RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/14/democracy-dies-in-darkness-adam-schiff-just-banned-a-gop-lawmaker-from-attending-key-ukrainegate-deposition/

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., just banned a key Republican lawmaker from the deposition of a former anti-Trump national security official believed to be at the center of ongoing Ukraine proceedings, sources tell The Federalist. Schiff tossed Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., out of the deposition.

Although the U.S. House of Representatives has not approved a resolution authorizing a formal impeachment investigation, House Democrats have nonetheless insisted that they have full authority to subpoena all documents and testimony they desire, even if specific committees lack the jurisdiction to demand particular information. Schiff, whom Pelosi tapped to lead her party’s anti-Trump impeachment efforts, chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), which only has jurisdiction over the federal government’s intelligence agencies and related components.

According to the Congressional Research Service, formal impeachment proceedings are typically referred to the House Judiciary Committee. Gaetz sits on that committee; Schiff does not. The House has yet to approve a resolution granting broad impeachment investigative authority to any of its committees.

Several officials told The Federalist that they believe Fiona Hill, who was subpoenaed last week to share her knowledge of allegations of wrongdoing against Trump regarding a phone conversation he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, is one of the unnamed sources for the anti-Trump whistleblower whose August 12 complaint fanned congressional impeachment fires. Hill was reportedly planning to testify about her knowledge of the ouster of Marie Yovanovitch, a controversial figure who was removed from her post as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in May.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/schiffs_democrats_plot_a_secret_impeachment_with_just_a_few_leaks.html

The ejection of Rep. Matt Gaetz from House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s witness testimony hearings for the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, as J.R. Dunn noted here, was pretty outrageous, given the right Gaetz had to be there as a member of the House Judiciary Committee and do nothing but listen.  He wasn’t some Code Pinko type disrupting the closed-door affair by yelling obscenities and hurling bags of urine.  He was ejected because he was a Republican.

It kind of tells you about the “fairness” of this entire inquiry.

Now the Washington Post is reporting that having done that, Democrats have now gotten into a huddle, whispering together behind closed doors like Renaissance plotters, the better to accelerate the impeachment of President Trump.  Presumably, they want to get it out of the way before the next election, which of course would be to serve their own political purposes.  Those, of course, are what this whole lunacy is really about — removing Trump and not having to face the wrath of the American voters.

It’s why impeachment for them needs to be done so secretly.  And the whole thing is being done in secret now, meaning it’s not just Republicans being shut out; the entire electorate isn’t allowed to be in on it, either.  Schiff and his fellow plotters, who apparently ran an intelligence operation of their own against the White House earlier to set the whole thing up, are now setting up a trial with a predetermined outcome, making themselves spy, cop, judge, jury, and executioner, with a pliant mainstream media to give exclusively their cherry-picked propaganda output from it as news.

And they know it’s a winner of sorts — now some polls show a public that favors impeachment and removal.  Keeping it all secret and releasing just their version of events, despite the president’s transparency about the matter, seems to be the plan in action.  They’re convinced it’s working.

It’s possible it’s working, given the disturbing content of at least a few polls.  But a lot of things say it isn’t.  There was the brutal Louisiana wipeout of the Democrats just this weekend.  There also was a bad-news focus group for Democrats cited by center-left Axios, noted by J.R. Dunn here, about how Ohio swing voters aren’t happy.  Their reaction to impeachment-obsessed Democrats matches what former governor John Kasich (who’s not a Trump fan), said earlier that “nobody is talking about this” in Ohio.  Axios also had warnings from political experts a few days ago that the whole thing was bad news for Democrats no matter what.  I wrote about that here. 

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-14-the-more-public-money-spen

San Francisco is the latest American city to try to solve the problem of “homelessness” by throwing more and yet more taxpayer cash at it. Should we check in on how it’s going?

You may recall that I last visited the issue of homelessness in San Francisco about a year ago, October 2018, in a post titled “The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite.” At that time, the number of “homeless” in San Francisco was estimated at about 7000, but there was an initiative on the November 2018 ballot, known as Proposition C, calling for a new payroll tax on large employers in San Francisco, intended to raise some $300 million per year to solve this homelessness problem once and for all. On October 25, 2018, one Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, had an op-ed in the New York Times supporting Proposition C. My post noted that Benioff was only too happy to advocate that others should be forced to spend hundreds of millions on this project through a new tax, while he himself offered to put up none of his own personal fortune, estimated at $6 billion, for the purpose.

So where are we now, a year later? The payroll tax initiative passed last November with 61% of the vote, and the new tax started getting collected. Opponents then brought litigation that has prevented the spending of the money so far. (The opponents’ claim — that a special tax like this requires a two-thirds majority — was rejected by a trial-level court in July; but appeals are ongoing.)

https://www.steynonline.com/9785/a-cure-worse-than-the-disease

“As we see in the UK, Canada, Europe and elsewhere, a permanent state power is ever more comfortable suppressing the possibility of political change. But in America the active partnership between the most lavish and secretive agencies on the planet and the Democrat-media complex is a threat of an entirely different order. Matt Taibbi understands that America can survive a “bad president”, but that it cannot survive the normalization of the Comey-Brennan-Clapper-McCabe rogue state.”

Happy Thanksgiving to our Canadian readers, Happy Columbus Day to our American readers, Happy First Day of Sukkot to our Jewish readers. We would wish our Ukrainian readers a Happy Defender of Ukraine Day, but we’re worried it might be the annual celebration of Hunter Biden’s latest oligarch-kissing sinecures.

~Matt Taibbi is a man of the left, but he is an iconoclastic one and The Washington Post’s recent attempt to #MeToo him has probably made him more so. He’s also a much better writer than most lefties, hobbled as they are by the Downton-Abbey-for-progressives rules of identity politics. Ten years ago, I was very admiring of his evisceration of The New York Times’ beloved comic figure Thomas Friedman:

Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: ‘I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, “We need better headlights for our tri-plane.”‘ And off he goes.

Indeed Taibbi can do Friedman rather better than the original:

After Thomas Friedman correlates (on the back of a napkin) freedom and the price of oil, Mr Taibbi correlates, rather more plausibly, happiness and the size of Valerie Bertinelli’s ass (with accompanying graph).

A lot of us were content to do low comedy a decade back. But these are ever more fevered times and Matt Taibbi has written a sobering piece after three years of what he calls “a permanent coup”. The nub of his argument:

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.