Hooray! Trump Changes Course On Decommissioning Aircraft Carrier Harry S. Truman

In a big conflict you need numbers and even an old ship is better than no ship.  Reagan took four WWII battleships out of mothballs for service in the Middle East and elsewhere so that shows you what can be done

President Trump on Wednesday said he is overturning the military’s plan to decommission the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, promising it will be updated “at the fraction of the cost of a new one” instead.

“I am overriding the Decommission Order of the magnificent aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman, built in 1998 (fairly new), and considered one of the largest and finest in the world,” the president tweeted. “It will be updated at a fraction of the cost of a new one (which also are being built)!”

VP Mike Pence delivered the welcome message for the Truman’s crew when he visited the ship pierside at Naval Station Norfolk.

“I met with the president at the White House this morning, and I told him I was going to be with all of you here on the deck of the Truman,” Pence told the crew. “And as I stand before you today, I know that the future of this aircraft carrier is the subject of some budget discussions in Washington, D.C.”

“President Donald Trump asked me to deliver a message to each and every one of you on the deck of the USS Truman: We are keeping the best carrier in the world in the fight. We are not retiring the Truman,” Pence said to thunderous applause.

“The USS Harry S. Truman is going to be ‘giving ‘em hell’ for many more years to come.”

The Pentagon, under pressure from the White House, had proposed retiring the carrier in 2024, about halfway through its normal useful life.

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Trump, Pelosi, Schumer Agree to Spend Additional $2 Trillion on Infrastructure

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) met with President Donald Trump at the White House today, after which Pelosi and Schumer said it was a "very productive" and "very constructive" meeting in which they agreed with Trump to spend $2 trillion on infrastructure. Schumer added that they had started a "little low" but the "president was eager to push it up to $2 trillion, and that is a very good thing."

"[I]t was a very constructive meeting," Schumer, flanked by Pelosi, told reporters outside the White House.  "It's clear that both the White House and all of us want to get something done on infrastructure in a big and bold way. And there was goodwill in this meeting. And that was different than some of the other meetings that we've had, which is a very good thing."

"We agreed on a number, which was very, very good," he said. "Two trillion for infrastructure. Originally, we had started a little low. Even the president was eager to push it up to $2 trillion. And that is a very good thing."

"We agreed that infrastructure is crucial to the future of America," he said.  "We agreed it creates jobs. We agreed it keeps us competitive. We agreed that for 25 years this kind of a big, bold bill that we could pass would make America a better place. This is not just a one-year or a two-year [project]."

Speaker Pelosi said, "It's about jobs, jobs, jobs. It's about promoting commerce. It's about cleaning air, clean water. It's a, therefore, a public health issue. It's a quality of life issue, getting people out of their cars, not being on the roads so much. And, in every way, it's a safety issue. So we're very excited about the conversation that we had with the president to advance an agenda of that kind."

Both Schumer and Pelosi stressed that the initiative would include broadband, making sure that it is available to every home in America.

"Obviously the roads and the bridges and the highways, obviously water, but also a big emphasis on broadband, that every American home, we believe, needs broadband, an emphasis on the power grid so we can bring clean energy from one end of the country to the other, and several other issues," said Schumer.

As for how Democrat-led investigations of Trump might jeopardize the passage of a major infrastructure bill, Schumer said, "In previous meetings, the president has said, if these investigations continue, I can't work with you. He didn't bring it up. And so we're going -- I believe we can do both at once."

"We can come up with some good ideas on infrastructure, and we want to hear his ideas on funding," said Schumer.  "That's going to be the crucial point in my opinion. And the House and the Senate can proceed in its oversight responsibilities. The two are not mutually exclusive, and we were glad he didn't make it that way."

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Democrats face new civil war in primary fight

The bell has rung on round two of the Democratic Party’s civil war.

Former Vice President Joe Biden’s entry into the 2020 presidential primary sets the stage for another knock-down, drag-out fight between the establishment wing of the party and the ascendant left, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

That showdown threatens to tear open old wounds the party suffered in the bitter 2016 primary contest between Sanders and Hillary Clinton.

Party leaders have tried to move on from that divisive episode, but deep wells of suspicion and distrust remain between mainstream Democrats and the left.

"The civil war that started in 2016 never ended," said one veteran Democratic hand. "It’s still going on."

The 2016 primary contest left liberals fuming at what they viewed as establishment interference in the race, underscored by the hacked Democratic National Committee (DNC) emails that showed favoritism toward Clinton.

And some mainstream Democrats are unnerved by what they view as a group of left-wing interlopers, online brawlers and sore losers trying to take over the party.

The same fight played out in 2017, when party officials elected Tom Perez to be the next DNC chairman. Perez, who was backed by Biden, narrowly defeated Sanders’s preferred candidate, former Rep. Keith Ellison (Minn.). That race similarly cut along establishment and grass-roots lines.

Now liberals are on the lookout for any whiff of malfeasance and warning party insiders that they’re playing with fire if they meddle in the 2020 primary.

"If I were in charge of the DNC or Joe Biden’s campaign or any other entity associated with the traditional Democratic Party, I would be going out of my way to embrace the new energy on the left and these anti-establishment forces," said Robert Reich, former President Clinton’s Labor secretary and a leading progressive thinker.

"I hope the establishment wing understands how dangerous it would be to attack Bernie Sanders or anybody else who they may feel represents the left wing of the party. That would be a really stupid thing to do," he added.

The left has won a slew of victories in the years since Sanders’s primary defeat.

There have been changes at the DNC to limit the power of superdelegates, the party officials who propelled Clinton to victory in 2016. A robust debate schedule will ensure that voters are exposed to the full field of candidates.

And many of Sanders’s once-fringe ideas have gone mainstream in the Democratic Party.

"Bernie Sanders has already defined the soul of the party if you look at the current conversation on health care, college tuition, foreign policy and wealth inequality," said Jonathan Tasini, a progressive writer. "That debate is over if the party looks at what voters thirst for."

But many on the left feel like outsiders in the Democratic Party. They’re still worried about officials exerting influence over the primary, particularly if there is a contested convention, which seems likelier this year with the massive field of candidates splitting votes.

"A lot of people still feel burned," said Jacob Limon, who was the Texas state director for Sanders’s 2016 campaign. "We corrected a lot of the imbalances, like the unfair superdelegates dynamic, but there are still a lot of raw feelings around that and a sense that you absolutely cannot burn the grass roots again."

Biden is trying to avoid the perception that he’s the anointed establishment candidate. In an interview on ABC’s "The View," Biden said that he specifically asked former President Obama not to endorse him in the primary.

"I didn’t want it to look like he’s putting his thumb on the scale here," Biden said. "I’m going to do this based on who I am, not by the president going out and saying, 'This is the guy you should be with.'"

But many centrist Democrats are just as worried about how the left will approach the primary contest.

They’re frustrated by Sanders’s steadfast refusal to officially join the Democratic Party and worried by what they view as his team of political assassins. And they wonder whether Sanders’s supporters will accept the outcome of the primary and turn out to vote for the nominee in the general election if Sanders falls short again.

"There is a 'Bernie-or-bust' coalition, and they have no allegiance to the party," said the Democratic strategist. "They don’t care about campaign infrastructure or winning up and down the ballot. They’re just concerned about bullshit litmus tests and defending their guy no matter what and pretending that everyone else is a member of the big bad establishment."

Liberal groups have torn into Biden since he launched his campaign, casting him as a relic of the "old guard" and an establishment figure beholden to corporate interests.

The Sanders campaign swiped at Biden for holding a fundraiser at the home of a lobbyist. The Justice Democrats, a liberal group started by former Sanders campaign aides, tore into the former vice president, saying he "stands in near complete opposition to where the center of energy is in the Democratic Party today."

"The level of nastiness we see here is completely up to Sanders and his camp," said Jon Reinish, a Democratic strategist.

"Joe Biden is an optimistic guy. I can’t think of a sunnier or more unifying person. The way he communicates is in stark contrast to Sen. Sanders, who unfortunately tends to campaign in a language of grievances, conspiracies and victimhood. It’s my hope that Sen. Sanders campaigns on his own merits and policies, but so far his surrogates and he have engaged in the same old attacks. No other Democrat is doing that. Sanders is the one that sets the tone for his campaign here," he added.

Still, some Democrats are optimistic that the party will come together in the end no matter the outcome.

"In 2016, the question was, do you want Bernie or Hillary?" said Howard Gutman, a former Obama administration ambassador. "The circumstances couldn’t be more different this time around. We have a broad array of strong candidates from the entire Democratic family, and the only issue is, how do we beat Donald Trump? That’s the great unifier."

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Florida Legislature Votes to End Sanctuary Cities

Naturally, leftists are apoplectic about this effort to actually enforce the law.   

The Florida state legislature has taken a stand against the American Left’s penchant for selective law enforcement. Last Wednesday, the GOP-controlled House passed a bill banning so-called sanctuary cities that harbor illegal aliens and refuse to cooperate with federal immigration authorities. The vote was 69-47 along party lines. On Friday, the state Senate passed its version of the ban by a 22-18 margin. Negotiations between the House and Senate will now commence until an identical bill can be sent to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis for his signature.

Barring major changes, the law prohibits local governments from ignoring detainer requests from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and requires them to hold suspected illegals in jail until the feds can take them into custody. A failure to do so could precipitate fines of up to $5,000 per day. The House version of the bill would also allow lawsuits to be filed against local governments for personal injuries or wrongful deaths tied to sanctuary policies, and suspend or remove government employees or elected officials who refuse to enforce immigration laws.

That very welcome part of the statute stands in stark contrast to the immunity that shields many sanctuary-city officials, most recently upheld by a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. That panel refused to allow the family of Kate Steinle to sue the city of San Francisco after their daughter was killed by Jose Ines Garcia Zarate, a seven-time convicted felon who had been deported five times. Despite ICE’s request for a detainer, former San Francisco Sheriff Ross Mirkarimi released Zarate, who was ultimately convicted of a firearms charge, but acquitted of murdering Steinle. Following that stunning verdict, Ellen Canale, a spokeswoman for Mayor Ed Lee, made it clear the death of an innocent citizen at the hands of an illegal alien felon wouldn’t alter the status quo one iota. “San Francisco is and always will be a sanctuary city,” she asserted.

Florida is on the verge of preventing similar outrages and, unsurprisingly, Democrats and their leftists allies are apoplectic. Prior to the bill’s passage there were protests staged at the Capitol, and district offices were besieged by sit-ins. The ACLU issued a “Florida Travel Alert,” warning that “Florida residents, citizens and non-citizens, and travelers could face risks of being racially profiled and being detained without probable cause.”

Or, illegal aliens who have no business being in Florida could be detained, prosecuted, and ultimately deported in accordance with federal immigration law.

The Left also played the economics card. The American Business Immigration Coalition sent a letter to the state’s elected officials declaring that “anti-immigrant” legislation will “inflict long-lasting damage to the state of Florida” to the tune of “an annual loss of $121.4M in taxes and $3.5B in GDP, threatening the economic prosperity and safety of all Floridians.”

The letter also trotted out the same tiresome talking points the Left has long used to justify wholesale law-breaking. It stated that the bill “gives traffickers another tool to terrorize and enslave their victims,” that the agricultural industry will be “devastated,” and that both the “documented and undocumented are less likely to commit a crime than native-born citizens.”

Traffickers can only “enslave” those willing to sneak across the border, which remains wide open because a purposefully do-nothing Congress beholden to the globalist agenda allows it — and because the hundreds of sanctuary cities across the nation further incentivize that contemptible reality. That the state’s agricultural industry that would be “devastated” without illegal workers is an argument eerily similar to the one made by pre-Civil War southern plantation owners who claimed to need slave labor to remain economically viable. And if there’s a more bankrupt argument than the insidious notion that Americans should abide a “reasonable” number of wholly avoidable crimes — including murder and rape — solely to accommodate leftist desires to “fundamentally transform” America, one is hard-pressed to imagine what it is.

Yet another propaganda point was disseminated by The Washington Post. “While the definition of sanctuary cities varies, most analysts say Florida does not have any,” the paper asserts.

If that’s the case, then this bill won’t pose any problem.

But that’s not the case, and no one made that clearer than Miami Police Chief Jorge Colina, who told a Spanish-language radio station that he’d rather be thrown out of the police department than follow the proposed law. “I don’t care if you have papers or don’t have papers, where you came from, or who your parents are,” Colina said. “That’s not my job. My job is to make sure everyone in this city is safe.”

No, a police chief’s job is to enforce the Rule of Law — period. Perhaps Gov. DeSantis, who has already successfully suspended Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel for his colossal failure of leadership in the Parkland atrocity, will address Colina’s defiance — along with that of every other similarly recalcitrant law-enforcement official — in a similarly no-nonsense manner.

Neptune Beach Republican Cord Byrd, who sponsored the House initiative, spoke to the real issues in play here. “We are more than just a job center. We are a nation of citizens governed by law,” he said. Sen. Joe Gruters, sponsor of the Senate legislation and chairman of the Florida Republican Party, echoed those sentiments. “This bill is about public safety and making sure we remove the criminal element of illegals that are here,” he said. “The president has a laser focus on the failures of Washington in terms of immigration policy, and I think that has made this effort easier.”

Those failures are monumental. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, approximately 775,000 illegals reside in Florida, and more than 20% of students attending Florida schools have at least one parent who is an illegal alien.

Yet those figures are likely low-ball estimates. On Nov. 28, 2018, Pew stated that the number of illegals in the U.S. declined to 10.7 million as of 2016.

That a Yale-MIT study pegged the number closer to 22 million? That ICE is currently holding 50,223 migrants, one of the highest total numbers on record? That the pace of illegal border crossings in 2019 alone is approaching 1.2 million?

The globalist agenda must be served, even if it requires rank propaganda, overt lying, or outright law-breaking to do so.

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