RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/the_schiff_coup_day_one.html

These facts cannot be disputed:

1. Former Vice President Joe Biden admitted and bragged on TV that he threatened to withhold one billion dollars in American foreign aid to Ukraine if Ukraine did not fire the prosecutor investigating Burisma.  Burisma was paying Hunter Biden, son of the Joe Biden, over $50,000 per year as a board member of Burisma.  There is no dirt to dig up.  Joe Biden admitted to the dirt.

2. The Obama-Biden administration did not supply military aid to Ukraine when Ukraine needed the aid against Russia. This was admitted by the acting ambassador to the Ukraine, William Taylor, in his testimony.Trump in December 2017 announced that the United States     would send military aid to Ukraine that then–Ukraine president Poroshenko requested from the USA.  Obama and Biden had refused the sale of $47 million’s worth of Javelin antitank missiles.

In May 2018, after Ukraine tested its new Javelin missiles, Poroshenko thanked Trump for supporting Ukraine and providing the Javelin antitank missile systems.

3. On November 25, 2019 President Trump asked Ukraine’s President Zelensky to investigate Ukraine’s involvement in the 2016 election.  There is evidence that Ukraine helped Hillary in the 2016 election and tried to sabotage the Trump election.

4. The transcript of the phone call was released by President Trump.  The transcript speaks for itself.  There is no mention of conditioning American aid on any investigation of Biden.

5. There was no investigation by Ukraine into the 2016 election or any investigation of Joe Biden.

6. Ukraine received the American military aid that is the subject of the “impeachment inquiry” on September 11, 2019, six weeks after the July 25, 2019 phone call between President Trump and President Zelensky.

7. The Democrats have refused to produce the so-called “whistleblower” to testify.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/the-real-mystery-about-caramella-and-vindman/

I was chatting with Terry, my writing partner, this morning. He was in the Intelligence Community for years, as was I; Terry on the analysis side, me in collection and later as a computer security researcher. Both of us had, at one time, an “Extended Background Investigation” clearance, the clearance you need for that stuff people like to say is “beyond top secret.” (It’s not, but that’s another topic I explored in detail back when Edward Snowden turned.)

Now, Terry is a Democrat, pretty liberal, not at all impressed with Trump. But we were talking about Eric Ciaramella who was fired from the White House staff because he was leaking confidential information to the media. According to all the sources, he then returned to the CIA, where he currently works.

Which is, frankly, odd.

How, exactly, do you lose a job for security violations and return to the CIA? One would normally lose one’s clearance, and even janitors and cafeteria workers at CIA are cleared.

Then there’s LTC Alex Vindman, NSC staffer and active-duty Army officer. He has testified that he disobeyed orders, advised foreign governments to resist Trump, leaked internal information to others, and was actively working to subvert the president’s foreign policy.

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/what-happened-to-california-republicans/

From 1967 to 2019, Republicans controlled the California governorship for 31 of 52 years. So why is there currently not a single statewide Republican officeholder? California also has a Democratic governor and Democratic supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature. Only seven of California’s 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans.

In 1994, then-Gov. Pete Wilson backed Proposition 187, which denied state social services to undocumented immigrants. The spin goes that it backfired, alienated the Hispanic community and thus marked the road to Republican perdition.

Not quite.

Prop 187 passed with 59 percent support. Wilson’s endorsement of the bill helped its passage, and his support of it aided his landslide 1994 re-election. Among minority voters, 52 percent of Asian and African American voters supported Proposition 187. Some 27 percent of Latinos voted for it.

Liberal groups immediately sued in federal court. Just three days after the measure passed, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing Proposition 187 from going into effect. A month later, U.S. District Judge Mariana Pfaelzer issued a permanent injunction. Prop 187 never became law.

In effect, two judges nullified the wishes of more than 5 million California voters.

Arnold Schwarzenegger had supported Prop 187. Yet in 2003 he was elected governor. So what caused the Republican demise?

Ironically, radical changes in California demography may have been brought about by Prop 187 — but not in the way many people think.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-banality-of-impeachment-11573689793

House Democrats went public Wednesday with what the media are calling “historic” impeachment hearings, but what strikes us is the pre-cooked nature of the exercise. This isn’t a search for truth. It’s a set-piece production to promote a foregone conclusion. Democrats are turning impeachment into another partisan banality, and the country won’t be better for it.

House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff plans only five days of public hearings, and he has already heard the witnesses in secret. Mr. Schiff won’t allow most witnesses requested by Republicans, notably the whistleblower who started it all and Hunter Biden. Perhaps Democrats have some new bombshell they’ve uncovered, but that has not been the pattern. What they learn, they quickly leak to the impeachment press.

***

The impeachment case—after the failure of non-collusion with Russia and the non-obstruction of Robert Mueller —now boils down to President Trump’s dealings over a few weeks this summer with new Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky. Readers who want to save time should read Mr. Schiff’s opening statement Wednesday because it offers the most damning interpretation of events.

Mr. Schiff’s claim is that Mr. Trump sought to “condition, coerce, extort or bribe an ally into conducting investigations to aid his re-election campaign.” He did this by having his Administration threaten to withhold U.S. military aid and deny an Oval Office meeting until Mr. Zelensky publicly announced a corruption probe. That sums up the case.

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2019/11/ukrainian-officials-release-records-of-46-payments-to-hunter-biden-from-burisma-holdings-38-payments-were-for-83333-totaling-over-3-1-million/

New memos released last week reveal Burisma Holdings, Hunter Biden’s Ukrainian natural gas company, pressured the Obama State Department to help end the corruption investigation during the 2016 election cycle just one month before then-Vice President Joe Biden forced Ukraine to fire Viktor Shokin, the prosecutor probing his son Hunter.

Joe Biden bragged about getting Viktor Shokin fired during a 2018 speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.

The media immediately covered for Biden and said his targeting of Mr. Shokin was totally unrelated to the prosecutor’s corruption investigation into Hunter and Burisma Holdings.

New memos released because of a FOIA lawsuit filed by award-winning investigative reporter John Solomon show Burisma Holdings contacted the Obama State Department several times during the 2016 election to discuss ending the probe.

In fact, Burisma Holdings actually name-dropped Hunter Biden when requesting help from the State Department.

According to CD Media last week former Ukrainian official Oleksandr Onyshchenko said Hunter Biden was receiving “off the books” payments from Burisma in the millions.

On Tuesday CD Media posted leaked records of payments to Hunter Biden from Burisma Holdings totaling millions.

The documents show 46 payments to Hunter Biden’s company from Novembe 2014 to November 2015.

There were 38 payments for $83,333 totaling more than $3.1 million.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/11/13/adam-schiffs-star-witness-just-admitted-burisma-should-be-investigated-for-corruption/

Deputy Assistant Secretary of State George Kent made the case for launching an investigation into the Bidens and their involvement in Ukraine related to the Ukrainian energy company Burisma.

Kent, the State Department’s top official on Ukraine, said during testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in the Democrats’ partisan impeachment proceedings Wednesday he was concerned about a, “perception of a conflict of interest,” related to Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, serving on the board of the energy company while his father oversaw the Obama administration’s policy towards Ukraine.

Hunter Biden served on the board of the company for $50,000 a month despite having no prior experience in the energy industry while his father served as vice president deeply involved U.S.-Ukrainian policy.

Kent also testified in a private deposition that he voiced his discomfort over the situation to the White House in 2015 where administration officials brushed off Kent’s concerns.

“I raised my concerns that I had heard that Hunter Biden was on the board of a company owned by somebody that the U.S. Government had spent money trying to get tens of millions of dollars back and that could create the perception of a conflict of interest,” Kent told lawmakers behind closed doors in October. “The message that I recall hearing back was that the vice president’s son Beau was dying of cancer and that there was no further bandwidth the deal with family related issues at that time… That was the end of that conversation.”

https://pjmedia.com/trending/amb-taylors-awkward-silence-in-response-to-a-question-about-hunter-biden-was-very-telling/

During Wednesday’s impeachment hearings, Steve Castor, House Intelligence Committee counsel for the minority, asked Ambassador Taylor a rather simple question about Hunter Biden and his position at Burisma, that he couldn’t (or perhaps refused) to answer, resulting in perhaps the most awkward silence I’ve ever seen in such a hearing.

CASTOR: Ambassador Taylor, do you know whether Hunter Biden offers anything other than the fact that his dad’s the former vice president

AMB. TAYLOR: I don’t—

CASTOR: Or at the time was the vice president.

AMB. TAYLOR: I have no knowledge of Hunter Biden—

CASTOR: But you agree it raises questions?

AMB. TAYLOR: (five seconds of silence)

Here’s video of the exchange.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/mandatory-shortages/

Governments create problems. Then they complain about them.

“A public health crisis exists,” says Kentucky’s government, citing a report that found “a shortage of ambulance providers.”

Local TV stations report on “people waiting hours for medical transportation.”

“Six-year-old Kyler Truesdell fell off his motorcycle,” reported Channel 12 news. “The local hospital told (his mother) he should be transported to Cincinnati Children’s to check for internal injuries.” But there was no ambulance available. Kyler had to wait two hours.

Yet Kyler’s cousin, Hannah Howe, runs an ambulance service in Ohio, just a few minutes away. “We would’ve (taken him) for free,” she says in my new video. “But it would’ve been illegal.”

It would be illegal because of something called certificate of need (CON) laws.

Kentucky and three other states require businesses to get a CON certificate before they are allowed to run an ambulance service. Certificates go only to businesses that bureaucrats deem “necessary.”

CON laws are supposed to prevent “oversupply” of essential services like, well, ambulances. If there are “too many” ambulance companies, some might cut corners or go out of business. Then patients would suffer, say the bureaucrats.

Of course, Kentucky patients already suffer, waiting.

It raises the question: If there’s demand, then who are politicians to say that a business is unnecessary?

Phillip Truesdell, Hannah’s father, often takes patients to hospitals in Kentucky, “I drop them off (but) I can’t go back and get them!” he told me. “Who gives the big man the right to say, ‘You can’t work here’?!”

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15158/alan-dershowitz-steve-cohen

For [Congressman Steve] Cohen [D-TN], the issues surrounding impeachment are one-sidedly simple, and there is no reason for anyone to express or listen to opposing points of view. Therein lies the true road to tyranny: when government officials like Cohen berate people for expressing contrary points of view, free speech and dissent are chilled.

Congressmen Steve Cohen, who has a long history of one-sided condemnation of Israel, recently called me a Nazi collaborator on MSNBC as the show’s host Alex Witt sat silently by. Here is the context: several days earlier, I had been on a Fox News show discussing impeachment when the host and another panelist began attacking Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, who was preparing to testify the next day regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s call with Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of the Ukraine. When the attack on Vindman occurred, I had never heard of him and had no idea why he was being vilified. Since I had no knowledge to offer, I remained silent about Vindman and continued to discuss the subject at hand, namely impeachment.

As soon as I learned who Vindman was, I did three things: I tweeted a strong statement criticizing the accusation against Vindman and describing him as a patriot who served his country; I went on TV and publicly apologized for my silence, explaining that I knew nothing about the issue at the time; I then wrote an op-ed declaring Vindman to be a patriot and calling on Republicans to “stop their smears.”

It was several days after I offered these explanations and apologies that Cohen described the attack on Vindman and said that “Dershowitz sat there listening like a quisling.” He said nothing about my subsequent statements.

For those too young to remember who Vidkun Quisling was, let me remind you. Quisling was a Nazi collaborator and strong supporter of Hitler. The name quisling has become a descriptive noun meaning traitor, collaborator and Nazi. I assume that congressman Cohen knew all this when he threw that despicable term at me.

The crowning irony is that Cohen was criticizing me for remaining silent while someone else wrongfully called Lt. Col. Vindman a traitor. Yet, Cohen himself was prepared to call me — a patriotic American and a liberal Democrat — a quisling. The further irony is that Cohen went on to bemoan how divided we have become as a nation: “we are separated tremendously.” Of course, we are separated, and Congressman Cohen is part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/11/trump-vs-the-policy-community/

We resolve policy disputes by elections, not impeachments.

When it comes to Russia, I am with what Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman calls the American “policy community.”

Vindman, of course, is one of the House Democrats’ star impeachment witnesses. His haughtiness in proclaiming the policy community and his membership in it grates, throughout his 340-page House deposition transcript. I couldn’t agree more, though, with our experts’ apparent consensus that Moscow is bad, should be challenged on various fronts, and would best be seen as the incorrigible rival it is, not the potential strategic partner some wish it to be — the “some” here known to include the president. Ukraine, for all its deep flaws, is valuable to us as a check on Russia’s aggression, another conclusion about which the president is skeptical.

That is, on the critical matter of America’s interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin’s anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions.

But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.

And that’s where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him — not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts — in charge of making policy. If we’re to remain a constitutional republic, that’s how it has to stay.