RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Sound investment advice (which I have too often ignored) suggests that one should pay attention to outliers – valuations that are out of the ordinary, either too high or too low, like the extraordinary low level of interest rates today. Good investors (which I am not) find them in stocks, commodities, bonds, real estate, etc., and either purchase or sell the attractive or offending instrument. It strikes me that debt, driven by unusually low interest rates (or, at least, low by post-War measurements) has risen as a percentage of GDP to risky levels. When unfunded pension and health liabilities are included, and when one considers demographics, the picture darkens.

Examples of our unusual situation abound. In the U.S., federal debt as a percent of GDP has exceeded 100% for eight years. By the end of World War II federal debt – understandably – reached 118% of GDP. Subsequently, it declined as a percentage for thirty-five years – during a time that included the Cold War, the construction of the interstate highway system, the birth of the Great Society and the landing of a man on the moon. It reached a nadir in 1981 at 31% of GDP. Since, that ratio has risen.

I would be remiss in not pointing out that Japan and Singapore have government debt as a percentage of their GDP that exceeds ours, along with far worse demographic trends, so perhaps we should not be worried. But I am. Federal debt is $22 trillion. State and local debt are $2 trillion. Unfunded pension and health liabilities are estimated at $46 trillion. (Forbes puts the number at over $200 trillion). Mandatory spending, which includes Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, student assistance, veterans care and supplemental nutritional assistance programs, accounted for 72% of the 2017 budget. Such “transfer payments” are immune from budget cuts. In 1962, the comparable number for transfer spending was 28%. The effect on investments, in education, highways, R&D, etc., has been substantial – from 35% of the 1965 budget to 13% today. Complaints about roads, bridges and tunnels are understandable. Given trends, conditions are likely to worsen, not get better.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/president-trump-is-impeached-or-is-he-11577045305?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Suddenly, impeachment can wait. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday she’ll delay transmitting the two House-approved articles to the Senate, in an obvious ploy for partisan advantage. For anti-Trump legal scholars Noah Feldman and Laurence Tribe, that has created a Schrödinger’s Cat scenario. They disagree on whether President Trump has been impeached at all.

Mr. Feldman says no: “If the House does not communicate its impeachment to the Senate, it hasn’t actually impeached the president.” Mr. Tribe says an affirmative vote on an article of impeachment is sufficient to impeach—but he also claims it’s proper to leave it at that. By declining to transmit the articles of impeachment, he argued in an op-ed that Mrs. Pelosi evidently found persuasive, the Democrats would get a win-win. Mr. Trump would carry the stigma of impeachment and be denied the opportunity to erase it via acquittal.

Messrs. Feldman and Tribe are both wrong. Mr. Tribe errs in asserting that the House can deny an impeached official a trial. Mr. Feldman errs in denying that the approval of articles of impeachment is sufficient to constitute an impeachment. The Senate need not wait for the articles to be “transmitted.” The Constitution grants the House the “sole power of impeachment,” and the Senate the “sole power to try all impeachments.” Now that the House’s job is done, it is up to the Senate to schedule a trial and make the rules for it.

My view—which I suspect much of the public shares—is that Mr. Trump was impeached by a partisan vote and deserves to be acquitted by a partisan vote. The representatives who impeached him along party lines after devising partisan rules of inquiry have no principled argument against a party-line acquittal.

Mr. Dershowitz is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School and author of “Guilt by Accusation: The Challenge of Proving Innocence in the Age of #MeToo.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/21/the-impeachment-of-donald-trump/

Did we just witness an historic event, the impeachment of only the third president in the entire history of the Republic?

Or was this a case of accusatio interrupta: impeachment interrupted by an untimely withdrawal from Nancy Pelosi?

The speaker of the House, unhappy at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s obvious contempt for the House proceedings, has suggested that she might not file the charges with the Senate.

In which case, the Senate could not hold a trial.

In which case, Donald Trump could neither be exonerated nor convicted.

In which case, he would not have been impeached by the House, but only “impeached.”

It’s amazing what semantic potency can reside in a pair of quotation marks.

Consider the difference between “fresh fish” and “‘fresh’ fish.”

It is the same with the quasi-legal, wholly political process known as impeachment. It is one thing to have been impeached. It is quite another to have been “impeached.”

From one follows a Senate trial, cross examination of witnesses, the presentation of evidence, an opportunity for the accused to defend himself.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/washingtons-seven-layer-fake-11576892157?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

Former FBI Director James Comey is sticking with his story that he was only vaguely aware of the details involving the request for historic political surveillance that he approved and certified. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s rush to overturn the results of the 2016 election has come to a sudden halt.

The Journal’s Natalie Andrews reports:

The California Democrat’s next step will be pushing Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) for what she considers a fair hearing on the impeachment articles. The House adjourned for the year on Thursday without sending articles to the Senate, which would automatically trigger a trial.
“We just want to see what process they’re going to use so we can determine who and how we put together our managers,” she said in an interview in her Capitol office. She added that Democratic lawmakers are clamoring to act as prosecutors in the trial.
Republicans have criticized the delay, given that Democrats have characterized impeachment as an urgent matter. “The prosecutors appear to have developed cold feet,” Mr. McConnell said.

One legal expert tells this column that since the House has not appointed impeachment managers or sent the charges to the Senate, so far the House has essentially voted merely for “censure on steroids.” But didn’t they tell us they had an urgent mission to save the Republic and the rule of law from Donald Trump ?

Constitutionally, it seems that Speaker Pelosi can choose to do nothing further. And if she ever does transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate, lawmakers in the upper chamber will also have a lot of discretion.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/donald-trump-impeach

“President Trump heads to Mar-a-Lago impeached but defiant, with a new NAFTA and a “Phase One” China deal, Space Force, 185 federal judges, the lowest unemployment in half a century, a stock market that has increased by 50 percent since Election Day 2016, a unified party, and an opposition barreling toward a confusing and bruising primary. Trump won 2019, but this is the preseason. The real game begins in 2020.”

President Trump ends 2019 in a better position than when he started. The year began with the swearing in of Nancy Pelosi as speaker of the House. The Mueller probe dragged on. The legislative agenda of Trump’s first two years in office had petered out. The Democratic frontrunner, Joe Biden, was beating him by double digits in the polls. A little more than halfway through the year, bond prices signaled recession.

Look where things stand now. Pelosi’s decision to impeach Trump already has cost her a seat and stands zero chance of resulting in a Senate conviction. Not only has Mueller shuffled off the stage, but Michael Horowitz’s report on FBI malfeasance also raises serious doubts about the credibility of the government and media elites who spent years arguing that Trump and his associates were Russian agents. Mitch McConnell blocks liberal bills from the House while confirming additional conservative judges. Biden is damaged, and the problems of his candidacy manifest as he sleepwalks toward his party’s nomination. The economy is gangbusters.

Nothing the Democratic majority has done has hurt Trump’s approval rating. At this time last year, he stood at 42 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. As I write, the RCP average of Trump’s approval rating is 45 percent and disapproval is 52 percent. Trump’s numbers are remarkably stable and closely track President Obama’s at this point in his presidency. Biden began the year with big leads over Trump. Since then his margin has dwindled to 4 percent. And that’s before Trump drops $1 billion in negative social media on him (or whoever the nominee is) next year.

https://townhall.com/columnists/stevesheldon/2019/12/18/the-democrats-just-impeached-themselves-the-giant-has-awoken-n2558223?

Mark this day on your calendar. It is the day that the Democratic Party sealed its fate for a generation becoming a minority party for years to come. After dancing in the dark near a cliff, they finally took one tantrum-two-step too far. It’s going to be a hard landing.

In 2016, a sleeping giant awoke but instead of respecting the giant, they’ve been chasing after the giant’s liberator. Now it is fully awake and starting to stand. You might just say it’s woke and it’s angry…very angry. This giant, the American people, have had enough. For some time now, they’ve been rubbing their eyes, slowly coming out of a deep slumber but now, they’re starting to see very clearly the menace that is before them. This menace has kept them tied down for too long now. It has been harassing the giant for years, but the giant was asleep and unaware of the noise that was around him. Now he realizes that the lullabies he thought he was hearing are the very thing that has been giving him nightmares and keeping him restrained.

The voices have kept the giant lulled to sleep for some time now, singing soft lullabies and soothing music. The giant keepers forgot one thing though. Giants are not peaceful creatures prone to slumber. Giants do what giants do. They are big things and they do big things. More importantly, the vehemently dislike being tied down and controlled.

In 2016 one brave soul started untying the giant, carefully, quietly, one rope at a time. At first, he whispered in the giant’s ear, “Wake up, they are keeping you tied down.” The giant grumbled. The giant rescuer kept untying ropes and repeating the message until the giant keepers recognized his efforts. They chased him and harassed him, but he was agile and clever eluding their capture. He avoided their attempts to silence him long enough to wake the giant enough that it became aware that it was tied down. They made every effort to subdue the giant’s rescuer but to no avail. He persisted. He became louder and louder encouraging the giant to recognize his captors for what they were.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/20/a-contemptible-tissue-of-lies-surrounds-impeachment/

Impeachment is just an effort to strengthen the Democrats as they make the uphill battle to persuade the voters to evict President Trump next year for confected moral turpitude, since he can’t be challenged on his accomplishments in office.

Even as the House Democrats voted to impeach the president this week, there was universal recognition that the effort to remove him was a dead pigeon on arrival at the Senate (assuming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summons the courage to apprise the Senate officially of the results of the House vote).

The battle, for some time already, has been at the public relations level, and there the president is winning. USA Today, an anti-Trump newspaper with regular anti-Trump polling results, reported a five point decline in the numbers of people who approved impeaching the president, and other polls indicate that this is a clear trend; he is now ahead of where President Obama was in the polls eight years ago. These polls also probably reflect the gathering disquietude of the country about revelations of unprecedented political skulduggery by the FBI in the Horowitz report.

In her public order Tuesday, Presiding Judge Rosemary Collyer of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court didn’t mention Robert Mueller. But her stinging rebuke of the FBI for abusing the FISA process to obtain a warrant to spy on Carter Page invites the question: How could the special counsel have ignored the Steele dossier?
Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirms the FBI sought to verify the claims former British spy Christopher Steele made in his dossier. Yet during an appearance before the House Intelligence Committee on March 20, 2017, when Mr. Comey was asked directly if the bureau was investigating them, Mr. Comey answered: “I’m not gonna comment on that.

He had good reason to dodge. By that time, the Horowitz report makes clear, the FBI knew that most of the Steele dossier’s claims were unreliable. Yet rather than take a hard look at it, Team Mueller made a deliberate choice to tiptoe around it. In his opening statement to Congress when he testified this July, Mr. Mueller declared he would not address “matters related to the so-called Steele dossier,” which he said were out of his purview.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/delay-senate-impeachment-trial-joseph-klein/

After her Democrat-controlled House of Representatives approved two articles of impeachment against President Trump Wednesday night, Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that she might just wait awhile before sending the articles over to the Senate for trial. “We will make our decision as to when we are going to send it when we see what they are doing on the Senate side,” Speaker Pelosi said. “So far, we have not seen anything that looks fair to us.” The House Democrats want the Senate to call the witnesses who House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler failed to call during their sham hearings. In their rush to impeach, they were too impatient to wait for a court decision compelling the witnesses to testify.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell responded Thursday morning to the House’s impeachment process and the latest delay tactics.  He said that “House Democrats may be too afraid to even transmit their shoddy work product to the Senate.” In a further dig, the Senate Majority Leader added, “Looks like the prosecutors are getting cold feet.” He noted that the same Democrats who stressed the urgency of impeaching President Trump immediately now seem “content to sit on their hands.”

Senator McConnell excoriated “Speaker Pelosi’s House” for conducting “the most rushed, least thorough, and most unfair impeachment inquiry in modern history.” He charged the Democrats with exhibiting “partisan rage at this particular President,” creating “a toxic new precedent that will echo well into the future.”