Trump’s Cabinet Picks Sounding Alarms

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It’s often said “personnel is policy” when it comes to an incoming president’s Cabinet selections, and that’s what has some of Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters asking, “Why THESE people?”

In fact, Americans on both the left and right of the political aisle are expressing concern over the president-elect’s recent choices for key positions in his administration.

On Wednesday came word that Vice-President-elect Mike Pence was meeting with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, an outspoken Trump critic. In October, Rice called for Trump to end his bid. “Donald Trump should not be president. He should withdraw,” she wrote in a Facebook post following release of a decade-old video of Trump having a lewd conversation about women. Rice even insisted Trump replace himself with “someone who has the dignity and stature to run for the highest office in the greatest democracy on earth.” In July, Rice declined to attend the Republican National Convention. The Trump team has not indicated whether it is considering Rice for a Cabinet post.

Also Wednesday, the New York Times reported Trump may be considering professional wrestling magnate Linda McMahon for the Small Business Administration. McMahon developed World Wresting Entertainment, or WWE, with her husband, Vince McMahon. Upon leaving Trump Tower Wednesday, McMahon told reporters, “The meeting went great. It was really nice to be up, and I was honored to be asked to come in. Anytime I think the president-elect of the United States asks you to come in for a conversation, you’re happy to do that. We talked about business and entrepreneurs and creating jobs, and we talked about S.B.A.”

Trump may also be considering former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin for secretary of Veterans Affairs, Reuters reported Wednesday. Trump has long said a top priority of his administration will be to improve veterans’ care. (Read more from “Trump’s Cabinet Picks Sounding Alarms” HERE)

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Why This Potential Pick for DHS Would Be a Huge Reversal on Trump’s Biggest Campaign Promise

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The possible appointment of Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Tex. (F, 56%) to the position of Homeland Security chief may finally signal to Donald Trump’s most loyal supporters that the president-elect is not going to follow through on his chief campaign proposals of border security and immigration.

McCaul, who chairs the House Homeland Security Committee, met with the president-elect Tuesday in Trump Tower. He is said to be among a handful of individuals in the running to become the next secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

During his presidential campaign, especially in the GOP primary, Trump promised to build a security wall along the southern border to strengthen domestic national security. He has also pledged to enforce immigration law and restore order to the immigration system as a whole.

Conservative critics of Rep. McCaul say he’d be a “very disappointing” pick to lead DHS, a gargantuan government department created in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

McCaul, of course, has also earned the scorn of many a conservative for floating the idea of challenging Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas (A, 96%) in a primary.

“We certainly hope that Donald Trump would not reward a deceptive pro-amnesty lawmaker like Michael McCaul with a Cabinet position,” William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, told the Washington Times on Tuesday. “That would be very disappointing to all of us that believed his campaign promises to secure our borders and deport millions of illegal immigrants under current U.S. laws.”

Immigration hawks are particularly startled by McCaul’s 2015 Secure Our Borders First Act. Critics say the Texas representative’s co-authored bill ignored policy solutions to deal with the millions of people living in America illegally, like the administration’s “catch and release” policy.

Another factor working against McCaul’s credibility to head the Cabinet department simply in charge of “keeping America safe” is his support for Obama’s Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) agenda, which seeks to prevent jihadist radicalization through a mix of community and counter-propaganda approaches.

The overarching goal of the CVE approach is to stop would-be jihadists before they act, by countering the destructive narratives that may radicalize them within their local communities and online. The problem, critics claim, is that the structure of the program does not actually lend itself to countering violent extremism.

Obama’s pilot program has been criticized as a “catastrophic failure,” primarily because it fails to address the roots of this brand of violence and extremism (jihadism), and engages Muslim organizations with extremist ties, instead of reformist outfits.

As Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a Muslim reformist and president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy puts it, entrusting groups like these with counter-terrorism responsibilities is akin to “treating arsonists like firefighters.”

What was Rep. Mike McCaul’s role in this? After criticizing President Obama’s approach during the White House CVE conference in Feb. 2015, the House Homeland Security Committee chairman sponsored a bill to create an entire CVE office inside the Department of Homeland Security.

Other potential nominees for DHS secretary (and related national security posts) include: Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, California Rep. Duncan Hunter, former Pennsylvania Rep. Robert Smith Walker, Lt. Gen. Keith Kellogg, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and former CIA officer Clare Lopez. (For more from the author of “Why This Potential Pick for DHS Would Be a Huge Reversal on Trump’s Biggest Campaign Promise” please click HERE)

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Dollywood Employee Finds Burned Bible Page After Wildfires

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The day after wildfires tore through Gatlinburg, destroying more than 150 structures, killing at least three people and displacing thousands, Isaac McCord was doing his part to help out, picking up debris from the Dollywood park grounds.

Gripping his rake, he revisited a spot in Craftsman Valley he had skimmed over after his co-worker, Misty Carver, quipped, “Is that how you clean your room?” Provoked, he said he had started “really getting in the nooks and crannies” under a park bench when he caught a glimpse of a piece of paper lying in a puddle of water — soggy, seared and torn in two . . .

“As soon as I got down on the ground, I noticed it was a Bible verse, and I was like holy crap,” McCord said in a phone interview on Tuesday night. “It was in a puddle of water. I said, ‘I want to take care of this the best way I can,’ so I gently scooped it up and carried it out the best I could” . . .

In silence, the pair pored over the page, the edges of which were burned black, rendering many words illegible. But parts of the right side of the page were preserved enough to get the message across: it perfectly reflected, McCord said, the tragic natural disaster that had thrust Gatlinburg and Sevier County into the national spotlight the night before.

“O Lord, to thee will I cry: For the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and the flame hath burned all the trees of the field,” the page reads, according to a picture of the page posted on McCord’s Facebook. (Read more from “Dollywood Employee Finds Burned Bible Page After Wildfires” HERE)

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Threatening Electors Violates Federal Law. So Why Isn’t Loretta Lynch Doing Anything About It?

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Before Donald Trump’s stunning victory on November 8, liberals called for acceptance of election results. But since the election didn’t go as they’d planned, some have taken to harassing and intimidating electors in an attempt to change the election results. Some of these threats may violate federal law, yet the Justice Department acts strangely uninterested in investigating.

Following the election, a coalition of liberal activist groups launched #NotMyPresident Alliance, an organization dedicated to fighting the inauguration of President-elect Trump. As part of that effort, #NotMyPresident distributed personal contact information — including telephone numbers and addresses — of electors in states that voted Republican.
According to Buzzfeed, Maddie Deming, a strategist for the group, said they wanted to put electors in the spotlight and “to hold them accountable for their decision.” Whatever the intent, the initiative has produced a deluge of threats.

Electors across the country report receiving not only a flood of emails and phone calls to change their vote to Hillary Clinton but death threats as well. Alex Kim, a Texas Republican elector, reported that he and other electors had “receiv[ed] thousands of emails a day” urging them to vote for Clinton, including threats of harm and death. Arizona’s electors have reported harassment as well.

Michael Banerian, a Michigan GOP elector, received some of the most extreme threats according to The Detroit News. One email, Banerian said, talked about “shoving a gun in my mouth and blowing my brains out.” Another told him to “do society a favor and throw yourself in front of a bus.”

In Georgia and Idaho, the threats have been so extreme that the secretaries of state both released statements calling for the harassment to end. But the federal law enforcement agency that should be acting to stop these threats — the U.S. Department of Justice — has not done a thing.

Section 11b of the Voting Rights Act (52 U.S.C. §10307) makes it a crime for anyone to “intimidate, threaten, or coerce, or attempt to intimidate, threaten, or coerce any person for voting or attempting to vote.” While this has been applied in the past to ordinary, everyday voters in federal elections, the language does not limit it only to such voters. Electors who are casting their votes for president and vice president are also protected by Section 11b since the Electoral College is an essential part of the federal voting process. This is supported by Section 14(c) of the VRA, which says that “voting” includes “all action necessary to make a vote effective in any primary, special, or general election.” Obviously, the votes cast by Americans on Nov. 8 will not be effective if the electors they chose are intimidated from casting their votes in the Electoral College.

Federal law (3 U.S.C. §7) requires electors to cast their votes on the first Monday after the second Wednesday of December, which this year is Dec. 19. These are recorded as “certificates of vote,” signed, sealed, and delivered by December 28 to the president of the Senate and the archivist of the United States (3 U.S.C. §11). Congress is required to meet on Jan. 6, 2017 in joint session to count the Electoral College votes (3 U.S.C. §15).

The Dec. 19 deadline for the electors to cast their votes is less than three weeks away, which makes it essential that the Justice Department act immediately — and very publicly — to deter and stop these threats and this intimidation. Yet the website of the Justice Department’s Office of Public Affairs contains no announcement of an investigation into these threats. Moreover, we can be pretty certain that if investigators had actually contacted any of the threatened electors, it would have been reported in the press by now. The obvious conclusion is that the Justice Department has done nothing to enforce Section 11b against those who have tried to intimidate and who have threatened electors with bodily harm if they vote for Donald Trump.

Unfortunately, that’s not surprising. After nearly eight years of operation, the Obama administration has yet to file a single Section 11b case. Indeed, shortly after Mr. Obama entered the Oval Office, his Justice Department essentially dismissed almost all of a pending, high-profile Section 11b case concerning voter intimidation by the New Black Panther Party in Philadelphia. Under Attorney General Eric Holder, the Civil Rights Division had the open-and-shut case dismissed because its “progressive” new leaders did not believe the Voting Rights Act should be used against black defendants to protect white voters. This radical position ignores the fact that the law is race-neutral and protects all voters.

Seriously, if Hillary Clinton had won and Donald Trump supporters were threatening Clinton electors with bodily injury, does anyone doubt that the Justice Department would have acted immediately to enforce Section 11b?

Making threats and attempting to intimidate electors is as anti-democratic as it gets. The U.S. Justice Department, which is charged with protecting all voters, should act to quash this outrage immediately. Failure to do so will just be further evidence that this Justice Department does not believe in equal protection under the law. (For more from the author of “Threatening Electors Violates Federal Law. So Why Isn’t Loretta Lynch Doing Anything About It?” please click HERE)

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Why Intellectuals Adore Tyrants Like Castro

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My best friend in high school was Will, a Cuban exile, who later went on to become a Catholic priest. When I complained that one of our teachers was a “tyrant,” Will laughed at me ruefully. “You have no idea what that word means.” He’d lived in a tyranny, and knew what it was like.

His father and grandfather had both supported Castro against the corrupt usurper Batista — then turned against the regime when it betrayed all its liberal promises, and turned a once-prosperous island into a rusting, starving outpost of the dismal Soviet bloc. Both those men were sent to prison camps, where they were tortured periodically during their multi-year sentences. “My father never wanted to take off his shirt in front of me, so I wouldn’t see all the scars,” Will told me.

Will recounted the heavy pressure his grade school teachers put on him not to go to church. “You should come to our parade, instead!” The Cuban Communist Party sponsored a festive march with bright red flags every Sunday morning, to draw the children from God and toward the Party. Will remembered the heavy emphasis that Cuban schools put on literacy: “They wanted everyone to be able to read their propaganda, and the orders sent by the Party. So there was no excuse for disobedience.”

Finally, after a harrowing escape from that prison island, Will and his parents made their way to New York City, to pursue the ordinary middle class lives that the poor worldwide still dream of — and that too many self-styled intellectuals hold in bemused contempt. That was one thing that Will always found puzzling. “Do these people have any idea what people in Cuba would give to live an American middle-class life? Or even a working-class life?” he would ask me, flabbergasted. In fact, many thousands gave their lives, sailing rickety boats through shark-infested waters, sometimes with the Cuban military shooting at them, as Castro had ordered.

Will would wonder aloud why so many intellectuals — and wannabes, like Hollywood actors — trooped off to Cuba over the decades? Why did they rally to the support of a vicious dictator who

drove one of the wealthiest nations in Latin America into poverty and stagnation;

oppressed and destroyed its middle class, nationalizing virtually all private property;

filled his jails with priests, nuns, businessmen, and ordinary citizens;

and tortured dissident authors and ordinary people whose only “crime” was that they’d been denounced as homosexual?

Why did anti-poverty icon Dorothy Day proclaim, “God bless Castro” in 1961, and poo-poo the obvious signs that he was imposing a totalitarian government that crushed Cuba’s churches? Why did the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, just offer an anodyne eulogy for Castro’s death that has set off a worldwide parody epidemic of comparably blind, bland praise for Pol Pot, Hitler, and Idi Amin?

Socialism: A Disease of the Spirit

There is something deeper going on than simple partisan blindness. What we are seeing grows from a disease of the spirit. We need to diagnose it.

The attraction that lures intellectuals to socialist tyrants like a dog to its master’s leg has its roots in three temptations, that build on one another.

Snobbery

To this day, “bourgeois” is an epithet that college students and teachers toss off with a satisfied smirk, in the same way that too many white Americans used to sling the “n-word.” But it’s still perfectly respectable, even clubbable, to scorn the middle class. In fact, it’s a method of social-climbing, a way to convey to listeners that you — of course — have always enjoyed the perks of good education, nutrition, economic opportunities, and personal freedom. No need for you to scramble after them. In fact, you are actually jaded by them, like an archduke bored with his family’s art collection.

You now have seen beyond the materialistic allure of abundance and social mobility — without, of course, sacrificing either one by embracing actual poverty or relocating to live in some socialist tyranny. (Not one leftist American threatened that if Donald Trump were elected, he would move to Cuba.) Piercing the bourgeois veil has freed you up for the next stage in socialist enlightenment.

Secret Knowledge

Unlike the sweaty, materialistic masses, you have enjoyed an education that would have put most aristocrats over the centuries to shame. You have read enough Marx or Zizek or Zinn in college to see through the empty rhetoric of a free society, to perceive the secret core of pulsating truth: that the status quo, which has cossetted you, is in fact profoundly evil. It is a mechanism by which the wealthy “one percent” hijack control of society’s money and power, while duping ordinary workers with the fleeting dream of a comfortable, peaceable life. That dream numbs these exploited masses to the damage being done to them, and dulls their appetite for struggle.

So it is your business to enlighten them — whether they want your enlightenment or not. In fact that is your duty, as one who has risen above their sad obsessions with cars and houses and tacky white picket fences, to the cold and austere vision offered by the socialist conspiracy theory. It is also deeply satisfying to know that you have a kind of political and economic X-ray vision, which sets you apart from the vast majority of dupes and victims. That superpower which you have gained introduces you to an elite, a class of supermen who make it their business to seize and redirect the course of human history.

God-Like Power

The great Catholic freedom advocate Frederic Bastiat observed that the socialists of his day (the mid-nineteenth century) imagined themselves to be philosopher-kings in exile. They awaited only the moment when they could impose their private designs for a perfect society by the force of the state on millions of hapless citizens — those who had been too blinkered and deluded by bourgeois slogans to know what they actually wanted.

As Bastiat put it, these socialist thinkers imagined their fellow men to be shrubs and trees, while they themselves were the gardeners. The men of Bastiat’s day had at least the excuse that they had not witnessed the Gulag, the famine in Ukraine, the tens of millions of needless deaths imposed by Mao in China, or Pol Pot in Cambodia. They didn’t dream that the shears they’d need to use to carve up human nature into the new shape of Socialist man would be drenched in innocent blood.

What possible excuse is there for favoring socialism today? (For more from the author of “Why Intellectuals Adore Tyrants Like Castro” please click HERE)

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Trump Must End the Obamacare Sex Change Mandate on Day 1. Oh, You Didn’t Know About That?

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Over the summer, without much notice at all from the national media, President Obama’s transgender agenda quietly crept out of the locker room and into your doctor’s office, thanks to a largely underreported Obamacare rule.

The Health and Human Services transgender mandate, which went into effect in July, forces doctors to participate in sex changes if they conduct procedures that can also be a part of a sex transition. It does this by following the example of other agencies by expanding the traditional definition of sex discrimination to include people suffering from gender dysphoria.

“We believe that it is important to ensure that civil rights protections are extended to transgender individuals to afford them equal access to health coverage, including for health services related to gender transition,” reads a section of the federal registry.

So what does this “Nondiscrimination in Health Programs and Activities” mandate mean in practice? It means that a great deal of doctors are going to be subject to much coercion, courtesy of Obama’s administrative state.

Have you ever performed a mastectomy for breast cancer? Congratulations: You now have to perform sex-change surgeries for women who want to look like men, according to executive fiat. Ever performed an orchiectomy because a patient had testicular cancer? Ditto.

And this applies to child patients, too. Indeed, under the new regulatory regime, any doctor who has ever prescribed hormone therapy but doesn’t want to help a teenage boy look like a girl now stands accused of sexual discrimination.

And the regulators in charge don’t want to allow any room for dissent, either.

“[W]e decline to adopt a blanket religious exemption in the final rule as any religious concerns are appropriately addressed pursuant to pre-existing laws such as RFRA and provider conscience laws,” the registry reads.

Wait, you mean the same laws that were invoked to protect Hobby Lobby and the Little Sisters of the Poor? Sometimes you have to wonder if there’s somebody in Obama’s HHS who just enjoys suing people with traditional beliefs.

Now the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is helping represent multiple clients in lawsuits in Texas and North Dakota stemming from the mandate, which they say (in similar fashion to the abortion and contraception mandates) violates the conscience rights of religious health care providers.

“No doctor should be forced to perform a procedure that he or she believes will harm a child,” reads a statement from Becket senior counsel Lori Windham. “Decisions on a child’s medical treatment should be between families and their doctors, not dictated by politicians and government bureaucrats.”

The distinction is worth noting because the HHS created the rule despite the American College of Pediatrics calling transgender conditioning child abuse in a paper earlier this year. Other research also suggests that a vast majority of cases of gender dysphoria in children will naturally resolve by adolescence’s end — without permanently altering the child’s life and body. But hey, they say that is what “progress” looks like, folks.

But the good news for religious people is that this can all be reversed by close of business on Jan. 20, 2017. As Congress prepares for the upcoming legislative session, there’s already discussion among Republicans on whether Obamacare should be fully or partially repealed, and how that should be accomplished.

This could get ugly, but fixing this egregious problem — just like removing the abortion and contraception mandates that have proven to be equally as damaging to conscience rights — is that it can be undone with a single use of the “pen and phone” that created it in the first place.

In addition to the skyrocketing premiums, collapsing exchanges, and host of other problems associated with the law, Congress now just has one more reason to completely scrap the system before spring. But, even if some less-than-conservative Republicans manage to misread the struggles of the American people and stymie a full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, at least President Trump could (and should) quickly eliminate the madness that is the transgender mandate.

Do it for the kids … and the consciences. (For more from the author of “Trump Must End the Obamacare Sex Change Mandate on Day 1. Oh, You Didn’t Know About That?” please click HERE)

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GOOD THING DEMS RENAMED FOOD STAMPS TO SNAP: Otherwise We’d Have Confused It for a Massive Giveaway of Soda and Energy Drinks

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A new study just released by the USDA, offers a very detailed look at exactly how participants in the “Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program” (SNAP, aka Food Stamps) spend their taxpayer-funded subsidies. Unfortunately for taxpayers, the amount of money spent on soft drinks and other unnecessary junk foods/drinks is fairly staggering. But, we suppose it’s a nice taxpayer funded subsidy for the soda industry…so score one for Warren Buffett and the Coca Cola lobbyists.

Per the study, nearly $360mm, or 5.4% of the $6.6BN of food expenditures made by SNAP recipients, is spent on soft drinks alone. In fact, soft drinks represent the single largest “commodity” purchased by SNAP participants with $100mm more spent on sodas than milk and $150mm more than beef.

Soft drinks were the top commodity bought by food stamp recipients shopping at outlets run by a single U.S. grocery retailer.

…That is according to a new study released by the Food and Nutrition Service, the federal agency responsible for running the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly known as the food stamp program.

…By contrast, milk was the top commodity bought from the same retailer by customers not on food stamps.

(Read more from “GOOD THING DEMS RENAMED FOOD STAMPS TO SNAP: Otherwise We’d Have Confused It for a Massive Giveaway of Soda and Energy Drinks” HERE)

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Report: Obama Ultimately Convinced Clinton to Concede on Election Night

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A new report suggests that Hillary Clinton’s concession call to Donald Trump in the early morning hours of Nov. 9 to congratulate him on winning the presidential election may not have happened if it weren’t for the urging of President Obama.

Amie Parnes, who serves as chief White House correspondent for The Hill, and Jonathan Allen are writing a book about Clinton’s defeat in the election. Among the stories they have compiled is the tale of what happened as the stunning results seemed to all but guarantee a Trump victory.

Parnes and Allen say that according to sources within the Clinton campaign and the White House, just after the Associated Press called Pennsylvania on behalf of Trump at approximately 1:30 a.m. EST, the president called Clinton.

His message was simple.

“You need to concede,” he told Clinton.

Clinton ultimately agreed to call Trump, but according to Parnes and Allen, not without hearing plenty of objections from members of her own staff, who believed there was still a chance Michigan and Wisconsin could turn into victories for Clinton.

“There was a lot of discussion about Michigan and Wisconsin and whether the numbers could flip it,” The Hill quoted one of the sources as saying.

While campaign chairman John Podesta went on stage to address supporters who had gathered to for what was anticipated to be a Clinton victory party at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City — he ultimately told them to go home for the evening because there were still votes being counted in the Rust Belt states — Clinton finally listened to what the president had suggested and decided to call Trump.

The Michigan outcome was so close — approximately 13,000 votes — that the state conducted its own recall, only to determine this week that Trump won by slightly more than 10,000 votes. The win officially gives Trump 306 electoral votes.

With Green Party candidate Jill Stein and other liberals demanding recounts in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, there are some conservatives pointing out the irony that Trump was ridiculed for not coming out and saying during the third presidential debate that he would automatically accept the results of the election if he were to lose. And yet, more than two weeks after the election, some on the Democratic side are the ones not willing to accept the results because Clinton has lost.

Stein said Friday that her online efforts have raised more than $4.5 million to launch recounts in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Officials with the Obama administration are not among those unwilling to accept the results. In fact, the White House has tried to dissuade the financial and logistical investments necessary to challenge the final vote totals because it does not want to be seen as doing anything to disrupt the smooth transition of power between the Obama and Trump administrations.

Clinton has also not lobbied for any official examination of the results, although Podesta has reportedly been contacted by a group of data experts who claim they’ve seen circumstantial evidence of “irregularities” in some of the vote totals, particularly in certain counties in Wisconsin. (For more from the author of “Report: Obama Ultimately Convinced Clinton to Concede on Election Night” please click HERE)

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Retail Chain Removes Christmas Decorations From Shelves: ‘We’re a Muslim Business Now’

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The pastime of shopping for Christmas decorations ended early this year for the residents of Dortmund, Germany.

The town’s local Woolworths, a popular department store, announced it was now catering to Muslims, and that Christmas decorations were to only be on display for a few days.

A member of the store’s staff reportedly claimed, “We are a Muslim business now. We do not want to sell Christmas articles.”

A local shopper reported all of the shelves featuring Christmas decorations were full on a Friday in mid-November, but when she visited again a day later, everything had been removed. According to the managers of Woolworths — which has 300 stores in Germany — the demand for Christmas related items was too low to justify keeping them on the shelves.

“The Christmas articles are hardly in demand here. Already last year, everything remained unsold,” Seda Capakcur, the branch’s manager, said.

Diana Preisert, a spokesman for Woolworths, tried to reassure the public that it is not a Muslim company, and that Christmas-themed items could be purchased as early as September.

“Woolworths is, of course, not a Muslim company. Christmas merchandise is available from September onwards and should be sold out by the end of December,” Preisert said.

“In this branch, however, demand was too low. Therefore the goods were distributed to other branches,” she added.

Preisert mentioned that not many people in the area celebrate Christmas because of “local conditions.” The local conditions she’s referring to are recent immigration policies, which resulted in a huge influx of Muslim migrants and have drastically changed the area’s demographics.

According to city officials, the share of Christians in the total population of Northern Dortmund where the store is located is less than 30 percent.

The Sun reported that local internet users were outraged when they heard about the store’s decision, posting things like “makes me puke” and “the company has themselves to blame if their sales will not go up.”

Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, one of the individuals largely responsible for Germany’s immigration policies, tried to comfort people last month by suggesting Germans play Christmas Carols to stop the Islamisation of their culture.

While speaking at a Christian Democratic Union party in Wittenburg, Merkel claimed Germany was going to lose a piece of it’s homeland if citizens didn’t participate in passing on Christianity.

“How many Christmas carols do we still know? And how many of them are we passing on to our children and grandchildren?” she said.

Tensions over immigration issues have flared up throughout the year. One incident concerning a German primary school left parents furious when they found out their children were being forced to chant “Allahu Akbar” in Muslim prayer.

That incident came just weeks after parents complained their children’s nursery was refusing to acknowledge “Christmas rituals” in order to accommodate diverse cultures. (For more from the author of “Retail Chain Removes Christmas Decorations From Shelves: ‘We’re a Muslim Business Now'” please click HERE)

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11 Ways President Obama Absolutely Destroyed the Democratic Party

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Analysts argue that Trump won because Hillary didn’t win like Obama did, or something like that. Obama argues that he was a better campaigner than Hillary was. But across the nation, it was clear that many former Democratic voters backed Trump in key areas.

Hillary Clinton has been controversial since college, and nominating her certainly did the Democrats no good. Looking back, you can see that she didn’t promote outlandish things while on the stump. She sounded like an old-time Democrat, a God-fearing white pantsuit-wearing smiler of smilers.

It’s just, well, America wasn’t fooled.

But it wasn’t just that Hillary was so bad that Republicans won. It was that Obama was so bad, America couldn’t see how they would improve with four more years of numbskull policies that didn’t benefit regular Americans to begin with.

While Barack Obama has less than two months left in his failed presidency, let’s review why so many traditional Democratic voters have abandoned the Democratic Party.

1. Cash for Clunkers

Cash for Clunkers was a grand plan that was supposed to increase the number of cars on the road with higher fuel efficiency. To the Obama administration, this program — one of the first down the pike — was offered as a fix for the poor. The theory was these consumers could use the money they got for their clunker to buy a better, more fuel efficient car. This worked for some in the middle class, who buy new or close to new vehicles every few years. For the working poor, however, it didn’t fix anything. In fact, the program cost three times its estimate, and the unseen consequences hit them the hardest.

See, when a clunker was turned in, it was made inoperable by dealers, (per instructions from on high) by filling the engine with liquid glass — literally destroying the engine. From there, the car was parted out for up to six months and then had to be destroyed completely. The government had to be notified when each car was dead. I mean, looking back on this massive waste now it seems so ridiculous that there was ever such a program that hurt lower middle class and low income earners the most. Think of all the used cars that were removed from the market.

If you needed a car with high miles and a little rust to get to your $9.00 an hour job seven miles away, finding a cheap one after this stupid program became a lot more difficult. Clunkers still on the market were few and far in between. Thanks to Cash for Clunkers, they were also more expensive and not better in any way.

2. Made getting to our jobs harder

Gas prices during the Obama administration were so high that all the fuel-efficient cars they tried to put on the roads didn’t matter much to people’s pocketbooks. Gas prices spiked in 2008 then dropped to almost nothing the month after Obama was elected, then steadily increased and stayed high for four full years spanning both Obama’s terms. Between 2011 and 2015, Americans filled up their trucks at about $80 a tank for gas. Gas prices between $3.50 to $4.10 hurt the working men and women trying to get to their jobs.

Of course, this increase in gas prices increased the cost of shipping of food to grocery stores, thereby raising the cost of groceries. When you have bills to pay and a budget for gas and groceries as most families do — and you need gas to get to your job — there isn’t much stretch to that budget. As a result, food quality suffers.

3. He told us we didn’t build that

Part of Obama’s campaign slogan in 2012 included telling mom and pop entrepreneurs across the countryside that they would be nothing if not for the government. It was as much a slap in the face as Hillary’s “deplorables” line was, but perhaps much more.

When a president who accomplished nothing in his life, and never had to keep his business going in tough times, produces the tough times that these entrepreneurs had to react to and overcome, a slow-burning intense passion begins to fester for outlasting such a vile enemy to producers. Small businesses are the back-bone of this economy, and Obama acted a punk to people whose hands were calloused and had to scrimp and save all they had, and use creative ways to stay open during a terrible economy.

4. Claimed wind and solar power was the wave of the future

Working Americans know that wind and solar power cannot replace coal and oil. There is no possible way that using the sun and wind could produce as much energy as burning something. It’s just logic, or basic science, if you will.

But the Obama administration did one foolish and wasteful thing after another to try to prove they were right anyway, and ended up wasting billions of your tax dollars on Solyndra and other fiascos like it.

The Ivanpah Solar Plant in Nevada, for example, is the largest solar farm in the world and is producing no where near the promised amount of power. The power it is producing is on the market at about $200 a megawatt hour compared to about $35 for natural gas. Oh, and the plant and those like it are killing birds and causing airplane pilots glare issues. Recently, a computer failure at the plant caused part of the farm to burn itself up, because the mirrors were directed the wrong way.

At a solar plant, birds who fly between the mirrors and the energy towers get burnt to death, which is horrible. All the plant seems to have done is create heat in the desert. Leave it to limousine liberals to spend your money to create heat in the desert.

Wind power is a joke, but what is irritating is that they notoriously kill birds. Stories of windmills killing eagles are numerous, and your government has protected wind farms from prosecution for killing bald eagles for 30 years. If I were to kill one eagle, I’d get prison time.

5. Poisoned an entire river in Colorado

The Animas River in Colorado was turned a disgusting shade of orange-yellow when the Obama administration’s do-gooders caused a massive flood of toxic waste including arsenic and lead to enter the river flow and poison local water systems. The administration then forgave itself without penalty. It doesn’t take a genius to understand what would have happened to a group of citizens who did the same thing.

6. Made building anything or increasing our comfort more expensive

Environmental regulations increased the cost of everything needed to build, repair, or make improvement on homes, and a flood of new lower-cost pipes and compounds caused problems for homeowners. If the Obama administration had not clung to a foolish agenda of controlling how we build things, much of the headaches involved with implementing an environmental agenda could have been avoided. It seems everything involved with helping the environment, as implemented by the government, hurt the working man and woman.

7. Did not make a stand for Christians

In the lifetime of most Americans, it is hard to recall such antagonistic reproach toward Christians as President Obama and his administration has projected. From denying Christian refugees to turning a blind eye to the mass genocide in the Middle East and Africa of Christians, to the insistence of the president to downplay the role Christianity has with the founding of America, Obama has seemed to be the most anti-Christian president we’ve ever had.

8. Shut down coal production

Union members are told to vote Democrat to save their way of life. But that circle couldn’t be squared after the Obama administration systematically shut down coal production. By September, 2016, Obama had been able to shut down 400 mines and 83,000 jobs in the industry — an impossible thing to ignore for most union workers. Coal’s big sin was that it was cheap and “dirty.” But regular Americans prefer cheap energy to non-existent energy, and prefer smaller electric bills to larger ones.

9. Tried to demoralize our military

The Obama administration began an effort to use our military as a social experiment, and consistently worked to undermine its effectiveness, with insane rules of engagement. Similarly, the administration reversed the military’s main role as a force to be reckoned with simply because President Obama, as a leftist, despises it. We remember his “corpse-men” comment, and taking full credit for the death of Osama Bin Laden. This nation is proud of our military and all it has done to fight for our freedoms. Obama doesn’t know the people all over the nation whose families have sent loved ones, and his ideology showed.

After Obama was reelected in 2012, the facts swirled about Benghazi. To this day that incident remains as one huge, unforgivable sin in the minds and hearts of many Americans. The lies and cover-up it took to get Obama reelected — as well as the ongoing whiff from politicians in Congress — makes the American patriot royally ticked off. Americans just want to know just what happened, and — relying on their own powers of observation — hold both Hillary and Obama culpable for the deaths of four Americans that night.

10. Kept on golfing

President Obama didn’t work much. That is the impression he gave to millions of hardworking families all across the nation. Nobody who wishes to keep their job takes in 300 rounds of golf in eight years. That’s ten months a year, every year, every weekend. If the president worked a 9-5 job and got weekends off, it would be one thing. But he was golfing during some of the most important international and domestic crises we’ve had. Flooding in Louisiana, the beheading of James Foley, the funeral of a decorated war hero, the funeral of the Polish president and much of his government officials, are just some of the times when Obama seemed cavalier. But mostly, we are and have been at war, and President Obama didn’t seem to really care to make appearances that he was in charge of doing anything about it.

11. Obamacare

Obamacare is a fantastic and predictable failure, and Hillary would have doubled down on it if she had become president. There is no question that many American’s healthcare choices have diminished, doctor availability has dried up, and costs have skyrocketed. Even unions called out in outrage about it. Employers were put in a vice, and now, premiums and “shared responsibility” fees are going through the roof.

Obama, and all political leftists waste mountains of money and show little empathy toward the working men and women who make this country tick. All of these examples and more turned working Americans away from the Democratic Party, and the party seems to be doubling down on its losing ideology. As a regular American, it is wonderful to see that the anti-American sentiment that the Democrats insist upon holds so little political power.

The power the media had and utilized to continue promoting the Obama agenda without questioning really, any of it, has been exposed for all to see. But with a little less than two months left in his term, President Obama can still do a lot more damage. Let us make sure the Democratic Party is held responsible. (For more from the author of “11 Ways President Obama Absolutely Destroyed the Democratic Party” please click HERE)

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