Here are my observations and opinions of my selected news of the day.
“STOP LISTENING TO ADVICE,” was the recommendation for Sen. Martha McSally from Arizona Republic editorial columnist Robert Robb in his Sunday column. “Particularly about politics,” he added.
“Despite Democrat gains in the last election, Arizona remains a center-right state. McSally should be a natural and comfortable fit for Arizona,” Robb believes.
Robb views McSally as a political realist. “Trump is president. She wants a constructive relationship with him to get things done she thinks would be good for the country and the state. That’s an approach that would make sense to Arizona’s center-right electorate.”
He should have stopped there, but he just couldn’t resist offering advice he told McSally to ignore.
“Candidly occupy the zone between Trump loyalist and Never-Trumpers, while maintaining a constructive relationship with the president to get things done. Then, when 2020 comes around, figure out how, given the politics of that moment, to market a center-right workhorse to a center-right electorate,” wrote Robb.
INSULTING TRUMP SUPPORTERS – Trump supporters are accustomed to the daily attacks on the man they elected president, Donald Trump; I just hope they realize that an attack on him is an attack on them, and their judgement in electing him.
Insulting Trump supporters directly began before his election. In 2015, columnist Jonah Goldberg wrote, “Trump supporters need an intervention.”
Everyone remembers how Hillary Clinton suggested that Trump supporters belonged in a basket of deplorables, she characterized by racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic views.
Then there was the August 26, 2016 text FBI agent Peter Strzok sent to his lover Lisa Page, in which he wrote: “Just went to a Southern Virginia Walmart and could smell the Trump support.” On another occasion he referred to “hillbillies” in another part of Virginia.
The most recent direct insult on Trump supporters came from anti-Trump GOP strategist Rick Wilson during an appearance last week on none other than CNN, one of the sour-grapes opposition networks. “The wall has always been a con for Donald Trump’s credulous rube, 10-tooth base,” he said.
As I have written here before, the elite media simply cannot relate to the people of flyover country who voted for the man who made a simple promise to make American great again. They had enough of “Hope” and “Together.”
YEAH, SURE, THAT’S THE ANSWER – “Instead of building a wall that won’t work, we should funnel that money into economic, educational and policing problems throughout Central America,” suggests Lisa Urias as an Arizona Republic guest columnist.
Urias reminds readers of the trillions of dollars and untold amounts of time and energy spent in the Middle East and Far East over the past 20 years, while ignoring the political and economic strategic value in our own Western Hemisphere. She forgets the blood and treasure of our human losses over that period.
“If we had used a fraction of those dollars toward building and strengthening ties to our neighbors to the south, perhaps the situation would be dramatically different today on many fronts in Central and South America, including the human migration problem,” writes Urias.
KRAMERONTHERIGHT’S VIEW: As far back as I can recall, presidents have talked about broadening our relationship with “our neighbors to the south.” It has been all talk. And how different is that from the “nation-building” we have failed at in the Middle East?
We have sent money there. Lots of it. However, missing is the plan on how it will be used; a competent American contingent on scene to monitor progress; and verifying results.
How much money sent to those countries simply lines the pockets of the leaders, who think nothing of instructing their UN representatives to vote against U.S. proposals?
FEDEX AND UPS have responded to Amazon’s additional purchases of aircraft to assure delivery to its Prime customers. FedEx CEO Fred Smith shrugged off competition from Amazon, while his executive vice president of global strategy, Raj Subramanier, says “a decline in Amazon packages would have a negligible impact on FedEx’s top line.” A similar comment came from UPS’s chief commercial officer, Alan Gershenhorn, saying it would be difficult for Amazon to match UPS’ network and value.
We’ll see.
THE WALL AROUND OBAMA’S MANSION in Washington DC has been a subject of conversation amid the discussion of the wall on our southern border.
While agreeing with the necessity for the Obama’s safety and security, President Trump has tweeted about it with the similar need for a wall on our border.
The Daily Caller decided to find out about the “10-foot wall” around the Obama home often criticized. They found that Obama does not have one wall, but many.
The beefed-up security includes a tall pilloried wall around the front of the home and high-tech guard tower to control entry to the home.
He has armed guards entirely blocking the suburban road where he lives. Multiple cement and iron barricades block the road leading up their home. A Secret Service car and agent keep people from entering the stretch of road.
When the Daily Caller reporter asked the agent if he could walk to the Obama house on the sidewalk, they agent told him he would be forced to stop him if he tried.
While the reporter was armed with a tape measure to confirm the existence of the 10-foot wall, he was unable to do so.
MEANWHILE, WALL DENIER Nancy Pelosi had declared a border wall as immoral. Immoral! And did you hear about her rude interruption of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen’s presentation on border security and illegal immigration, lashing out with “I reject your facts?”
“These aren’t my facts,” Nielsen shot back, “These are the facts,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
Another secure border expert, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), later criticized Nielsen’s presentation in an interview with Bloomberg News, saying that it “was not a credible presentation … it was preposterous.”
Personally, I found it preposterous that Durbin, the man who took the word of Kavanaugh accuser Christine Blasey Ford, but refused to believe Nielsen’s statistics provided by his own government agencies.
YOU WOULD BE WRONG if you thought immigration was Angela Merkel’s only problem in Germany. With the announcement of a new European standard that would require emission cuts of 37.5 percent from new autos by 2030, diesel cars have become the target of German cities, according to an insightful column by Holman W. Jenkins Jr. in the Wall Street Journal.
While diesel cars produce a little less CO2 per mile than gasoline, it provides more smog and particulates, that is apparently not fixable.
Hamburg was the first city to ban all but the most recent diesel models from its downtown; actually, the parts of town close to air quality monitoring stations.
Cologne, Bonn and Dusseldorf is rolling out its own stringent bans, and even Stuttgart, home of Daimler and Porsche, will impose a citywide ban.
Frankfurt is under orders to outlaw a quarter of the vehicles registered to city residents.
Merkel insists that the situation would be fixed at the expense of Germany’s automakers, not taxpayers or car owners. Voters are rightly skeptical.
“Inane amounts of political capital were spent trying to wring meaningless CO2 reductions from cars.”
Behind the misery, naturally, is a small environment group funded mainly by donations from central and regional governments (and Toyota).
They’re hoping to stimulate sales of electric cars that will be charged with wind and solar power, Jenkins writes, but they won’t be. A forest is being cleared to open a coal mine to supplement its heavily subsidized and inadequate wind and solar power.
May God bless the United States of America.
