How the NAACP and Broward County School Board are responsible for the Parkland Massacre and Trayvon Martin shooting

The Associated Press in a November 2013 article titled In Florida, agreement to reduce student arrests Christine Armario reported:

 (AP) — One of the nation’s largest school districts, law enforcement and the NAACP have reached a deal aimed at arresting fewer students for minor offenses and cutting down the so-called school-to-prison pipeline, which the civil rights group and others say disproportionately affects minority students.

The agreement with Broward County Public Schools in Florida announced Tuesday is one of the first comprehensive plans bringing together district officials, police and the state attorney’s office to create an alternative to the zero-tolerance policies prevalent in many schools. It charges principals rather than school resource officers with being the primary decision makers in responding to student misbehavior.

[ … ]

“It’s pretty rare,” Michael Krezmien, a professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said of the agreement. “I think if every other school district did it that would be a great step forward.”

The new policy creates a matrix for district officials and school resource officers to follow when a student misbehaves. For non-violent misdemeanors like trespassing, harassment, incidents related to alcohol, possession of a misdemeanor amount of marijuana and drug paraphernalia, administrators are instructed to try and resolve the situation without an arrest. A variety of alternatives, like participation in a week-long counseling program, are designed to address and correct the student’s behavior.

No student would be arrested for a first non-violent misdemeanor, but further offenses will result in graduated levels of school-based interventions. After a fifth incident, students are referred to law enforcement.

Felonies or serious threats will still be handled by police. [Emphasis added]

Read more.

After Florida’s Broward County School Board implemented this policy the Miami-Dade School Board did the same. This new “matrix” is dubbed “diversionary programs.”

Diversionary Programs Kill

Four days after the Parkland massacre a column was published by the Conservative Tree House titled School Shooting Was Outcome of Broward County School Board Policy – Now Local and National Politicians Weaponize Kids for Ideological Intents. The author reported:

Broward County schools intentionally created polices from 2010 through 2016 that culminated in the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland.  We know this with great specificity because five years ago we warned Broward County Florida school board members this could happen.

In 2012 and 2013 while doing research into the Trayvon Martin shooting we discovered an alarming set of school policies being enacted in Miami-Dade and Broward County Florida.  The policies were called “diversionary programs” and were essentially about stopping High School students from being arrested. Law enforcement was instructed to avoid arrests and defer criminal conduct to school administrators.

Students who engaged in violence, drug sales, robberies, burglaries, theft and other various crimes were intentionally kept out of the criminal justice system.  County administrators and School Superintendents told local and county law enforcement officers to stop arresting students. [Emphasis added]

How the Miami-Dade School Board mandated policies came into conflict with law and order

Frances Robles from the Miami Herald reported:

Trayvon [Martin] was suspended several times in the months before his death, including one incident in which a school police officer said he caught the Michael Krop High student with a bag of what appeared to be stolen jewelry.

The Conservative Tree House reported:

It was that M-DSPD internal affairs investigation which revealed in October 2011 Trayvon Martin was searched by School Resource Officer, Darryl Dunn. The search of Trayvon Martin’s backpack turned up at least 12 pcs of ladies jewelry, and a man’s watch, in addition to a flat head screwdriver described as “a burglary tool”.

When Trayvon was questioned about who owned the jewelry and where it came from, he claimed he was just holding it for a “friend”. A “friend” he would not name.

Later, after the police report was outlined in the Robles article, and despite Trayvon being suspended for the second time in a new school year, Martin family attorney, Benjamin Crump, said Trayvon’s dad, Tracy Martin, and Trayvon’s mom, Sybrina Fulton, did not know anything about the jewelry case.

[ … ]

However, there was ONE big issue. SRO Dunn never filed a criminal report, nor opened a criminal investigation, surrounding the stolen jewelry. Instead, and as a result of pressure from M-DSPD Chief [Charles] Hurley to avoid criminal reports for black male students, Dunn wrote up the jewelry as “found items”, and transferred them, along with the burglary tool, to the Miami-Dade Police property room where they sat on a shelf unassigned to anyone for investigation.

Read M-DSPD Chief Charles Hurley’s testimony here.

In April 2012 Jessie Jackson, after the Trayvon Martin shooting, called for “no more black suspensions.” It should be noted that the Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz is Hispanic, a minority. Jackson said at a rally that the Trayvon Martin case was about ending all types of racial profiling — not just in criminal cases, but by banks, insurance companies and in the job market. Jackson called for “end profiling now.” “We must stop suspending our children,” Jackson said, asking the crowd to repeat: “Invest in them. Educate them.”  (read more)

After Jackson’s remarks this policy was implemented nation wide by former President Obama and led to an executive order to allow black male students to have independent disciplinary policies based on their race and gender.

What happens when law enforcement sees something and does nothing in order to “end profiling”based on race and gender?

Are the NAACP and the Broward County School District’s “diversionary program” responsible for the Parkland massacre? We report, you decide.

READ: The Broward County School Board’s Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline dated November 5th, 2013:

Broward Co Collaborative Agreement on School Discipline – MOU by The Conservative Treehouse on Scribd

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Are Democrat Midterm Ambitions the Real Reason Parkland is Still in News?

Unlike after other mass school shootings, the movement from Parkland to propaganda has had tremendous lasting power. The tragedy’s wake has seen sustained news coverage and energized anti-Second Amendment protests, ostensibly due to organic “student activism.” Yet post-shooting leftist anti-gun appeals and young students willing to facilitate them are nothing new. What is new is that the Democrats just recently suffered a devastating political one-two punch.

Not long ago Democrats were licking their chops at the prospect of a November midterm sweep. Since then, however, two momentous things have occurred: Both the Trump-Russia-collusion narrative and the Democrats’ generic congressional poll numbers have collapsed. To right this listing ship, leftists need a new issue, and fast, and they may think they’ve got it: gun control.

As U.S. News & World Report informed Feb. 14, “The new Morning Consult/Politico poll released Wednesday showed respondents rewarding Republicans for passing the tax cut bill in December, with 39 percent saying they would vote Republican if the election were held today compared to 38 percent who would vote for Democrats — down from a 10-point Democrat advantage in mid-December.” The same poll showed President Trump’s approval rating drawing even with his disapproval number; in fact, Trump’s approval figure is three points better than Barack Obama’s was at the same time in his presidency. This was wholly unanticipated.

On Feb. 16, the Friday before a three-day weekend, Special Counsel Robert Mueller announced the vanity indictments of 13 nationals and three entities of the Russian persuasion. A Project Veritas sting operation had already captured CNN figures on video last summer admitting there was nothing to the Trump-Russia-collusion story and that they were pushing it for ratings (and if CNN knew it was nonsense, so did the rest of the mainstream media), but this didn’t stop Fourth Estate Russia fakery.

But with these nonsense indictments — of men who can never be extradited and tried — the writing is on the wall: “The Trump-Russia collusion narrative is dead,” as Fox News put it.

How bad is it for the Dems? The party for months was talking about impeaching President Trump as if it were only a matter of time. Now some leftists claim that collusion was never even the focus of the Mueller investigation! They just wanted to learn more about Russian meddling, you see. The people who gave us revisionist history now have graduated to revisionist current events.

But it gets worse still. Mueller’s latest indictment, of lawyer and son-in-law of Russian oligarch Alex Van Der Zwaan, may lead to the implication of prominent Democrats. So the Dems and media may want Mueller’s investigation off the front pages posthaste, and they need an issue to replace it and hopefully buoy their flagging poll numbers. Ergo Parkland, Parkland and more Parkland, 24-7.

The Democrats, mind you, have played this game before. Remember how “contraception” suddenly became a big issue during the 2012 campaign? This was no accident. As former Clinton insider Dick Morris explained at the time, the Democrats needed to replace prenatal infanticide — which is no longer a winning issue for them — with something else. As he put it, “It used to be ten points more pro-choice than pro-Life[;] now it’s ten points more pro-Life than pro-choice…. So what they’re trying to do now is replace it with contraception.”

So prenatal infanticide became contraception and Russia control becomes gun control — as the demagogues transition from defending the killing of unborn children to bemoaning the killing of older children — whatever it takes to win. The reality is that the Left’s focus isn’t on stopping school shootings, but on stopping GOP momentum. And the Parkland kids are a very handy means to that end.

Contact Selwyn Duke, follow him on Twitter or log on to SelwynDuke.com

Sons of Guns: Violence Grows in the Void of Faith and Family

While Americans try to cope with the losses in Florida, they’re saying goodbye to someone else: America’s pastor, Billy Graham. Never has our nation so desperately needed to hear the message of hope and healing that the 99-year-old spent his life sharing. So surely, it’s no earthly coincidence that even in Reverend Graham’s death, he’s forcing us to look in the one place where the answers to this heartbreak lie: up.Torn apart by grief and rage, Americans are frantic to know why our nation is unraveling in one act of violence after another. “We’re done with thoughts and prayers!” an angry man shouted at a Colorado townhall, when Rep. Mike Coffman (R) asked for a moment of silence for Parkland. But isn’t that the problem? Too many schools and colleges are done with prayer. They’ve been so busy kicking God out (and his standards) that they haven’t noticed what’s coming in. Every moral vacuum is filled with something. And maybe it’s time we stepped back as a nation and take a long hard look at what those things are and how they’re impacting our culture. Violence, relativism, promiscuity, and suicide didn’t get their start when God was expelled from school. But they’ve certainly been given a culture in which to thrive now that we’ve removed the Judeo-Christian foundation that anchored the country.

Donald Trump’s opponents are scratching their heads over these shootings, saying, “We’ve got to control the instruments of the violence.” No, what we have to do is impact the hearts and minds of children and let them know their lives have meaning. “It had to have broken Billy Graham’s heart,” Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) told me on radio yesterday, “to see our nation get to the point where we refuse to teach morality, we refuse to teach right or wrong. The two-parent home has come under attack and been destroyed. And really, I’ve given this a lot of thought. When you get rid of teaching morality, when you destroy the foundational home that’s been the foundation for every civilization, then if you want to stay safe, you’re gonna have to give up all of your constitutional rights — at least most of them.”

Even now, I don’t think our country has come to a point of serious reflection on the violence that’s snuffing out these innocent lives. Sure, we can talk about limiting access to guns, but if we’re truly concerned about violence, let’s also talk about expanding access to God. Until we’re willing to address both — the instrument and the motivation — this discussion won’t change anything. There has to be a moral component. Gun control, knife control, truck rental control, pressure cooker control — they’re never going to stop evil. Only a repentant and restored people, with hearts turned toward what’s right, can do that.

Do I think there are steps we can take to make the nation safer? Absolutely. I think President Trump has a pragmatic approach to filling some holes in our system. More comprehensive background checks, an emphasis on mental health, or banning bump stocks could all help. I think many parents, like myself, empathize with the moms and dads across this nation who’ve lost their children to senseless acts of violence. We’re ready to have a conversation about strengthening America’s gun laws — but not in the absence of a discussion about the moral and spiritual void that’s been created by policies that try to appease a few while putting all children at risk.

“The real work of reducing violent crime is the work of rebuilding the family,” Dr. Pat Fagan has said. Americans need to carefully consider how an agenda of religious hostility detracts from that. And what about the years of liberal policies pushing America away from the natural family? Or the fact that we’ve gotten to a point in our “civil” society where people no longer value humans created in the image of God? A God, I might add, that some Americans are punished for even invoking.

Faith has become such an anathema after eight years of Barack Obama that people are furious at the mere expression of it. Just this week, Congressman Mike Bost (R-Ill.) posted a picture on social media with Donald Trump holding a bag of prayer cards he’d collected last year from constituents in his district. “Sickening,” followers posted. “What a disgusting stunt.” In a torrent of profanity and contempt, others insisted, “F— your thoughts and prayers. Your children are dying…”

If Congress wants to stop these tragedies, then it has to start by encouraging the two things — faith and family — that can address the real problem: the human heart. “‘This government,’ John Adams said,” and Louie Gohmert reminded us, “‘was only intended to govern a moral and religious people. It’s not fit to govern any other.'”

We can’t use laws to do what only God can. We have to get back to a basic understanding of right and wrong. Until then, we’re only treating the symptoms.


Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.


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When it Comes to School Shootings, Stop the Bickering and Solve the Problem.

The Chamber of the Florida House of Representatives is a very austere place.  Upon entering, you feel the weight of your constituents urging you to work for the betterment of all Floridians.

Despite its loftiness, during session, it is also a place bustling with activity as members scope out other members’ positions on issues and chairmen are approached regarding the possibility of having a bill heard.

But on Wednesday, February 14, 2018, all of that came to a halt as the announcement was made that a terrible mass shooting incident was taking place at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School, and a moment of silence was called in solidarity with those who were tragically affected by the day’s events.  The work of the Florida House continued after that, but at a much more somber pace.

As we know, seventeen people paid the ultimate price for this senseless act of violence while countless others were left with a huge void in their lives and in their hearts.  And those of us in the Florida House were left with a renewed call to do something to address this tragic problem.

The question, of course, is what?

The easy but fruitless answer is to reach for gun control legislation.  All sorts of ideas have been floated ranging from a ban on assault weapons all the way to confiscation.  The problem with these suggestions is that no matter how many of these laws are passed, the nefarious shooter will continue to obtain weapons and wreak havoc on the frail and unarmed.  Although many are frustrated by the Congress’s inability to enact stricter gun control legislation, the ineffectiveness and futility of these measures is the very reason for the gridlock.  Unquestionably, if gun control measures truly worked, their passage would be unstoppable.

So, absent these ineffective measures, what else can be done?

Well, there are actually some very promising solutions.  For starters, school districts can enact programs designating individuals with familiarity in handling weapons (such as concealed weapon permit holders, military veterans, former law enforcement officers, etc.) to carry them in schools for the purposes of protecting students in case of an active shooter or hostage situation.  These programs may include training requirements, background checks, and psychological testing in order to qualify to carry in a school.  These individuals ought to be carrying in a concealed manner so that no student or stranger would know the identity or number of such designated carriers.

Many states prohibit the carrying of any weapons in all schools, public or private, thus rendering the members of churches with schools on church grounds powerless to respond in the case of an active shooter incident.  Those restrictions need be lifted, particularly during times when the church’s school is not in session, such as Sundays, the same time that services are being held.

States ought to enact legislation requiring school districts to develop policies and response plans to active shooter situations, and drill them, so that all involved know how to respond.

Simulation programs, such as the one run by the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine where field enactments are created requiring coordinated responses by local SWAT, EMS teams, and assigned weapons carriers.

This will allow for better coordination among the different players needing to work together and for the identification of challenges before they are encountered in live events.

Like in other areas, prevention is the best policy and over reliance on the federal system is a prescription for failure.  Consequently, state law enforcement must be tasked with the job of identifying high-risk individuals and with investigating them before a mass casualty event takes place.  It follow that state legislatures must pass laws and appropriations providing these agencies the tools they need to hunt down these would be killers and get them the interventions they need.

So why haven’t these very reasonable and logical steps been enacted?  In my experience, the number one reason legislation in this arena meets so much resistance is because of the conflations and misguidance provided by its opponents.  Without fail, whenever these measures are presented, opponents turn the debate into a discussion about the expansion of guns in schools or the intrusion on gun free zones when, in fact, these measures represent no such expansions or intrusions.  Additionally, fear mongering inevitably takes place as if the fear of the unknown were greater than the acknowledgment of the certainty of another deadly occurrence.

Clearly, our country’s problem with violent behavior and murderous conduct is much greater than the mere existence of guns, and we should never have a discussion about gun violence and school safety without noting the need to improve the moral ills afflicting us.  More importantly, we cannot allow the paralysis that grips us regarding gun control to keep us from enacting useful and lifesaving measures.  Doing so not only represents a terrible negligence on our part, but it will also lead to more tragic and needless loss of life.

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EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in The Federalist Pages. The featured image is of the Cottonwood Heights, Utah Police Department motto, solve the problem.

Trump Administration wrongly blamed for closure of refugee offices

I told you about it herebut I’ve noticed over the last 24 hours that the story about Trump’s refugee policies being blamed for closure of NON-PROFIT GROUP offices is all over the media.

Let me be clear!

The blame rests squarely on the design of the US Refugee Admissions Program (and Congress) which has shoveled so much federal money to NON-PROFITS that they long ago gave up any idea of seriously attempting to raise private money to TAKE CARE OF THE REFUGEES THEY CLAIM THEY WANTED!

The program has essentially become a ponzi-scheme built on US Treasury payments to NON-PROFIT groups on a refugee per head basis.  Refugee (paying client) numbers decline, and thus so does the NON-PROFIT groups’ taxpayer support.

For ten years I have been hammering this point—nothing has stopped NON-PROFIT refugee agencies from raising PRIVATE money in the old fashioned way! They could have held more fundraisers, sought out grants from businesses AND from religious groups to tide them over through the ups and downs of the refugee admissions flow.

(If, at this point, they say there isn’t enough private money for this, then that means the public doesn’t want it!)

So instead they got lazy on the federal dole.  It isn’t the Trump State Department’s fault if refugees brought in previous months and years are now left without local support. The State Department can’t legally shutter NON-PROFIT groups.

It is the management at the top of the nine federal contractors (below) who were careless and lazy (all the while collecting exorbitant salaries themselves!) who are to blame if refugees are left in the lurch now, or staff at the lowest levels is dismissed.

Where the h*** is Congress! It is way past time to either dump or completely reform the Refugee Act of 1980!

The nine contractors….

The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)!  From most recent accounting, here.

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We Don’t Need Stronger Gun Laws. We Need Stronger Communities!

Here we go again. Another school massacre and another overreaction by liberals who want to play politics with the Second Amendment.

On Valentine’s Day, 17 students and faculty members were murdered by a former classmate at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., a small community west of Boca Raton.

As tragic as the murders were, sometimes I am confused by the way people react to tragedies. In the aftermath of a mass shooting, many people want the government to immediately pass new gun control laws. The hard truth is that there is absolutely nothing the government can do to protect you from tragedies like the horrific massacre in Parkland.

Tragedy, by definition is, “an event causing great suffering, destruction, and distress, such as a serious accident, crime, or natural catastrophe.”

Sometimes good people are beset by tragedies, randomly and without warning.

If you ban guns, do you really think violent tragedies will go away? One need look no further than Japan to find the answer.

In Japan, it is illegal to possess, carry, sell or buy guns. So, it is extremely rare, if ever, for a shooting death to occur in Japan.

For example, in 2014, Japan had six gun related deaths compared to 33,599 in the U.S.

In 2016, however, nineteen people were killed and 26 injured in a stabbing massacre in Tokyo, which was Japan’s deadliest mass killing since World War II. In 2008, a man ran over a group of people with his truck and then stabbed 18, killing seven in Tokyo’s Akihabara gaming district. In 2001, eight children were killed when a former employee, a janitor, entered an elementary school in Osaka and stabbed them to death.

So, the point is that even if guns were outlawed in the U.S., a person determined to commit an act of violence will always find a weapon of choice to unleash their diabolical schemes.

Irresponsible mainstream media outlets take advantage of these crises, broadcasting the anguish and misery of distraught family members just to boost their own ratings. As they say, “if it bleeds, it leads.”

Let’s game out one of the liberal arguments that outlawing guns is the solution to these mass shootings, that seem to happen with more frequency.

So, Japan has outlawed guns. Now, killers in that country use knives and cars to inflict massive carnage upon their fellow citizens.

If the U.S. outlawed guns and preemptively banned, let’s say, ice picks and utility knives, then individuals that are committed to killing other people will simply use whatever else they can get their hands on. Cars and trucks might become the weapons of choice; should we ban them, too? If we go down that road, where will it end?

What liberals refuse to address is the lack of values and morality in our society. Religion instills in a society a sense of right and wrong and demands some type of structure in our lives, but liberals have run prayer out of our nation’s schools; and any mentions or references to God in the public square are questioned, mocked or maligned outright.

Regardless of one’s religious beliefs, can anyone legitimately argue that the Ten Commandments are not good standards for any society to live by? Thou shalt not murder, lie, covet, etc.

In American society today, many people have bought into the notion that man, not God, is the measure of all things. There are no rules. No restraints. American society has cast the traditional nuclear family by the wayside. For liberals, normal is whatever you feel like doing at any given moment.

Liberal Hollywood elites, the most vociferous advocates for gun control, refuse to take responsibility for the violence and lack of morals that are constant themes in their movies and TV shows; most of them won’t even acknowledge the negative effects that their industry has on the minds of young people.

The result is generations of children who become desensitized to violence and mayhem, who then lash out in real life, without ever considering the repercussions of their actions.

These kids don’t wake up one day and decide to go on murderous rampages at their schools, simply because someone picked on them during lunch or they experienced a bad breakup. We have all gone through that as teenagers and young adults and we got through it without killing and maiming dozens of our classmates.

What is different now? Today, it’s very hard to get teenagers and young adults to think critically about the world they live in. No one wants to accept personal responsibility for anything that happens in their lives; everyone gets a trophy; everything bad that happens to them is always someone else’s fault.

The state of Florida and the F.B.I. are going to spend millions of dollars trying to figure out why this kid killed students and faculty members at that school in Parkland. In reality, there are no simple solutions to most problems that we wrestle with as a society.

Unfortunately, sometimes bad things happen to good people and banning guns won’t change that.

RELATED ARTICLE: School Shooting Was Outcome of Broward County School Board Policy – Now Local and National Politicians Weaponize Kids for Ideological Intents…

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in Black Press USA.

President Donald J. Trump’s Plan to ‘Make America Bourgeois Again’

President Trump ran on an America first platform. His mantra was MAGA – Make America Great Again. President Trump in his inaugural address said:

Today’s ceremony, however, has very special meaning. Because today we are not merely transferring power from one Administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.

When President Trump attends a rally, speaks at a press conference or Tweets, he is talking directly to America’s “bourgeois class.” Bourgeois is defined as “a member of the middle class.”

Who will make America great, again?

In an August 9th, 2017 Philadelphia Inquirer article titled Paying the price for breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture Amy Wax and Larry Alexander defined America’s bourgeois culture. Wax and Alexander wrote,

That [bourgeois] culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow:

Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

Supporters of Barack Obama at a rally.

Politicians have wooed the bourgeois class as did former President Barack Obama. Once elected, however, the bourgeois class have been either ignored or suffered under various administrations.

In a April 22nd, 2014 New York Times column titled Losing the Lead: The American Middle Class Is No Longer the World’s Richest David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy reported:

The American middle [bourgeois] class, long the most affluent in the world, has lost that distinction.

While the wealthiest Americans are outpacing many of their global peers, a New York Times analysis shows that across the lower- and middle-income tiers, citizens of other advanced countries have received considerably larger raises over the last three decades.

After-tax middle-class incomes in Canada — substantially behind in 2000 — now appear to be higher than in the United States. The poor in much of Europe earn more than poor Americans.

The bourgeois class is President Trump’s base and the bedrock of people who will make America great again.

What are the challenges to making America bourgeois again?

Wax and Alexander pointed out in their article:

Did everyone abide by those [bourgeois culture] precepts? Of course not. There are always rebels — and hypocrites, those who publicly endorse the norms but transgress them. But as the saying goes, hypocrisy is the homage vice pays to virtue. Even the deviants rarely disavowed or openly disparaged the prevailing expectations.

Today there are many “deviants” who openly disavow and disparage the most basic bourgeois cultural norms.

Who are the bourgeois culture deviants? Who are the hypocrites? Who are the transgressors? Here is a short list:

  1. Those who labled the $1,000 bonuses given to workers as “crumbs.”
  2. Hollywood which no longer makes films about the bourgeois class.
  3. Those who do not serve their country and are openly unpatriotic.
  4.  Those who would rather be idle rather than work
  5. Those politicians who subsidize idleness and sloth.
  6. Those who create sanctuaries for those who abuse drugs and other addictive substances.
  7. Those who on radio, television, in music and during the day use course language.
  8. Those who are not respectful of the duly elected President of these United States.

Wax and Alexander noted:

[T]hose adults with influence over the [bourgeois] culture, for a variety of reasons, abandoned their role as advocates for respectability, civility, and adult values. As a consequence, the counterculture made great headway, particularly among the chattering classes — academics, writers, artists, actors, and journalists — who relished liberation from conventional constraints and turned condemning America and reviewing its crimes into a class marker of virtue and sophistication.

Making America Bourgeois Again!

President Trump and his administration have made it their sole mission to restore America’s bourgeois class. Washington, D.C. does not want to empower the bourgeois class because as President Trump pointed out during his inaugural address,

Washington flourished – but the people did not share in its wealth.

Politicians prospered – but the jobs left, and the factories closed.

The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country.

Their victories have not been your victories; their triumphs have not been your triumphs; and while they celebrated in our nation’s Capital, there was little to celebrate for struggling families all across our land.

Today there is much to celebrate, especially for the bourgeois class. Make America Bourgeois Again!

RELATED VIDEO: Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) staying tax cuts are unpatriotic.

In God Schools Trust

America has been successful at keeping God out of schools, but not guns. And that irony isn’t lost on leaders in Arkansas, who are desperately trying to put positive influences back into classrooms. If there was ever a time to put a simple reminder like “In God We Trust” before students, it’s now. While Florida families mourn the loss of 17 young lives, maybe it’s time to rethink what messages we’re teaching our teenagers.

In Arkansas, the idea was simple: require schools to put up “In God We Trust” posters. The bill sailed through the state legislature, passing 78-1 in the House and 28-2 in the Senate. Rep. Jim Dotson (R) thought it wouldn’t just be an opportunity to honor America’s heritage, but also “provide students with a good conscience while in school.” “We all know of instances in recent events where our culture of violence is being shown all around, and I think it’s something that hopefully students will be able to see on the walls and know that our country was founded on something better.”

As a show of support, local American Legion posts have raised money to pay for 1,000 framed posters in one school district, and others are lining up to donate more. As usual, the American Atheists are pitching a fit that children might be exposed to the word “God,” something they could certainly stand to hear more of, if the latest headlines are any indication. “Rep. Dotson and groups who have pledged to donate these displays have been quite clear about their purpose: injecting religion into Arkansas’s public schools.” Well, I hate to break it to them, but God’s already there. Unless these kids check their purses and wallets at the front door, He’s on every dollar they have.

As for putting the motto out where everyone can see it, the Supreme Court has said time and time again that there’s absolutely nothing wrong about it. The motto isn’t an endorsement of religion, the court said, but a “statement of optimism” about America’s heritage. If you want to protect kids from something, try the schools’ graphic sex-ed curriculums or propaganda of those trying to deconstruct society and the family that’s paraded through our schools. Those are the real destructive influences.

At a time when more schools are war zones than classrooms, surely we can all see the good of pointing kids to the fact that there is a God to whom we will all give an account — including the atheists who work night and day to fight someone they say doesn’t exist. For everyone else, maybe we should ponder the possibility that by letting God back in we might keep the violence out.


Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.


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How Billy Graham’s Invitation Forever Changed My Life

On Russia, Media Sticks to Its Foregone Collusions

There’s the media’s usual treatment of conservatives — guilty until proven innocent — and then there’s the Donald Trump treatment: guilty even after proven innocent. Unfortunately for this president, there’s no winning under this toxic cloud of media bias. Barack Obama could do no wrong — and Donald Trump can do no right. Even after a nine-month investigation proves he is.

Nothing seems to move the needle on the press’s contempt — not even Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 13 indictments in the Russia probe, which should prove what the president has said all along: there is no collusion! Under normal circumstances, the detailed charges should have gone a long way to softening the media’s stance on what they claimed was a coordinated effort between the Trump campaign and foreign nationals to interfere in the 2016 election. “Russia started their anti-U.S. campaign in 2014,” the president tweeted when Mueller’s announcement came down, “long before I announced that I would run for president. The results of the election were not impacted. The Trump campaign did nothing wrong — no collusion!

But what should have been validation turned to indignation when outlets like the Associated Press and New York Times refused to accept Mueller’s findings as fact. “Trump’s claim of vindication appeared to be unsupported by the indictment and premature,” reporters said, “as Mueller’s probe has shown no signs of abating.” Then, later, “The cries of vindication seem to be more show than substance.” And, “Neither [the Deputy Attorney General] nor Mueller’s office has ruled out any potential collusion in any other plot to disrupt the election.”

Even in the face of the Special Counsel’s own evidence, liberal reporters refused to accept the fact that Trump had no role in teaming up with the Russians to sway the election outcome. “The fake news media never fails,” he tweeted. So, instead of harping on his involvement, they started to attack him for being rightThe New York Times continued to bash Trump for insisting the allegations were a hoax. “The president’s mood began to darken as it became clearer to him that some commentators were portraying the indictment as nothing for him to celebrate, according to three people with knowledge of his reaction. Those commentators called it proof that he had not won the election on his own, a particularly galling, if not completely accurate, charge for a president long concerned about his legitimacy.”

Even now, without a scrap of evidence to stand on, some outlets refuse to give up their bogus theories of Trump’s involvement. Maybe they’re upset about being duped. After all, as Media Research Center (MRC) points out, they were the ones who were played the fool. Liberal networks were airing almost around-the-clock coverage of the anti-Trump rallies after the election — only to learn that the Russians had organized the whole thing! MRC combed through the Mueller indictments and found that, “Like their counterparts at CNN and MSNBC, multiple news outlets were quick to promote anti-Trump protests in New York City on November 12, 2016 — and in doing so became unwitting promoters of Russian propaganda… Special Counsel Robert Mueller revealed that this protest, as well as one in Charlotte, NC on November 19, 2016, was organized by Russian operatives.”

Congressman Don Bacon isn’t surprised. Yesterday on “Washington Watch,” he explained that Russia does this same thing all over the world. Why? Because, as he explains, “When we turn on each other, we’re less focused on what they’re doing in Ukraine, what they’re doing in Syria, and how they’re threatening the Baltics. And they gain more leeway in their part of the world. This is their way of distracting us from what they’re doing and helps them further their goals, while it undermines our ability to stop that.”

And the media played right into the Russians’ hands. Slate, the Daily Beast, and Huffington Post seized on the rallies, planting seeds of distrust and disunity. “If the goal of the secret Russian organizers was to inject nonsense like that into the American political dialogue,” MRC said, “then their unwitting helpers on CNN and MSNBC certainly gave them plenty of assistance that day.” Even radical filmmaker Michael Moore was suckered into the scam, tweeting photos from a protest that had been secretly orchestrated by the Russians. “If it was the goal of Russia to create discord, disruption and chaos within the U.S.,” President Trump said, “then with all of the Committee Hearings, Investigations and Party hatred, they have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. They are laughing [at us] in Moscow. Get smart America!”

In the end, this had nothing to do with propping up Trump and undermining Clinton, it was about dividing America. And the media took the bait, ultimately playing a bigger role in tearing the country apart than anyone.


Tony Perkins’ Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.


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Florida’s Multi-System Failures and the broken ‘Baker Act’

Everyday in Florida, the sun does not shine on the multitudes involuntarily confined via the innocuous-sounding “Baker Act” … the multitudes of harmless elders, in particular. What can cause the sudden detention of an elderly man, 89 years old, inside a metropolitan Florida hospital mental ward?

In the case of my Father, Al Katz was determined to be a threat to others because he pushed his walker against someone, known as “walker abuse,” not normally lethal or catastrophic. Although Al Katz, a Holocaust Survivor of seven years of slave labor in temperatures reaching 52 degrees below zero, had never harmed another human being or himself, the Manatee County judge sentenced my Dad to three weeks of involuntary commitment with a no-contact order placed upon him. Al Katz was prohibited thereby from receiving from or sending to his family any communications of any kind.

Al Katz’s involuntary confinement in the gruesome underground psychiatric ward in Manatee Memorial Hospital would have lasted by law 72 hours, but instead, Al Katz was detained without further court hearings for three weeks, isolated from his family waiting to see him just on the other side of the electronic metal doors guarded by armed officers. Al Katz was re-living the Holocaust, surrounded by men in uniforms with guns and unable to communicate with the ones he loved.

The threshold for Baker Act commitments of elders in Florida is extremely low. For the most minimal of reasons, elders are imprisoned in hospitals and psychiatric facilities for days, reaping enormous funds for these providers of makeshift jail cells, where grandmas and grandpas barely able to walk are kept off the streets as threats to society.

Al Katz could barely walk, could not drive, had no weapons of any kind, and had lived 89 years as an admirable asset to his community, but the court found that he posed a threat to himself or others, purportedly necessitating the Baker Act. On the other hand, Florida’s infamous school mass murder suspect, who shall remain unnamed herein, posed low risk of harming himself or others, according to the Florida Department of Children and Families, which had visited the suspect and his family following his Internet postings of self-mutilation and express keen interest in buying a gun. DCF records state that the suspect “plans to go out and buy a gun. It is unknown what he is buying the gun for.”

What else did DCF and multiple other agencies know about the suspect or should have known? He was on medications for A.D.H.D., seeing counselors, and a client at a number of mental health facilities. He was referred for a “threat assessment” due to his long history of fights with teachers and frequent profanity directed against school staff. He posted on the Internet photos of dead and mutilated animals that he had killed; had a Nazi symbol on his book bag; was prohibited from carrying a backpack at school; harassed his neighbors; was investigated or visited by law enforcement nearly 40 times in eight years; attended numerous schools, including a school for students with emotional problems and an alternative high school for at-risk youths; was regularly disciplined for disobedience; made a false 911 call; posted “I’m going to be a professional school shooter.” on the Internet using his real name; was uncomfortable with his Hispanic heritage; was suspended multiple times in the 2016-17 school year; shared photos of small animals he had shot; bragged about his intent to bring guns to school; was found with bullets in his backpack; kicked out a glass window at his middle school; had frequent prolonged, unexplained absences from school; had made numerous Internet postings of guns, knives, and other ominous images; and had been referred to a mental health center to be detained under the Baker Act, which center determined that the suspect was not a threat after visiting him at his home and giving him a safety contract to sign.

Al Katz never had a mental health counselor visit him at his home, never was given a safety contract to sign, and was illegally held in the Baker Act for many weeks without the mandatory court hearings. Al Katz never had any warning signs that he would pose a threat to society; the suspect had every warning sign that he would “be a professional school shooter,” including his own word on it signed with his own uniquely-spelled name.

Could dozens of murders have been prevented in Florida? Yes. How are mass detentions of elders in sunless cages lowering the societal threat? How many detained grandmas and grandpas would ever commit a mass murder?

This past summer, I once again alerted the Florida and Indiana authorities about another young man with a violent history who has made foreboding Internet postings for years, including videos of simulated decapitations with blood spurting out of the necks, photographs of assault weapons, and his own ominous poetry reminiscent of past mass murderers, but the evidence and I are invariably ignored. The clock is ticking with his rage, but no one will listen. Previously, this convicted serial predator mutilated the genital area of one of his victim’s dolls and set it on fire to “release his anger.”

Again, the clock is ticking with his rage, but no one will listen … just like the Florida school shooting case, with flagrant warning signs unheeded. Said the shooting suspect’s public defender:

This kid exhibited every single known red flag, from killing animals to having a cache of weapons to disruptive behavior to saying he wanted to be a school shooter. If this isn’t a person who should have gotten someone’s attention, I don’t know who is. This was a multi-system failure…

When harmless elders are locked up, this too is a multi-system failure that any decent society cannot condone any more than a mass murderer walking its streets or a serial predator lurking.

U.S. State Department not yet concerned about sexual harassment allegations involving refugee agency it funds

That is what Breitbart’s Michael Patrick Leahy is reporting about his efforts to get an answer from the major funding source for the nine federal contractors*** hired by State for the US Refugee Admissions Program.  Leahy’s story is entitled:

U.S. Government Continues to Fund Refugee Resettlement NGO Whose Funding Has Been Frozen by the U.K.

(We reported on the mess the International Refugee Committee is in with its British funding, here.)

miliband and soros 2 (2) close

Miliband and Soros in 2013.

Here is some of what Leahy is reporting after attempting to get something definitive from the State Department:

The government of the United Kingdom has frozen all payments to the International Rescue Committee (IRC), one of the largest non-profit refugee resettlement agencies in the world, pending the outcome of an investigation into allegations of “sexual harassment and fraud” in the organization.

As one of the nine voluntary agencies (VOLAGs) that have for decades received about $1 billion annually from the U.S. federal government, the IRC is also heavily funded by American taxpayers.

The IRC is the third VOLAG in the last six months to come under scrutiny for questions surrounding its leadership and management.

[….]

The management and leadership of former U.K. Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who has served as CEO of the IRC since 2013 and receives an annual salary of $671,000, is now under serious question, and his ability to maintain his current job is uncertain.

The State Department offered no indication that it intends to stop funding the IRC, despite the actions of the U.K government when asked specifically by Breitbart News if the U.S. government currently has plans to immediately stop making payments to the IRC to conduct refugee resettlement operations in the United States.

“The Department of State takes very seriously the prevention and response of all accusations of sexual exploitation and abuse,” a State Department spokesperson told Breitbart News when asked if the U.S. government intends to follow the lead of the U.K. government in suspending payments to the IRC pending the results of an investigation.

[….]

The State Department has not responded to this follow up question from Breitbart News: Now that the allegations of abuse against the IRC have been brought to the State Department’s attention, what specifically is the State Department doing to ensure the IRC is taking the necessary steps to address the issue appropriately?

Continue reading here.

Quick, someone tell the IRC’s new partner—Sesame Street!

See my David Miliband archive by clicking here.

If the IRC does have any government funds frozen, even temporarily, it will be a blow to their subcontractors (working in cities below) that are wholly dependent on the IRC mothership in Manhattan. (IRC website):

IRC offices

*** These are the nine federally funded refugee agencies operating in the US.

The number in parenthesis is the percentage of their income paid by you (the taxpayer) to place the refugees and get them signed up for their services (aka welfare)!  From most recent accounting, here.

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Go Green With Gasoline If You’re Going to Consume That Sandwich

A new study shows that if you aren’t ready to go vegan to save the world, then you should quit riding your bike and take a car.

An article in the Journal of Insufferable Busybodies (official title: Sustainable Production and Consumption) calculates the carbon footprint for a variety of sandwiches. These carbon footprints include carbon dioxide emissions from things such as farming, transportation, and refrigeration.

In the article, researchers at the University of Manchester offer helpful tips on Earth-friendly sandwich making. Among them: avoid using lettuce, tomatoes, cheese, and meat.

If you’re like me, though, every sandwich you’ve eaten since middle school includes at least two of those ingredients.

However, don’t despair, you still can alter your behavior to reduce your carbon footprint. In particular, make sure you don’t ride a bike when you could drive a car.

How’s that? Well, the people at Phys.org thought the sandwich-climate topic was important enough to get access to the full text of the original article.

They pass on this particularly interesting tidbit: A bacon, sausage, and egg sandwich (the whole Hampton Inn breakfast buffet in one tidy package) has a carbon footprint “equivalent to CO2 emissions from driving a car for 12 miles.”

Driving a car uses energy that comes from gasoline. Riding a bike uses energy that comes from the bicyclist’s food. Both sources of energy have carbon footprints.

We are told carbon dioxide emissions from the life-cycle process of producing a sandwich is equal to that of driving a car 12 miles. The question, then, is how far will the calories in that sandwich take you on a bike?

It isn’t clear that anybody in the U.S. has the courage to sell the cardiologist’s delight described above, which means the total caloric content of the sandwich doesn’t show up on the first page of a Google search. Fortunately, my calorie-counting app (no evidence of use since 2015, hmm … ) can do the job:

English muffin                  150 calories
2 slices of bacon                  87
2.5 ounces pork sausage  250
egg                                          72
Total                                  559 calories

According to this calculator, a 180-pound bicycle rider going 15 mph for 51 minutes will travel 11.9 miles, but expend 729 calories.  So, this bacon, sausage, and egg sandwich doesn’t have enough food energy to power the cyclist for the full 12 miles.

The bicyclist would need to eat 1.3 sandwiches to go 12 miles. That is, the carbon dioxide footprint of riding a sandwich-fueled bike would be 30 percent higher than driving a car.

Since it takes more energy to move bigger people, the imperative to drive instead of ride is even greater for those who shop in the Big & Tall section.

A 222-pound blogger, for instance, would burn 899 calories for the same time and distance, requiring 60 percent more sandwich and, therefore, 60 percent more carbon dioxide from riding a bike than driving a car.

Of course, smaller people need less energy to propel themselves on a bike. The break-even weight for the ride-or-drive decision is around 140 pounds. Going more slowly helps, too.

If carbon dioxide-induced climate change is the existential threat some claim, and if people are still going to eat sandwiches that might include sausage, bacon, egg, tomato, lettuce, meat, or cheese, perhaps we need a prohibition against bike riding. Just sayin’.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of David Kreutzer

David Kreutzer is the senior research fellow in labor markets and trade at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. Read his research. Twitter: .

RELATED ARTICLE: More than 300 Climate skeptics ask Trump to withdraw from UN agency

A Note for our Readers:

Trust in the mainstream media is at a historic low—and rightfully so given the behavior of many journalists in Washington, D.C.

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, it is painfully clear that the mainstream media covers liberals glowingly and conservatives critically.

Now journalists spread false, negative rumors about President Trump before any evidence is even produced.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. That’s why The Daily Signal exists.

The Daily Signal’s mission is to give Americans the real, unvarnished truth about what is happening in Washington and what must be done to save our country.

Our dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts rely on the financial support of patriots like you.

Your donation helps us fight for access to our nation’s leaders and report the facts.

You deserve the truth about what’s going on in Washington.

Please make a gift to support The Daily Signal.

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EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by Ingram Publishing/Newscom.

Sessions Says FBI’s Handling of Anti-Trump Dossier ‘Will Be Investigated’

Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the Justice Department is investigating the accuracy of information the FBI submitted before the 2016 election about a “dossier” damaging to Donald Trump to obtain a warrant to surveil a campaign adviser.

“That will be investigated and looked at,” Sessions said in an interview Sunday.

dcnf-logo

Maria Bartiromo, host of Fox’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” had asked Sessions: “Are you, sir, investigating the fact that the FBI used the dossier to get a wiretap against Trump associates and they did not tell the FISA court that the Democrats and [the] Hillary Clinton [campaign] paid for the dossier?”

“Let me tell you, every FISA warrant based on facts submitted to that court [has] to be accurate,” Sessions replied.

“That will be investigated and looked at, and we are not going to participate as a Department of Justice in providing anything less than a proper disclosure to the court before they issue a FISA warrant. Other than that, I’m not going to talk about the details of it, but I tell you, we’re not going to let that happen.”

FISA refers to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which created a secret court system to oversee requests for surveillance warrants by federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Sessions did not provide additional details about the investigation, which has been urged by Republican lawmakers.

In October 2016, not long before the election, the FBI and Justice Department submitted an application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain a spy warrant against Carter Page, a business consultant and campaign volunteer who had left the Trump team a month earlier.

The partisan dossier compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele is said to have been a significant part of the application to the court, even though the salacious document about Trump’s connections to Russia was and is largely unverified.

Republican lawmakers have asserted that law enforcement officials who submitted the application failed to note to the court that the dossier was funded by the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The application does note that the dossier was put together by a “U.S. person” with political motivations, but Republicans have argued that the application should have been more specific.

Republicans also alleged that Steele, the opponent of Trump who authored the dossier, misled the FBI by failing to reveal that he met with reporters in September 2016 to discuss his investigation of Trump.

One of those reporters, Michael Isikoff of Yahoo! News, wrote a story based on Steele’s information.

That Sept. 23, 2016, article, which included Steele’s allegations about Page, also was used by the FBI and Justice Department to help justify the surveillance warrant. The application did not note that the Isikoff article came from the same source as the dossier.

Also Sunday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., offhandedly criticized former President Barack Obama for not doing enough to warn voters about the Russian government’s attempt to meddle during the presidential election.

Obama probably didn’t do enough to raise a red flag after he found out Russia interfered in the election, Sanders said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” before pivoting to criticize Trump for downplaying Russia’s role.

“Obama was in a very difficult position and didn’t want to make it appear he was favoring Hillary Clinton,” Sanders, who challenged Clinton for the Democratic nomination, said. “Maybe he should have done more.”

An indictment announced Friday alleged that 13 Russian nationals tried to help both Sanders and Trump during their respective presidential candidacies.

Special counsel Robert Mueller secured the indictment from a grand jury against the Russians, affiliated with three Russian companies suspected of interfering in the election. The goal was to create chaos inside the U.S. political process, according to the indictment.

The indicted Russians operated both pro- and anti-Trump social media accounts. The accounts also were used to provide support for Sanders, at the time considered a formidable opponent to Clinton, and to Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Sanders’ comments Sunday came after Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House intelligence committee, said Obama should have called out Russian meddling much sooner.

New protections must be enacted to prevent similar election meddling, Sanders said, referring specifically to the upcoming 2018 midterm elections.

“We have got to do everything we can to make sure that they do not undermine American democracy,” he said.

EDITORS NOTE: Content created by The Daily Caller News Foundation is available without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities for this original content, email licensing@dailycallernewsfoundation.org. The featured image is by Yuri Gripas/Reuters /Newscom.

Congress Blew Through the Budget Caps, Again. Here’s What Needs to Change.

The Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018 signed into law last week really should be renamed the Bipartisan Budget Crash Act.

This spending spree takes a Mack Truck and rams through the hard-fought budget caps under the 2011 Budget Control Act to the tune of at least $300 billion.

When all is said and done, the fiscal wreckage could be worse than that. With a federal debt already at $20.5 trillion, we have just lurched closer to fiscal insolvency.

Republicans touted that they got $1 of new military spending for every $1 of domestic social programs, but even that is wishful thinking at best. This calculation doesn’t include emergency disaster spending for hurricanes and fires, which was close to $90 billion. At least $21 billion of “defense” spending goes to the State Department instead, which does not fight wars.

In the end, the domestic agencies may wind up with $2 of added funding for every $1 for national security, which is hardly a good deal for taxpayers.

It also isn’t clear why the recovery efforts to pay for disaster relief should be paid for by the federal government.

In the wake of some of the worst disasters in American history—the hurricane that wiped out Galveston, Texas, the Great Chicago Fire, and the San Francisco earthquake, for example—the rebuilding of these cities happened swiftly and was almost all funded by private businesses, private charities, and state and local initiatives, not by Washington writing a big check.

And when, alas, the feds do write big checks for disasters, the money should come from across-the-board cuts of 2 or 3 percent from all the other federal agencies—not by running up the debt.

The Budget Control Act caps are now a victim of their own success. From 2011-2016, the spending caps held discretionary spending increases below the 2 percent level of inflation. For three years, federal spending actually fell, in no small part because of those caps.

But now those tight caps have been evaded four times in six years, and each time the overspending has been larger. The cork has been pulled off the champagne bottle.

The lack of spending restraint and the inability of Congress to keep its past legislative promises not only erodes trust in the political class, but shows a frightening and complete indifference by Washington toward our nation’s growing fiscal crisis.

The big question is, where do we go from here on the budget?

With neither party at all committed to reducing debt and deficits, our worry is that the budget caps are, for all intents and purposes, gone forever.

The caps after 2020 are still technically in place, but the 2019 levels of spending are going to come in at as much as $200 billion above the 2020 caps. So either we see a massive cut in government spending in the election year of 2020, which would be a wonderful thing to behold—but is as likely as President Donald Trump and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dancing a tango together—or, Congress throws the caps into the dustbin of history.

That’s a scary prospect, because it would mean that Congress would be budgeting without any fiscal guard rails or speed limits at all. This will only invite further bipartisan spending sprees that are against the interests of the American people.

The indefensible budget behavior of Congress over the last several weeks reinforces the case for Congress to extend the Budget Control Act caps into 2022 and beyond, since the caps expire at the end of 2021.

These future caps should be based on the 2011 Budget Control Act’s average annual spending growth rate, not the new budget’s enormous spending growth rate. Failure to extend the caps would be a total surrender and a green light to the already out-of-control Mack Truck.

COMMENTARY BY

Portrait of Stephen Moore

Stephen Moore

Stephen Moore, who formerly wrote on the economy and public policy for The Wall Street Journal, is a distinguished visiting fellow for the Project for Economic Growth at The Heritage Foundation. He was also a senior economic advisor to Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign. Read his research. Twitter: .

Christian Andzel

Christian Andzel is a member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation.

A Note for our Readers:

Trust in the mainstream media is at a historic low—and rightfully so given the behavior of many journalists in Washington, D.C.

Ever since Donald Trump was elected president, it is painfully clear that the mainstream media covers liberals glowingly and conservatives critically.

Now journalists spread false, negative rumors about President Trump before any evidence is even produced.

Americans need an alternative to the mainstream media. That’s why The Daily Signal exists.

The Daily Signal’s mission is to give Americans the real, unvarnished truth about what is happening in Washington and what must be done to save our country.

Our dedicated team of more than 100 journalists and policy experts rely on the financial support of patriots like you.

Your donation helps us fight for access to our nation’s leaders and report the facts.

You deserve the truth about what’s going on in Washington.

Please make a gift to support The Daily Signal.

SUPPORT THE DAILY SIGNAL

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is by erick4x4/Getty Images.

VIDEO: What You Need to Know About Planned Parenthood

Planned Parenthood bills itself as one of “the nation’s leading providers of high-quality, affordable health care” and claims that federal defunding of the organization would leave millions of women “without a place to go for needed care.” Do these claims accurately reflect what Planned Parenthood does? Or does it have another reason for being?

In this week’s video, Lila Rose, founder and president of Live Action, lays out the differences between the way Planned Parenthood presents itself and the reality.