Texas has the right idea

It’s a pretty sad day when you have to pass a law to compel police officials to enforce the law, but that’s just what they did in Texas. At least one municipality in Texas has routinely thumbed its nose at federal law and federal authorities when it comes to criminal illegal aliens. Criminal illegals are persons who have committed criminal acts in the United States and for whom the feds have made an immigration detainer request. That means they’ve asked the local authorities to hold this criminal until ICE can pick them up.

One week in late January, Travis County, Texas, declined 142 requests to hold illegal immigrants. That was about 69 percent of all requests for that week. This included criminals accused of sexual offenses against children, domestic violence, and kidnapping. Travis County is primarily Austin. Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez has made quite a name for herself as a sanctuary sheriff.

Hernandez has the backing of activist judges like Sarah Eckhardt who believe in what Sheriff Hernandez is doing. Were the issue ever to appear before Eckhardt it would be struck down. Both are part of the problem.

Gov. Gregg Abbott signed SB4 into law. Not only does it fine law enforcement officials who don’t cooperate with federal immigration detainer requests, it makes it a crime.

“This is racist and wrongheaded,” the ACLU predictably fired back. The ACLU is far more concerned about the criminals than the victims. Despite the protestations of DNC Chairman Tom Perez that no human is illegal, some actually are. That would include murderers, bank robbers, and rapists. It also includes anyone who breaks into our country.

Is that to say that all illegals are murderers, bank robbers, and rapists? Not at all. It’s merely a reminder that breaking into this country the first time is a misdemeanor. Second and subsequent times are felonies.

The opponents of this law are screaming that it allows police to randomly profile illegal aliens. Personally, I don’t have a problem with that, but it does no such thing. Police can only inquire as to one’s immigration status if the person is either accused of a crime or a witness to one. In fact, otherwise profiling is prohibited by law.

The Texas Conference of Catholic Bishops strongly opposed this bill. They have a long history of supporting illegal immigration. You have to wonder whose side their on. It’s certainly not the side of law and order.

We have immigration laws for a reason. They are designed to keep people with disease, terrorist ties, or criminal histories out of the country. There is an orderly way to come into this country. Two-thirds of the people coming up from Mexico come the legal way. Makes you wonder what the excuse is for the other third.

If you’re saying it takes too long go, that’s a cop-out. No one has a right to bust in line just because they’re impatient. We need to be reminded that immigration isn’t about the immigrant. It’s about the country they’re immigrating to. What do they bring to the table? If your answer is cheap labor, that’s not a benefit to the millions of Americans who have seen their wages depressed because employers can pay illegals under the table.

I applaud Gov. Abbott and the Texas legislature. They’ve taken a courageous stand against the forces that are eating away at the very fiber of our country. SB4 should be the pace car for the rest of the country.

Who wants to take bets on how quickly it takes an activist judge to shoot it down?

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

May Day, May Day! Communism is dying!

Well, we made it through another May Day. This one was particularly boisterous because Donald Trump is president. We heard from the usual assortment of misfits and communists, and the usual violence accompanied the marches across the globe. What was especially evident this year is the May Day movement has never been so irrelevant.

A quick primer. May Day started off as a pagan holiday once upon a time in ancient Rome. With the Christianization of Europe, May Day morphed into a celebration of the Virgin Mary. In England, it’s a Celtic tradition and many places still crown the May Queen.

Then in the late 19th century the commies came along and hijacked the day. They turned it into International Workers’ Day. The Soviets took May Day to a whole new level with huge military parades in Red Square. It’s also a big day in communist China, North Korea, and Cuba.

Castro is dead. His brother is stepping down from power early next year. Word is Cuba may transition into something resembling a republic. Kim Jong-un is flailing about desperately trying to rally his people behind him by making the United States the focus of all evil. His days are numbered, and he may be pushed over the edge, ironically, by China. Donald Trump has forged an amazing friendship with China’s President Xi. Something like 90 percent of NoKo’s economic support comes from China. Could it be that China is poised to make a dramatic lurch toward freedom?

I remember when Ronald Reagan was derided for saying he was going to relegate the Soviet Union to the ash bin of history. But relegate, he did. Almost overnight the Soviet Union crumbled. All the naysayers who screamed that he was going to start World War III quickly pivoted to give Mikhail Gorbachev the credit. The truth, of course, is Ronald Reagan drove them to bankruptcy.

The Chinese are not stupid. They understand history. They also surely understand that communism is unsustainable. Propping up Kim Jong-un is simply delaying the inevitable. They can no longer count on indifference and appeasement from the United States. Had the Democrats remained in power then communism would have had unwitting accomplices in the furtherance of communism. Useful idiots, as Vladimir Lenin purportedly called non-communists who did his bidding, although the attribution cannot be confirmed. Ours were useful idiots without the useful part.

Then the Neville Chamberlain Society was suddenly thrown from power. Trump ushered in tough talk against communist nations that would make Reagan blush. Capitalism has never had a better friend, communism never a more dangerous foe. Communist nations survive through brute strength and absolute power. That strength needs nourishment. Trump is persuading China to starve the North Korean beast. Cuba is running on fumes. Not to mention Venezuela.

Dropping 59 Tomahawk missiles on Syria while dining with President Xi was a calculated move by President Trump. This guy has negotiated with some of the most ruthless mobsters in the country. You don’t build in Atlantic City and Vegas without dealing with the mob. Trump knows a thing or two about intimidation. 

China saw President Obama as a doormat. They see Trump as the door. A very strong locked door. They know they’re not walking through unless he opens it. And Trump isn’t going to open it unless there’s serious change.

Don’t forget how quickly the Soviet Union fell, all the while the left cowered in a corner. Sound familiar? This past May Day may be looked back on by history as one of the last gasps of communism on planet Earth.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Global warming is so yesterday

Earth Day came and went and with the predictable hysteria over global warming. Like the Dakota Pipeline protestors, they left behind their mounds of trash. At the Dakota Pipeline protest, the U.S. Army Corp of Engineers spent over a million dollars hauling off 835 dumpsters full of trash. Protestors set fire to their campsite burning trash, plastic, even tires, spewing black smoke into the air. Oddly enough, a dozen dogs were abandoned and had to be rescued by a local shelter.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, the evidence is piling up like trash at a global warming protest. CO2 is not a pollutant. 

A new study published by some level-headed scientists who actually spend their careers looking for the truth vindicates the dreaded greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. This study found that the EPA’s “CO2 Endangerment Finding” is, in their words, “totally false.” They analyzed the 14 different temperature data sets and found no manmade global warming at all. Furthermore, they found “that there is no published, peer-reviewed, statistically valid proof that past increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations have caused the officially reported rising.” Any warming at all, which has been minimal, is attributed to volcanic, oceanic, and solar activity. In fact, according to the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, 96 percent of CO2 emissions worldwide are natural. Of the remaining 4 percent, China is responsible for half of it, and they show no signs of complying with UN climate change standards. The United States accounts for 1.2 percent.

A new Chinese study is closer to the truth. It’s the sun, stupid! A team of scientists found, according to DailyGalaxy.com, “a robust relationship between solar wind speed and North Atlantic Oscillation.” The NAO can have a tremendous effect on hurricane activity, sea levels, and temperatures in Europe and much of eastern North America.

Satellites show that temperatures have remained steady for much of the last 20 years. This is in direct correlation to solar activity. Scientists are just now starting to understand this complicated relationship, but it certainly makes more sense that the sun is major factor than a trace gas like CO2 which makes up just four-hundredths of one percent of the atmosphere.

Still, pseudo-scientists like “Bill Nye the Science Guy” double down on the tired theory of manmade global warming. He even lied to an Earth Day crowd, telling them funding for science research is mandated by the Constitution. It’s not. And even if it were, there’s nothing that would mandate pouring more good money after bad.

Bill Nye continued to embarrass himself in an episode of “Bill Nye Saves the World.” He enthusiastically introduced a “dance routine” by actress Rachel Bloom called “My Sex Junk” in which she boldly proclaims that her “vagina has its own voice” and that “sexuality’s a spectrum,” we should “just do what feels right.” The painfully awkward Nye cheers her on from behind a turntable looking like a middle-age nerd trying too hard to be hip.

But this is the era of Trump. Suddenly whining about global warming looks as out of style as, well, Bill Nye. With all the so-called consensus (there is no such thing, by the way) it looks like somebody somewhere on their side could come up with a shred of evidence that supports their theory that we’re destroying the planet with CO2. They can’t. 

While we waste trillions on global warming, six of the ten most air-polluted cities in the United States are in California. Imagine where we’d be if those trillions were spent on combating real pollution.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

What the MSM are missing about Trump's foreign policy

The mainstream media don’t seem to be able to wrap their minds around strategic missile strikes. They assumed the U.S. was going to war with either Syria or Russia or both because Trump approved missile strikes in response to a chemical attack. They’re making the same mistake regarding North Korea.

Surgical strikes have a rich history in American warfare. Ronald Reagan bombed Libya after our intelligence showed Muammar Gaddafi was behind the bombing of a discotheque in Germany frequented by U.S. soldiers. Clinton bombed Kosovo. George H.W. Bush attacked Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait and drove them back to Baghdad. Neither incident resulted in our invading the country and taking it over. Yes, years later, Bush’s son would see fit to run Saddam from power, but the point is military use of force doesn’t have to result in regime change.

I think it’s inevitable that shots will be fired in North Korea. We will either shoot down NoKo missiles or we will determine where these missiles are coming from and take them out before they’re launched. With all the blustering going on with Kim Jong-un it’s probably the best course of action.

Too many people don’t understand Kim’s motivations either. This guy literally inherited a country. It’s a dump of a country but a country nonetheless. People are starving. The economy is in shambles. Eventually internal pressures reach a point where a coup is inevitable. How does one stave off a coup? By fabricating a common enemy. It’s the oldest trick in the dictator playbook.

Kim says they have to develop nukes to keep the United States from invading. The U.S. has no interest in invading North Korea. Heck, we’d have to knock half of it down just to make it inhabitable. We haven’t had an interest in invading North Korea since the Korean War. Kim knows this, but he also knows the best way to get his countrymen’s attention off their growling stomachs is to create a boogyman.

If you understand this, you understand that there’s no way this guy escalates a strike by the U.S. Quite the contrary. He uses any strike against his country to prove his point to his own people that an invasion is imminent. He knows that if he attacks South Korea or U.S. ships he leaves us no choice but to depose him. He also understands he’s got the best gig in the world. He just has to rattle his saber loud enough to rally the North Korean people behind him. 

With all that in mind, Trump can take out any perceived threat and not have to worry about escalation.

Here’s something else to think about. And don’t misinterpret this as saying this is being done on purpose. Trump’s approval ratings are rising. Just as, I’m sure, Kim’s approval ratings are rising in North Korea, public opinion tends to rally around a country’s leader in time of military conflict. Trump is doing what he thinks he needs to do to keep us safe. And he’s right. Allowing NoKo to develop precision-strike missiles does not serve the best interest of the United States.

But there’s a side benefit to keeping us safe. Military strikes will almost certainly bolster Trump’s popularity. He can use that new capital to get some things done in Congress that have been more difficult with his approval ratings below 50 percent. That may sound cynical, but it’s the political reality.

Trump can kill two birds with one stone. Make America safe again and make America great again in one fell swoop.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

Trump: How do you like him so far?

The libs may want to invest in a new narrative. The old ‘Trump is Putin’s puppet’ ain’t gettin’ it any longer. Trump’s Syria attack put an end to that. There are, however, some left-wing kooks who posit that Putin allowed Trump to bomb Syria to make Trump look good, more evidence that some of these people’s hatred for Trump knows no bounds. The Democrats and the media have been drilling the dry hole of Trump being in cahoots with the Russians to steal the election for months now. There’s obviously nothing to the allegations.

And isn’t it interesting how quickly the Susan Rice unmasking of Americans in intelligence reports story faded away? I was so surprised the ACLU didn’t file a lawsuit. (Too bad there’s not a sarcasm emoji.) If there’s a Russia connection it’s the Democrats playing Russian Roulette with issues Americans care absolutely nothing about. Remember Fight for $15? Heck, even global warming is becoming a distant memory. They didn’t connect with a single issue. Trump connected on all of his. Build the wall. Lower taxes. Get the economy moving again. Do away with stupid trade agreements that penalize the American worker. Repeal and replace Obamacare.

By the way, these were all problems that were, in large measure, either created or exacerbated by liberals. Which plays into my basic theory that liberalism can’t solve problems, it can only make them worse.

Hillary crawled out from under her rock with a postmortem on why she lost the election. She not only blames the Russians, she blames misogyny. What she fails to realize is men don’t hate all women. Just her. It’s a shame she’s trying to take all the other ladies down with her. Now Chelsea’s rumored to be contemplating a run for Congress. She’ll have to explain why she asked in a tweet if a picture of Abraham Lincoln with a Trump hat on was Photoshopped. No, Chelsea, he actually wore that at the Gettysburg Address. (Where’s that sarcasm emoji when I need it?) The Clinton dynasty is circling the drain and we watch and wave bye-bye with glee.

How distant does Obama’s feckless foreign policy seem after Trump popped a cap in Assad? Now we’re hearing reports that John Kerry was urging Obama to strike Syria to give him a negotiating leg up with the Russians. Obama refused. When you make John Kerry look like a hawk you’re doing something. Of course, it was Kerry and Susan Rice who assured us that Syria had destroyed all their chemical weapons. Those bold statements are emblematic of the naivete´ of the last eight years.

Remember Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize? That was just nine months into his presidency. Flash forward and the entire Middle East is on fire. ISIS rose to take over large swaths of Iraq and Syria because we cut and ran in Iraq wiping out years of progress. And isn’t it great to have a president who actually calls ISIS ISIS instead ISIL? That was just another small indicator that Obama was out of step with the rest of the country.

While the media concentrate on the lack of a deal between Trump and Congress on repealing and replacing Obamacare, they say Trump is distracted by the palace intrigue of whether Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon get along. Truth is, the media are the ones who are distracted. Trump is busy checking off the bucket list he made on the campaign trail. Some issues are harder than others. No one said it would be easy, but so far it’s been very encouraging.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

The real target of the Syrian strikes

President Trump's decision to strike Syria left much of the world stunned and many of his most ardent supporters disillusioned. There's so much at play that it's not nearly as simple as outrage over images of little children being gassed.

There are two things we have come to know about Donald Trump: 1) His reaction to being wronged tends to lean toward a knee-jerk reaction, and 2) Hardly anything he does isn't carefully calculated.

From a casual view of the past week it appears that Trump saw the images of dead and dying children in Syria, was distraught and outraged over the images, and ordered airstrikes against Bashar al-Assad's airbase. To see it as only that would be missing so much of what's at play.

Before I get to what is at play, it needs to be pointed out that no matter whether Assad was behind the most recent gassing of Syrian rebels, we know definitively that he's a bad man. He has killed tens of thousands of his own people with chemical weapons, conventional weapons, and starvation. Thousands more have been executed in mass hangings. Remember Obama's red line? Assad thumbed his nose at it and attacked his own people with more chemical weapons. Obama did nothing.

Trump's position has been it's none of our affair, but the most recent gassing changed that. It is odd that the day before the attack Trump said Assad should be left alone. At that point, Assad had the support of Russia and Iran and the assurance that we would not interfere in the Syrian civil war. By all accounts, Assad is winning that war against the rebels. And the rebels have now been taken over by jihadists, many of whom were fighting the Americans in Iraq. This is no longer a civil uprising over human rights. It's ISIS and other Muslim extremists who now own the rebel cause.

Why in the world would Assad invite worldwide condemnation by gassing some innocent children? Some say he didn't. There are intelligence reports that say the Obama administration had been running weapons to the Syrian rebels for some time. Those weapons, they say, included chemical weapons. There's evidence suggesting that's what the Benghazi attack in 2012 was all about. If that's true, the Syrian rebels, now controlled by Muslim extremists, are in possession of chemical weapons. After seeing Trump pull back from deposing Assad, it's possible the chemical attack was actually an act of desperation on the part of the rebels to bring to pass exactly what happened: airstrikes against Assad.

I hope and pray that our intelligence information showing Assad was responsible for the attack is accurate. Let's assume that it is. Trump could've waited days, if not weeks, to formulate a response. He didn't. Nor did he act immediately. He waited until the visit by Chinese President Xi to act. I believe this was on purpose.

What was the primary reason for the meeting with Xi? Talks about our trade imbalance, yes, but the main focus was on North Korea. Everyone knows North Korea is a puppet regime of China. The airstrikes against Syrian were a not so subtle message to Xi that this is what happens to tin-horn dictators that hack off the president.

Xi heads back to China with one certainty. Donald Trump doesn't play. It also makes it clear that Trump's no Putin puppet. Every bad actor around the world has to be sleeping less soundly now.

For those who fear escalation, I think this airstrike should actually ease your mind. Trump has demonstrated that he can punish Assad any time he wants to and never set one pair of boots on the ground. We don't want to invade Syria. We don't need to invade Syria. If Assad decides to get out of line again he can expect a night sky filled with Tomahawk missiles. It's a marvelous behavior modifier. 

But make no mistake, those missiles weren't meant for just Assad. They were a message to Kim Jong-un, the ayatollahs in Iran, ISIS, and every other despot around the world. Don't screw with the U.S.A.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.

If the media won't cover it, did the scandal really happen?

You're probably sick hearing me say it, but media bias isn’t so much what they tell you, it’s what they don’t. Truer words were never spoken when it comes to the Susan Rice scandal. If you’re asking, “What Susan Rice scandal?” then you’ve been tuned exclusively to CNN, ABC, or NBC.

Let's start with a baseline of knowledge. You’re familiar with House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes and his rendezvous with an intelligence source at a secure location at the White House. He came out of that meeting incredulous that someone inside the intelligence community had unmasked the names of U.S. citizens caught up in surveillance. Eavesdropping on foreign entities doesn’t allow the exposure of U.S. citizens they may talk to or about unless that person is believed to be involved in something unlawful or if their lives are in danger. In this case, it was neither, and the citizens being surveilled were associates of Donald Trump.

Republicans in Congress, including Nunes, have been wanting to get to the bottom of who ordered the unmasking of the names of U.S. citizens. Now we know. It was Susan Rice, Obama’s national security advisor. Huge news, right? Not if you’re CNN, ABC, or NBC. The only mention on MSNBC was on Greta’s show. They’re probably regretting that hire about now.

CBS did mention the story but only to defend Rice. It’s indefensible. The Daily Caller reported that Rice ordered spy agencies to produce “detailed spreadsheets” of legal phone calls by Trump aides and Trump himself. This makes Watergate look like a traffic ticket.

The big question, of course, is what did the president know and when did he know it? I would suggest it is inconceivable that Susan Rice ordered detailed spreadsheets on Trump and his associates, distributed the information to various intelligence heads, including Obama’s Director of National Intelligence and the CIA director, and Obama knew nothing of it. 

One of the big fears of Barack Obama was that he was allowing our intelligence agencies to become too aggressive in gathering information on U.S. citizens. Remember when James Clapper, Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, was asked under oath before Congress if the NSA was collecting “any type of data at all” on American citizens? He said, “No, sir.” The Snowden leaks proved him a liar, revealing that the NSA was collecting domestic call records in bulk on American citizens.

Speaking of lying, don’t forget it was Susan Rice who went on five different Sunday talking head shows on September 16, 2012 to spread the lie that the Benghazi attack was a protest that boiled over because of a Mohammed video. Many parts of the Obama administration were rotten to the core and now we’re starting to smell the stench.

Yet, according to the same news media who won’t cover the Susan Rice story, it’s Donald Trump who lied when he tweeted back in March that Obama had Trump Tower “wire-tapped.” The media now seem obsessed with taking him literally. Wire-tapping to Trump, and to many others, is a catch-all phrase for surveillance. It’s splitting hairs, but they’ve sunk their teeth into the phrase like a determined dog because it’s the only hope they have.

The evidence is starting to show that Trump was right. He and his associates at Trump Tower were under surveillance, and possibly for up to a year before he took office, and President Obama may very well have ordered it. The fact that a large segment of the mainstream media chooses to ignore it should shake you to your core.

Phil Valentine is the host of the award-winning, nationally syndicated talk radio show, The Phil Valentine Show.