TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
Grassley to Trump: Drop Tariffs
or the Trade Deal Gets It
Nate Jackson
.
Thursday Top News Executive Summary
Media Editors: BARR SAYS NO THANKS: “Attorney General William Barr will not appear before the House Judiciary Committee [today] to answer questions about special counsel dirty cop-Robert Mueller’s investigation as previously planned, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday evening. Citing the ‘unprecedented and unnecessary’ conditions placed on Barr’s planned testimony by Congressional Democrats, a Department of Justice spokeswoman announced the attorney general would not return to Capitol Hill on Thursday to further explain his handling of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s findings.” (National Review)
.
dirty cop-MUELLER TO TAKE THE STAND: “The Democratic chairman of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee said on Wednesday an agreement had been reached to have Special Counsel dirty cop-Robert Mueller testify to Congress on his probe into Russian election interference and possible attempts by the President Donald Trump to impede the probe. Representative scumbag liar-Jerry Nadler told reporters the agreement was for dirty cop-Mueller to testify sometime in May, but that a specific date had yet to be agreed upon.” (Reuters)
.
GENDER IDENTITY HEADS TO COURT: “In 2013, several years after he was first hired, a male employee told his employer, R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes, he wanted to dress as a woman at work. The funeral home owner, Thomas Rost, refused to comply with this wish, insisting it was not ‘in the best interest of grieving families.’ … The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled that the federal government can force R.G. & G.R. Harris Funeral Homes and its owner to allow a male employee who identifies as female to dress in women’s clothing at work. This essentially redefines ‘sex’ as referred to in Title VII in a way that is different than when it was interpreted when enacted in 1964. Now the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case and see if the EEOC and federal judges have the power to bypass Congress and redefine ‘sex.’” (Washington Examiner)
.
GOP TAKES BUDGET LEAD: “Weeks after Democratic leadership decided to shelve their budget resolution for fiscal year 2020, a group of House Republicans has released a detailed budget it hopes will serve as a ‘playbook’ for how to govern should they regain the majority. The Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Mike Johnson (R., La.), called it an abdication of responsibility by Democrats to fail to present a budget, but said it was ‘ready and willing to fill that vacuum of leadership’ with its own budget.” (The Washington Free Beacon)
.
TRUMP SOLICITS EMERGENCY BORDER FUNDS: “The White House sent Congress a $4.5 billion emergency spending request on Wednesday, citing an unfolding ‘humanitarian and security crisis’ at the U.S.-Mexico border as record numbers of Central American families and children seek entrance to the United States. The request includes $3.3 billion for humanitarian assistance and $1.1 billion for border operations.” (The Washington Post)
.
HISTORIC MIGRANT BUST: “U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents arrested 424 migrants attempting to cross the southern border on Tuesday in the ‘largest’ collective arrest in the agency’s history. CBP agents encountered and ultimately apprehended ‘a group of what seemed to be over 400 illegal aliens’ early Tuesday morning near the border town of Sunland Park, N.M., according to an agency press release.” (National Review)
.
NANNY STATE UPDATE: According to the Associated Press, “Maine has banned single-use food and drink containers made from polystyrene foam, commonly known as Styrofoam, becoming the first state to do so. Democratic Gov. Janet Mills signed the bill, which takes effect in 2021, into law Tuesday.” On the flip side, Fox News reports that “Florida lawmakers on Tuesday passed a bill stating local governments could not enforce plastic straw bans over the next five years.”
.
GILLIBRAND’S TERRIBLE, NO-GOOD IDEA: “In her first major policy proposal of the 2020 presidential election, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D–NY) — a long shot candidate for the Democratic nomination — is suggesting that every voter be given $600 to donate to federal election campaigns. Affectionately named ‘Democracy Dollars,’ she says the taxpayer-funded venture will clean up elections and "attack the corrupting influence of money at its core.” (Reason)
.
SANDMANN MARCHES ON: “On Wednesday, attorneys for Nicholas Sandmann, the Covington Catholic High School student who was targeted by the media after his encounter with Native American activist Nathan Phillips at the Lincoln Memorial on January 18, announced they are filing a $275 million lawsuit against NBCUniversal, alleging ‘NBCUniversal created a false narrative by portraying the "confrontation” as a “hate crime” committed by Nicholas.’ … Sandmann’s attorneys have already filed a $250 million suit against the Washington Post and another suit against CNN for $275 million.“ (The Daily Wire)
.
TRADE-DEAL WINDFALL: "The European Union announced Thursday that its imports of U.S. liquefied natural gas have climbed 272% since 2016, with the steepest increases occurring after President Trump met last July with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker to hash out a trade deal. … The EU said it recorded its highest level of EU-U.S. natural gas trade in March with more than 1.4 billion cubic meters of LNG imports.” (Washington Examiner)
.
.
.
POLICY: California’s high-speed train makes Solyndra look like a bargain (Foundation for Economic Education)
~The Patriot Post
.
Da Nang scumbag-Dick & Crazy Mazie
Unhinged! Barr Squashes Stolen Valor Dick
.
'Russia' collusion? Now Democrats
to be investigated
.
Amid good news, can Democrats
talk down the economy?
by Byron York.
It’s Getting Difficult To Tell The Difference
Between The New York Times And Al Jazeera
by David Harsanyi
{ thefederalist.com } ~ It’s hard not to laugh reading The New York Times coverage of the Trump administration’s efforts to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization... The three-person-bylined article kicks off by describing the group as a “storied and influential Islamist political movement with millions of members across the Middle East.” Sounds like a global social club! Just some folks batting around ideas. The authors didn’t even have the decency to throw in a superficial adjective like “controversial” to create a veneer of balance. Whether the Muslim Brotherhood’s many disparate groups and organizations meet the criteria of a single terror organization under U.S. law is debatable, but what isn’t debatable is that a large faction of the Muslim Brotherhood leads a Sunni movement that aims to implement sharia law under a global caliphate. Its deep network of “charitable” institutions and political parties form an infrastructure for extremist causes. One could, if not a New York Times writer, describe its philosophy as dogmatic, illiberal, theocratic, and violent; and its “storied” history a long-term threat to secularism, Muslim reformers, liberalism, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East. These days, members of the Muslim Brotherhood advocate for child suicide bombings, political assassinations, mass murder of minorities, violent mobs—basically the entire deadly menu of jihadist activities. This is context that Times readers would not learn. Nor would they learn that the Muslim Brotherhood helped birth modern Islamic extremism, first to undermine nationalistic Arabic governments, but later moving onto bigger goals. Readers would not learn that Muslim Brotherhood’s spurred the creation of al-Qaeda or that its intellectual founder, Sayyid Qutb, was an inspiration to Osama bin Laden. Zachary Laub of the Council on Foreign Relations once noted that Qutb’s writings “provided the intellectual and theological underpinnings for many militant Sunni Islamist groups, including al-Qaeda and Hamas.” It would have been easy to include such a quote....
Graham Reads Profane Anti-Trump Strzok
Text to Highlight Possible FBI Bias:
‘Sorry for the Kids Out There’
by Houston Keene.
The Pulosi Preakness
by Frank Friday.
.
Grassley to Trump: Drop Tariffs or the
Trade Deal Gets It
Nate Jackson: Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley has a way with ultimatums. In the last two years, Mr. King Corn himself has threatened any and all of President Donald Trump’s nominees if action is taken to do anything but increase the ethanol mandate. As chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, Grassley could have made good on that threat. Thus, Americans will, for the foreseeable future, be forced to continue pumping corrosive corn into our gas tanks solely to placate the corn lobby.
Now, as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Grassley has a new target: Tariffs. His rationale is largely still saving Iowa corn (and hog) farmers, though, unlike with ethanol, he’s actually onto something about tariffs. In a Wall Street Journal op-edtitled “Trump’s Tariffs End or His Trade Deal Dies,” Grassley vigorously argues that Trump must rescind his tariffs or risk the future of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) to replace NAFTA:
I’ve met with congressional colleagues, as well as U.S., Canadian and Mexican trade officials, to discuss how our nations will secure legislative approval of USMCA. A significant roadblock is the administration’s tariffs on steel and aluminum and retaliatory Canadian and Mexican tariffs on U.S. products. These levies are a tax on Americans, and they jeopardize USMCA’s prospects of passage in the Mexican Congress, Canadian Parliament and U.S. Congress. Canadian and Mexican trade officials may be more delicate in their language, but they’re diplomats. I’m not. If these tariffs aren’t lifted, USMCA is dead. There is no appetite in Congress to debate USMCA with these tariffs in place.
Grassley is exactly right that tariffs are “a tax on Americans.” In fact, Trump’s 20% tariff on imported washing machines ended up adding roughly $90 to each appliance consumers buy. As NBC News reported just yesterday, “Collectively, Americans are paying more than $1.5 billion extra every year from this tariff alone.” But the overall toll is far higher: “Another recent study by a trio of economists from Princeton and Columbia universities and the New York Fed found that the combined impact of all the Trump administration’s trade sanctions costs Americans $1.4 billion each month.”
Now, as we’ve written numerous times, Trump has a strategy with tariffs, and that involves absorbing some pain for longterm gain. But, arguably, when it comes to Canada and Mexico, it’s time for relief as the three nations work toward a deal. Trump’s more justifiable beef is with China. So we’ll see what comes of Grassley’s threat. Trump didn’t even put up a fight over ethanol, but he was never interested in really cutting that mandate. Trade has been one of his biggest issues, and Grassley is challenging him head on. ~The Patriot Post
Comments