Happy Presidents Day to all our American readers and viewers. We'll be back with the second half of my cavalcade of presidential songs later this afternoon - that's Benjamin Harrison to Donald Trump, if you're keeping score. Despite the official federal holiday - "Washington's Birthday (observed)" - it's a working day for yours truly and I will be keeping my regular Monday date with Tucker Carlson live across America tonight at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific. If you are in the presence of the receiving apparatus, I hope you'll dial us up.
~On Saturday night I joined Kat, Tyrus and my fellow Torontonian Dr Debra Soh on the "Greg Gutfeld Show" sofa. It was a fun hour as always. Here's Greg's opening monologue, and our initial remarks:
And from later in the show here's some wall talk:
You can watch the full show, including nude Brexit and Toronto chair-tossing commentary, here.
~Pat Caddell died over the weekend, from a stroke and far too young. He came to prominence in his mid-twenties as Jimmy Carter's brilliant pollster, and was supposedly responsible for the President's catastrophic "malaise" speech. The Democrats moved left and he moved iconoclastically right, which is how I came to know him - from green-room conversations at Fox over the last decade or so. Unlike most talking-heads who make their living yakking on TV all day long, Pat was an original thinker with an entertainingly weird streak; to the end he was an incisive analyst of underlying trends, and always worth listening to. I quoted him in After America:
It is never a good idea to send the message, as the political class now does consistently, that there are no democratic means by which the people can restrain their rulers. As the (Democrat) pollster Pat Caddell pointed out, the logic of that is "pre-revolutionary".
I think that was just an off-the-cuff green-room aside of Pat's at the time I put it in the book, but he started saying it out loud. The last time I saw him was at the 2017 Restoration Weekend in Palm Beach, in which he looked back, as a pollster, on the Trump victory:
Perhaps most interesting of all is the question we asked on whether the Declaration of Independence says that the government receives their authority from the consent of the people. "Does the federal government today have the consent of the people?" And it's 68 to 75 percent we've ranged saying no, and I call that, when I first saw that result in 2013, a pre-revolutionary moment. And the question was whether anybody would speak to any of this.
And from the beginning, Donald Trump, a lot of his own instincts were – it's not exactly the way I would've designed it – but he managed to make a campaign and he stood up against 16 other people who were, in their own ways, essentially epitomizing the political class or the ideological class of their party, when the issue was neither ideology or the right of kings of our political class to rule.
In 2016, after one Trump-less debate, Pat emphasized the difference the non-party man made:
Citing the data, said Caddell, 'It's unbelievable. This country has left the building if you will on the political establishment, on America in trouble and in decline.' Caddell also noted that, just as with the last debate minus front runner Donald Trump, none of those themes really get 'hammered' without him.
'This is what it would have looked like without the insurgents having arrived.'
Indeed. And (to go back to that After America warning) the Dems, the Paul Ryan GOP, the media and the Deep State are determined to teach the people a lesson on what happens when their political inclinations stray beyond the permitted bounds.
Pat Caddell saw all that years before most of us. Rest in peace.
~Aside from the Presidents Day edition of "Tucker Carlson Tonight", please join me on the radio at 8am Eastern tomorrow morning, Tuesday, with Dave Allen on 570 WSYR in Syracuse, New York - where I'll be appearing on stage at the Oncenter with Dennis Miller this Saturday:
You can listen live to me and Dave Allen here. (Dave will be introducing Dennis and me on stage at the Oncenter.)
You can find out more about the first ever Miller/Steyn tour here. It kicks off this Friday, February 22nd, at the Santander Performing Arts Center in Reading, Pennsylvania, and there are still just a few tickets left. After Syracuse the following night we head for the Kodak Center in Rochester and the Kirby Center in Wilkes-Barre. And, if you need to make up for a floppo Valentine's, don't forget that with VIP seats you get to have your picture snapped with me and Dennis, and to take home a special autographed gift. But please note: VIP tickets are almost gone, so, if you've been looking forward to bending our ears as we come off stage and telling me and Miller how we totally sucked, don't leave it too late.
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Wish we'd taken bets. Today another POTUS tweet - the Army Corps pf Engineers completed -- under budget and under schedule a big section of wall in New Mexico. The Army Corps of Engineers is so happy and enthused with being deployed and moto - that is motivated - they're now producing show-off videos. No work done? Secret? LOL!
Caught the tail end of Tucker. Apparently Hobbs in Calvin & Hobbs is a Republican!
BTW. Liked Dr Debra Soh's comment and poised demeanor in that clip up there. :)
Heh. Like the adver-tiz-ment - the nah-ray-tor sounds like the Honest Trailers dude.
LOL the auto correct put Honest Railers... artifical intel strikes again... finally with some primitive signs of humor.
While we're on the subject when is someone going to explain to our ignorant and apathetic public that phase two of the current ice age is overdue to resume. Climate change fanatics are correct that a likely catastrophic climate change event lies ahead for mankind - but not surprisingly they get it totally wrong. Although the precise cause is poorly understood ice ages feature a puzzling mid-way warming trend lasting somewhere between less than 10,000 years to rarely as long as 30,000 years. The average being between 10,000 to 15,000 years. Our current ice age is called the Quaternary and this interglacial period of warming known as the Holocene began about 18,000 years ago - not 12,000 years ago as usually reported. It took 6,000 years or so for the massive Wisconsin glacier - almost two miles high in places - to melt leaving behind the great lakes. Usually you'll read that the the ice age 'ended' 12,000 ago when the ice had fully retreated. Both 'facts' are dead wrong. This 'inconvenient truth' never sees the light of day in the media nor in academia for that matter. Sorry to get all academic here on the subject but these facts do matter. One more disturbing fact - when the Quaternary ice age resumes it will happen not over many millennia but more likely over a few decades or possibly even over a few years when the effects begin to be felt as frosts become widespread in the north even in the summer. By the way higher levels of carbon dioxide, a weak greenhouse gas, will have little effect in mitigating the 'Great Cold' lying ahead for mankind. Statistically speaking, the resumption of the ice age is overdue and the clock is ticking.
Well said and most interesting, Roy. The huge swings in Earth's climate that we know have occurred in the past should be much more worrying than a relatively small change predicted by the Church of Climate Change.
I think we are also overdue for the magnetic flip, too.
Is this why the Dems are suddenly in favor of the CIAFBINSA, against civil liberties, in favor of rich plutocrats and hostile to working class Americans, whereas the Trump Party is opposite?
Good point Perry - Given that our civilization goes back less than 10,000 years mankind has no experience living through either a magnetic flip or dealing with an ice age. Prior to the beginning of this inter-glacial warming some 18,000 years ago so called 'primitive' man was far hardier in dealing with with harsh climate issues than todays advanced civilization will be. For a certain period when the flip occurs mother earth will be bombarded with high energy particles. In effect our 'shields' will be down. How dangerous this will be is an open question. When the ice age resumes our population may top 10 billion souls. How to feed such a population under harsh growing conditions never encountered in modern history is another open question.
When there are marching columns of military-age men headed for and converging on the border, who could be supplied arms once through, and the president is being briefed by the US military on this for months, what's any responsible POTUS Commander in Chief supposed to do? The potential for bloody havoc inside the nation is no extreme hypothetical when those two critical elements are in fact available: masses of men on the one side of the line and weapons stocks on the other.
The cost in abuse, blood and lives of the human trafficking of young children and teens across that same border has always been a reason of the highest humanitarian priority to do all efforts required to enable our own national defense forces to be able to stop it, but this new on-the-march assault goes beyond that, taking it fully into the realm of warfare.
It's exactly the vicious model used against other nations in the southern Americans and in Africa that causes so much havoc and destruction - infiltrating the mercenary manpower across the borders, once inside the borders to assemble at established rendezvous to be issued arms, then setting them against targets while disingenously calling them 'rebels' who have 'grievances.'
Not actually appreciating any snarky jokes about this. Guess too many Americans are so used to peace that they assume it's 'normal' when many places don't have it, and have zero gut sense of the terrible danger this poses to their comfortable lives or have any cognizance of all the efforts and resources required to establish and maintain security for citizens to go about normal daily business and lives. This is not a game.
That all sounds about right to me, PGao, and this assault on innocent lives at the hands of the Mexican cartels has gone on decades longer than it should have that my concern now is that the Mexican cartels are already living here and they've been planning for a while for the day that was eventually coming when Americans would wake up and defend her borders. That's an entire new chapter in the fight that may never end. Already, since some of these more affordable taxi type services have been going, just across our border in the larger cities, I've heard that the drivers get generous kickbacks if they have a single young girl as passenger if they drop her at a warehouse, she's never seen or heard from again. I suspect some of the more vicious crimes are never making it into print for our protection. In the thirty years I lived along the Rio Grande, I've never seen Border Patrol agents this adamnant that they can't do their job successfully without a wall getting completed. A fabricated crisis by President Trump, my foot!
Consider that in the SOTU that President Trump stated that great countries don't conduct endless wars.
How is it that a country with all the world's best resources couldn't stop cartels coming in? The question of today is how is it cartels were allowed to set up in the US and move what they needed across the border? Wouldn't it be correct to deduce that it had to have been done by key positions collusion by ordering the national defense and domestic law enforcement to 'stand down' and allow what they could see and hear - by all methods of high tech plus boots on the ground street activity - to go past without interference?
What then does that strongly imply as to the state of corruption of key positions/ key persons in those positions inside the country at the local, state and federal level? If that network is at risk of being rolled up, what would it do to protect itself in the face of someone who is in a position to act and who believes it needs to be changed from endless to ENDED?
Can't be nice things judging by how all of this requires pathologically ammoral mentalities that don't care about high death tolls and human suffering in their fevers to make money and hold power. Some of those sociopaths do look like the cruel thugs they are who openly hang the mutilated bodies of their victims from bridges, some of them look like normal stylish people in nice clothes and suits, sipping wine at luncheons at swish restos, all seemingly unremarkable until... chuckling about how many baby body parts net profits needed to sell to pay for their exotic cars. From sommet to base, as one famous fellow recently sniffed, for years none of them have been worried in the least about being held accountable for their modern savagery. What if the party's over?
What resources could such types muster up to stop it? An army? They've done it elsewhere in lots of places, so they know the drill, better if the targeted population is kept in the dark about all of it - denied information, told lies, so it doesn't think to mobilize itself to set up defenses.
Ironically Nigerians, infamous for the 419 scams, made the news this week - but not for a scam of their concoction, but for what is being questioned as possibly being American-originated - which it may be, as it had none of the humor and tongue-in-cheek human foibles-baiting of Nigerian scams. No Nigerian scam was about trying to set people against each other, but to simply free up some open space for fresh air in greedy people's stuffy bank accounts.
There's a lot here for me to think over, but just a knee-jerk reaction: I think corruption is like rust. Once it sets in, you don't get rid of it. About the wall, it's there in bits and pieces and where it exists, it works. If you heard Beto or Kamala say it's coming down, they really haven't checked in with their Liberal base in these parts. I think you can bet on this: they are in jockeying mode for a run at something or other that they'll never get. They are out of touch with the people who live along the border. This issue is not about skin color or nationalities, it's about keeping the US border communities safe. It's about persuading immigrants south of the border to go home because their lives are in grave danger. If the politicians north-of-the-border states want to use it as a political football, and non-profits and charitable organizations want to continue to virtue signal, the blood of the immigrants is on their hands. The corrupt politicians can answer to their constituents because cartels don't do their dirty deeds just along the borders. They penetrate communities all across the USA.
It's probably stating the obvious here but you know how to most easily follow the corruption? It's just where justice is not being served. A week or so ago I heard Joe Concha on Tucker's show that the conviction rate for homicides in Mexico is about 3%. The conviction rate for people who were behind the coup to subvert Donald Trump's presidency, what's that, about 0%?
The decision to release convicted criminals who came here illegally by certain jurisdictions in the sanctuary cities is also a sign of corruption. These people are repeat offenders many of them. The fact that the state governments, US Congress and/or DOJ is unwilling or impotent at reversing the sanctuary municipalitiy laws around the country tells me the corruption is pervasive. Now with the new abortion laws popping up around the state, there'll be 0% convictions for aborting babies being delivered alive and healthy. We're hung up on decades-old black face photographs, though. People are foolish throughout their lives but crimes that go unpunished, that's our larger problem. Low conviction rates spell red-alert corruption and security alert.
Yes, time people became aware. Hmm... see President Trump's tweets this week? Maybe that 0% might start to budge. Go back to the SOTU speech and see how the camera lingered on not the white coats (that horde of scary Nurse Rachets) but with high res love on a score or so of top Dems. 'Sullen' doesn't even begin to describe the quality of their fixed stares, hardly the look of confidence of majority-holders.
I'm really not impressed with Trump's sing-song comic turn at that press conference. Yeah, big "national emergency"! Try to imagine other presidents treating a national emergency this way.
President Roosevelt: So now we're at war with JaPANNNNN! And next we'll send out our FLEEEEET! And then they'll shoot down our PLANNNNNNES! And they'll take our soldiers prisoneRRRRRRRR!
But don't worry, the resolute Commander in Chief has it all under control. As if. Daniel Horowitz said if this is an emergency, then why isn't Trump treating it like one? Honestly, if I were a judge I'd rule against him too. He's not acting as if there's an emergency at the border, he's just plugging in the terminology and hoping the Supreme Court will rescue him in the end.
I hear what you're saying, Wanda, it wasn't appropriate but whatever President Trump does to get the border secured, whatever he does about anything, he gets ridiculed. He can be down to earth for three minutes, he gets ridiculed. Or if he makes a bold, positive decision and breaks with the useless strategies of the past administrations, he's gets ridiculed. He's been making the right decisions for the country and the media rants that he's instigating or making up a crisis every few weeks or months. The Deep State has created the only national crisis since he beat Hillary Clinton.
He knows that the US Justice system now favors the Deep State players and is hostile to innocent people. He knows what a travesty this is for America. He knows that the perpetrators of the Russian Trump collusion scheme will probably never serve time. He's has the backs of the American people who put him in the White House, even if he and the wishes of We the American people who put him there are not being respected. They've been hell bent on destroying him since he beat Hillary. I would be pretty sick of it all, too, and I would be making a mockery of their tactics to thwart him as well. But what do I know, i'm just another pro-Trump jerk.
What makes people think he hasn't had it under control since he was sworn in? By the media theatrics? He's had the money for it since a year, in the 'biggest ever increase ' military budget... as it was reported at the time? It's national security - something that directly falls on the POTUS and miitary, so which specialty of the military builds things - whatever's needed? Army Corps of Engineers. What's the military for anyway? People forget? National defense. Just because people aren't used to warfare on the border doesn't mean it can't happen and that US military can't be deployed there. The Commander-in-Chief has the Constitutional authority to act without any Congressional interference in real and present danger of national defense, so he's had for a year the money plus the full Constitutional authority to mobilize troops and what they require to secure defensive positions, without needing any pre-approvals.
He's a builder of skyscapers by profession - with a life-long reputation for getting it done under schedule and under budget, so doesn't that make President Trump the most competant POTUS in US history to be able to get any large scale building job done, especially if it's got the urgency and importance of national defense? Maybe he has been acting and implementing for nearly a year because there is a real emergency at the border, but the media would rather committ hari-kiri first before reporting to the public anything of the sort?
There is no wall. Despite having the authority, having the power, having the duty, having the constitutional justification, having the skill to build it, it is not built. That's what makes me think that Trump doesn't have this under control, and worse, that he has no intention of getting it under control. I think the skeptics are right: that "Build the wall" was a slogan that resonated with his supporters, and Trump recklessly ran with it to get elected, with no real plan to do it. I think he figured that by now people would have forgotten all about that promise, and now he doesn't know how to escape from his careless pledge, which, it turns out, they really were serious about.
Have you been to the border to check that statement? 'Barrier' and 'wall' are synonyms, so all sorts of variations can be equivalent in effectiveness. The Morocco-Western Sahara wall was only a big, long sand berm, but it stopped the Western Saharan Polisario rebels extremely effectively, and it wasn't tricky or costly to find the sand in the Sahara desert to mound it up in short time.
Concertina wire itsn't technically a 'wall' but it does the same work and miles can be unrolled in a couple of days, so that's what the military uses when it's in a hurry to stop infiltration, to give it time to put something more permanent in place. It was reported last year that US troops had been sent to the border with just this wire to install. So far. it hasn't been a worry of being prepared against tanks and other armoured assault vehicles, but of humans trying to sneak in, so it's much simpler.
Honestly, bougainvilla vine thorns are so vicious people in tropical climes all around the globe routinely grow bougainvilla to top their walls if they don't have concertina wire or to train the plant to grow through the concertina wire to cover it. It's a beautiful plant overall, nice green leaves, very pretty flowers of all delightful colors, but woe to anyone trying to sneak through it. So, in plenty of other countries that require walls and barriers, people do try to make the overall affect to be reasonably pleasing - to honest people who think the flowers look nice as they politely knock at the door and are invited in, but make life hell for thieves trying to sneak in around the back, un-invited and unwanted.
You are a hard woman, Wanda. I like that. I think Trump was serious about a wall but doesn't fully appreciate, "Read my lips..."
I tend to agree with Wanda. I do think that Trump's sing-song type speech there was making fun of the all too certain result of his issuing the emergency order, not the emergency itself. It was as certain as the sun rising that the events he laid out there would happen, just like they have for pretty much everything else he's tried to do.
That being said, Wanda is right, there is no wall. No wall has been built. No wall is being built. If, as P says, Trump has everything he needs to build it, why isn't it being built? Playing word games is not building a wall.
Interesting to read the comments there, but we shouldn't forget that troops have been reported as being ordered and confirmed by the media as actually sent to the border, and with materials. The media has been sullenly silent about details since. Hmm. So what might the military be doing there on taxpayer dime? It's a long border, too. Nothing?
From where do people get the idea President Trump hasn't accomplished what he promised? The media? How accurate and unbaised have they been?
If President Trump has actually ordered the military to secure the border and they have been carrying out the mandate properly delegated to them during the past year, then in what context should we all take his eye-roll comments about being gratiutiously sued to stop this national defense effort? That he doesn't take it seriously or he's already done it and he knows and they know, but they're still posturing to waste everyone's time and attention?
Where's the scorn for the people trying to stop by any means a very normal. logical and correct effort to keep a nation safe from invaders? By his many statements and by the details in his Executive Orders, President Trump has been very open to explain and to inform the public about what's going on.
So P, are you contending that the military has been secretly barricading the border, but the media is keeping this secret from us? I find that hard, impossible really, to believe. While the MSM is quite hostile to Trump, he does have a few allies that can use a camera. For that matter, why wouldn't Trump himself show us some pictures of newly secured border areas, if they existed?
People get the idea that Trump hasn't accomplished what he promised from him not saying so and him declaring a state of emergency to accomplish it. Isn't that the logical way to look at it?
Always interesting to watch plain statements reworked like that. POTUS announced it to the public, and subsequently media reported indeed the military was on site at the border. What secret? THEN the media turns on a dime and squeals like insulted barnyard pigs after the veterinary visit that nothing's being done so logically HENCEFORTH- sink me! - the president's base won't want to vote for him again. LOL.
Mark,
Howie Carr's column yesterday in the Boston Herald mentions how a pair of "climate denialists" challenged Senator Markey during a Senate hearing some time ago. He didn't mention anyone by name but I'm guessing he was talking about you and Dr. Judith Curry. I enjoyed reading your account about that exchange. I would love to read it again as I'm sure other club members would as well. Would you be so kind as to dust it off and repost it online?
Search SteynOnline.com for "Markey" and it will come up.
Found it! Thanks Walt. Click on Columns&Essays, click The War on Free Speech and scroll down to the column titled Markey Mark if interested. Great read. But then again everything out here is A+ material.
Such a shock to learn about Pat Caddell. Always so perceptive and candid. I'll miss his analyses.
Even when he was with Jimmy Carter I always thought he was honest. Rare beyond price in the D.C. swamp.