RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/new-bolton-book-allegations-drop-hours-ahead-of-vote-on-witnesses/

New reports of the contents of former White House adviser John Bolton’s book have surfaced hours before the Senate is scheduled to vote on whether to call witnesses in the impeachment trial of President Trump.

According to the New York Times, Bolton writes in his forthcoming book that Trump directed him to assist in the pressure campaign to coerce Ukrainian officials to conduct investigations against Joe and Hunter Biden during a May meeting at which the president’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani, acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, and White House counsel Pat Cipillone were present.

During the meeting, Trump directed Bolton to set up a meeting between Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and Giuliani, who was then planning a trip to Ukraine to discuss the opening of the Biden investigation with government officials. Giuliani on Friday denied he was present at such a meeting, while Trump said Bolton’s alleged account was wrong.

The Times’ Sunday report on Bolton’s book, The Room Where it Happened, disrupted Republicans’ blanket opposition to calling witnesses in the impeachment trial. After unanimously resisting Democrats’ calls for Bolton to testify, moderate Republicans began to waver on Monday.

https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/democrats-forgot-to-begin-with-the-end-in-mind/?utm_source=recirc-desktop&utm_medium=homepage&utm_

On the menu today: With Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander declaring, “there is no need for more evidence to prove something that has already been proven and that does not meet the United States Constitution’s high bar for an impeachable offense,” the Senate’s impeachment trial might be wrapping up as soon as today. If impeachment is indeed coming to a close, it’s time to focus on a strangely unasked question in much of this: Whom were the House impeachment managers trying to persuade? And did they seem like a group that was primarily focused on changing the minds of Republican senators?

Were the House Impeachment Managers Even Trying to Persuade GOP Senators?

In Steven Covey’s bestselling book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, his second habit is to “begin with the end in mind,” which means to “begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination.”

In all likelihood, reaching 67 votes in the Senate to support the removal of the president was probably impossible. House impeachment managers had to try to convince, at minimum, 20 Republican senators to vote to remove. This means that targeting their message to persuade a rebellious senator such as Lisa Murkowski wasn’t enough. The message would have to be designed to persuade senators right in the middle of the GOP caucus who usually vote with the president and who have no inherent desire to see him removed from office. House impeachment managers were asking Republican senators to sign off on something that had never happened in 230 years. (George Washington took the oath of office to be president in 1789.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/there-is-no-strict-legal-test-of-impeachment/

It’s an eye test, a political determination, and even great lawyers trip up when they frame it as a legal question.

When you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail. And when you’re a lawyer, particularly a constitutional scholar and criminal-defense practitioner of Alan Dershowitz’s caliber, everything looks like a legal problem.

Not everything is. Impeachment is not. Not principally.

Professor Dershowitz, for whom I have great respect, got a bit carried away in what was otherwise a bravura performance in the well of the Senate on Wednesday night, when he offered a constitutional defense against President Trump’s impeachment. As will be clear momentarily, I have never agreed with Dershowitz’s impeachment theory. Yet the excerpt of his argument at the Senate trial that has critics up in arms was a case of misspeaking; it was not an outrage that would effectively turn the president into a dictator.

I believe Dershowitz was trying to make the uncontroversial point that executive acts a president subjectively believes are in the national interest do not become impeachable just because the president simultaneously believes such acts will help him politically. But Dersh garbled the point — which also occasionally happens, even to those of us who are not 81 and lack the professor’s vigor. Taken out of the context of his broader argument, he could be misunderstood as having asserted that, if a president believed his own reelection was in the national interest, no executive act he took in furtherance of being reelected could be impeachable.

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/30/chief-justice-roberts-blocks-question-from-sen-paul-about-ciaramella-allows-question-about-schiff-staffer/

For the second day in a row, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to read a question submitted by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that mentioned the name of Eric Ciaramella, the alleged “whistleblower” at the center of the case who was outed by RealClearInvestigations.

Senators have been submitting questions to Roberts who asks them on behalf of the senators. The legal team and impeachment managers each have five minutes to respond to each question. On Wednesday, Roberts blocked Paul from posing a question that would have named the alleged whistleblower, as well.

After receiving Paul’s question card, Thursday afternoon, Roberts said, “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”

The Chief Justice did not explain why he rejected the question, which did not identify Ciaramella as the whistleblower.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/misuse-of-whistleblower-law-created-impeachment-farce_3222948.html

Who is the whistleblower, the man or woman who launched a thousand Schiffs?

Okay, bad joke. In any case, anyone with the slightest interest already knows who he or she is, although some pretend they don’t, like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts and the very Adam Schiff.

Nevertheless his (let’s be at least that honest) identity is being hidden because that is allegedly required by the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. It’s unclear whether that is true.

But let’s be honest a second time. Congress (if it’s still awake) and legal scholars should look immediately into revising the Whistleblower Protection Act because it appears to have been turned on its head and used as a weapon for some of the most despicable behavior in American history. Something’s drastically wrong with its language that it could be exploited that way.

The misuse of this act is the proximate cause of the embarrassing impeachment charade that has been numbing minds across our republic for weeks, almost always ignoring the sublime and going straight to the ultra-ridiculous—Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar debating the law with Alan Dershowitz on “The View.”

America deserves to know how [name redacted] was able to manipulate this law for such egregious ends, who manipulated it with him (was it the inspector general? Schiff personnel? Schiff himself? Others?), and when did it start? That last may take us way back into 2015-2016, back to the days of the Steele dossier. So many things are connected now.

We need to know the answer. Was [name redacted] really a whistleblower or just another low rent, stomach-turning political operative, the kind of people who—while assuming they know better than the rest of us—are like termites undermining the fabric of our republic?

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/30/yes-the-senate-should-call-witnesses/

The prevailing opinion of Republican lawmakers and most pundits on the Right is that the Senate impeachment trial should end without calling witnesses. Time to get back to the business of the American people, fair-minded people argue in defense of that view. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), especially, appears ready to move on.

But Democrats, led by their resident rock star, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), have no intention of getting back to any other business than continuing their scorched earth crusade against Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, Schiff hinted at his next move. “There are going to continue to be revelations that members of both sides of the aisle will have to answer a question each time it does,” Schiff told the trapped senators. “We are going to continue to see new evidence come out all the time.”

Schiff claimed the tell-all book by former National Security Advisor John Bolton, set for a March release, will disclose more damaging evidence against the president.

Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, was characteristically blunt about the Democrats’ pre-election strategy. Emanuel explained that an incomplete impeachment trial would not just be used against Trump but is central to the Democrats’ effort to win back the Senate.

“A vote to acquit . . . will force every senator to own Trump’s emboldened rhetoric of being exonerated,” the former Chicago mayor wrote in the Washington Post on Thursday. “Which means they’ll have to defend Trump when the next embarrassing audio recording hits the airwaves, or when another witness surfaces to speak, or when John Bolton’s book comes out, or when internal memos about the ‘drug deal’ come out via the Freedom of Information Act.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/gallup-reports-americans-satisfaction-with-race-relations-has-increased-14-percent-since-trumps-inauguration/

A new Gallup poll released Monday found that Americans have become considerably more optimistic about the state of race relations since Trump took office, with a 14-point increase over just three years.

Satisfaction on “the state of race relations” in the country rose from a mere 22 percent in January 2017, just before Trump took office, to 36 percent in January 2020, just weeks before Trump’s State of the Union address.

Race relations optimism still remains 8 points lower than it was in 2001, and a survey of the population from January 2 to January 15 showed that 58 percent of Americans were still dissatisfied with the state of race relations.

Respondents’ satisfaction with “the position of blacks and other racial minorities in the nation” also rose nine points over three years to 46 percent in 2020, as part of a larger trend which showed that Americans overall satisfaction with the direction of the country was at its highest point since 2005.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/video-120-members-congress-support-hamas-linked-frontpagemagcom/

In this new Jamie Glazov Moment, Jamie discusses 120 Members of Congress Support Hamas-Linked CAIR, unveiling a nation’s suicide.

Don’t miss it!

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/rashida-tlaib-blood-libels-and-democratic-party-ari-lieberman/

By the time Israeli first responders had pulled eight-year-old Qais Abu Ramila out of the rain-filled cistern in the Arab neighborhood of Beit Haninah this past Friday night, he was showing no signs of life. Israeli paramedics frantically tried to resuscitate the boy, but it was too late. Ramila had accidentally fallen into the cistern and drowned. Israeli efforts to locate Ramila and resuscitate him were nothing short of heroic. To the Israeli paramedics and other first responders who waded in the pond’s cold, murky waters, it mattered not that he was Arab or Jewish. A boy was missing, and his anguished parents needed resolution.

That should have been the end of this sad and tragic affair, but sadly, it was only the beginning. The boy’s family initially claimed that Ramila was kidnapped by “settlers,” an unsubstantiated claim that they quickly retracted. Nevertheless, rumors of a kidnapping whipped an Arab mob into a frenzy. The mob tried to enter an adjacent Jewish neighborhood but was blunted by Israeli security forces.

A faceless and nameless Palestinian troll account going by the name realSeifBitar, then took to Twitter and tweeted that Ramila was “kidnapped by a Herd of violent #Israeli settlers, assaulted and thrown in a water well…” That was a blatant lie and could be characterized as nothing short of a blood libel. The troll account further noted that Israeli security forces tried to impede with rescue efforts; another revolting lie.

It’s one thing for a nameless, faceless troll account to invoke a blood libel in furtherance of nefarious political aims. It’s an entirely different matter however, when those who propagate the blood libel are government officials.

Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent Palestinian official and no stranger to blood libels, retweeted the troll account’s mendacious comments adding, “The heart just shatters.” She later recanted, noting that the report was unverified. But before she did so, her tweet was picked up by democratic congressional lawmaker Rashida Tlaib of Michigan’s 13th congressional district. Though she later deleted the offensive tweet, she refused to apologize even after Ashrawi retracted.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/trump_years_bring_real_hope_and_change_making_america_great_again.html

Although former president Barack H. Obama (D) campaigned and won the presidency twice on a slogan of hope and change, he left his office leaving Americans “frustrated and angry” according to an AP survey analyzed in Fortune, full of “fear and loathing,” deemed Michael Goodwin of the New York Post — both admittedly not Obama fans.  However, even the Obama-friendly Public Broadcasting System (PBS) could only sum up the two Obama terms with “achievements and setbacks.”

That was then; this is now.  Three years into the Donald J. Trump (R) presidency, ABC News, another media outlet hostile to Trump, reports: 

US life expectancy rose in 2018 for 1st time in 4 years: Study

Drug overdose deaths are declining for the first time in decades.

Life expectancy in the U.S. rose in 2018, the first such increase in four years, according to a report the National Center for Health Statistics published on Thursday.

The average American man will live to be 76, and the average woman will live to be 81.

Those gains were driven by declines in 6 of the 10 leading causes of death between 2017 and 2018, and a notable drop in drug overdose deaths.

Overdose deaths, after increasing for decades, fell for the first time in 28 years, from 70,237 in 2017 to 67,367 in 2018, according to the report.

“It’s really the drug overdose deaths that are driving that trend,” said Robert Anderson, chief of the mortality statistics branch at NCHS.

Drug overdose deaths, Anderson explained, have a profound impact on average life expectancy because many occur at younger ages than other leading causes of death — cancer, heart disease, stroke, Alzheimer’s disease.