Donald Trump’s approval average over at RealClearPolitics continues to inch down due to the Government shutdown….
Will the Republican lawmakers continue to stick with him as he loses with the American public?
Could Trump be helping the Democrats for 2020?
It is becoming increasing clear that at SOME POINT?
US Senate majority leader Mitch McDonnell is gonna have to go to his Republican party senators and offer a vote on reopening the government with funding….
He’ll have to take the heat, which will be a political payback for the last two years of ignoring the Democrats in order to please Donald Trump….
House Democrats and some Republicans HAVE sent to the Senate bills to open the government….
While the media has comments that this can go on for a long while?
I won’t….
Not if the Republicans in Congress want to survive….
When government employee’s start getting notices from creditors about losing their home and they start begging for food to feed their families?
The Grand ole Party is DONE….
They will have followed Trump off the cliff…
“The U.S. government shutdown over President Trump’s demand for border wall funding became the longest in the modern era as it stretched into its 22nd day Saturday with no end in sight,” Bloomberg reports.
“Negotiations are at a standstill and no more talks are scheduled for the weekend or early next week. The White House scuttled efforts to reach a deal on Capitol Hill on Thursday, and Trump’s budget team is drawing up contingency plans for a shutdown that extends through the end of February.”
Axios: “This could go on for a long time. Early in the 1995 shutdown, Clinton and Republican leaders were already talking about a deal to end their budget battles. But Trump isn’t talking to Democrats anymore.”
Rural Western states that voted for President Trump are disproportionately affected by the government shutdown, which today sets a record as the longest in U.S. history, since federal workers there make up a large share of the workforce.
The big picture: Out of the 10 states with the most affected federal employees per 10,000, six voted for Trump — Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Idaho and West Virginia….
The partial government shutdown, hours away from becoming the longest in U.S. history, means that millions of low-income Americans are about to get their February food stamps a few weeks early — an unprecedented payout of billions of dollars in benefits that has states and grocery stores scrambling.
After raising alarm that the food-stamp program could run out of funding for February, the Trump administration announced this week that it had come up with a way to bankroll more than $4.8 billion in benefits next month — with just one catch: Benefits for the nearly 39 million people enrolled in the program must be paid out by Jan. 20, weeks earlier than usual….
The head of Mexico’s immigration office, Tonatiuh Guillen, left on Wednesday on a trip to El Salvador and Honduras to meet with his counterparts and other authorities, said Interior Ministry spokesman Hector Gandini.
Mexico hopes to discourage a mass exodus from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and wants Central Americans who decide to migrate north to do so in an orderly way and through legal ports of entry.
“The doors to Mexico are open to anyone who wants to enter in an orderly fashion,” Gandini told Reuters in a telephone interview. “But whoever wants to come in illegally will be deported.”
Previous Central American caravans became a flashpoint in the debate over U.S. immigration policy….
On Friday’s broadcast of CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Senate Finance Committee Chairman and Senate Judiciary Committee member Chuck Grassley (R-IA) stated that President Trump declaring a national emergency is “a bad precedent,” and he should not do so.
Grassley said, “The president is threatening emergency action — a national emergency declaration. I don’t think he should do that. I think it’s a bad precedent, and it contravenes the power of the purse that comes from the elected representatives of the people.”….
IF THERE WAS ANY DOUBT, WHEN NANCY PELOSI SAYS NO, SHE MEANS IT … People in the White House ranging from PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP to VICE PRESIDENT MIKE PENCE have made clear they want to negotiate with SPEAKER NANCY PELOSI on the wall. She has said no. She doesn’t believe the U.S. needs the wall, as described by the president, and has now kept that position for three weeks. They keep asking when she’ll put an offer on the table, but why would she? She doesn’t want what the president wants.
— THE WHITE HOUSE HAS A TOUGH TIME KEEPING ITS STORY STRAIGHT … Washington has been wrestling with this funding mess for more than a month now. White House aides have been making it up as they go along. They’ve said the president would be fine with spending bills without wall money, then he threatened to veto them, putting the government in shutdown.
THE PRESIDENT has said he wants this fight. But this week he said he didn’t, and it’s the Democrats’ fault. The White House has been on every side of whether they’d be interested in a DACA-for-wall trade. There’s one guy who matters here, and it’s the president, and even he is shifting. NYT’S Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Maggie Haberman on ‘mercurial Trump’
— THE PRESIDENT’S BAG OF TRICKS IS NEARLY EMPTY … He’s tried the Oval Office address and he’s stormed out of a negotiation. He went down to the border, did an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity and launched his usual Twitter attacks, but none of it has moved the needle.
— … BUT TRUMP HAS A STOMACH FOR CONFLICT: The president has finally decided to have an all-out fight with Democrats, and this is what it looks like. He’s being pushed along by the Freedom Caucus, which believes if you hold out in a situation like this, you can win….
President Trump said “he was alone in the White House with a plan at the ready to reopen the federal government, but close White House advisers and staff said they remained in the dark about how he would end the three-week partial shutdown,” Politicoreports.
Said one Republican: “No one knows what he will do, and the president has not decided yet, so it keeps everyone guessing. This could go on another week and he could declare an emergency, or this will go on until February.”
Donald Trump
@realDonaldTrump
3 hours ago
We have a massive Humanitarian Crisis at our Southern Border. We will be out for a long time unless the Democrats come back from their “vacations” and get back to work. I am in the White House ready to sign!
3 hours ago
I just watched a Fake reporter from the Amazon Washington Post say the White House is “chaotic, there does not seem to be a strategy for this Shutdown. There is no plan.” The Fakes always like talking Chaos, there is NONE. In fact, there’s almost nobody in the W.H. but me, and…
….I do have a plan on the Shutdown. But to understand that plan you would have to understand the fact that I won the election, and I promised safety and security for the American people. Part of that promise was a Wall at the Southern Border. Elections have consequences!
4 hours ago
Democrats could solve the Shutdown in 15 minutes! Call your Dem Senator or Congresswoman/man. Tell them to get it done! Humanitarian Crisis.
4 hours ago
23% of Federal inmates are illegal immigrants. Border arrests are up 240%. In the Great State of Texas, between 2011 & 2018, there were a total of 292,000 crimes by illegal aliens, 539 murders, 32,000 assaults, 3,426 sexual assaults and 3000 weapons charges. Democrats come back!
RFD TV’s Farm Report must be going crazy….
U.S. shutdown sends grain traders, farmers hunting for data
P.J. Huffstutter, Tom Polansek
CHICAGO (Reuters) – When the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced last week that a slew of key farm reports would not be released on Friday due to the partial government shutdown, the phones at crop forecaster Gro Intelligence blew up.
The USDA was set to release its views on the projected size of U.S. soybean stockpiles, among other data, following a record-large domestic harvest and a trade war with China that has slowed U.S. exports.
Commodity traders, economists, grain merchants and farmers are anxious for crop updates as they work to project their financial balance sheets and make spring planting decisions.
“It’s been crazy busy,” said Sara Menker, chief executive of New York-based Gro Intelligence.
The shutdown, now in its third week, has rippled across the already struggling U.S. farm economy ahead of President Donald Trump’s planned address at the American Farm Bureau conference in Louisiana on Monday. Federal loan and farm aid applications have also been delayed.
To fill the void on data, traders and farmers are relying on private crop forecasters, satellite imagery firms and brokerages offering analyses on trade and supplies. Some have been scouring Twitter for tidbits on shifting weather patterns and rumors of grain exports, but say it is difficult to replace the USDA.
“We’re just doing the best we can, looking for as much information as is available,” said Brian Basting, economist for Illinois-based broker Advance Trading, which provides customers its own harvest and crop supply estimates.
Dan Henebry, an Illinois corn and soy farmer, said the absence of USDA data was difficult.
“You delay all these reports and the market has no idea where to go, other than trade guesses,” Henebry said.
HUNT FOR NUMBERS
Gro Intelligence has been offering free access to its data platform since Dec. 27, and released worldwide supply-demand crop forecasts on Friday.
The company’s estimates for the U.S. 2018-2019 corn crop yield were 177.4 bushels per acre, below both USDA’s last forecast and lower than the average of estimates in a Reuters survey. Gro pegged the U.S. 2018-2019 soybean yield at 50.6 bushels per acre, also below USDA and below the range of Reuters’ survey.
The company will keep its platform open for the duration of the shutdown, Menker said….
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-shutdown-agriculture/u-s-shutdown-sends-grain-traders-farmers-hunting-for-data-idUSKCN1P51G3?feedType=RSS&feedName=domesticNews