Trump Signs New Ninety Day Travel Ban

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President Donald Trump on Monday signed a new version of his temporary travel ban, aiming to withstand court challenges while still barring new visas for citizens from six Muslim-majority countries and shutting down the U.S. refugee program.

The revised travel order leaves Iraq off the list of banned countries but still affects would-be visitors from Iran, Syria, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen and Libya.

Trump privately signed the new order Monday while Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Attorney General Jeff Sessions formally unveiled the new edict. The low-key rollout was a contrast to the first version of the order, signed in a high-profile ceremony at the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes as Secretary of Defense James Mattis stood by Trump’s side. (Read more from “Trump Signs New Ninety Day Travel Ban” HERE)

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Tucson Police Obstruct Border Patrol From Arresting Violent Illegal Alien Escapee

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Since Donald Trump became president, local governments in highly Democratic areas have announced their intentions to shield illegal immigrants from deportation. Now, a local law enforcement agency in Arizona is joining in the obstruction.

Last weekend, the Tucson Police Department (TPD) refused to assist the U.S. Border Patrol with recovering a violent illegal immigrant who had escaped from custody. According to U.S. Border Patrol Agent Art del Cueto, 37-year-old Carlos Erazo-Velasquez violently assaulted a border patrol agent before escaping.

The Police Department v. the Border Patrol

From Honduras,Erazo-Velasquez has been deported before and has a serious criminal history. Exhausted from running, he was soon caught, and transported to a hospital for medical treatment. While undergoing treatment, he escaped again.

As Border Patrol agents looked for Erazo-Velasquez, protesters in the predominantly Democratic city reportedly blocked one of their vehicles. Agents set up an incident command center in the TPD parking lot, according to Breitbart Texas. At first, TPD cooperated with them.

But later a police supervisor informed them that “Due to the recent political climate, the Tucson Police Department could no longer assist the Border Patrol.” The Border Patrol was ordered off the property.

TPD claims this was done in part due to a lack of staff and a busy night dealing with other types of crime, posting a full statement in response.

The Tucson Sector Border Patrol’s union posted a frustrated rant on its Facebook page.

This is now the times we are living in. Where one law enforcement agency has put politics over rule of law and oath of office. Never has Border Patrol or Border Patrol Agents refused or ignored a call for help from Tucson Police Department.

Nothing to Do With Immigration

“It has nothing to do with immigration,” del Cueto said, according to a report by Tucson News Now. “It has something to do with a convicted felon running around the streets of Tucson, and Tucson changing their mind and stopping from doing the right thing because of political pressure, and that is wrong.”

The TPD is headed by liberal Police Chief Chris Magnus, known for supporting Black Lives Matter when he was police chief of the Richmond Police Department in California. He admitted to the East Bay Times in a 2012 interview, “I’m probably not a cops’ chief.” He is also known for posting articles on Facebook by liberal New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd.

Erazo-Velasquez remains at large, and criticism of the department has begun mounting. Tucson has one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation. On a scale of 1 to 100, with 100 being the safest city, Tucson scores a 1 on the website NeighborhoodScout’s report.

A study done a few years ago in neighboring Maricopa County, Arizona, found that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a rate significantly higher than the general population. While they comprise 9 percent of the population, they commit 21.8 percent of felonies. Del Cueto told Breitbart Texas, “This man being on the loose is a danger to the community and any other law enforcement officer he might encounter.” (For more from the author of “Tucson Police Obstruct Border Patrol From Arresting Violent Illegal Alien Escapee” please click HERE)

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When Replacing ObamaCare, Remember Health Insurance Isn’t Health Care

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Big Louie whispers to you, “Say, Mac. The fix is in. The Redskins are throwing it to the Browns. It’s all set. Guaranteed.”

“No, kiddin’, Louie?”

“I’m tellin’ ya. Now listen. I want you to bet me the Skins win.”

“Wha…? But you just told me ….”

“You aren’t paying attention. What’s wrong with you, Mac? You want trouble? I said the Skins will lose and you will bet they’re going to win. Now gimme sixty bucks that says the Skins will win.”

“Hey! You don’t have to be so rough …”

“Say, these twenties are new! Considerate of you. Listen. Don’t be so glum. You’re contributing to a good cause: me.”

What Insurance Is
Any of this remind you, Dear Reader, of the insurance business? It shouldn’t. Yet the word insurance has undergone a strange metamorphosis, which is caused, as you won’t be surprised to learn, by government.

Insurance used to be a bet you would make that you hoped you wouldn’t win. You went to an insurer and made a bet that something bad would happen, say, you got cancer or your house would burn down. The insurer figured out how much it would cost to pay you to fix the bad thing. He then said, “Okay, gimme Y dollars, and if the bad thing happens, I pay you X.” If you didn’t like Y or X, you negotiated with the insurer until a pair of numbers were mutually agreeable — or you agreed to part ways.

But suppose you told the insurer, “I have cancer. It will cost X to treat. I want to bet with you that I get cancer. What’s the minimum Y I should pay you?”

The insurer would either laugh you out of his office, as he commiserated with you about the sad state of your health, or he would pick a Y greater than X. Why? Because it was guaranteed that the insurer would pay out X. Why would he ever take an amount less than X?

The Government “Fix”

Because government, that’s why. Because your cancer is a “pre-existing condition” and it was seen as cruel and heartless for the insurer not to lose money on your behalf. But government forced the insurer to lose money. Government enjoyed playing Robin Hood. Hood as in criminal, crook, confidence trickster (did you not know that? Big Louie knew).

However, because the entities that comprise government move in and out of insurers (and their banks), the government also took pity. Government knew insurers had to make up their forced deficits. So it mandated that citizens who did not want to make a bet with any insurer had to give the insurer money for bad things that would almost never happen. ObamaCare became Big Louie muscling twenty-somethings to insure themselves against Alzheimer’s.

Thanks to Supreme Court Justice Roberts, you being forced to fork over funds to a private entity was called a tax. (Same thing Big Louie calls it!) Thus, not only was the word insurance gutted of most of its actual meaning, so was tax. Orwell lives.

Of course, insurers assisted in their own demise. They, like everybody else, were happy to let folks conflate the incompatible terms health insurance and health care. Once people could no longer keep these separate in their minds, the end of insurance was guaranteed.

What Insurance Isn’t

Insurers blurred these distinctions by separating themselves from the purely betting side of business, by dealing with people’s employers and not people (a condition ensconced by further Government mandates), by paying doctors and hospitals and not people, and by writing blanket instead of specific contracts. It came to be seen as normal for a person to expect “insurance” to pay for their kid’s visit to the doctor for sniffles.

Having the sniffles is almost guaranteed; it is thus numerically no different than a pre-existing condition. Having an insurer pay out on these “sure bets” meant that an additional layer of bureaucracy had to be built to handle the paperwork and shuffle funds around. Insurers unwisely moved to make a profit on these sure bets, which caused them to be penurious when paying out on large claims. Doctors had to increase their staff to handle the busywork. Monies that would have gone to pay for “bettable” diseases had to be diverted to pay for aspirins and bandages. Every step along the way caused premiums to be driven higher.

Now no one understand’s the true cost of care. Worse, we’re at the point where the true meaning of insurance is under active attack. A recent article in Bloomberg complains that it would be better if insurers used data to calculate a person’s chance of this or that disease — which is exactly what insurers should do. The author of that article also frets that insurers might “once again [be] allowed to charge extra for pre-existing conditions, an idea currently being debated in Congress.” In other words, the author is worried that insurers might once again be allowed to do what insurers are supposed to do, and what they must do if insurance is to work.

When Congress scraps ObamaCare, they must not replace it with any scheme that confuses insurance and care. This confusion guarantees that costs will go up and the bureaucracy will grow. (For more from the author of “When Replacing ObamaCare, Remember Health Insurance Isn’t Health Care” please click HERE)

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Numbers Show That Democrats Place More Trust in the Media

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While anecdotal examples and internal inklings might convince some that media bias is afoot, is there actually evidence to corroborate the claim?

Personally, I’ve always felt that bias is most certainly at play, but it’s making the concept provable that is quite complicated. While not foolproof, I would look at how the public assesses its own confidence in the press to explore that paradigm.

In a June 2016 Gallup poll, only 8 percent of Americans expressed “a great deal” of confidence in newspapers, with an additional 12 percent saying they have “quite a lot” of confidence in periodicals.

That means that just 2 in 10 Americans have a great deal of confidence in newspapers—and TV news doesn’t fare much better, with 8 percent selecting “a great deal” and an additional 13 percent expressing “quite a lot” of confidence.

Other institutions such as public schools (14 percent and 16 percent, respectively), the medical system (17 percent and 22 percent), small businesses (30 percent and 38 percent) and the military (41 percent and 32 percent), among other institutions, fared much better.

The confidence proportions have changed in recent years when it comes to both newspapers and TV news.

While just 20 percent of the public expressed a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in newspapers in 2016, that same measure was at 30 percent in 2006 and at 51 percent in 1979 (though it largely remained in the 30s over the years).

Meanwhile, TV news has also experienced changes over the decades. While 21 percent expressed, at the least, “quite a lot” of confidence in the 2016 poll, that proportion was at 46 percent in 1993.

Clearly an erosion of trust has unfolded over the years.

The Newseum Institute also asked a question about bias in its “The 2016 State of the First Amendment” report, finding that only 23 percent of American respondents “believe that the news media attempts to report on news without bias.” Meanwhile, 74 percent disagreed with this notion.

The report found, most specifically, that 85 percent of conservatives disagreed with the idea that media outlets report without any bias, with 71 percent of moderates and 68 percent of liberals disagreeing.

And the deep trust issues don’t end there.

Consider another Gallup poll that was conducted in September 2015. It found that the nation’s trust in the media remained at a “historic low,” offering additional data that backs up the idea that Americans are skeptical about what’s being reported.

Respondents were asked, “How much trust and confidence do you have in the mass media—such as newspapers, TV, and radio—when it comes to reporting the news fully, accurately, and fairly?” and were offered up a number of choices, which included “a great deal,” “a fair amount,” “not very much,” and “none at all.”

While the public’s trust was at 55 percent in 1998 and 1999, with people saying that they had at least “a fair amount” of trust at the time, the proportion was at just 40 percent in 2015.

Again, there is more evidence of the erosion of trust: “Since 2007, the majority of Americans have had little or no trust in the mass media,” Gallup reported. “Trust has typically dipped in election years, including 2004, 2008, 2012.”

And guess what? When the question was again asked in 2016 amid the heated presidential campaign, the firm found “32 percent saying they have a great deal or fair amount of trust in the media”—the lowest proportion in Gallup history, topping even the shocking 2015 proportion.

At this point, you have to wonder: What’s driving those dips, especially during politically charged election years? Something the media are doing is simply turning the public off.

Perhaps a 2016 Pew Research Center poll further spoke to this dynamic, finding that 74 percent of Americans said they believe the media “tend to favor one side” when covering social and political issues, with just 24 percent saying outlets tend to “deal fairly with both sides.”

Now here’s the piece of the Gallup puzzle that is, perhaps, most fascinating: For more than a decade, Democrats have been significantly more likely than Republicans and independents to express trust for the mass media.

Let’s just quickly recap the proportions of Democrats over the years that have said that they have a great deal or fair amount of trust for the media.

In 1997, 64 percent of Democrats fell into this category, with that proportion reaching 70 percent in 2005. After that, it moved into the 50s before popping back up to 60 percent in 2013, 55 percent in 2015, and 51 percent in 2016.

While there has been a general consistency among Democrats, the story is entirely different for independents and Republicans.

While 53 percent of independents said that they had a great deal or fair amount of trust in media in 1997, only 30 percent said the same in 2016.

It should be noted that the highest this proportion reached between those years was 55 percent back in 1999. There is a similar dynamic for Republicans, who saw their highest trust come in at 52 percent in 1998.

But Republicans have consistently not had majority trust in the media, with the proportion found in 1998 standing as the only time between 1997 and 2015 that the combined percent of those who selected a “great deal” or “fair amount” of trust crossed the 50 percent threshold.

Only 32 percent of Republicans said that they had trust in the media when asked this question in 2015, putting them on par at the time with independents. But in 2016, that proportion dipped to just 14 percent.

Forgive me for all the data and numbers, but it seemed prudent to delve into exactly where Americans stand when it comes to confidence and trust in media.

The main takeaway is that Democrats have consistently had a higher regard for trust of the media. While that is not a smoking gun on the bias front, it’s telling that more people who describe themselves as left of center would have fewer qualms with the mass media.

Are they seeing more of their values being represented and are thus less perturbed by what they’re seeing on the news front? Perhaps.

And just when you thought we might be done with the data, let’s look at yet another Gallup question that asked Americans a bit more directly what they believe about perceived bias in the news media.

The polling firm said in a 2014 report that “historically, Americans are most likely to feel the news media are ‘too liberal,’” finding that year that 44 percent of Americans felt the press were too left of center, compared to 19 percent who said too conservative and 34 percent who selected “just about right.”

As for those saying the press is “too liberal,” the proportion has fluctuated from between 44 percent and 48 percent since 2002.

Meanwhile, the “too conservative” cohort has been as low as 11 percent in 2002 and has never exceeded 19 percent. Republicans (71 percent) were the most likely to select “too liberal,” with 42 percent of independents and only 20 percent of Democrats doing the same.

With all of this in mind, Gallup concluded in its 2014 study that trust in media likely won’t be improving anytime soon: “The overarching pattern of the past decade has shown few signs of slowing the decline of faith in mass media as a whole.” (For more from the author of “Numbers Show That Democrats Place More Trust in the Media” please click HERE)

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Supreme Court Watchers Hail Neil Gorsuch as a Judge Who ‘Goes Deep’

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Neil Gorsuch will be a defender of the rule of law and a worthy successor to Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court, a panel of prominent lawyers said Tuesday at The Heritage Foundation.

“I think that with this addition [of] Judge Gorsuch, we’ll see … a lot more pressure put on the Congress to do its job right, and on the courts to not be taken advantage of by the agencies,” C. Boyden Gray, a counselor to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said during the panel discussion on Gorsuch’s judicial record.

President Donald Trump nominated Gorsuch, a 49-year-old federal appeals judge, to fill the seat of Scalia, who died unexpectedly last February.

Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, an organization dedicated to advancing Judeo-Christian values in public policy, said Gorsuch would be an excellent successor.

“I think that Judge Gorsuch’s record shows him to be an eminently worthy successor to Justice Scalia, and that is about the highest praise I can offer,” Whelan said.

Also on the panel with Whelan and Gray, now a partner in the D.C. law firm Boyden Gray & Associates, was Michael Carvin of the D.C. law firm Jones Day, who praised Gorsuch’s attention to detail.

“This guy goes deep,” Carvin said. “Somebody makes a stupid argument … but [Gorsuch] will reframe it and say, ‘It has these consequences, and we must respectfully disagree.’ So he really goes down each rabbit hole and makes sure that his opinions reach the right result.”

Gorsuch currently is a judge on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The 10th Circuit includes the states of Oklahoma, Kansas, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, plus portions of Yellowstone National Park that extend into Montana and Idaho.

Whelan lauded the role Gorsuch played in the 10th Circuit’s ruling in the so-called Hobby Lobby case. The Oklahoma City-based retailer Hobby Lobby, owned by a Christian family, took issue with the Obamacare mandate forcing employers to cover contraception, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization in employee health plans.

“There’s been a lot more focus on more … high-profile cases like Judge Gorsuch’s votes in Hobby Lobby,” Whelan said. “And those deserve attention, and I think he deserves credit for his votes there.”

Gorsuch was part of the 5-3 majority that ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby. In his opinion supporting the retail chain, he wrote:

It is not for secular courts to rewrite the religious complaint of a faithful adherent, or to decide whether a religious teaching about complicity imposes ‘too much’ moral disapproval on those only ‘indirectly’ assisting wrongful conduct. Whether an act of complicity is or isn’t ‘too attenuated’ from the underlying wrong is sometimes itself a matter of faith we must respect.

Whelan said allegations that Gorsuch was simply voting to satisfy his personal beliefs are unfounded.

“Some on the other side have suggested that, ‘Oh, he was simply indulging his own personal preferences there in Hobby Lobby.’ Instead, I think what you see … is no, he is carefully scrutinizing the [case] and applying it neutrally,” Whelan said.

Gorsuch’s support for Hobby Lobby’s position, Whelan said, exemplifies his understanding of the balance between the law and the rights of those with deeply held religious beliefs.

“Judge Gorsuch fully understands the Supreme Court’s precedents, making clear that it is no business of the government to second-guess or try to redefine a person’s religious beliefs,” he said.

Conservatives in the Senate, where hearings on Gorsuch’s confirmation are set to begin March 20, emphasize this attribute.

Carvin highlighted Gorsuch’s leadership on a case where candidates for public office had to meet a bizarre set of requirements.

“[Gorsuch] had this kind of screwy case out of Colorado where … if you were Republican or Democrat, you had to have a primary even if you did not have a contestant,” Carvin said.

“If you were a minor party, you wouldn’t have a primary unless there was more than one candidate vying for the seat,” he said, adding:

They also had a campaign contribution limit which was $200 for the primary and $200 for the general [election], because the major parties always had primaries and the minor parties very rarely had primaries.

The case was significant, Carvin said, because Gorsuch ruled to do away with the “differential treatment of major and minor parties.”

“I think it shows … a sympathy for political speech [and] a recognition of how important this is under the Constitution.”

Just as Scalia has left a powerful legacy, Whelan said, Gorsuch could make a significant impact on the high court for generations to come.

“Like Justice Scalia, he is a brilliant jurist and dedicated originalist and textualist,” Whelan said. “Like Justice Scalia, he thinks through issues very deeply … and I think all of these talents promise to give him an outsize impact on future generations of lawyers and judges.” (For more from the author of “Supreme Court Watchers Hail Neil Gorsuch as a Judge Who ‘Goes Deep'” please click HERE)

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How Close-Minded Liberals Have Ruined Higher Education

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While college administrators and professors accept disgraceful behavior, we as taxpayers, donors, and parents should not foot the bill.

Let’s look at some of that behavior.

A University of Washington Tacoma Writing Center press release told students that expecting Americans to use proper grammar perpetuates racism. The University of Nebraska Omaha will host a workshop for “anti-racist allies” to develop “action plans” that confront America’s “foundation of systemic oppression” in the context of “the current political climate.”

The workshop was inspired by professor Tammie Kennedy’s recent book, titled “Rhetorics of Whiteness.” She will lead a discussion on “taking action against white supremacy.”

Black students at the University of Michigan demand campus officials provide them with “a permanent designated space on central campus for black students and students of color to organize and do social justice work.”

Bob Lange is an associate professor emeritus of physics and an adjunct associate professor at Brandeis University’s Heller School for Social Policy and Management. He says, “It is not terrorism to kill representatives of a government that you are opposed to.”

His remarks were reported by Canary Mission, a group of students who document people and groups who are promoting hatred of the USA, Israel, and the Jewish people, particularly on American college campuses.

It reports that Lange maintained that the 2012 terrorist attacks on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya—which killed four people and injured 10 others—were “not terrorism.”

Orange Coast College suspended Caleb O’Neil for violating an obscure school policy against recording classroom lectures. It’s what he recorded that was disturbing to the college administration.

He recorded a human sexuality professor, Olga Perez Stable Cox, spending class time telling her students that President Donald Trump’s election was an “act of terrorism” because he is a “white supremacist” and Vice President Mike Pence “is one of the most anti-gay humans in this country.”

Additionally, the professor asked all of the Trump supporters in the classroom to stand up and be accounted for.

In a relatively rare incidence of the education establishment’s doing the right thing, the Coast Community College District’s board of trustees overrode the college president and rescinded O’Neil’s suspension and other sanctions. What the board did not do was to sanction Cox for being a thug and bullying her students.

Commentator Dennis Prager recently wrote a column titled “Why Professors Object to Being Recorded.” Prager says:

Our colleges and universities (and an increasing number of high schools and elementary schools) have been transformed from educational institutions into indoctrination institutions. With the left-wing takeover of universities, their primary aim has become graduating as many leftists as possible.

He adds:

Most professors objecting to being recorded know on some level that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed largely of very young people just out of high school. They know that if their ideas are exposed to adults, they may be revealed as intellectual lightweights.

These professors know that they are persuasive only when their audience is composed of very young people with minds full of mush. If their ideas are exposed to more mature adults, they will be seen as quacks, hustlers, and charlatans.

By the way, I’ve taught graduate and undergraduate economic theory for 36 years at George Mason University. At the beginning of each semester, I invite students to record my lectures.

I have no idea who has listened to the lectures or where the recordings wind up. But I challenge anyone to find a lecture in which I proselytized students to my political or personal values.

While professorial proselytization is accepted at most universities, I believe that to use one’s classroom to push one’s personal beliefs, particularly on immature students, is both immoral and academic dishonesty.

What’s going on at the nation’s colleges represents a threat to both liberty and academic excellence. It is a gross dereliction of duty for legislators, donors, and decent Americans to allow it to continue. (For more from the author of “How Close-Minded Liberals Have Ruined Higher Education” please click HERE)

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Note to Congress: Light Work Schedule Isn’t Getting the Job Done

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I have rarely been one to argue that Congress spend more time in Washington. In general, the less they are here to create new laws and new regulations and other busybody measures telling the rest of us how to live, the better.

But in order to get less government, we need the current Congress to put in a little more time rolling back the one we have.

As of the end of February, the House of Representatives has spent a total of 31 days doing business in Washington and the U.S. Senate has spent 30. If nothing changes, they are basically on track to meet the same monthly Washington workload as the 114th Congress where the House averaged a whopping 13 days a month in both 2015 and 2016, and the Senate’s monthly average was 14 days across the same time period.

Now I know many members will say that just because they aren’t in Washington doesn’t mean they aren’t working. They are busy, busy back in their districts and states staying in touch with their constituents and learning about issues they need to address.

But let’s be honest. In this brave new connected world of phones, email, the internet, and social media, let’s just say it’s not quite as hard for lawmakers to reach out and touch the folks back home—and vice versa—as it used to be.

Second, what’s the point of learning about new problems to solve when you have yet to deliver on the very ones you’ve already promised to fix?

For more of an “apples to apples” comparison, let’s look at the last two periods where Congress was dealing with a new chief executive.

In 2001, the House was only in session 14 days over the first two months of President George W. Bush’s presidency, and the Senate was here for 25. Republicans, at that time, had majorities in the House and Senate.

In 2009, during the first two months of President Barack Obama’s presidency, the House spent 27 days in session, the Senate was here 34. Democrats controlled both the House and Senate.

Notice a difference? When Democrats have majorities, they tend to run with it.

A look at the legislative history over the first 100 days of the Bush and Obama presidencies provides further evidence.

Congress introduced mostly minor legislative proposals during Bush’s first 100 days, and even his signature legislation, the No Child Left Behind Act, was only introduced—it didn’t actually pass Congress until the end of 2001.

In fact, Bush signed no legislation until June of that year. And that was before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, which understandably altered the Bush administration’s agenda.

Contrast that to the record of Obama, who signed six pieces of legislation in his first 100 days. That’s right, six. And they included some big-ticket items for the left.

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was teed up by Democrats in Congress before Obama even took the oath of office, and the new president signed it on Jan. 29. Both the Children’s Health Insurance Program Reauthorization and the “stimulus” deal, known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, were passed and signed by mid-February.

And none of these bills were bipartisan, unity-building exercises. They got through with mostly Democratic votes.

Fast forward to 2017, when two months into President Donald Trump’s administration, no major legislation has been passed. There is no excuse. Legislation to repeal Obamacare made it’s way through both the House and Senate in 2015. All it needed was a Republican president to sign it.

Republicans could have simply reintroduced that legislation in early January of this year, passed it, and had it ready for Trump to sign his first day in office. But they didn’t.

And, as has been widely reported, even by the mainstream media, Trump’s Cabinet confirmations have gone through at a much slower pace than previous recent administrations. On Day One of the Bush administration, seven Cabinet nominees were confirmed. Six were confirmed on Day One of Obama’s administration.

But on Trump’s? Only two.

Additionally, according to one tracking service monitoring 550 key positions, out of approximately 1,200 across the government that require Senate confirmation (deputy and assistant secretaries, general counsels, chief financial officers, etc.), only 18 of Trump’s have been confirmed as of this writing. Eighteen.

That means the political appointees from the previous administration still hold majority of those positions. And if you think many of them aren’t using every last day they have on the job to block the new administration’s agenda, then you haven’t been following stories about government leaks.

This brings us back to the congressional calendar, particularly the work schedule of the Senate.

Yes, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and company have been using all the parliamentary and procedural tricks they can find to block confirmations and stall the process. Yes, that is very frustrating.

But even more frustrating is that Republicans aren’t doing all they can to put a stop to this.

The Senate does not have a constitutional right to go home. They can be kept in session for as long as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell keeps them there. They can even be forced to work every week, and six or seven days per week, if that’s what it takes to stop this nonsense.

Democrats want to filibuster? Fine. They should be forced to do it all week, Sunday through Saturday.

These folks are public servants, after all, and they would better serve the public by staying in session and getting the people’s business done rather than flying home after three and half days of work each week and complaining at a local ribbon cutting or town hall about all the gridlock in Washington.

Perhaps the problem is that while voters sent a very strong message in the 2016 election, business as usual for Congress hasn’t changed—they typically fly in on Monday mornings and leave on Thursday afternoons.

The idea that at this rate they will succeed in repealing Obamacare, protecting the border, reforming the tax code, overhauling regulations, and making good on other campaign promises they made is increasingly questionable.

According to Gallup, American adults who work full time average 47 hours a week, which breaks down to about six days a week.

If Congress can do its job in half the time it takes the rest of us, great. But there is little evidence to suggest that’s what’s going on.

It’s past time for Congress to realize business as usual isn’t going to get the job done. Congress should do what regular Americans do when a job is left unfinished: work overtime. (For more from the author of “Note to Congress: Light Work Schedule Isn’t Getting the Job Done” please click HERE)

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A Nude Photo Scandal Has Shaken the Entire Marine Corps

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The U.S. Marine Corps is investigating allegations an unspecified number of military personnel and veterans allegedly distributed nude photos of female colleagues and other women as part of a perverse social media network that promotes sexual violence.

The explosive revelation was first reported by The War Horse and published Saturday via Reveal, part of the Center for Investigative Reporting. Potentially hundreds of Marines may be caught up in the scandal, which has shaken top Pentagon officials and prompted death threats against the Marine veteran who disclosed it. An undetermined number of nude photos were shared online by way of a Facebook group titled Marines United, according to the report. The community has nearly 30,000 members, mostly comprising active-duty U.S. Marines, Marine Corps veterans and British Royal Marines.

The unseemly episode is deeply embarrassing for the Marine Corps and the Defense Department, proud institutions that, like many college campuses around the country, have struggled to curtail widespread problems with sexual assault. At the same time, it exposes an unsettling rift within a segment of American society consistently regarded as reputable, honorable and trustworthy.

A Marine Corps spokesman at the Pentagon confirmed that an investigation is underway, telling Marine Corps Times on Saturday night that military officials are uncertain how many personnel may be involved. The spokesman, Maj. Clark Carpenter, referred additional questions to the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, but that agency’s spokesman was not immediately available. (Read more from “A Nude Photo Scandal Has Shaken the Entire Marine Corps” HERE)

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Oops! Leaked DHS Report PROVES Trump’s Point on Immigration

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Amidst the national debate over the deep state embedded in the intelligence bureaucracies sabotaging the Trump presidency, career DHS officials came out with a report trying to undermine the president’s immigration moratorium from high-risk countries. The report, which was conveniently leaked to MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow last week, elicited the following headlines from the liberal media:

“In leaked document, the case for Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ takes another huge hit” (Greg Sargent, Washington Post).

“DHS report undermines President Trump’s travel ban: Most foreign-born terrorists become radicalized in the US” (Salon.com).

“Homeland Security Still Doesn’t Think Donald Trump’s Immigration Order Will Work” (Huffington Post).

To begin with, if such a high-profile DHS intel report was leaked to MSNBC, why was the individual responsible for it not fired over the weekend? Where is DHS Sec. John Kelly? He was one of the first members of the Cabinet to be confirmed and should already have control over the department.

Moreover, the eight-page report actually proves the thesis we’ve formulated since my column began here at CR.

Here is the punchline of the report: “We assess that most foreign-born, US-based violent extremists likely radicalized several years after their entry to the United States, limiting the ability of screening and vetting officials to prevent their entry because of national security concerns.”

There you have it, folks! What this means is that the immigration threat from the Middle East is even more severe than what Trump is making it out to be, not less problematic. His detractors are trying to use this report, and clearly it was published and leaked under such a premise — to show that there is no way to vet individuals for terror links. As such, they contend that the immigration moratorium is worthless. This is a classic straw man argument. In fact, the report demonstrates why only a moratorium can help.

As we’ve said ad nauseam, the problem we face with mass migration from the Middle East is a lot more ubiquitous than a mere few individuals with known ties to official terror groups. It is a civilization problem – importing mass numbers of Sharia-adherent immigrants to the West who will then cluster in communities and cultivate a climate that sows resentment for the host country among their children. This is the enduring lesson of Europe, and yes, this is the reality demonstrated by the 88 cases of radicalized Muslim immigrant families analyzed by this DHS report.

When most of these terrorists came to the U.S. at a young age, they probably looked as cute as any other kid. There was nothing to vet … other than the parents adhering fervently to Shariah. What history has demonstrated is that the parents who are focused on settling down usually do not commit terror attacks. For example, the father will open up a deli shop in Dearborn, Mich., or Brooklyn, for example, and live a pretty quiet life. However, they will raise their kids under a culture that, by and large, is incompatible with western values. This sows resentment among the younger generation, which becomes even more disenchanted with the host country (particularly with the advent of cyber-jihad).

This is the story of the Chattanooga shooter who was brought here from Kuwait when he was 2, the New York/New Jersey bomber (Ahmad Khan Rahami) who came here from Afghanistan when he was 12, and the Ohio State Somali vehicular jihadist who came here as a teenager. As the report itself recognized, most of the 88 cases they studied involved a suspect who was less than 16 years old when admitted to the country.

Therefore, this DHS report, much like a broken clock that is right twice a day, accidentally stumbled across the truth: We have an assimilation problem with many immigrants from the Middle East. The last thing you want to do, then, is to bring in more from the Middle East – to the tune of 160,000 a year – when we badly need to assimilate the record numbers that already migrated here over the past 15 years.

The real number to focus on is not the few people who will have a known paper trail linking them to terrorists from day one, but the 90-plus percent from countries like Iraq who subscribe to Shariah. That is why it was such a mistake for Trump to remove Iraq from the list; Trump should have cited this report as reason to expand the moratorium to places like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

Undoubtedly, there is also an element of vetting that is important — for example, in the case of Tashfeen Malik (one of the San Bernardino shooters). She should have never been admitted from Pakistan; her social media accounts and her basic biography reeked of Islamic supremacy. Then again, the people drafting these DHS reports don’t believe in vetting the supremacist mentality that cultivates the climate of terror.

Nobody disputes that if you only vet for known ISIS ties up front, many people will slip through the net. Yet, at the same time, it completely misses the point. Just ask our friends in Europe. (For more from the author of “Oops! Leaked DHS Report PROVES Trump’s Point on Immigration” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Vice Cop Talks Facts, Myths of Sex Trafficking in America, and How We Can Fight It

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Actor Ashton Kutcher delivered a moving speech before Congress last month on the global problem of human trafficking. Kutcher called on America’s leaders to come together and address the “bipartisan issue” that is, at least for now, universally recognized as a gross injustice.

But what does the average American know about human trafficking? Where is it happening, and who is it affecting? It’s one thing to agree that there is a problem, but how do we even begin to solve an issue that we don’t understand?

Corporal Jon Doherty investigates sex trafficking cases for the Gwinnett County police’s vice unit. He recently spoke with Conservative Review about his efforts to combat sex trafficking in Georgia, and how it’s shaped his views on how communities and individuals can address this epidemic.

Doherty explained that technology has transformed “the game” of sex trafficking in America. Thanks to social media and websites like Craigslist and Backpage, perpetrators have been able to expand their operations to prey on women and seek clients across the country.

“[Predators] can look at girls’ Facebook pages,” Doherty told CR. “They can see what type of bait they need to give these certain girls. They can read the things they post, and know what’s going on maybe in the girl’s life or in her mind, or what she’s thinking about.”

Modern “pimps” aren’t walking around with top hats and canes, either, he warned of the stereotypical image. In many cases, they’re average-looking men (and sometimes women), some as young as college age. They lure and manipulate victims by feigning interest in a romantic relationship, or pretending to have connections in the modeling or acting industry.

And it’s not just the predators who have evolved. Doherty explained that the “type” of women targeted for trafficking today varies dramatically from decades past. There are “the girls you would expect it to happen to” — victims of abuse or poverty, with little or no support system. But in his experience, Cpl. Doherty has found that women from well-to-do families and privileged backgrounds can be just as vulnerable. Trafficking is prevalent in places like Atlanta because the excitement of big-city life is an easy sell for most victims, he said.

“These guys do their homework,” Doherty said. “They know their targets; they know what they’re looking for: the girl with the low self-esteem, the girl who’s got some kind of family issue going on. There’s so many things out there nowadays that it can happen to anybody.”

“We’ve recovered girls before that are police detectives’ — long-time police detectives’ — daughters that have come in from other areas,” he told CR. “It can happen to anybody.”

Doherty and his team view their work as a rescue operation — freeing victims from the abuse and deception of their captors. He remembers the victims he’s saved — as well as those he couldn’t. He recalled the case of a young woman named Crystal, who he and his partner arrested and successfully rescued. Years after they brought Crystal into custody, the two ran into her at a restaurant.

“My partner said, ‘You know who that is?’ He said, ‘That’s Crystal over there.’ I said, ‘Gosh, she doesn’t look the same […] She looks a lot different.’ When our food came, we were sitting there — she was the hostess. She came over to me, and she said, ‘Do you remember me?’ I said, ‘Of course I remember you,’ and I called her by her name. Tears just started running down her face.”

Many individuals forced into the sex industry become addicted to drugs, and therefore grow dependent on pimps, for both work and their next fix. The biggest challenge officers face is convincing these individuals to part with their abusers, Doherty said:

We explain to them that there’s no future in this. The things we can guarantee if you continue in this lifestyle are horrible things. There’s no retirement, and there’s no health insurance. There’s guaranteed beatings, rapes, robberies, just a bad life. But the hardest thing we have to compete with, other than the drugs, is the connections, sometimes of just love, and the pimp telling them, “I love you. We’re a team. It’s you and I against the world.” It’s that. They’re almost brainwashed. That’s one of the hardest things to break, right there.

Doherty explained that often the only way to pry these individuals away from the deceptive vortex of prostitution — the lure of money, the promise of emotional fulfilment, and a sense of belonging — is to detain them. Only then can Doherty and his team offer resources to help get the victims back on their feet.

“I know that one of the big, hot issues is, ‘Why do we arrest these girls? Why do we go after the victims?’” he said, addressing a very common attack on law enforcement. “A lot of times, we just go after them because that’s the only time we can get them, and we can separate them from the lifestyle. We can separate them from the pimp.”

Every year, Doherty and his team from the Gwinnett County force attend anti-sex trafficking conferences, where they’re often greeted with opposition from advocacy groups.

“When we go to these conferences, it’s almost like the police feel like … I mean … they hate us,” he said. “They do not like us. They’ll say, ‘Are you still locking up the victims?’”

According to Doherty, these advocates are simply unaware of how “the game” works: “They think these girls, if you just sat down and talked to them, that you’re going to talk them out of that life.”

“Something needs to be done with the courts and with law enforcement and with the advocate groups,” Doherty continued. “If we don’t get a hook in these girls — even if we just get them into probation or get them into drug treatment, or get them into something — we’ll never get them out of it.”

Doherty stressed that the effort to fight trafficking in America requires that law enforcement, advocacy groups, political leaders, and families work together to address the problem holistically.

“It’s a social issue where the community and the law enforcement have to come together and work for the better of reforming this person, and turning their life around,” he said, adding, “I don’t think we’ll every stop it [completely].”

Cpl. Doherty said that, like drugs, the demand for prostitution and the greed of sex traffickers will always be around. But the more the issue is discussed and understood, the better the chances are of reducing the threat.

Further, he believes “there needs to be a platform for educating young girls on the dangers of social media, besides the guy who wants to send you creepy pictures or ask you for creepy pictures.”

“They need to be educated in what’s out there, these are sharks in the water, and what these guys that are out there, and the lifestyle they can get dragged into. Before they even get a chance to look up, they find themselves in the middle of it.”

As Cpl. Jon Doherty said, we will never completely eradicate human trafficking — or any form of evil, for that matter. But by drawing attention to the breadth and depth of the problem, and by being aware of the modern threats facing young women especially (and their most effective solutions), lives can be saved. (For more from the author of “Vice Cop Talks Facts, Myths of Sex Trafficking in America, and How We Can Fight It” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.