RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2021/02/16/turley-one-of-raskins-claims-about-trump-was-breathtaking-and-chilling-n2584741

George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley followed last week’s impeachment trial against former President Trump very closely. Turley was the only witness called by Republicans to participate in the first trial against Trump in 2019, when the president faced charges after discussing the Bidens and corruption on a phone call with Ukrainian President Zelensky. At the time, Turley explained that “impeachment has to be based on proof, not presumptions.”

Turley found several more glaring holes in the Democrats’ arguments last week as they tried to convict him on inciting an insurrection. One argument in particular Turley found to be “breathtaking” and “chilling” – when lead impeachment manager Jamie Raskin (MD) suggested that Trump was guilty because he refused to show up and testify. 

“If you decline this invitation, we reserve any and all rights, including the right to establish at trial that your refusal to testify supports a strong adverse inference regarding your actions (and inaction) on January 6, 2021,” Rep. Raskin wrote to Trump, essentially arguing that the former president needed to testify or his silence equals guilt.

On his blog, Turley explained that Raskin was misleading senators because Trump’s decision is not unprecedented:

“Presidents have historically not testified at impeachment trials.  One reason is that, until now, only sitting presidents have been impeached and presidents balked at the prospect of being examined as head of the Executive Branch by the Legislative Branch. Moreover, it was likely viewed as undignified and frankly too risky.  Indeed, most defense attorneys routinely discourage their clients from testifying in actual criminal cases because the risks outweigh any benefits. Finally, Trump is arguing that this trial is unconstitutional and thus he would be even less likely to depart from tradition and appear as a witness.”

Turley said that Raskin’s statement “conflicts with one of the most precious and revered principles in American law that a refusal to testify should not be used against an accused party.”

https://spectator.org/desantis-florida-covid/

At the end of January I watched a video message from the commissioners of the suburban Philadelphia county where my wife and I reside. According to them, it may take Pennsylvania up to a year to administer COVID vaccinations to all persons over the age of 65. We oldsters (my wife and I are 76) were told to register with the county and prepare for a long wait.

This information decided the issue of whether or not we should take up residence in Florida for the remaining winter months. Not only would the weather be more congenial, according to our Florida friends, but our chances of receiving the COVID vaccine in a timely manner also would increase exponentially.

And, in fact, within 11 days of our arrival in Florida, we received our first jabs of the Moderna vaccine and will receive our second doses in mid-March. We are now among the 2,355,792 persons who have been vaccinated in Florida as of February 13, 2021.

The comparison between Florida’s efficient handling of COVID vaccinations, under the leadership of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, and that of Pennsylvania, under Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf, could not be more telling. And the favorable comparisons don’t end there.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/02/15/the-vast-bipartisan-pretense-of-trumps-demise/

The vast bipartisan pretense that the Trump era is over continued through the universally predicted ignominy of the second impeachment of him. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), whose misfired brainwave the impeachment was, intruded upon a press conference of the House managers, and harangued the audience for nearly 15 minutes with her theory that Donald Trump is an evil and disgraced man who attempted the violent overthrow of the United States government, that his acquittal was really a conviction, and that the Republicans who declined to remove him from an office he no longer holds were “cowards” who sought public office because they weren’t qualified to do anything else. 

The real problem the Trump-haters have is that the Trump phenomenon is alive and well. Not only is it lurking everywhere in the country; not only has the maniacal Democratic and NeverTrump coalition’s effort to legitimize the results of the November presidential election failed to convince anyone except themselves; this fatuous impeachment exercise is the end of the fervent five-year Democratic media effort to make the defamation of Donald Trump a substitute for all other government and politics. That ship has not sailed; it has sunk.

Trump failed to assemble the proper team on the ground to identify voting irregularities as they occurred, taking videos of them, and arranging believable witnesses and a formidable legal case already developed when the much-predicted ballot harvesting and helicopter mass vote-drops in the middle of election-night flipped the Electoral College by turning the results in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (at the least). 

Of course, Trump did not, as he claimed, win the popular vote and the Democrats did not steal millions of votes. It remains one of the mysteries of this formidable and talented man that he commits such needless mistakes and carries his famous “constructive hyperbole” to such self-damaging extremes. 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/02/pelosi-wants-911-type-commission-investigate-why-daniel-greenfield/

The Democrats want to extend their military occupation of Washington D.C. into the fall and Speaker Pelosi has called for “an outside, independent 9/11-type Commission” to investigate the Capitol riot.

Or as Pelosi puts it, “To protect our security, our security, our security, our next step will be to establish an outside, independent 9/11-type Commission to “investigate and report on the facts and causes relating to the January 6, 2021 domestic terrorist attack upon the United States Capitol Complex… and relating to the interference with the peaceful transfer of power, including facts and causes relating to the preparedness and response of the United States Capitol Police and other Federal, State, and local law enforcement in the National Capitol Region.””

Security, security, security!

The preparedness and response of the Capitol Police rests with Congress. The Capitol Police are under the authority of Congress. So Pelosi can investigate herself to her little heart’s content.

The Capitol Police, as I wrote in my article, The Capitol Hill Riot Was Pelosi’s Fault, Not Trump’s, had more than enough manpower.

The Capitol Police have over 2,000 sworn officers. A police force dedicated to protecting Capitol Hill has more personnel in its service than the police forces of most of the country.

Congress’ private cops are the 19th largest police force in the country. It’s a larger force than the police forces of Atlanta, Baltimore, Denver, or Milwaukee with a massive $460 million budget.

It’s the only legislative federal force in the country that is answerable exclusively to Congress.

And then she can investigate why she failed to call for the National Guard.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/tucker-carlson-video-everything-media-told-you-frontpagemagcom/

In this new video Tucker Carlson notes baffling inconsistencies and mysteries about the Capitol riot, noting that although Alexandria Ocasio -Cortez and many Democrats claimed the mob was coming for them, it was Trump supporters that were actually killed. Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/02/impeachment-and-opening-pandoras-box-matthew-vadum/

As the overpowering stench of hypocrisy invaded their nostrils, Democrat senators voted for a second time in a year to convict President Donald John Trump, now out of office three weeks, on make-believe charges that sought to criminalize his lawful activities as president.

Now that the show trial is complete, we may soon witness an era of presidential impeachments as a regular occurrence in America.

“We’ve opened Pandora’s box to future presidents,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) said, according to The Blaze.

“If you use this model, I don’t know how Kamala Harris doesn’t get impeached if the Republicans take over the House, because she actually bailed out rioters and one of the rioters went back to the streets and broke somebody’s head open,” Graham said, referring to Harris encouraging people to donate to a bail fund for Black Lives Matter-Antifa rioters last summer.

One lawmaker has already filed articles of impeachment against Joe Biden, the nation’s new placeholder president.

Ahead of the curve, freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) filed articles against Biden the day after he was inaugurated. In a press release, her office explained that she was taking action because of Biden’s “corrupt actions involving his quid pro quo in Ukraine and his abuse of power by allowing his son, Hunter Biden, to siphon off cash from America’s greatest enemies Russia and China.”

Democrats lost the latest round in the impeachment wars when they failed to get the two-thirds Senate vote they needed. In the process these desperate radicals cheapened and trivialized the impeachment process, which is supposed to be reserved for actual baddies like current Rep. Alcee Hastings (D-Fla.), a Teflon lawmaker who was impeached by the House in 1988 and convicted and removed from a federal judgeship on corruption charges by the Senate in 1989.

https://justthenews.com/accountability/russia-and-ukraine-scandals/comey-told-intel-chief-steele-dossier-was-not

The very day in January 2017 that then-FBI Director James Comey signed a FISA surveillance warrant application declaring content from Christopher Steele’s dossier had been “verified,” he wrote President Obama’s outgoing intelligence community chief with a very different assessment of the British spy’s intelligence on Russia collusion, a newly released memo shows.

“We are not able to sufficiently corroborate the reporting,” Comey wrote in a Jan. 12, 2017 email to then-Director of National Intelligence James Clapper that was declassified and made public through an open records lawsuit by the Southeastern Legal Foundation.

The memo recounts an internal debate inside the U.S. intelligence community during one of the most delicate moments in the FBI’s then six-month old Crossfire Hurricane probe.

CIA officials had already informed Comey’s FBI that the target of the FISA warrant, Carter Page, wasn’t a Russian spy but rather an asset helping U.S. intelligence. The bureau had received warnings about Steele and the reliability of his source network, including that it might have been compromised by Russian disinformation. Agents had also just recommended on Jan. 4, 2017 shutting down the probe’s inquiry into incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lack of evidence.

The FBI had been warned the previous summer that Hillary Clinton’s campaign may have planted the false Russia collusion story as a way to “vilify” Trump and distract from her email scandal, and agents were about to interview Steele’s primary sub-source, who would discount much of the information in the dossier attributed to him as bar talk and unconfirmed rumor not worthy of official intelligence.

And the larger intelligence community had decided it did not want to vouch for the Steele dossier in its official Intelligence Community Assessment about Russian meddling in the 2016 U.S. election.

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/02/16/do-dems-care-minimum-wage-hike-will-devastate-poor-minorities/

Democrats like to talk about helping the “little guy” struggling to make it in an economically hostile world. But instead of providing help, their policies often punish the most vulnerable among us. So it is with the fight to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, as recent research shows.

Democrats have included a federal $15-an-hour minimum wage in the $1.9 trillion pork-a-palooza reconciliation bill they call “stimulus.” The left-media, predictably, have supported the idea. But a minimum wage hike is not stimulus. It is, in fact, a devastating blow to small, struggling businesses and, worst of all, for the poorest Americans; it’s a recipe for fewer jobs, lower incomes and lasting economic inequality.

We’ve written about this numerous times (for example, here, here, and here) because, as policies go, the minimum wage is awful. While sounding as if it’s a great gift to working people (in polls, it routinely garners more than 50% approval), the minimum wage’s real beneficiary is one of the Democrats’ major financial backers: Organized labor.

Unions love minimum-wage hikes because many of their contracts have clauses that automatically raise union wages or allow the unions to renegotiate contracts when minimum wages go up.

So, not by coincidence, Democrats love minimum-wage hikes, too. Unfortunately, recent research has bad news for minimum-wage hike supporters.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/house-gopers-demand-answers-from-pelosi-on-jan-6-security-failures_3697484.html

Ranking Republicans on four key House committees concerned with security at the Capitol complex are demanding answers from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) about her actions before, during, and after the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol building.

“It has been widely reported and confirmed by multiple sources that when [then-Capitol Hill Police] Chief [Steven] Sund requested the National Guard be activated ahead of the January 6th Joint Session of Congress, the response from the Sergeant-At-Arms (SAA), acting on your behalf, was that the ‘optics’ of having the National Guard on-site were not good and the intelligence didn’t support the move. The request was not approved,” the four GOP representatives told Pelosi in a lengthy letter made public on Feb. 15.

“Furthermore, on January 6th, in the middle of the on-going attack of the Capitol, Chief Sund again notified the SAA of his request for approval to authorize the National Guard. It took over an hour for his request to be approved because the SAA had to run the request up the chain of command, which undoubtedly included you and your designees.”

The four signers of the letter are Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, the ranking Republican on the House Committee on Administration, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, the ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Rep. Devin Nunes of California, the senior Republican on the House Select Committee on Intelligence.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/biden-administration-our-new-vaccination-sites-will-not-include-vaccine-doses/

This morning brings another example of how the Biden administration’s much-touted plan to expand and accelerate the pace of vaccinations is less than meets the eye. The plan to establish 100 federally supported vaccination sites by the end of February means the federal government will deploy tents and staffers . . . but not more doses of vaccine, which is pretty fundamental to running a successful vaccination site.

Eager to protect more people against the coronavirus, health officials in Oklahoma jumped at the chance to add large, federally supported vaccination sites. They wanted them in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and a third, mid-size city, Lawton, thinking the extra help would allow them to send more doses to smaller communities that had yet to benefit.

“We felt like if we could get them in the metro areas, what that would allow us to do is . . . free up a lot of our other resources to do more targeted vaccinations in underserved areas,” said state Deputy Health Commissioner Keith Reed.

Those plans are now on hold after the state learned that the sites would not come with additional vaccines. Instead, the doses would have to be pulled from the state’s existing allocation, and the three sites alone might have used more than half of Oklahoma’s vaccine supply.

“We’re not prepared to pull the trigger on it unless it comes with vaccine,” Reed said.