Tag: Politics

Burning Question

Classic Beauty, Foreign Affairs

Okay, it’s probably just me, but…

Where the hell does Trump find all these beautiful and intelligent women to work for him?  (I know, the Left is all over this, whining that he only appoints these “bimbos” — their word, not mine — as though it’s utterly impossible to be clever and beautiful, the combination of which is conspicuous by its absence on their side of the aisle.)

I mean, probably the ugliest woman working in Trump’s administration is his AG, and Pam Bondi is not at all ugly — especially when compared to leftists like OMG Janet Reno, Rosa de Lauro and that screeching lesbianist on MSNBC/MS NOW(?) with the black glasses.

The latest one to catch my eye was when reading at American Thinker about Trump’s Deputy U.S. Envoy for the Middle East, Morgan Ortagus, whose first name made me think it was a guy.  But nope, Morgan is absolutely no guy:

Now young Morgan is not just a pretty face.  Here’s what the boffins at AmThink have to say about her:

Hezbollah, rattled by her bluntness, staged demonstrations against her remarks in February, when she declared that the group had been defeated militarily and that its role in government was no longer tolerable. Many in Beirut concluded she had been sidelined, replaced by Tom Barrack’s more measured style. By June, her name was shorthand for a missed opportunity—the hawk who had pressed too hard, too fast.

Now, though, President Trump has issued a directive ordering her back, a powerful signal that Washington has not abandoned the line of pressure and accountability she embodied, but is rebalancing it, pairing Tom Barrack’s optimism with her credibility.

In the meetings with President Joseph Aoun, Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, and Speaker Berri, Ortagus sat quietly through most of the formal sessions, letting Barrack take the lead in public. Lebanon’s political class, however, understands that her silence was because she already knows the playbook. She has studied the system, understands the “political theatre” that governs decision-making in Beirut, and has seen how elites manipulate time and process to stall change.

That knowledge is why her return matters. Lebanese leaders thrive on ambiguity and exhausting new envoys with a maze of committees, statements, and staged “dialogue.” Ortagus, though, has already rattled the system once, and her reappearance signals she will do so again.

And I’ll bet her combination of brains and beauty confuses those Arab assholes beyond words, because they’re likely more accustomed to gargoyles like Obama’s one-time Secretary of State, who combined astounding ugliness and stupidity:

…quite the reverse of Mrs. Ortagus.

As I said, I don’t know where Trump is finding all these smart, attractive women to work for him, but let’s hope he keeps the trend going.

Oh, and by the way?  Morgan Ortagus has a twin sister named Megan.

Have mercy.

Quote Of The Day

QOTD

From Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA, not the dead Massachusetts one):

“I’ve met James Comey.  I’ve met John Brennan.  And I’ll be honest with you, I don’t think either of them could follow more than six of the Ten Commandments on a good day.”

Me, I’ll take “four out of ten” for $400, Alex.

Warning Note

Politics

In this post from Stephen Green at Insty’s, we see the following:

President Trump’s strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities were the result of 15 years of intel work, the Pentagon said Thursday — but Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard curiously was missing from key moments before and after the raid.

The ex-Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii — an outspoken opponent of US military intervention in the Middle East — now faces the perception that she’s being shunted to the side by the commander-in-chief, with CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who previously held her job, taking on a larger profile.

Gabbard, 44, was missing from an intelligence briefing with Congress on Thursday, where Ratcliffe gave lawmakers classified details of the Saturday strike.

She also was excluded from a June 8 national security pow-wow at Camp David, where Trump began to shape his plans for Iran with Ratcliffe and other key leaders, such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Two days after that meeting — to which administration officials told Fox News Gabbard was not invited — she released what one person close to the administration described as a “fear-mongering” video on the dangers of nuclear war, in what was seen as a swipe against a preemptive strike.

Uh huh.  And as I noted before (yes, that’s my meme wot I wrote):

My guess is that Trump and his buddies took note of her Middle East isolationist tendencies, and froze her out of Operation Midnight Hammer or whatever it was called.

Let’s see what happens from here.

And let me get ahead of this one, as well:

I don’t trust RFK Jr., for similar reasons.

Getting Tough?

Good Stuff, Immigration

Whoa.  How’s this for immigration reform?

Plans are to end migrants’ automatic right to apply for indefinite leave to remain and citizenship after five years as part of a new “controlled, selective and fair” immigration system.
Instead, they face a 10-year wait unless they are able show a “real and lasting contribution” to the economy and society.
Only migrants who show their contribution through their tax returns, work as doctors, nurses or hospital staff and other public services, or outstanding voluntary service will be entitled to apply for permanent residency before the 10-year deadline.
Indefinite leave to remain and citizenship bring with it the right to welfare benefits, free healthcare, full civic rights including voting and the ability to apply for a passport.
The changes are part of a series of measures to “substantially” reduce net migration.

Here are some details.

Language skills.
Skilled foreign workers will face tougher English language tests to get entry visas. Under the proposed rules, they will be required to have the equivalent of [12th-grade] English, where they can speak “fluently and spontaneously” and “flexibly and effectively” for social, academic and professional purposes.
They had previously only been required to be at the [8th-grade] level where migrants have to be able to understand the main issues “regularly encountered in work, school or leisure” and deal with situations “likely to arise while traveling.”
Known as B-2, [12th-grade] English will also be the standard expected of anyone seeking to apply for indefinite leave and then US citizenship, as well as for overseas students.
For the first time, spouses, children or parents of successful visa applicants who want to join them in the US will have to pass language tests which require a basic understanding of English. If the dependents want to extend their visa after two years, they will have to show improvements to pass higher-level tests.

Care workers.
Care homes will be barred from recruiting foreign staff from overseas from later this year and will instead be required to hire foreign workers who are already in the US.
Care homes would be able to recruit from a pool of around 40,000 foreign staff who came on care worker visas only for their visa sponsorship to be cancelled. As explained:
“They are here and care companies should be recruiting from that pool of people, rather than recruiting from abroad. We are closing recruitment from abroad.”

Deportation of criminals.
Under these plans, any offense committed by a foreign national will be reported to ICE rather than only those crimes where they have been jailed, as is presently the rule.
It raises the prospect that migrants could be removed for lower-level offenses. At present, only foreign criminals jailed for more than a year face automatic deportation while the removal of those imprisoned for under a year is discretionary.
The change could mirror moves already announced to class any foreign national placed on the sex offenders’ register, regardless of their sexual crime or sentence, as having committed a “serious crime” with no right to asylum protections.
The new measures would also cover any foreign national arriving on a visa who was subsequently found to have committed crimes abroad but failed to declare them, or who were found guilty of any offences in the US.

Sounds pretty good, dunnit?

Okay, I need to ‘fess up. These aren’t measures proposed by the Trump Administration… but by Britain’s Labour Party.  (I changed some of the words to mislead y’all, sorry.)

But I have to say that if it passes, there’ll be massive weeping and wailing. Hence I expect that lawyers will be powdering their wigs, even as we speak.

I’m normally reluctant to recommend that we copy the Brits, in just about any endeavor;  but I have to say there are some good ideas in there.

Update:  Of course, it could all be a pack of lies.

No Surprises There

Elections, Mocking Furriners

Well, the Strylians have re-elected their left-wing Labor Party by an even larger majority than last time, so clearly they’re happy with Comrade Albanese, his fellow-travelers and their Red & Green policies.

No doubt they’ll combine massive anti-Trumpism with pleas for the US to help them fend off Chinese imperialism in southeast Asia.

Plus ça change, etc.  Hell, even the Brits are showing signs of coming to their senses — but the Strylians?  Forget abaht it, it’s just head-in-the-sand time, pour another beer on the barby and whine about the Poms beating them at cricket.

Useless fucking wankers.

My Loyal Readers from Oz — and there are quite a few — probably feel even worse about the situation than I do.

Being Patient

Bad News, Business, Economics

Like many, I suspect, I was somewhat surprised that our GDP shrank a little during Q1, especially as the job market continues to grow (despite hundreds if not thousands of government jobs ending).  However, we have to remember that we essentially started off the year in Q1 with the last remaining month of Bidenomics, and no doubt the hangover from four years of said stupidity was one hell of a handbrake to the start of the year.

Still, I refuse to be a slave to the “Q” mindset so beloved of financial types, where every fiscal quarter has to show growth even if market conditions make it impossible.  Which, I suspect, is what happened here, for all sorts of reasons.

It’s short-term thinking like this which causes trouble in the longer term.

What we do know, however, is that large corporations are moving production back to the U.S. and away from Asia (especially from China yay) to the tune of some $5.2 trillion — but those are just planned investments, i.e. promises, which will take some time to be realized.  In addition, there are planned growths in ship-building which are almost certain to revive once-moribund areas, not to mention making us both more independent in trade and more secure militarily.  But those too are still in the planning stages.

Factories don’t just spring up overnight, in other words.

Listen:  we all knew that to reverse the tide of red ink, both in government spending and the trade deficit, we would have to experience some discomfort.  And while ICE is doing well — from all accounts, over 60,000 illegals (mostly of the career criminal persuasion) have been booted out in the past three months — but as I’ve said before, that still leaves many millions more that still need to be expelled:  millions of whom, we all know, that are sucking up public money in healthcare and education, to name but two areas of ongoing concern.

The question is:  are we on the right track?

I think so.  The moves to reduce tax burdens on the majority of the population, the DOGE-inspired slashing of government spending and the efforts to cut deadwood and make both business and government more efficient — by stopping the inherent inefficiencies of DEI policy, for one — all mean that the long-term prospects for our economy look promising.

And to a large degree, the market swings caused by the tariff business are simply due to the fact that markets hate uncertainty, because they’re slaves to short-term thinking — remember, stock prices are tracked daily.  These are very uncertain times we live in.

But we need to give the whole thing more time to develop.  We didn’t sink into quasi- (and in some cases actual) socialism in a single quarter, either.  That took decades of work by socialists like Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and their cohorts in Congress from even before then.  And we’re not going to reverse this tide in a single quarter.  Hell, it may take years.

It didn’t take that long for Javier Milei to effect massive changes in Argentina, but it should be remembered that taming an inflation rate of hundreds is considerably easier than doing the same to an inflation rate in the teens (as we experienced under Biden), let alone getting inflation into low single digits, which in today’s world is almost impossible and takes a supreme effort of will.

But although cheaper energy and the concomitant lowering of the prices of goods and services is going to make a difference, that’s not going to happen immediately because we still have to drill new holes, build new refineries and get more nuclear power generators online to replace the unreliable and fragile Net Zero-style solar- and wind-based power generators so beloved of the Eco-Nazis.  None of that can happen in a single quarter, either.

We’re doing the right thing — and by “we” I mean the Trump Administration, whom we voted into power.  We just need time to get it done, and not be swayed by short-term thinking.