Why are millions of people leaving California and moving to other states? What do those states have that California doesn’t? PragerU’s first mini documentary explores the root causes of this mass exodus from the Golden State. “Fleeing California,” featuring PragerU’s own Will Witt, sheds light on one of the most significant but underreported stories of our time.
While many Americans were focused on Washington this week, I was paying special attention to Fort Bend County, Texas. What took place in that Houston suburb may reveal more about the 2020 election than the impeachment trial in the Senate does.
Fort Bend held a special runoff election to fill a vacant state House seat left open by the resignation of the Republican incumbent, who took a job with the University of Texas. Sensing an opening, state and national Democrats decided a win in House District 28 would give them a head start on flipping the nine seats they’d need to control the Texas House and boost their efforts to overturn GOP state legislative majorities from Arizona to Florida, Wisconsin to Pennsylvania and a dozen states in between.
The reason for this intense Democratic interest in state politics is redistricting.Democrats saw how Republican state legislative majorities affected the composition of the U.S. House after the 2010 census. Democrats want to do in more states what they did back then in drawing congressional lines favorable to their party in California, Illinois, Maryland and other blue bastions. The 2020 census gives them the opportunity, but only if they control at least one chamber of a state’s legislature.
Democrats, eager to set the tone for 2020, piled into the race with money, endorsements, technology, lists and volunteers to help Elizabeth Markowitz defeat her Republican opponent. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren and Mike Bloomberg all endorsed Ms. Markowitz. Mr. Bloomberg even carved out time from his presidential campaign to go door-to-door with her. Former presidential candidates Julián Castro and Robert Francis O’Rourke also canvassed neighborhoods, Mr. O’Rourke so frequently that it looked as if he was trying to establish residency.
Calling the race “the most important election (yet) in 2020,” the former El Paso congressman said a victory could help turn Texas blue and “build momentum” in the state for the eventual Democratic presidential nominee.
The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee echoed Mr. O’Rourke’s enthusiasm, saying that flipping the district would be “earth-shattering.” The Texas House Democratic Campaign Committee called the race “a dead heat” in the campaign’s final week.
Former Attorney General Eric Holder, chairman of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, said if Ms. Markowitz was elected, she’d be “a key voice in fixing our broken political system.” His praise was accompanied by $50,000 in contributions, part of the nearly $1.3 million from national and state Democratic groups. More than 70% of Ms. Markowitz’s contributors were from outside Texas, and more than 94% from outside her district, according to Texas Ethics Commission campaign reports.
All these hopes of a Democratic victory were shattered Tuesday. In the biggest turnout in history for a Texas House special runoff, Republican Gary Gates walloped Ms. Markowitz 58% to 42%. His 16-point margin of victory was more than twice the Republican incumbent’s in 2018 and larger than the district margins for President Trump in 2016 (10 points) and Sen. Ted Cruz in 2018 (three).
An ISIS operative jailed in Chicago and mysteriously released after FBI intervention, has surfaced in a minimum security prison about 165 miles south of the Windy City. His name is Emad Karakrah, the ringleader of a sophisticated narco-terror operation,
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Michael Anton is a lecturer and research fellow at Hillsdale College and a former national security official in the Trump administration.
As Capitol Hill Republicans attempt for — what, the eighth? ninth? — time in the past two decades to jam through an amnesty that their voters have explicitly, loudly and repeatedly said they do not want, it’s worth asking a question that is rarely raised:
Does the United States — population 320 million and rising — need more people? If so, why?
To most ears, the question sounds blasphemous, which illustrates the rottenness of our immigration debate. Actually, “debate” is far too generous. One side has made sure that there is no debate. Good people want more immigration, and bad people object or raise questions. An inherently political issue has been effectively rendered religious, with the righteous on one side, sinners on the other.
The basic question remains. The pat answer over the past 20 years — “to do the jobs Americans just won’t do” — may seem to have some salience with a 3.9 percent unemployment rate. But that only further raises the question. After at least two decades of wage stagnation and even decline, now that we’ve finally reached the nirvana of full employment (and who knows how long it will last), why not take advantage of this tight labor market to raise wages across the board? Especially for the working and middle classes that got nowhere or even lost ground during the housing, finance and tech booms of recent years?
Just about everyone knows the answer: because the business community does not like tight labor markets and the concomitant necessity to raise wages. That’s bad for the bottom line. The solution? More workers! And so the Chamber of Commerce annex — a.k.a. Capitol Hill Republicans — dutifully attempt to do their donors’ bidding at the expense of their voters’ interests.
Economists in league with big business got good at torturing data to “show” that immigration benefits the economy. But as demonstrated by Harvard University’s George Borjas, one of the nation’s leading economists on the topic, immigration is a net economic benefit to immigrants and to their employers. To workers already here, not so much.
Imagine you are a sane Democrat who recognizes that a big reason Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump in November was that she alienated many members of the white working class. In the year since, you have been working on your fellow Democrats to change their message in hopes of wooing these voters back into the fold. Then a gunman opens fire at a Baptist church in Texas, and suddenly progressives are in full deplorable mode, attacking anyone who dares offer . . . prayers.
This is the extraordinary turn of events since Devin Patrick Kelley turned his rifle on the innocent churchgoers inside First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. What provoked the left, if it can really be called a provocation, was President Trump’s statement from Japan Sunday, in which he said that “our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and families of today’s horrible and murderous attack.” House Speaker Paul Ryan likewise set off the furies by tweeting, “The people of Sutherland Springs need our prayers right now.”
The responses have to be read to be believed. Here’s one of the more charming: “The murdered victims were in a church,” tweeted actor Wil Wheaton to Mr. Ryan. “If prayers did anything, they’d still be alive, you worthless sack of [expletive].”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren chose less inflammatory wording for her own tweet. “Thoughts & prayers are not enough, GOP,” wrote the Massachusetts Democrat. “We must end this violence. We must stop these tragedies. People are dying while you wait.” In short, if you are a Republican praying instead of passing gun control, you’ve got blood on your hands.
More praise needs to be given to the Texas rifleman who stopped the carnage. If anything, more people need to be armed to protect their families, neighbors and themselves from the crazies and terrorists that live in our communities. Nancy
www.wsj.com/articles/a-plumber-with-a-rifle-1510011070?tesla=y
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
A PLUMBER WITH A RIFLE
November 7, 2017 By The Editorial Board
The world is trying to figure out what evil, or madness, caused Devin Kelley to kill 26 people and wound 20 more at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Sunday morning. But forgive us if we focus on Stephen Willeford, the local plumber who saved lives by grabbing his rifle and firing at Kelley.
Freeman Martin, the Texas Department of Public Safety chief, said Mr. Willeford “grabbed his rifle and engaged the suspect” as he left the church. Kelley dropped his Ruger AR-15 and fled, and Mr. Willeford jumped in a truck driven by another local resident, Johnnie Langendorff, and pursued the killer. After a 95-mile-per-hour chase, Kelley crashed his vehicle, where police found him dead a short time later. Police believe Kelley killed himself.
The two locals are being hailed as heroes since their quick action was the only deterrent to more murders until police arrived. Kelley, who was discharged from the Air Force for bad conduct, should not have been able to obtain a gun legally, but the Journal reports that the military failed to send his conviction record to the FBI. The harsh reality of mass murders is that often only the presence of someone with a legal weapon to shoot back can stop the rampage.
We saw this in Virginia this year when Capitol Hill police saved the lives of many Members of Congress. Security officers in Garland, Texas, prevented mass casualties by killing two jihadists in 2015 trying to shoot up a contest featuring cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.
No one wants crowds of vigilantes looking for someone to shoot, but we’re sure glad Stephen Willeford had a rifle and knew how to use it. Like the passengers aboard Flight 93 on 9/11, or the Yanks who foiled a terror attack on a train in Belgium in 2015, he didn’t wait for orders to protect his fellow human beings.
VIDEO BILL WHITTLE, HOT MICPOP CULTURE’S VIEW OF POLICE AND VIOLENCEHot Mic – Respect for Law Enforcement (07/10/17)Published on July 10, 2017Last week NYPD Officer Myosotis Familia was ambushed and killed. Today
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George Lopez claims President Trump needs to deport the police to make the
streets safer.
The two are connected.
Bill Whittle talks about how George Lopez is part of a culture which has no respect
for law enforcement.
FORT WORTH, Texas, March 4, 2016 (LifeSiteNews) — The abortionist who appealed to the Supreme Court in oral arguments this week says Jesus would supportively hold the hands of women as they abort their children.
Amy Hagstrom Miller, whose Texas abortion business conglomerate Whole Women’s Health owns and runs seven abortion facilities, says she is “mission-driven” by her commitment “to human rights and justice.”
She is fighting state legislation requiring her abortionists to have a local hospital admitting agreement, and requiring her abortion mills to have cleanliness and facility standards up to the required standards of other surgical clinics.
Legislators say the laws protect the health and safety of women. Miller says the laws were only passed to create fear and discourage women from choosing abortion.
In an interview with the pro-abortion website alternet.org, Miller explains that she reassures hesitating Christian mothers and encourages them to abort by telling them, “The majority of our patients are Christian. The majority are mothers already.”
“I was raised in a liberal Christian tradition, and I come to the work (at one of her seven abortion businesses) because of that background,” she shared. “The Jesus that I was taught about would be holding the hands of women inside the clinic.”
One of the pro-life laws passed in Texas is an informed consent law, which gives women the choice to look at an ultrasound of her growing baby, which must be done anyway to determine the baby’s gestational age. Proponents of the pro-life law say seeing an ultrasound has encouraged many women to keep their baby and choose life.
