The mess at our southern border is, without any shred of doubt, attributable to the gaggle of Incompetents in our nation’s Capitol. The nincompoops in Washington D.C., namely our Congressmen, Senators, and especially our president, are the enablers of this fiasco.

My most recent furor over our broken border was triggered by the newspaper column I read last night. I’ll reproduce parts of it in red below so you can evaluate the man’s arguments, which align with my own. The column began as follows:

“Every sensible immigration policy has two objectives: (1) to regain control of our borders so that it is we who decide who enters, and (2) to find a way to normalize and legalize the situation of the . . . illegals among us.

The columnist acknowledged what most of us feel, namely that no one of goodwill wants to see illegals suffer. Then he brought up the obvious: each time we legalize illegals (as of course we have done), we thereby create an incentive for more folks to slip into our country illegally. He documented this by pointing to the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration reform law of 1986. That law allowed some three million illegals then living here to get permanent residencies here.  But, the columnist said, there were far more illegals inside our country as he tapped his keyboard, evaluating the mess at our southern border.

He offered a strong recommendation, an option we all know about: “Build a barrier. It is simply ridiculous to say it cannot be done. If one fence won’t do it, then build a second 100 yards behind it. And then build a road for patrols in between. Put cameras. Put sensors. Put out lots of patrols.  . . .”

“Of course it will be ugly. So are the concrete barriers to keep truck bombs from driving into the White House. But sometimes necessity trumps aesthetics. And don’t tell me this is our Berlin Wall. When you build a wall to keep people in, that’s a prison. When you build a wall to keep people out, that’s sovereignty.  . . . Of course, no barrier will be foolproof. But it doesn’t have to be.  It simply has to reduce the river of illegals to a manageable trickle.

“This is no time for mushy compromise,” he wrote near the end of his column. And indeed it was not; nor is it now. Let me explain. This is not a recent column. It was written nearly two decades ago. First A Wall –Then Amnesty appeared in the April 7. 2006, edition of the Washington Post. For reference, George W. Bush was president at the time. Yet now, the wound at our southern border is festering with greater urgency than it was when Charles Krauthammer’s column was written. The mess at our southern borders continues.

Question of the day: What is the current crowd in Washington doing about it?

FYI: The column I quoted from was republished on page 169 in this collection of Krauthammer’s columns (See reviews of that book here).

NOTICE: As I mentioned in my previous post (way back at the beginning of this year, by far my longest pause since I started this blog) I planned to be absent for a while. The immediate cause was my temporary frustration over losing key additions to my post evaluating Joe Biden (see that here), but I also had other compelling reasons. I had been dawdling over a couple of major projects that needed to be finished. Since then, I’ve made some progress on those (but alas, they are not yet completed). I think I understand why I’ve been a laggard. The reason seems obvious. Having logged over 92 years on this planet, I still resolutely step to the beat of my drummer, but his rhythm has slowed, his beat grown fainter. Yet I am thankful that he marches on.

Please read housekeeping note at end of this post!

Joe Biden’s presidential grade so far? A grim F is what he deserves. This is doubly tragic, because Biden seems determined to run again in the 2024 presidential election, and his  likely opponent will be Donald Trump, whose presidential escapades prompted me, as regular readers of this blog may recall, to grade his White House performance as a D- (see that post here).

If you’re a Biden supporter (or a Trump supporter, or none of either), please read on. Consider the present situation for a moment. Our country seems doomed to have a gloomy election next year, specifically a race between an angry, bumbling D- and a dense, blundering F? Imagine how you will feel with these two geriatrics lurching breathlessly around the country, each struggling to reach the finish line in November.

Having already assessed Mr. Trump’s presidential performance, I’ll now explain why I believe Mr. Biden deserves his ignominious F. I begin by acknowledging that I’m stunned that his most recent approval ratings hover around 35%. How, I wonder, can a third of our populous approve of his performance? Certainly party loyalty is strong in certain individuals, but I can’t fathom how even his strongest backers refuse to acknowledge his mental decline. Even last spring a Washington Post/ABC poll, 63% of over 1,000 voting-age respondents believed Mr Biden was not sharp enough to serve effectively as leader of the free world (See here), and his blunders have continued since then. All one has to do is watch a few TV clips to see he’s cognitively impaired. (I refuse to lay his weakened cerebration and uncertain balance entirely on his age; I’m a full decade older than he is, yet I don’t stumble around like he does. Nor do I mumble as much.)

Setting aside his mental and physical lapses, I believe that three main reasons account for his low popularity. These are the 1, the economy, 2, the border crisis, and 3, a string of suspicious family financial dealings. One could extend the evidence each of these into a long chapter, but I’ll just touch on some highlights each one.

1: The Economy

Earlier in his administration, Biden went big on spending, submitting an unprecedented $6 trillion budget, this compared to Trump’s proposed budget of $4.8 trillion in the last year of his term. Biden’s goal purportedly was a way to thing green and to spend our way to prosperity. How did it work out? Well, inflation took off, but not wages. What happened to the average hourly earnings of all private workers? Here’s the information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

As the Wall Street Journal explained, there was a 3.16% drop in real earnings for the average worker across the 29 months of the Biden presidency as of mid-2023.

You probably have heard a variation of the old line: Statistics don’t lie, but liars often use statistics.  This seems to be especially true in our nation’s capitol. Here’s how Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen touted “Bidenomics” in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal just before Christmas. In her piece, she said, “wages have risen more than prices since 2019,” thus implying that Biden’s plan had benefited workers. 

Can you spot the misdirection in her statement? Well, former chairman of the Senate Banking Committee Phil Gramm, and Prof. Donald Boudreaux did.

In a letter to the editor of the WSJ earlier this week they wrote, “The problem with this claim is that President Biden wasn’t in office a single day in 2019—or in 2020. From the beginning of 2019 to the end of 2020, with Donald Trump still in the White House, real weekly earnings rose by $69 (or 6.2%) and annual median income rose by $3,592. But from the beginning of the Biden administration to the third quarter of 2023, the last quarter for which we have data, real weekly earnings fell by more than $25 (or 2.1%), pushing real annual median income down by $1,306. Oh, and they added: “Maybe Bidenomics works only when Mr. Biden isn’t President.”

2, The Border Crisis

Photo from BBC News

This is a big one.

Here’s what CNN reported last Friday: Border authorities encountered more than 225,000 migrants along the US-Mexico border this month, marking the highest monthly total recorded since 2000, according to preliminary Homeland Security statistics shared with CNN. Over the course of the month, authorities dealt with more than 10,000 migrants crossing daily until more recently, when the numbers began to drop.

This onslaught wasn’t particularly worrisome for so called sanctuary cities; these large cities are almost uniformly under control of Democrats. (According to the Washington Post, sanctuary cities are communities with policies that limit local law enforcement’s cooperation with federal authorities’ efforts to deport immigrants. For the past few decades, “U.S. sanctuary city policies have been chiefly about welcoming immigrants . . .)

How times have changed! In the past few years, the burden of rampant illegal migration was felt mostly by the southern border states and Florida. That is no longer true. Migrants now are being shipped northward by a stream of buses, most notably from Texas by order of Governor Greg Abbott.

 Effects of illegal migration on northern cities

Chicago

“Chicago’s migrant crisis spirals out of control: City spent nearly $1 million on failed camp before pulling the plug – as officials now IMPOUND buses bringing migrants to the city from Texas on Gov. Greg Abbott’s orders” Headline from UK Daily Mail. Subheadings: * * *The city spent over $985,000 on the shuttered migrant camp at Brighton Park * * * There are currently more than 13,000 migrants staying in Chicago’s shelter system and the city has spent more than 250M handing the crisis this year.                            (The full article in the Daily Mail [12/15/2023] is well worth reading. See it here.)

New York City

And things are really getting dicey in New York City. The cost of sheltering migrants in the Big Apple could run to about $12 billion by summer of 2025 if the flow of migrants continues apace with current numbers, this according to Politico (see story here). Apparently more than 160,000 migrants have entered New York City since the spring of 2022. See an up-to-date New York Daily News story (1 Jan 2024) here.   *  *  *  *  * I could go on, but you get the point.

 3. A String of Suspicious Financial Dealings

 

Housekeeping note:

I have decided to take a break from blogging. Why? Yesterday, when working on this article, I mistakenly  clicked on “publish” instead of “preview,” so you received an unbaked loaf of my bread. Major frustration #1. Today, I spent three hours cleaning things up, adding Denver to Chicago and New York regarding the illegal migrant crisis. I tuned up the entire article, much improving it and adding interesting details, none of which you will ever see. Why? When my post was finally ready to go, I moved to another part of my “backdoor,” where I work on my blog. and when I came back to my new draft, all of the careful changes and additions I had made were gone, unable to be retrieved. That was major frustration #2. Am I going to take time to repeat those three hours? Not a chance!

I’m cruising (or maybe crashing) into 92 in a few days, and I’d prefer to do that without a bundle of frustrations. So, I’m taking a break of at least a month, maybe more. Writerken.com will remain open, so I’d love to have you browse through what I’ve written here, over 100 articles are available on topics such as politics, classical medical experiments, information on aging, health, travel, literature, culture, and whatnot.

Thanks for reading.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The photo of fallen Biden was on CNN

I’m re-posting Donald Trump’s Final Grade (it appeared here nearly three years ago) for four important reasons:

1) Odds are high that Trump will again be the Republican candidate for our presidency.

2) If he does become a candidate, he will face a cacophony of denunciation from the mainstream media.

3) The flood of denunciation will almost certainly effect his ability to perform well (see below for explanation of this).

4) For comparison, I plan to write soon about Joe Biden’s less-than-stellar performance to date.

Here is my original post:

A number of articles I’ve seen, along with opinions from certain syndicated columnists, make the case that the Covid-19 pandemic defeated Donald Trump. I have trouble swallowing that. The virus clearly shifted some votes, but I would argue that Donald Trump knocked himself right out of the Oval Office.

The reason seems obvious. Trump never learned to be presidential. He spent his four years in office squabbling. He flooded his nights with ridiculous tweets, and in daylight threw his abrasive jabs and roundhouse rants at practically everyone. In the end, enough of those blows turned around and smacked him solidly on the jaw, putting him down for the count.

I suppose one might argue that his bluster was caused by the press, the majority of which pummeled him at every turn, putting him on the defensive, but I don’t buy that either. He had shown plenty of nastiness even as a candidate while skirmishing with others for the Republican nomination.

I think he won the first time because he was the outsider itching to drain the Washington swamp and yank some federal tentacles off our backs. That sounded good to me, as it apparently still does to most citizens. As I wrote in my Washington’s Swamp post, in December only 15% of us approved of the work of our Washington legislators.

Not that it matters to anyone else, but I give Trump a D- for his term. In my system, he avoided a flat out failing grade because he accomplished some things I believe have been good for our country. But he sits tightly wedged near the bottom of the presidential barrel because he was often an embarrassment while in office.

URGENT NOTE: If you’re among the 85% of us disappointed with our congressional crowd, and if you know anyone capable of draining gigantic swamps, someone reasonably stable and fortified with stamina galore, give that person a nudge toward greatness.

End of original post. Now some updated thoughts:

It is now clear that Trump’s presidency was thrown violently off course by the false Trump-Russia collusion narrative. If you don’t know the origin of the narrative, it was funded by the Clinton campaign and it was trumpeted loudly by the New York Times, the Washington Post, many other left-leaning big city newspapers. Ironically, the Times and the Post even won Pulitzer Prizes for their stories touting the fake Steele dossier that ignited the fuss. The collusion narrative was also frequently highlighted on ABC, CBS, CNN, NBC, and MSNBC. But emerging facts, especially those in the Durham report (See here) turned that narrative around.

Here are a summary of the factual story, as revealed by a few paragraphs taken from a more reliable CNN report (The Steele dossier: A reckoning, written in November 2021). Read it carefully. There are some bombshells in it.

When it came to light in January 2017, just days before Donald Trump took office, the so-called Steele dossier landed like a bombshell and sent shockwaves around the world with its salacious allegations about Trump and his supposed ties to Russia.

But five years later, the credibility of the dossier has significantly diminished.

A series of investigations and lawsuits have discredited many of its central allegations and exposed the unreliability of Steele’s sources. They also raise serious questions about the political underpinnings of some key explosive claims about Trump by shedding new light on the involvement of some well-connected Democrats in the dossier, and separate efforts to prod the FBI to investigate ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia.

Two special counsel investigations, multiple congressional inquiries, civil lawsuits in the US and the United Kingdom, and an internal Justice Department review have now fully unspooled the behind-the-scenes role that some Democrats played in this saga. They paid for the research, funneled information to Steele’s sources, and then urged the FBI to investigate Trump’s connections to Russia.

Nearly a year passed before the full truth came out about the financing: The money flowed from Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign to law firm Perkins Coie, to the research company Fusion GPS, and then ultimately to Steele, who got $168,000.

But Democratic involvement in Steele’s work was much deeper than previously known. Court filings from the Durham inquiry recently revealed that some information in the dossier originated from Charles Dolan, 71, a public relations executive with expertise in Russian affairs who had a decades-long political relationship with the Clinton family. He has not been accused of any crimes.

But that isn’t the end of the story. Obama and Biden knew the truth, as did the Deep State

“In July 2016, CIA Director John Brennan rushed to the White House to brief then-President Barack Obama and Joe Biden, our current president, about alarming new evidence uncovered by American intelligence. The agency had obtained reliable information that “Hillary Clinton had approved a campaign plan to stir up a scandal against Donald Trump by tying him to Putin and the Russians.” (page 81 of the Durham report).

But not only did Obama and Biden know about Hillary’s treachery, so did other top officials who were also secretly briefed. These officials included Attorney General Loretta Lynch, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and FBI Director James Comey. This is made clear from some of Brennan’s handwritten notes. Yet, for the next three years all of these high-ranking officials remained silent about the CIA’s findings. How deep can the Washington Swamp (see here) get?

Final questions:

Do you think it possible that the same forces described above would surge again against Donald Trump if he were elected president for a second term? Do you think that Trump would be both vengeful and vindictive during his term? Do you think such a scenario would be good for our country? Are these important questions?

If this post interests you, please pass it on. And if you are not a subscriber, I would appreciate you signing on.

Stay tuned. I’ll get to Biden next.

 

Biden versus Trump: What Can We Do? I’ve written about this problem before (see here and here), but events continue to move in the wrong direction. Will we have the opportunity to vote for a candidate we actually prefer during our next presidential election? Doesn’t look like it. Both Biden and Trump have unfavorable ratings of 55% according to recent polls (see Biden’s here, and Trump’s here) And their approval ratings are hovering between the upper 30s to low 40s. Nevertheless, unless a miracle occurs, those two tainted individuals are headed toward an undesirable slug fest in 2024. WHAT CAN WE DO?

First, try to recall a time when two more unpalatable candidates vied for our presidency. Admittedly, there have been some colossal duds in the past, but I submit that never before have our choices been so bleak. Both Biden and Trump are imbued with scary traits. I’ll consider here just two of each candidate’s many drawbacks.

Personal attributes

Mr. Biden:

People talk about his age. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 73% of voters think him too old to run for president. Some 60% say he isn’t mentally capable. I’m most concerned about his mental acuity, which is in shreds. Even partisan Democrats must have noticed the endless indications of the man’s dotage. One telling recent blooper occurred at a private campaign event, in which Biden told a story about why he chose to run. Minutes later he told the same story again, almost word for word, as verified by a transcript of the speech later published by the White House. Think about that. An aware person may repeat a word, but not an entire story after just telling it. In short, Mr. Biden’s mental status is dismal, and far below the level necessary to adequately perform duties of the presidency.

Mr. Trump:

Although he is just three years younger than Biden, fewer people focus on his age. His brash, vindictive personality weighs him down far more than his age. Try to recall all the former friends and associates that Trump has turned his vengeance on. It would take some doing to log all the bodies strewn in his wake. Accordingly, it seems likely that the former president, if he were to move back into the White House, would spend much of his time settling what he considers old grievances. Moreover, it was obvious that Mr. Trump did little to dignify the presidency while he occupied the White House, and it is difficult to imagine his behavior would improve if he were reelected. In short, Mr. Trump’s aggressive and vindictive personality likely would inflame the already-divisive Washington climate and thereby hinder his performance as president. 

Legal difficulties

Mr. Trump:

1) The former president is immersed in a swamp of legal problems. He faces charges that legal experts say portends a dangerous road ahead for him.

2) In Washington federal court, he is charged with conspiring to defraud the U.S. by preventing Congress from certifying Biden’s victory over Trump and thus depriving voters of their right to a fair election.

3) A Georgia grand jury has issued an indictment accusing him of efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat Joe Biden.

4) A federal court in Miami has charged him with unlawfully keeping classified national security documents when he left office in 2021 and lying to officials who sought to recover them.

5) A New York grand jury indicted him for allegedly falsifying business records in connection with a hush-money payment (allegedly using campaign funds) to a porn star before the 2016 presidential election.

6) A New York attorney has  sued Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization, in September 2022 for alleged fraud by him and his family.

Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all of the above charges. Each of them, it should be noted, carries possible prison sentences. Stay tuned.

Mr. Biden:

1) House Republicans have started an impeachment inquiry of the current president, this concerning whether Mr. Biden collaborated with his son, Hunter, in enriching the son, other family members, and the president himself.

2) I don’t pretend to know fact from fiction here, but one point seems self-evident, that being that Hunter Biden has neither the knowledge nor the expertise to have earned (without help) the millions of dollars he collected from foreign sources. As has been widely reported, a sizeable amount of circumstantial evidence suggests his father, while vice president, was linked to Hunter’s earnings. I’m not alone. Some 61% of those in a recent poll (see here) believe that Mr. Biden had some level of involvement in Hunter’s business dealings — and 42% think that he acted illegally (there has been no proof of wrongdoing by the president). 

3) According to Business Insider, subpoenaed bank records reveal that the Biden family created over 20 shell companies (companies through which they reportedly received about $20 million in payments from foreign sources). Bankrate.com defines a shell company, or shell corporation as an entity that typically lacks active business operations or employees. Shell companies can have many possible uses, from serving as vehicles to raise funds to facilitating corporate mergers, but they may also be used by individuals and companies to evade taxes, launder money and hide the identities of their owners.

4) It also has been reported that a total of nine Biden family members received unexplained wire transfers from foreign businesses. Even two of Biden’s grandchildren received payments. It’s unclear which grandchildren received payments, but most of them are in their early twenties with no personal or business ties to Ukraine, Russia, or China.

5) An IRS whistle blower, Joseph Ziegler, who works in the agency’s International Tax and Financial Crime section, said in his opening statement before Congress that he was the lead IRS case agent on the investigation and that the IRS had recommended both felony and misdemeanor charges against the president’s son.  That recommendation was ignored. “I have a reason to believe that there was gross mismanagement present throughout this investigation,” Ziegler said.

6) According to Hunter Biden’s former associates, the Vice President joined Hunter in telephone conversations with the foreign representatives who provided money to Hunter.

Mr Biden denies that he was in any way connected to his son’s businesses. The investigation continues. Stay tuned.

Final thoughts

I’ll end where I began. Biden versus Trump: What can we do? Well, we can raise a fuss, and many of us can raise many fusses. If that fails, we can individually assess the multiple drawbacks of each of these sorry candidates. Once that is decided, we then can vote against the one considered to be the worst. By doing that, We the People of the United States, will form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, just as the preamble to our Constitution proclaims.

If you agree that a Biden – Trump ticket is not what our country needs, please consider forwarding this post to others, and urge them to do the same. Who knows? Perhaps we can make a difference.