Did he mean it then?
The national media is usually quick to jump on every tweet from President Donald Trump, hoping to exploit it, find errors in it and turn it against him. One he sent out last week, the media left alone. They didn't want anybody to see it. Why? It had a link to a nine-year-old video by Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, now an advocate of unfettered immigration, speaking out against illegal immigration.
"Illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple," he said to an immigration policy conference at Georgetown Law School. "Until the American people are convinced that we will stop future flows of illegal immigration, we will make no progress on dealing with the millions of illegal immigrants who are here now, and on rationalizing our system on legal immigration.
"When we use phrases like 'undocumented workers,' we convey a message to the American people that their government is not serious about combating illegal immigration, which the American people overwhelmingly oppose," Schumer went on. "People who enter the United States without our permission are illegal aliens, and illegal aliens should not be treated the same as people who entered the U.S. legally," he said.
Trump, cleverly, added to the video only by saying, "Chuck Schumer, I agree!
Words mean things
Speaking of hypocrisy, it seems to be running over from New York politicians this week. While the president exposed Schumer's words, the state's other U.S. senator, Kirsten Gillibrand, who used much of July to attack the role of money in politics, had a fundraising event in the tony Hamptons over the weekend.
"Almost every bad policy that comes out of Washington can be traced back to the toxic influence money has over our politics," she said last month. "We can transform our economy and level the playing field by getting corporate money out of our elections."
Ah, but personal money that comes through corporate heads apparently is another thing.
Lisa Rosenblum, a vice president for cable company Altica USA, was to have hosted the event for Gillibrand and Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin. Rosenblum was an early supporter of Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, giving the Hillary Victory Fund $60,000, according to the Federal Election Commission.
Does he like Russian dressing?
A online investigative website funded by in part by Democratic money titan George Soros is trying to get real dirt on U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. It's asking baseball fans to help with whatever they may have seen when they saw the nominee at a Washington Nationals game, where he had season and playoff tickets.
"We think it's important to figure out as much as we can about a nominee's background before he is confirmed," ProPublica said in reaching out to readers. "So we're turning to you."
Kavanaugh, it said, has gone to games with District Judge James E. Boasberg, an Obama nominee, who was his roommate in law school.
And, ProPublica said, "he's been photographed at least twice wearing blue striped polo shirts." Horrors!
Not long after Kavanaugh was nominated, it was revealed he'd had $60,000 to $200,000 in credit card debt in 2006 and 2016. It turned out he had bought season tickets for himself and for friends. Some of the debt also came from home improvements.
ProPublica said it would "especially like to figure out where he sat, how many seats he bought and which friends attended games with him."
Undoubtedly, the site is planning some explosive article that also will reveal whether the nominee also picked his nose, drank a foreign beer, ate his hot dog without condiments or dissed the abilities of one of the Nationals players to his neighbor.
Laker overboard
A former NBA star who once took himself so lightly that he played an airline co-captain in the 1980 comedy "Airplane" now says the national anthem is indistinguishable from a "slave song."
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, in an editorial for The Hollywood Reporter, said forcing NFL players to stand for the anthem is akin to pre-Civil War slaves expected to sing during their work.
"Currently, the song being demanded is the national anthem during football games," he wrote. "But [in a preseason game] several Eagles players kneeled during the anthem or raised their fists - their way of singing their own song.
"For them," the former Los Angeles Laker said, "lyrics like 'land of the free' don't accurately represent the daily reality for people of color."
Abdul-Jabbar also took issue with Trump's claim many players don't understand what the protests are really about.
"Who would know better how to define their outrage:," he asked, "the privileged darling of white supremacists, the 94 percent-white team owners, the 75 percent-white head coaches or the 70 percent-black players who actually take the field each week?"
Time will tell if kneeling players again will drag the NFL to low television ratings and partially empty stands like they did last year.