Trump won the night; Schumer, Pelosi lost

Via Billy

President Trump did something Tuesday night that he has rarely done since taking office: He used the presidential bully pulpit to reach beyond his hardcore base of supporters to make his case to the American people as a whole.

Speaking from the Oval Office for the first time during his presidency, Trump embraced our country’s tradition as a nation of immigrants, declaring “America proudly welcomes millions of lawful immigrants who enrich our society and contribute to our nation.” He then offered a cogent explanation why he believes we face what he called “a humanitarian crisis — a crisis of the heart and a crisis of the soul” along our southern border.

More @ Syracuse

False Messiah

 

A review of Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1999) by Allen C. Guelzo.

Presidential hopeful John McCain recently stated that he was of “the party of Lincoln, not Bob Jones.” This could be taken in ways the gentleman from Arizona never intended. For it was not Bob Jones who said “I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white women.” Those were the words of an earlier presidential hopeful, Abraham Lincoln.

In this Age of Information it is remarkable that anyone would appeal to Lincoln as the politically correct standard for race relations. The Party of Lincoln rhetoric, for years the shibboleth of all national Republican candidates, is illustrative of the pervasive Lincoln myth that has held sway in American thought for over one-hundred and thirty years.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

Israel Day II

 

A view from the apartment in Jerusalem

More @ David Hunt

NC: How Scott Family Farms Grew From 60 to 14,000 Acres

Via Cousin John

 There are three generations of Scotts at the family farm in Lucama, North Carolina.

With humble beginnings on 60 acres, the sixth-generation Scott Family Farms now spans 14,000 acres and includes a growing sweet potato exporting business. 


If the late Linwood Scott Sr. could see his family’s farm today, there would be few similarities from the tobacco and soybean farm he knew with today’s large, diverse, and international operation.

“He wouldn’t recognize it,” says Linwood Scott Jr., his son, who is better known as Sonny. “If he had the same mentality he had in 1976, he’d think I was crazy. I might be. Who knows?”

“For the record, I don’t think he is,” adds Jeff Thomas, director of marketing at Scott Farms International.

 More @ SF

Trump Admin Moves Toward Shutting Down Food Stamp Loopholes

 Via Billy

 

The proposed changes could save taxpayers $15 billion every year over the next 10 years, USDA Secretary Sonny Perdue said in a statement.

The Trump Administration plans to implement a rule change to close loopholes that states have been using to exempt large portions of healthy, younger food stamp recipients from work requirements.

The new rule changes the application process for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, also known as food stamps, from every two years to every year, and narrows the unemployment benchmark for applicants.

Federal law allows states to waive work requirements for areas with high unemployment rates (10 percent and above), and higher than the national rate (currently 3.7 percent). For decades, states have abused this flexibility in order to waive work requirements for as many ABWDs as possible, the Foundation for Government Accountability says.

“Despite record low unemployment rates nationwide, more than a third of the nation lives in an area where work requirements have been waived,” FGA said.

More @ WJ

Average American Family Has Seen $3,100 Increase in Income Under Trump in 2 Years

The Electoral College, Why We Need It

Via Billy

Erdogan Won't Meet Bolton After Bolton Insists On Protecting Kurds

Via Billy

On Tuesday, White House national security adviser John R. Bolton left Turkey’s capital, Ankara, after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, angered that Bolton had stated that Turkey needed to promise it would not attack the Kurds after the United States pulled its troops from Syria, refused to meet with Bolton, then told the Turkish parliament that Bolton was delivering a message from Israel. He stated, "Bolton's remarks in Israel are not acceptable. It is not possible for me to swallow this. Bolton made a serious mistake. If he thinks that way, he is in a big mistake. We will not compromise."

More @ The Daily Wire

The Legacy of D.W. Griffith

 

None knew it then, but in 1915, Southern agrarian influence on the movies was at its height. The film trade had just left Fort Lee, New Jersey, only to land in the equally piously named Mount Lee, California. Of course, the latter’s new name was Hollywood, due to its Kansas prohibitionist developers, but it was also the same name as the Richmond cemetery sanctified by so many Confederate figures.

More important was that the industry leader was director David Wark Griffith, son of a Kentucky Confederate colonel and the man who dominated the industry almost from the moment he started making shorts for Biograph. All that was really pre-history. On February 8, he premiered The Birth of a Nation at Clune’s Auditorium. This Southern view of the Confederacy and Reconstruction is the most important movie in history. It became the biggest hit ever and provided the cash for innumerable film fortunes. Politics aside, no film historian disagrees that it’s the most important film artistically in that it served as the textbook for generations of filmmakers.

More @ The Abbeville Institute

These Are The Families Impacted By Illegal Immigration

Via Billy