polecat news and views: February 2024

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Donald Trump's rise to political prominence in the 2016 presidential election cycle created an offshoot of the GOP known as the Never Trump Republicans. It's comprised of the people who use to be called RINOs, the acronym for Republicans in Name Only. I never liked that disparaging nickname because I think the rhino is a magnificent animal and shouldn't have its name tainted by association with invertebrate Republicans.

As many others do, I still use "squish" when referring to the Romney wing of the GOP. It's not as catchy, but it gets the job done.

I happen to think that Trump did a great service to the Republican Party by making the unreliable squish element out itself. For far too long, the GOP has been dragged down by members of its own party in Congress who couldn't be counted on for the big votes. Yes, they'd be good for voting with their colleagues most of the time but would too easily side with the Democrats when Republican voters needed them the most.

These politicians don't exist in a vacuum, of course. They are enabled by a portion of the GOP electorate that, for reasons that baffle me, are still Democrat-adjacent rather than conservative. These are the people who Trump sent fleeing for the welcoming but deceitful arms of a media establishment that will always be dedicated to destroying them. Even the most vaunted intellectuals in the ranks of Never Trump don't grasp that they're pathetic pawns.

As long as Trump is around, however, they serve a purpose for the Democratic flying monkeys in the mainstream media and mistakenly continue believing that they have some sort of relevance in the national political conversation.

Some of the most eager Never Trump media lapdogs got together last weekend for an anti-CPAC hissy fit that they laughingly call the "Principes First" summit.

The Wall Street Journal:

And there is an audience: Haley has a vocal cheering section in the GOP’s Never Trump faction, which includes a swath of highly credentialed former officeholders who say they no longer recognize their party.
These were the people who gathered in Washington over the weekend for the Principles First summit, a conference of anti-Trump conservatives that styled itself as counterprogramming to the Conservative Political Action Conference where Trump rallied his faithful on Saturday.
Sessions at the Principles First gathering featured an array of luminaries from yesterday’s GOP: former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, as well as former presidential candidate and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson. The former Trump White House staffers Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson and Sarah Matthews appeared on a panel together, where they agreed that another Trump term would be, in Cassidy Hutchinson’s words, “the greatest step toward fascism that we have taken in this country.”

It should be noted that these people stopped recognizing their party in 2016 because Donald Trump won an election that his GOP primary opponents almost certainly would have lost to Hillary Clinton. After eight years of His High Holiness the Lightbringer Barack Obama, the squishy middle of the Republican party was OK with losing to one of the most loathsome people in the history of American politics because of "principles" and stuff.

It's not surprising that Cassidy Hutchinson can quote Dem talking points with casual ease. She was plucked from obscurity by the House J6 Soviet Select Committee on Daddy Issues to be one of its prized lapdogs.

Alyssa Farah Griffin has carved out a niche by never challenging her shrieking harridan colleagues on "The View" with anything that might indicate she was ever a Republican.

And then there's little Adam Kinzinger, the guy who decided to stomp his feet about Trump on his way out of Washington after his district was redrawn.

You couldn't find any principles among these people with an MRI machine.

I'm going to write this a lot in the next several months: anyone claiming to be vehemently anti-Trump because of principles is willfully aiding and abetting the rapid leftist destruction of the United States of America. If these people do have principles, they're commie principles. You can't throw in with the progressive pigs in Washington and run around saying that you don't have any mud on you.

There's a lot more in that sty than just mud that's covering these people, and it stinks to high Heaven.

https://pjmedia.com/stephen-kruiser/2024/02/26/never-trump-principles-first-summit-was-a-parade-of-lying-charlatans-who-have-no-principles-n4926774

Shocker! Media Headlines Avoiding a Detail About Univ. of Georgia Murder Suspect

Shocker! Media Headlines Avoiding a Detail About Univ. of Georgia Murder Suspect

Doug P.

Another tragic consequence of Biden's open border is in the news, not that you'd know it from many media headlines, but I'll get to that in a second.

A University of Georgia student has been murdered and the suspect is a man who entered the U.S. illegally in 2022:

The University of Georgia Police Department have taken a suspect in custody in connection with the suspected homicide of a 22-year-old nursing student from Augusta University who police found dead on the University of Georgia campus Thursday.
Police have charged Jose Antonio Ibarra with malice murder, felony murder, aggravated battery, aggravated assault, false imprisonment, kidnapping, hindering a 911 call and concealing the death of another, UGA Police Chief Jeffrey L. Clark said during a news briefing Friday evening. The suspect is not a U.S. citizen, according to authorities.

Before the 2020 election, Joe Biden said that if he were to end up in the White House people should illegally "surge to the border," and that's exactly what happened.

The media's obviously focusing on giving Biden as much of an election year boost as possible (for example, today Axios re-posted a story claiming the border is "more fortified than ever"), which is why discovering that this murder suspect is an illegal alien is something you won't find out in many headlines.

CNN wouldn't go there of course:

Job ‘Gains’ Are for Migrants as U.S. Men Kept Out of Workforce

Job ‘Gains’ Are for Migrants as U.S. Men Kept Out of Workforce

CATHERINE SALGADO

The alleged wonderful jobs gains that Democrats and especially the Biden administration have touted only helped immigrants, many of whom are illegals. Meanwhile U.S.-born men who don’t have college degrees are struggling to find jobs in Biden’s economy.

Now, jobs should go to the person most qualified, so it’s not wrong for businesses to hire legal immigrants. Many legal immigrants contribute significantly to the economy. On the other hand, the New York Post estimated that, with six out of ten of the 2.9 million additional employed migrants being non-citizens, up to half of the migrants taking millions of jobs are likely illegal aliens. These illegal aliens should not be in the country at all, yet they are taking jobs that could go to Americans while simultaneously sucking up government resources. That’s a problem, which unfortunately Democrats and some Republicans are wholly uninterested in addressing.

“There are enormous costs associated with illegal immigration,” New York Post explained. “Most illegal immigrants have low levels of education, and people with that skill profile generally earn modest wages, pay relatively little in taxes, and consume a lot of means-tested benefits.” But what they also do is take lower-wage jobs that ought to go to American citizens, the outlet added.

One of the most serious social problems we face as a country is the decades-long decline in the labor force participation of US-born men … Today, the labor force participation rate of US-born men without a bachelor’s (ages 18 to 64) stands at 75.6% — still below the 76.3% rate it was in the fourth quarter of 2019.
And both those figures are far below the 80.6% rate in 2006 and 82.6% in 2000.

If you go back a few decades more to the 1960s, almost 90% of these American men participated in the workforce.

And, just as a reminder, labor force participation includes only those employed or looking for work, while the unemployment rate is calculated based only on those looking for work in the last four weeks before the unemployment rate was estimated. That means there are many more American men who are unemployed.

This decline matters because the list of negative outcomes for individuals, their families, and society associated with being out of the labor force is extreme. Not working is linked with higher rates of crime and social isolation, as well as so-called “deaths of despair,” including suicide, drug overdose and alcoholism.

Yes, welfare and disability programs and other forces do influence whether Americans try to enter the workforce, the New York Post noted. But the fact that all those job gains are helping immigrants, including many illegals, and not U.S.-born men tells us that the Democrats’ open borders policies are helpful for immigrants but harmful for American citizens. As usual, the Biden administration’s policies favor foreign law-breakers and undermine citizens.

https://pjmedia.com/catherinesalgado/2024/02/24/job-gains-are-for-migrants-as-us-men-kept-out-of-workforce-n4926735

Wow: Border Patrol Reveals How Many 'Criminal Aliens' Have Been Apprehended at the Border Since October

Wow: Border Patrol Reveals How Many 'Criminal Aliens' Have Been Apprehended at the Border Since October

Guy Benson

The stats tell the story of the Biden border crisis, and they can sometimes get overwhelming to intellectually process. Since Biden took office, more than nine million illegal crossings have taken place -- and that's a lowball estimate. A senior GOP aide for the House Homeland Security Committee does some back-of-the-envelope math and estimates that the number is actually well over ten million illegal crossings on Biden's watch. Keep in mind that this arithmetic excludes, by necessity, an unknowable universe of unknown got-aways, a population that has almost certainly grown significantly while US enforcement resources are deployed processing migrants elsewhere:

For context, 10.5 million is higher than the entire population in 40 of our 50 states. More people have crossed the border illegally under Biden than there are residents of Michigan, New Jersey, Virginia, Arizona, Tennessee, and so forth. Among the millions 'encountered' at the southwest border (I'd note that the numbers coming across from the north has been increasing lately), some of them are known criminals with records either inside the US, from previous illegal entries, or based on international records to which US officials have access. This fiscal year, just since October 1st, thousands of these known 'criminal aliens' have been apprehended:

As Owens points out, there are some very dangerous criminals included on this list. That's well north of 1,000 of illegal immigrants with criminal convictions every month that we know of. That last bit is the key point. How many of the unlawful crossers have criminal records in other countries that our officials aren't aware of? China, for example, is not letting American law enforcement cross-reference their databases, and the number of military-age single men arriving at our border from that country has skyrocketed lately. More alarming are the got-aways, of which tens of thousands have entered every month, for months on end. We know that close to two million of them have arrived under Biden. We don't know who any of them are, or where they are (again, to say nothing of the unknown got-aways). Logic dictates that illegal immigrants who purposefully elude capture -- especially when the word is out that getting 'encountered' and released is a high-probability pathway into the US under Biden's policies -- are disproportionately more likely to be dangerous. The number of Biden-era known got-aways alone is larger than the populations of 12 of our 50 states.

I often note how statistics show that immigrants, including illegal ones, aren't more likely to be violent or commit additional crimes than Americans legally residing in the country. The difference is that illegal immigrants have no right to be here, so every crime they commit has an added component of unacceptability and avoidability. This revolting outrage, for instance, represents layer upon layer of failure, costing a young boy his life:

The list goes on, and on, and on. And since we recently wrote about New York residents upbraiding Mayor Adams over a since-quashed migrant re-settlement plan in their city, check out this clip of irate Chicagoans:

polecat news and views

Thursday, February 29, 2024

Never Trump 'Principles First' Summit Was a Parade of Lying Charlatans Who Have No Principles

Shocker! Media Headlines Avoiding a Detail About Univ. of Georgia Murder Suspect

Recommended

Job ‘Gains’ Are for Migrants as U.S. Men Kept Out of Workforce

Wow: Border Patrol Reveals How Many 'Criminal Aliens' Have Been Apprehended at the Border Since October

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