Let’s not do a shutdown, Democrats – do what’s right for the American People! pic.twitter.com/bZg07ZKQqo

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 13, 2018

Busted.

Via Washington Times:

President Trump posted a video to Twitter on Thursday in which he accused the Democrats of being “absolute hypocrites” on border security and his wall, using clips from numerous high-profile Democrats to support his point.

In the clips, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, failed 2016 presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and former President Barack Obama all denounce illegal immigration, and Mrs. Clinton specifically brags about voting to keep immigrants out with barriers.

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Owned.

Via Daily Caller:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) responded Wednesday after CNN accused President Donald Trump of making up statistics about illegal immigration.

Trump claimed during a meeting with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer this week that terrorists are illegally immigrating to the United States.

“People are pouring into our country, including terrorists. We caught 10 terrorists over a short period of time,” Trump said.

CNN anchor Jim Sciutto asserted multiple times that Trump was incorrect, writing, “DHS did not provide evidence of a single terrorist caught at the southern border over the very last short period of time as the president claimed.”

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And not taxpayer money but encouraging private investment in areas that need it. The second guy in this video is Bob Johnson, head at BET, who was a Hillary Clinton supporter.

President Trump just announced an urban revitalization council, that will produce $100 billion in capital for urban areas from Arizona to Baltimore.

Cities ruined by democrat failures will now get the help they need.

And there’s all but a media blackout.#BlackTwitter #Maga pic.twitter.com/GKuKfK4mYG

— Adrian Norman (@madriannorman) December 13, 2018

Why were taxpayers even paying for this to begin with? Where is the list of 1) who approved this and 2) who hush money was paid out for. Why is this not a crime yet Trump using his own money is somehow supposed to be a crime? Bizarre.

Via Daily Wire:

Members of Congress will no longer be able to rely on taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment and sexual misconduct claims, thanks to legislation passed just this week.

The Huffington Post reports that the final version of the bill passed Thursday, “sailing” through the House and Senate by unanimous consent, and will be on President Donald Trump’s desk awaiting a signature by the end of this week.

“Time is finally up for members of Congress who think that they can sexually harass and get away with it. They will no longer be able to slink away with no one knowing that they have harassed. … They will pay back the U.S. Treasury,” Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA), one of the primary sponsors of the bill told reporters on Thursday, according to Reuters.

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The DHS issued the following release on how the wall is working in places where it has been built.

Via DHS:

WE ARE BUILDING THE FIRST NEW BORDER WALL IN A DECADE.

DHS is committed to building wall and building wall quickly. We are not replacing short, outdated and ineffective wall with similar wall. Instead, under this President we are building a wall that is 30-feet high.

FACT: Prior to President Trump taking office, we have never built wall that high.

Once funding was provided, DHS began construction of border wall exceptionally quickly, in some locations in as little as nine months from funding to building– a process that commonly takes two years or more in other parts of Government. By the end of FY 2019, DHS expects to have construction completed or underway for more than 120 miles in the areas it’s most needed by the U.S. Border Patrol. The pace of construction has picked up as initial limiting factors like land acquisition and funding have been addressed.

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Once again, infested DOJ, this is the office anti-Trump Preet Bhrara was in charge of. They can’t get Trump through Mueller, so they’re trying another fishing expedition, investigation without a crime to tar the administration. They’re looking at did donors give money for access? Are they kidding? That’s what donors have done with every administration for the history of the country.

Via WSJ:

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan are investigating whether President Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee misspent some of the record $107 million it raised from donations, people familiar with the matter said.

The criminal probe by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, which is in its early stages, also is examining whether some of the committee’s top donors gave money in exchange for access to the incoming Trump administration, policy concessions or to influence official administration positions, some of the people said.

Giving money in exchange for political favors could run afoul of federal corruption laws. Diverting funds from the organization, which was registered as a nonprofit, could also violate federal law.

The investigation represents another potential legal threat to people who are or were in Mr. Trump’s orbit. Their business dealings and activities during and since the campaign have led to a number of indictments and guilty pleas. Many of the president’s biggest campaign backers were involved in the inaugural fund.

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Ok, so that’s the Senate’s version of a “strongly-worded letter” that does nothing. And there’s a lot to question about Obama having gotten involved in this without proper authorization. But the only reason this is being pushed now is to help Iran. That’s the whole point of the media obsession with Khashoggi.

Via Washington Examiner:

The U.S. Senate voted Thursday to check the executive branch’s war powers authority by voting to end U.S. support of the Saudi-led airstrikes in Yemen.

Senators voted 56-41 in favor of the resolution, which passed after lawmakers agreed to a series of amendments, including on by Sen. Todd Young, R-Ind., to block the U.S. military from in-flight refueling of Saudi jets.

Support for the measure was fueled by a growing disdain for the Yemeni civil war, which has created a humanitarian crisis and has killed more than 10,000 people.

Senators were also eager to punish the Saudi government over its involvement in the brutal murder of dissident Jamal Khashoggi, who was also a columnist at the Washington Post.

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Equality doesn’t secure the nation.

WASHINGTON — The incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee wants lawmakers to vote on a measure ensuring transgender individuals can enlist and serve in the military, but he’s also pessimistic about its chances of success.

“I would like to pass legislation like we did when we got rid of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’” said Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., who currently serves as ranking member on the defense oversight panel. “We made it clear that gay people could serve openly. I think we should pass the same thing for transgender.”

“But I’m realistic about our ability to do that, so I think it does play out in the courts at this point.”

Representatives of President Donald Trump’s administration were back in federal court this week on the issue of restricting transgender individuals from serving in the military, arguing that lower court rulings blocking his proposed ban unfairly limited his executive power.

Opponents of Trump policy — including numerous Democrats on Capitol Hill — have argued it’s an issue of basic fairness, after former President Barack Obama paved the way for open service by transgender individuals for the first time.

Smith, who will take over the House’s defense committee when the new Congress begins in January, said the transgender debate will be one of several “equality” issues taken up by his members in coming months. He characterized the debate as one not just about fairness, but also military readiness.

“We don’t want to discriminate against people based on sexual preference, race, gender, religion,” he told reporters at a roundtable event with defense reporters on Wednesday.

“We do discriminate against people based on their capability. You have to be able to meet the standards that are necessary to do the job you are being asked to do. But we’re not going to say no gay people, no transgender people, no Muslims.”

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It’s called Kudzu in the south.

Via NBC News:

Air pollution is an enormous problem in many urban areas, but two European architects have developed plant-filled plastic curtains designed to turn building facades into “living walls” that help purify dirty air.

The curtains contain a mazelike network of tubes filled with microscopic algae, which like all green plants remove carbon dioxide from the air while pumping out oxygen via the carbon-sequestering process known as photosynthesis. Air flows into the bottom of the curtains and rises through the tubes, feeding the microalgae along the way.

“Microalgae have exceptional properties that have been discovered by biologists that allow them to re-metabolize some of the waste that our city generates,” said Claudia Pasquero, an architect with the London-based firm EcoLogicStudio and one of the developers of the algae curtains. “What we’ve done is try to understand how we can integrate microalgae in the urban environment.”

Pasquero and her partner on the project, Marco Poletto, said they foresee a strong market for the eco-friendly curtains, especially for use on warehouses and other large buildings valued more for their function than their appearance. They said the curtains might sell for $350 a square meter, though they didn’t specify when a commercial version of their prototype curtains might be commercially available.

Last month, the architects displayed an early prototype of the curtains in Ireland, covering the first and second floors of Dublin Castle with more than a dozen of the drapes. Collectively, the curtains used to cover the castle can suck more than two pounds of carbon dioxide from the air each day, according to the architects. That’s roughly the amount removed each day by 20 large trees, they said.

It’s an impressive claim, but not everyone is convinced.

“I appreciate the architects thinking outside the box, but this approach seems more of a gimmick than a real solution,” Gaboury Benoit, a professor of environmental chemistry at Yale, told NBC News MACH in an email.

Even if the curtains are effective at removing some carbon dioxide from the air, Benoit said, they don’t provide shade, as trees do. And unlike the drapes, which the architects said would need to be reconditioned every two to three years, trees are naturally self-replenishing.

“I’d say trees do it better, unless detailed study shows me otherwise,” Benoit said.

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Nice.

Media or parents causing the bullying?

Via WPVI:

A student at a Delaware school will be going by a different name in class after relentless bullying.

The situation had the parents reaching out to Action News for help, saying their son’s bullying wasn’t being addressed by the Brandywine School District.

The problem: They say 11-year-old Joshua Trump was being picked on because of his last name.

“They curse at him, they call him an idiot, they call him stupid,” said his mother, Megan Trump.

“He was getting ridiculed and bullied for the fact that his last name was Trump,” said his father, Bobby Berto.

His parents say the bullying started for Joshua – who is not related to the 45th president – when Donald Trump began running for office.

“I pulled him out of school and homeschooled him for a year,” his father said.

This year, Joshua was moving into middle school, so his parents thought things would change.

They even said they met with school officials and teachers to tell them about Joshua’s past problems.

It’s a fact that the Principal of Talley Middle School, Mark Mayer, acknowledges.

“I do know the teachers were aware of the last name, and I know in speaking with the student that the teachers do their very best to try not to say his last name,” Mayer said.

Joshua’s parents say the bullying didn’t stop.

“He said he hates himself, and he hates his last name, and he feels sad all the time, and he doesn’t want to live feeling like that anymore, and as a parent that’s scary,” said Megan.

Mayer says after a recent meeting with Joshua’s parents, there was an investigation. He says five students were identified and disciplined.

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Paying to control the narrative.

Via Fox News:

Kentucky’s Republican Gov. Matt Bevin blasted the Louisville Courier-Journal newspaper Wednesday for partnering with ProPublica, an investigative journalism outlet whose backers include liberal financier George Soros.

In a YouTube video, Bevin accuses the outlet, ProPublica, of left-wing bias and also tears into the local paper.

“This is the same Courier-Journal, mind you, which, while it’s dying, continues to maintain that they are unbiased, that they are good journalists and that they are interested in transparency, and holding government … accountable,” Bevin says in the video. “Who’s holding the Courier-Journal accountable?”

Bevin also criticizes ProPublica’s founders, Herbert and Marion Sandler, who have donated to progressive causes and groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union. He says the news organization receives funding from Democratic donors, including Soros, whom he nicknamed George “I hate America” Soros.

Soros, a frequent target of Republican critics, supports ProPublica through the Open Society Foundations.

The Courier-Journal announced Wednesday that it is one of several local newspapers partnering with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network with the aim of investigating an unspecified state program.

“While the past year has seen yet more cutbacks at local news organizations, the ProPublica Local Reporting Network has been a bright spot nationally,” ProPublica senior editor Charles Ornstein said in a statement. “We couldn’t be happier with the accountability journalism produced by our inaugural class and are excited to pursue another year of investigative projects with moral force.”[…]

Other news organizations partnering with ProPublica for state investigations include the Charleston Gazette-Mail in Charleston, W. Va., the Connecticut Mirror, the Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C., and the Sacramento Bee in California.

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Sheltering in place wasn’t an option for him.

Via Washington Times:

A judge has rejected a deputy’s claim that he had no duty to confront the gunman during the school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

Refusing to dismiss a lawsuit filed by the parent of a victim, Broward Circuit Judge Patti Englander Henning found after a hearing Wednesday that ex-deputy Scot Peterson did have a duty to protect those inside the school where 17 people died and 17 were wounded on Feb. 14. Video and other evidence shows Peterson, the only armed officer at the school, remained outside while shots rang out.

The negligence lawsuit was filed by Andrew Pollack, whose daughter Meadow was killed. He said it made no sense for Peterson’s attorneys to argue that a sworn law enforcement officer with a badge and a gun had no requirement to go inside.

“Then what is he doing there?” Pollack said after the ruling. “He had a duty. I’m not going to let this go. My daughter, her death is not going to be in vain.”

Peterson attorney Michael Piper said he understands that people might be offended or outraged at his client’s defense, but he argued that as a matter of law, the deputy had no duty to confront the shooter. Peterson did not attend the hearing.

“There is no legal duty that can be found,” Piper said. “At its very worst, Scot Peterson is accused of being a coward. That does not equate to bad faith.”

Meanwhile, the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, which is investigating the shooting, heavily criticized the Broward school district Wednesday for not having a universal policy for calling a “Code Red” – the term for immediately locking down classrooms because an active shooter is on campus – and little training for staff and students.

Commission members meeting in Tallahassee said that contributed to no one calling a Code Red until more than three minutes after the first shots were fired. By that time, 15 people were fatally shot inside the three-story freshman building and the last two victims were in the shooter’s sights. Nikolas Cruz, 20, a former student with mental health issues, has been charged with the shooting.

“I am extremely dismayed that the people around this table and behind the scenes are taking this much more seriously than Broward County,” said commissioner Melissa Larkin-Skinner, the Florida chief executive officer for a mental health treatment group. “It makes me physically ill. … I am sitting here and getting more and more pissed off by the minute.”

Broward school officials did not return a call and email Wednesday seeking comment.

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Selective on who they go after.

Via Washington Times:

The American civil rights movements became necessary because minority groups in this country had enough of being bullied, marginalized and targeted by a society that punished them for being different. Whether it be the black or gay civil rights movements, or the movement to enfranchise and expand women’s rights, the goal was not for special rights, but for the ability to live our lives without threat and to enjoy all the rights to which every American is entitled.

The right to not be destroyed because people don’t like you — the bedrock principle informing all civil rights values and successes — is being made a mockery of by today’s modern liberal inquisitors. Ask comedian and actor Kevin Hart and Heisman Trophy winner Kyler Murray.

Both black men offended the liberal morality police by making comments deemed insensitive or the now ubiquitous “homophobic” on social media years ago. Their word crimes required some miserable soul to pour over Twitter looking for a statement or attitude with which to crucify them.

This is done not just at a random moment, but during extraordinarily important times in their lives so the maximum amount of damage can be inflicted on their lives, reputations and careers.

Mr. Hart had just been named host of the 2019 Oscar awards when comments he made over a decade ago about not wanting his son to be gay were resurfaced. In a video on Instagram, Mr. Hart responded: “My team calls me, ‘Oh my God, Kevin, everyone’s upset by tweets you did years ago,’ he said in that video. “Guys, I’m nearly 40 years old. If you don’t believe that people change, grow, evolve as they get older, I don’t know what to tell you. If you want to hold people in a position where they always have to justify the past, do you. I’m the wrong guy, man,” Variety reported.

The film academy asked him to apologize or they would find a new host. He opted for the former reminding people he had addressed the issue in the past and has become a different person. In a tweet, he then also apologized for his “insensitive words of the past.” Genuflection complete.

Mr. Murray was also condemned as ‘homophobic’ in a USA Today column covering the announcement that he was the recipient of the Heisman Trophy. Instead of covering the most important moment in this young man’s life, an apparently bitter columnist decided to dig through Mr. Murray’s Twitter account to see if there was anything with which he could smear the 21-year-old. And viola! Seven years ago, when he was 14, Mr. Murray used a word some consider to be a gay slur when referring to someone he knew. It’s a word, by the way, gays use all the time when referring to themselves.

The news coverage of the most important time in this young man’s life was then marred by allegations of Mr. Murray being anti-gay, which then also required an apology. He wrote on Twitter, “I apologize for the tweets that have come to light tonight from when I was 14 and 15. I used a poor choice of word that doesn’t reflect who I am or what I believe. I did not intend to single out any individual or group.” Genuflection complete. Again.

In Mr. Hart’s case, there are many parents who do not want their children to be homosexual, which doesn’t make them homophobic. It’s because living as a sexual minority anywhere is difficult, and parents generally wish for their children to not have difficult lives.

Despite what we may want as gay people or how we see our lives, other individuals, including parents, have every right to have an opinion about what they want for their children. When it differs from our opinions, that doesn’t make everyone a homophobe. It also doesn’t mean they should be hounded for the rest of their lives, or their careers destroyed because they hurt our feelings or reminded us that our society is still imperfect.

The attack on Mr. Murray was disgusting and awful. He was smeared for a word he wrote as a child. The attack not just marred his great moment, but was perhaps meant to destroy his career as another warning by the liberal mob that any deviation from acceptable behavior and policy will be met with life-altering consequences.

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Stay classy.

Via Newsbusters

While not exactly paying for the wall, that’s a lot of investment in stopping migration to the U.S.

Via Mexico News Daily:

The federal government will invest more than US $30 billion over the next five years on a Comprehensive Development Plan with Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador aimed at curbing migration to the United States, the foreign secretary said yesterday.

Speaking at a United Nations (UN) migration conference in Marrakech, Morocco, Marcelo Ebrard said that Mexico has made a commitment to cooperate closely with Central American countries and expressed confidence that the plan would be feasible and effective.

Ebrard said he expected that the plan, which will seek to develop Mexico’s poor southern states, would curb migration better than “containment measures.”

However, he didn’t explain exactly how the US $30 billion investment will be used or where the money would come from.

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Via Townhall:

The Department of Justice Inspector a General released a report Thursday showing thousands of text messages sent by fired FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page were not properly preserved and presented a “gap” in investigating their misconduct at the Bureau.

“The Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General initiated this investigation upon being notified of a gap in text message data collection during the period December 15, 2016 through May 17, 2017, from Federal Bureau of Investigation mobile devices assigned to FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page relevant to a matter being investigated by the OIG’s Oversight and Review Division. Specifically, the OIG’s Cyber Investigations Office was asked to attempt recovery of these missing text message for the referenced period from FBI issued mobile devices issued to Strzok and Page,” the report states. “In view of the content of many of the text messages between Strzok and Page, the OIG also asked the Special Counsel’s Office to provide the OIG the DOJ issues iPhones that had been assigned to Strzok and Page during their respective assignments to the SCO.”

After a number of steps by the OIG, “was the recovery of thousands of text messages within the period of the missing text messages, December 15, 2016 through May 17, 2017, as well as hundreds of other text messages outside the gap period that had not been produced by the FBI due to technical problems with its text message collection tool.”

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And this is why they are not trusted.

Via Twitchy:

Remember FBI texting pals Peter Strzok and Lisa Page? Well, the OIG is out with a new report pertaining to their mobile devices, and it contains some pretty interesting information:

According to the report, the Special Counsel’s Office issued iPhones to both Page and Strzok in late May 2017 and early June 2017, respectively. And while Page left the SCO on July 15, 2017, the Justice Management Division was unable to locate her iPhone until September 2018. After examining the device, the OIG found that it had been reset to factory settings on July 31, 2017. As for Strzok, he completed his SCO Exit Clearance Certificate on August 11, 2017. The SCO Records Officer who reviewed his phone the following month made a note in her log that Strzok’s phone contained “no substantive texts, notes or reminders.” When OIG received Strzok’s phone in late January 2018, they found that his phone had been reconfigured for a new user — by resetting it to factory settings.

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This is the critical point that keeps getting missed: “It must exist solely because the candidate is running for office.” And that’s a challenging bar.

Via Washington Examiner:

Democrats and media commentators are noting that many Republicans are “shrugging off” the fact that Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to felony campaign finance violations which prosecutors say President Trump directed him to commit. The president, they say, is “implicated in two felonies.” How could GOP lawmakers shrug that off?

One little-discussed reason is that many Republicans never liked and continue to oppose current campaign finance laws. They don’t approve of limits on contributions by individuals, corporations, and others — they view those limits as restrictions on constitutionally-protected speech. So they don’t approve of what the laws are designed to do. But of course, the restrictions are law. Given that, many Republicans favor interpreting the law in the most limited way possible.

In that spirit, with the Cohen case, some of the best conservative thinkers on campaign finance are arguing that Cohen’s offense, to which he has pleaded guilty, wasn’t really an offense at all. And it certainly wasn’t an offense for which President Trump could be prosecuted.

Brad Smith, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, is one of the strongest voices in opposition to much of the current campaign finance law structure. He doesn’t believe the Trump-Cohen Stormy Daniels payoff was a campaign finance violation because he doesn’t believe it was a campaign expenditure. In a recent email exchange, Smith explained his position at some length:

Not everything that is subjectively intended to influence an election is a campaign expenditure. For example, if Trump (or any other businessman running for office) settled lawsuits against the business in order to get them off the table, so that they wouldn’t become campaign issues, those settlements would not be campaign expenses, but would remain personal expenses, payable by Trump or the company sued. That is true even if the suits were deemed totally meritless by Trump’s lawyers and paid solely as nuisance settlements to prevent bad campaign press.

The standard “for the purpose of influencing a campaign” must be read in pari materia with the prohibition in the statute on personal use of campaign funds. That section and its regulations define things that are not campaign expenditures, and personal use includes any obligations that would exist irrespective of the campaign. The obligations to Daniels or others (such as they were) were not created as a candidate. Moreover, even if Trump decided to pay the blackmail in part because he was running for president, in its implementing regulations, the FEC specifically rejected a mixed motive test, i.e. that something would count as a campaign expense if one of multiple motives was to help the campaign. It must exist solely because the candidate is running for office. But Daniels’ blackmail threat exists whether or not Trump was running for office. Clearly, Trump may be more inclined to pay it because he was running for office, but it still existed. Indeed, Daniels has said she was threatened way back in 2012. And if she only came forward after Trump were elected, he might still pay it — yet the campaign would be over. In short, it doesn’t arise solely from the campaign.

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No eggnog for you.

Via Free Beacon:

President Donald Trump canceled the annual White House Christmas party with reporters and members of the media on Thursday, according to Fox News.

The White House has made no public announcement of the cancellation. The decades-long tradition has been a time for members of the press and White House officials to celebrate the holiday season. The party traditionally featured a picture-taking session where the president would pose for photos with guests and chat in an informal setting.

Last year, Trump and First Lady Melanie Trump made a brief appearance at the party but did not take pictures with the guests.

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