RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/11/23/impeachment_3_crucial_qu

Question 1: What did the president want from Ukraine?
 
The Democrats presented testimony that Trump cared much more about getting Ukraine to investigate the Biden family than he did about advancing American national security. That’s the most likely explanation for the five-week hold on aid to Ukraine. But the Republicans have offered a plausible alternative, though not an entirely convincing one. Given Ukraine’s dismal record on corruption, they say, wasn’t it prudent to wait briefly and see whether country’s new president lived up to his big promises?
 
Question 2: Can the Democrats prove their case?
 
Can they show conclusively that the president wanted something illicit and was using official resources to get it?
 
Democrats need firsthand proof of Trump’s motives to demolish the Republican case. That means they need documents or testimony from people who dealt directly with the president. Democrats have subpoenaed some of Trump’s close aides; the president ordered them not to testify. Nancy Pelosi has decided to skip over them rather than wait for the Federal Courts to adjudicate the conflict between the two branches.
 
The result, so far, is what Scottish courts call “unproven.” Crimes that carry draconian punishment rightly require conclusive evidence to match. The Democrats simply cannot produce it without firsthand accounts.
 
Question 3: What’s the rush?

The Democrats argue — and have presented testimony — that Trump cared a lot more about getting Ukraine to investigate the Biden family than he did about advancing American national security. If Trump’s real goal was bringing down the Bidens, and if he tried to get Kyiv to do that by leveraging U.S. foreign aid and the prospect of a White House meeting, then he would be wrongly seeking personal, political benefits from a foreign government against a likely 2020 competitor.

Those are reasonable arguments. Indeed, they are the most likely explanations for the 55-day hold on aid to Ukraine, which Congress had authorized. Still, other explanations are possible, and the White House and its Republican allies have offered them. They say Trump had perfectly legitimate national-security concerns about U.S. policy in Ukraine, that he had often mentioned them to advisers, and that he paused the aid as he evaluated them.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/22/the-curtain-closes-on-the-schiff-show/

Every theater rat knows that closing night is even tougher than the debut.

After all the auditions, the practices, the blocking, the tech rehearsals, the dress rehearsals, the opener, and the full run, the final performance usually comes quicker than expected.

Exhausted and emotional, nerves are as raw as they were during callbacks. The leading man glances around at his castmates one last time, realizing he’ll never have the same experience again. A bow to the orchestra pit, a gesture to the lighting crew, roses for the director, and a prolonged, bittersweet wave to the crowd—then the heavy red curtain slowly closes the stage off from the cheering audience.

The show, the ensemble must accept, is over.

In what presumably was his final encore Thursday afternoon, U.S. Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) bid an emotional farewell to his long run as the lead role in his impeachment inquiry, a.k.a. “The Schiff Show.” As the lights dimmed and folks headed for an early exit, Schiff choked up during his closing monologue.

“In my view, there is nothing more dangerous than an unethical president who believes they are above the law,” Schiff emoted, voice trembling, tears welling. “And I would just say to people watching here at home and around the world [dramatic pause] . . . we are better than that!” Voice breaking, Schiff then gaveled his theater to a close.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/winning-was-trumps-high-crime-and-misdemeanor-11574466051

When I don’t get the feeling Adam Schiff is secretly working for the Russians, I get the feeling he’s secretly working for Donald Trump. The latter feeling predominated during two weeks of impeachment hearings. The case, which doesn’t strike me as strong, should be that Mr. Trump withheld, or threatened to withhold, congressionally mandated military aid for Ukraine for an illegal purpose. But the witnesses who were supposed to be harmful to Mr. Trump weren’t. They failed to establish, or even argue, that Mr. Trump’s concern with the Biden role in Ukraine, or Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election, was illegitimate.

State Department witness George Kent testified that he himself upbraided Ukrainian officials for ending an investigation of Burisma, Hunter Biden’s employer, which U.S. taxpayer dollars had helped support. He called for—guess what?—an investigation: “I would love to see [Ukraine’s government] find out who the corrupt prosecutor was, and who took the bribe, and how much he was paid.”

William Taylor, another presumably hostile State Department witness, was sufficiently open to the agenda of his outsider president to propose that an official other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky make the wished-for announcement, “in coordination with Attorney General Barr’s probe into the investigation of interference in the 2016 elections.”

Like a dinner-theater detective, Mr. Schiff shouts “Aha!” at every confirmation of what has been obvious since the White House released its own transcript of the Trump call with Mr. Zelensky. The Trump administration was keen on arming Ukraine and supporting its new government to exact a cost from Vladimir Putin. That is, everybody in the Trump administration except the president himself, who was cool or indifferent to this agenda but intruded only occasionally to push the Biden talking point.

His staff, apparently appreciating who actually received votes from the electorate, busied itself at times trying to reconcile Mr. Trump’s agenda with their own. And yet, in the manner of factotums everywhere, the agenda they ended up delivering was their own—Ukraine got its arms and presidential meeting—while Mr. Trump’s fell through the cracks.

Mr. Trump is chaotic, unschooled and politically motivated, but only the first two qualities differentiate him from other presidents. He cares only about “the big things,” Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified. Isn’t that the job description? If President Obama’s staff had been as successful as Mr. Trump’s, U.S. troops would never have left Iraq. Yet Mr. Obama was entitled to make the trade-off he did, unfortunate as it was. Securing re-election is the first thing any president owes his supporters. It’s what makes our system go ’round.

Unfortunately, the media, in the grip of narrative-itis and its own partisan myopia, leaves no fact or logical premise unmolested. Numerous outlets peddle the fallacy that election meddling is what economists call a rivalrous good: If Russia engaged in it, Ukraine couldn’t have. An NBC reporter, lacking any bombshells, proclaims that a “bombshell” is the word “more” in an official’s recollected impression that Mr. Trump “cared more” about investigations than he did about Ukraine.

The national media is an idiot at this point to keep the name of the whisteblower, which they’ve known for weeks, from the public. His identity and motives are unquestionably newsworthy. The media exists to report newsworthy information. All the press does is sow distrust about what other news it’s hiding. CONTINUE AT SITE

http://www.algemeiner.com/2019/11/22/new-assault-on-orthodox-jew-in-brooklyn-repo

Yet another Orthodox Jew was assaulted in Brooklyn on Thursday night, the latest in a series of violent incidents that have set Jewish communities in several of the borough’s neighborhoods on edge.

Thursday’s assault was caught on camera shortly before midnight on Sanford Street near Willoughby Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Police said the unprovoked attack was carried out by a 32-year-old man, who punched his 21-year-old victim without exchanging a word with him.

The suspect was arrested on assault charges shortly after.

More than half of the hate crimes reported in New York City this year have been antisemitic in nature, with over 150 incidents targeting Jews — a rise of 63 percent from the previous year, according to figures released by the New York Police Department in September.

Speaking to The Algemeiner in an extensive interview earlier this month, Rabbi Yaacov Behrman — the founder of the Brooklyn-based Jewish Future Alliance — said that the spate of attacks over the last two years against Orthodox Jews in the Williamsburg, Crown Heights and Borough Park neighborhoods were overwhelmingly perceived within the community as driven by antisemitic hatred.

https://www.jns.org/doubt-lingers-about-adls-ability-to-fight-anti-semitism-in-brooklyn-despite-the-new-push/

“The ADL has failed to call out any form of anti-Semitism that isn’t borne of white supremacy, and their curriculum is more about tolerance and racism in general than it is about the unique history of anti-Semitism,” said Bryan Leib, a board member of Americans Against Anti-Semitism.
Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt announcing an expansion for the “No Place for Hate Peer to Peer Program” in Brooklyn to combat rising anti-Semitism. Source: Anti-Defamation League via Twitter.

Standing alongside Brooklyn Borough president Eric L. Adams, local faith leaders, elected officials and community partners, ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt announced last week that the New York-based group will be doubling the number of Brooklyn schools involved in its “No Place for Hate Peer to Peer Program” for the 2019-20 school year. The ADL committed $250,000 to expanding the initiative, which has helped promote tolerance in more than 1,700 public and private schools nationwide since 1999.

The program has already been rolled out in 22 schools in Brooklyn, N.Y., and reached more than 8,200 students, according to ABC7. The number of schools administering the program will expand to up to 40 this academic year, with a focus on the neighborhoods of Crown Heights, Williamsburg and Borough Park, where most of the recent anti-Semitic incidents against Orthodox Jews have taken place.

https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/11/article/weak-consumer-economic-slump-could-sink-trump-re-election-bid/

US President Donald Trump’s case for re-election in 2020 comes down to his economic record. New forecasts from two Federal Reserve banks, though, warn of near-recession conditions just as the presidential election campaign is getting underway.

Both the New York Federal Reserve “Nowcast” model and the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s “GDPNow” model predict that US economic growth will slow to barely above zero during 2019’s fourth quarter. Both models translate the latest data releases from government agencies into overall GDP growth. The NY Fed’s forecast stands at 0.4% annualized GDP growth and the Atlanta Fed model shows just 0.3%. This degree of convergence is rare, and the dip from an estimated 1.9% growth rate during the third quarter to 0.3%-0.4% is alarming.

Eighteen months ago the Trump Administration advertised the Atlanta Federal Reserve’s forecast as proof of its success. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin told CNBC in June 2018, “The Atlanta Fed is projecting 4.7% [GDP growth]. I have no idea whether it will be that high. But a year ago, people were laughing when we talked about 3% GDP. We have an economy that’s here because of the president’s tax plan and the president’s regulatory relief.”

The administration isn’t bragging about the Atlanta Fed’s present forecast of just 0.3% annualized GDP growth.

Since then GDP growth has fallen below 2%, as businesses cancel capital investment plans in response to uncertainty about global supply chains, following the Trump Administration tariff war on China and threatened bans on technology exports to Chinese companies. Consumer spending kept the economy growing despite shrinking CapEx and a manufacturing recession that is now in its third quarter. At just 12% of GDP, the manufacturing recession isn’t enough to tip the overall economy into recession.