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Ruth King

No longer an impeachment. Now, it’s a railroading By Monica Showalter

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

Under pressure to make their Soviet-style impeachment to overturn the results of the 2016 election “fairer,” Trump-maddened Democrats have put on an “impeachment resolution” public relations show in a bid to legitimize their secret basement hearings.

According to CNN (transcript of resolution here): 

The resolution provides the procedural details for how the House will move its impeachment inquiry into its next phase, and it also represents the first time that the full chamber will take a vote related to impeaching the President. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has argued that the vote is not being taken to formally authorize the impeachment inquiry, as Republicans have demanded, but will help “to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony, disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House of Representatives.”

Just one problem: They made it even less fair.

Here’s how bad it is:

The resolution now involves shutting some of the sharpest Republicans out of the hearings, such as Rep. Jim Jordan who’s on the House Oversight Committee as well as all the Republicans (and Democrats) on the House Foreign Affairs Committee.  We all know that they don’t like Jordan, a kick-ass interrogator, in the impeachment room asking uncomfortable questions of their handpicked Deep-State witnesses and blowing apart their “narratives.”  It’s also worth noting that shutting out the Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees keeps a lot of vulnerable Democrats in swing districts (or being primaried by the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez “Justice” Democrats, who are committed to ousting moderate Democrats in blue districts and replacing them with extremists), uninvolved in the kangaroo-court spectacle.  House Foreign Affairs Committee chairman Eliot Engels is one of these, so the political convenience is obvious.  

Pathologist Says Jeffrey Epstein’s Autopsy More Consistent With Homicide Than Suicide The forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother is challenging the suicide ruling By Kayla Kibbe

https://www.insidehook.com/daily_brief/news-opinion/pathologist-says-jeffrey-epsteins-autopsy-more-consistent-with-homicide-than-suicide

A forensic pathologist has claimed evidence from Jeffrey Epstein’s autopsy suggests the disgraced financier may have died by homicide, not suicide, the New York Times reported.

Dr. Michael Baden, the private pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother, announced his findings on Fox & Friends Wednesday morning, saying that Epstein’s autopsy revealed evidence of a number of injuries that “are extremely unusual in suicidal hangings and could occur much more commonly in homicidal strangulation.”

Baden pointed to “three fractures in the hyoid bone, the thyroid cartilage,” which he said were “very unusual for suicide and more indicative of strangulation — homicidal strangulation.”

Baden’s findings dispute the official cause of death declared by New York chief medical examiner, Dr. Barbara Sampson, who ruled Epstein’s August death a suicide.

U.S. Economy Holds Up With 1.9% Growth on Consumer Strength

https://www.msn.com/en-us/finance/markets/us-economy-holds-up-with-19-25-growth-on-consumer-strength/ar-AAJzqQX

A resilient American consumer helped the U.S. economy expand more than forecast in the third quarter, assuaging concerns for now of a more pervasive slowdown tied to weakening business investment and faltering export markets.

Gross domestic product increased at a 1.9% annualized rate, according to Commerce Department data Wednesday that topped forecasts in a Bloomberg survey that called for 1.6% growth. Still, that’s down from 2% in the second quarter and is the lowest since the end of 2018.The gain mainly reflected strength in consumer spending, the biggest part of the economy, which increased at a 2.9% rate and exceeded projections for a 2.6% rise. For businesses, nonresidential fixed investment fell the most since late 2015.

Democrats Retreat From Subpoenas To Schedule Impeachment Vote By Adam Mill

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/democrats-retreat-from-subpoenas-to-schedule-impeachment-vote/

So Democrats are now abandoning any effort to seek court enforcement of past subpoenas issued under Rep. Adam Schiff’s Ukraine charade?

Almost six weeks into the Ukraine impeachment farce, Democrats find themselves maneuvering into a “strategic repositioning” (translation: “retreat”). One of the “main talking points to rebut impeachment,” as the Washington Post characterized it, is that the “House Democrats’ inquiry isn’t legitimate because the members didn’t vote to start one.” A “talking point” is what corporate media calls an argument for which it has no ready response.

The Post article cited a Democrat House aide who said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has no intention of taking a vote, no matter what demands President Trump makes. This aide called the “full vote” argument “pathetic” and “bogus.”

Pelosi doesn’t need a full house vote, Ramsey Touchberry insisted in in Newsweek. Legal experts assured Touchberry, “President Trump is wrong in saying that it is not a legitimate impeachment inquiry without a floor vote.”

The New York Times “fact checked” the claim that past presidential impeachment inquiries have always started with a House vote, writing, “This is misleading. Though the full chamber voted to start impeachment inquiries against Presidents Bill Clinton and Richard M. Nixon, nothing in the Constitution or House rules requires it.” “Misleading” is code for “true but we don’t want it to be.”

Kamala Harris To Cut Staff And Restructure Campaign To Save Sinking Presidential Bid By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/30/kamala-harris-to-cut-staff-and-restructure-campaign-to-save-sinking-presidential-bid/

Kamala Harris, according to a memo obtained by Politico on Wednesday, is reportedly letting go of “dozens” of campaign staff at her Baltimore headquarters and will send some to Iowa as she hopes to save her presidential ambitions.

Harris’ decision to double-down on Iowa comes after her campaign posted poor fundraising numbers for the third quarter, struggling to garner the necessary resources and support required to be a competitive candidate. Politico reports that the “overhaul will touch nearly every face of Harris’ operation,” with staff layoffs and reassignments coming from New Hampshire, Nevada, and California, the senator’s home state.

High-level campaign staff, including Campaign Manager Juan Rodriguez will also see their salaries cut.

Harris’ latest decision to re-focus her efforts on Iowa comes after the California senator already announced in September that the month of October would be focused on the critical first-in-the-nation caucus state, spending 15 of the month’s 30 days so far in the Hawkeye state.

“I’m f-cking moving to Iowa,” Harris was caught joking to Hawaii Senator Mazie Hirono.

The campaign pledged a third-place finish in the state to stay competitive in the primary, a campaign promise that Harris’ latest moves signal might have been a bad bet as she finds herself polling worse there than she did at the beginning of the month.

According to Real Clear Politics’ latest aggregate of polls, Harris is only polling with 2.7 percent support, trailing behind six other candidates and tied with Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and billionaire Tom Steyer.

Harris entered the race as a top-tier candidate. With a breakout moment at the first Democratic primary debate calling out former Vice President Joe Biden for his previous opposition to bussing, Harris was once seen as a candidate on the rise before seeing a steady decline in support starting in July.

Nationally, Harris is at 5 percent support in Real Clear Politics’ aggregate of polls, behind Biden, Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, and South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

CHARLOTTE’S NEWS WEB

https://spectator.org/the-bell-is-about-to-toll/

The Bell is About to Toll
R. Emmett Tyrrell III, Spectator.org

It has taken a long time, but finally the Justice Department is training its guns on what heretofore was unthinkable, unless you are a career civil libertarian. For years the civil libertarians have been warning us that the intelligence community posed a threat to democracy, as we know it in these United States. Every so often they would point to some excess of the FBI or the CIA and tell us that the lights were going out in democratic America. Does not the Washington Post run atop its front page the maudlin line, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”?

www.statedepartmentwatch.org/2019/10/29/breaking-comeys-friend-just-turned-on-him-admits-everything/

BREAKING: COMEY’S FRIEND JUST TURNED ON HIM – ADMITS EVERYTHING
StateDepartmentWatch.org

(Gateway Pundit) – The Gateway Pundit reported on May 25th that the infamous Trump Tower meeting in early January 2017 may have initiated the Trump obstruction investigation.

Then we reported on August 3rd that text messages from Peter Strzok to Lisa Page showed that the Mueller Special Counsel in its first month was already working on an obstruction trap for President Trump to step in.

Democracy Dies in Derangement Too By Charles Lipson

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/10/30/democracy_dies_in_derangement_too_141613.html

Because our country is so deeply split and so distrustful of its basic institutions, it needs solid, dispassionate reporting now more than ever. We are not getting it.

Americans know this, and we’re angry about it. Polls show we don’t trust the media any more than we trust Congress, the president, universities, or big business. And we don’t trust them at all. That’s deeply troubling since those institutions should be the secure foundations of our public life. Only one is still trusted by more than half the population — the military. Our men and women in uniform certainly deserve our trust and respect, but it’s grim news for a democracy when only the armed forces merit it.

The media has added to this sulfurous climate of distrust and division. Take the country’s most important newspaper, the New York Times. After badly misjudging voter sentiment during the 2016 election, the Times publicly promised to reevaluate its biases, take occasional trips across the Hudson, and try harder. That lasted about a week.

The Times soon joined every other media organization in the race to discredit Donald Trump’s election, imply it was the product of Russian interference, and paint him as an illegitimate intruder in the White House. Although they were right to investigate Russian interference, they were wrong to pump up a thinly based conspiracy story that served their political aims.

Ankara’s Mountain Turk Headache & the Crocodile Tears of Academia by Gerald A. Honigman

Once again, it’s taken tragedy and scores of thousands of dead, wounded, and displaced Kurds to awaken most of the rest of the world to the plight of these thirty-eight million truly stateless people in the Middle East. Decades ago, at least some folks learned that they were not just something that Little Miss Muffet ate while sitting on her tuffet. That occasion required thousands of Kurds (not curds) getting gassed to death by Arabs, and many more scores of thousands being slaughtered by them as well in Iraq’s Anfal Campaign and afterwards.

The Kurds’ plight, while a bit more severe than in most other cases, was not atypical of the response of Arabs and Arabism have historically had to any of the region’s other scores of millions of non-Arab peoples daring to assert rights in the region Arabs claim solely to be “purely Arab patrimony”… https://ekurd.net/arabism-zionism-journeys-2019-01-12 .

The reason for this new examination of an old problem has to do–this time–with not only (but still including) Arab, but also the Turks’ Kurdish “headaches” in the age of nationalism. Ankara’s current, ongoing invasion and slaughter in Syrian Kurdistan is just the latest manifestation of this.

With all of the above in mind, some serious background information–missing in most other accounts–is thus in order…

Now, I know…perhaps I’m really not supposed to talk about such things.

I mean, after all, didn’t a Turkish Sultan give refuge to Jews when Christendom was expelling, inquisitioning, ghettoizing, humiliating, demonizing, forcibly converting, massacring, blood libeling, etc. and so forth…them ?

Yes, there’s some truth here.

The J Street Democrats Ben Shapiro

https://townhall.com/columnists/benshapiro/2019/10/30/the-j-street-democrats-n2555560

This week, four of the top candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination — Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro and Bernie Sanders — gathered at the J Street Conference to explain why the United States ought to pressure the state of Israel to make concessions to terrorists, why the Obama administration was correct to appease the Iranian regime and why American Jews ought to value the opinions of Bernie Sanders over those of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the future of Jewish safety. Two other top Democrats — Elizabeth Warren and Joe Biden — sent video messages in support of the group.

By contrast, when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee held its annual conference in March, not a single Democratic presidential candidate showed up. The Democrats are, by and large, simply too ashamed to stand with an actual pro-Israel group, although prominent congressional leaders still show up to mouth nostrums about bipartisan support for Israel.

But the heart of the Democratic Party has moved against Israel. That’s because Israel is economically successful, while its enemies are not; Israel is liberal, while its enemies are not; Israel is the tip of the spear of Western civilization in an area known for its tribalism and brutality. This means that according to the radical left, Israel is an exploitative country hell-bent on domination, despite its lack of territorial ambition — Israel has signed over large swaths of land won through military victory to geopolitical enemies, and offered much more repeatedly.

So the Democrats built up and gave credence to J Street, a Trojan horse group dedicated to undermining American support for Israel and justifying left-wing hatred of the Jewish state. J Street was founded by Clinton operative Jeremy Ben-Ami and Israeli far-left political figure Daniel Levy in late 2007. One of its chief sources of funding — a source obscured in the early years by its founders — was anti-Israel radical George Soros.

Israel Blocks Terrorists, Palestinians Block Critics by Bassam Tawil

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15077/palestinians-internet-censorship

On the one hand, leaders of the Palestinian Authority (PA) condemn Facebook for “surrendering to Israeli pressure” and taking action against those who incite terrorism and hate speech. On the other hand, the same PA leaders keep pressuring Facebook to silence Palestinians who demand an end to financial and administrative corruption in the PA.

“[E]very time Fatah posts a new terror message on Facebook encouraging violence or presenting murderers as role models, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians are given more motivation to kill Israelis. Facebook still chooses to do nothing to stop it.” — Itamar Marcus, Jerusalem Post, September 11, 2019.

What Abbas and his senior officials apparently fear is that the current wave of anti-corruption protests sweeping Lebanon and other Arab countries may reach the West Bank. They appear nervous that their critics and political rivals will use social media to encourage Palestinians to revolt against corruption and tyranny.

For these leaders, when they turn to Facebook to clamp down on criticism and voices calling for reform and democracy, that is good government. However, when Israel tries to silence those who seek to spill more Jewish blood — well, that is criminal.

For the past few months, Palestinians have been accusing Facebook of “waging war on Palestinian content” by suspending dozens of accounts belonging to Palestinian activists and groups suspected of anti-Israel incitement and promotion of terrorism. The Palestinians even went as far as accusing the social media giant of being in collusion with Israel to “suppress the Palestinian narrative and conceal the reality of Israeli crimes.”

In the context of the campaign, the Palestinians used the hashtag #FBblocksPalestine to “reveal the double-standard policy of Facebook management in dealing with Israeli and Palestinian incitement on its site,” according to the Palestinian NGO Sada Social Center.

Earlier this month, Facebook further angered Palestinians when it deleted the page of the Hamas-affiliated Palestinian Information Center. Several Palestinian journalists, political activists and Hamas officials accused Facebook of serving as a “tool of suppression” in the hands of Israel.