What does a real negotiator negotiate? Pretty much everything. Just ask German Chancellor Angela Merkel, she came for tea and left having to commit to ponying up her overdue NATO dues.
Trump told Merkel he supports a "strong NATO" but added that her country and other European nations must pay their "fair share" of the costs of the alliance.
"Many nations owe vast sums of money from past years and it is very unfair to the United States," Trump said in a joint news conference with Merkel after their meetings. "These nations must pay what they owe."
Merkel said Germany is increasing its NATO contributions, seeking to meet the organization's goal of 2% of gross domestic product. USA Today
It looks like President Trump is going to be more successful at making people pay their “fair share” than Barry ever was.
But don’t expect him to negotiate on his travel ban. Even left-wing radical lawyer Alan Dershowitz thinks it’s legal and will withstand a Supreme Court ruling, should it come to that.
As Yogi Berra once quipped “it’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” It’s even harder if the prediction is about what eight, or possibly nine, justices will rule in a given case.
Having said that I will venture a prognostication: I think the justices will uphold the major provisions of the order, if the case gets to them.-The Hill
You don’t have to negotiate when you are holding the winning hand.
Besides, while most everything else is negotiable, America’s sovereignty is not.
Today it is quite alright to be green, But please do so responsibly. Overindulging could have serious consequences:
Meanwhile, “things dressed up for St. Patrick’s Day” – which doesn’t belong and why?
And finally, I give you a tune aired every St. Patrick’s Day on Detroit’s iconic J.P. McCarthy’s morning drive time radio show: WHY PADDY'S NOT AT WORK TODAY. Also known by several different titles this Pat Cooksey classic was a centerpiece of J. P.’s annual St. Patrick’s Day morning extravaganza held in the lobby of the Fisher Theatre and playing host to celebrities, corporate CEOs and politicians (of both parties, since this occurred in the good old days). Performed here by Leggos.
Have a great day; I’m off to get the ingredients to make Carlyle’s Irish Soda Bread.
“Where’s the snowblower?” “Right outside the door, honey.”
That’s primarily due to the fact that New York City was spared. And despite what Chuck Todd said everybody knows that NYC is the epicenter of the country and nothing outside it’s borders matters all that much.
Not much has changed since 1976 in that regard H/TEd Driscoll
Unless of course you actually allow those rural hicks to vote, in which case they might just elect somebody like Donald J. Trump. Chuck Todd blames himself:
“We may have reported on it statistically, but we didn’t do that person-to-person stuff. . . . Then you would get an idea, oh, these little towns, this opioid crisis, it’s connected to this lack of employment, which is connected to the lack of educational opportunities, which is connected to — then all of a sudden you realize, no wonder these people are so pissed off, and no wonder they think everyone has abandoned them. Their town looks abandoned.”
Anyway, back to the snow; have you run out of ideas on where to put it all? Here’s a creative, and at the same time practical, use for all that white powder that has to be cleared away:
PHOTO REMOVED @ MR. BOFFOLI’s REQUEST
Photo by Christopher Boffoli, a fine art, commercial and editorial photographer.
A new game: It’s called Things You Should Never Believe. And why can you never believe them? Because they are always bogus, which is to say, they lie.
1. CBO - The Congressional Budget Office; they lie regardless of which party is in power and cannot be trusted to be anything remotely close to accurate. Remember when they scored the Affordable Care Act?
Health Reform: Remember when Democrats were promising that ObamaCare would cut the deficit by $1 trillion in its second decade? Turns out they were off by, well, about $1 trillion.
And even that’s assuming that:
ObamaCare's extraordinarily deep Medicare cuts would actually be made if the law remained in place. In fact, it assumes (based on official estimates from government agencies) that ObamaCare will reduce Medicare spending a total of $1.1 trillion from 2018 to 2027. Without these draconian Medicare cuts, ObamaCare would be a huge money loser going forward.
Medicare's own trustees — which includes several top Obama administration officials — says that ObamaCare's steep payment cuts to doctors and hospitals who treat Medicare patients "are unlikely to be sustainable" because they'll drive doctors out of the program and push half the nation's hospitals into the red. – IBD
And they weren’t any more accurate on their enrollment projections:
So now that the CBO has scored the GOP “repeal” plan…who cares? You can’t believe a word they say anyway.
2. Polls: They also lie regardless of which party is in (or likely to be in) power and cannot be trusted to be anything remotely close to accurate. So if anyone claims they have a poll showing that your candidate/issue is winning/losing ignore them. Unless they predicted both Brexit AND Donald J. Trump’s win.
Because polls can easily be effected by exogenous variables:
I only have time for the two entries today but this is an audience participation game so please add your own suggestions for other “Things You Should Never Believe.”
Two things today: Diversity and Resistance, in reverse order.
First, “resistance” (h/t American Digest)
No, sorry, you aren’t a resistance, because USA is not a dictatorship. Nobody is persecuting you; none of your rights are being violated; no illegal purges enacted; no tortures and disappearances. You didn’t like the results of an election – and want to pretend it is illegitimate, because you don’t want to do the hard work of rebuilding a constituency alienated, “Because you thought correcting people’s attitudes was more important than finding them jobs. Because you turned ‘white man’ from a description into an insult (…) Because you cried when someone mocked the Koran but laughed when they mocked the Bible. (…) Because you kept telling people, ‘You can’t think that, you can’t say that, you can’t do that’,” as Brendan O’Neill has said. Alas, the only people losing their legitimacy are you; who wear little pink hats and take off all your clothes and wander through public spaces offending friend and foe alike; who vandalize coffee shops and write little slogans misspelled on cardboard. No, you aren’t a resistance, and you don’t get to have that word. -Sorry, You’re Not a #Resistance
Second “diversity” – and by extension “tolerance,” or lack there of – as demonstrated bythe incident at Middlebury College last week in which violence erupted in protest of the speaking appearance of Charles Murray (author of Bell Curve and Coming Apart:The State of White America, 1960-2010) resulting inthe concussion of the Leftist professor who disagreed with him but came to his defense. To say that “the campus failed in its duty to exemplify how to debate unpopular ideas with civility” is an understatement. Thomas Sowell (making a retirement appearance at American Spectator) documents the Left’s latest sophomoric antics, college division, of mind control in The Real Lessons of Middlebury College:
The moral dry rot in academia — and beyond — goes far deeper than student storm troopers at one college.
Frank Bruni of the New York Times, for example, while criticizing the rioters, lent credence to the claim that Charles Murray was “a white nationalist.” Similar — and worse — things have been said, in supposedly reputable publications, by people who could not cite one statement from any of Dr. Murray’s books that bears any resemblance to their smears.
Academia, however, is ground zero in the war against people whose ideas go against the current political correctness. The virtual monopoly of the political left, on campuses across the country, allows all sorts of things to be attributed to people the left disagrees with, irrespective of whether those people have ever said anything resembling what they are alleged to have said.
To be clear, the agitators and protestors were objecting to Charles Murray who they accused of being a “white nationalist,” (without any evidence) a racist, (without evidence) a sexist, (without any evidence) and a homophobe (without any evidence). They viewed their role as the “Resistance” (see above) to Charles Murray’s “fascism” (for which they had no evidence).
Mark Steyn, filling in for Rush yesterday, explained emphatically why they are NOT the resistance:
“When you’re beating up a middle-aged female professor and sending her to the hospital - you’re the fascist.”
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face forever. – Orwell
Following their success with the normalization of lesbians and gays, the enforcers of peaceful non-judgmental coexistence decided to expand the franchise. When the L and G became LGBTQIA - Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, Queer, Intersex AND Asexual - is when we all began obsessing over bathrooms. “Where does it all end?” you might ask. In a normal world that would be a rhetorical question but in Progressive World, where nobody has ever heard of following an idea to its logical conclusion, it’s anything but; consider this claim that we saw yesterday:
That’s right; if people can have gender identification issues it stands to (liberal) reason that their pets can as well. As their human it’s up to you to determine what gender issues your pet has. Perhaps it even goes beyond the now standard LGBTQIA spectrum: perhaps Fido has trans-species confusion.
A dog-identifying-as-a cat should be allowed access to the litter box
Have we reached the point where we could all agree that perhaps it was a mistake to close all those mental health facilities that used to warehouse society’s nutz? You know, in order to prevent them from doing substantial harm to themselves or others? Call me crazy but I honestly think people who self-identify as a dog are the ones who need help, not me.
Apparently this new form of perversionbondage species-confusion is a real thing - they’re known as “Otherkins” - people who identify as nonhuman. I guess it’s LGBTQIAO now. Pretty soon we’ll have the whole alphabet. In Progressive World the logic works like this: if both humans and animals can be confused about their gender identity then clearly they can be confused about their species identity too. So if you identify as a dog why shouldn’t you be able to live your life as somebody’s puppy?
The trend exploded in the last 15 years, particularly among homosexual men who enjoy wearing leather and dog-like hoods, according to London’s Guardian. The wannabe pooches also love to have their stomachs rubbed and their ears tickled. They fetch squeaky toys and eat chow out of dog bowls.
And they have romantic relationships with their human “handlers.” WND
“Dear Dog!” is no longer just an expression.
“You disappear. You start to chase puppy toys and people give you ear scratches and treat you like a puppy,” Tom told the Mirror. “You disappear so much in the head space that you don’t stop to think, but you crave it. And you want it. And you wish for it. It’s magic. It just really is genuinely magic. I am strongly, happily proud of who I am and what I look like, and I don’t care what anyone else thinks.”
The Guardian reported, “[Tom] is keen to point out that puppy play is about more than just outfits and surface-level power games: It’s about being given license to behave in a way that feels natural, even primal.”
Tom explains, “You’re not worrying about money or food or work. It’s just the chance to enjoy each other’s company on a very simple level.”
Although to be honest I’m more concerned with dogs who identify as humans than I am about humans identifying as dogs.
Will we have to give them the right to vote too?
And allow them to get drivers licenses?
Either way, expect to see a lot more of these around the country in the near future:
"Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." – Noam Chomsky
Ironic isn’t it that Progressives embrace both? Propaganda and bludgeons?
What old Noam failed to mention was that if everything goes according to plan, propaganda becomes the bludgeon. They’ve been using propaganda for a long while to establish officially sanctioned thought on everything from global warming to immigration to sexuality. For example they’ve propagandized the notion that all forms of sexuality is normal and acceptable unless you are a small minded bigot. I’m not being judgmental here - something Progressives abhor more than the devil himself - but simply wish to point out that “normal” has been defined as “the usual, average, or typical state or condition.” I truly don’t care about other people’s sexuality, but my brain tells me that cis-gendered (previously known as heterosexual in the biological world) is the norm.
I use this example only to point out that it is liberal propaganda that has forced the country to pretend anything and everything on the LGBTQIA (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual, Queer, Intersex, Asexual) spectrum is “normal” and must be accepted by one and all. They are trying to convince you that exercising your own judgment on this matter (along with other issues too important to leave to our own judgement like global warming, immigration etc.) makes you a bad person unless it leads to the same conclusion as theirs.
Forcing me to agree with their world-view - when I clearly do not – has crossed over from the arena of propaganda to the venue of totalitarianism. This is what passes these days as free speech from Progressives - the arbiters of all things right and holy. Of course things are much simpler once you eliminate judgement from the sphere of normal human brain activity; nobody has to think, you just follow the rules established by your betters.
But where, precisely, does the road of tolerance end? Meet Eva, a woman born a man. She’s shown here half way through her surgeries to have scales applied to her skin and her nose and ears removed because he/she/it identifies as a dragon.
Where do you fall on the spectrum of mental health?
Maybe we really need to re-open the discussion on the institutionalization of mental patients for their own good.
![st pat's doggie_thumb[3]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-TNh_DkEZj5o/WMvllc7iOKI/AAAAAAABinw/bO7qjFzqqbw/s1600-h/st%252520pat%252527s%252520doggie_thumb%25255B3%25255D%25255B5%25255D.jpg "st pat's doggie_thumb[3]")
![transgender tomato_thumb[1]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-fdzctTapQqw/WMVf5L55JFI/AAAAAAABigg/RWRzr7GI3yE/s1600-h/transgender%252520tomato_thumb%25255B1%25255D%25255B2%25255D.jpg "transgender tomato_thumb[1]")
![transgender dragon in making_thumb[1]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-mkPlYm8Jm-I/WMVf8LiOPlI/AAAAAAABigw/oomJW9CLeG4/s1600-h/transgender%252520dragon%252520in%252520making_thumb%25255B1%25255D%25255B2%25255D.jpg "transgender dragon in making_thumb[1]")
![13179359_1105945846107997_6201314953234585633_n_thumb[1]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-7VJEtfz9quo/WMVf9vKdwZI/AAAAAAABig4/coNQF8YhxmY/s1600-h/13179359_1105945846107997_6201314953234585633_n_thumb%25255B1%25255D%25255B2%25255D.jpg "13179359_1105945846107997_6201314953234585633_n_thumb[1]")
Posts
