RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2019/12/12/californias-accounting-s

California State Controller Betty Yee admits to paying 49 million bills last year. Yet, she won’t produce a single transaction subject to our public records request for line-by-line state spending.

Out of the 50 states, California is the only one that refuses to produce its state checkbook to our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com. Even though it’s home to Silicon Valley, the state government isn’t letting tech drive transparency when it comes to its own records.

It shouldn’t take subpoenas and litigation to force open the books.

Last year, Yee paid 49 million bills for about $320 billion in payments. If you can make the payment, then you can track the payment. The state controller’s office – whose job it is to stop waste, fraud, corruption, and taxpayer abuse – may be in violation of transparency laws.

In 2013, then-California State Controller John Chang rejected our public records request for the state checkbook telling us: stop asking because the records can’t be located. Today, six-years later – Yee is still parroting the same answer.

So, how is the controller even doing her job without access to the records she helped create? We reached out to Yee for comment, and will update the piece if she responds.

She’s charged with tracking “every dollar spent by the state.” Her duties includepaying the bills and all state accounting, bookkeeping, payroll, and auditing– including financial and compliance audits and attestations.

https://us7.campaign-archive.com/?e=a9fdc67db9&u=9d011a88d8fe324cae8c084c5&i

As of today, it appears that the House of Representatives is moving toward voting Articles of Impeachment against President Trump as early as next week. On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee (under the chairmanship of my very own Congressperson Jerrold Nadler) released draft Articles, in preparation for hearings occurring today, and a committee vote as early as tomorrow.

Although the version of the Articles currently in circulation may change somewhat before the voting, all indications are that what we’re now looking at is substantially what they intend to go with. Really?? It looks like most everything they were previously talking about that sounded remotely serious is gone! Bribery? Gone! Extortion? Gone! Quid pro quo? Gone! In place of these things, we now have only the amorphous phrase “abuse of power.” In a federal code containing thousands of crimes, this isn’t even one of them. Isn’t “abuse of power” something that every politician could be accused of, with justification, several times every day?

The “abuse of power” being referred to here consists entirely of dealings with the country of Ukraine occurring during the summer of 2019:

Using the powers of his high office, President Trump solicited the interference of a foreign government, Ukraine, in the 2020 United States Presidential election. He did so through a scheme or course of conduct that included soliciting the Government of Ukraine to publicly announce investigations that would benefit his reelection, harm the election prospects of a political opponent, and influence the 2020 United States Presidential election to his advantage. President Trump also sought to pressure the Government of Ukraine to take these steps by conditioning official United States Government acts of significant value to Ukraine on its public announcement of the investigations. President Trump engaged in this scheme or course of conduct for corrupt purposes in pursuit of personal political benefit.

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/473468-what-is-that-big-us-military-for-anyhow

There are, roughly speaking, two ways to use a large, modern military force. The first is to enforce international “rules of the road,” guaranteeing freedom of the seas or punishing gross violations of international law and treaties, or keeping the peace by backing up treaties with capabilities. This includes rescuing Kuwait from invasion and occupation by Saddam’s Iraq. It includes retaliating for Syria’s use of chemical weapons. The second is to try to settle other people’s problems. This could include the Vietnam War, 18 years of war in Afghanistan, or centuries-long animosities engendered by 400 years of Turkish anti-Arab colonialism called the Ottoman Empire.

Very roughly speaking.

The historic wars of Europe engendered no American participation; World Wars I and II did, and in the aftermath, keeping Germany under control as well as preventing the further takeover of central Europe by Russia was the basis for NATO. We have no formal alliance with Taiwan or Israel but we operate under the terms of the Taiwan Relations Act and decades of close security cooperation with Israel.

President Donald Trump appears to believe more in the first construct for the use of force and less in the second.

Despite fears that the U.S. might quit NATO — and pretensions by France and Germany that they could field a European military force to replace it — the fact is that under the Trump administration, U.S. spending on NATO has increased and European spending on NATO also has increased.

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg noted that defense spending across European allies and Canada increased in real terms by 4.6 percent in 2019. “This is unprecedented progress and it is making NATO stronger,” he said. Stoltenberg told reporters in Brussels before the G-7 meetings that the organization’s burden-sharing rules also have changed: “We have now agreed to a new formula for sharing those costs. … The U.S. will pay less. Germany will pay more. So now the U.S. and Germany will pay the same, roughly 16 percent of NATO’s budget.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/the-costs-of-trivializing

In the absence of public objection to the politicization of impeachment, it is apt to become the new normal.

Resorting to a vague “abuse of power” theory, the House Judiciary Committee Friday morning referred two articles of impeachment to the full House on the inevitable party-line vote. The full House will impeach the president next week, perhaps Wednesday, also on the inevitable party-line vote. The scarlet “I” will be affixed to Donald Trump in the history books. He will not be removed from power by the Senate, however, and he has a fairly good chance of being reelected by the voters.

In sum, then, we are exactly where the Framers hoped we would never be when they added the impeachment clauses to the Constitution: in a governing system in which impeachment has been trivialized into a partisan weapon for straitjacketing the incumbent administration, rather than being reserved as a nuclear option for misconduct so egregious that Congress must act, transcending partisan, factional, or ideological considerations.

What will be the cost of trivializing impeachment this way?

I do not think that question will be answered in the Senate. It will be answered in the election next November. I fear that the answer will be banana republic-style dysfunction in government and a chasm of divisiveness in the body politic that may not be bridgeable.

That is because I believe the voters may enable Democrats to retain control of the House. In the absence of public objection to the politicization of impeachment, it is apt to become the new normal.

That does not necessarily mean we will continue to have the level of dysfunctional governance impeachment now entails. Even now, although the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry has chewed up an inordinate amount of committee and floor time, the House appears to have reached agreement with the White House on a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico, as well as government spending for fiscal 2020. No one is taking impeachment all that seriously.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/12/13/pelosi-meets-with-islamist-groups-about-overturning-muslim-ban-impeaching-trump/

The meeting between Pelosi and the Muslim Advocates-led group represents yet more evidence of the alignment of Islamists as full members of the leftist political resistance to Trump.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi took time out during the House’s ongoing impeachment effort to meet with a group of Muslim activists. The activists were seeking support for legislation to oppose the president’s executive order 13780, banning travel from countries of national security concern. Critics insist on identifying the executive order as a “Muslim ban” despite that it affects only seven countries, two of which—North Korea and Venezuela—are not Muslim. The executive order was upheld by the Supreme Court in a 5-4 ruling.

Pelosi attended a meeting on December 10 organized by Muslim Advocates, which led lawsuits against the travel ban. The group is known for opposing even the most reasonable counter-terrorism efforts, and played a key role in undermining Customs and Border patrol efforts to screen for radical Islamists during the Obama administration.

Pelosi met with a number of Muslim organizers and politicians from around the country, with both Sunni and Shia groups represented. A representative of the Open Society Foundation was also present, according to pictures of the meeting provided by Muslim Advocates.

The meeting was organized to encourage Pelosi to support H.R. 2214, the so-called No Ban Act, introduced by Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif), which seeks to prevent the president from enforcing the travel ban and seeks to extend other limitations on the president’s authority to restrict immigration for national security reasons. Chu has a history of close ties to Islamist lobby groups. The bill currently has 205 co-sponsors, all Democrats.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/supreme-court-agrees-to-hear-appeals-over-the-release-of-trumps-financial-records_3173732.html?utm_source=pushengage&utm_medium=pushnotification&utm_campaign=pushengage

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear President Donald Trump’s appeals in cases requesting the top court to block the House and a Manhattan investigation from having access to his financial records.

The top court justices met in a private conference on Friday to discuss whether to hear Trump’s appeals of lower court decisions that require his accounting firm Mazars USA and two banks to comply with the subpoenas issued by the House and a New York District attorney in a grand jury probe.

Three cases relating to Trump’s financial records have reached the Supreme Court in recent weeks after appellate judges upheld the subpoenas. Two of the cases stem from subpoenas that were issued earlier in the year by three House committees as part of their investigations into the president’s dealings. Meanwhile, the third case—the one where the private conference was scheduled—deals with a criminal investigation in Manhattan.

Trump has asked the Supreme Court to reverse the lower courts’ decisions in all three cases.

The justices on Friday afternoon granted Trump’s request to hear the appeals for all three cases and consolidated two of the cases so that they could be heard together (pdf). Oral arguments for all three cases will be scheduled for March 2020.

The subpoenas are unrelated to the two articles of impeachment that were approved by the House Judiciary Committee on Friday morning and could continue to cause concerns for the president into 2020 even if he is acquitted by the Senate.