Here are my observations and opinions on my selected news of the day.

THE WALL – “We all like to knock and mock Trump’s braggadocio claims that he is the best negotiator ever. But in this case, he really has outflanked his opponents,” wrote Dave Marcus in The Federalist.

“Pelosi and Schumer have painted themselves into a corner. They have said, “No funding for a wall.” They say this despite the fact that they have supported barrier funding in the past. So, in essence they have no fallback position.”

Marcus writes that “he (Trump) can go on TV and say, ‘Hey, I’m up for a compromise.’ Meanwhile Chuck and Nancy have to slam the door shut on getting 800,000 federal employees back to work.”

Trump will be willing to keep the government shut down, Marcus believes, and doesn’t think Pelosi is up to it. “If the government gets shut down in the forest and nobody notices, does it make a sound,” Marcus asks. “That is to say, maybe people will think, huh, perhaps the federal government is too big after all. And wouldn’t conservatives rejoice at that?”

PEGGY NOONAN moves from the generally accepted belief that both parties have not wanted to solve the border problem to still another attack on President Trump in her Saturday Wall Street Journal column, “End This Stupid Shutdown.”

“It was not in the interests of the Republican Party to address the border problem because that might leave them open to charges they were driven by questions of race and color.

“Democrats never intended to control the border because they think doing nothing marks them as the nonracist party, the compassionate, generous party that Hispanics will see as home. They would reap the electoral rewards in a demographically changing country. They will own the future! Their big donors too opposed border strictness,” wrote Noonan in comparison.

However, she again chose to target Trump. “The president at the center of this drama is an unserious man,” she said, without acknowledging that he moved to try and solve the border problem despite being called a “racist” and a “white supremacist” who wants to keep people of color out of this country.

Her statement that, “he (Trump) didn’t get a wall in two years with a Republican Congress is now in a fix,” is right out of the Democrat playbook of talking points. Noonan knows that he would have needed at least 10 Democrats to gain approval for the wall.

Noonan suggests that a deal should be made to protect the Dreamers, saying “This would actually be good for the country.” How?

I don’t have a problem with negotiating a Dreamer deal that involved funding for the wall, as long as it did not include a pathway to citizenship. If anything, they could be “legalized” and given “Legal Alien” ID’s with an opportunity to apply for U.S. citizenship.

Early in her column, Noonan related how her people came from Ireland, and two generations later, she worked for an American president (Ronald Reagan), citing it as a miracle.

I repeatedly ask myself why I continue to read her columns. She is ensconced on the east coast with the elites, most likely with the belief that she isn’t one, but she is. It’s time for her to get serious.

AT LEAST ONE NEWSPAPER, The Boston Herald, was willing to report that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo “delivered a scathing rebuke of the Obama administration’s Mideast policies” during his speech in Cairo last Thursday.

Pompeo accused the former president of “misguided” thinking that diminished America’s role in the region while harming the longtime friends and emboldening Iran.

Without mentioning Obama by name, he said “he was naïve and timid when confronted with challenges posed by the revolts that convulsed the Middle East, including Egypt, beginning in 2011,” he said, as he denounced the vision outline by Obama in a speech he gave in Cairo in 2009 in which he spoke of “a new beginning” for U.S. relations in the Arab and Muslim world.

“Remember … it was here, here in this very city, another American stood before you,“ Pompeo told his audience, “that radical Islamist terrorism does not stem from ideology. He told you 9/11 led my country to abandon its ideals, particularly in the Middle East. He told you that the United States and the Muslim world needed a ‘new beginning.’ The results of these misjudgments have been dire.”

IGNORANCE, from those “man on the street” questions to students on college campuses, is, frankly, scary. Tweeter Xena Amirani recently wrote @xenaarchy about a college classroom exchange in which the professor told his students to do a sentence diagram of the Second Amendment.

A young woman in the class responded, “wait, so do we have to it for the WHOLE second amendment, like every sentence, or just pick one sentence from it? To which Amirani said to her, “The Second Amendment IS one sentence.”

“OMG, really?,” she said.

“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Amirani sadly explained that the class is exclusive in the University of Southern California’s top honors program, open only to one percent of the 15 percent admitted to USC.

SPEAKING OF THE LEFT COAST – Newly sworn-in Democrat California Gov. Gavin Newsom is going after cities and counties not keeping up with the demand for affordable housing and is proposing a radical step of punishing communities that block homebuilding by withholding state tax dollars.

The problem has forced millions of Californians to pay more than half of their income on rent, pushed home prices to new highs and added thousands to the homeless population, according to Newsom, who claims that California’s highest-in-the-nation poverty rate is largely driven by escalating housing costs.

Interestingly, his predecessor, Jerry Brown, signed legislation requiring all new homes to have solar panels in 2020, a regulation that will cause housing prices to rise.

THERE’S MORE – First it was those nasty plastic bags, then plastic straws; now, the liberal crusade is moving to fight … wait for it … paper receipts. Yes, paper receipts, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Paper receipts generate 686 million pounds of waste and 12 billion pounds of carbon dioxide each year,” claims San Francisco Assemblyman Phil Ting, adding that’s the equivalent of one million cars on the road. What’s more, the receipts may contain the chemical BPA, which could cause birth defects if ingested in high doses.

Wait just a minute … where are those liberal fact-checkers when you really need them?

THE BOLD HEADLINE, “Politicians Never Lied Before Trump,” over a column by Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal jumped out a me, because we all know, of course, that previous administrations have done so.

“Lying is the other mother’s milk of politics. All political speech is a means to an end.”

Jenkins recalls how Barack Obama himself repeatedly lied about ObamaCare, and reminds us of the lie about the origins of the Benghazi terrorist attack, and how his National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes even admitted lying to, and manipulating, the media about the administration’s Iran policy.

Border security, more precisely “the wall,” has been the focus of not only President Trump’s blunt and often grossly hyperbolic statements, but the call for a wall by the likes of Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and even Hillary Clinton dating back to 2006, is evidence of their disingenuousness (lying).

Democrats, constantly looking for ways to attack the president, blamed him for separating children at the southern border and housing them in cages, but we know that was going on back in 2003, and continued under Obama. The media was complicit with the blame Trump game by showing video footage of caged children during the Obama administration and attributing it to Trump’s policy.

Since Donald Trump announced his candidacy, Democrats and the opposition media have been looking for a chance to defeat him for the sake of defeating him. Putting it simply – they hate him, and will freely lie to achieve their end.

            May God bless the United States of America.