To listen to the Democrats (or is it now Progressives), you'd think that money grows on trees. Free this, free that, and you have the platform of the Democrats/Socialists. Money is no object to them if it means generating votes. It's “deja vu” Robin Hood all over again.

Look around you, two of our most populous states (California and New York) are losing population, mainly among the taxpaying upper and middle-class, and are absorbing poor, uneducated, non-taxpaying people to replace them (including illegal aliens). Notwithstanding their economic woes, these states and cities are proposing free healthcare for all (including to illegal aliens), free college tuition, and a mandated $15 minimum wage. When asked how they will pay for it, they say it is not a problem, and that the “rich” will pay for it. It seems that the new Governor of California, Gavin Newsom, the Mayor of New York City, Bill DeBlasio, and the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, have taken the mantle of Robin Hood and have
taken it to the extreme.

With the less than adequate results from the ill-conceived Obamacare, these three “illiberal” advocates, by offering freebies to the masses, are running their states into bankruptcy, and are emerging as the face of the modern Democrat Party. Most all of the states and cities who are financial “basket cases” are run by the Democrats. Runaway public worker pensions, granted as political payback to the unions, have most of these governors and mayors scrambling to generate revenue to meet these outrageous agreements that they had given to their public employees. When many state and city retirees make upper six-figure pensions, you know that bankruptcy is in the future of these states and cities, yet the voters continue to elect the same people who have gotten them into this mess. As H.L. Menken once said, “Never underestimate the intelligence of the American people”. Touche.

The answer by some of the newly elected politicians, representing the far-left, is to propose raising the taxes on the “rich” (the very entrepreneurs and business men/women who supply the jobs). Little do they realize that by over taxing the rich, they still will not be able to meet their financial obligations. Then, as it has happened in the past, those feckless politicians will have to after the middle-income people and tax them to get the funds for their retirees and the overly generous welfare programs they have instituted. It is in the middle-class where the money is, not in the over-taxed wealthy class (the top 10% of all taxpayers pay 70% of the income taxes now). When this happens, as in New York and California, the taxpaying citizens vote with their feet and move to tax-friendlier states and cities, and who fills their places in those states and cities, poor and non-taxpaying citizens and illegal aliens. That's why two of the no income tax states of Florida and Texas are booming (by the way both states are run by
Republicans).

The prevalence of people praising the economic tenets of socialism, which is promoted in our schools and colleges (and by socialists Sen. Bernie Sanders and that airhead , Rep.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez), are aiding in this problem by filling the heads of these young people with erroneous economic information. These feckless politicians, who only want power and will do anything to get elected or re-elected, will promise the naive ill-informed voters, freebies from the public treasury so they will be able to “suckle on the teat of Uncle Sam” in exchange for their vote. The old expression that “there's no such thing as a free lunch” certainly applies here.

​Robin Hood was a mythical character from the past, who took from the rich to give to the poor, let's hope, that mindset, doesn't become the way of the future in the U.S.A. We don't want to become the next Venezuela or Cuba.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann

‎In order for you to put idiots in office, you'll need a supply of idiots to vote them in. Sadly, the new face of the Democratic party seems to have a cache of them being used successfully, considering how many we have representing us in Washington. A degree in logic isn't needed to understand what is going on that caused the partial shutdown of government.

The other day, I witnessed a kitchen helper trying to empty a wide mouth container of its contents into a narrow necked receptacle. The contents spewed all over the floor. When handed a funnel, this inept worker was able to fill it with nary a loss of a drop.

Our southern border is like that wide mouth container, uncontrollable. A substantial barrier will act like that funnel, directing the flow in a controllable manner, able to filter undesirables.

The stalemate is due to too many insincere individuals who falsely want a secured border while advocating open borders, claiming diversity is good. Diversity is good only when it adds to, not swallows our American and Judeo/Christian values. A large portion of today's so called emigrants are not the same as the ones, like my parents and yours, who passed through the gates of Ellis Island. Many do not want to assimilate into our culture, but demand we accept and adopt theirs. They suck up whatever they can get right away before they will give anything in return, except their middle finger. Many want in to do us harm; 1993 World Trade Center bombing, 9/11, Boston Marathon bombing, etc. and many that have been thwarted.

The President stayed in town over the holiday, waiting to have dialogue with any Democrat, with no avail to get 800,000 government workers back to work, while the Left, left on vacation. Then went to Puerto Rico to be entertained by a hundred 
 lobbyists. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is trying to divert the President from advising the country the "State of the Nation" and shutting the door on 'Angel Mothers" who lost their children to illegal intruders before trying to hop on a plane for a week of P.R. and photo ops while the idle government workers are wondering how they will pay the rent or feed their family without a paycheck.
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 You don't leave the roast in the oven to go do something else.

Conservative Commentary by George Giftos​

You might think that would be a ridiculous contest, but look around you and see what is goingon, it might not be so ridiculous after all. Ever since the election of Donald Trump, there has been a concerted effort to not only to try to undermine Pres. Trump, but to undermine the U.S. Constitution itself. Shutting down speakers on campus, rallying to ban or control guns, disseminating “fake news” as fact, and advancing the tactic of the “politics of personal destruction” are all part of the radical Alinsky agenda.

The Alinskyites, mainly liberal Democrats and Progressives, use the tactics as listed in his famous book called, “Rules for Radicals”. These tactics include the stigmatizing opponents as “racists”, “sexists”, “homophobes”, and “Islamophobes”. The radicals often pretend to be what they are not. The acolytes of Alinsky's rules lie to their opponents (fake news) and disarm them pretending to be a moderate and a main stream liberal. The Alynskyites attempt to advance their radical goals by camouflaging them by changing their style to appear to be working within the system (the U.S. Constitution). The radicals will most always champion following the Constitution to get your vote, but when they become the government it will be a different story.

The radicals are taught the art of miss-communication. They are trying to impose socialism (Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren etc.) on a country whose forefathers understood that socialism destroys freedom, so they avoid the use of the word socialism and in its place they sell it as “Progressive”, “Economic Democracy”, and “Social Justice”. In other words, they will work within the system (the Constitution) until they can accumulate enough power to destroy it. The radicals (Alinskyites) will try to sell the people on change by using terms and phrases like “Audacity of Hope”, “Yes, We Can” (Obama's terms). They do this selling of radical change by proposing “moderate” changes to the Constitution and laws which will open the door to more radical changes in the future (the old foot in the door syndrome).

The radicals, make no mistake about it, are at “war”, especially against the 1st and 2nd Amendments to the Constitution. Shutting off “free speech” and religion (the 1st Amendment) and the control or banning of firearms (the 2nd Amendment) are at the forefront of their constitutional attacks. Radicals perceive opponents of their causes as enemies on a battlefield, and they set about to destroy them by demonizing and discrediting them (that's what the whole Trump “resistance” movement is all about).

So, in the battle between the United States Constitution vs, Alinsky's “Rules for Radicals”, we must not let our guard down by believing the arguments the radicals propose, because it is all a charade by them to impose their will on an unsuspecting electorate who, these elitists, feel are a bunch of naive “hayseed” morons who voted for

Donald Trump. President Trump, with all his personal “warts” and bombast, is the person to support in this quest for upholding the Constitution against the attacks by the radical Alynskyites. We do not want to become the United States of Europe.
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Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann

Do you think that Democrats who are against building a security border wall on the border with Mexico, could or should be called or classified as “ignominious ingrates”? The definition of those terms by Merriam-Webster is as follows. “Ignominious” – marked or characterized by disgrace or shame, despicable, and, “Ingrate” - an ungrateful person. Do those definitions describe the actions of the anti-wall Democrats and their flunky's in the main stream media?

Well, is that a fair description of the attitudes of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer and the majority of Democrats?

Just a few short years ago, those same Democrat leaders (including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton) were in favor of building a wall, but now that President Trump is in office, the wall is now considered immoral and a complete waste of money, what has changed since then? You probably guessed it, Donald Trump is now president and they (the Democrats) don't want to give him a victory on one of his signature proposals, even if it good for the security of the country.

​All of our professionals in the field of immigration enforcement (the Border Patrol, I.C.E., the Office of Homeland Security) are all in favor of erecting a wall to deter illegal immigration, the prevention and distribution of illegal drugs, and the illegal trafficking of young boys and girls for prostitution purposes. They point out that where a wall is in place, the aforementioned illegal activities are cut down precipitously. They claim that their job would be made much easier if a wall or barrier was in place. Shouldn't we listen to the people on the front lines of trying to enhance our national security, instead of the political hacks who put party interests ahead of our national security?

In addition, most of those very same people who are against the border wall are also in favor of “sanctuary states and cities”. That's where the term “ignominious ingrates” applies or comes into play. Any sane person realizes that putting up a barrier (ex: a wall) will prevent or reduce illegal border activities by over 90% (those figures supplied by the Border Patrol). So, by totally rejecting the funding of a border wall, it shows that the nay-sayers deserve to be called “ignominious ingrates”.

How many more innocent citizens and law enforcement personnel must be injured or killed by illegal aliens before common sense kicks in?

During the previous presidential campaign, then Democrat candidate, Hillary Clinton, called her opponents “a basket of deplorables”, but it should've been directed at her own supporters who were the advocates of that policy of no border wall and sanctuary states and cities.

Our national security is at stake and the sooner those “ignominious ingrates” put sane policy proposals ahead of their political party, the safer and better off our country will be. A country divided against itself is a recipe for disaster now and in the future.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann

Of course, that is tongue-in-the-cheek, but if you believe that the general liberal philosophy is to coddle criminals and to denigrate law enforcement, you could find some relevance in that statement. The proof is in the pudding, as the old expression goes.

Why is it when we read about some judge releasing a known criminal back into society by assessing low bail or no bail at all, the chances are great that those federal judges were appointed by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, or is a jurist with obvious liberal tendencies? We have had a spate of recent cases over the past few years, especially when the subjected criminal is an illegal alien. Lenient judges and some feckless politicians have caused some of these criminals to be let go back into society where they then commit further crimes, some that have had a fatal outcome. The Kate Steinle and Mollie Tibbetts murders are unfortunate cases to point out this misguided behavior on the part of the powers-to-be. If the law was enforced the way it was intended, both of those beautiful, hapless victims would still be alive today as their murderers would not have been in our country illegally.

​How can supposedly law abiding citizens, on the liberal side of the political spectrum, condone the lenient law enforcement practices that we read about almost on a weekly basis. Compounding the problem is the instituting of “Sanctuary Cities and States” that give illegal aliens more rights than what the average U.S. Citizen gets. It's like a “get out of jail card” that makes a mockery of our laws.

How many crimes have to be committed by illegal aliens in order to bring sanity back into our criminal justice system? Any crime committed by an illegal alien against a U.S. citizen would have been prevented if the law was carried out like it should have been carried out. Some of these illegal alien criminals have been deported multiple times and were using the sanctuary cities as a safe haven to avoid prosecution by ICE.

It seems that the people of the liberal persuasion are more prone to advocate for taking it easy on enforcing the law against illegal aliens, and you could say on criminals in general.

Many of these people who tend to want to take it easy on criminals are people who have not had any bad experiences being physically hurt or personally violated by a criminal. That's why our headline, “What's a Liberal: Someone Who Hasn't Been Mugged Yet” has a certain amount of relevance. Once these “bleeding hearts” get mugged (or otherwise be the victim of a crime), they then become more inclined to look differently about our criminal justice system. The biggest problem we face today in bringing common sense back to our criminal justice system is that nefarious mindset called “political correctness”, and the constant berating of our law enforcement personnel, the people charged with protecting us from the criminal element.

Conservative commentary by Chuck Lehmann