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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Rashida Tlaib and Rasha Mubarak, American Muslims for Hamas Why are Democrats ignoring the Islamist fifth column infiltrating their party? Joe Kaufman

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/rashida-tlaib-and-r

Following the founding of Hamas in 1987, the Muslim Brotherhood set up worldwide committees to assist the newly formed terrorist group. In the US, it was called the Palestine Committee, and by the end of 1994, it would consist of four organizations, all falling under the leadership of then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. Of the four, only one remains, CAIR. However, remnants of the others came together in the form of a more recent group, American Muslims for Palestine (AMP). Given AMP’s connection to a terrorist organization, why would Democrat officials, including US Representative Rashida Tlaib, go out of their way to aid and abet the group, and why isn’t the Democratic Party doing anything to stop this?

AMP was established, in 2006, with the goal of vilifying and delegitimizing Israel. True to its Hamas roots, AMP’s message is laced with support for violence. The Executive Director of AMP is Osama Abu-Irshaid. Prior to AMP, he served as editor of Al Zaytounah, the official newsletter of the Palestine Committee’s Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP). This month, Abu-Irshaid stated at an AMP event, “Palestinians, if they don’t take what they want willingly, they will take it forcefully. We promise you this, we’re going to liberate our land and we’re going to liberate our people, whether they like it or they don’t like it. Well, they have picked the wrong enemy!”

Last month, AMP celebrated, on its Facebook page, the 32nd anniversary of the First Intifada, the violent uprising against Israel from which Hamas was created. During its January 2018 ‘JERUSALEM IS A RED LINE’ rally, AMP repeatedly led chants of “Long live Intifada.” AMP’s Chairman, Hatem Bazian, who is also the founder of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), at an April 2004 rally held in San Francisco, called for an intifada in America. He stated, “Well, we’ve been watching intifada in Palestine, we’ve been watching an uprising in Iraq. And the question is what are we doing? How come we don’t have an intifada in this country?”

Pelosi’s Impeachment Offenses The Senate should vote to acquit or convict on the evidence at hand.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/pelosis-impeachment-offenses-11579134502?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

House Democrats have finally vouchsafed to deliver their impeachment articles to the Senate, a month after they claimed their rushed votes were essential to save the republic. The Senate can now do better by the Constitution by holding a trial that judges President Trump without validating the partisan House process and its weak case.

Nancy Pelosi’s delay in appointing House managers further exposes how Democrats have defined impeachment down. The House hearings blocked GOP witnesses and limited cross-examination. Despite selective leaks and a pro-impeachment media, they failed to move public opinion or persuade Republicans that Mr. Trump committed impeachable offenses.

And now the Speaker admits she withheld the articles to intimidate Republicans into calling witnesses that the House wouldn’t call. “We think we accomplished in the past few weeks is that we wanted the public to see the need for witnesses, witnesses with firsthand knowledge of what happened, documentation which the president has prevented from coming to the Congress,” Mrs. Pelosi said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “Now the ball is in their court to either do that or pay a price.”

Impeachment and the Fight Over the Deep State By Charles Lipson –

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/15/impeachment_and_the_fight_over_the_deep_state_142152.html

Why is official Washington so determined to rid itself of Donald Trump? The usual answers focus on the country’s ideological divisions, now calcified in the parties, and Trump’s polarizing personality. Democrats of all stripes truly loathe him. All true, but those are only part of the answer. 

There is a deeper reason that helps explain both the origins of the impeachment articles and the larger movement to remove Trump. The key is that Trump not only ran against Washington’s entrenched power, he is actually delivering on that promise. Nothing is more dangerous to the Beltway’s power and profits, to its most powerful actors and the foot soldiers behind them. Those endangered interests are the essential backdrop to the House impeachment and Senate trial. 

Trump not only ran against the capital’s lobbyists, lawyers, and bureaucrats, he has avoided capture by them since taking office. Instead of making his peace with traditional Republican constituencies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, he has shut them out. He pays little attention to familiar Republican think tanks. Instead of deferring to state party leaders, he stepped into the primaries, backed his own candidates (often underdogs), and showed it was fatal for Republicans to oppose him. Back in Washington, the Democrats shut out Trump, deciding from the outset to block as many of his Cabinet and judicial appointments as they could. The result is that Trump firmly controls his own party and is uniformly opposed by Democrats, who are otherwise fractured by ideology and age. 

Millionaires demand that California save others from their fate By Andrea Widburg

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

In California, America’s limousine liberals are at it again, demanding that the rapacious California legislature step in and manage corporations lest anyone within the corporation become too rich. Leading the charge is Walt Disney’s great niece.

Abigail Disney is a child of incredible privilege because she is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney and great niece of Walt Disney, the two men whose genius combined to create The Walt Disney Company. Abigail, a degree jockey, went to all the right schools, by which we really mean all the leftist schools: Yale, Stanford, and Columbia.

As an adult, Abigail has taught English, written about the celebration of violence in American fiction, and produced and directed a handful of documentary films. She is purely leftist in her politics and is, of course, hostile to Israel.

Although Abigail claims to have given away $70 million since she gained control of her inheritance in 1981, she is still estimated to be worth $120 million. In other words, she still has a lot left to give away.

San Francisco continues to shine a light on what Leftism does to civilization By Andrea Widburg

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

In the 1970s, San Francisco, as was true for most major American cities, had gotten very shabby. While tourists still flocked to the neighborhood directly north of Market Street, where they could find Union Square, fancy stores, and upscale hotels, those who crossed Market Street and headed south found themselves in a four-block-square area of unpleasant squalor. There were always a handful of drunken men sleeping it off in the doorways of decrepit buildings and the sidewalks stank of urine.

By the end of the 1970s, San Francisco began a massive plan to revitalize that area. It tore down the decayed buildings and, in their place, built the Moscone Conference Center, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Yerba Buena Gardens, and the Metreon theater and shopping center. It was all beautiful and inviting. People loved coming to trade shows and conferences in San Francisco, and families happily took their children to the museum, the garden, the skating rink, and the movie theaters.

Things aren’t like that anymore. While it was once just the South of Market region that was icky because of a few sleeping (or rambunctious) drunks, some stinky pee, and some shabby buildings, tourists are discovering that San Francisco’s entire downtown is inundated with hundreds of scary homeless people, mounds of fecal matter, thousands of discarded needles, and clusters of tents and shopping carts.

The Democrats’ weird response to sending the impeachment articles to the Senate By Andrea Widburg

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

The past few years have disabused us of any notion that the American Congress is a solemn place, filled with statesmanlike, or at least decent, people working for the betterment of America and Americans. To those few who still clung to that outdated idea, the House Democrats’ behavior when sending the Articles of Impeachment to the Senate shows that Congress is no longer a serious institution.

People of a certain age remember a time when drunkenness was played for laughs. In the family-friendly show Bewitched, a running gag had a chronically drunk man invariably see Samantha practice magic — and, of course, no one believed him. Foster Brooks’ imitation of a drunk was also a perennial favorite in the 1960s and early 1970s:

Lately, it’s easy to suspect that the Democrat party has its own version of Foster Brooks. Don’t pay too much attention to what Nancy Pelosi is saying in this short video; just focus on her delivery:

This is not a well woman, and that’s true whether what bedevils her is a biological ailment or something else.

And then there was her word soup:

Postpone the Impeachment Trial until the House Finishes Investigating By Andrew C. McCarthy

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/trump-impeachment-postpone-senate-trial-until-house-finishes-investigation/

Letting House Democrats string the process along is not fair to Trump, the Senate, or the people.

Two things happened simultaneously on Wednesday: (a) The House of Representatives transmitted to the Senate two articles of impeachment approved on straight partisan lines a month ago, and (b) the House’s impeachment inquiry — yes, it’s still very much alive — highlighted new, relevant evidence it has turned up about the activities in Ukraine of President Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, and Giuliani’s associates.

The Democrats’ strategy is coming clear.

The House provided the Senate with two half-baked impeachment articles. House Democrats rushed through the investigation, forgoing salient witnesses and evidence, because of the political calendar. The charges are weak and the inquiry was needlessly short-circuited, so Democrats have continued investigating the premature allegations. Now they are publicly disclosing newly acquired evidence, with the promise of more to come. Transparently, their goal is to pressure the Senate not merely to conduct a trial but to complete the investigation that the House failed to complete — calling witnesses and gathering evidence, as if a trial were nothing more than an extension of an open-ended grand-jury probe.

Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans should not let them get away with it. No trial court would allow itself to be whipsawed this way. A federal judge would tell prosecutors to go back to the grand jury, finish the investigation, and come back to the trial court when they have a case ready to be tried, not investigated.

Dem Debate Flop Same old socialist, faux impeachment, climate change, and Trump Derangement Syndrome boilerplate. Lloyd Billingsley

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/01/dem-six-pack-serves-flop-lloyd-billingsley/

Most viewers were watching President Trump hold forth in Milwaukee but the run-up to Tuesday’s CNN Democrat debate in Des Moines features some stories of interest. Cory Booker had recently dropped up, so some Democrats were lamenting that all the candidates were white, a condition beyond their control. And as word had it, things were going to get tough on stage.

Tucker Carlson showed video of Sanders’ staffers warning of violence if Bernie did not get the nomination. And if he was elected, we would need re-education campaigns so people would not be “Nazis.”

The prevailing story was Elizabeth Warren’s charge that Bernie Sanders claimed a woman could not be president. Sanders claimed he never said it, and the debate kicked off on who would be the best commander in chief.

Bernie Sanders claimed he had opposed military and foreign policy blunders such as Iraq, Vietnam and Afghanistan. The Vermont socialist seemed unconcerned about actual enemies the nation was now facing.

Joe Biden said he would compare his record compare to anyone on this stage, but came up short on specifics. It was a mistake, he said, to give the president authority to go to war.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar wanted good health care and education for the troops. And she would get the nation back into the Iran deal from which President Trump had withdrawn.

South Dakota State Rep Proposes Bill to Criminalize Gender-Transition Surgeries on Children By Tobias Hoonhout

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/south-dakota-state-rep-proposes-bill-to-criminalize-gender-transition-surgeries-on-children/

South Dakota State Representative Fred Deutsch introduced a bill Tuesday to prosecute medical professionals who attempt to transition children struggling with gender dysphoria, the latest state-level effort to prevent physicians from performing irreversible sex-change surgeries on minors.

The “Vulnerable Child Protection Act” is not Deutsch’s first attempt to limit transgender influence on children. He sponsored a 2016 bill that sought to limit the bathrooms and locker rooms that South Dakota’s transgender students can use, which passed the state legislature, but was vetoed by then-Governor Dennis Daugaard.

In recent months, and with the high-profile custody battle in Texas over James Younger’s potential transition, several states have introduced similar bills, which are intended to punish doctors and healthcare providers who attempt to transition children. Alaska, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, and South Carolina have all seen similar efforts at the state level.

“Every child in South Dakota should be protected from dangerous drugs and procedures,” Deutsch said in a statement emailed to National Review. “The solution for children’s identification with the opposite sex isn’t to poison their bodies with mega-doses of the wrong hormones, to chemically or surgically castrate and sterilize them, or to remove healthy breasts and reproductive organs. The solution is compassionate care, and that doesn’t include catastrophically and irreversibly altering their bodies.”

Will Trump’s Pentagon stand tall when atheists attack? By Andrea Widburg

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

A formal blessing for the Space Force “official” Bible resulted in a squeal of outrage from a man who has dedicated his life to making sure that America’s troops, who are mostly Christian, have no easy access to God.

When the Founding Fathers drafted the Constitution, 85% of the American population did not belong to the Church of England. Were they in England, they would have had to pay to support the Anglican church and would have been barred from universities or government employment. Things were easier in the colonies, with the hold the Church of England had over the population varying from one colony to the next. 

It was in this context that the Founders included in the First Amendment the language stating that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion….” The Founders were not banning religion from America or even from government. They were saying only that Congress could not set up a state church and demand that people belong to it or suffer the consequences.

This mandate did not affect the Founders’ belief that God and morality were inextricably intertwined with a free, functioning country. After all, as Thomas Jefferson wrote, to the extent that all people have inherent rights, they are inherent because a divine Creator endowed us with those rights. John Adams believed that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

And then there’s Mikey Weinstein, founder and president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation. He is a fanatically anti-Christian atheist who has been on a crusade for years now to purge religion entirely from the United States Military. To Mikey, Christians in the military are a “well-funded gangs of fundamentalist Christian monsters who terrorize their fellow Americans by forcing their weaponized and twisted version of Christianity upon their helpless subordinates in our nation’s armed forces.”