socialism more positively than capitalism. The term “Democratic Socialist” was only broadly popularized with the 2016 presidential run of Bernie Sanders, who identifies as one. The enthusiasm behind his bid underscored how ideas that once marinated on the party’s fringe were increasingly becoming mainstream.

Rashida Tlaib, Democratic candidate for the Michigan's 13th Congressional District, smiles during a rally in Dearborn, Mich., Friday, Oct. 26, 2018. (AP Photo/Paul Sancya)

Now, two more Democratic Socialists will join Sanders in Congress on Thursday -- Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich. Ocasio-Cortez has embraced the mantle, while Tlaib is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). And while Ocasio-Cortez and Tlaib represent only a sliver of the Democratic Party’s new majority in the House, they have attracted outsized media attention and are pushing policies with dozens of supporters.
Medicare-for-all in particular is quickly picking up support. A New York Times analysis found that one-third of Senate Democrats and more than half of House Democrats have endorsed Medicare-for-all proposals -- including a number of possible 2020 presidential hopefuls. Such proposals would lead to more government involvement in health care, and bring the U.S. a step closer to mostly socialized systems such as the British National Health Service. Their popularity is driven by frustration with the current private insurance system, which remains costly on the individual market despite ObamaCare’s goals. And while Medicare-for-all is estimated to cost tens of trillions of dollars over a decade, advocates argue some of this would replace out-of-pocket expenses already being shouldered by millions of Americans.
But even more ambitious than Medicare-for-all is what’s known as the Green New Deal. While echoing the language of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Green New Deal could be an even more sprawling government and economic overhaul. Championed by groups such as the Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats, the plan would aim to combat both climate change and income inequality – and has been picked up by lawmakers such as Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez.
“We are calling for a wartime-level, just economic mobilization plan to get to 100% renewable energy ASAP,” Ocasio-Cortez tweeted.
A draft text circulated around Congress calls for a select committee to be formed to create a plan, and lays out a framework that includes eliminating greenhouse gas emissions from manufacturing and agriculture and “dramatically” expanding energy sources to meet 100 percent of power demand through renewable sources.
If that wasn’t ambitious enough, the proposal describes this as “a historic opportunity to virtually eliminate poverty in the United States and to make prosperity, wealth and economic security available to everyone participating in the transformation.”
On the economic front, it also demands a job guarantee program that offers “a living wage job to every person who wants one,” a “just transition” for workers affected by climate change, basic income programs, universal health care “and any others as the select committee may deem appropriate to promote economic security, labor market flexibility and entrepreneurism.”
In at least a partial nod to the presumably mammoth cost that overhauling the nation’s economy and energy sector would entail, it says that the financing of “the Plan” would be accomplished by “the federal government, using a combination of the Federal Reserve, a new public bank or system of regional and specialized public banks, public venture funds and such other vehicles or structures that the select committee deems appropriate, in order to ensure that interest and other investment returns generated from public investments made in connection with the Plan will be returned to the treasury, reduce taxpayer burden and allow for more investment.”
Indeed, the question that has long dogged such proposals is how to pay for it all. But the answer has typically avoided specifics, instead arguing that America has found ways to pay for other gargantuan costs in the past. In a follow-up FAQ, one explainer says the plan would be funded by “the same ways we paid for World War II and many other wars.”
“The Federal Reserve can extend credit to power these projects and investments, new public banks can be created (as in WWII) to extend credit and a combination of various taxation tools (including taxes on carbon and other emissions and progressive wealth taxes) can be employed,” it says.
Conservatives warn these ambitious programs, though, would do generational damage to the U.S. economy.
“Together, Ocasio-Cortez’s proposals would effectively eliminate fossil fuels from most of society, destroy millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of wealth, require 'upgrading' every home and business in America, create a national federal jobs-guarantee program, impose single-payer health care (costing trillions more), establish a new system of publicly owned banks, run up the national debt by countless trillions of dollars, and move the United States closer than ever to socialism,” Justin Haskins, a research fellow at the Heartland Institute, wrote in an op-ed for Fox News. “If we don’t stop it, it will destroy our economy for a whole generation of Americans.”
Some liberal commentators have warmed to the proposals. The New York Times’ Paul Krugman said it wasn’t clear what the Green New Deal meant, “which is what makes it a good slogan.”
Such a sweeping policy would almost certainly be dead on arrival as long as Republicans control at least one chamber of Congress or the White House. Krugman noted the political realities for the left, arguing that Democrats can’t enact such a plan this year “but they should start preparing now, and be ready to move in two years.”
But regardless of how much progress these proposals might make on the House floor, they’re already part of the 2020 conversation. Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., who has been tipped for a White House bid, said last month that he is “excited” to support the Green New Deal.
The Chicago Tribune reported that Sen. Kamala Harris’, D-Calif., staff have been in touch with the organizers behind the Green New Deal. Axios reported Wednesday that Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who just launched an exploratory committee for a presidential run, supports a Green New Deal.
"Senator Warren has been a longtime advocate of aggressively addressing climate change and shifting toward renewables, and supports the idea of a Green New Deal to ambitiously tackle our climate crisis, economic inequality, and racial injustice," an aide told the outlet.
Warren, Harris and Booker have also backed separate Medicare-for-all plans.
In the House, the Sunrise Movement says that it has more than 40 House members who are backing the Green New Deal, including Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, Joe Kennedy, D-Mass., Ted Lieu, D-Calif., and Veronica Escobar, D-Texas.
However, Democratic leadership has been cautious about adopting such proposals. Roll Call reported that Rep. Frank Pallone, D-N.J., who is set to be the Energy and Commerce Committee chairman, said he supports the idea of Medicare-for-all but doesn’t think the votes are there.
Earlier this week, House Democrats formalized proposals for a new committee on climate change, but without the features that proponents of a Green New Deal have sought -- such as the power to subpoena and the authority to vote on legislation and send it directly to the House floor.
A sign of possible tensions within the party was on display in November, when environmental activists took part in a sit-in outside Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi’s, D-Calif., office, demanding leadership do more to promote the Green New Deal.
Joining the protesters was Ocasio-Cortez, who said: “We need to tell her that we’ve got her back in showing and pursuing the most progressive energy agenda that this country has ever seen.”

Elizabeth Warren Indian Cartoons

As Democrats look to 2020 they need to remember THIS about Trump (and their chances)

Elizabeth Warren

The calendar has flipped to 2019, and that means presidential politics are kicking into high gear. Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., got the fun started, triggering an avalanche of fellow White House wannabes in the coming days.
Last week, an analysis from Bloomberg News likened the forming field of contenders to the start of the March Madness college basketball bracket. It’s an appropriate analogy, not only because of the vast number of names, but also the unpredictability of the outcome. The Democratic nominating process is quite literally a jump ball.
Another worthwhile comparison to the Democrats in 2020 is looking back at the Republican nominating process in 2016. Four years ago, the 17-person GOP field boasted the brightest stars from Congress and statehouses across the country. United in their opposition to President Barack Obama, they all offered a change of direction. They all struggled to understand the undercurrents in their party that, driven by pitchfork populism, had shifted many of its bedrock principles on trade and America’s role in the world. One candidate recognized the changing political winds, and he now sits in the Oval Office.
It is a similar story now on the other side. There could be as many as 40 household names vying for the Democratic prize. A recent CNN headline stated “Democrats head into 2019 split on everything but Trump.” Populism has hijacked the left-of-center policy debate, with polls showing socialism more popular than capitalism. Ideological purity and litmus tests on energy, health care and immigration are driving the discussion. The center-left governing days of the Obama era championing global trade deals are a distant memory.
Speaking of debates, Democratic bigwigs tried to head off headaches by announcing they will hold at least a dozen, beginning in June 2019. Last time, the debate over debates consumed attention in both parties. Supporters of Bernie Sanders accused the Democratic National Committee of rigging the process for Hillary Clinton, while Republicans argued about the qualifying threshold to make the primetime contests.
How the party infrastructure accommodates the immense number of candidates is an open question and promises to be messy process. In this age of cable news sound bites and viral social media videos, one thing is certain: being on the big debate stage matters. It made and broke candidates in 2016 and will again in 2020.
Ultimately, the successful Democratic nominee will be able to do two things: win over at least two of the competing factions of the party – establishment, liberal, diverse and outsider – and articulate an authentic economic vision that goes beyond reflexive opposition to Trump. The actions of the 44th and 45th occupants of the White House offer clues on how that process will play out.

Trump is presiding over an economy that remains healthy. The Democrats have yet to find a compelling alternative economic message.

Not content to fade into retirement, Barack Obama’s post-presidential life has broken from tradition. A vocal critic of his successor, Obama actively campaigned for Democrats in last year’s midterms, endorsing more than 300 candidates. His blessing remains highly coveted, and the public comments from his former staff and advisers are parsed for clues about his thinking.
While the party he once presided over is divided on most everything, they are united in their reverence to Obama. Should he throw his support behind a candidate down the road, he could be the only prayer the party has of a semblance of unity.
That brings us to President Trump. Despite the recent turmoil, the nomination is his for the taking as long as he runs again. It’s difficult to unseat a sitting president, and you can’t beat someone with no one –  a lesson the anti-Nancy Pelosi House Democrat insurgents just learned.
Beyond incumbency, Trump is presiding over an economy that remains healthy. The Democrats have yet to find a compelling alternative economic message.
Speaking of breaking from tradition, Trump is not going to take the route of focusing on being a president and ignoring the noise from his competition. Hours after Warren made her news, Trump was questioning her mental health in a media interview, reminding voters of her Native American scandal and denying her valuable news oxygen.
Trump’s megaphone and ability to disqualify his opponents are unmatched. Unlike last year’s midterms, next year’s presidential race will be a choice between two candidates and not a referendum on one. That’s a fight that favors Trump, regardless of what Democrat ends up facing him.

DNA is irrelevant — Elizabeth Warren is simply not Cherokee

 

 

© Anna Moneymaker

Elizabeth Warren has repeatedly identified herself as Cherokee. From 1986 to 1995 she listed herself as Native American in the Association of American Law Schools directory of law professors. After gaining tenure, she insisted University of Pennsylvania categorize her as Native American, too. She then identified herself as Native American to Harvard — in her application and hiring materials and in other forms beyond. 

Harvard has insisted that Warren’s Native American ancestry made no impact on their hiring decisions. Yet, the university immediately held up the recruitment of Warren, a “Native American woman,” to push back against claims that they were insufficiently diverse and diffuse pressure to hire more people of color. Warren was described as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color” in a 1997 Fordham Law Review article. She even published multiple recipes to a cookbook, Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes from Families of the Five Civilized Tribes — all signed, “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.”

Warren has consistently struggled to substantiate her claims to Native American ancestry (beyond her grandfather’s “high cheekbones”). Warren asserts her mother was “part Cherokee and part Delaware,” yet a prominent Cherokee genealogist who traced Warren’s maternal ancestry all the way back to the Revolutionary War era found no evidence of any Native American heritage. Some relatives have publicly disputed Warren’s narrative about their family. And, of course, Warren phenotypically presents as white.

For these reasons, she has faced consistent accusations that her claims to Native American ancestry were either mistaken or cynical. The president of the United States mockingly refers to her as “Pocahontas” —  and told Warren he would pay $1 million dollars to a charity of her choice “if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.” He precited Warren would decline this challenge. It would have been better for her if she had.

What the test shows (and doesn’t)

According to the test, Warren’s DNA is between 1/64 and 1/1032 Columbian, Mexican and/or Peruvian (used as proxies for measuring Cherokee heritage for reasons described in the report); between 0.1 percent and 1.5 percent of her DNA may be Native American in origin; she may have had a Native American ancestor between six to 10 generations back.

Warren depicted this as “slam dunk” proof that she really is of Native American ancestry. This is a base-rate fallacy. In fact, the average white person in America has 0.18 percent Native American DNA — meaning they could be described as about 1/ 556 Native American or as having a Native American ancestor nine to10 generations back. Warren does not seem to have a unique claim to Native American heritage over and above the typical white American.

For comparison: the average U.S. white also has about 0.19 percent African DNA; they can be said to be 1/ 526 black or to have a black ancestor nine to10 generations back. Rachel Dolezal might have about the same genetic claim to being black as Elizabeth Warren does to being Cherokee. Already, memes are circulating comparing the two. Of course, Warren and supporters can make arguments explaining how the two cases are not similar, but this is beside the point. If it has to be explained why or how Warren is substantively different from Dolezal, the war is already lost. 

Non sequitur

Rather than acknowledging she has no meaningful claim to Cherokee / Native American heritage or identity, Warren has doubled down. She claims to have “won” the bet, and has demanded Trump donate $1 million to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center. The president has refused, insisting he won the wager. Unfortunately, he is correct: although Warren did take the test it did not prove she is “an Indian.”

Genes, race and ethnicity are non-identical and the relationship between them is complicated. Warren is phenotypically white. She has no identifiable Native American ancestor, no clan affiliation, and no meaningful connection to Cherokee language, customs or culture. As a result, even if the DNA test had suggested she could meet the 1/16 blood quantum required by Cherokee for a federally recognized Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood(she was nowhere near this) — it would still not have established Warren is “an Indian.”

It was actually impossible for Warren to actually win Trump’s bet: Cherokee do not decide who is (or is not) one of them the basis of DNA; what matters are clan ancestry, tracing one’s genealogy to an ancestor on the “Dawes Rolls,” or being adopted into a clan by a Clan Mother.  Elizabeth Warren fails to meet any of these criteria. As a result, she is simply not Cherokee — not even a little. DNA is irrelevant.

This point was powerfully driven home by the Cherokee Nation’s Secretary of State, who described Warren’s attempt as wrong-headed and insulting. He went on to say that Warren is “undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage” (neither Warren nor her team consulted with Cherokee leadership before conducting the test or releasing the results).

And so, rather than neutralizing Trump’s attacks, it is now has made it far easier to portray Warren as a phony: She appropriated Native American heritage for years in both private and professional settings.

Confronted with evidence that her claims were illegitimate (her DNA is comparable to the average white; she has no other empirical proof of heritage) — Warren nonetheless claimed vindication, emulating Trump’s “post-truth politics.”

Throughout, she failed to challenge (and in fact, reinforced) Trump’s false narratives about race, Affirmative Action and the quality of the minority applicants who benefit from it.

Rather than using her platforms and energies to discuss her own agenda, hold Trump accountable for his record and proposals, or speak to constituents’ priorities — we are instead discussing Warren’s (lack of) Native American ancestry because she herself dragged the issue into the spotlight.  

Elizabeth Warren tried to play Trump’s game. She lost. Democrats, take heed.

Democrats' flip-flop on border security has everything to do with 2020 (and nothing to do with immigration)

The Oscar for the biggest bluff of 2018 goes to Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi for almost having us convinced they’re opposed to immigration reform from high atop the fabricated moral high ground they’ve staked out.
In reality, they weren’t always opposed to illegal immigrants being forced to follow the law and come here through legal channels.
How do we know this? They told us.
In 2009, while speaking at Georgetown University, Sen. Schumer, D-NY, said “illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.” Indirectly referencing over 600 miles of border fence that had already been built, he literally claimed it was a “significant barrier to illegal immigration.” This is exactly President Trump’s position about completing the border wall, almost word for word.
Schumer is also on record, and on video, as having said, "One of the most effective things we do on the border is turn people back … they get up to the border and we find them and say, 'go home!’" Again, this is President Trump’s position, almost word for word.
House Minority Leader and incoming Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., also had a different position on borders. In 2008 she said, “Because we do need to address the issue of immigration and the challenge we have of undocumented people in our country. We certainly do not want any more coming in.”
Even Hillary Clinton, the Democratic frontrunner for president took a hard line on illegal immigration as late as 2014 saying, “We have to send a clear message that just because your child gets across the border, that doesn’t mean your child gets to stay. We don’t want to send a message that is contrary to our laws or encourage more children to make that dangerous journey.”
Nancy and Hillary sound a lot like President Trump, again almost verbatim.
In 2013 every single Democrat in the Senate — all 54 of them — voted for $46 billion in border security, which included 700 miles in border fencing. Yet today, the Democrats are willing to shut down the government over just $5 billion dollars.
To most people $5 billion is an inconceivable amount of money. To Congress it’s lunch money.
To put it in perspective, in 2009 when Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress and the White House, they passed a $787 billion stimulus bill, a $410 billion Omnibus Appropriations bill. Then in 2015 they overwhelmingly voted for President Obama’s Iran Nuclear Deal, which gave that nation — the world’s most foremost sponsor of terrorism —$150 billion in the hope that would keep the Iranians from developing a nuclear weapon.
President Trump rightly extracted the U.S. from that deal, which Iran had no intention of honoring, but the money is gone and we can’t get it back.
To show just how principled they are in their spending, they’ve also thrown money at swine odor and manure management research to the tune of $1.8 million.
When you look at it in these terms, why would Democrats shut down the government over a measly $5 billion, halt government employee paychecks and, in the case of Pelosi, jet off to Hawaii to figure it all out later when they’ve voted for almost 10 times that amount in border security?
Because a border wall isn’t just a win for America, it’s a win for President Trump. If America gets the wall, the president will have made good on his biggest campaign promise, and it will likely mean he’s headed toward a second term in 2020.
And Democrats can’t let President Trump win. This is what flexible morals look like.
They are so consumed with contempt for the president they’re willing to gamble on our country’s security — gangs, drug cartels and possibly even terrorists crossing the border. In their mind, it’s better than the likely alternative — another four years of Trump in the White House.
It’s Trump Derangement Syndrome at its worst.
While Pelosi packed up and went on a Hawaiian vacation amidst the government shutdown, President Trump canceled his Christmas plans at Mar-a-Lago. Except for his trip to Iraq to visit U.S. troops he stayed at the White House ready work with Democrats and reopen the government.
Of course that wasn’t the headline the media reported. Many mainstream outlets ignored Pelosi’s Christmas vacation at a Hawaiian resort, where rooms go from $489 to $3,499 a night, ignored the fact that the president was sticking around and willing to work, ignored that he went to Iraq to support our soldiers, and ignored that for the first time in a very long time a first lady went to a war zone with the president.
Instead, they went full blown Scrooge on the military for daring to bring MAGA hats for the president to sign during his visit to Iraq, accused the president of turning the visit into a campaign rally, and made fun of the first lady’s shoes.
Has anyone else noticed that the media has a borderline creepy obsession with the first lady’s feet? The president could broker a peace agreement in the Middle East and the headline would mock what Melania wore on her feet.
The $5 billion President Trump is asking for is less than one percent of the federal budget. Considering the billions of dollars the Democrats have been more than willing to spend, they look ridiculous digging their heels in over $5 billion — to secure our border nonetheless.
Walls work. Just ask our ally Israel which has a wall along its border; a wall the Israelis have found to be over 99 percent effective.
Democrats aren’t used to Republicans not caving to them. For the first time in a long time we have a president who’s working hard to deliver everything he promised.
For the President Trump this is a national security fight, but for the Democrats this is just another case of anti-Trump resistance. If he didn’t want any funding for border security, Democrats would probably insist on it. It’s all a game to them.
The president needs to stay the course. It’s the right thing for the country, and it’s why he was elected.

Jason Chaffetz: If Democrats won't spend $5 billion on a wall they should spend $25 billion on border security

Jason Chaffetz Fox News

If congressional Democrats won’t provide the $5 billion President Trump has asked for to fund a wall or other physical barrier along the U.S. border with Mexico and end the partial government shutdown, then Republicans should offer an alternative proposal: $25 billion – five times as much – for border security.
To properly protect the integrity of our borders without a wall, the government will need at least an additional $25 billion. That should be the message to the Democrats.
Here’s how the $25 billion should be spent:
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM JASON CHAFFETZ: TRUMP'S BORDER WALL MAY GET FUNDING AFTER ALL (THANKS TO THIS DIRTY LITTLE WASHINGTON SECRET)
Repairs to existing barriers
Congress should agree with the Customs and Border Patrol that certain sections of the nearly 2,000 miles of border with Mexico need a physical impediment to curb the flow of human trafficking, drugs, weapons and other illegal activity.
Use $5 billion to simply fix and improve current border walls and fencing. Democrats should be able to live with this because it would enables them to keep their commitment to oppose a new wall.
More officers at higher pay
Days after he took office, President Trump signed an executive order to hire 5,000 additional Customs and Border Patrol officers, and 10,000 additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers.
Two years later there are fewer people at the Customs and Border Patrol and only a negligible increase in ICE officers. There are currently roughly 4,800 ICE officers and 60,000 Transportation Security Administration personnel.
Let’s give Customs and Border Patrol and ICE officers a 20 percent pay increase to attract the highest quality employees and to diminish longstanding retention issues. Money will also be needed to dramatically staff up as promised. Democrats should have no difficulty justifying support for federal workers to their base.

Let’s give Customs and Border Patrol and ICE officers a 20 percent pay increase to attract the highest quality employees and to diminish longstanding retention issues. Money will also be needed to dramatically staff up as promised. Democrats should have no difficulty justifying support for federal workers to their base.

Tracking entry and exit
For decades, the law has required an entry and exit system to track movement across the border. But that system is still not operational. It remains in development.
President Trump has done more to move this effort forward than any other president, but let’s take this opportunity to get it across the finish line.
Properly funding the entry and exit tracking system will provide the tools to address the fundamental problem of visa overstays. If you don’t know who is coming in and leaving the country, you can’t consistently enforce the law.
Further, we should track the millions of people who use a border crossing card to enter the U.S. The card is intended to be used for short trips – a maximum of 72 hours.
We have no reliable method to track the abuse of this system. Border crossing cards are valuable to criminals, drug mules, or human traffickers who might use them to travel undetected to our country’s interior. The cards are a convenience for those who live near the border, but we must have the ability to track when those cards are being abused.
Holding illegal immigrants
With large numbers of people crossing our border illegally, we must allocate more money to detain, house, transport and deport illegal immigrants. This is especially true with criminals and those who have previously been deported but illegally returned to the United States.
The Homeland Security Department needs to be able to increase the contracting with county facilities and live with their standards of incarceration. The county facilities should be compensated to hold people while the feds process them for potential deportation.
Cargo inspections
Current law requires 100 percent of all inbound cargo to the U.S. to be inspected. However, we inspect less than 2 percent.
Previously, I worked with incoming House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., on this topic. Improving inspections requires more funding. The Chinese are the worst offenders.
Our customs officials have great working relationships with South Korean and Pakistan, for instance, where we can inspect cargo as it goes into the containers.
Not true with China. The Chinese are the most secretive and difficult, from my experience. Let’s do as the law requires and inspect 100 percent of the cargo. Democrats such as Nadler have supported this previously and should do so now.
Sanctuary cities
In just the last few weeks we have seen the devastation of the sanctuary policies play out in the San Joaquin Valley of California as the criminal element of the illegal immigrant population was able to evade ICE officers.
It’s time to force the issue and allow local law enforcement officers to appropriately cooperate with their federal law enforcement partners. This may be a tough pill to swallow for Democrats, but remember, in return there will be no new wall, which is just as tough for Republicans.

In just the last few weeks we have seen the devastation of the sanctuary policies play out in the San Joaquin Valley of California as the criminal element of the illegal immigrant population was able to evade ICE officers.  It’s time to force the issue and allow local law enforcement officers to appropriately cooperate with their federal law enforcement partners.

DACA
DACA stands for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Action should take place now to help the illegal immigrants brought here by their parents as children who are protected by this program.
Citizenship should not be automatic, but this population should receive legal documentation to be in the U.S. and an ability to get in line, like those who came here legally, for citizenship if they choose.
Should a DACA designee be convicted of a serious crime, then that person should be subject to deportation just like any other non-citizen immigrant.
Tunnel Task Force
When many members of our military were being killed by Improvised Explosive Devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon stood up the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (JIEDDO). We spent more than $20 billion.
Let’s do the same to detect and destroy the tunnels used by drug cartels and human traffickers to enter our country. We can call it Tunnel Recognition Underground Military Program (TRUMP).
The Democrats say they support “border security,” but they can’t back up the claim. Many of them have advocated for abolishing ICE, supporting sanctuary cities, and opposing an “immoral” wall on our southern border.
Perhaps the steps outlined here strike the right balance for both parties to solve the impasse and improve the integrity of our borders.
But then again, it is Washington, where delay, blame, and inaction usually prevail. #SAD.

Former NY Times editor rips Trump coverage as biased

Jill Abramson

A former executive editor of the New York Times says the paper’s news pages, the home of its straight-news coverage, have become “unmistakably anti-Trump.”
Jill Abramson, the veteran journalist who led the newspaper from 2011 to 2014, says the Times has a financial incentive to bash the president and that the imbalance is helping to erode its credibility.
In a soon-to-be published book, “Merchants of Truth,” that casts a skeptical eye on the news business, Abramson defends the Times in some ways but offers some harsh words for her successor, Dean Baquet. And Abramson, who was the paper’s only female executive editor until her firing, invoked Steve Bannon’s slam that in the Trump era the mainstream media have become the “opposition party.”
“Though Baquet said publicly he didn’t want the Times to be the opposition party, his news pages were unmistakably anti-Trump,” Abramson writes, adding that she believes the same is true of the Washington Post. “Some headlines contained raw opinion, as did some of the stories that were labeled as news analysis.”
What’s more, she says, citing legendary 20th century publisher Adolph Ochs, “the more anti-Trump the Times was perceived to be, the more it was mistrusted for being biased. Ochs’s vow to cover the news without fear or favor sounded like an impossible promise in such a polarized environment.”
Abramson describes a generational split at the Times, with younger staffers, many of them in digital jobs, favoring an unrestrained assault on the presidency. “The more ‘woke’ staff thought that urgent times called for urgent measures; the dangers of Trump’s presidency obviated the old standards,” she writes.
Trump claims he is keeping the “failing” Times in business—an obvious exaggeration—but the former editor acknowledges a “Trump bump” that saw digital subscriptions during his first six months in office jump by 600,000, to more than 2 million.

Former executive editor of the New York Times Jill Abramson.

Dean Baquet 2019 New York Times Editor

“Given its mostly liberal audience, there was an implicit financial reward for the Times in running lots of Trump stories, almost all of them negative: they drove big traffic numbers and, despite the blip of cancellations after the election, inflated subscription orders to levels no one anticipated.”
The Times has long faced accusations of liberal bias, even before Trump got into politics and became its harshest critic. But Abramson’s words carry special weight because she is also a former Times Washington bureau chief and Wall Street Journal correspondent specializing in investigative reporting.
Baquet has said that Trump’s attacks on the press are “out of control” and that it is important to use the word “lie” when the president tells a clear untruth.
In “Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts,” Abramson praised as “brave and right” Baquet’s decision to run this headline when Trump abandoned his birtherism attacks on Barack Obama: “Trump Gives Up a Lie But Refuses to Repent.”
Abramson, who had her share of clashes with Baquet when he was her managing editor, sheds light on a 2016 episode when Baquet held off on publishing a story that would have linked the Trump campaign with Russian attempts to influence the election.
Liz Spayd, then the Times public editor, wrote that the paper, which concluded that more evidence was needed, appeared “too timid” in not running the piece, produced by a team that included reporter Eric Lichtblau.
Baquet “seethed” at this scolding, Abramson says, and emailed Lichtblau: “I hope your colleagues rip you a new a*****e.”
Baquet wrote that “the most disturbing thing” about Spayd’s column “was that there was information in it that came from very confidential, really difficult conversations we had about whether or not to publish the back channel information. I guess I’m disappointed that this ended up in print.
“It is hard for a journalist to complain when confidential information goes public. That’s what we do for a living, after all. But I’ll admit that you may find me less than open, less willing to invite debate, the next time we have a hard decision to make.”
Lichtblau soon left the Times for CNN, where he was one of three journalists fired when the network retracted and apologized for a story making uncorroborated accusations against Trump confidante Anthony Scaramucci. And the Times soon abolished the public editor’s column.
Abramson is critical of Trump as well. She calls his “fake news” attacks a “cheap way of trying to undermine the credibility of the Times’s reporting as something to be accepted as truth only by liberals in urban, cosmopolitan areas.”
The Times, which broke the story of Hillary Clinton’s private email server, also “made some bad judgment calls and blew its Clinton coverage out of proportion,” Abramson writes. She says Clinton “was wary of me,” mishandled the scandal and “was secretive to the point of being paranoid.”
Abramson is candid in acknowledging her faults. When then-publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. was considering promoting her to the top job, he told her over lunch at Le Bernadin: “Everyone knows there’s a good Jill and a bad Jill. The big question for me is which one we’ll see if you become executive editor.”
She admitted to him that “I could be self-righteous when I felt unheard, I interrupted, I didn’t listen enough.”
It was a heated battle with Baquet that led to her ouster in 2014. He was furious upon learning that she was trying to trying to recruit another top journalist—Abramson says an executive ordered her to keep it secret—who would share the managing editor’s title.
Sulzberger called her in, fired her, and handed her a press release announcing her resignation.
Abramson says she replied: “Arthur, I’ve devoted my entire career to telling the truth, and I won’t agree to this press release. I’m going to say I’ve been fired.”
Her final judgment: “I was a less than stellar manager, but I also had been judged by an unfair double standard applied to many women leaders.”

Best Dumb Democrat Cartoons

And You Did Vote Them Back In Dumb Asses.

Lawmaker who suggested Trump use ‘own funds’ to help pay for border wall has history of missing votes: report

Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., ranks 48th out of 435 congress members for missed votes.  (ivn.us)

A congressman who last week suggested that President Trump ought to fork over his "own funds" to help fund the border wall, reportedly has a history of missing votes on Capitol Hill.
U.S. Rep. Walter Jones, a Republican who represents North Carolina’s 3rd Congressional District, missed a total of 7.7 percent of House votes in 2017 – ranking him 48th among 435 members in missed votes, according to statistics cited by the News & Observer of Raleigh.
More recently, an illness has prevented Jones from voting since late September. He has missed at least 27 roll call votes since then, through the House's reconvening in November, the report said. He is expected to Capitol Hill when Congress reconvenes in January, the News & Observer reported.
Jones, 75, won an easy victory in the November midterms. During the primary, he said it would be his final term in office if he was elected.
The lawmaker's statement that Trump should contribute his own money was said amid a partial government shutdown, stemming in part from Congress' inability to reach a deal on Trump's request for $5 billion for a border wall.
Jones also suggested slashing federal aid or funding the war in Afghanistan as ways to come up with the extra money.
Since the federal government partially shut down Dec. 22, Republicans and Democrats have been at a seeming impasse over Trump’s demands for $5 billion for a border wall. Trump continued to press Democrats to "give us the votes necessary for border security" in a series of tweets on New Year's Eve.
House Democrats said they plan to introduce a legislative package later Monday to re-open the government, including a bill that would fund the Department of Homeland Security at current levels through Feb. 8 with $1.3 billion for border security, but it's unclear what kind of support it will get from Republicans. It did not include money for the wall.

Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential run ‘will be the end of her’: A.B. Stoddard

U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren has her eyes set on the 2020 presidential race, but the controversy surrounding her claims of Native American ancestry may have cost her political future, RealClearPolitics associate editor A.B. Stoddard argued Monday night on the "Special Report" All-Star panel.
On Monday morning, Warren announced she was forming an exploratory committee in preparation of what will likely be a presidential run in 2020. The Massachusetts Democrat is the third member of her party to declare such ambitions -- following former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro and U.S. Rep. John Delaney of Maryland.
In October, Warren released the findings of a DNA test that show that she may be 1/1,024th Native American, in a bid to quiet her critics. She had been accused of claiming she had Native American heritage to advance her career, something President Trump has repeatedly suggested.
Stoddard, who appeared with the Federalist senior editor Mollie Hemingway and Washington Examiner editorial director Hugo Gurdon, expressed that Warren’s deflection from the ancestry controversy isn’t good enough since it was “truly a debacle.”
“It showed what her political judgment is really like. And it’s one thing to just be on the Senate floor or the campaign trail in 2016, have a national network of support, have a good message. It’s another to make a huge blunder, sort of taking Trump’s bait ... but yeah, she has a bad story on this issue,” Stoddard told the panel. “She brings the video out in late October, two weeks before the midterms, steps on the Democrats’ message. It’s completely selfish and sort of self-absorbed and tone-deaf, and then she gets dissed by the Cherokee Nation. It was a disaster and Democrats were furious. And they believe that it was a fatal blow.”

“She brings the video out in late October, two weeks before the midterms, steps on the Democrats’ message. ... It was a disaster and Democrats were furious. And they believe that it was a fatal blow.”
— A.B. Stoddard, RealClearPolitics associate editor

“Instead of sort of just stepping aside and using what she has, which is some national support and kind of being a kingmaker, she’s gonna step into this race and it’s gonna be the end of her,” Stoddard continued. “It’s a wide-open race and I expect that this primary run to really go into late spring of 2020, so a year-and-a-half of a Democratic Party freak-out. They are very divided, but Elizabeth Warren, even after 2016 I’m going to deposit is not going to be the nominee. Look at the polling, no one is excited about her.”
Hemingway agreed with Stoddard, calling Warren’s rollout of her DNA results was “horrifically done.” She also drew attention to Warren’s “vibe,” which she described as a “hectoring middle school principal” and suggested that her policies would be “more challenging” for the senator since a general election candidate tends to be more moderate.
Meanwhile, Gurdon asserted that President Trump wasn’t going to “get his wish” in running against Warren in 2020 since many already see her as “yesterday’s woman.”
“The fact is that the party has already moved to adopt most of her positions. She doesn’t stand out and there are younger guns in the field,” Gurdon said. “Her announcement today was pretty drab, it was very formulaic. She, you know, emphasized her roots in Oklahoma and her links to the military and the middle class. And it was just ho-hum kind of -- I just think that she’s already yesterday’s woman. There will be somebody else who gets the nomination.”