RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiff-impeaches-biden-11575591017?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the least surprising news of the year Thursday by announcing that the House will proceed to impeach President Trump. Once she fired the “inquiry” missile, it could never be called back.

The question now is what precisely the articles of impeachment will say, and in particular we wonder if they will include the charge of bribery. If they do, Joe Biden should prepare for a Senate grilling.

Recall that Adam Schiff, the leading House impeachment advocate, has been floating a capacious definition of bribery that bears no relation to current law. “Well, bribery, first of all, as the Founders understood bribery, it was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader,” he told NPR. “It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you’re offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation’s interest.”

Mr. Schiff repeated this definition during his Intelligence Committee hearings, and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) made the same point this week when he claimed in the Washington Post that “federal law defines bribery as the solicitation of ‘anything of value personally’ by a public official ‘in return for’ an official act.”

Voila, the charge is that Donald Trump solicited a bribe when he tried to withhold a White House meeting or military aid to Ukraine’s new President in return for investigations into corruption and Joe and Hunter Biden. Mrs. Pelosi says the witnesses summoned by Mr. Schiff “corroborated” the bribery charge.

We’ve argued that Mr. Schiff’s definition of bribery wasn’t true for America’s Founders and isn’t true today. And we were pleased to see support this week from impeachment scholar Jonathan Turley in his testimony to Congress. “On its face, the bribery theory is undermined by the fact that Trump released the aid without the alleged pre-conditions,” Mr. Turley said, adding that “this record does not support a bribery charge in either century.”

As for current bribery law, Mr. Turley noted, the “Supreme Court has repeatedly narrowed the scope.” The Court specifically ruled out the promise of a meeting as a corrupt “official act” in McDonnell (2016). Numerous corruption cases have been thrown out as a result, including one against New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. The delay in military funds also fails under bribery law given that the aid was ultimately delivered and there’s doubt Mr. Trump even had the statutory authority to deny it.

https://spectator.us/impeachment-pathetic-clown-show/

First it was COLLUSION! Can you believe it? Trump was colluding with the Russians to steal the election from its rightful owner, H.R. Clinton. For a brief and shining moment, ‘collusion’ filled the airwaves and cyberspace. The president of the United States was colluding with Vladimir Putin, whose puppet he was. John Brennan, the excitable talking head who somehow became director of the CIA despite voting for Gus Hall, perpetual candidate for the US presidency on the Communist ticket, declared that Trump’s behavior was ‘nothing short of treasonous.’ Yikes.

That show had a good run, almost two years. But it collapsed like an abused soufflé after Robert Mueller’s expensive fishing expedition failed to hook any fish, at least any implicating the president in wrongdoing, to say nothing of treasonous wrong doing. Mueller’s pathetic performance before Congress probably counts as a form of elder abuse. This was supposed to be the spectacle that delivered the coup de grâce to the impossible orange man. Instead, it was a demonstration of the liabilities of senile incapacity. We spent $34 million for this?

In any normal world, that would have put paid to the Democrats’ greatest ever expedition, the unremitting search for a crime to which their preordained verdict — impeachment! — could be attached.

But this is not a normal world, it is our world, one in which such Soviet style of justice — show me the man and I will show you the crime — applies to anything involving Donald Trump. Still, though the animus remained, ‘collusion’ had to be retired.

Next up was Ukraine and a supposed ‘quid pro quo’. Repetitio mater memoriae: for a couple of weeks, the blank spot in the media’s script that had been occupied by ‘collusion’ now featured this new tort: Trump promised to give the Ukrainian president something in exchange for something. Exactly what those somethings were was a vague and shifting series of conjectures, undercut by denials on the part of all the principals that anything was offered for anything. 

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/473171-turley-democrats-offering-passion-over-proof-in-trump-impeachment

The most dangerous place for an academic is often between the House and the impeachment of an American president. I knew that going into the first hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on the impeachment of Donald Trump. After all, Alexander Hamilton that impeachment would often occur in an environment of “agitated passions.” Yet I remained a tad naive in hoping that an academic discussion on the history and standards of it might offer a brief hiatus from hateful rhetoric on both sides.

In my testimony Wednesday, I lamented that, as in the impeachment of President Clinton from 1998 to 1999, there is an intense “rancor and rage” and “stifling intolerance” that blinds people to opposing views. My call for greater civility and dialogue may have been the least successful argument I made to the committee. Before I finished my testimony, my home and office were inundated with threatening messages and demands that I be fired from George Washington University for arguing that, while a case for impeachment can be made, it has not been made on this record.

Some of the most heated attacks came from Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Representative Eric Swalwell of California attacked me for defending my client, Judge Thomas Porteous, in the last impeachment trial and noted that I lost that case. Swalwell pointed out that I said Porteous had not been charged with a crime for any conduct, which is an obviously material point for any impeachment defense.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/cognitiveworld/2019/12/05/quantum-trends-and-the-internet-of-things/#69fd80483eb0

As a new decade approaches, we are in a state of technological flux across many spectrums. One area to take note of is quantum computing. We are starting to evolve beyond classical computing into a new data era called quantum computing. It is envisioned that quantum computing (still in a development stage) will accelerate us into the future by impacting the landscape of artificial intelligence and data analytics. The quantum computing power and speed will help us solve some of the biggest and most complex challenges we face as humans.

Gartner describes quantum computing as: “[T]he use of atomic quantum states to effect computation. Data is held in qubits (quantum bits), which have the ability to hold all possible states simultaneously. Data held in qubits is affected by data held in other qubits, even when physically separated. This effect is known as entanglement.” In a simplified description, quantum computers use quantum bits or qubits instead of using binary traditional bits of ones and zeros for digital communications.

There is an additional “entanglement” relating to quantum, and that is its intersection with the Internet of Things (IoT). Loosely defined, the Internet of Things (IoT) refers to the general idea of things that are readable, recognizable, locatable, addressable, and/or controllable via the Internet. It encompasses devices, sensors, people, data, and machines and the interactions between them. Business Insider Intelligence forecasted that “by 2023, consumers, companies and governments will install 40 billion IoT devices globally.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/04/leninism

As the talk of socialism becomes more widespread on the Left, particularly within Democratic party politics, and as anger at President Trump boils over, the advocacy of political scientists will become even clearer: first, Progressivism, then socialism, and ultimately, Leninism.

Everyone knows the universities are on the political Left. Political science is part of that problem, though it isn’t nearly as corrupt as some other disciplines. While many professors hold their partisan biases close, those inclinations all too often appear in curricula and scholarship and inevitably reach the classroom.

A contrary example both of the theory and practice of politics, because its focus is on advancing the principles of the Declaration of Independence, are the panels and scholarship sponsored by the Claremont Institute—recently honored at the White House with the National Humanities Medal.

So Claremont has its work cut out for it. How far will the  Left take political science? We all know as well, when the political Left wants legitimacy, it does not turn to the people but to academics, as it has in the impeachment inquiry. Factions within the political science profession, bored by the dominant behaviorist and quantitative approaches to the discipline, have agitated for more connection between scholarship and its policy implications.

One example is the journal Perspectives on Politics, launched in 2003 as a publication of the American Political Science Association, the professional association of political science founded in 1903 in the midst of the Progressive era. The journal’s distinctiveness lies in its avowed “attention only on work that in some way bridges subfield and methodological divides, and tries to address a broad readership of political scientists about matters of consequence.” What this amorphous language actually means is plain: In these pages, the Left is free to indulge its pleasures and fantasies.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-interagency-isnt-supposed-to-rule-11575505183?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

EXCERPT

“Last month’s testimony before the Intelligence Committee shed light on this club whose members are a permanent shadow government credentialed by family histories, elite schools and unique career experiences. This common pedigree informs their perspective of how America should relate to the world. The dogmatists of the interagency seem to share a common discomfort with a president who probably couldn’t describe the doctrine of soft power, doesn’t desire to be the center of attention at Davos, and wouldn’t know that Francis Fukuyama once decided that history was over.

The impeachment hearings will have served a useful purpose if all they do is demonstrate that a cabal of unelected officials are fashioning profound aspects of U.S. foreign policy on their own motion. No statutes anticipate that the president or Congress will delegate such authority to a secret working group formed largely at the initiation of entrepreneurial bureaucrats, notwithstanding that they may be area experts, experienced in diplomatic and military affairs, and motivated by what they see as the best interests of the country.

However the impeachment drama plays out, Congress has cause to enact comprehensive legislation akin to the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, which created more-efficient structures and transparent processes in the Defense Department. Americans deserve to know who really is responsible for making the nation’s foreign policy. The interagency, if it is to exist, should have a chairman appointed by the president, and its decisions, much like the once-secret minutes of the Federal Reserve, should be published, with limited and necessary exceptions, for all to see.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffs-surveillance-state-11575506091?m

The impeachment press is playing this as if the calls are a new part of the scandal, but the real outrage here is Mr. Schiff’s snooping on political opponents. The Democrat’s motive appears to be an attempt to portray Mr. Nunes, a presidential defender and Mr. Schiff’s leading antagonist in Congress, as part of a conspiracy to commit impeachable offenses.

“It is, I think, deeply concerning, that at a time when the President of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity,” Mr. Schiff told the press on Tuesday. Complicit in what? Doing his job of Congressional oversight? Talking to Mr. Trump’s lawyer to get a complete view of the Ukrainian tale? Apparently Mr. Schiff now wants to impeach Members of Congress too.

This is unprecedented and looks like an abuse of government surveillance authority for partisan gain. Democrats were caught using the Steele dossier to coax the FBI into snooping on the 2016 Trump campaign. Now we have elected members of Congress using secret subpoenas to obtain, and then release to the public, the call records of political opponents.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/nadlers-impeachment-circus-joseph-klein/

The House Intelligence Committee approved its Democrat majority report on Tuesday claiming there was “overwhelming evidence” that President Trump committed misconduct in office and obstruction. The “overwhelming” evidence consisted of no more than an accumulation of hearsay and presumptions. It is contradicted by direct evidence that President Trump demanded nothing from Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also denied that there was any pressure exerted on him by President Trump, and he said recently that he “never talked to the President from the position of a quid pro quo.” On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee took over the impeachment circus. The House Judiciary Committee’s first public hearing consisted of a supposedly academic discussion by constitutional law experts on impeachment. Before kicking off the public hearing, Chairman Jerry Nadler summed up his not so scholarly approach in a closed-door session with Democrats as follows; “I’m not going to take any sh*t.” He just likes to dish it out like his comrade, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.

The professors who testified before the House Judiciary Committee were Noah Feldman (Harvard Law School), Pamela S. Karlan (Stanford Law School),  Michael Gerhardt (University of North Carolina School of Law), and Jonathan Turley (George Washington University Law School). Three out of the four experts called to testify were hand-picked by the Democrats, stacking the deck against President Trump. The Republicans’ single choice was Professor Turley, a Democrat himself but relatively open-minded compared to the Democrats’ choices.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/rep-matt-gaetz-just-brought-a-blow-torch-to-the-impeachment-hearings-and-set-a-glorious-bonfire/

Wednesday’s impeachment hearing in the House Judiciary Committee was comprised of exactly four law professors giving their opinions of what they thought President Trump meant when he spoke with the Ukrainian president last July. In five minutes, Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) laid down so much cover-fire and hit so many targets, that when he was done, his verbal “smoke” hung in the air.

Gaetz established that all the professors supported Democratic presidential candidates and most had given them thousands of dollars. He asked them to raise their hands if they had any personal knowledge of any material facts from Congressman Adam Schiff’s impeachment report. All hands stayed down. And he noted that at least two of them had been calling for Trump’s impeachment for years: