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February 2021

The Impeachment Trial’s Stacked Deck By John Yoo & Robert Delahunty

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/02/the-impeachment-trials-stacked-deck/

EXCERPTS:

Trump should receive a fair chance to present the facts and legal arguments of his defense.

A s the Senate launches its second impeachment trial of Donald Trump next week, its members must confront the deep unfairness of the proceedings.

The Senate rashly claimed jurisdiction over a former president, fumbled on the selection of a presiding judge, and ignored the constitutional — not political — standards that should prevail. Further, it has given Trump’s depleted legal team little time or means to present a full defense — the only guarantee that the American people will accept the verdict as fair. Trump’s lawyers will have to accept these unfair conditions, though might conceivably be able to appeal directly to the federal courts to stop a show trial (more on that later).

Nevertheless, the Senate has ignored the constitutional limits on its powers and refused to follow principles of fairness in the trial. As we have argued earlier, the constitutional text — read in light of the understanding held by the Framers — does not appear to permit the trial of executive officers after their terms have ended. If the Framers had wanted to provide for the Senate trial of an impeached former president, they could have said so explicitly, as did several state constitutions of the Founding period. Days ago, 45 senators supported proceeding with a losing motion by Senator Rand Paul (R., Ky.) to dismiss the impeachment on this constitutional ground alone.

But a Senate trial compounds this fundamental problem by placing Senator Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) in charge of the proceedings, rather than Chief Justice John Roberts. The Constitution states that the chief justice “shall” preside over the trial of the president. But Donald Trump is no longer the president. Roberts could not preside because no constitutional clause clearly provides for the trial of an ex-president.

San Francisco’s Race Games The school board is set to eliminate merit exams for admission to an acclaimed school.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-franciscos-race-games-11612571242?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

First, George Washington and Abe Lincoln get the boot as school names. Now academic achievement will soon be history. The progressive beat goes on in San Francisco, where the school board next week is expected to consider a resolution abolishing merit exams and high grade point averages for admission to Lowell High School.

Named for 19th-century poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell, the school is a nationally known beacon of excellence. Lowell is also among the 44 schools whose names the school board recently voted to change because Lowell’s references to African-Americans are regarded as insufficiently enlightened by today’s standards.

One school board commissioner, Alison Collins, has called merit-based admissions “racist.” The real problem progressives have with Lowell is that too many Asian-Americans are passing the entrance exam. But it’s perverse to penalize Asian-Americans because other children do less well on tests.

Fox News Axes Lou Dobbs’ Show; Top-Rated Pro-Trump Host Not Expected Back on the Air by Jeffrey Rubin

https://www.newsmax.com/t/newsmax/article/1008864?dkt_nbr=010104430ayz&section=us&keywords=dobbs-trump-voter-fraud&year=2021&month=02&date=05&id=1008864

Fox News has canceled ”Lou Dobbs Tonight,” the program hosted by one of the media’s most steadfast supporters of Donald Trump and the former president’s claims of voter fraud, the Los Angeles Times reported Friday. 

Dobbs’ program, which has been airing twice nightly at 5 and 7 p.m. ET on the Fox Business Network, will be replaced next week with ”Fox Business Tonight,” with rotating substitute hosts Jackie DeAngelis and David Asman, who filled in for Dobbs on Friday. This, according to a Fox rep who confirmed the news to the Times.

Dobbs, 75, remains under contract at Fox News, the newspaper said, but his future on the conservative news network is murky. 

The cancellation comes a day after a large voting software company, Smartmatic, filed a $2.7 billion defamation suit against Fox News and three of its hosts — Dobbs, Maria Bartiromo and Jeanine Pirro. The company said the hosts helped to spread lies about Smartmatic’s role in the presidential election, to the detriment of its reputation and its business.

Fox News has been in turmoil as long-time viewers have abandoned the channel since Election Day. Former President Donald Trump has attributed his election loss to Joe Biden to unfair coverage by Fox News as well as massive voter fraud.

Time Publishes an Astonishing Story About a ‘Cabal’ and ‘Shadow Campaign’ That Helped Biden Win By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2021/02/05/time-writes-an-astonishing-story-about-a-cabal-that-fortified-the-2020-election-but-it-sounds-like-rigging-n1423401

Time published a story that provides absolutely astonishing details and framing of activities that took place around the 2020 election. As readers, you deserve a detailed analysis of this story and the people and organizations involved. The recounting of the story in Time is longer than a chapter in many novels. Time says additional details will be provided in a series of articles over the next several days. This article is an introduction.

The title is provocative enough. “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election.” The story goes on to describe in precise detail a coalition of various powerful special interest groups that united, beginning a year before the election, to ensure Joe Biden would win.

Time begins by describing the trepidation that surrounded the 2020 election after a summer filled with left-wing violence and the concern that more violence would follow the election outcome. The article then quotes President Trump on December 2nd when the chorus calling on him to concede reached a fever pitch, even among his supporters:

To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”

In a way, Trump was right.

THIS IS GETTING ALMOST NO MEDIA ATTENTION! — Democrat lawyers w/ Perkins Coie fighting against seating the winning Republican in NY’s CD 22 are arguing in briefs the voting machines “changed thousands of votes.”

https://twitter.com/PeterRoff/status/1357341461893681157

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@PeterRoff

Democrat lawyers w/ Perkins Coie fighting against seating the winning Republican in NY’s CD 22 are arguing in briefs the voting machines “changed thousands of votes.” No big surprise this is not getting a lot of attention. #Elections

How China Exploits Commerce To Curb-Stomp The United States By Ben Weingarten

https://thefederalist.com/2021/02/05/how-china-exploits-commerce-to-curb-stomp-th

America must acknowledge that every transaction with any Chinese entity may well be a deal with a genocidal regime hellbent on becoming the dominant world power.

China wants the West to know it loves “openness,” “inclusiveness,” and “cooperation,” Communist dictator Xi Jinping told the World Economic Forum on Jan. 25. This is the same Jinping who is perpetrating the Xinjiang genocide and working to crush freedom from Hong Kong to Taiwan and far beyond.

One can understand why Xi’s speech was titled, “Let the Torch of Multilateralism Light up Humanity’s Way Forward.” Economic, military, and political relations with the mostly free world have been very good to China. These ties have enabled a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that cares nothing for any of the principles Xi claims to espouse to pursue hegemony.

Particularly as a consequence of the Western ruling class’s desire to do business with China in numerous strategically significant areas, virtually all of America has been left vulnerable. Here’s one indicator of the extent America has been compromised by the CCP: According to the former head of U.S. counterintelligence, William Evanina, “80% of American adults have had all of their personally identifiable information stolen by the Communist Party of China.”

This was largely achieved through subterfuge. But such efforts at extracting our most precious assets and information — right down to our individual health data — are also transpiring right out in the open. Is anyone going to stand up and say “Enough!”?

Chasing Chaucer and Beowulf out of the curriculum A secular pilgrimage to the wrong destination Charles Lipson

https://spectator.us/topic/chasing-chaucer-beowulf-curriculum/

 In British and American universities, fewer and fewer students are studying English, history and other humanities. That’s a job killer for the faculty. It’s time for quick answers — and the English faculty at Leicester University has come up with a beauty. The problem with their curriculum, they have decided, is that it is just not left-wing and anti-Western enough. They must figure students want to study English mostly to learn more about imperialism, capitalism and social theory, not to read and interpret great novels and poetry or to read modern works against the background of a great tradition.

So, out with the old, in with the new. In this case, ‘the new’ reflects the tendentious political preoccupations of the faculty and their most agitated students. At Yale, which has had one of the greatest English departments in the world for decades, the students demanded removal of Shakespeare’s portrait. It’s gone. No problem. Yale’s art history department killed off its iconic course on architectural history because they deemed it too Western. Oh, the horror. No matter that it was the department’s most popular course by far. Leicester’s English faculty decided to drop its traditional requirement for Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and the medieval epic ‘Beowulf’. All gone, sent to the rice paddies to learn from the glorious peasants.

What’s wrong here? And what’s right? There’s nothing wrong with including some social theory in the humanities. But this theoretical work should meet two criteria. It should be first-rate, not inferior, ideological claptrap, as so much of it is. Second, it should supplement essential works in the curriculum, not supplant them. The goal is to build upon students’ prior knowledge of foundational works in their field. That means English students should read Shakespeare, Jonson, Spenser and Marlowe before they read social critiques of Elizabethan England. They should read Dickens and his contemporaries before they read Marx and Mill. Why? Because the overriding goal for English students should be to enrich their study of literary texts. These primary and secondary categories would reverse for students of sociology. They might be asked to read imaginative literature to enrich their understanding of social structure.

Hiding Biden: How Democrats Crafted the First Impeachment, Helping Defeat Trump in 2020 With Media Help By Mark Hemingway

https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2021/02/04/hiding_biden_how_democrats_crafted_the_first_impeachment_helping_defeat_trump_with_media_help_127009.html

By the numbers, Joe Biden is president of the United States because he won the swing states of Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin by a combined total of some 43,000 votes.

Hunter Biden and the President: The father owes his victory in part to the groundwork laid by Democrats and their media allies during the first impeachment of Donald Trump. It shielded him from scrutiny.

But he also owes his victory to the groundwork laid by Democrats and their media allies one year before, during the first impeachment of Donald Trump over his supposedly strings-attached demand that the Ukrainian government investigate alleged corruption involving Biden’s son, Hunter.

The first impeachment failed to oust Trump from office, but it helped secure the White House for Biden. It shielded him from scrutiny, enabling him and his supporters to cast allegations during the campaign about dubious Biden family business ties as rehashed Trumpian conspiracy theories.

Biden’s razor-thin swing state victories might not have materialized if the Trump campaign had been able to gain traction from its October Surprise – a series of articles it helped orchestrate in the New York Post that reported information from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden suggesting corrupt foreign business deals that may have involved his father.

As many as 45% of Biden voters said they were unaware of Hunter’s financial scandals before the election. That’s likely because Democrats and much of the media discredited or did not report the accusations in the final weeks of the campaign – accusations that were bolstered after the election when Hunter admitted that he has been the subject of an ongoing federal corruption probe since 2018.

MY SAY: A PREVIEW OF BIDEN’S MID-EAST POLICY

Many folks are speculating on what will be President-Select’s policies with respect to Israel and the Middle East.

Here it is: Barack Obama’s speech to Al-Azhar University in Egypt on June 4, 2009:

It is very long and if the platitudes were removed, it could be shorter but it is a preview of what is to come…..rsk

The following is a text of President Obama’s prepared remarks to the Muslim world, delivered on June 4, 2009, as released by the White House.

I am honored to be in the timeless city of Cairo, and to be hosted by two remarkable institutions. For over a thousand years, Al-Azhar has stood as a beacon of Islamic learning, and for over a century, Cairo University has been a source of Egypt’s advancement. Together, you represent the harmony between tradition and progress. I am grateful for your hospitality, and the hospitality of the people of Egypt. I am also proud to carry with me the goodwill of the American people, and a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum.

We meet at a time of tension between the United States and Muslims around the world – tension rooted in historical forces that go beyond any current policy debate. The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.

Trump’s response to The Screen Actor’s Guild shows he’s still got it By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/02/trumps_response_to_the_screen_actors_guild_shows_hes_still_got_it.html

One of the most disheartening things since Trump left office is that he took his bravado with him. Thanks to the Democrats’ new ownership of the police state, the Supreme Court’s passivity, and the Democrats’ turning events at the Capitol on January 6 into America’s Reichstag’s fire, Democrats have cowed Republicans. It’s therefore nice to know that Trump is still Trump – as evidenced by his response to the Screen Actor’s Guild, which threatened him with expulsion over January 6.

All people, no matter how peanut-sized their brains, know now that what happened on January 6 had nothing to do with Donald Trump. Even the FBI has admitted that the events were planned long before January 6 and had nothing to do with Trump. Worse, even the WaPo had to admit that the FBI may well have been warned in advance…and done nothing.

The timeline of events also shows that (a) Trump was still speaking when events began to play out at the Capitol and (b) Trump told his supporters to behave alike Americans: peaceably go to the Capitol and cheer on Republican senators who were attempting to get some sunlight onto claims of massive election fraud.

One of the main figures in the Capitol fiasco was a leftist, and there were multiple non-Trump supporters involved. Moreover, it appears that it’s fake news that protesters beat a police officer to death with a fire extinguisher.