What Donald Trump's Wall Says to the World (VIDEO)

From Patrick Buchanan, at Real Clear Politics, "What Trump's Wall Says to the World":

"Something there is that doesn't love a wall," wrote poet Robert Frost in the opening line of "Mending Walls."

And on the American left there is something like revulsion at the idea of the "beautiful wall" President Trump intends to build along the 1,900-mile border between the U.S. and Mexico.

The opposition's arguments are usually rooted in economics or practicality. The wall is unnecessary. It will not stop people from coming illegally. It costs too much.

Yet something deeper is afoot here. The idea of a permanent barrier between our countries goes to the heart of the divide between our two Americas on the most fundamental of questions.

Who are we? What is a nation? What does America stand for?

Those desperate to see the wall built, illegal immigration halted, and those here illegally deported, see the country they grew up in as dying, disappearing, with something strange and foreign taking its place.

It is not only that illegal migrants take jobs from Americans, that they commit crimes, or that so many require subsidized food, welfare, housing, education and health care. It is that they are changing our country. They are changing who we are...

Keep reading.

Blonde Bombshell: 'Baywatch' Babe Kelly Rohrbach in Lipsy Campaign

At London's Daily Mail, "Baywatch babe Kelly Rohrbach swaps her lifeguard suit for a skimpy bikini as she flaunts her buxom bust for new fashion campaign."

Erin Andrews Undergoes Surgery for Cervical Cancer

At Sports Illustrated, "Erin Andrews on Cancer Diagnosis, Hotel Stalker Trial."

Via Emily Kaplan:

From the trial to a cancer diagnosis, here's how @ErinAndrews found strength in the most difficult year of her life. https://t.co/KtdwO2DENw

— Emily Kaplan (@emilymkaplan) January 24, 2017

Thanks for all of the Twitter love. Touched by how many are touched by EA's story. A little backstory on the piece.. https://t.co/dBmfXb9v0Z

— Emily Kaplan (@emilymkaplan) January 24, 2017

The National Elite Nervous Breakdown

From JPod, at Commentary:

The National Elite Nervous Breakdown - by @jpodhoretz https://t.co/oytEkuaWcL pic.twitter.com/sxjdhmkzxI

— Commentary Magazine (@Commentary) January 26, 2017

It cannot go on like this. It’s been five days since the inaugural and the adrenalized, hypercaffeinated, speed-freak affect of the entire chattering class is beginning to seem like we’re living through Bob Woodward’s classic depiction in his book Wired of John Belushi’s final overcharged sleepless days before dying from a cocaine speedball overdose in 1981.

If every word out of Donald Trump’s mouth is greeted with shrieks of horror and rage and anger and despair and hysteria by his opponents, they are going to find it impossible to serve as any kind of effective opposition to him. If media spends their hours celebrating each other for the most creative or the most direct way in which to call Trump a liar, they are going to take their (our) taste for self-referential solipsism to a new level at which their capacity to communicate with their own readers and viewers will be fatally compromised. And just at the moment when they could find new audiences and new credibility in serving as an authoritative source of information in a sea of White House spin and outright disinformation.

This is where the follow-through on Saturday’s “women’s marches” will tell the tale. It would be a terrible mistake for conservatives, Republicans, and Trump supporters to pooh-pooh this mass event, which happened simultaneously in several cities and towns, with a gross turnout dwarfing any mass protest in American history. Dismissing three million people taking to the streets nationwide would be an act of willful blindness, and ascribing the march’s success to Soros money would be foolish.

Similarly, it would be wrong to assume those crowds even heard a single word of Madonna’s curses or cared one whit about the fight between the “check your privilege” activists and the offended/cowed Brooklynite feminists over whose march it was. It was no one’s march. It was everyone’s march. And it worked, I believe, for one reason: It had a simple message. That message: We don’t like Trump and his behavior toward women...

Actually, I'm totally impressed.

But it's still almost four years until the country votes again for the presidency. A lot can happen in that time, but if the left keeps up with mass protests, they could have a big effect on public opinion, especially with a hate-addled, Democrat-compliant mass media.

But keep reading.

Lily Aldridge in Cook Islands (VIDEO)

The new Sports Illustrated Swimsuit should be out in about a week.

Featuring the lovely Ms. Lily, via Theo Spark:



PREVIOUSLY: "Lily Aldridge Intimates Sports Illustrated Swimsuit 2017 (VIDEO)."

Representative Tulsi Gabbard Says She Met With Syrian Strongman Bashar Assad

At Hot Air, "Dem Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: Why, yes, I met with Assad on my freelance visit to Syria":

The people of Syria are crying for peace, asking the US to stop arming terrorist "rebels" who are destroying Syria. https://t.co/tu0O5ThBvc

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) January 25, 2017

I met these beautiful children at a shelter in Aleppo. The message I heard from the Syrian people there: Give peace a chance. #voicesofsyria pic.twitter.com/j9wjZ97ksU

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) January 25, 2017

My goodness. Logan Act violations are like Bigfoot sightings: Claims are made all the time but they’re never solid enough to convince anyone. In this case, we may have the equivalent of a real-life ‘Squatch in captivity. Quote:

Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.

Gabbard went to Damascus not only without the endorsement of leaders in Congress, she went without their knowledge. Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi had no idea she was gone until after she’d arrived in Syria. It was the Ohio chapter of the Arab American Community Center for Economic and Social Services that footed the bill for her, apparently, which until today had been another mystery about Gabbard’s trip. Watch the clip below. It sounds like she went to Damascus to lend Assad moral support and to carry back talking points aimed at convincing Americans to take his side. Unless you want to argue that no “dispute” technically exists between the U.S. and Syria, which would be hard given the American aid provided to anti-Assad rebels, how is this not a Logan Act violation? Does being a member of Congress mean by definition that she enjoys the “authority of the United States” in carrying out freelance diplomacy?

A choice bit from her interview with Tapper below:

“When the opportunity arose to meet with [Assad], I did so because I felt it’s important that if we profess to truly care about the Syrian people, about their suffering, then we’ve got to be able to meet with anyone that we need to if there’s a possibility that we could achieve peace,” Gabbard said. “And that’s exactly what we’ve talked about.”

What do you mean “we”? The president speaks for Americans on foreign policy. Last week that was Obama, this week it’s Trump. Meeting with Assad is especially dubious since the U.S. broke off official diplomatic relations with his regime several years ago. It was the judgment of the White House that he’s a sufficiently monstrous human that the United States shouldn’t legitimize him by formally meeting with him. Gabbard, a member of Congress, had other ideas. By what authority does her judgment trump Trump’s?

Keep reading.

Model Kelly Klein Walks Streets of London Wearing Body Paint (VIDEO)

That is crazy!

At London's Daily Mail, "It's a bit nippy outside! Model struts down a busy high street in a painted top... but will anyone notice her bare chest? Body paint artist Sarah Ashleigh spent two hours painting the fake top on model; Beauty Kelly Klein then walked past dozens of people in Kensington, London."

Also at FHM, "Model Kelly Klein Walking Through the Streets of London in Just Body Paint is an Attention Grabber."

Yeah, that'll grab your attention alright, lol.

Unindicted Council on American-Islamic Relations Furious After President Trumps Bans Muslim Immigration

Ha!

This is too good, at Pamela's:

Hamas-CAIR enraged after Trump signs ‘Muslim Ban’ executive orders https://t.co/0rONcmdMoY pic.twitter.com/YKIuUUnpcf

— Pamela Geller (@PamelaGeller) January 25, 2017

Trump May Lift Ban on C.I.A. 'Black Site' Prisons

Wow!

This is major!

At the New York Times, "Trump Poised to Lift Ban on C.I.A. ‘Black Site’ Prisons":

NY Times reports Trump issuing exec order to re-open CIA black sites, bar ICRC access. #torture. Deplorable. https://t.co/WfvJZIshsz

— Craig Martin (@craigxmartin) January 25, 2017

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration is preparing a sweeping executive order that would clear the way for the C.I.A. to reopen overseas “black site” prisons, like those where it detained and tortured terrorism suspects before former President Barack Obama shut them down.

President Trump’s three-page draft order, titled “Detention and Interrogation of Enemy Combatants” and obtained by The New York Times, would also undo many of the other restrictions on handling detainees that Mr. Obama put in place in response to policies of the George W. Bush administration.

If Mr. Trump signs the draft order, he would also revoke Mr. Obama’s directive to give the International Committee of the Red Cross access to all detainees in American custody. That would be another step toward reopening secret prisons outside of the normal wartime rules established by the Geneva Conventions, although statutory obstacles would remain.

Mr. Obama tried to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and refused to send new detainees there, but the draft order directs the Pentagon to continue using the site “for the detention and trial of newly captured” detainees — including not just more people suspected of being members of Al Qaeda or the Taliban, like the 41 remaining detainees, but also Islamic State detainees. It does not address legal problems that might raise.

The draft order does not direct any immediate reopening of C.I.A. prisons or revival of torture tactics, which are now banned by statute. But it sets up high-level policy reviews to make further recommendations in both areas to Mr. Trump, who vowed during the campaign to bring back waterboarding and a “hell of a lot worse” — not only because “torture works,” but because even “if it doesn’t work, they deserve it anyway.”

Elisa Massimino, the director of Human Rights First, denounced the draft order as “flirting with a return to the ‘enhanced interrogation program’ and the environment that gave rise to it.” She noted that numerous retired military leaders have rejected torture as “illegal, immoral and damaging to national security,” and she said that many of Mr. Trump’s cabinet nominees had seemed to share that view in their confirmation testimony.

“It would be surprising and extremely troubling if the national security cabinet officials were to acquiesce in an order like that after the assurances that they gave in their confirmation hearings,” she said.

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to an email inquiring about the draft order, including when Mr. Trump may intend to sign it. But the order was accompanied by a one-page statement that criticized the Obama administration for having “refrained from exercising certain authorities” about detainees it said were critical to defending the country from “radical Islamism.”

Specifically, the draft order would revoke two executive orders about detainees that Mr. Obama issued in January 2009, shortly after his inauguration. One was Mr. Obama’s directive to close the Guantánamo prison and the other was his directive to end C.I.A. prisons, grant Red Cross access to all detainees and limit interrogators to the Army Field Manual techniques.

In their place, Mr. Trump’s draft order would resurrect a 2007 executive order issued by President Bush. It responded to a 2006 Supreme Court ruling about the Geneva Conventions that had put C.I.A. interrogators at risk of prosecution for war crimes, leading to a temporary halt of the agency’s “enhanced” interrogations program.

Mr. Bush’s 2007 order enabled the agency to resume a form of the program by specifically listing what sorts of prisoner abuses counted as war crimes. That made it safe for interrogators to use other tactics, like extended sleep deprivation, that were not on the list. Mr. Obama revoked that order as part of his 2009 overhaul of detention legal policy...

Keep reading.

America's Second Civil War

From Dennis Prager (I love Dennis Prager), at RealClearPolitics (via Stephen Green, at Instapundit):

It is time for our society to acknowledge a sad truth: America is currently fighting its second Civil War.

In fact, with the obvious and enormous exception of attitudes toward slavery, Americans are more divided morally, ideologically and politically today than they were during the Civil War. For that reason, just as the Great War came to be known as World War I once there was World War II, the Civil War will become known as the First Civil War when more Americans come to regard the current battle as the Second Civil War.

This Second Civil War, fortunately, differs in another critically important way: It has thus far been largely nonviolent. But given increasing left-wing violence, such as riots, the taking over of college presidents' offices and the illegal occupation of state capitols, nonviolence is not guaranteed to be a permanent characteristic of the Second Civil War.

There are those on both the left and right who call for American unity. But these calls are either naive or disingenuous. Unity was possible between the right and liberals, but not between the right and the left.

Liberalism -- which was anti-left, pro-American and deeply committed to the Judeo-Christian foundations of America; and which regarded the melting pot as the American ideal, fought for free speech for its opponents, regarded Western civilization as the greatest moral and artistic human achievement and viewed the celebration of racial identity as racism -- is now affirmed almost exclusively on the right and among a handful of people who don't call themselves conservative.

The left, however, is opposed to every one of those core principles of liberalism.

Like the left in every other country, the left in America essentially sees America as a racist, xenophobic, colonialist, imperialist, warmongering, money-worshipping, moronically religious nation.

Just as in Western Europe, the left in America seeks to erase America's Judeo-Christian foundations. The melting pot is regarded as nothing more than an anti-black, anti-Muslim, anti-Hispanic meme. The left suppresses free speech wherever possible for those who oppose it, labeling all non-left speech "hate speech." To cite only one example, if you think Shakespeare is the greatest playwright or Bach is the greatest composer, you are a proponent of dead white European males and therefore racist.

Without any important value held in common, how can there be unity between left and non-left? Obviously, there cannot...

Keep reading.

It's TNAC, "The New American Civil War," which I've been arguing for a while now.

President Trump's Executive Actions Bring Progressives Back to Earth

This is great.

At Roll Call:

Unless progressives can turn mass Trump outrage into real pressure and power, they're in for a long 4 years https://t.co/epaJk4hrVe pic.twitter.com/lx8uLNwtqO

— Roll Call (@rollcall) January 24, 2017

President Donald Trump’s opponents spent inauguration weekend invigorated by their show of strength in Washington and around the country, but Trump brought them back down to earth Monday and Tuesday with a couple flicks of his pen on executive actions that struck against much of what they hold dear.

Trump signed executive actions Tuesday forcing the Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines to go forward. Years of progressive organizing against Keystone on the grounds of environmental and climate concerns succeeded in getting former President Barack Obama to cancel it in 2015.

A ferocious direct action campaign by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe attempted to physically block the pipeline from being built on their land. In addition to concerns about the climate and the use of fossil fuels generally, activists aimed to prevent their water from being made unusable by oil spills. The Army Corps of Engineers refused permission to extend the pipeline in December, giving activists hope that the fight was won.

Now those victories appear to have been temporary...

Twitter Celebrates Diverse Oscar Nominations After 2 Years of #OscarsSoWhite

At the New York Observer.

Whatever.

I actually want to see "La La Land," but I'm afraid I'll be called racist for patronizing the all-white leads, Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone (the movie garnered 14 nomination, tying a record, which I'm sure is racist too).

BLACK women are the majority in the best supporting actress category for the very first time! ✨ #OscarNoms pic.twitter.com/WIC6xtx740

— Sylvia Obell (@SylviaObell) January 24, 2017

Ted Cruz Owns Deadspin

Heh, this is pretty good.

At Red State:

Ted Cruz Owns Deadspin in Hilarious Tweets - This might be one of the best Twitter exchanges in a long time. De... https://t.co/LW259DYSWQ

— RedState (@RedState) January 25, 2017

White House Press Room Seating Chart

The Associated Press always gets front and center, although this year the organization was dissed on getting the first question, a first.

At Politico, "The White House press room seating chart."

As far as I can tell, this WH briefing room seating chart still stands for those wondering who is being called on https://t.co/PD8uZxNFy4

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) January 24, 2017

Amber Lee's Partly Cloudy Forecast

Looks like we'll be getting a break from the rains. We're more than double the average rain totals this season, which is awesome for tackling the drought.

Here's the lovely Ms. Amber:

#PresidentTrump Expected to Sign Order Banning Migrants from the Middle East

Well, it's a limited, temporary order.

But's it's exactly what he said he'd do during the campaign. Word is he'll sign an order to start building the wall with Mexico tomorrow as well.

Red meat, baby. Red meat.

All those protests, and the progressive marchers will be seething this week, as their most cherished policy priorities get smashed like a cheap piece of pottery.

#PresidentTrump to 'ban migrants from Syria; sign order on border wall tomorrow. #MAGA #TRUMP https://t.co/d75GwfWcvv

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 25, 2017

Rebecca Traister: The Women's March Was an 'Earth Shaking Triumph'

Leftists seem to have abandoned any talk about moderating their message, about reaching out to working class white voters, especially blue-collar men.

Rebecca Traister's freakin' hardcore, man. I read her piece on abortion rights a couple of weeks ago and it as like manifesto for infant genocide.

In any case, here's her latest, "The Future of the Left Is Female: Women’s rights are human rights, and women leaders are progressive leaders:

@PatriarchTree It's Rebecca Traister, again: The Future of the Left Is Female https://t.co/OTnSmBsT3t #WomensMarch

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 24, 2017

A lot of people predicted that women were going to change America’s political history in January of 2017. But pretty much no one anticipated that they’d be doing it as leaders of the resistance. On Saturday, millions of women and men — organized largely by young women of color — staged the largest one-day demonstration in political history, a show of international solidarity that let the world know that women will be heading up the opposition to Donald Trump and the white patriarchal order he represents. Women — and again, especially women of color, always progressivism’s most reliable and least recognized warriors, the women who did the most to stop the rise of Trump — were the ones taking progressive politics into the future.

The Women’s March, dreamed up by a couple of women with no organizing experience in the feverish, grief-addled hours after Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton, and then organized by an expanded team in the span of about ten weeks, was an earth-shaking triumph.

According to early reports, it drew somewhere north of 680,000 to Washington, D.C., 750,000 to Los Angeles, 400,000 to New York City, 250,000 to Chicago, 100,000 each to Seattle, Denver, San Francisco, the Twin Cities, and Portland Oregon; and crowds of thousands to smaller cities, including 11,000 to Ann Arbor, 5,000 to Lexington, Kentucky, 8,000 to Honolulu, and 20,000 to Houston. There were 2,000 protesters in Anchorage, Alaska, and 1,000 in Jackson, Mississippi. Demonstrations took place on all seven continents, including Antarctica.

This mass turnout in support of liberty, sorority, and equality was conceived by women, led by women, and staged in the name of women. It also drew millions of men. It was a forceful pushback to the notion that because a woman just lost the American presidency, women should not be leading the politics of the left. Women, everyone saw on Saturday, are already leading the left, reframing what has historically been understood as the women’s movement as the face and body and energy of what is now the Resistance.

Plenty of factors made this effort so successful, but perhaps the biggest was the shock and horror that jolted portions of a long-complacent population awake after the election of Donald Trump. As it turns out, sometimes, It Takes a Villain. We’ve got one now; he lives in the White House, has the nuclear codes, and spent Saturday defending the size of his, er, inauguration crowds. In his first weeks in office, he might very well nominate an anti-choice Supreme Court nominee, begin deportations, repeal health-care reform, start the process of withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, and defund Planned Parenthood. He has already reinstated the Global Gag Rule.

Yes, Trump exposed himself as a villain long before the election, and for many on the day of the march, the question was: Where was this energy before November 8? Clearly, the vast majority of Saturday’s crowd had been Hillary Clinton supporters, at the very least in the general election if not in the primary. But it is also true that some of the apathy, some of the complacency, that many critics took as a reflection of Clinton’s “flawed” candidacy stemmed instead from the sense that Americans didn’t really need to panic or take to the streets on her behalf because she was going to win. She was going to win, the assumption went, because of course we are evolved enough that this guy could never get elected president and thus we were free to focus on the imperfections of the woman who was going to be the president.

Through this lens, those who had been out there before the election, wearing T-shirts, holding signs, and talking passionately about the sexism Clinton was facing or racist backlash toward Obama or the high stakes of this election for women and people of color were silly bed-wetters, Hill-bots, embarrassing in their fixations on “identity politics.” Those yelling about sexism were playing some dated “woman card”; those trying to explain how gender and race and class intersect were jargon-happy hysterics. There was a confidence that the country’s problems with women had been largely redressed, or at least were no longer so entrenched that we would have to put in extra work on behalf of the first one to be running for the White House. But that confidence was baseless, ahistorical. The country has a yuge problem with women, and Donald Trump is the cartoonish embodiment of that problem.

If a time traveler had been able to jump just 24 hours backward, from the night of November 8 to the night of November 7, to warn us what was about to happen, Election Day turnout would have looked a lot more like the march turnout, not just in numbers but in energy and purpose and passion. But since reverse time travel remains largely a right-wing goal, we got Donald Trump. Of course, we also got 4 million or more people to the streets on Saturday and a sense of the potential for the women’s movement to be both much larger and much broader than it’s ever been before...

Secret Service Agent Kerry O'Grady Won't 'Take a Bullet' for President Trump

It's not the biggest story of the day, but I definitely had to shake my head.

One joins the Secret Service to protect presidents regardless of party or politics. That's the essence of the job (and required by law). Or so it would seem.

First seen at Ms. EBL's, and also the Washington Examiner below:

Why isn't the answer to Special Agent #KerryOGrady's Trump Derangement #YoureFired? https://t.co/m13AlnzoyX#AsshatOfTheDay@AceofSpadesHQ pic.twitter.com/ntMwpG7IOw

— Evi L. Bloggerlady (@MsEBL) January 24, 2017

EXCLUSIVE: Senior Secret Service agent says she would "take jail time" rather than "take a bullet" for Donald Trump https://t.co/7WWfkFi0Sf pic.twitter.com/76v6N7VGqx

— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) January 24, 2017

The Twitter Presidency

I've been in arguing about the coming Twitter presidency, in my classes, during my last couple of semesters. So this is interesting.

At USA Today:

#DonaldTrump's Twitter presidency. #PresidentTrump #TRUMP #MAGA https://t.co/O1rEbB1T2D

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) January 24, 2017

Should We Bring Back 'Big Stick' Dipomacy?

Professor Eliot Cohen's out with a new book, at Amazon, The Big Stick: The Limits of Soft Power and the Necessity of Military Force.

And here's his op-ed at LAT from last week, "Should the U.S. still carry a ‘big stick’?":

To the extent that President-elect Donald Trump has articulated a coherent view of foreign affairs, it appears to be that the United States needs to reject most policies of the post-1945 period. NATO is a bad bargain; nuclear proliferation is a good thing; Russian President Vladimir Putin is an admirable fellow; great deals that advantage only us should replace free trade.

In his unique way, Trump is forcing a question that probably should have been up for debate 25 years ago: Should the United States stay a global power that maintains world order — including by force of arms, what Theodore Roosevelt famously called “the big stick”?

Curiously, the death of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not immediately occasion that debate. In the 1990s, keeping a global leadership role for the United States looked cheap — other nations, after all, paid for the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In that conflict and America’s succeeding interventions in the former Yugoslavia, costs and casualties were low. Then in the early 2000s, Americans were understandably absorbed by the consequences of 9/11 and the ensuing wars and terror attacks. Now, for better or worse, the debate is upon us.

It is worth keeping some history in mind as we decide whether to reject the posture that the United States has maintained abroad for more than half a century.

*****

President Obama hoped to end the wars he had inherited in 2008. Instead, he launched America’s third war in Iraq, ramped up our deployments in Afghanistan, expanded by an order of magnitude our campaign of counter-terrorist assassination and ordered an air campaign against the Libyan government. He deployed warships near China’s man-made islands and began redeploying American forces to a frightened Eastern Europe. Reality, not ideology, overcame his principled reluctance to exerting American power.

The choice between global engagement and America First is bogus. As in the last century, our choice is whether to lead wisely, firmly and usually peacefully while we can, or to send men and women into harm’s way belatedly and bloodily when we must. Let us hope that the new president comes to understand that we need the “big stick” not “to make America great again,” but to keep a peace that is precious, fragile and worth protecting.

RTWT.