Welcome to the commentary magazine podcast today is Thursday January 10th,

2019 Happy Birthday Zach, this is John Pondhoritz your coldly editor of

commentary magazine the 70-odd year old monthly of intellectual analysis political

probing and cultural criticism from a conservative perspective we invite

you to join us at commentary magazine.com where we give you a few free reads ask

you to subscribe 1995 for a digital subscription 2995 for an all-access

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times a year Christine Rosen is not with us today but with us as always senior

editor Abe Greenwald hi a hi John and associate editor and author of the almost

being published unjust from Regri publishing no arothman high-knowa hi John so I

really am sorry I am under the weather and very horse and and sniffly so please

excuse the problematic broadcasting here so I guess Tuesday night we saw the

president speak and then we saw Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schubert speak and we are

now into day 20 or something of the shutdown and the checks don't go out this

week to federal workers and there's no money for the wall and nothing seems to

have changed as a result of the speech and the response no uh yeah that was my

impression was it was kind of the both the speech and the response will start with

the president speech was kind of anti-climactic and I wrote it up for a

commentary magazine.com which you should read where I pretty much said you know

he started out with the speech about it this is a humanitarian crisis it's a

national disaster there's children in mass who are being uh truthfully who are

being misused by disrepidable human traffickers at the border there are people

...