Month: January 2019

I do not like Nancy Pelosi. I do not obsessively HATE her like Dennis Miller, but I am generally not impressed. I’m sure that someone who’s been an elected official for as long as she has must have some virtues and skills that are not readily apparent, but as a public figure, Pelosi is almost as dull as Chuck Schumer and that much more gaffe-prone than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and unlike AOC, Pelosi isn’t so media-savvy and quick on the uptake that she will recognize and correct her gaffes as quickly as possible.

So I have to give Pelosi credit for her polite disinvitation of Viceroy Trump to the State of the Union speech scheduled for January 29, “given the security concerns” as long as the government is shut down and Secret Service people are not paid. This hits Trump where he lives. Not only is he deprived of (yet another) opportunity to make his case for the shutdown on TV, he is deprived of a traditional aspect of our increasingly imperial presidency. Now Trump won’t get to penguin-waddle up the aisle, get up to the speaker’s podium, and show all the TV cameras how big his hands are. Pelosi did give Trump the traditional option of presenting the speech in writing, which is an even bigger insult. Not that Trump, or any other president, is going to write his entire State of the Union speech, but now Stephen Miller is going to have to do the hard work of searching Trump’s tweets to come up with enough typos and unneeded capitalizations to make it look authentic.

Some Republicans, like Kentucky Senator Rand Paul (who seems to equate ‘libertarianism’ with ‘kissing Trump’s ass’) have suggested that Senate leader Mitch McConnell offer his chamber of Congress for the SOTU speech, but apparently he hasn’t considered that this would simply be inviting a mass Democratic boycott of the event, which Pelosi’s action effectively is.

Instead, Trump decided – about 24 hours after Nancy’s maneuver – to be clever and cite his own security concerns as a pretext for cancelling the military escort for the trip that Pelosi and other Representatives were scheduled to make to an Afghanistan war zone, apparently timing the decision after the Congressmen had already gotten on a bus to the airport. No doubt that impressed many of those moderate Democrats that Trump is trying to get on his side. It didn’t even seem to impress some of Trump’s usual defenders, like Senator Lindsay Graham (R.-S.C.) who opposed Pelosi’s manuever but said, “One sophomoric response does not deserve another”. And the fact that Trump was not terribly serious in his opposition to the use of military escort during a shutdown was confirmed when Melania Trump took a military flight to Trump Mar-a-Lago in Florida, after King Donnie’s royal proclamation.

Seriously, how DID this man sire five kids with such a teeny weenie?

Perhaps realizing that all of his posturing is getting him less than nothing in the polls, Trump spent some time between Wednesday and Friday conferring with Republicans and confidants including Jared Kushner (but not Democrats), Trump declared on Friday that there would be a “major announcement” about border security and the budget standoff on Saturday afternoon. This turned out to be a plan with several points: while still demanding $5.7 billion for a wall, Trump is offering a three-year extension of status for DACA recipients and Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders with $800 million more to address humanitarian issues at the border (which Trump’s policies had exacerbated). The problem being that these concessions are of a temporary nature while the wall is intended to be permanent. More importantly, at this stage, Democrats have no reason to trust Trump (but then, neither would Republicans, if they weren’t so desperate). Specifically, when Pelosi and Schumer tried to shut down the government to protect DACA “dreamers”, and were at a disadvantage because they didn’t have a majority in either house of Congress, they’d offered Trump his wall with a $25 billion budget in exchange for offering Dreamers a path to citizenship. Trump, apparently at the last minute, went back on the deal. So now Trump is escalating his demands with less leverage to work with (because now Pelosi has a majority). So normally one would give the president some credit for moving toward common ground, but you can never assume good faith with Trump. And now, not only do the Democrats know this, they are in position to act on that knowledge. So the major announcement comes down to a big fat nothing. Just like Trump.

It’s amazing that our nominal president did even this much to negotiate, but it’s still of a piece with his generally lazy, grudging and half-assed approach to governance. It probably explains why he made his announcement on a Saturday, when there weren’t going to be that many national media folks covering it. Of course the other danger of staging your event on a non-news day is that not only are people going to be focused on other things, the media may end up focusing on something even more marginal.

In my case, when I woke up late on Saturday and checked social media, the buzz wasn’t about Trump’s pseudo-concession. Rather, most news articles were going on about another incident in Washington.

Friday afternoon, some teenagers (allegedly) from a Catholic school in Kentucky were attending a March for Life rally (which hadn’t gotten that much attention in the media) and confronted a group of tribal native protestors of the Indigenous Peoples March (which got even less media attention). Everyone was focused on a particular moment when social activist and Omaha elder Nathan Phillips walked up to the kids and got in a face-off with this one Andy Samberg lookalike. By Saturday it was the only thing anyone could talk about, including Trump’s “deal.”

Now, there are a lot of the usual suspects on conservative websites and YouTube claiming to present the “real” story, such as the fact that the kids (who were all wearing MAGA hats, and not that much Christian or pro-life gear) were being provoked by some left-wing extremists called the Black Hebrews. At one point this group noticed a black student with the “pro-life” group and taunted him saying “when you get old enough, they gonna steal your organs” and then telling him, “get out, nigga.” Phillips himself told reporters that his group noticed the confrontation, although blaming the mostly white kids for it, saying: “They were in the process of attacking these four black individuals.” At that point Phillips and his group walked up to the crowd and began chanting. At which point one of the Indians got in an animated but civil discussion with one of the whites there, telling him, “this is not your land.” Videos taken by the black protestors tend to confirm the position that Phillips intervened on their behalf, with one guy saying “he came to the rescue.” During the event some of the kids were jumping up and down in imitation of the Indian chant, which one YouTube apologist captioned as “kids clearly having fun & making light of a tense situation”.

And while other apologists bought into the narrative that the media were editing the presentation to make conservative Christians look bad, it again raises the point why these kids were almost all wearing “Make America Great Again” or “Trump 2020” hats instead of carrying Christian or pro-life signs. And if Rod Dreher thinks that Nathan Phillips “seeks out these opportunities for confrontation, and then (goes) to the media with them,” well again, this was a lot more publicity than either the Indigenous march or the March for Life had gotten up to this point, and the result reflected far more badly on the latter.

So that’s the other reason that Trump’s gesture of conciliation failed. Not only did it not attract enough attention with the limited emphasis he gave it, Trump’s fan club gave the media a more vivid example of what the movement is really about.

Ironically, this incident just proves that we really do need a strong immigration policy for this country. After all, the Omaha didn’t have one, and look what happened to them.

Something to consider as this country heads toward Martin Luther King Day, the only federal holiday that celebrates an individual who was not a member of the military, not an elected politician, and used his First Amendment rights to protest for change within the system.

If for no other reason, that makes King a better example for libertarians than Rand Paul.

As of Saturday morning, we have officially reached the point where the current government shutdown is the longest in American history, all for a manufactured crisis because Edward Babyhands wanted to have something tall and hard in his life for once.

I refer again to the tweetstorm by writer Matthew Chapman: https://twitter.com/fawfulfan/status/1002502139367837702

“The one thing that you need to understand about Trump is that he is, at his core, a con man with no empathy. Therefore, he assumes that all other people are also con men with no empathy, and every exchange of goods and services that exists in the world is, on some level, a con. Trump assumes every transaction in the world — between people, businesses, nation-states, even between two different agencies of the same government — has a winner and a loser, a scammer and a sucker. He believes if you’re not ripping someone off, you’re getting ripped off. … This is why Trump will never, ever, be able to negotiate with the rest of the world. He doesn’t believe in mutual benefit. The second anyone tells him ‘this is your end of the deal’ he’ll rip it up. He believes only one party can have an end of the deal, and it shouldn’t be him.”

Chapman said this in June 2018. He went on to say:

“This explains his behavior over DACA, spiking two bipartisan deals even though they were what he asked for. He assumed if Democrats were willing to talk, his deal wasn’t ripping them off, ergo it would rip him off. That implies if Democrats win Congress, we are going to enter an all-out legislative standstill like we’ve never before seen. Our system is entirely reliant on compromise and compromise isn’t compatible with Trump’s beliefs. We will struggle to pass even basic reauthorizations.”

Where is the lie, Trumpniks?

This is of course not the first time that one party (usually it’s the Republicans) has refused to approve a budget and forced a shutdown hoping to get their way. And when this happens, the shutdown is really more rhetorical than actual. In this case, about a quarter of the government and 800,000 workers are either furloughed outright or expected to work without pay.

Because various agencies (including Defense and Social Security) were already pre-funded by December, Congress, acting without foresight, has thus decided that not only are there non-essential functions that are no longer done and do not get paid, there are essential functions that do get paid, and then there are essential functions that do NOT get paid. Got it?

This makes sense, really. If you actually shut down the government, its truly essential functions would no longer be covered, and basic stuff like border security – which remember, is what this whole squabble is supposed to be about – would be suspended. So we’re still doing that stuff, right? Wrong.

Yet, rather than focusing on how this national security “emergency” is threatening national security in the here and now, the mainstream media is focusing on the hardship to employees of the TSA, the IRS and even the Border Patrol, because they’re among the “essential” agencies who are still not budgeted or getting paid. Since the entire raison d’etre of the TSA is security theater, the fact that TSA agents are having their paychecks held hostage to the newer, bigger and louder iteration of security theater is kinda ironic. If the Resistance is hoping to pull the tear ducts of the average American by asking them to sympathize with the average TSA employee or IRS agent… well, they’d better get used to six more years of this.

Because that’s what the Very Stable Genius said could happen when he hoped that this could go on for “months, even years.” And I kinda hope it does too. Well, not two whole years. Just 22 months. So that on November 2020, Trump can go to the cameras and ask the general electorate if they think his shutdown is still worth it. I think he will be truly amazed by the response.

What’s essential? Apparently the salaries of Congress. And the president who started this whole mess in the first place. So the people who are actually serving the public are not being paid while they do so, meanwhile the people who could stop this at any time but refuse to vote for a budget are being paid for not doing their jobs.

If y’all wonder why libertarians hate government, here you are.

The “solution” that Trump and his sycophants are waving around is the idea of using presidential powers to declare a national emergency and appropriating funds from elsewhere, such as the money that is supposed to go to disaster relief in California and Puerto Rico. As even Fox & Friends (the closest thing to a panel of trusted advisors that the president has) said, making a national emergency out of a partisan demand would set the stage for the next Democratic president to declare (say) climate change a national emergency and bypass opposition in Congress to reorder the government to his liking. Thereby giving the “liberal” Big Government movement more precedent and support than it could have achieved by its own efforts. Nevertheless, even though Trump seems to have backed off this idea for now, there are supposed to be just as many Republicans who would like Trump to do this, because by making the standoff a matter of executive action, Congress won’t have to deal with it anymore, the government can get back in session, and in the (not guaranteed) event that the courts strike the initiative down, the Republicans can go to their base and say “at least we tried.”

So we’re supposed to give the president emergency power (that he says he already has) because of an “emergency” that was not pressing enough to do something about through constitutional means when the Republicans held all branches and the opportunity existed. What this really amounts to is a desire by the executive to bypass the legislative process and by the Republican contingent of the legislature to dodge responsibility for its role in the government. If they allow this to occur, then they are asserting that the standard for what constitutes a “national emergency” is whatever gets a bug up the current president’s ass.

The party of small government, ladies and gentlemen. As Rachel Maddow would put it, a government just small enough to fit in your uterus. In this case, it’s so small it may not even reach the uterus.

As I’ve stated, while many of us want to believe in natural rights, as a practical matter, “rights” are only those things we can convince the government to support and enforce. In the same regard, government itself is not an a priori thing that exists outside politics. In part, this is just a matter of ontology. People on the Right are (broadly) individualists rather than collectivists because the individual is pre-existing and necessarily existing. The collective does not necessarily exist. Any collective is just an empty set without its constituent individuals. In that regard, government, as a collective, does not pre-exist the people of the nation. If we ceased to exist, the government would not exist. If the government did not exist, we would still continue to exist. We would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, yes, but we WOULD exist.

That being the case, everything government does is not truly “essential”, except in terms of descending priorities. A government needs to be able to collect revenue to do anything else, including enforce laws. To enforce tax collection, it needs to have various levels of law enforcement (for all the laws deemed necessary, including taxation). And to have a territory in which to enforce laws, it needs to be able to enforce borders and standards of citizenship. Even the Right should be able to agree that taxes are necessary on that level, and even the Left should be able to agree that borders and standards are necessary. But to confirm even these minimal standards, there has to be a political consensus. In a republic or representative system, we elect people to serve a party agenda that is stated in advance. But if Republicans elect people for the sake of law enforcement and border security (and Democrats do the same, just not so self-consciously), and they end up thwarting both law enforcement and border security for the sake of one man’s emotional pique, then even the most minarchist right-wing conception of government is rendered non-essential, because fripperies like border security, law enforcement and taxation have been rendered into negotiables.

We have not needed to consider this because up until now it was considered a given that all the things approved by government were always going to be funded (whether the money was there or not). Now that’s no longer the case. Conversely, even during the New Deal, it was not automatically assumed that government would be involved in all endeavors of life. Now most people (other than libertarians) can’t imagine government NOT being involved in all endeavors of life. But now they’ll have to, not necessarily by choice. Now the question is not the hypothetical “how much government do we need” versus “how much government do we want?” Now it’s the practical question, “how are you going to get along without the level of government that we’ve had?”

When even the funding of the IRS is just a matter of priorities, this only makes it clear that the only difference between “essential” and non-essential services is the ability to reach a political consensus. This can be demonstrated by the simple fact that some “essential” services did get funding resolutions in 2018 while others did not. If Social Security had not been funded for next year before Ann Coulter took Donnie to the woodshed, then that Trump would be dancing on that “third rail” hard enough for us to know how much of his scalp is still naturally covered. Liberals might think it is “essential” for government to provide a national health care system, or to have a comprehensive plan to deal with climate change. But not only do we not have either now, we have never had either. And that’s because of the political environment. While the Constitution puts a limit on what government is allowed to do, most of what it does reflects the political consensus more than the limits of the law.

So while a libertarian might question how much of this government is actually necessary, the fact of the matter is that we have as much government as we do because a lot of people did consider it necessary, and a lot of voters elected politicians to create a certain level of government. The Republican sellout to the Trumpnik cult of personality has short-circuited that connection between public demand and the political system. And since even libertarians don’t want to live on the level of wolves and cavemen (most of us, anyway) we need to find some way around that.

There are points for debate that we need to have now, not just in terms of the current shutdown but in future cases where the president isn’t acting like the paid agent of a foreign power yet where politicians are on a pre-Trump standard of discourse and are still not able to reconcile. One solution to the high likelihood of a budget standoff shutting down the government would be to simply pass a law saying that where a new budget cannot be passed, the government continues on with the previous budget or continuing budget agreement by default.

An automatic resolution would at least serve budget hawks in that they could not hold the government hostage to their budget but could also make sure that the government did not grow any more. They might ask, “Wait – wouldn’t this also mean there’s no incentive to reduce the size of government?” Yes. But that would force them to acknowledge that the Republican Party has never cared about this. However much they may hack at the base of tax revenue and pretend that even steeper hacks to the safety net will make up the difference, the overall size of government never goes down. And that’s partially because for all the cuts they make to infrastructure, regulations and social services, Republicans throw in a few more wasteful, intrusive pet projects like the TSA and the YFW (Your Fucking Wall). Like all good redistributionists, they are less about taking money for the common good (if that exists) and more about shunting it to preserve their political machine and benefit their favored demographics, in this case the people who pay for their campaigns. The problem, as the budget standoff will soon make clear, is that however much money Republicans get from the donor class, their actual votes are outnumbered by the number of voters living paycheck to paycheck, which is that much harder when the government wants to not issue paychecks because the day of the week has a Y in it.

One of the reasons that intelligent Republicans continue to goosestep in line is that, however apostate Trump is with regard to the free market, he still ends up giving the donor class what they want: tax cuts for the upper percentile (at the expense of everyone else) and cuts to regulations on business. That’s much more Paul Ryan’s vision than Trump’s, but Ryan needed a Republican president to get what he wanted. Thing is, though, this is not out of line for right-wing economic philosophy, which holds that a hands-off approach to business is better than a high-tax approach that might pay for a comprehensive safety net but could also depress the economy and thus the revenues that are needed to pay for that safety net. Various liberals like Paul Krugman attack this policy because of its effects on the deficit and government’s ability to pay for existing projects. Conservatives claim that the low-tax policy will pay for itself because the resulting economic growth will be just that high. Well, Krugman is right at least in the respect that the US budget deficit grew 17% in 2018. That is largely because of the change in tax policy. In 2017, just after Trump took office, corporate taxes paid for 9 percent of government revenue and individual income taxes paid for 48. Last year (2018) corporations paid 7 percent and individual returns paid for 49 percent. And yet, economic indicators are good. You wouldn’t know from the government website, bea.gov, since “Due to a lapse in Congressional Appropriations for fiscal year 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis is closed. This website is not being updated until further notice.” But indicators seem to be improving. Yearly inflation continues to average under 3 percent. In Fall 2018, the unemployment rate reached a historic low of 3.7 percent. US GDP per capita has gone up from $53,399.4 in 2016 to $54,225.45 in 2018, with average wage going up from $22.34 at the beginning of 2018 to $23.05 by December 2018. Economic indicators for 2018 were going that much better, before somebody decided to start a tariff war with the Chinese.

It would seem that, whatever the long-term fiscal costs, the right-wing approach to the economy is working. Why then is it that so many people think this country is on the wrong track?

Perhaps because the party which claims to have the trademark on “small government” is currently run by a squalling man-baby and wannabe authoritarian whose only concept of public service is that the public serves him while he loots the Treasury, assisted by an entire Cabinet of private sector rent-seekers with similar attitudes.

Likewise, if people are discovering that they don’t actually need all the government that they’re paying for, that doesn’t mean they have to like the way that knowledge came about.

It’s time for another old-school fisking.

Today it’s this week’s column in The Daily Caller by Ann Coulter. As you may recall, half of the reason we have this partial government shutdown over “border security” is because Coulter browbeat Viceroy Trump when it looked like he was going to take Mitch McConnell’s escape route and sign the Senate bill that McConnell set up without funding for Trump’s wall.

So now, we have the shutdown, and this is Coulter’s opinion of Mr. Trump’s political strategy so far:

“The media are trying to convince Trump that if he abandons the wall, he’ll be a statesman, so that as soon as he folds, they can start making fun of him as an untrustworthy liar. “
Well, here’s the first error right here. Not that the media would portray Trump as an untrustworthy liar, but that they never had before. Because they were calling him an untrustworthy liar in 2015 and 2016, they have been calling him an untrustworthy liar all through his presidency and they will continue to do so. You wanna know WHY? CAUSE HE’S AN UNTRUSTWORTHY LIAR.

Glad that you’re starting to figure this out, Ann. And while we’re at it, Mexico will never pay for the wall, there is no Easter Bunny, and those guys with Mumford are not his Sons.

“Everyone knows that we can never have a secure border without an impermeable barrier — something like a wall— across all of it.”
Seriously, review your history. The Wall didn’t work for East Germany. And to the extent that border control did work for totalitarian socialist countries – and by the way, how are they worth emulating all of a sudden? – the Warsaw Pact border in Western Europe was a lot less territory to reinforce and defend, and most of the much longer borders of the Soviet Union proper were either at geographically inaccessible points or were adjacent to other totalitarian states that were no improvement.

“The Democrats know it, the voters know it, and the millions of illegals hurtling toward our border like cannonballs know it. “

This is an example of engaging prose that makes absolutely no sense when you think about it.

“The Democrats’ latest idea is to call a wall “immoral, ineffective and expensive. If they think a wall is “immoral,” then they’re admitting it’s effective. “

Derp.

For one thing, it does not logically follow that a thing that is immoral is necessarily effective. The conclusion here being that a thing that is effective must be immoral, and the immorality of a thing is proof of its effectiveness. Which is par for the course with Ann Coulter. But for another thing, isn’t the usual conservative critique of government action that it’s (often) immoral, ineffective and expensive?

As a libertarian, I agree with conservatives that government is often immoral and ineffective. The problem with conservatism in action is that government is made more immoral and ineffective because of conservatives, and in the case of the Trump Administration, that is undeniably ON PURPOSE.
For example: This article in the Washington Post details how one direct result of the shutdown is that the border security work that WAS going on hitherto is now on hold:

“The paralysis in bank accounts extends to overburdened U.S. immigration courts. New filings are piling up on dockets already backlogged by nearly 1 million cases, but many of the judges and clerks who process them have been sent home.:
“And when U.S. companies and employers want to check the immigration status of potential hires, they are greeted by a red banner across the top of the government’s E-Verify website. Those services are “currently unavailable due to a lapse in government appropriations,” it says.”

Why? Because border control and immigration processing are not considered essential government services.

You can’t make this up. Trumpniks really would saw off their own nads with a butter knife if they thought it would own the libs, wouldn’t they?

“To keep the third-world masses flowing across our un-walled border, the media are demanding that Trump agree to nonspecific “border security.” It’s like ordering a Starbucks and instead of getting a coffee, you’re told to have more “pep.” Now move along. Here’s your change. “

There are specific measures for border security already. They may be inadequate by conservative standards, but they do exist. They can indeed be improved. What are those measures? The ones I mentioned in the story above. The very measures, like E-Verify, that are currently suspended even as people can slip through cracks in the Border Patrol, because YOU, Ann, pussywhipped your Dear Leader into this dickwaving contest.

Now move along, Ann. Here’s your change.

https://video.search.yahoo.com/search/video?fr=yset_ff_syc_oracle&p=tyrion+slaps+joffrey#id=3&vid=d894a852d489bab37cfd7b62f3ff2bb2&action=click

“Would liberals accept such airy statements of intent in lieu of clear legal commands for any of the things they care about? (Not to be confused with “our country,” which they do not care about.)

Instead of EPA emissions standards, with specific parts per million of pollutants allowed into lakes and rivers, how about a law promoting “enhanced appreciation of God’s bounty”? Emissions standards are immoral and ineffective!“

See that last part? Now go back to the part where Ann says that Democrats call the wall “immoral, ineffective and expensive.” This is proof that Ann, like her President, is either too stupid to go back and recall her own words before she contradicts herself, or is cynical enough to think that the rubes won’t notice.

You can say that government is generally immoral, ineffective and expensive (the usual right-wing position), you can say that government is often immoral, ineffective and expensive but can be regulated and reformed (the moderate to liberal position), or you can try to claim that the same government that you claim is generally immoral, ineffective and expensive is suddenly moral, effective and fiscally prudent solely on the basis of whether you like the policy and it fits your ideology, which is pure horseshit.

“Democrats’ backup argument is to cite — every four minutes on MSNBC — Trump’s claim that Mexico would pay for the wall.”

They can do that because every four minutes during his speeches, Trump claims that Mexico will pay for the wall.

Once again, Ann: Those guys with Mumford aren’t his sons. Seriously, they’re like the same age, and everything.

“We’re all baffled by Trump not having already taxed remittances to Mexico to pay for the wall (100-percent within the president’s authority under various banking regulations), “

You’re baffled, Ann. The rest of us in the category of “all” are not baffled, we’re disgusted but not surprised.

“but if we’re going to start listing the promises Trump hasn’t kept, this is going to be a long column. “

Understatement.

“In point of fact, however, he never said Mexico would pre-pay. We can tax remittances anytime.”

Well, I’m with you there, Ann. If Trump could do these things, why doesn’t he?
It couldn’t be because your precious little boy never had a plan, has no idea what he’s doing, has no idea how to run a business, let alone a government, and is ultimately just a modern snake-oil salesman with a career pattern of bluffing his way through life, finding out what the suckers want to hear, continuing to lie past the point that everyone knows he’s lying, and hoping that he’ll avoid prosecution because the marks are too ashamed to admit they were conned?

Nah, that can’t be it.

“Nearly every Republican presidential candidate tried to con voters with these meaningless catchphrases about “border security.”

Here are The Des Moines Register’s summaries of some of the candidates’ positions on immigration a few weeks before the 2016 Iowa caucus:

• Jeb Bush: “has called for enhanced border security.”
• Marco Rubio: “proposes … improved security on the border.”
  John Kasich: “believes border security should be strengthened.”
• Chris Christie: “urges … using technology to improve border surveillance …”
• Rand Paul: “would secure the border immediately.”
• Carly Fiorina: “would secure the border, which she says requires only money and manpower.”

They all lost.”

Yes. And the fact that Trump won with “Wall good. Fire bad” is all we need to know about the intellectual character of the “conservative” movement today. Especially in regard to opinion makers like Ann Coulter, who know how to write polysyllabic, grammatically correct paragraphs (unlike Trump) but who still insist on acting like tribal cave dwellers.

“But instead of doing what he said and building a wall, Trump has hired people who don’t even grasp that the point is to make it unattractive to break into our country.

On ABC’s “This Week” last Sunday, Trump’s head of Customs and Border Protection, Kevin McAleenan, announced plans to give illegal alien kids free medical care at the border: “What we’ve done immediately, (Homeland Security) Secretary (Kirstjen) Nielsen and I have directed that we do medical checks of children 17 and under as they come into our process.”

Apparently, our working class is rolling in so much free health care that now, our country is diverting medical resources to treat other countries’ sick kids.”

I’m sorry, you guys keep saying that these people are full of diseases. Now you’re saying you don’t WANT them to have medical screenings?
I suppose we could just shoot the motherfuckers like a horde of invading zombies if we want to make sure they never cross the border at all. Ann, I’m sure that Sarah Sanders would appreciate you making her job more entertaining!

“McAleenan boasted that we — that’s you, taxpayer — will be providing “doctors, physician assistants, paramedics to do an initial intake check so that we know if a child is healthy as they arrive at the border and then make sure they can get medical care if they need it.”

Luckily, this won’t hurt any Americans because the doctors they’re sending to the border are not currently treating any U.S. citizens. Oh, wait! This just in: They will be taken away from sick Americans!”

“[citation needed]” – Wikipedia

“Doctors aren’t like the Petroleum Reserve. We don’t keep them cryogenically frozen, waiting to be unfrozen so they can treat illegals demanding free medical care as the price of hating us. If we rush doctors to the border, they are being rushed away from Americans who need medical care.

How about Democrats compile a list, by name, of the Americans they would like not to see their doctors anymore?”

This is another example of engaging prose that fails to make any sense. Even before thinking about it.

“As a result of this boundless compassion for anyone who is not an American, how many more sick kids are going be dragged by their parents across hundreds of miles of desert just to see an American doctor?…”

There’s a lot of kids within our borders who have to go miles just to see a doctor. And Ann is right, their parents do have to pay out the ass while prisoners, migrants and other freeloaders get care for free. Now, is she saying it’s a BAD thing that the average American can’t afford medical care? What does she propose to do about that?

“And when those kids die, Secretary Nielsen can demand more free medical care for illegals breaking into our country. Instead of having a wall, we’ll have a series of interlocking charity hospitals on the border treating the poor of the world before crossing into a country that didn’t ask for them and doesn’t want them.

“Sorry, America. You lose again. “

Yes. And America will keep on losing as long as the only alternative to liberalism is the “conservative” movement, because if the whip hand of conservatism thinks that Kirstjen Nielsen is too mushy and compassionate, then we’ll never get anything done in this country.

“Ann Coulter is a syndicated columnist and lawyer. “

https://www.theonion.com/law-school-applications-increase-upon-realization-that-1828464779