RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/democrats-impeachment-theater-corey-lew

How you come out on the question about the scope of obstruction should determine how you come out on the question of executive privilege.

President Trump’s former campaign adviser Corey Lewandowski is scheduled to testify this afternoon before the House Judiciary Committee. The White House is not objecting to his appearance but has reportedly instructed him not to answer questions about his communications with the president. (See the letter of White House counsel Pat Cipollone to House Judiciary Committee chairman Jerrold Nadler.) This raises an interesting question: May the president assert executive privilege to shield disclosure of his communications with people who are not part of the White House staff and the broader executive branch?

Lewandowski was not a government official in June and July 2017, when, according the Mueller Report, the president instructed him to convey a directive to then–attorney general Jeff Sessions. The directive was for Sessions to narrow his recusal from the Russia investigation so that he could limit then–special counsel Robert Mueller’s jurisdiction — such that Mueller could investigate only to prevent Russian meddling in future elections. That is, Mueller would end his probe of Kremlin interference in the 2016 campaign, on the rationale that Trump had done nothing wrong. Sessions was to add that he had been with Trump for nine months on the campaign and therefore knew that “there were no Russians involved with him.”

The last claim was an overstatement. We now know that the Trump organization was involved in negotiations for Trump Tower Moscow throughout the 2016 campaign. Moreover, while there is no evidence that candidate Trump himself was informed about the matter, his top campaign officials (his son Don Jr., his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and his then–campaign manager Paul Manafort) met in June 2016 with a lawyer they understood to be a Kremlin emissary (Natalia Veselnitskaya, with an entourage of Russians in tow) in the expectation (unfulfilled) of receiving campaign dirt on Hillary Clinton. (Ironically, as I further detail in Ball of Collusion, Veselnitskaya obtained the materials she presented from Fusion GPS, the same outfit that was working for Clinton to scrounge up campaign dirt on Donald Trump from Russian sources.)

My purpose here, though, is to focus not on questions about the president’s credibility, which congressional Democrats have every right to highlight. Let’s stick with executive privilege.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/09/new-womens-march-board-member-listens-farrakhan-daniel-greenfield/

Easy come, easy go.

The Women’s March is replacing three inaugural board members who have been dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism, infighting and financial mismanagement — controversies some say have slowed the organization’s progress and diminished its impact.

Co-Chairs Bob Bland, Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour stepped down from the board July 15, though the organization has been slow to announce their departures. The Women’s March website continued to host their photos and titles as co-chairs through this week, when the group announced the board turnover.

A diverse cast of 16 new board members that includes three Jewish women, a transgender woman, a former legislator, two religious leaders and a member of the Oglala tribe of the Lakota nation will inherit an organization recovering from a failed attempt to trademark the Women’s March name and fractured relationships with local activist groups and the Jewish community.

Notice the vagueness. The organization does things. No people actually mentioned by name.

Mallory, Sarsour and Bland left in July, but we’re only being told this in September.

It goes without saying that the Women’s March has replaced anti-Israel and anti-Semitic figures with more of the same.

 Samia Assed, a Palestinian American activist from New Mexico who serves on the board of the Albuquerque Center for Peace and Justice and leads the organization’s New Mexico chapter.

Zahra Billoo, a civil rights attorney and executive director of the San Francisco Bay area chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Ginna Green, who runs the strategy arm of liberal Jewish group Bend the Arc and was among a group of Jewish women to lead the 2019 Women’s March on Washington.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-assault-on-the-supreme-court-11568674522

Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh will apparently receive continuing education in the politics of personal destruction, and this weekend came another round of rumor-mill accusations over his conduct in college. It’s important to understand that this assault on the Justice is part of the left’s larger campaign against the legitimacy of the current Supreme Court and an independent judiciary.

By now readers have seen Democrats running for President calling for Justice Kavanaugh to be impeached, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris and Beto O’Rourke. These Democrats know there is zero chance of a Republican Senate voting to remove Mr. Kavanaugh from office.

The attacks on Justice Kavanaugh are an attempt at intimidation to influence his opinions. But if Democrats fail in that, they want to portray conservative opinions of the current Court as illegitimate. Even Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota now says the Judiciary confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh was “a sham.” She knows better but so much for her self-styling as a “moderate.”

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https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14741/us-politics-britain

My friends assured me there were terrible, terrible things that would become apparent in the ensuing months.

Even in the extended echo-chamber of social media, there appeared to be a seemingly pathological fear of anything even remotely resembling a balanced view.

The only thing that has not changed is the Democrats’ make-believe view that President Trump and the Russians were somehow trying to rig the election, when it was, in fact, they themselves who were doing that.

Before the advent of online news, residents of the UK had to rely on the British press to report on the minutiae of the American political system — something that didn’t happen all that often. In politics what went on in the USA, stayed in the USA, most of it at least. Beyond a major political upheaval, or the swearing in of a new president, news reportage was more concerned with the cut and thrust of our own routine domestic politics.

Only the bickering between the Democrats and Republicans rang a familiar note, mirroring as it did, our British Punch and Judy stereotype, with the stuffy old Tories on one side, and the loony-left Labour on the other.

By 2008, along with the advent of social media, and a growing awareness of international affairs, it became increasingly impossible not to notice the apparently out of proportion intensity driving the Democrat-Republican voter divide. Heralded in by the arrival of the US’s first president “of colour”, Barack Obama, and coinciding with the rising usage of Twitter and Facebook, the “Left” seemed to jump at the chance of embracing the one-dimensional limitations of an “echo chamber”. The “echo-chamber” served not only to widen the chasm between left and right, but — even to the outsider — noticeably amplified the animosity between the two sides. Compared to the almost polite political rivalry between voters and parties in Britain, the political division in the US began looking distinctly engineered.

My American friends, in an effort to help me try and understand their conclusions, sent a raft of articles from the US mainstream media, which, in their bias, displayed the same lack of integrity as my friends’. Even in the extended echo-chamber of social media, there appeared to be a seemingly pathological fear of anything even remotely resembling a balanced view.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/16/trumps-biggest-failure-hes-had-no-success-at-being-a-white-supremacist/

President Donald Trump’s critics have called him many things during his nearly three years in office. “Racist.” “Fascist.” “Misogynist.” “Anti-middle class.” “Anti-poor.” And so on. But if that’s so, he’s failing miserably at all those things they accuse him of.

A spate of recent data and reports, including an update of the income and poverty statistics by the U.S. Census Bureau for 2017 and 2018, show just how bad that failure is.

Take that “racist” charge. The Census report shows that black unemployment, at 5.5% in August, is the lowest it’s been since records started being kept in 1972.

The gap between black unemployment and white unemployment is also the lowest on record.

Typically, the unemployment rate for African Americans is at least two times the white unemployment rate. Today, it’s about 1.6 times the white rate.

It isn’t only African Americans who are doing better. Both Hispanic-Americans and Asian-Americans now have near-record low unemployment rates.

Just ask the Washington Post. To its credit, it recently analyzed Labor Department data. What it found was shocking: More than 86% of the jobs added since the end of 2016 went to minorities. Out of 5.2 million new jobs, minorities accounted for 4.5 million.

If Trump’s a racist, he’s an abject failure.

amgreatness.com/2019/09/15/trumped-out/

After nearly four years of ceaseless attacks by Democrats and the press, the strange thing is not that Trump can be occasionally wearisome, but that he is even still breathing.

The new post-Mueller media narrative is “weariness” and “exhaustion” with President Trump’s tweets, his cul de sac Sharpie controversy, his ideas about buying Greenland, his unorthodox art-of-the-deal foreign policy that resulted in a plan to talk to Taliban leaders in the United States, and his firing of arch-conservative John Bolton.

The Drudge Report, once a go-to site for Trumpism, now seems unapologetically anti-Trump, in its often trademark snarky style.

Are Trump supporters then weary?

The August jobs report “unexpectedly” reminds us that never have so many Americans been at work. The 3.7 percent unemployment rate continues to be the lowest peacetime unemployment figure in 50 years. Black and Hispanic unemployment remain at record lows. Workers’ wages continue to rise. Talk of recession is belied by low interest, low inflation, low unemployment, and a strong stock market. The result is that millions of Americans enjoy far better lives than they had in 2016.

When we look to alternatives, all we seem to hear is multi-trillion-dollar hare-brained schemes from radical progressives and socialists masquerading as Democrats at a time of record national debt. The Green New Deal, Medicare for All, free healthcare for illegal aliens, reparations, the abolition of $1.5 trillion in student loan debt, and free tuition for all—are the stuff of fantasies and either would have to be repudiated by any of the Democratic nominees who actually was elected, or would destroy an already indebted nation.

So, again, where exactly is the supposed dissension in the Trump ranks, given that in 2020 he will be only the alternative to the above?

Too Many Tweets?

Many seem disappointed that after the implosion of the 22-month Mueller investigation, Trump’s polls have not neared 50 percent—given the final exposure of the entire collusion/obstruction hoax and the possibility of indictments to follow for those who had staged a veritable coup against the executive branch of the United States.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/the-new-york-times-anti-kavanaugh-bombshell-is-actually-a-dud/

The authors omit the fact that the alleged victim has no memory of the alleged incident.

If you opened Twitter on Sunday morning, you were likely greeted with the bombshell headline of the top trending news story: “NYT reporters’ book details new sexual assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.”

The allegation, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly write in a New York Times story adapted from their forthcoming anti-Kavanaugh book, is this: “We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”

Wait a second. Who did what to whom?

Kavanaugh’s “friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student”?

Can someone explain the logistics of the allegation here? Was Kavanaugh allegedly walking around naked when his friends pushed him into the female student?