RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/no-trump-isnt-threatening-our-constitutional-system/

Recently, Tom Nichols, a leading anti-Trump voice (and a former colleague), informed me that “Trump has already changed our constitutional system in ways that will outlast us both. You think it’s worth it. I don’t.”

I hear this claim all the time. Trump’s antagonists keep telling me that conservatives, unable to win through democratic institutions, have adopted extreme policies that are corroding the constitutional order. How is still a mystery.

When I point out that religious freedom, one of the issues social conservatives tend to worry about, doesn’t depend on democratic institutions, Nichols tells me: “I remember when conservatives swore to stop liberals from getting things through the courts as fundamentally inimical to our system of government.”

What policies have Trump-era conservatives conspired to push through the courts that are “fundamentally inimical to our system of government,” I wondered?

“Outlawing abortion, changing the meaning of the second amendment to mean Home Bazookas are two that come to mind,” he answered, “but you’re being slippery here: You want the courts, not the legislature or the public, to be the vessel of ideas. The same thing cons once hated about liberals.”

Now, I understand it’s become routine to scare the public about guns, but there’s never been any political desire or effort to make Home Bazookas, or even fully automatic weapons, more easily available. (Though Tom is free to a buy a Bazooka if he pleases.) In the Heller decision, decided long before Trump’s presidency, Justice Scalia defined protected firearms as weapons in “common use.” It’s the left that wants overturn settled law.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/impeachment-power-can-be-abused/

Democrats say Trump exploited his constitutional power for political purposes, but how is that different from what they are doing now?

I t is not a good look for Democrats, in purporting to respond to the president’s abuse of his constitutional power over foreign relations, to abuse the House’s power over impeachment. That, however, is exactly what they are doing in their unseemly zeal to impeach President Trump on a blatantly political deadline.

In a December 1 letter, White House counsel Pat Cipollone notified House Judiciary chairman Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.) that the president will not participate in the committee’s first open hearing on Wednesday, December 4. Ordinarily — not that there’s anything “ordinary” about the potential impeachment of an American president — I’d be inclined to assess this as poor judgment.

After all, the lack of due process has been one of the president’s major complaints since late October, when the House belatedly voted to endorse the impeachment inquiry that Democrats have been conducting for months. Among the fundamental elements of due process is the opportunity to be heard. Having denied this opportunity to the president in Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s faux grand-jury phase of the proceedings, Democrats are now inviting the president to participate in the Judiciary Committee phase, where articles of impeachment are soon to be drafted and voted on. The president’s complaints are apt to ring hollow if he carps about the witnesses from the Twitter sidelines while forfeiting the right to question them at the formal hearings.

Abstaining now could also be problematic down the road. Eventually, there will be a Senate impeachment trial. Because the House is now giving the president an opportunity to examine witnesses, Senate Democrats will have a good argument that transcripts from Nadler’s hearings should be admitted as trial evidence — i.e., the president should not be heard to complain since he will have passed up his chance to confront his accusers.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/here-are-four-pieces-of-great-news-for-america-and-president-trump/

Thanks to the noise of the Democrats’ divisive and destructive impeachment drive, hardly anyone is noticing just how good we have it right now. We’re in a Golden Age. Here are four pieces of great news that benefit all Americans.

Unemployment

Unemployment stands at a historic low – just 3.6%. To a degree not seen in previous strong economies, all boats are truly being lifted by the rising tide. Black and Hispanic unemployment are shattering records. You don’t have to listen to me or to President Trump. This is CNN:

The unemployment rate for black women fell to a record 4.4% from 5.2% in July. The unemployment rate for black men crept up to 5.9% from 5.8%. But the previous month’s rate was a record, so the rate is still near its historic low.

Unemployment among workers who identify themselves as Hispanic or Latino also fell in August to 4.2%, which matched a record low set earlier this year.

Minority unemployment has been tracked by the Labor Department since the early 1970’s. Both black and Hispanic or Latino unemployment numbers have traditionally been higher than white unemployment, and it remains so today. White unemployment was 3.4% in August, up from 3.3% previously. But this is the smallest gap on record between the respective unemployment rates for blacks and whites.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/12/the-deep-states-co

The Special Counsel’s investigation of Russiagate was supposed to end with the impeachment of President Trump and the termination of his illegitimate presidency. The Mueller Report, when it eventually saw the light of day, was going to expose Donald Trump as the arch-villain of all times. Not only did this charlatan happen to be a white-supremacist dog-whistler, sexual deviant and financial fraudster of the highest order, he was likely the greatest traitor in American history. This was the prevailing view expressed by the commentariat before the release of Mueller’s findings. The title of an article by Jonathan Chait, published in the New York Magazine on the eve of the 2018 summit between President Trump and President Putin, says it all: “Will Trump Be Meeting with His Counterpart—Or His Handler?” Ukrainegate, which is nothing but a reprise of Russiagate, reminds me of Karl Marx’s sardonic comment about Napoleon III: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Coming up empty-handed after $45 million and two full years of scrutiny would suggest that the Great Kremlin Conspiracy had all along been nothing more than smoke and mirrors. Perhaps, offered the tinfoil-hat conspiracists, Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice had been so thorough that all evidence of a conspiracy was erased. Whatever. The mainstream media, Democratic politicians and former directors of intelligence agencies adopted the curious notion that if Candidate Trump did not engage in actual collusion, maybe he was guilty—in the words of Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper—of “passive collusion”. But how can anyone, including President Trump, be guilty of a non-crime, one without a definite time or location and unsupported by corroborating evidence? It is as if Donald Trump, like a character in a Franz Kafka story, is guilty of something, and even if nobody is entirely sure of the nature of the crime, that does not make him any less guilty of it.

Paradoxically, perhaps, even those not taken in by the Trump–Putin collusion delusion assumed that Mueller’s team, led by the Justice Department’s Andrew Weissmann, would deliver a game-changer. Something, to put it bluntly, more emphatic than the Mueller Report’s non-condemnation/non-exoneration. After all, Mueller, Weissmann and Co have form when it comes to using coercive, unlawful and unscrupulous tactics to achieve a decisive outcome, if Sidney Powell’s Licensed to Lie: Exposing Corruption in the Department of Justice (2014) is anything to go by. Surely Team Mueller could have unearthed some infraction of the law, however minor or obscure, during their inquisition. What about the 2016 Trump Tower meeting of Paul Manafort, Jared Kushner and Donald Trump Jr with a bunch of Russian lobbyists, including Natalia Veselnitskaya? No crime, according to Trump’s inquisitors, was committed. Weissmann did eventually nab Manafort on tax fraud unrelated to the Trump campaign. The feds put him away for seven and a half years. The anti-Trump brigade, to use the commentariat’s cliché of the time, talked up Manafort’s arrest as a sign that “the walls were closing in on Trump”, and yet those walls remained distant.

But before we move from the crumbly walls of Russiagate to the newly erected ramparts of Ukrainegate, some perspective. Matt Taibbi, an anti-Trumper and contributing editor to the trendily leftist Rolling Stone, an unlikely Great Kremlin Conspiracy denier, admonishes his peers for the damage they have done to democracy.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/02/fusion-gps-chiefs-spin-hard-before-the-horowitz-report/

Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch might try to equate the Steele dossier with the Pentagon Papers, but it’s more likely their efforts will go down as the biggest con job in American history.

There are a few bombshells tucked in the new book authored by Glenn Simpson and Peter Fritsch, co-owners of Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm responsible for the most infamous dossier in American political history.

Here’s one that—as far as I know—hasn’t been disclosed until now: Before Fusion hired Christopher Steele in 2016 to produce his sketchy dossier on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, Steele hired Fusion to help him with a client at odds with a key figure in the Trump camp. The London-based operative, misleadingly portrayed in the press as a mere former British intelligence officer, needed help investigating the Trump advisor for his client.

The campaign advisor? Paul Manafort.

Steele’s client? Vladimir Putin-tied oligarch Oleg Deripaska.

“Weeks before Trump tapped Manafort to run his campaign, Christopher Steele had hired Fusion for help investigating Manafort,” Simpson and Fritsch write. “The matter had nothing to do with politics and was a typical commercial assignment.” Fusion and Steele’s firm “inked a small deal to research Manafort’s finances for Steele’s client.”

The Fusion chiefs insist that Steele had been hired by an “unidentified client” to find out whether Manafort had stolen millions of dollars from him. That anonymous client—Deripaska—also happened to be in trouble with the U.S. government for money laundering.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/02/a-deplorable-strategy-beyond-2020/

In 2016 and since, we have learned that our ruling class has amassed the power and developed the taste to revel in making us miserable. We have also learned that to avoid this, we must undo or separate ourselves from them, their structures, and priorities.

Regardless of who wins in 2020, the mega-issue that drove the 2016 elections will grip the country more intensely than ever.

From President Obama on down, the political, educational, media, and corporate establishment had long since taken for granted that placing the opinions, interests, tastes, and the rights of the rest of America on the same plane as their own amounts to “false equality.” They had come to regard us as lower beings. No matter whether they attributed our purported inferiority to our alleged racism, sexism, etc., or just plain stupidity, they negated the possibility of common citizenship with us. The moment that Hillary Clinton’s reference to those disinclined to vote for her as “deplorables” and “irredeemables” made this unmistakable, Donald Trump’s victory became possible.

The people who voted for Trump, many despite reservations about him, did so seeking a shield against insult and injury from above. But the 2016 results confirmed the ruling class in its judgment, and emboldened it to act in “resistance” and in ways no one had ever imagined.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/censure-rather-impeachment-wont-end-political-bruce-thornton/

As the House impeachment farce doubles-down on its buffoonery, many voices are calling for an alternative: Don’t impeach, but censure the president. This compromise will end the Dems’ effort to impeach on the basis of second- and third-hand opinion and an Orwellian torture of terms like “bribery,” yet still “send a message” that Trump crossed some line of presidential decorum by asking a foreign head of state to “dig up dirt,” as some pundits call it, on a possible political opponent. Perhaps such a bipartisan gesture will also contribute to ending the stark divisions between the parties, and return us to our bipartisan “democratic norms.”

This “solution,” however, solves nothing, and begs the central question of the whole imbroglio: that the president did something seriously wrong. That claim is not self-evidently true, and should be contested as yet another obsession with Trump’s undiplomatic––i.e. not weaselly––words rather than his actions.

Let’s review the background of the alleged offense. Towards the end of the Obama administration, the issue of Ukraine’s endemic corruption had been raised. Also of concern was Hunter Biden’s cushy job with the corrupt Ukrainian Burisma company, as former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch testified during the impeachment hearings. Moreover, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik pointed out during her questioning that Yovanovitch was coached by Obama’s people about how Yovanovitch should respond to questions concerning the bad optics of the Bidens’ actions when she testified in her Senate confirmation hearings.

As the Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman reported last month,  Obama administration officials, then, certainly were concerned about the Bidens, and with good cause. For example, a Washington consulting outfit used Biden’s name while requesting a State Department meeting to improve Bursima’s image, explicitly saying that Burisma put Hunter Biden on its board to leverage such meetings. A State Department official who tried to raise a red flag about the Bidens was ignored by a Biden staffer. An Obama Administration’s special envoy for energy policy also expressed concerns to Biden himself, with no results.

This new edition of The Glazov Gang features Dr. Jason D. Hill, a professor of philosophy at DePaul University in Chicago, and a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He is the author of several books, including We Have Overcome: An Immigrant’s Letter to the American People. Follow him on Twitter: @JasonDhill6.

Jason Hill Video: The Barbarians Are Among Us.
And bleeding us to death – with thousands of tiny scratches.

https://jamieglazov.com/2019/12/02/jason-hill-video-the-barbarians-are-among-us/

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/11/the-life-and-death-of-the-american-song-book/

Between about 1920 and 1960, American composers transformed the nature of popular music through an unparalleled array of songs which became known throughout the world, publicised by sheet music, musicals, radio, films and by the big bands of the era. Hallmarked by melodies and lyrics which could be sung and were memorable, this world of popular music has become known as “The Great American Song Book”, and was quite unlike the popular music which preceded it or the rock-and-roll which replaced it. It was peculiarly American, and in many respects was the earliest product of American popular culture to become internationally known. Above all, the best of these songs were unforgettable and beautifully written and crafted, and their most famous composers were seemingly able to churn out hit songs at will. “The Great American Song Book” lasted for only forty years or so, and then largely disappeared. It is well worth considering its place in popular culture.

This music emerged from New York, the popular-music capital of the world, and specifically from the sheet music and piano roll publishers centred on West 28th Street in midtown Manhattan, known then and since as “Tin Pan Alley”. Most of those in the industry were immigrant Jews, whose livelihood depended on finding something new and popular. Although there were some well-known popular songs written earlier, the First World War, which shattered so many Victorian conventions, and also turned the United States into the world’s leading superpower, was the primary trigger for a new form of popular music. Almost overnight, many dozens, perhaps hundreds, of talented popular composers appeared, whose output became nationally and internationally known on 78 rpm records, and was played as the background music to silent films, by dance bands and popular orchestras, and above all on radio stations, which began to broadcast in the early 1920s.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15219/durham-indictments

The alternative to a purely domestic intelligence operation targeting a major political party’s candidate for the presidency (and later, president) was to manufacture a foreign counterintelligence (FCI) “threat” that could then be “imported” back into the United States.

Plausible deniability, the Holy Grail of covert activities, was in reach for the plotters if they could develop an FCI operation outside the continental United States (OCONUS) involving FBI confidential human sources (Halper, Mifsud, others?) that would act as “lures” (intelligence jargon associated with double agent operations) to ensnare Trump associates.

We have evidence of these machinations from December 2015 when FBI lawyer Lisa Page texts to her boyfriend, the now infamous FBI Special Agent Peter Strzok, “You get all our oconus lures approved? ;).”

The coup plot failed, but the chief coup conspirators are free, crisscrossing the country on book tours and appearing as paid contributors to CNN and MSNBC.

There is new evidence that U.S. Attorney John Durham is getting to the root of criminal abuses by senior U.S. law enforcement and intelligence officials in their conspiracy to undermine the Trump campaign, transition and presidency. Mr. Durham’s mandate from Attorney General William Barr — to uncover the seditious plot behind the Trump-Russia hoax, if pursued vigorously, will uncover the single greatest threat to the Constitution since the nation’s founding.

Mr. Durham’s apparent interest in FBI source Stefan Halper and the contract vehicles available to the Pentagon think tank, the Office of Net Assessments, for whom Halper worked, is an important clue.

Likewise, Mr. Durham’s travel to Italy for talks with the Italian government and their intelligence service points to another possible clue concerning the mysterious Maltese academic, Joseph Mifsud.

For the purposes of the manufactured Trump-Russia hoax, one need only remember the associations of Halper with Trump campaign volunteer Carter Page — and Joseph Mifsud with George Papadopoulos, a foreign policy junior advisor — to the Trump campaign.