"The swelling population of illegal immigrants and their kids is costing American taxpayers $135 billion a year, the highest ever, driven by free medical care, education and a huge law enforcement bill, according to the the most authoritative report on the issue yet.

"And despite claims from pro-illegal immigration advocates that the aliens pay significant off-setting taxes back to federal, state and local treasuries, the Federation for American Immigration Reform report tallied just $19 billion, making the final hit to taxpayers about $116 billion.

"State and local governments are getting ravaged by the costs, at over $88 billion.The federal government, by comparison, is getting off easy at $45 billion in costs for illegals.

"President Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and conservatives in Congress are moving aggressively to deal with illegals, especially those with long criminal records. But their effort is being fought by courts and some 300 so-called 'sanctuary communities' that refuse to work with federal law enforcement.

"The added burden on taxpayers and the unfairness to those who have applied to come into the United States through legal channels is also driving the administration's immigration crackdown."

Read entire article here.

"When the White House and Congress release their new tax reform guidelines on Wednesday, they will likely talk a lot about middle-class tax cuts, business tax relief, and a simpler, fairer tax code. These are all popular and useful goals. But the media will not be talking about these goals when the tax reform plan is unveiled.

"Instead, the media pundits will focus almost exclusively on the winners and losers of tax reform, with special attention paid to those whose deductions and exemptions are capped or repealed to pay for lower rates for everyone. Stories about the negative impact of tax reform on this sector or that industry will far outnumber stories about the potential overall benefits of reform.

"Reagan and Kennedy proposed the last two major tax reform plans enacted into law -- Reagan 31 years ago in 1986, and Kennedy 22 years before that in 1964. Both presidents campaigned on restoring economic growth, and sold their plans as a way to get the economy moving again. Both of their plans worked, leading to two of the longest and largest economic expansions in our history. ...

"Tax reform is hard, which is why it has happened only twice in the last half century. But Presidents Kennedy and Reagan showed that focusing on increasing economic growth for everyone, not arguing about winners and losers, is the best way to sell and pass tax reform. And history has shown that a Reagan-Kennedy-style tax reform plan can produce years of 3 percent or higher economic growth."

"The NFL Will Lose Most From This Nonsense. They Deserve To. The NFL will be destroyed by this. Thousands of Americans were already tuning out due to concussion coverage and domestic abuse issues. Now that will accelerate. That's due in large measure to the NFL's utterly inconsistent stance with regard to political posturing. When St. Louis Rams players engaged in 'Hands Up, Don't Shoot' protests in 2014, the league did nothing; when Dallas Cowboys players wanted to wear Dallas police decals to honor the department after a massacre of officers by a black radical, the NFL turned them down flat. When Kaepernick knelt for the Anthem, and other players followed, the NFL did nothing; when some players wanted to wear cleats on September 11, 2016 honoring the fallen, the NFL threatened fines. Is it any wonder that fans feel like the NFL took a side here?

"Here's the bottom line: this conflict isn't good for the country. We need our shared symbols, and we need our shared spaces. Both of those elements are being destroyed for political and ratings gain. If that doesn't stop, we're not going to have anything at all in common anymore."

Read entire article here.

"The number is so large that it explodes everything we were led to believe about how tightly-controlled our government's surveillance programs are.

"The number is 260, and that's how many times Samantha Power, the ambassador to the United Nations under President Obama, reportedly requested the names of American citizens who were included in intelligence reports covering foreign officials.

"The story, by respected Fox News' journalists Bret Baier and Catherine Herridge, said Power made the requests to 'unmask' the 260 names in one year alone, including the period between the presidential election and the inauguration. ...

"It is not a minor point that the names of some people who were involved in President Trump's campaign or his administration were unmasked and then leaked to the anti-Trump media, which breathlessly reported them as evidence of collusion with Russia and even treason. It is not a stretch to wonder if Power was behind any of those leaks."

Read entire article here.

"The United Nations is mostly about noise, hot air and fatuous nonsense, and American presidents usually say nice, harmless things they don't actually believe, to be diplomatic, gracious and polite, rarely rebuking with plain speech the lies and hypocrisy that find such a comfortable home at the United Nations.

"Mr. Trump didn't disappoint the delegates who came to see for themselves if the new American was really the president they had heard so much about. He proved that yes indeed, he is, but he said the necessarily harsh things with the cool demeanor he usually keeps to himself.

"In all, his speech was a good day's work, proving again that when he wants to the Donald can rise to a presidential occasion with grit and panache. The alliances of decent men and women had 'tilted the world toward freedom since World War II,' he told them, and invited them to join the United States and 'fight together, sacrifice together for peace, for freedom, for justice.'

"But these must not be mere words. That was the message for the delegates to take home, because he's a president who sounds like he means it."

"I've suggested that Hillary Clinton's new book, What Happened, would be more accurately titled Why I Should Have Won. But if you wanted to position it as a sequel to her earlier memoir, Living History, you could title it Rewriting History, because What Happened is a recycling bin full of evasions, misleading statements, and flat-out whoppers.

"The biggest lie is the one she has told many times before, on her notorious private email server: 'As the FBI had confirmed, none of the emails I sent or received was marked as classified.' She has said this many times before and been called on it many times before. The verdict? 'That's not true,' said then-FBI director James Comey. 'False,' said PolitiFact. The Washington Post's strange fact-checking system initially gave her two Pinocchios, then decided to give her the full four.

"On top of the lie, Clinton is being misleading in a familiar Clintonian way, because the law doesn't distinguish between information that is classified by its nature, despite not being marked as such, and information that is marked classified. 'Even if information is not marked "classified" in an email, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it,' Comey said at his July 5, 2016, press conference. This means that Hillary caused classified information to be removed from secure channels more than 100 times. That's supposed to be a felony if gross negligence is involved, and it certainly appeared to be in her case."

Read entire article here

"On the same day socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced his 'Medicare for All' health-care plan, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-La.) introduced a last-ditch effort to sorta-kinda repeal and replace ObamaCare. Despite having zero chance of being passed any time soon, Sanders' bill grabbed the limelight for two reasons.

"First, it's a beacon of hope for the demoralized Democratic base. ...

"Second, Sanders got 15 co-sponsors -- including some Democratic senators with presidential ambitions. The fact that so many contenders signed on to a bill that, if enacted, would throw 100 million Americans off their employer-provided health care and cost taxpayers an estimated $32 trillion over a decade revealed just how far to the left the Democratic Party has moved."

"The middle class is back -- or so it seems.

"That's the message from the Census Bureau's latest report on 'Income and Poverty in the United States.' The news is mostly good. The income of the median household (the one exactly in the middle) rose to a record $59,039; the two-year increase was a strong 8.5 percent. Meanwhile, 2.5 million fewer Americans were living beneath the government's poverty line ($24,563 for a family of four). The poverty rate fell from 13.5 percent of the population in 2015 to 12.7 percent in 2016.

"The Census report reinforces Gallup polls -- reported here a few weeks ago -- that Americans have re-embraced their middle-class identities. The Great Recession made people feel economically vulnerable and betrayed. Nearly half of Americans self-identified as belonging to the 'working and lower classes' -- a huge shift from the nearly two-thirds that, before the recession, had classified themselves as 'middle class.' Now, Americans have reverted to tradition. Almost two-thirds again call themselves middle class, Gallup finds.

"People are reassured, because the economy's steady, if plodding, performance seems to embody middle-class virtues: order, predictability and hard work."

"There's no way to sugarcoat it: The hackers who breached the credit bureau Equifax scored big. They made off with the personal identities of 143 million Americans -- names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses, and, in some instances, driver's license numbers. With that kind of information circulating on black markets, criminals can perpetrate all sorts of financial fraud, from opening credit cards in other people's names to claiming their tax returns. It will upturn lives.

"Along with hurricane recovery, addressing this problem should be an urgent priority for Congress. There should be two main focuses.

"First, lawmakers should harden the country's tactical defenses by passing a national data breach bill, requiring companies to disclose their cybersecurity policies, and creating new training opportunities to eliminate the country's cybersecurity workforce shortage. But while these changes might help prevent the next attack, they will not do anything to help victims whose Social Security numbers are now in the wild. So, lawmakers should also adopt a more fundamental shift in strategy when it comes to protecting people's identities: They should replace America's outdated system of Social Security numbers with a secure alternative that effectively turns other forms of personal information into worthless trivia."

Read entire article here.

"Hillary Clinton is again everywhere, touting her new memoir and adding to the list of who and what are to blame for her loss: Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Barack Obama, James Comey, Jill Stein, Vladimir Putin, Julian Assange, Anthony Weiner, sexism, misogyny, the New York Times , lazy women, liberal activists and the 'godforsaken Electoral College.' All she's missing is climate change.

"Hillary's take on 'What Happened' has unsurprisingly unleashed another round of analysis about her mistakes -- Wisconsin, deplorables, email. These sorts of detailed postmortems of failed campaigns are popular, but they tend to obscure the bigger reasons for failure. In this case: The Democratic Party saddled itself with an ethically compromised and joyless candidate, because it had nobody else. ...

"Which brings us to Mr. Sanders, the symbol of Democrats' other big problem. This week the senator, flanked by about one-third of Senate Democrats, released his 'Medicare for All' proposal to nationalize health care. These are the ascendant voices in the party. Yet there are few of them, because their agenda is highly unpopular.

"Mr. Sanders was an unexpected force in the primary, though mostly because he wasn't Hillary. Sanders supporters resent this argument, and claim the only reason his agenda didn't triumph is because the DNC robbed him of the election. If so, why did Bernie's people and ideas fail spectacularly everywhere else on the ballot?"