Here are my observations on the news of the day.

FLAKE SHOULD BE ASHAMED, if not, certainly embarrassed by his pathetic Senate floor speech Wednesday. Unfortunately, I cannot say Sen. Jeff Flake is not my senator. While he has voted with the administration, his attacks on President Trump, only serve to prove why he is so disliked in Arizona.

In a sequel to his October 23, 2017 floor speech in which he criticized the president on several fronts, while focusing on his lack of leadership ideals, Flake astonishingly accused the president of using Stalinist language in his criticism of the media that is promoting global instability.

“It is a testament to the condition of our democracy that our president uses words infamously spoken by mass-murdering Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, that the media is the “enemy of the people,” Flake said. How ludicrous.

While Flake claims the president has “inspired authoritarians and dictators with his own language,” the senator recently visited Cuba where he withheld critical comments of the oppressive Cuban regime.

Newt Gingrich believes Flake might successfully get a job with CNN.

AN ASIDE: Stalin censored newspapers, literature, pictures and film. His purges directly caused the deaths of an estimated three million people. His policies also sparked famine, leading to the deaths of millions more.

ARPAIO’S DECISION TO RUN for the senate is not helpful to the Republican Party. If former sheriff Joe Arpaio is running for the seat to be vacated by Jeff Flake, as a payback to the president for pardoning him, it’s a bad decision. Arpaio was a campaign supporter of Trump in Arizona, and it could be said that the president’s pardon was in appreciation of that support. However, Arpaio, who has been one to believe all of the national press he received over the years, now needs to put his ego in-check and check-out.

Unfortunately, public and private polling suggests that Arpaio “would be competitive” against Rep. Martha McSally and former state Sen. Kelli Ward, according to a piece by an Illinois attorney writing under the nom de plume of Warren Henry in The Federalist.

CNN REPORTING OFF-BASE, AGAIN – “He was a socialist before it was cool,” read the subhead in a CNN online piece written by John Blake, referring to Martin Luther King Jr. on MLK Day. Blake claims that many of King’s beliefs were in line with Democrat socialists like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who captured the imagination of millennials. “There was a time in American politics when calling someone a socialist was a slur,” wrote Blake, who adds, “Not anymore, at least to many younger Americans who are developing a distrust of capitalism.”

While some of King’s ideas could be termed socialistic, he was not a socialist as Blake would have us believe. We all remember King’s plea for non-violence during all of his protests. True socialists lean to violence in it’s many forms.

A couple years ago, Harvard University was delighted, I’m sure, to report that 51 percent of young Americans (18-29 years of age) in its poll oppose capitalism, because it confirms that its left-leaning teaching is working.

SCHUMER WRONG, AGAIN, but what else is new? During all of the Democrat demagoguery over the tax reform legislation, it was Sen. Chuck “Chuckles the Clown” Schumer (D-NY) who refused to believe that the companies would respond to the corporate tax reduction by bringing back funds from overseas and invest in America. He said they would simply buy back stock.

By now, he has probably heard that Apple has announced that it will be bringing $200 billion in foreign cash back to the U.S. as a result of the tax bill and it will infuse the U.S. economy with more than $350 billion over the next five years. Apple also plans to create some 20,000 new jobs. But that won’t stop “Chuckles.”

WASTE MANAGEMENT, a North American company, will inject $68 million into the economy by giving its 34,000 employees $2,000 bonuses, according to its CEO James Fish. Early next month, Waste Management, as the primary sponsor of the Phoenix Open in Scottsdale, will host thousands of spectators resulting in charitable giving to worthwhile organizations..

A TRIP THE DENTIST – This morning, a bit of humor while listening to the radio, nicely eased the bit of anxiety that always seems to accompany a trip to the dentist. Sen. John M. Kennedy (R-LA), who I always enjoy listening to because of his “down home” southern dialect and candid response to questions, was being interviewed about the pending vote on the continuing resolution, and spoke of some fellow Republicans, who were talking about voting against the CR. “I don’t know whether they’re going to come to their senses or not,” he quipped.

When Fox’s Bill Hemmer thanked him for his candid response, Kennedy said he was once advised to “be yourself … unless you suck.” You had to hear him. You would have laughed.

TRUMP IS RIGHT – A friend of mine called my attention to an article, “What I Learned in the Peace Corp in Africa: Trump is Right,” written by Karin Mc Quillan, who went to Senegal, West Africa just three weeks out college to run a community center for the Peace Corps.

With the recent over-reaction to President Trump’s reference to places in the world most likely unable to provide us with quality immigrants that fit his merit-based goal, I highly recommend that you read her article in American Thinker, January 17, 2018. Space will not permit me to include it in this blog, but you can click here to read and/or print it. Here are a few excerpts:

McQuillan gave the presidents slang, “s—thole,” meaning, saying, “In plain English: – s— is everywhere, telling that “people there defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust; onto you, your clothes, your food, the water.” A Peace Corps doctor called it, “a fecalized environment.”

Even on a trip to Paris, she saw an African woman and her child defecating on the sidewalk next to the Notre Dame Cathedral.

It reminded me of the day I arrived for an Air Force assignment in Morocco, when I asked myself what am I doing in this place. There, along the roadside, a woman was relieving herself.

McQuillan goes beyond the filth, writing about the culture of multiple marriages, where wives do all of the work while husbands lazed in the shade. Thievery and bribery was common.

I couldn’t help but think of our foolish Visa Lottery program as I read her description of the town full of young men doing nothing, waiting for a government job. There was no private enterprise. Government officials did absolutely nothing. What can they contribute to America?

“Why would I want to bring Africa here?” she asks, “Non-Westerners do not magically become American by arriving on our shores with a visa. We are lectured by Democrats that we must privilege third world immigration by the hundred millions with chain migration … to prove we are not racist. I don’t have to prove a thing. They want to destroy America as we know it. I am not willing to donate my country.”

SAMANTHA POWER’S Tweet, in which she asked “Does anybody else pine for the good old days when we weren’t talking or thinking about buttons – the size of nuclear buttons, the ease of hitting the wrong button, etc.” was discussed in my January 14, 2018 post. Among the Tweets in response was this one from Sarah Abdallah: “You mean the good old days when Obama dropped 26,171 bombs on 7 countries in a single year and nobody really gave a damn because he looked and sounded classy while doing it?”

I’m still waiting for investigators to determine who Power unmasked and why she felt the need to unmask so many Americans as a UN ambassador.