RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/former-intelligence-chiefs-fit-perfectly-into-media-advocacy-culture/

Former FBI Director James Comey and deputy director Andrew McCabe, former CIA Director John Brennan and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper have lots of things in common.

One, they ran the nation’s key intelligence and investigatory agencies under former President Barack Obama. They were deeply involved in the “Russian collusion” hoax. And they participated in the surveillance of the Trump campaign and transition.

Comey and McCabe both signed applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrants requesting surveillance on Trump campaign aide Carter Page. A report by Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz criticized Comey and McCabe’s FBI for falsehoods and misrepresentations during its investigation of the Donald Trump campaign.

Clapper, Brennan and the FBI helped to disseminate the fallacious Steele dossier to the press and among government agencies.

Two, Comey, McCabe, Brennan and Clapper have all lied either under oath or in the public sphere.

Horowitz has said that he referred Comey for criminal prosecution for leaking classified memos he wrote about his confidential conversations with the president, but the Justice Department did not pursue charges. He signed FISA warrant applications that the inspector general has determined were misleading at best and at worst simply flat-out wrong.

President Trump’s job approval rating has ticked up 6 percentage points since the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry began, according to a new survey.

The Gallup poll released early Wednesday found Trump’s approval rating at 45 percent, up from 39 percent when the inquiry was launched in the fall. The new findings mark the third-consecutive increase in Trump’s approval rating, Gallup noted.

DPS Note: I don’t understand why the newspapers have to refer to people filmed committing violent crimes as “suspects” when they could say “perpetrators.” The guy in the film referred to in this article really can’t be “suspected” of punching the 21 year old lady in the face when you can actually see him do it. 
Weird, huh? But not as weird as the fact that not a single person in the article is identified by race. I wonder if police reports are written this way. Also, keep in mind that under the new NYS law to go into effect on January 1st, 2020, this “suspect” will be required to be released without putting up any bail to assure that he’ll return for his next required appearance but might well be given Mets tickets to encourage him to do so because the system is being nice to him. Brave new world. The market for bodyguards is getting tight.

****************************************December 18, 2019 | 12:10am | 

https://nypost.com/metro/

Cops are looking for a maniac who launched a string of violent outbursts Monday on the Upper East Side — including a random slugging of a woman looking at her cellphone.

The suspect can be seen on surveillance video gingerly walking on East 85th Street near Park Avenue around 11 a.m. when he suddenly strikes the 21-year-old woman in the face without notice, according to police.

The victim suffered bruising and swelling to the face but refused medical attention. The suspect simply walked away.

Minutes earlier, the suspect approached a man sitting in his car in front of 960 Park Ave., cops said.

“I know you are talking about me!” the suspect said before brandishing a knife and chasing the man around his car.

The suspect in the Upper East Side attacks

After the assault captured on video, the suspect approached his next victims at East 87th Street and Third Avenue around 11:13 a.m., when he deliberately walked into a man and woman, cops said.

He then brandished a knife and threatened the couple.

Cops were looking for the individual, who was described as about 25 years old and around 5 feet 6 inches tall.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/schumer-presses-senate-testimony-bolton-mulvaney-joseph-klein/

Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer has proposed that the Senate hear from four current or former high-level Trump administration officials he considers to be vital witnesses in the trial that will follow the House of Representatives’ impeachment of President Trump. These witnesses include Mick Mulvaney, the Acting White House Chief of Staff, and John R. Bolton, the former National Security Adviser. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wisely rejected the Schumer proposal. He argued that it was incumbent upon the House, in their role as prosecutors, to bring the strongest case they can to the Senate for trial.

“It is not the Senate’s job to leap into the breach and search desperately for ways to get to ‘guilty,’” Senator McConnell said. “That would hardly be impartial justice. If House Democrats’ case is this deficient, this thin, the answer is not for the judge and jury to cure it here in the Senate.The answer is that the House should not impeach on this basis in the first place.” Senator McConnell emphasized that it is the House’s “duty to investigate. It’s their duty to meet the very high bar for undoing a national election. As Speaker Pelosi herself once said, it is the House’s obligation to, quote, ‘build an ironclad case to act.’” What the House Democrats have produced falls far short of that standard.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/12/the_democrats_are_imploding.html

It’s too soon to predict that the Democrats will go the way of the Whigs, but the oldest political party in the world is tripping over its own doctrines; making a public spectacle of its inability to coherently sponsor debates; riven by ideological fissures that seem to be widening; driving away two bedrock constituencies, the white working class and black voters; and hitching itself to a doomed impeachment effort that could cost it dearly next November.

It’s a great time to be alive if you are a Republican!

Consider the forthcoming presidential debates.

Next Thursday’s scheduled debate is being boycotted by all its candidates because the food service provider at the host institution, Loyola Marymount University — itself a second choice venue after UCLA was chosen and rejected because of a strike there — is experiencing a strike, and the candidates refuse to cross a picket line.  DNC chair Tom Perez, a former secretary of labor, is leaning hard on the parties to the strike to settle their differences (do you suspect there may be some quid pro quo promises?), so the squabble between the two constituencies of the Democrats, higher education and left wing labor unions, can end.

But solving that issue is child’s play compared to the “diversity” issue facing the debate scheduled for next February:

Nine Democratic presidential candidates have called on the Democratic National Committee to relax its debate standards next year, allowing some lower-polling rivals onto the stage.

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/474887-democrats-repeat-failed-history-with-mad-dash-to-impeach-donald-trump

“Let them impeach and be damned.” Those words could have easily come from Donald Trump, as the House moves this week to impeach him. They were, however, the words of another president who not only shares some striking similarities to Trump but who went through an impeachment with chilling parallels to the current proceedings. The impeachment of Trump is not just history repeating itself but repeating itself with a vengeance.

The closest of the three prior presidential impeachment cases to the House effort today is the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson. This is certainly not a comparison that Democrats should relish. The Johnson case has long been widely regarded as the very prototype of an abusive impeachment. As in the case of Trump, calls to impeach Johnson began almost as soon as he took office. A southerner who ascended to power after the Civil War as a result of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Johnson was called the “accidental president” and his legitimacy was never accepted by critics. Representative John Farnsworth of Illinois called Johnson an “ungrateful, despicable, besotted, traitorous man.”

Johnson opposed much of the reconstruction plan Lincoln had for the defeated south and was criticized for fueling racial divisions. He was widely viewed as an alcoholic and racist liar who opposed full citizenship for freed slaves. Ridiculed for not being able to spell, Johnson responded, “It is a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word.” Sound familiar? The “Radical Republicans” in Congress started to lay a trap a year before impeachment. They were aware that Johnson wanted their ally, War Secretary Edwin Stanton, out of his cabinet, so they then decided to pass an unconstitutional law that made his firing a crime.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/12/17/the_blues_at_st_james_comey

When your best explanation for humiliating failures is that you were incompetent, not criminal, you are in trouble. When your defense is that underlings are to blame, you can expect them to bite back. That’s the situation facing James Comey, former FBI director. His current story matches Richard Nixon’s lame admission: “mistakes were made.”

Not that Comey made those mistakes himself, mind you. Mere sloppiness by others, he says. That’s his new story. His old one was that the FBI did everything by the book and that his critics were dishonest partisan hacks. His self-righteous stance went down the garbage disposal last week when Inspector General Michael Horowitz issued his devastating report and then told a Senate committee that Comey was wrong when he said the report vindicated him and the bureau.

Comey is still drifting down that river in Egypt, denying he failed in his basic duties. Yet he signed surveillance warrants as “truthful and verified” when he knew (or should have known) they were neither. He and senior officials at the Department of Justice used the same misinformation four times to spy on Carter Page, claiming, without evidence, that Page might be a Russian agent.

Caught in these lies, Comey is reluctantly admitting that he relied on the FBI’s standard procedures for gaining warrants and that underlings may have been careless. They may well have been, but so was Comey. Moreover, it was the director himself who gutted the safeguards designed to prevent overzealous agents from deceiving the court.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/dec/16/trump-hits-new-approval-rating-high-amid-impeachme/

By Stephen Dinan – The Washington Times – Monday, December 16, 2019

President Trump hit a record-high approval rating in one of the country’s most influential polls Monday, as Democrats lost support for impeachment over the past six weeks of hearings.

Impeachment has cost Democrats their first House seat as well. Rep. Jefferson Van Drew of New Jersey, an outspoken critic of the process, fled the Democratic Party to join the Republicans.

Democratic leaders aren’t changing course, though.