The Rod Martin Report - MLK, Cuba, Obamacare Repeal, and More

The Rod Martin Report – January 16, 2017

Martin Luther King’s Legacy
Parting Shots: Obama Betrays Cuba
The Deep State’s War Against Trump
Obamacare Repeal Moves Forward
Why Democrats Preach that Jobs “Can’t Come Back”
More Gun Deaths in Chicago Than Iraq and Afghanistan

Dear Friends,

Happy MLK Day! This is our last Report before we head not only into Donald Trump’s inauguration but, far more importantly, the closing moments of the Era of the Obamanation.

Sherri and I will be on hand at the Capitol to sing “Ding Dong the Witch is Dead.” Be sure to join in from wherever you are: you all know the words.

Trust me: we won’t be alone.

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Today is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, which represents virtually everything whatsoever that is opposite Barack Obama. King believed in America, and called it to live up to its founding principles.

King sought for “the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners” to “sit down at the table of brotherhood.” King called the church to stand for Christ’s teachings out in the world where it counted. King worked to build a nation wherein all people were “judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin.”

Oh, and as my dear friend (and Dr. King’s niece) Alveda King points out, Martin Luther King was pro-life, and would have made life his cause had he survived long enough to do so.

Oh how different from the Obamanation of Desolation, the Divider-in-Chief, the Great Zero.

Here at The Martin Organization, we celebrate every year by reading Dr. King’s “Letter From the Birmingham Jail“. It’s about far more than race, and it’s well worth the effort. I encourage you to join us. And I encourage all of us to strive for the ideals contained therein.

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Continuing to milk his last weeks in office for every opportunity to harm America’s friends and reward America’s enemies, the almost-gone President summarily revoked America’s longstanding “Wet-Foot Dry-Foot” policy late last week.

From USA Today:

“Effective immediately, Cuban nationals who attempt to enter the United States illegally and do not qualify for humanitarian relief will be subject to removal,” Obama said. “By taking this step, we are treating Cuban migrants the same way we treat migrants from other countries.”

Choke, cough…”the same as other countries”??? Obama is doing everything he can to flood the country with illegals — including all the unvetted military-aged Muslim males he can recruit from ISIS territory in Syria — but refugees from Communism seeking to reunite with their families in Miami? Well, they just need to go back to the prison camp.

This is a huge gift to Raul Castro and an enormous betrayal of the Cuban people. It is also, of course, political payback to South Florida for not delivering the election as-planned to Hillary. And note well that, as with his betrayal of Israel at the UN, if this was not in fact payback, Obama didn’t have the courage to do it before the election.

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The “Deep State” and the media continued their war against Donald Trump this week, overplaying their hand about as badly as Hillary did last fall with their ludicrous Buzzfeed story and CNN’s breathless coverage of same. That last bit brought about one of the most epic smackdowns of the Enemedia, well, ever.

But Trump’s presser was nothing beside the sheer embarrassment of the whole sordid thing, epitomized by the DNI, James Clapper, having to apologize to the President-Elect for the release of the fake dossier.

To get a sense of what’s really going on at this point, you have to appreciate the cross-ideological range of concern. The Intercept, a leftwing publication created and funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, ran this highly enlightening piece entitled “The Deep State Goes to War With President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer“. Over at the #NeverTrump, neoconservative pro-Intelligence Community (IC) Weekly Standard, Bill Kristol’s merry band published “The Sordid History of the Firm Behind the Trump-Russia Dossier“. Meanwhile, Richard Viguerie, Cold Warrior extraordinaire and “Funding Father of the Right” ran this: “The Deep State Tries to Destroy Donald Trump“.

Even Bob Woodward says their claims are “garbage”.

That covers just about the entire ideological spectrum.

That this sort of assault is going to be our everyday life for the next four or eight years should by now be obvious. An anonymous friend of mine details this somewhat over at Breitbart in “The Deep State Strikes Back: The Permanent Campaign Against Donald Trump“. It’s worth a look.

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Oh, this one is too good — and too telling — to miss: #NeverTrump National Review points out that in the entire declassified intelligence report released last week, one word never appears, not even once: “Podesta”.

And lest you think that the Democrats are suddenly more concerned about cybersecurity than they were when Hillary put all of America’s secrets on a homebrew server (which the FBI tells us was hacked by at least five foreign intelligence agencies, not one of which the Obama Administration imposed sanctions against), consider this: John Podesta’s email password…was “password”.

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Some conservatives have been taken off guard by the suggestion that the IC, and particularly the CIA, would have a leftist orientation.

I truly have to marvel at that. Barack Obama has been hiring and firing people for eight years now, relentlessly and purposefully. Why some of our people don’t grasp that elections have consequences I cannot fathom.

But it’s much worse than that. My pal Jack Wheeler (architect of the Reagan Doctrine) has been chronicling the left’s stranglehold on the CIA in particular for many years. As he describes in the article to which I just linked above, he first encountered it up-close back in the 1980s, when the agency was doing everything in its power to thwart Reagan’s (and Charlie Wilson’s) efforts to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, in part by arming only those Afghans who refused to fight the Russians and who ultimately joined the Taliban.

Jack, Charlie and Reagan eventually overcame them. But the damage was done, and the story is instructive. And while the battle was won in Afghanistan, the war in Langley was decisively lost. (It was lost again when George W. Bush briefly fought it with his too-short appointment of Porter Goss.)

Why our side thinks that a government entirely composed of political appointees and unionized bureaucrats would play fair I simply cannot imagine. Democrats don’t stop campaigning. Ever. And they understand that campaigning is less brochures and more agitprop.

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Meanwhile, Donald Trump “proved” yet again that he’s in the pocket of the Russians. He’s spooked Lockheed Martin into building us more fighter jets for less money. Because, you know, what Russia desperately wants is for America to build more fighter jets, and for less money.

If you don’t think there are people at the Pentagon and in the IC who are deeply upset about this victory for the American people, Trump’s similar success with Boeing over Air Force One, and what this is all likely to mean for the next decade of defense procurement, I have some swamp land to sell you.

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In our seemingly-weekly schadenfreude section, we feature our RMR Loser of the Week, George Soros. It’s being widely reported that the Nazi-collaborating convicted-insider-trading Soros bet heavily against U.S. markets in the run-up to what he thought would be Hillary’s election. He lost, and at most recent count, has lost over $1 billion of his own money.

The linked Wall Street Journal story, like others, suggests that Soros shorted the market after the election. But of course this isn’t true: the market surged at the open on November 9th and has only just paused now, two months later.

Which means..wait for it…Hillary Clinton’s and the Democrat Party’s biggest funder believed that her victory would tank the market.

Let that sink in for a minute.

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Going back for just a second to the IC, here’s America’s soon-to-be top-ranking Democrat, the Senate Minority Leader, stating flatly that the Intelligence Community will “get back at” the duly-elected President of the United States.

This is not the picture of apolitical public servants we’re being fed. One can genuinely hope the New York Senator is mistaken. But if he’s not, he’s describing the mafia.

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Oh, and another liberal called for an actual military coup this week, this time Rosie O’Donnell.

Don’t you find it just a bit odd that Democrats suddenly love the CIA and the Pentagon? And are scared of Russia? Because that’s…absolutely never happened before.

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So on the other side of things, Republicans kicked off the new Congress by taking the first steps to repeal Obamacare.

Lots of us have been concerned about this, and about where Donald Trump stood. We were right on the first count, as Paul Ryan publicly flirted with a “Repeal and Delay” strategy that some said might not result in a new healthcare law for two years or more.

But lo and behold, it was none other than Donald Trump who killed thatboondoggle, announcing that the “Unaffordable Care Act” will be repealed and replaced “simultaneously” as soon as his pick for Secretary of Health and Human Services, Dr. Tom Price, is confirmed by the Senate.

In case you’ve forgotten, Price has written and sponsored four separate repeal-and-replace bills since Obamacare passed.

I note this because many of us were concerned during the campaign as to whether The Donald was serious about his promise to replace Obamacare. Picking Price proved he was. This past week’s woodshedding of the GOP leadership drove that home.

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On that note about Price: it’s worth remembering that before the Democrats forced Obamacare on us, and for every one of the last seven years up to and including this week, the unending mantra of the left — from Obama down — has been that “Republicans have never offered any alternative.”

If the only Republican you’d ever heard of was Congressman (and soon to be Secretary) Tom Price, that would be an over-the-top lie, right up there with “if you like your plan you can keep it” and “if you like your doctor you can keep him.”

And speaking of “price”, albeit lower-case, Sherri’s and my health insurance premiums just spiked 125%. And if that weren’t bad enough, I now pay for my baby daughter alone more than double what I paid for our entire family before Obama.

Yeah, “affordable.” Right.

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The media is suddenly very concerned about supposed Trump conflicts of interest (which boil down to “no one who owns anything, has ever built anything, and isn’t a government bureaucrat or other welfare recipient may ever run for office, unless they’re a Democrat”).

Note that the people elected Trump precisely because he was a business mogul. They knew he owned stuff.

Anyway, my friend Brian Ward points out this little “conflict of interest”, one among countless others, that the media didn’t think important for the last eight years:

“The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is located at 1700 G St. in D.C. The owner? Neil Bluhm, longtime bundler for Obama. CFPB paid almost $175m in renovations for a building that only cost $100m to build including the land.

“What’s more, no signature exists anywhere giving authority for that project to move forward. And of course 100% of all political donations from CFPB employees went to Dems running for office this past election.”

A prize to anyone who can find a hard-hitting expose of this, at any time in the last eight years, on NBC, MSNBC, CNN, ABC or CBS.

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In a 180 degree reversal from the unanimous expert prognostications of just two months ago, the World Bank announced that Donald Trump’s tax plan could jumpstart the entire global economy. This is just a week after The Times of London pronounced Britain’s post-Brexit economy the top economy in the worldfor 2016.

Beware Nobel Prize-winners with an agenda.

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Speaking of Brexit, over the weekend Trump announced plans for a yuuuge trade deal with the UK. So much for “back of the queue.”

I’ve been writing about this dream of a North Atlantic Free Trade Area for more than a quarter century. Here’s a piece I’m especially fond of, that I wrote back in 2002. It’s extraordinarily gratifying to watch it come to pass.

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It was also a great week for jobs, as Amazon announced plans to add over 100,000 of them in the U.S. over the next 18 months. That’s another big win for the incoming President, with whom the online giant pointedly sought to patch things up. Meanwhile, Alibaba’s Jack Ma promised Trump he’d bring one million jobs to America, jobs which presumably otherwise would go to China.

This is a significant departure from the previous President’s prognosis:

I know, I know: I’ve run that clip before. But there’s a reason I’m showing it to you again.

Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton want you to believe that it’s impossible to bring back manufacturing jobs to America. Remember Bill Clinton’s famous 1992 speech to that effect in New Hampshire, and the re-enactment of same in Primary Colors? It’s worth a quick look.

Okay, fine. That’s the conventional wisdom, and you know that’s never wrong.

But if it’s right, explain to me this: why does Toyota have a plant in Kentucky? And Indiana? And Texas? And Mississippi? Why does Honda have two plants in Ohio and one each in Indiana and Alabama?

Why do Nissan and Infiniti make cars, trucks and SUVs in Tennessee and Mississippi if the jobs are gone and can never come back “because America just can’t compete”? Why is Subaru in Indiana? Volkswagen in Tennessee, Hyundai in Alabama, Kia in Georgia, BMW in South Carolina? Why is Mercedes in both Alabama and South Carolina, if it can make more money in Mexico?

Why? Because America’s the greatest market in the world, that’s why, with world-beating productivity to boot.

So why do the Democrats insist the jobs are gone and can never come back? Simple: because Democrat policies kill jobs, and Democrats don’t want to be blamed for the cause when workers get shafted with the effect.

Nowhere is this more true than in the Rust Belt states that voted for Donald Trump. Mandatory union dues, closed shops, insane tax and regulatory regimes, all make those states impossible to compete in: there’s a reason none of the plants I just named are in Michigan, once the center of the global auto industry.

Democrats for decades have promised Rust Belt workers that impersonal forces beyond anyone’s control were the reason for their malaise. And Obama’s little speech above was his preparation of the way for the Hildebeast to take that nightmare national, increasing what is already the world’s highest corporate tax rate, imposing truly socialized medicine, and taking the Obama-era regulatory state to heights not seen this side of Venezuela.

Donald Trump is daily proving those Emperors have no clothes. And short of a Supreme Court majority, that may prove to be his greatest achievement as President.

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It’s hard to fully grasp just how dreadful Obama’s been without visual aids. Here’s one of the most striking:

This is the Obama record. These deficits managed to take 240 years of accumulated national debt and double it in just eight years, from $9 trillion to almost $20 trillion.

Can you point to anything we have to show for that? Good luck. And more to the point, this was just Hillary’s warm-up act, on the certain path to “Democratic Socialism”.

And don’t forget: Obama’s also the only American President ever to lose the country’s credit rating. You can tell how much Democrats cared.

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I posted that graphic on Facebook, and immediately got a chorus of lefties telling me that these record deficits are “because of Bush.” But alas, you can’t believe that lie and simultaneously believe their other one: that Obama led the economy to an epic recovery in 2009, and it’s been booming under his policies ever since.

Oops. Which is it? It can’t be both. And the truth is, it’s neither.

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Given these things, America’s top-ranking Democrat (post-Obama) Chuckie Schumer’s tweet this week was a refreshing blast of honesty:

Realizing he’d told the truth, Schumer hurriedly deleted this about an hour later. But not before we all got screenshots.

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Barack Obama ended his Presidency with a Farewell Address in his hometown of Chicago. Which is a most fitting microcosm of his failures.

Chicago is run by Obama’s first White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emanuel, and has been run by Democrats for a century. It is a “Sanctuary City” and the Mecca of gun control: the showplace for Democrats “proving” they’re smarter than the Constitution.

In 2016, 762 people were murdered in Chicago. That’s a 63% increase from the 468 murders recorded in 2015 and almost double the murders in 2014. It’s also the highest rate in 19 years, which is to say, since the last time a Democrat was President.

Shootings are also the worst in the nation. 4,331 people were shot in Chicago in 2016, up from 3,550 in 2015, according to police.

Final numbers aren’t in yet, but it appears that Chicago is actually going to end 2016 with more gun crimes and gun murders than the entire state of Florida.

Chicago’s population is just 2.7 million. Florida’s is 20 million, including 1.5 million concealed carry permit-holders.

Just to be clear, that’s Florida: third largest state, highly diverse population, land of “Miami Vice” for goodness sake!, few gun laws, Castle Doctrine…yeah, exactly what liberals say will necessarily produce a war zone.

And as long as we’re talking about war zones, since 2001, Chicago has had over 8,000 murders. During the same period, America lost 4,504 servicemen in Iraq, 2,384 in Afghanistan.

It is literally safer to go to war than to live in a Democrat-controlled American city.

This election was not about a friendly tug-of-war between elephants and donkeys. Those days are gone. This election was about utterly opposite worldviews, with real-world consequences as different as daylight and dark.

It remains to be seen whether we’ll achieve what we hope for these next few years. But that we dodged a lethal bullet cannot reasonably be denied.

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A few last things before we wrap up. Donald Trump has officially asked the British to return the Winston Churchill bust Obama removed from the Oval Office. Trump’s cabinet picks are sailing through their confirmation hearings. And Kellyanne Conway will be speaking at the 2017 March for Life in Washington. You certainly won’t want to miss that.

You can read about the world anywhere. You come to RodMartin.org to understand it. The Rod Martin Report was the most accurate analysis of 2016. Do your friends a favor and pass it along; and remember, there’s a lot more we publish each week that doesn’t make the newsletter.

For Freedom,

P.S. Speaking of Washington, Sherri and I are off to the Inauguration this week, where we’ll see a lot of old friends, celebrate the transition and attend a ball or two. I expect we’ll see some of you there, and any of you who are going to be in town, please let me know. It’s going to be a truly great day.