How Trump Can Win Reelection

It's Larry Sabato, who got pretty much everything wrong in 2016, at least concerning the presidential race, so caveat emptor.

At the Washington Post, "It’s easy to see how Trump can win reelection":

It's Easy To See How Trump Could Win Reelection -- from @LarrySabato and me in @PostOpinions https://t.co/DCt6aCewAr

— Kyle Kondik (@kkondik) April 24, 2019

President Trump thrives on chaos, much of it his own creation. But it would be a mistake to assume that the reelection campaign of this most untraditional president will mirror the tumult of his 2016 effort. It’s too early to handicap 2020, but Trump may try to capitalize on some of the same factors that helped three modern Republican presidents, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, win reelection.

The reelections of all three men were not always certain. Around this time in the 1972 election cycle, Nixon held only a modest lead over the early Democratic front-runner, Edmund Muskie, who in 1968 had been the vice-presidential running mate of Hubert Humphrey. In late January 1983, pollster Lou Harris found former vice president Walter Mondale leading Reagan 53 percent to 44 percent. John Kerry’s challenge to Bush was nip-and-tuck throughout 2004. Fast-forward to 2019, and Trump often trails some Democrats in presidential trial heats, but with his large, solid base and a continuing good economy, it isn’t hard to see how Trump could win again.

That is not to suggest that Trump is destined to win, much less that he would rebound to a gigantic victory like Nixon’s and Reagan’s. For one thing, the landslides that one finds at regular intervals throughout much of the 20th century don’t even seem possible in this highly partisan, polarized era. America is in a stretch of eight consecutive presidential elections where neither side has won the popular vote by double digits, the longest such streak of close, competitive elections in U.S. history.

Another caveat: Trump’s approval rating has been upside down for essentially his entire presidency, and he has shown no inclination to broaden his base of support by changing his policies or softening his sharp rhetoric. From that perspective, even matching Bush’s 50.7 percent in 2004 seems like a major reach. Yet Trump could again win the presidency without winning the popular vote because of the strength of his coalition in the crucial Midwest battlegrounds.

Trump is in the process of jumping one major hurdle: He lacks a major primary challenger. (Bill Weld, the 2016 Libertarian vice-presidential candidate who recently declared a GOP primary challenge, does not count as “major.”) With approval ratings among Republicans usually exceeding 80 percent, and with his allies firmly in control of the party apparatus almost everywhere, Trump has thus far boxed out major intraparty opposition. The last three reelected GOP presidents all waltzed to renomination.

Trump is also going to be in a much better financial position than he was in 2016, when Hillary Clinton vastly outspent him. Trump already has $40 million in the bank for his reelection bid, and he should be able to raise hundreds of millions more now that his party is more completely behind him than in 2016. Money is not everything, as Trump himself showed in 2016, but any campaign would prefer having more, not less.

The Internet will be a campaign wild card again. Trump will probably reprise his 2016 digital advertising strategy to dissuade specific demographic groups, such as African Americans and young women, from voting for the Democratic candidate. His army of domestic online trolls no doubt will also turn out in force, and foreign actors, particularly Russians tied to the Kremlin, will almost certainly try to influence the election. Don’t expect the Trump administration to devote a lot of energy to frustrating those efforts.

The Democratic Party may inadvertently boost Trump if it gets carried away with an impeachment frenzy that prompts a voter backlash. Opposition to Trump will help unify the Democrats and fund the eventual nominee after a standard-bearer emerges from what is a giant and growing field of about 20 candidates. But one or more factions of the Democratic Party may emerge from the primary season disappointed and angry. Trump’s well-funded digital strategy will work to widen these fissures.

Ultimately, Trump may turn out to be at the mercy of conventional factors...

More.

Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made.

Also, inexpensive copies of the original 1990 paperback here.

A Stinging Defeat for President Trump

Actually, I'm glad the government reopened. I just wish it had been the Democrats who caved.

This feels like a real turning point in Trump's presidency, mostly it's really the one time I think he's seriously hurt politically. Democrats were gloating, as I would have been too, given both the stakes and polarization. But more importantly, Trump's capitulation, especially after the longest shutdown, hurt him with the base --- yes, even folks who've been die-hard Trump supporters were turned off by the long impasse.

If there's no deal on this supposed set of congressional conference negotiations, Trump will either deploy the Army Corps of Engineers or blow off any hopes of reelection.

We'll see.

At NYT, "For a President Consumed With Winning, a Stinging Defeat":

After the longest government shutdown in history, Trump surrendered with nothing concrete (or steel) to show for the battle, taking essentially the same deal that was on the table in December that he originally rejected, touching off a 35-day impasse. https://t.co/9LfBpXd1Pq

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) January 26, 2019

And now go live to Ann Coulter to get her remarks on Trump caving on the wall. Ann? pic.twitter.com/VhuxgyNwuK

— Dana Goldberg (@DGComedy) January 25, 2019

WASHINGTON — President Trump famously declared that in his administration the nation would become tired of all the winning. So on Friday he tried a little losing.

After the longest government shutdown in history, Mr. Trump surrendered with nothing concrete (or steel) to show for the battle, taking essentially the same deal that was on the table in December that he originally rejected, touching off a 35-day impasse.

With Senator Mitch McConnell on the telephone, rank-and-file Republicans in revolt and televisions in the White House showing air traffic slowing in the Northeast because of the shutdown, Mr. Trump bowed to the inevitable and agreed to reopen the government until Feb. 15 without the money for his border wall that he had demanded.

For a president who believes in zero-sum politics and considers compromise a sign of weakness, it was a bruising setback, a retreat that underscored the limits of his ability to bull his way through the opposition in this new era of divided government. As it turned out, the art of the deal at this stage of Mr. Trump’s presidency requires a different approach and the question is whether he can adjust.

“By any measure, it was an unequivocal loss,” said Patrick J. Griffin, who was the White House legislative director for President Bill Clinton during the government shutdowns of the 1990s. “No interpretation is needed. No wall and probably lost votes rather than gain or strengthen his base.”

The next three weeks will test whether Mr. Trump can rebound as he faces a new deadline to come up with an agreement. If he can find common ground with Democrats led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Chuck Schumer while making progress on his wall, he may yet emerge from this searing ordeal claiming a political victory.

If not, however, he may discover his disgruntled fellow Republicans on Capitol Hill less willing to go along with a renewed government shutdown, forcing him to decide whether to provoke a constitutional clash by declaring a national emergency to bypass Congress altogether and build the wall without legislative approval.

White House officials argue that there are more moderate House Democrats who are willing to support a wall even though Ms. Pelosi has called the project “immoral” and opposed spending even a single dollar on it. In the days to come, they hope to either peel off those Democrats and force Ms. Pelosi to meet somewhere in the middle or to drive a wedge among Democrats highlighting their own divisions.

“Moving forward for the next three weeks, have the Democrats boxed themselves into a corner with zero for wall funding that makes them look weak on border security?” asked Marc Short, who was Mr. Trump’s White House legislative director earlier in his presidency. “Will the White House be able to work around Pelosi to gain enough Democrat support for some wall funding?”

After watching Ms. Pelosi this week disinvite Mr. Trump from delivering the State of the Union address while the government remained closed, Mr. McConnell concluded that she would never cave and decided to come off the sidelines to try to end the standoff. He scheduled votes for Thursday on two plans to end the stalemate, one on Mr. Trump’s terms and another Democratic version, mainly to demonstrate to the president that he did not have enough support to prevail.

After both bills failed to muster the 60 votes required for passage on Thursday, Mr. Trump was fed up and ready to get it over with, according to advisers. He was eager to get the dispute resolved at least temporarily so he could deliver his State of the Union address. He told Vice President Mike Pence and Jared Kushner, his son-in-law and senior adviser, to give him options.

They came back with four ways to reopen the government: a three-week spending bill that included a prorated portion of money as a down payment on the border wall pending further negotiations; a “clean” short-term spending bill that included no such money; a clean short-term bill with a bipartisan House-Senate conference committee to negotiate border security; or a declaration of national emergency that Mr. Trump would use to move money on his own while resuming government operations for the rest of the fiscal year...

Still more.

Sweden’s 'Immigrant' Ghettos

From Andy Ngo, at National Review, "Sweden’s Parallel Society":

Excellent, unfliching on-the-ground reporting by @MrAndyNgo on the consequences of mass immigration without assimilation in Sweden -- a recipe for ruin==> https://t.co/gHxC47h0NW

— Michelle Malkin (@michellemalkin) December 21, 2018

I don’t go to those places without security,” a Swedish journalist tells me when I ask whether she would accompany me to some of her country’s “especially vulnerable” areas. The label is given by police to neighborhoods where crime is rampant and parallel social structures compete for authority with the state. To the politically incorrect, these are also known as “immigrant ghettos.”

While much attention was focused on Germany during the 2015 refugee crisis, in which more than a million migrants from the Middle East and Africa entered the continent at the behest of Angela Merkel, the country that admitted the most migrants per capita was Sweden. In one year alone, the northern European nation of 10 million added nearly 2 percent to its population. Most of those arrivals were young men. Tens of thousands more have continued to arrive since then.

It is too early to see the long-term impact of the 2015 migrant crisis, but if the past is any indication of Sweden’s future, the answer may be found in its “vulnerable” neighborhoods. In recent years, the Nordic state known for scoring among the highest among all nations in quality-of-life indexes has also gained a reputation for gang shootings, grenade attacks, and sexual crimes.

Days before I was due to arrive in Sweden last summer, the country was rocked by mass car burnings across its west coast. Authorities faulted “youth gangs” for the fires, a euphemism for criminal young men of migrant backgrounds. My first visit was to Rosengård, Seved, and Nydala, immigrant neighborhoods in the southern city of Malmö and among the 23 “especially vulnerable” areas across Sweden. At times, ambulances and fire trucks will enter only with police protection. Desperate police have appealed to imams and clan leaders for help when they cannot contain the violence.

From Malmö’s central train station, I began walking alone to Rosengård, an area rocked by some of the country’s most violent riots in 2008 after a mosque was denied a new lease. Halfway through my journey, I stopped outside the Malmö Synagogue. I was greeted by a metal security fence and closed-circuit cameras. In 2010, the synagogue was attacked with explosives. And in December 2017, hundreds of protesters in the city chanted for an intifada and promised to “shoot the Jews” after President Trump announced the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. One of the consequences of mass migration to Europe that no one had predicted was the importation of a different strain of anti-Semitism.

I continued onward.

The closer the GPS told me I was to my destination, the more headscarves I saw and the less Swedish I heard. In Rosengård, youths gathered during school hours in streets and parks around the public housing that lined the neighborhood. In fact, fewer than half of ninth-graders here pass enough classes to enroll in high school.

Four hundred miles north, in the country’s capital, I witnessed similar social phenomena in some Stockholm neighborhoods. I was more discreet on that trip; journalists have been violently attacked in those areas.

In Rinkeby, young girls and even some babies were dressed in modesty headscarves. Cafés were in practice male-only spaces, and a restaurant in the town center offered segregated seating, with a curtain, for “families,” a euphemism for women.

Here, there were no H&Ms or other hallmarks of Swedish fashion. Instead, small clothing stores sold Islamic robes, hijabs, and face veils. And in contrast to the near-cashless society I encountered elsewhere in urban Sweden, many businesses here accepted only cash.

In Tensta, another “extremely vulnerable” district near Rinkeby, I stopped by the local administrative office. It is one of the few visible institutions of the Swedish state in the area. Security guards stood at the door. The week before, masked assailants left burning tires outside the office — one of a number of attacks on authorities in the neighborhood.

Left-wing parties also plastered campaign posters all over featuring politicians of conspicuous Muslim background. The Left party played Arabic-language music and distributed food in Alby, a “vulnerable” district in southern Stockholm.

The on-the-ground reality I witnessed in some parts of Sweden stood in stark contrast to the egalitarian utopia I had been sold by American progressives. How did Sweden, on the whole a prosperous and peaceful nation, also develop parallel, segregated societies afflicted by criminality and violence? The starkest reminder of this reality are the numerous grenade explosions and gun murders that have become a regular occurrence across some sections of society. In fact, Sweden’s homicide rate is now above the Western European average...

That's a great essay. Keep reading.

Ngo's a brave mofo, lol.

Progressive Denmark, the Scandinavian Wet Dream of Leftist 'Democratic Socialists' the World Over, Will Warehouse 'Unwanted' Refugees on Remote Pestilential Island

Seriously, the 2015 international refugees crisis has turned Europe upside down. Now those dang fascist Danes have produced a plan to house their virus-ridden unwanted refugees on some godforsaken island. You couldn't invent this in your most dystopian novel.

At the New York Times, "Denmark Plans to Isolate Unwanted Migrants on a Small Island":

Denmark plans to house the country’s most unwelcome foreigners in a tiny, hard-to-reach island. One of the two ferries that serve the island is called the Virus. https://t.co/BsAP5scxcf

— The New York Times (@nytimes) December 4, 2018

COPENHAGEN — Denmark plans to house the country’s most unwelcome foreigners in a most unwelcoming place: a tiny, hard-to-reach island that now holds the laboratories, stables and crematory of a center for researching contagious animal diseases.

As if to make the message clearer, one of the two ferries that serve the island is called the Virus.

“They are unwanted in Denmark, and they will feel that,” the immigration minister, Inger Stojberg, wrote on Facebook.

On Friday, the center-right government and the right-wing Danish People’s Party announced an agreement to house as many as 100 people on Lindholm Island — foreigners who have been convicted of crimes but who cannot be returned to their home countries. Many would be rejected asylum seekers.

The 17-acre island, in an inlet of the Baltic Sea, lies about two miles from the nearest shore, and ferry service is infrequent. Foreigners will be required to report at the island center daily, and face imprisonment if they do not.

“We’re going to minimize the number of ferry departures as much as at all possible,” Martin Henriksen, a spokesman for the Danish People’s Party on immigration, told TV 2. “We’re going to make it as cumbersome and expensive as possible.”

The deal allocates about $115 million over four years for immigrant facilities on the island, which are scheduled to open in 2021.

The finance minister, Kristian Jensen, who led the negotiations, said the island was not a prison, but added that anyone placed there would have to sleep there.

Louise Holck, deputy executive director of The Danish Institute for Human Rights, said her organization would watch the situation “very closely” for possible violations of Denmark’s international obligations...

Oh, like the U.N.' s1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol? Well, doesn't sound like Denmark's too worried about non-compliance or anything, but who am I to critique? (*Eye-roll.*)

Still more.

Attack on America: 7,000-Strong 'Migrant Caravan' Heads to the U.S. Through Southern Mexico (VIDEO)

Kate Linthicum of the L.A. Times is a partisan advocate campaigning through her "journalism" for open borders and unlimited access for the so-called "refugees" of the illegal immigrant caravan.

And below, Newt Gringrich's recent op-ed at Fox News and a raw video of the recent migrant siege of the Mexico border, via Ruptly:

“All my life is there, waiting for me,” said a migrant who was deported a month ago from Phoenix. “I miss my Playstation. I miss Buffalo Wild Wings. I miss my car.”https://t.co/MdlDFLHuO9

— Kate Linthicum (@katelinthicum) October 22, 2018

.@newtgingrich: The caravan is an attack on America -- Stop the caravan now https://t.co/swtG7y3K1x

— Fox News (@FoxNews) October 20, 2018

U.S. Has Highest Share of Foreign-Born Since 1910

I'm teaching immigration in my classes this week, so I took note of this piece at the New York Times from a couple of weeks ago.

It's fascinating, especially the share of immigrants from Asia.

I'm telling you, Irvine is practically Beijing west. The city is an Asian-majority burg, and it's trippy. Lots of folks wear hospital mask all the time, even while driving their cars (remember, the air quality in China is terrible). Also, lots of folks don't speak English. The kids are bilingual, but the parents, and for sure the grandparents, don't. I can go shopping, hitting two or three different stores, including Walmart, and not hear anyone speaking English.

At some point you'd like immigration rates to slow down, and remember, this is legal immigration. The numbers are too high. Assimilation is breaking down where I live. Let's slow things down. It's a national problem, but I'm seeing things close up right here in the O.C.

In any case, see "U.S. Has Highest Share of Foreign-Born Since 1910, With More Coming From Asia":

The foreign-born population in the U.S. has reached its highest share since 1910, according to government data, and the new arrivals are more likely to come from Asia and to have college degrees than those who arrived in past decades https://t.co/mqZE2cGOZt

— The New York Times (@nytimes) September 13, 2018

WASHINGTON — The foreign-born population in the United States has reached its highest share since 1910, according to government data released Thursday, and the new arrivals are more likely to come from Asia and to have college degrees than those who arrived in past decades.

The Census Bureau’s figures for 2017 confirm a major shift in who is coming to the United States. For years newcomers tended to be from Latin America, but a Brookings Institution analysis of that data shows that 41 percent of the people who said they arrived since 2010 came from Asia. Just 39 percent were from Latin America. About 45 percent were college educated, the analysis found, compared with about 30 percent of those who came between 2000 and 2009.

“This is quite different from what we had thought,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution who conducted the analysis. “We think of immigrants as being low-skilled workers from Latin America, but for recent arrivals that’s much less the case. People from Asia have overtaken people from Latin America.”

The new data was released as the nation’s changing demography has become a flash point in American politics. President Trump, and many Republicans, have sounded alarms about immigration and suggested the government needs to restrict both the number and types of people coming into the country.

The foreign-born population stood at 13.7 percent in 2017, or 44.5 million people, according to the data, compared with 13.5 percent in 2016...

Still more.

The U.S. Maintains the Most Generous Immigration Policies in the World (VIDEO)

Here's Michelle Malkin, for Prager University:

Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We?

*BUMPED.*

Following-up, "Progressives Outraged at Laura Ingraham's Opening Segment Slamming Left's Program to Remake America (VIDEO)."

It's not like Ms. Laura was saying anything new. Conservatives have been sound the tocsin for decades. Here's Pat Buchanan's book from 2002, The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

And don't forget Jean Raspail's 1973 novel, The Camp of the Saints.

Also, Victor Davis Hanson, Mexifornia: A State of Becoming.

More recently, see Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam.

And my favorite, which was eye-opening at the time (2004), Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? The Challenges to America's National Identity.

New Focus on Denaturalization

Well, this is new ---- and great!

At LAT, "Under Trump, the rare act of denaturalizing U.S. citizens on the rise":

Working a Saturday shift in the stuffy Immigration and Naturalization Service office in downtown Los Angeles in the 1970s, Carl Shusterman came across a rap sheet.

A man recently sworn in as a United States citizen had failed to disclose on his naturalization application that he had been arrested, but not convicted, in California on rape and theft charges.

Shusterman, then a naturalization attorney, embarked on a months-long effort to do something that rarely happened: strip someone of their American citizenship.

“We had to look it up to find out how to do this,” he said. “We’d never even heard of it.”

Forty years later, denaturalization — a complex process once primarily reserved for Nazi war criminals and human rights violators — is on the rise under the Trump administration.

A United States Citizenship and Immigration Services team in Los Angeles has been reviewing more than 2,500 naturalization files for possible denaturalization, focusing on identity fraud and willful misrepresentation. More than 100 cases have been referred to the Department of Justice for possible action.

“We’re receiving cases where [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] believes there is fraud, where our systems have identified that individuals used more than one identity, sometimes more than two or three identities,” said Dan Renaud, the associate director for field operations at the citizenship agency. “Those are the cases we’re pursuing.”

The move comes at a time when Trump and top advisors have made it clear that they want to dramatically reduce immigration, both illegal and legal.

The administration granted fewer visas and accepted fewer refugees in 2017 than in previous years.

Recently, the federal government moved to block victims of gang violence and domestic abuse from claiming asylum. White House senior advisor Stephen Miller — an immigration hawk — is pushing a policy that could make it more difficult for those who have received public benefits, including Obamacare, to become citizens or green card holders, according to multiple news outlets.

Shusterman, now a private immigration attorney in L.A., said he’s concerned denaturalization could be used as another tool to achieve the president’s goals.

“I think they’ll … find people with very minor transgressions,” he said, “and they’ll take away their citizenship.”

Dozens of U.S. mayors, including L.A.’s Eric Garcetti, signed a letter sent to the citizenship agency’s director in late July, criticizing a backlog in naturalization applications and the agency’s commitment of resources to “stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans.”

“The new measure to investigate thousands of cases from almost 30 years ago, under the pretext of the incredibly minimal problem of fraud in citizenship applications, instead of managing resources in a manner that processes the backlogs before them, suggests that the agency is more interested in following an aggressive political agenda rather than its own mission,” the letter stated.

But Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls, said “denaturalization, like deportation, is an essential tool to use against those who break the rules.”

“It’s for people who are fraudsters, liars,” he said. “We’ve been lax about this for a long time, and this unit that’s been developed is really just a question of taking the law seriously.”

From 2009 to 2016, an average of 16 civil denaturalization cases were filed each year, Department of Justice data show. Last year, more than 25 cases were filed. Through mid-July of this year, the Justice Department has filed 20 more.

Separately, ICE has a pending budget request for $207.6 million to hire 300 agents to help root out citizenship fraud, as well as to “complement work site enforcement, visa overstay investigations, forensic document examination, outreach programs and other activities,” according to the agency...

More.

Progressives Outraged at Laura Ingraham's Opening Segment Slamming Left's Program to Remake America (VIDEO)

Leftists are currently escalating their war on America, right now with a heightened attack on conservative media, everything from the reprehensible Alex Jones to the mainstream conservative views at Fox News. Laura Ingraham really hit a nerve with her opening monologue Wednesday night on the left's malevolent efforts to remake America in the communist image.

And they're pulling out the big guns. Memeorandum has been covered with outrageous headlines attacking Ms. Laura for her alleged "racism." See, "Laura Ingraham's Anti-Immigrant Rant Was So Racist It Was Endorsed by Ex-KKK Leader David Duke" (the Daily Beast), "White anxiety finds a home at Fox News" (CNN), "Ingraham: 'America We Know and Love Doesn't Exist Anymore' in Some Places Because of ‘Massive Demographic Changes’" (Mediaite), and "Laura Ingraham Doesn't Love Her Country Anymore" (the Atlantic).

She responded with a follow up to her Wednesday opening last night, reiterating her main points and smacking down the idiot race-mongering progs. See, "My commentary was about keeping America safe."

And here's the full video from Wednesday:

Who's Really to Blame at the Border?

From Heather Mac Donald, at City Journal:

Who’s really to blame at the border? https://t.co/WV6B0i4XEj pic.twitter.com/LArcwLXgdg

— City Journal (@CityJournal) June 23, 2018

So it was a ruse. The hysteria over the separation of illegal-alien asylum-seekers from their children (or their purported children) was in large part pretextual. The real target of rage was the Trump administration’s policy of prosecuting all illegal border-crossers for the federal misdemeanor of illegal entry.

In April, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a “zero-tolerance” policy for illegal entry. Henceforth, virtually all aliens caught entering the country illegally would be held for prosecution, rather than being released on their own recognizance for a later noncriminal deportation proceeding, to which few ever showed up. (This new enforcement policy would have come as a surprise to anyone who had fallen for the advocates’ decades-long lie that illegal entry is not a crime.) Under the new policy, even if the adult had brought a child with him across the border—the usual accoutrement of an asylum-seeker, for reasons explained below—the adult would still be prosecuted. The adult would be held in a U.S. marshal’s facility pending trial, while the child would be placed in a dormitory run by the U.S. Health and Human Services department, since children cannot be held in criminal lockups.

Images of child border-crossers, separated from their adult companion and crying or looking upset—and the experience would undoubtedly be traumatic for most young children—triggered nonstop coverage of Trump administration cruelty. MSNBC and CNN set up border encampments from which reporters and pundits pontificated on the child-separation crisis. Nazi and Holocaust analogies flew around the Internet; faculty petitions invoked the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Mexico and four other Latin American countries filed a human rights complaint against the U.S. Politicians and religious leaders lined up to denounce White House racism and anti-immigrant hatred.

On Wednesday, Trump called their bluff. He signed an executive order that would house illegal-alien adults with minors in Department of Homeland Security or other government facilities.  The zero-tolerance policy, however, would continue. Democratic politicians and illegal alien advocates immediately cried foul. “Make no mistake: the President is doubling down on his ‘zero tolerance’ policy,” Democratic U.S. Senator Dick Durbin, said in a statement Wednesday. “His new Executive Order criminalizes asylum-seekers . . . . Locking up whole families is no solution at all—the Trump Administration must reverse its policy of prosecuting vulnerable people fleeing three of the most dangerous countries on earth.”

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Juliette Kayyem told CNN’s Don Lemon on Wednesday night: “The real problem is Sessions’ decision to prosecute [illegal border crossers] 100 percent.” A CNN anchor on Thursday morning asked U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat, if his position was: don’t criminally charge each person who illegally crosses the border. Schiff responded: “We don’t have to criminalize everyone that’s coming here seeking asylum.” NPR interviewed the director of Migrant Rights and Justice at the Women’s Refugee Commission, Michelle Brané. “Families will be just as traumatized, children will be just as traumatized” under the executive order, she said on Thursday morning. “Exchanging one form of trauma for another is not the solution”; getting rid of the prosecutorial mandate is. 

And the open-borders lobby possesses a powerful weapon for doing just that. The extraordinarily complex thicket of interpolated rules and rights that govern U.S. immigration policy (the result of decades of nonstop litigation by the immigration bar) contains a series of judicial mandates that defeated even the Obama administration’s tepid efforts to bring some semblance of lawfulness to the border. A long-running class-action lawsuit in the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, originally styled Flores v. Reno, has held that alien minors cannot be confined by the government for longer than 20 days. This 20-day cap contributed to the flood of Central American child-toting asylum seekers that picked up steam during President Obama’s second term. Asylum petitions typically take months, if not years, to adjudicate, given the long backlog of such cases in the immigration courts. If an adult crosses the border alone and utters the magic asylum words—a fear of persecution in his home country—he could in theory be held in detention until his asylum claim was adjudicated. If, however, he brings a child with him and makes an asylum pitch, he puts the government to a choice: detain the adult separately until his claim is heard and release the child after 20 days, or release both adult and child together.

The Obama administration usually chose the second option...

Naturally.

But keep reading.

Despite Raids and Tariffs, California Farmers Still Back Trump

Well, it's the Central Valley. You'd think they'd still back Trump, over the diabolical Democrats. Sheesh.

At LAT, "Raids and tariffs? We'll take our lumps, say California farmers":

“You know what? The Cold War affected us, too, It’s not going to be free to win this war, but it may be worth it."--CA farmer https://t.co/i4HB6qgfuu

— Virginia Dare (@vdare) April 22, 2018

You might assume walnut grower Mike Poindexter would be regretting his vote for Donald Trump.

Since the inauguration, immigration officials have raided his Selma, Calif., office and China has slapped tariffs on his walnuts to retaliate against President Trump’s protection of steel, aluminum and manufacturing.

But you’d be dead wrong. Like many other farmers in the rural and conservative San Joaquin Valley, Poindexter, 46, is holding as steadfast as his trees.

“It’s not about sticking through thick and thin,” he said. “What is our other option? In California, they’re not willing to back [Sen. Dianne] Feinstein because she’s not liberal enough. They don’t have anyone who’s palatable to us.”

So, if Trump thinks a trade war will improve the market for U.S. goods, so be it, Poindexter figures. “You know what? The Cold War affected us, too,” he said. “It’s not going to be free to win this war, but it may be worth it. I don’t think you’ll have farmers go out and vote for Democrats over tariffs.”

Poindexter’s stoicism echoes across the farms of the San Joaquin Valley, where rural and suburban voters strongly supported Trump and where they regularly send Republicans to the House of Representatives. House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield is in his sixth term, and fellow Republican Devin Nunes, farther north in Tulare, is in his seventh.

“If I’ve gotta take a few bullets getting caught up in the cross-fire, but after four years or eight years — however long he spends in office — we’re on a better trajectory as a country, then it’s all parred up,” said Matt Fisher, a fourth-generation citrus grower in Arvin, near Bakersfield. “I did my part, so to speak.”

Jeff Bortolussi grows half a dozen fruit crops at the eastern edge of Kingsburg, where he contributed to his precinct’s 70% tally for Trump.

He lives in the house where he grew up, and eagerly invites a visitor on a driving tour around a mile-square box of country roads to show off the spring crop: peaches and nectarines the size of a baby’s fist, almond and walnuts still too small to see, reedy blueberry bushes, leafy grape vines and trees pregnant with apples, pomegranates, clementines, persimmons and figs.

It’s that kind of diversity — California grows more than 200 crops — that could soften the impact of tariffs on the state. And it’s what differentiates California’s $45-billion agriculture industry from frustrated farmers in the Midwest, who heavily depend on a soy crop that faces tariffs of 25%. (A tariff raises the price for Chinese importers, making the U.S. crop less competitive.)

Bortolussi is as patient about politics as he is with his crops.

“A lot of this stuff needs to play out,” he said. “I think a lot of it is posturing, and his way of communicating, his ‘art of the deal.’ We really don’t know what’s going on.”

Even almonds, California’s second-largest agricultural export to China, may not suffer from tariffs as much as first thought, Bortolussi says. “The almond crop this year is going to be a little off, because it got a little freeze,” he said. “So, if the tariffs are going to affect almonds, this may be the year when it will have less effect.”

Last year, California sold $1.1 billion worth of nuts — almonds, walnuts and pistachios — to China, its third-largest foreign customer, according to the state Department of Food and Agriculture. China also bought more than $240 million in fresh citrus and table grapes from California in 2016, according to the department's data...

More.

Orange County Faces Legal Threat Over Anti-Camping Laws

I've been blogging on homelessness quite a bit, mainly because I'm moved by the plight of the homeless and I'm flummoxed by the pathetic public policy response. In the O.C., as I noted at the time of a bogus meme going around arguing that the Anaheim Stadium encampment was populated by illegal immigrants, most of the O.C. homeless are white working-class people who've been wiped out by economic change, especially coming out of the Great Recession. So folks might see why I have quite a different take on the issue than other conservatives, such as the otherwise outstanding Daniel Greenfield, at FrontPage Magazine: "ASIAN-AMERICANS ACCUSED OF INTOLERANCE FOR OPPOSING HOMELESS."

Asian-Americans, pfft.

Where was where the mass Asian-American protests against the Chinese birth tourism hotels here in Irvine? There weren't any. The Feds had to come in and shut them down. See, "'Maternity tourism' raids target California operations catering to Chinese." According to the report:

More than 400 women associated with the Irvine location have given birth at one Orange County hospital since 2013, agents wrote in the affidavit. One of the women paid $4,080 out of $28,845 in hospital bills when her bank account showed charges at Wynn Las Vegas and purchases at Rolex and Louis Vuitton stores, the affidavit said.

Nope, no massive protests against Chinese birth tourists committing immigration fraud and cheating local hospitals out of maternity costs. And the Asian-American community has demonstrated extremely slow assimilation into American political culture. It's half Asian-American in Irvine, and the population's large presence continues to drive Anglo-American retail institutions out of the area. The 99 Ranch Market across from my neighborhood is the anchor store for a nearly entirely Asian-American shopping center. Only the McDonald's and KFC remain from a least a half a dozen American restaurants, including Baskin Robbins, Marie Calendar's, and Subway.

In any case, here's today's front-page report on the new judicial ruling barring cities from enforcing anti-camping laws against the county's homeless --- with the photograph of Diane Rutan, gathering her things from the downtown Santa Ana homeless camp. See, "Judge threatens to bar O.C. from enforcing anti-camping laws if it can't shelter homeless":

The political crisis over homelessness in Orange County approached a crucial moment Tuesday as a federal judge raised the prospect of barring local governments from enforcing anti-camping ordinances if officials cannot create temporary shelters for hundreds being swept out of tent cities.

The county for weeks has been struggling to find locations to place the homeless after removing them from an encampment along the Santa Ana River. A plan to place temporary shelters in Irvine, Laguna Niguel and Huntington Beach died amid loud protests from residents last week, and the problem is expected to get worse as officials move to clear out another tent city at the Santa Ana Civic Center.

U.S. District Judge David O. Carter expressed frustration at the political stalemate during a hearing Tuesday. He said he could not decide where the shelters should go, but said he could prohibit cities from enforcing laws that ban people from camping in public spaces such as parks and river ways. Carter said that without those laws, Orange County communities could become magnets for homeless people.

In essence, the judge said Orange County can't have it both ways.

"We can't criminalize homeless by citing them in one location, and citing them in another location simply for being homeless," Carter said.

Carter is overseeing a case brought by homeless advocates trying to stop the removal of the homeless encampments. He stressed that the shelters don't have to be fancy, only that they be able to serve those who have nowhere else to live.

"This doesn't have to be a nice thing," Carter said. "It just has to be humane and dignified. That will probably get us through this crisis."

The county's two armories, which provide temporary shelter for up to 400 homeless individuals during the winter, are scheduled to close this month — adding a new layer of urgency as space is limited in other shelters throughout the county. Fullerton officials requested to keep the armory in their city open, but it's not clear if that will happen.

Orange County Board of Supervisors Chairman Andrew Do said he is pessimistic about the county and city officials finding a solution unless Carter steps in.

"At this point, I see us — the county — and the cities being at a standstill," Do said. "With each passing day we betray our responsibility to care for all of our residents as required by law."

Residents in Irvine and other cities have said they don't want homeless shelters in their communities, which is the same argument made by neighborhoods along the Santa Ana River that prompted officials to clear out the camps in the first place.

But Carter said the situation has forced certain cities to take on a disproportionate burden. He singled out Santa Ana, home to the county's only major emergency shelter

"Santa Ana is being forced to absorb all of the homeless because they're brought to this area for assessments and services," Carter said. "It's disproportionate."

Data presented by Santa Ana during the hearing back up that claim...

Keep reading.

Conservative Amnesia

Center-right parties in Europe have forgotten how to be conservative, argues Jan-Werner Mueller, at Foreign Policy, "Europe Forgot What ‘Conservative’ Means":

Whether or not to adapt to right-wing populism constitutes the major strategic dilemma for Europe’s center-right today, writes Jan-Werner Mueller. https://t.co/2hYxTYgKKd

— Foreign Policy (@ForeignPolicy) March 21, 2018

Conventional wisdom has it that Europe’s social democrats are in terminal decline. In recent elections in Italy, Germany, and France, once proud left-wing mass parties have been reduced to at best getting a fifth of the vote. The obvious flip side of the mainstream left’s decline seems to be that populists but also the center-right are faring well. In fact, this picture is highly misleading. Center-right parties — European Christian democrats above all — face a real crisis. It is increasingly unclear what they stand for, and, unlike social democrats, they are in real danger of being replaced by the populist right.

Social democrats have been struggling because the “Third Way” pursued by leaders such as Tony Blair and Gerhard Schröder during the late 1990s left them with an enormous credibility problem. They had not just tolerated but actively furthered finance capitalism; deregulation and increasing inequality happened under the watch of nominally left-wing governments, which today are perceived as having betrayed socialist ideals. But, importantly, it is not really in doubt what these ideals are. As the surprise success of Jeremy Corbyn in last year’s British general elections demonstrated, the left can still do remarkably well, under two conditions: Social democrats have to restore their credibility and reorient public attention away from the one issue that is most likely to split its core constituency — immigration. Whether one likes Corbyn’s ideas or not, it is remarkable that a grassroots movement, Momentum, largely captured the Labour Party and effectively erased its toxic association with the widely discredited Blairism.

In somewhat similar fashion, Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) has been trying to assert an agenda offering better protection for workers and more accessible health care. While this month’s decision to re-enter a grand coalition with the Christian Democrats has temporarily obscured this reorientation, the SPD will likely continue to sharpen its profile as a distinctively left-wing party in government.

If one asks, by contrast, what exactly Europe’s center-right stands for today, most citizens will be unable to articulate an answer. This has partly to do with historical amnesia — including forgetfulness on the part of center-right leaders themselves. After World War II, Christian democrats dominated politics in Germany, Italy, and, to a lesser extent, France. The circumstances were uniquely favorable for such moderate center-right parties, which claimed a religious, though nonsectarian, inspiration. Fascism had discredited the nationalist right; the horrors of the midcentury made many Europeans look for moral certainty in religion; and in the context of the Cold War, Christian democrats presented themselves as quintessentially anti-communist actors. Not least, they suggested that there was an affinity between the materialism of classical liberalism on the one hand and communism on the other — and that they were the only parties that clearly rejected both in favor of communitarian values. It is virtually forgotten today that Christian democratic parties had strong progressive elements — even if one occasionally gets a glimpse of that past: Matteo Renzi, who resigned as leader of Italy’s major left-wing party this month, had actually started his political life as a Christian Democrat.

Above all, Christian democrats were the original architects of European integration. They deeply distrusted the nation-state; the fact that, in the 19th century, both the newly unified Italy and the Germany united by Otto von Bismarck had waged prolonged culture wars against Catholics was seared in their collective memory. European integration also chimed with a distinct Christian democratic approach to politics in general: the imperative to mediate among distinct identities and interests. Ultimately, this quest for compromise among different groups (and, in Europe, states) went back to Pope Leo XIII’s idea — directed against rising socialist parties — that capital and labor could work together for the benefit of all in a harmonious society. Christian democracy had been a creation to avoid both culture war and class conflict.

Little is left of these legacies today. Christian democrats and other center-right parties continue to be pragmatists, but it is often unclear what, other than the imperative to preserve power, animates them in the first place. The European Union’s three main presidents — of the European Commission, the European Parliament, and the European Council — are all Christian democrats. Yet none of them has advanced a bold vision for the union as a whole. All seem to take it for granted that citizens are wary of further integration. To be sure, this is the narrative right-wing populists push, but evidence from surveys is far more ambiguous.

Whether or not to adapt to right-wing populism constitutes the major strategic dilemma for Europe’s center-right today...

Actually, Christian Democrats today --- think Angela Merkel --- are basically leftists. Yeah, they better learn how to be conservative again, or be relegated to the dustbin of history. They need to conserve their own societies, for one thing. Sheesh.

But keep reading.

'Punish a Muslim Day'

This is pretty intense. And pretty terrible.

It's not defensible, although I will say that I'm not surprised and I expect we'll see more of this kind of thing. Western societies are at a boiling point over mass Islamic immigration, which is seen as an invasion. And leftist elites are oblivious to what's happening within their own communities. It's recipe for violence.

At the New York Times, the Guardian, the Mirror U.K.

‘Punish a Muslim Day’ Letters Rattle U.K. Communities https://t.co/hjbTTl7FA7

— The New York Times (@nytimes) March 11, 2018

UK charity urges vigilance after 'Punish a Muslim Day' letters https://t.co/e4ByHecRHr

— The Guardian (@guardian) March 11, 2018

Horrific 'Punish a Muslim Day' letters sent out offering rewards for violencehttps://t.co/vrf6FvLzeS pic.twitter.com/6vHZg2SpjR

— Daily Mirror (@DailyMirror) March 10, 2018

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf Tipped Off Illegal Aliens Ahead of ICE Enforcement

At the Washington Post, via Memeorandum, "Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf tipped off immigrants about ICE raid and isn't sorry she did."

And at Althouse.

More at the San Francisco Chronicle:

Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf warned that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could be conducting an operation in the Bay Area in the next day or so.https://t.co/xcqWge3VRX

— San Francisco Chronicle (@sfchronicle) February 25, 2018

Leftists Allege U.S. Separating Illegal Alien Families

Actually, that sounds like a plan. But to leftists, it's just evidence that immigration enforcement is evil.

At the Los Angeles Times, "U.S. is separating immigrant parents and children to discourage others, activists say."

Hannity: President Trump Delivered Soaring First State of the Union Address (VIDEO)

The Democrats have nothing. They're nihilists.

From Hannity's show last night. It's good:

About That 2018 Democrat Midterms Rout?

At WaPo, "That upcoming Democratic rout? Suddenly, it’s looking far less certain":

Analysis: That upcoming Democratic rout? Suddenly, it’s looking far less certain. https://t.co/p2yPW8QeKD

— Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 1, 2018

There have been a lot of positive signs for Democrats’ chances in 2018 over the past few months: A series of special elections in which the party vastly improved on its performance in past contests, though without always seeing a victory as a result. A widening gap in the “generic ballot” poll question, asking people if they prefer to vote for the Democrats or the Republicans in the upcoming House contests. And, of course, President Trump’s ongoing unpopularity.

Mix those ingredients together, and the result is a midterm election that looks like it could be awfully good for the still-battered party. This has led to a surge of enthusiasm on the left about a seemingly inevitable blue wave sweeping over Washington, bringing the Democrats back to power.

But those trends aren’t as stable as they seem.

Consider the generic ballot question. In RealClearPolitics’ average of polling, the Democrats had a stunning 13-point advantage over the Republicans in late December. Since then, though, that advantage has plunged.

The Democratic advantage now is 7.3 points — still big, but the lowest it has been since last July.

At the same time, Trump’s getting more popular. He hit a low in approval last December, too. He’s still unpopular — but since that low he’s seen a four-point increase in approval according to the RealClearPolitics average. His net approval rating — those who approve minus those who don’t — has risen from minus-21 to minus-13.

Those still aren’t great numbers, but there’s a correlation between a president’s approval and how his party fares in House races. As Trump’s approval rises, so do his party’s chances in November.

Then there’s money. On Thursday morning, The Post reported that the Republican National Committee had substantially outraised the Democrats in 2017. The RNC and its House and Senate committees raised a total of nearly $289 million last year. The Democrats raised a combined $258 million — but the Democratic National Committee raised only $64.5 million to the RNC’s $123 million.

As we will write in nearly every article about the 2018 elections until, say, August, it’s still early. Lots of time to raise money, lots of time for movement in the polls. But the question is how those polls will move. Recent polls have shown an improvement in perceptions of the Republican tax bill, for example, which could both be driving the recent increase in the party’s overall polling and could suggest a longer-term improvement is in the offing...

The Democrats are totally freakin' out. The State of the Union speech was phenomenal and leftists have seen the future. It's not bright for them. (They're already unglued, so I can't say they've become any more unglued than they already are; perhaps they're just showing it more?)

More at the link.