WashPost Op-Ed: Girl’s Death Shows Americans Are a Threat to Migrants

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By Neil Munro

The death of a migrant girl shows that Americans are a threat to migrants, says Never Trump author Jennifer Rubin at the Washington Post.

“It’s a cruel irony that [President Donald] Trump has portrayed refugees as a threat to Americans. In fact, the reverse is true,” Rubin wrote in a column that slammed any barrier or regulatory curbs on the flow of economic migrants into the United States.

Rubin’s column was headlined “Horrifying indifference to children’s lives,” and it cited the death of seven-year Guatemalan girl, Jakelin Caal, who was brought over the New Mexico border by her father, Nery Gilberto Caal Cuz. The subheadline on the article declared: The Trump administration certainly is responsible for death of a child in its custody.”

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Fewer migrants will die while sneaking across the border if the federal government just provides a better welcome and easier asylum rules, Rubin argues:

With adequate border security and staffing, a sufficient number of immigration judges deployed to handle the caseload, reversal of the administration’s deliberately cruel policies … the current, intolerable situation should improve.

Rubin ignored the alternative policy of discouraging migration by careful enforcement of the nation’s laws against illegal migration and the employment of illegals.

Rubin also did not mention the thousands of illegal migrants who are rescued by the border patrol each year, nor the tens of thousands who are by border agents to file clearly fraudulent cases which are subsequently rejected by judges.

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Also, Rubin did not mention the moral responsibility of the child’s father who brought her through the desert in an apparent effort to use the catch-and-release Flores loophole to get past border guards. The loophole was created by Judge Dolly Gee who has ordered border officials to release migrants after 20 days if they bring a child with them.

The AP reported that the father was an economic migrant:

Family members in Guatemala said Caal decided to migrate with his favorite child to earn money he could send back home. Jakelin’s mother and three siblings remained in San Antonio Secortez, a village of about 420 inhabitants.

Economic migrants are not eligible for asylum.

But Rubin posted a litany of complaints by open-borders groups, including the ACLU and America’s Voice, who argue that curbs on illegal migrant force migrants to take more dangerous routines through the scrubland into the United States. Rubin cited the ACLU’s complaints:

In 2017, migrant deaths increased even as the number of border crossings dramatically decreased. When the Trump administration pushes for the militarization of the border, including more border wall construction, they are driving people fleeing violence into the deadliest desert regions.

Rubin exemplifies the open-borders advocates who hide their views underneath a blizzard of nit-picking complaints about minor aspects of the nation’s popular border-control rules. For example, she quoted one activist’s complaints that the temporary holding centers along the border are characterized by “freezing temperatures, no beds, lights left on, no showers, not enough toilets or toilet paper, filthy conditions, horrible smell, inedible food and not enough clean water to drink, and [are] run by insulting and abusive agents.”

But Rubin declined to say if the United States has a right to protect its borders or to deport foreign migrants from the United States. She showed indifference to the huge economic and civic costs to ordinary Americans of cheap-labor migration into the nation’s blue-collar and middle-class workplaces,  neighborhoods, hospitals, welfare centers, and K-12 schools.

Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told Breitbart News:

The Democrats are using this [death] cynically as a cudgel against the very idea of immigration enforcement. It is shameless. It is really shameless.

The left is objectively in favor of open borders. They deny it if you ask them straight out, but they are opposed to any meaningful measure to enforce the borders. Any time there is a tragedy like this they immediately turn it into an excuse for weakening the borders — and say at the same when you point to an illegal immigrant criminal [as a reason] for tightening the borders, they charge you with acting irresponsibly.

The logical conclusion of the Democrats’ outrage over this is that there should be no border enforcement because any rules about border control will also create people who evade them, and it is an evasion of the laws that is the responsible (mechanism] for this tragedy. The only logical conclusion is that we must have open borders.

For example, Democrats are now describing the detention centers used to hold migrant parents together with their children prior to their release or asylum hearings as illegitimate “internment camps.”

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This “internment” claim comes after Democrats decried the governments’ release of children to government-run shelters while their parents were detained prior to court hearings.

Nationwide, the U.S. establishment’s economic policy of using legal migration to boost economic growth shifts wealth from young people towards older people by flooding the market with cheap white collar and blue collar foreign labor. That flood of outside labor spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor that blue collar and white collar employees.

The cheap labor policy widens wealth gaps, reduces high tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high tech careers, and sidelines at least five million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with fentanyl addictions.

Immigration also steers investment and wealth away from towns in heartland states because coastal investors can more easily hire and supervise the large immigrant populations who prefer to live in coastal cities. In turn, that investment flow drives up coastal real-estate prices, pricing poor U.S. Latinos and blacks out of prosperous cities, such as Berkeley and Oakland.

Democrats Are Drooling With Glee Over 2 New Legal Developments That They Believe Could End The Trump Presidency

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By Michael Snyder

There never was any “collusion with Russia”, but the Mueller investigation opened the door for investigators to keep turning over rocks, and it was inevitable that they were eventually going to find something.  In America today, we are governed by literally millions of laws, rules and regulations, and nobody has more laws that they must follow than the president of the United States.  So if the Deep State really wants to get the resident of the White House, there are lots of ways that they can do it.  Over the past several days, there have been a couple of new legal developments that potentially represent great threats to the Trump presidency, and Democrats are drooling with delight.

The first development involves a potential violation of campaign finance laws.  In August, lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to arranging payments to two women “at the direction” of Donald Trump.  A $130,000 payment was made through a shell company to Stormy Daniels, and it was arranged that a $150,000 payment would be made to former Playboy model Karen McDougal through American Media Inc., which is the parent company of the National Enquirer.  It was ruled that these payments were made “for the principal purpose of influencing” the election, and it is one of the reasons why Michael Cohen is going to prison for three years.

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Personally, I am quite skeptical that these hush money payments constitute “campaign expenses” which must be reported, but this is the interpretation that is being pushed by the Deep State, and it is being widely accepted by the mainstream media and by members of both political parties.

In August 2015, there was a meeting between Michael Cohen, American Media Inc. CEO David Pecker and “at least one other member of the campaign” during which a plan to “catch and kill” negative stories about Trump was discussed.  According to NBC News, it has been confirmed that the “other member” in the room was Trump himself…

As part of a nonprosecution agreement disclosed Wednesday by federal prosecutors, American Media Inc., the Enquirer’s parent company, admitted that “Pecker offered to help deal with negative stories about that presidential candidate’s relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”

The “statement of admitted facts” says that AMI admitted making a $150,000 payment “in concert with the campaign,” and says that Pecker, Cohen and “at least one other member of the campaign” were in the meeting. According to a person familiar with the matter, the “other member” was Trump.

With Cohen and Pecker now both cooperating with federal investigators, Trump could potentially be in a huge amount of trouble, and the left is loving it.

As a former assistant U.S. attorney explained to NBC News, it would essentially be a slam dunk to prove “a conspiracy to commit campaign finance fraud”…

Daniel Goldman, an NBC News analyst and former assistant U.S. attorney said the agreement doesn’t detail what Trump said and did in the meeting. “But if Trump is now in the room, as early as August of 2015 and in combination with the recording where Trump clearly knows what Cohen is talking about with regarding to David Pecker, you now squarely place Trump in the middle of a conspiracy to commit campaign finance fraud.”

But once again, that is only true if the hush money payments actually constituted “campaign expenses”, and it is my opinion that they do not.

Meanwhile, federal authorities have also opened up a new investigation into potential corruption by President Trump’s inauguration committee.  The following comes from USA Today

The investigation is being led by federal prosecutors in Manhattan and is examining whether donors gave money in return for access to Donald Trump and his administration, the Wall Street Journal and CNN reported.

The Journal, citing unnamed officials, reports the probe is in its early stages but aims to determine whether some of the donors to Trump’s $107 million inauguration fund attempted to gain influence within the administration on policy decisions, something that could violate federal corruption laws.

This new investigation never would have occurred if federal authorities had not already been investigating Michael Cohen.

Reportedly, they came across some potentially incriminating information when they raided his home, office and hotel room in April

During the April raids on Cohen’s home, office, and hotel room, federal investigators discovered a taped conversation between Cohen and Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, who worked with the inaugural committee, the WSJ reported.

The contents of the recording are unclear but Wolkoff, according to the Journal, voiced concerns over how some of the inaugural funds were being spent.

During the Nixon administration, the Department of Justice ruled that a sitting president could not be indicted, but now there are quite a few Democrats that are calling for that ruling to be “reevaluated”.  One of those Democrats is Representative Adam Schiff

‘I think the Justice Department needs to re-examine that OLC opinion, the Office of Legal Counsel opinion, that you cannot indict a sitting president under circumstances in which the failure to do so may mean that person escapes justice,’ Schiff told CNN on Wednesday, hours after Donald Trump’s longtime lawyer Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to breaking campaign finance laws and other matters.

In the short-term, it is probably unlikely that Trump will be indicted, and so if Democrats want to get rid of him they will need to go down the road of impeachment.

Now that Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats have taken control of the House, they could probably pull off a vote to impeach Trump.  But the tricky part would be the Senate, because the Republicans still have a majority there.

But it is a very small majority, and it would only take a handful of Republican votes to remove Trump from office.

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Let us hope that the Democrats do not decide to pursue impeachment, because that would only create even more division in a country that is already greatly divided.

We live in very troubled times, and unfortunately things are likely to become even more troubled in 2019.

Weekly Standard Goes Belly Up, Actual Conservatives Celebrate

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A formerly-relevant conservative magazine has shut down after two years of #NeverTrump commentary finally drove the majority of its readership away.

“All good things come to an end. And so, after 23 years, does The Weekly Standard. I want to express my gratitude to our readers and my admiration for my colleagues. We worked hard to put out a quality magazine, and we had a good time doing so. And we have much more to do. Onward!” said Bill Kristol, formerly Weekly Standard’s editor-at-large and the publication’s most prominent personality.

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Kristol is known for ditching the GOP over the nomination of President Donald J. Trump in favor of the globalist establishment. Weekly Standard’s former readers left for more in-touch media sources and never forgave him. After 23 years in business, the publication became obsolete in just two years.

The conservative world reacted on Twitter, mostly celebrating the death of a rag that worked against the interests of conservatives who support Trump.

“The Weekly Standard folded because conservatives are tired of being force fed bullsh*t from out-of-touch, outdated elitists that think their opinions (& that of legacy media in general) are superior to everyone else’s. You won’t see a single ounce of pity coming from me over it,” said Richard Armande Mills.

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“Tonight, I will toast to the end of the Weekly Standard. In fact I’m gonna toast right now. And at lunch. And at Christmas parties tonight. Basically, fuck those guys,” said former Breitbart editor Raheem Kassam.

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“Cut the fake mourning. The Weekly Standard died several years ago when it told loyal readers like me to fuck off. Don’t pretend it that it was just too principled for us brutes. It told us to fuck off. And we did. So now it’s fucked. Ahoy,” said Bconservative author Kurt Schlictter.

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This reporter had some thoughts too:

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There were rumors that the magazine might merge with Washington Examiner, but that deal never came to fruition. The last issue of Weekly Standard will be published on Dec. 24.

Not journalism but propaganda: Fact-checkers turn on Facebook for spreading its own fake news

Not journalism but propaganda: Fact-checkers turn on Facebook for spreading its own fake news

Journalist fact-checkers who signed up for a controversial partnership with social media giant Facebook to combat fake news are abandoning ship citing ethical concerns and shady practices.

The fact-checkers became disillusioned with Facebook after the company ignored requests for meaningful data that showed the impact of the anti-fake news initiatives. Participating journalists anecdotally reported minimal results and Facebook allegedly did nothing to assuage their concerns.

Facebook began courting journalists and roughly 40 media partners, including AP, Snopes, and Politifact for the project in the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential elections but despite the noble intentions and lofty goals, research and anecdotal evidence suggest the debunking had little effect. Facebook’s hiring of the Definers PR firm to smear critics was the final straw for many disillusioned do-gooders.

ALSO ON RT.COMStanding against Soros: Facebook board defends COO Sandberg’s decision to snoop on billionaire“They’ve essentially used us for crisis PR,” Brooke Binkowski, former managing editor of Snopes, said to the Guardian.“They’re not taking anything seriously. They are more interested in making themselves look good and passing the buck … They clearly don’t care.”

Binkowski went one step further, accusing the platform of spreading its own fake news and pressuring debunkers to help Facebook’s advertising partners.

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“I strongly believe that they are spreading fake news on behalf of hostile foreign powers and authoritarian governments as part of their business model,” Binkowski said. “I was bringing up Myanmar over and over and over… They were absolutely resistant.”

ALSO ON RT.COMUK MPs seize documents expected to expose Facebook’s covert data harvesting

In addition, fact-checkers received increased death threats and harassment from members of the online far-right as well as conservatives who accused both Snopes and Facebook of exhibiting a left wing bias.

“They threw us under the bus at every opportunity,” Binkowski said. A Facebook spokesperson claimed the company is now offering journalist safety training for partners.

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Kim LaCapria, a former content manager and fact-checker with Snopes, also left due to the malign influence Facebook was exerting. She accused the company of giving the “appearance of trying to prevent damage without actually doing anything.”

She claimed that on more than one occasion she and her colleagues found themselves wasting their time debunking satire websites or debunking information that affected Facebook advertisers.

She also decried the financial arrangement Facebook has with Snopes. “That felt really gross,” she said. “You’re not doing journalism anymore. You’re doing propaganda.”

ALSO ON RT.COMFacebook spied on Android users’ calls & texts while pretending to care about privacy

Several media partners became jaded when it emerged that Facebook had conducted a smear campaign tying opponents to billionaire Jewish philanthropist George Soros.

“Why should we trust Facebook when it’s pushing the same rumors that its own fact-checkers are calling fake news?” said a current Facebook fact-checker who was not authorized to speak publicly about their news outlet’s partnership.

It’s worth asking how do they treat stories about George Soros on the platform knowing they specifically pay people to try to link political enemies to him?

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Mika missing at Morning Joe after calling Pompeo ‘a wannabe dictator’s butt boy’

Mika missing at Morning Joe after calling Pompeo ‘a wannabe dictator’s butt boy’

MSNBC’s talk show Morning Joe had half of its host family missing on Thursday. Mika Brzezinski was notably absent amid a scandal over a homophobic slur thrown at Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

Brzezinski’s offensive remark slipped in during a live interview with Senator Richard Durbin on Wednesday. She wanted to ask his opinion about the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi and remarks made by Pompeo on the subject earlier on Fox & Friends.

“I understand that Donald Trump doesn’t care. He doesn’t care. But why doesn’t Mike Pompeo care right now? Are the pathetic deflections that we just heard when he appeared on Fox and Friends, is that a patriot speaking? Or a wannabe dictator’s butt boy?” she asked.

MSNBC apparently tried and failed to censor the poorly thought-out quip by briefly silencing Brzezinski’s words.

On Thursday, Brzezinski’s co-host and husband, Joe Scarborough, explained her absence by saying that “Mika has the day off with her family, a long-planned family event.” He assured she would be coming back on Friday.

The network however did not immediately comment on the scandal, in contrast to its swift expression of support for host Joy Reid at the time she was criticized for homophobic posts written a decade ago.

Mika’s slur was met with instant outrage on social media, with people of all kinds of political affiliation expressing disgust with the phrase.

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Facing the heat, Brzezinski tried to apologize on her Twitter account, saying that implying a pederasty relationship was a“SUPER BAD choice of words” and that she should have called the secretary of state a “water boy” instead.

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Brzezinski’s remark is hardly the first instance when critics of Donald Trump have used homophobic biases to target him or his policies. In June, the New York Times published a cartoon showing an imaginary date between the US president and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, which viewers were supposed to find disgusting.

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New York’s new Attorney General promises to ‘use every area of the law’ to investigate Trumps

New York’s new Attorney General promises to ‘use every area of the law’ to investigate Trumps

New York City’s incoming attorney general Letitia James speaking at an anti-Trump rally in 2017 © Reuters / Mike Segar

New York’s incoming Attorney General has threatened President Trump with legal warfare, saying she will “use every area of the law” to investigate the president and his family.

Democrat Letitia James tied her campaign to the anti-Trump #resistance early on, accusing the president of money laundering and promising to find out “whether he’s engaged in conspiracy and whether or not he’s colluded, not only with Putin, but also with China, as well.”

The familiar message clearly has found a receptive crowd, as James defeated Republican challenger Keith Wofford last month.

Speaking to NBC News on Tuesday, James kept up her anti-Trump crusade. “We will use every area of the law to investigate President Trump and his business transactions and that of his family as well,”James said. “We want to investigate anyone in his orbit who has, in fact, violated the law.”

As for the specifics, James promised to look into Trump’s real estate holdings in New York City, as well as the much-publicized meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer at Trump Tower in 2016. President Trump reportedly told Special Counsel Robert Mueller last month that he didn’t know the meeting had taken place, CNN reported.

“Taking on President Trump and looking at all of the violations of law I think is no match to what I have seen in my lifetime,” James told NBC.

Whatever about the real-estate probe, James’ investigation into the Trump Tower meeting, and into “conspiracy” and “collusion” is unlikely to turn over any new evidence. Mueller has been investigating Trump’s alleged connections to Russia for over a year-and-a-half now, and has thus far come up empty handed.

Still, James told NBC that she believes Mueller is “closing in on this president” and that “his days are going to be coming to an end shortly.”

James may have spoken with #resistance fervor on NBC, but her pledge to investigate Trump is not a radical move for a New York Attorney General.

Her predecessor, Barbara Underwood, already has dozens of cases pending against Trump, including an investigation into his charity and lawsuits to block the rollback of net neutrality and environmental regulations. Underwood, in turn, has continued the anti-Trump pushback of disgraced former AG Eric Schneiderman, whom she replaced in May after he resigned over sexual assault allegations.

Underwood continued Schneiderman’s investigation of Trump’s charity, the Trump Foundation, accusing the charity in a lawsuit last year of “unlawful political coordination” with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Schneiderman had also overseen an investigation into Trump University for alleged illegal business practices.

On Twitter, James’ fighting words were celebrated by the anti-Trump crowd, but decried by conservatives. “When Letitia James says she is going to investigate someone to look for a crime, that is a crime,” said one. “It goers (sic) against the Constitution.”

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Alex Jones heckles CEO of ‘evil’ Google in Senate halls on way to hearing

Alex Jones heckles CEO of ‘evil’ Google in Senate halls on way to hearing

Roger Stone and Alex Jones at Tuesday’s House hearing © Reuters / Jim Young

Banned conspiracy theorist and pundit Alex Jones was stalking the corridors of the Capitol again, heckling Google CEO Sundar Pichai ahead of a House hearing focused on the tech giant’s data collection and alleged political bias.

As Pichai made his way into the House Judiciary Committee hearing on Tuesday morning, Jones followed the CEO down the hall, repeatedly chanting “Google is evil!”

Accompanied by conservative strategist and fellow Infowars personality Roger Stone, Jones ranted at Pichai for Google’s alleged censorship of conservative voices, until Pichai’s police escort warned the bellicose conspiracy theorist to be quiet or be arrested.

“They’re going to talk about me in this committee, I will be talked about – so what am I supposed to do?” Jones asked reporters. “His people come lie to Congress over and over and over again and we don’t get to respond to them,” he added.

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Jones’ interest in free speech on the internet is a personal one. Google was one of more than a dozen tech companies that banned Jones from using some of its services this August, for allegedly promoting violence and for hate speech. The move was cheered by social-justice types but was decried by conservatives and free-speech advocates.

While Jones may have favored a more confrontational approach, lawmakers inside the hearing took Pichai to task on a litany of accusations. Democrats slammed Pichai for not cracking down harder on Russians purchasing political ads (a paltry $4,700 worth, according to Pichai himself). Both parties questioned him on his company’s opaque data collection policies, while Republicans grilled him on persistent allegations of liberal bias.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren asked Pichai why a picture of President Donald Trump was for a long time the first result for a search for the word “idiot,” on Google. Pichai explained this away as the work of impartial algorithms, but that explanation didn’t satisfy some lawmakers.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R) from Texas asked Pichai whether Google’s algorithms themselves are biased, and whether pro-Trump and anti-immigration content had been deliberately tagged as “hate speech.”Pichai again denied the allegations of bias.

His online presence greatly diminished by the bans, Jones is unlikely to be sated by the results of Tuesday’s hearing. In an Infowars stream of proceedings titled ‘Live at the Google Treason Hearings’, Jones called Google “absolutely the most horrible corporation on earth.”

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