"President Trump said Wednesday he will not sign an immigration deal that does not include funding for a border wall.

"'It's gotta include the wall,' Trump said at a press conference with Norway's prime minister. 'Any solution has to include the wall.'

"'We need the wall for security, we need the wall for safety, we need the wall for stopping the drugs from pouring in.'

"Trump sought to clarify comments he made Wednesday, when he told lawmakers he would sign just about any immigration deal they put on his desk."

"Immigration policy always spurs a debate. It's a complex matter, but also there's so much emotion on both sides. But the current debate suffers from an unfortunate malady. One side seems not actually to want the policy it claims it wants; it instead simply wants the fight.

"Democrats, while gnashing their teeth about the fate of 'Dreamers,' illegal immigrants who arrived as children, behave as though they don't actually want to keep these immigrants in the country. Instead, they want to keep the Dreamer issue alive for political gain in 2018 and 2020. ...

"Opposing Trump is paramount to Democrats. Everything else is secondary. Passing DACA legislatively would also have the politically unwanted effect of taking the issue off the table for Democrats in this year's elections.

"As the immigration debate heats up, all observers and commentators ought to keep this in mind that Democrats may legitimately care about these young illegal immigrants affected by DACA, but not enough to fix the problem."

"A federal judge on Monday dismissed the charges against Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy, his two sons and a militia member for their role in a 2014 standoff with federal officers.

"Judge Gloria Navarro dismissed the charges against the men 'with prejudice,' meaning they can't be put on trial again, The Arizona Republic reported. She said the conduct of prosecutors in the case had been 'outrageous' and violated due process rights.

"Navarro also ordered Bundy be released from prison.

"Navarro last month declared a mistrial in the criminal conspiracy case against Bundy and his sons, saying federal prosecutors had improperly withheld evidence that could have changed the outcome of the trial."

"This isn't the first time the left has questioned the aptitude of a conservative president. Throughout Ronald Reagan's eight years in office, liberals dismissed the Gipper as a Grade B actor who attended tiny Eureka College and who was so stupid that he thought ketchup was a vegetable.

"He was accused of 'a penchant for offering simplistic solutions to hideously complex problems' who watched 'Little House on the Prairie' reruns with Nancy in the White House at night. This simpleton won two landslide presidential elections, resurrected the stagflation-ravaged economy of the 1970s, and won the Cold War. What an imbecile.

"My friend Craig Shirley, one of the definitive Reagan biographers, tells me that 'one similarity between Reagan and Trump is that both were always underestimated by their political adversaries.' ...

"It's time for the left to engage in some serious self-appraisal. If Mr. Trump is such an idiot, what does this say about the intelligence quotient of the elites on the left he keeps outsmarting?"

"Washington is a circus with many rings. If you're bored with Robert Mueller's pursuit of Donald Trump's Russian friends, which doesn't appear to be going anywhere, there's always a new chapter in the president's verbal duel with Rocket Man in North Korea.

"This week there's a new book out (there's always a new book out), which promises tales of fire and fury at the White House and delivers mostly the fevered imagination of a New York columnist determined to shred what was left of his reputation after writing earlier bombshells with wet fuses. ...

"His reliability has been challenged before, writes Paul Farhi of The Washington Post, and he cites Wolff on Wolff describing his earlier life as an internet entrepreneur: 'How many grievous lies had I told? How many moral lapses had I committed? How many ethical breaches had I fallen into? I was in a short-term mode.'

"A writer with a reputation like that might not be taken seriously in Chicago or Cleveland or Sacramento, but for the Washington circus the ringmasters are always searching for material, and Mr. Wolff and his book are likely to survive through the weekend news cycle. He can cry all the way to the bank, because there's a market for entertaining stories of Trump trivia, authentic or not, and the appetite for fancy in the home bubble of Trump Derangement Syndrome is voracious. ...

"The president should reconsider his urge to strike back, and take the oldest advice that a politician ever got: 'When your enemy is killing himself, get out of his way.'"

"One in five inmates in federal prison are foreign-born, of which 92 percent are unlawfully present in the United States, according to a recently released report.

"The report, produced jointly by the Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice, shows that of 58,766 'known or suspected aliens' in custody between the Bureau of Prisons and United States Marshal facilities, 37,557 are confirmed non-citizens. Of that number, 35,334 (a full 94 percent) were illegally present in the United States. It's worth noting that DHS data returns are incomplete, because state prisons and local jails, where nearly 90 percent of the U.S. incarcerated population is held, do not routinely provide such data to the federal government."

"Lost in the Democratic, media driven catharsis of what happened in state legislative races in Virginia this week, and last November, is the series of recent Republican victories in places as cobalt blue as Massachusetts in recent weeks. Even this week, Republicans won a special election outside Tampa, where Democrats hold a higher registration advantage.

"With state legislative Republicans at all-time highs after the 2016 elections, the political goalposts have moved so far to the right (nearly 1000 state legislative seats flipped to Republican under President Obama), there should be plenty of opportunities for Democrats to reclaim momentum, and they haven't. In the last quarter of 2017, it has been Republicans flipping blue seats to red -- three of them in the bluest states in the country. With better candidates, now backed by a solid tax reform package, Republicans will continue to win in blue areas in 2018.

"The Democrats, and their allies on shows like 'Morning Joe,' suggest that what has happened in Virginia alone is the beginning of something bigger. All that happened in Virginia is that a blue state voted blue. It has been three election cycles since Republicans won their only statewide seat of the Obama-era in Virginia."

"Last week, former Obama national security advisor Susan Rice -- she of the infamously shifting Benghazi explanations -- published an op-ed in the New York Times dedicated to the proposition that Trump's 'America first' foreign policy has 'relinquish[ed] the nation's moral authority in these difficult times.' According to Rice, Trump has shifted away from seizing 'opportunities to expand prosperity, freedom and security' around the globe.

"Yet when confronted with protests in Iran, it was Trump, not Obama, who took the hard-line approach in support of freedom.

"In the past few days, thousands of Iranians have marched against the terrorist regime in Tehran. As of this writing, twelve of these Iranians have been murdered by the country's Revolutionary Guard. Trump has tweeted his support for the protesters, spoken out in their favor, and made clear that he'd love to see them topple the regime itself.

"Contrast Trump's behavior with that of the Obama administration, which deliberately ignored anti-regime protests in 2009, choosing instead to cozy favor with the regime and maximize Tehran's regional power. The administration even went so far as to give Tehran a legal pathway to a nuclear weapon. Obama stated that while he was 'troubled' by violence against the protesters, it was 'up to Iranians to make decisions about who Iran's leaders will be,' and he hoped 'to avoid the United States being the issue inside of Iran.'"

"We wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Good tidings we bring to you and your kin; We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!"

"Congressional investigators tell Fox News that Tuesday's seven-hour interrogation of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe contained numerous conflicts with the testimony of previous witnesses, prompting the Republican majority staff of the House Intelligence Committee to decide to issue fresh subpoenas next week on Justice Department and FBI personnel.

"While HPSCI staff would not confirm who will be summoned for testimony, all indications point to demoted DOJ official Bruce G. Ohr and FBI General Counsel James A. Baker, who accompanied McCabe, along with other lawyers, to Tuesday's HPSCI session.

"The issuance of a subpoena against the Justice Department's top lawyer could provoke a new constitutional clash between the two branches, even worse than the months-long tug of war over documents and witnesses that has already led House Speaker Paul Ryan to accuse DOJ and FBI of 'stonewalling' and HPSCI Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., to threaten contempt-of-Congress citations against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and FBI Director Christopher Wray.

'"It's hard to know who's telling us the truth,' said one House investigator after McCabe's questioning."