“Only 109 people out of 325,000 were detained and held for questioning,” [Trump] wrote. “Big problems at airports were caused by Delta computer outage, protesters and the tears of Senator Schumer.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer teared up during a press conference on Sunday, calling Trump’s executive order “mean spirited and un-American.” On Monday, he stated his intent to ask for a vote in the Senate to repeal Trump’s order.
Trump did not signal any intention of backing down. Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office on Monday, he dismissed Schumer’s tears as “fake.”
“I noticed that Chuck Schumer yesterday with fake tears, I’m going to ask him who is his acting coach, because I know him very well. I don’t see him as a crier,” Trump said. “If he is, he’s different man. There’s about a 5 percent chance that it was real but I think they were fake tears.”
Over the weekend, openly defiant CEOs, particularly among the tech sector, expressed their displeasure with Trump’s Friday executive order temporarily banning refugees and limiting travel from seven Muslim countries. …
The biggest reason for the anger by tech CEOs at the Trump administration is a simple and … selfish one. The reason for the simmering cold war between tech CEOs and Trump can be summarized in just three letters: H1-B.
The bottom line is that tech CEOs fear Trump will single them out for outsourcing jobs or shut down the so-called H-1B visa program they use to hire high-skilled foreign employees for crucial engineering and technical jobs. …
On the campaign trail, [Trump] promised to “end forever the use of H-1B as a cheap labor program.” He later signaled in a meeting with tech leaders that he’s most concerned about companies misusing the visas to displace lower-wage American workers. …
Tech companies such as Microsoft, Google, IBM, Cisco, Apple, Intel and Facebook say the visas are crucial for specialized jobs they can’t fill domestically because of a shortage of American graduates with the right technical skills. When CEOs spoke out over the weekend about the ban, they pointed out the importance of allowing the “best and brightest” to work in the U.S.
Bloomberg reports that the Trump administration has drafted an executive order aimed at overhauling the work-visa programs technology companies depend on to hire tens of thousands of employees each year.
If implemented, the reforms could force wholesale changes at India companies such as Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd., and shift the way American companies like Microsoft Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. recruit talent. Companies would have to try to hire American first and if they recruit foreign workers, priority would be given to the most highly paid.
Many US tech companies hire cheap programmers from India and elsewhere to work in the US, while the American programmers have to teach the newcomers how to do their jobs before being sacked. The Americans forgo a bonus if they refuse to teach their replacements how to do their job. These H1-B visa have been shamelessly exploited to replace Americans in jobs in America with cheaper imported laborers.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer issued a stern warning on Monday to State Department officials who have criticized President Trump’s decision to temporarily halt immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
“I think that they should either get with the program or they can go,” Spicer told reporters at the daily briefing. “This is about the safety of America and there’s a reason a majority of Americans agree with the president.”
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier Monday that more than 100 agency officials are internally protesting the president’s order on immigration and the Syrian refugee program due to concerns that it will increase threats to U.S. national security rather than advance anti-terror efforts.
It was the starkest confrontation yet between the new president, who is moving swiftly to upend years of government policies, and an entrenched bureaucracy, parts of which are openly hostile to Mr. Trump’s proposals or have struggled to enforce his executive orders, which have been announced with little warning and no input from the rank and file.
The ACLU is getting “multiple reports” that federal customs agents are siding with President Trump — and willfully ignoring a Brooklyn federal judge’s demand that travelers from seven Muslim countries not be deported from the nation’s airports.
“The court’s order could not be clearer… they need to comply with the order,” Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants Rights project, told The Post late Saturday.
Former President Barack Obama said just before leaving office that he wanted to give the new administration space — unless President Donald Trump took some sort of extreme action. …
It took all of 10 days for Obama to decide that criterion had been met by Trump’s executive order suspending the Syrian refugee programs and temporarily blocking other refugees and freezing travel from seven high-risk countries. …
Michael Johns, who served as a speechwriter in the administration of George H.W. Bush, said it is unseemly for Obama to criticize his successor.
“This is entirely unprecedented in modern presidential politics and violates the unstated decorum that generally has governed the conduct of presidents after leaving office,” said Johns, who president and executive director of Tea Party Community. “Everything Trump has done in the first week is truly consistent with what he promised he would do.”
Again, partisanship being ratcheted up by the new left.
President Trump is scheduled to announce his nominee for the vacant US Supreme Court seat this week….
The so-called nuclear option would happen if Republicans fully quash the filibuster, a process Democrats began eroding in 2013 when they nuked the filibuster for most judicial and executive-branch nominees.
The Democrats had the majority then, and heedless of the possibility that the tables might soon be turned, former leader Harry Reid decided to short-circuit the ability of the minority to frustrate the will of President Obama by forcing Democrats to get 60 votes on nominees.
The Democrats used the shift to pack the lower courts with Obama nominees. But, as [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer now admits ruefully, that gives Republicans an edge now that they control Congress and the White House. It means that no matter how much Democrats rail against Trump’s cabinet choices, every single one of them is likely to be confirmed.
However, Reid left one exception when he altered the rules: the Supreme Court. So while Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell might abhor trashing tradition, he might have no choice but to use his power to end the filibuster altogether. …
Once it fell to Trump to fill the seat, Democrats were going to go all-out to prevent him from preserving a conservative majority on the court for the foreseeable future. …
Given the large number of red-state Democrats up for re-election in 2018, there is a chance McConnell will be able to split the opposition and win without a rules change. But that possibility is limited by the certainty that some defecting Democrats would then face primary challenges from the increasingly belligerent Bernie Sanders wing of the party that seeks to recreate the same dynamic on the left that the Tea Party had on the GOP. …
Given the stakes involved in replacing Scalia and the disappearance of any neutral ground left between the two parties, for either side to meekly allow their opponents to shift the court without a battle to the death has become unimaginable.
This comes about because nowadays so much of policy in the US is made by activist judges, which means that the political composition of the highest US court becomes an important matter in politics. With neutral ground shrinking under a tide of partisanship from the new left over the past decade or more, countered at last from the right, everything just comes down to raw numbers. The trend-leading US is now a fractured and divided society politically.
Dubai’s Head of General Security, Dhahi Khalfan this morning expressed his support for President Trump’s “Muslim ban”:
“We completely support Trump in his ban on entry to those who may cause a breach in America’s security. Every country has the right to protect its security from anyone who could be dangerous for the safety of its people.
Previous US administrations have embraced all the wanted men of the Arab world and those classified as terrorists… Trump what you’re doing is right.”
The man police believe opened fire on a Quebec City mosque is 27-year-old Alexandre Bissonnette …
According to his Facebook page, which has since been taken down, Bissonnette …studied anthropology and political science at Laval University. …
The shooting happened less than three kilometres away from Laval’s campus, during evening prayers at the Centre Culturel Islamique de Quebec on Sunday shortly before 8 p.m. …
As Bissonnette’s name began to circulate online, one Facebook group dedicated to welcoming refugees in the Quebec City area expressed “pain and anger” over the news.
The suspect was “unfortunately known to several activists in Quebec City for his pro-Le Pen and anti-feminist positions at Laval University and on social networks,” wrote the Bienvenue aux réfugié.es – Ville de Québec Facebook group.
Alexandre Bissonnette has been accused of killing six people and wounding eight others in a “barbaric” massacre Sunday night at a Quebec City mosque, TVA News reports.
The 27-year-old entered the Centre Culturel Islamique de Quebec and opened fire with a rifle, shooting members of the mosque as they prayed, police and witnesses say.
He is in police custody and was being questioned Monday morning. He is expected to face murder charges.
A second man, Mohamed el Khadir, a Moroccan immigrant also called Mohamed Belkhadir, was previously identified by authorities as a suspect. He was taken into custody near the mosque and questioned, but Quebec Provincial Police said in a tweet Monday afternoon that he is no longer considered to be a suspect. He is now being called a witness. …
Confusion over the number of shooters, based on witness statements and the fact two men were taken into police custody, along with speculation about the motive’s behind the shooting, spread quickly on social media in the hours after the attack. Adding to the disorder were hoaxes, including a viral tweet from a fake Reuters news account that named two “white supremacists” as the attackers, and another hoax, started at Donald Trump forums on Reddit, that claimed the gunmen were recent refugees from Syria. …
Bissonnette Has Right-Wing, Pro-Israel, Pro-Trump & Anti-Immigration Beliefs, a Former Classmate Says. … He said Bissonnette was an “unpopular nerd,” and was not always taken seriously by classmates. “He replied to insults, but never with physical violence,” Labrecque Berger said, adding that he and his twin brother didn’t integrate with other students. They were usually only seen together, he said. …
Bissonnette likes the Facebook pages of U.S. President Donald Trump and French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, but he does not express support for them elsewhere on his page. Other likes include the Israel Defense Forces, United With Israel and Parti Québécois of Université Laval. He also likes U.S. Senator John McCain, a moderate Republican who has opposed Trump on some issues, President George W. Bush, the Canadian New Democratic Party and late Canadian politician Jack Layton, who was a leader of the left-wing NDP, so the likes do not shed much light on Bissonnette’s beliefs. …
About 17 minutes after the first call of shots fired at the mosque, Alexandre Bissonnette, called 911 to police he felt guilty about what he had done …
Witnesses told Reuters that two to three gunmen opened fire on worshippers inside the mosque Sunday night. But police now say Bissonnette was the lone shooter. … It has not been confirmed by police that the shooter said “Allahu akbar,” an Islamic phrase that means “God is great” and is often associated with terrorist attacks. It is also not clear that if it was said, if it was used mockingly.
No longer a conspiracy, it’s just one lone wolf. …
So right now, it looks like Alexandre Bissonnette may be a French-Canadian Dylann Roof. This is unfortunate because leftwing mainstream media journalists will now smugly lecture us that white Christians are the REAL terrorists.
Commenter Richard: “Rightly or wrongly, the Quebec shooting is going to be linked with Trump’s executive order for as long as liberal historians write books”.
Commenter Roli: “The comments section of Canadian media sites are currently flooded with comments ascribing blame to the US and more specifically Trump. As a non-white Canadian myself, I’ve always found Canadians to be very accepting, civil and mature, but on the topic of the US or Americans generally all hell breaks loose.”
The suspect in the deadly attack on a Quebec City mosque was known in the city’s activist circles as a right-wing troll who frequently took anti-foreigner and anti-feminist positions and stood up for U.S. President Donald Trump. …
Acquaintances from Mr. Bissonnette’s earlier years at Les Compagnons-de-Cartier high school in Quebec City say he was introverted, socially awkward and frequently bullied. Toma Popescu remembered bigger kids teasing Mr. Bissonnette for his slight, pallid appearance and his unfashionable clothing. “He dressed like a country boy,” Mr. Popescu said.
The bullies who targeted Mr. Bissonnette would demand his money and his lunch, even roughing him up, Mr. Popescu added. But Mikael Labrecque Berger said that Mr. Bissonnette wasn’t cowed by his social problems at school.
He never seemed to take it like personally,” Mr. Berger. “He had an almost happy attitude about it.”
“Someone [would] tell him, ‘You’re ugly,’ and he would say, ‘You too are ugly.’” …
A spokesman for the Canadian Forces confirmed that Mr. Bissonnette had participated in the cadet program from 2002 to 2004 in the Quebec City area. …
Police say the suspect was not on their radar before the attack. A court records search shows no other involvement with police other than traffic tickets.
A mass shooting occurred on the evening of January 29, 2017, at the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec (CCIQ) a mosque in Sainte-Foy, a suburb of Quebec City, Quebec, Canada.
Six people were killed and eight injured after two gunmen opened fire just after the end of evening prayers at 8:00 p.m. 53 people were reported present at the time of the shooting. Two suspects have been arrested. Quebec authorities are treating the shooting as a terrorist attack. …
According to witnesses at the scene, gunmen wearing ski masks entered the mosque, shortly after the scheduled 7:30 pm prayers began. They began shooting at the 53 worshiping Muslims at about 7:55 p.m, when the first calls to the police were made. According to one witness, the gunmen used an AK-47. According to one witness, the attackers two men “dressed in black” with “Quebec accents” who shouted “Allahu Akbar” during the shooting.
Parody Twitter accounts are circulating false and unverified details about the identities of the shooters in a Quebec-area mosque on Sunday. …
The Twitter account “Reuter New Braek,” which identifies itself as a parody account in its profile, tweeted that police had identified the assailants as two white supremacists, David Aurine and Mathieu Fournier. Police had not publicly identified any suspects at that time.
The tweet was retweeted over 1,000 times in roughly one hour. … The website “The Daily Beast” ran a story citing the Reuters parody account on its site and was the target of much of the ridicule.
People are trying to spin this to their preferred narrative:
Too early to know if #Quebec mosque shooting was perpetrated by right-wing extremists. If it was, then this is result of Trump rhetoric.
If there is a guiding principle to today’s left-leaning bourgeoisie, it is niceness. The votes of this group depend largely on which party is seen as being nicer to those most in need. Being nice to minorities, women, the disabled, gay people, poor people and illegal immigrants is of paramount importance.
But what if niceness is not just vague but destructive? What if niceness is just an excuse for selfishness? What if being nice to groups seen as marginalized is actually hurting them? …
Niceness isn’t really a virtue, Lawler says. It’s more of a cop-out, a moral shrug. “A nice person won’t fight for you,” he points out. “A nice person isn’t animated by love or honor or God. Niceness, if you think about it, is the most selfish of virtues, one, as Tocqueville noticed, rooted in a deep indifference to the well-being of others.” …
Today, in Britain as in America, the nice-ocracy simply shrugs as the struggling classes make terrible decisions. Who are we to impose our values on others, ask the nice-ocrats? Isn’t this or that regional patois just as good as standard English? If children in the poorer zip codes are getting a terrible education, the nice-ocrats don’t make a fuss. People are intelligent in their own ways, say the nice-ocrats. If testing doesn’t support this, we should cast doubt on the tests. Anyway, if the not-so-gifted people raise not-so-gifted children, there won’t be additional competition for those few spots on the best campuses. …
Not-nice Trump voters sometimes speak dismissively of immigrants and others who refuse to learn English; nice Clinton voters are shocked that anyone could hold such cruel views. It isn’t nice to point out that some people don’t have very good command of grammar. Even teachers no longer make it a priority to teach others how to speak properly … To the nice people, “attempts to foist alleged grammatical ‘correctness’ on native speakers of an ‘incorrect’ dialect are nothing but the unacknowledged and oppressive exercise of social control — the means by which the elites deprive whole social classes and people of self-esteem.” Moreover, all forms of expression are equally valid, says the nice-ocrat … So refusing to teach grammar is “both in accord with a correct understanding of the nature of language and is politically generous.” If people who can’t speak properly find themselves subsequently accruing little value in today’s job market, the nice-ocrat simply shrugs again. …
Today’s elites, as Charles Murray has noted in his book, Coming Apart, … refuse to preach what they practice. They are well aware of the pro-social behavior that leads to success, but are too nice to encourage others to follow their lead. Indeed, they recoil in horror from the prospect of being thought “judgmental” toward others.
Dalrymple, who was born in 1949, is old enough to remember a time when the upper classes and the educational establishment encouraged the lower classes to acquire virtue. The lower classes took the challenge seriously.
There is a logic to the 7 countries. Six are failed states known to have large ISIS activity, and one, Iran, is a sworn enemy of the U.S. and worldwide sponsor of terrorism. … And, the 7 countries on the list were not even so-designated by Trump. Rather, they were selected last year by the Obama administration as posing special risks for visa entry. …
There are accusations that one particular provision discriminates. It gives preference to those fleeing religious persecution in countries in which they are a religious minority … This is being referred to as a de facto discrimination against Muslims because it mostly applies to Christians. Well, that’s because Christians are the most persecuted religion in the Middle East, by Muslims. If there were a country in which Muslims were persecuted by another majority religion, they would get preference. …
An offshoot of the “Muslim ban” claim is the claim that Trump deliberately excluded countries in which he does business. This argument is made in order to claim Muslims are targeted even though most of the Muslim world is not affected. The problem, of course, is that Trump worked off of the Obama administration’s list of particularly risky countries for visa entry.
There is a lot of fake news in the media nowadays.
You will note I say Islam and not some other euphemistic expression like radical Islam or Islamism or Islamofascism. Islam.
I know that disturbs you because chances are you live in a world where cultural relativism prevails and all religions — fusty old things that they are — are equal.
Well, it is so if you think so, but I will note again that at least one interested party — the current president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi — has declared bluntly that his religion is in dire need of a reformation. Chances are he knows more about Islam than you. He certainly does than me. Also, he lives in a hellacious region of the world dominated by that religion and its violent ideology.
How dangerous is that ideology? Ask yourself this: Why is it that since 9/11/2001 there he have been 30,209 terror attacks in the name of Allah? There have been 38 in the last six days alone, resulting in 425 killed and 419 injured. There were also nine suicide bombings during that time frame. …
How about an ideology that urges you to do these things, just as it always has since the seventh century? Could that be the reason — just possibly?
