RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/10/corrupt_senators_took_ukraine_cash.html

While Democrats are pushing the bogus Trump-Ukraine quid pro quo story invented by that great storyteller, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, two groups of Democratic senators have been colluding with Ukrainian interests to advance their own agenda and political careers.

Kudos to Steve Hilton for pointing out the corruption of the first group on the Oct. 13 edition of his Fox show “The Next Revolution” – a group of Democratic senators took cash from a Ukraine lobbyist to push Ukrainian gas interests at the same time the Democrats are pushing the Trump-Ukraine yarn. As Hilton states in a transcript of his show available on Fox Opinion:

Remember Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner? He had previously been a top fundraiser for John Kerry, who was Secretary of State at the time. And soon after Devon and Hunter joined the Burisma Board, the company channeled $90,000 to a lobbying firm called ML Strategies, which was headed by none other than David Leiter, John Kerry’s former chief of staff.

That’s handy because then-Secretary of State John Kerry himself has visited Ukraine with promises of U.S. aid and assistance. Well, Leiter registered as a Burisma lobbyist in mid-2014. But in the year leading up to that, he gave close to $60,000 to Democrats, including a select group of U.S. senators who would later be instrumental in pushing cash towards Ukraine’s energy sector, directly in line with Burisma’s interests.

He donated to Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., four times and to Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., three times. A month after the last of those donations, both Markey and Shaheen were among four senators who wrote a letter to President Obama that said, “We should leverage the full resources and expertise of the U.S. government to assist Ukraine in improving its energy efficiency, increasing its domestic production and reforming its energy markets.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-bidens-concede-11571078740

Not even the Biden family seems willing to stand behind their questionable financial arrangements. A business associate in Shanghai doesn’t seem to have an explanation yet, either. Are the bitter-enders at CNN and NBC News finally ready to stop defending the indefensible?

Last week this column noted that former Vice President Joe Biden once again declined to offer a defense of his family’s business model even in an op-ed ostensibly responding to attacks on this model. Over the weekend, his son Hunter Biden quit another of the overseas engagements for which he seemed eminently unqualified.

The Journal’s Ken Thomas and Thomas Grove noted on Sunday:

Hunter Biden is stepping down from a director’s position at a Chinese private-equity firm and said he wouldn’t serve on any foreign boards if his father, Joe Biden, is elected president, lowering his controversial business profile as it becomes embroiled in the 2020 election and Democrats’ efforts to impeach President Trump.
…The former vice president’s son, 49 years old, served on the board of Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings Ltd. while his father oversaw U.S. policy on Ukraine as vice president. Hunter Biden stepped down from the Burisma board in April. The younger Biden remained a director of BHR (Shanghai) Equity Investment Fund Management Co., a Chinese investment firm, where Mr. Trump also alleges inappropriate conduct by the Bidens. Hunter Biden said Sunday he would remove himself from the firm’s board on Oct. 31. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/13/the-strategies-of-targeting-trump/

There is no logical Democratic explanation for impeaching Donald Trump. The various factions within the Democratic Party calling for impeachment are united only by their loathing of Donald Trump, the person, and his systematic repeal of the Obama progressive project.

After failing with the voting machine gambit, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the emoluments clause, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux-coup, the Comey memos farce, the “resistance” efforts outlined by the New York Times anonymous op-ed writer, the campaign finance violations accusations, Stormy, tax returns, whistleblowers, leakers, the Mueller 22 months charade, and now impeachment 2.0, what exactly is the point of impeaching Trump just 13 months before the election?

Here are the various rationales behind Trump’s Democratic and leftwing opponents’ latest “whistleblower” hoax. None of these scenarios are mutually exclusive.

The Primal Scream? 

There doesn’t have to be a point to impeachment. Democrats loathe Trump. That is enough. They would have impeached him on day one of his presidency before he set foot in the White House but they did not have control of the House. Now they do, so they can. Who cares whether he is convicted in the Senate? House members just want to go on record that they impeached him and put an asterisk on his presidency at worst, and at best drive his polls down to prevent his reelection.

The only hesitation after January 2018 when they took over the House was the completion of the Mueller investigation that seemed a certain road to impeachment. When that failed, it took just a few weeks to recoup, get their spirits back up, and resort to the prearranged fallback whistleblower tact. Now they are back on track.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/adam-schiffs-grand-jury-11571003444

Donald Trump is lucky in his opponents. Hillary Clinton was a bad candidate, and now House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has chosen Rep. Adam Schiff to be the face of impeachment for Democrats.

Mrs. Pelosi took the impeachment reins away from Judiciary Chairman Jerrold Nadler and handed them to Mr. Schiff, who has been running secret hearings as Chairman of the Intelligence Committee. Witnesses testify behind closed doors, and Democrats selectively leak the testimony or evidence to the pro-impeachment press in ways that are often distorted or incomplete. Republicans then offer a competing narrative, and the public is left to wonder what’s true. All of this is supposedly in service to the serious purpose of removing a President elected by 63 million Americans.

Mr. Schiff was challenged on his secrecy on Sunday by Margaret Brennan of CBS’s “Face the Nation,” and the Democrat’s response was extraordinary. “There’s a reason why investigations and grand jury proceedings for example, and I think this is analogous to a grand jury proceeding, are done out of the public view initially,” Mr. Schiff said. “Now we may very well call some of the same witnesses or all the same witnesses in public hearings as well. But we want to make sure that we meet the needs of the investigation and not give the President or his legal minions the opportunity to tailor their testimony and in some cases fabricate testimony to suit their interests.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/10/four-stages-never-trump-republicans-daniel-greenfield/

There are four stages of Never Trumper Republicans, much like the four stages of grief, and the most pivotal of these is the open letter to lefties.

James Comey did one of those. As did Jennifer Rubin. Also, I believe Max Boot. And innumerable other quislings. Now Tom Nichols has one.

We don’t agree about everything; still, we get along pretty well, you and I, centered around the daily understanding that Donald Trump is a dire threat to the United States. That’s why I’ve been comfortable in my public commitment to vote for the Democratic presidential nominee, come hell or high water. You’ve mostly responded to this by…

Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? I feel like you’re not doing your part here.

We take our walks together and we discuss the importance of getting rid of Donald Trump. And yet, when we both leave for work in the morning, it feels like only one of us is really, truly serious about that.

Here we go.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/rashida_and_the_law.html

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/10/rashida_and_the_law.html

Rashida opens mouth, inserts foot.

It seems that the charming and attractive Rashida Talib is still running off at the mouth about arresting people, specifically administration officials who refuse to respond to the House’s “impeachment” subpoenas.

According to Rashida:

“There have been actual serious conversations about what the logistics would look like… if we did have to force someone through a court order to come before the Congressional committee… she said. “This is pretty uncharted territory for many of us and even for Congress.”

Of course there have been. Leftists yearn for police powers, for the ability to reach out and punish anyone they see, with a ferocity unknown to normal human beings. That was true during the French Revolution, and will be true of the Ganymede revolt of 2250.

There’s only one problem, as I see it. To arrest somebody, you have to be able to appeal to authority, and there’s no authority involved here. An impeachment process has not be formally begun, therefore, the House has absolutely no grounds for subpoenaing anybody. It’s quite similar to all the jabber about “obstruction of justice” surrounding the Mueller Report. If there’s no crime, there’s no obstruction. You’d figure an institution packed full of lawyers would have some grasp of actual law.

Rashida opens mouth, inserts foot.

It seems that the charming and attractive Rashida Talib is still running off at the mouth about arresting people, specifically administration officials who refuse to respond to the House’s “impeachment” subpoenas.

According to Rashida:

“There have been actual serious conversations about what the logistics would look like… if we did have to force someone through a court order to come before the Congressional committee… she said. “This is pretty uncharted territory for many of us and even for Congress.”

Of course there have been. Leftists yearn for police powers, for the ability to reach out and punish anyone they see, with a ferocity unknown to normal human beings. That was true during the French Revolution, and will be true of the Ganymede revolt of 2250.

There’s only one problem, as I see it. To arrest somebody, you have to be able to appeal to authority, and there’s no authority involved here. An impeachment process has not be formally begun, therefore, the House has absolutely no grounds for subpoenaing anybody. It’s quite similar to all the jabber about “obstruction of justice” surrounding the Mueller Report. If there’s no crime, there’s no obstruction. You’d figure an institution packed full of lawyers would have some grasp of actual law.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

Accusations fly furiously around corridors of power in Washington and in newsrooms across the country. Neighbor no longer speaks to neighbor; children are distanced from their parents; colleges promote ideologies rather than encourage debate. Doctors tell us we have become stressed due to harsh and unrelenting political attacks. Serious debate is ignored, yet issues remain: What kind of government do we want? A state whose tentacles reach deep into our lives, or one based on self-rule that values individual independence? Should we tilt toward socialism or rely on free-market capitalism?

For almost a century, the nation has moved away from small government and citizen representatives, toward big government and professional politicians, bureaucrats and administrators – toward a “deep state,” defined by Kimberly Strassel of the Wall Street Journal, as “consisting of career civil servants who have growing power in the administrative state but work in the shadows.” Both political parties have perpetuated this trend. Even under Reagan, for example, Washington bureaucracy continued to grow, albeit at a slower pace. But the Left has always been more aggressive. Think of FDR and the New Deal, LBJ and the Great Society and Barack Obama “fundamentally transforming the United States of America.”

As to when and where it began – the trust-busting policies of regulatory reformers in the late 19th Century, the appointment of J. Edgar Hoover as director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924, or the Alphabet Agencies of Franklin Roosevelt’s thirteen-year reign – is less important than recognition that an unfortunate consequence has been the expanding influence and power of unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats and administrators. It has been cozy, tacit arrangements that allowed both political parties to accommodate their special interests. It has permitted political and personal loyalty to germinate and expand within agencies – loyalty toward those who encourage the growth of their responsibilities and treachery toward those who challenge their positions.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/10/14/lgbtq_town_hall_showcased_democratic_extremism_141484.html

Last week the Equality Town Hall held by my network, CNN, plainly revealed the radicalism that drives the Democratic Party today. In stark terms, candidates and audience members advocated for wholesale government-compelled social engineering to comport with their liberal secular-humanist agenda. Such proposals contravene foundational protections of our Constitution and also imperil Democrats’ electoral prospects for 2020.

Robert Francis O’Rourke continued his steady philosophical assault upon the Bill of Rights. Apparently, O’Rourke is no longer content to merely eviscerate the Second Amendment with his plan to confiscate tens of millions of firearms from law-abiding citizens. Like most leftists who disrespect the Second Amendment, he also promotes hollowing out the First Amendment as well. CNN’s Don Lemon asked if religious institutions should “lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.” The candidate answered in the affirmative, stating, “There can be no benefit, no reward, no tax break for anyone, or any institution … that denies the full human rights, and the full civil rights of every single one of us.”

In a sense, O’Rourke did America a favor by stating plainly the true goal of social liberal activists: to bring private groups into full compliance with their postmodernist precepts, by compulsion if necessary. The practical application of such extremism would clearly bankrupt mosques, Catholic schools, and faith-based charitable service organizations across our land. But such destruction is not a side effect but rather the very goal of this fascistic statism.

Consider the perversion of the inverse policy: What if traditional conservatives had tried to revoke the tax-exempt status of pro-gay-marriage mainline Protestant churches before our laws totally changed the millennia-old definition of marriage? Liberals would have rightly condemned such an encroachment, and the courts would have surely protected the rights of progressive churches to privately define marriage according to their beliefs. After all, our government should have no more say in determining a faith’s doctrinal beliefs on marriage than it does regarding baptism or bar/bat mitzvahs.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coup

I’ve lived through a few coups. They’re insane, random, and terrifying, like watching sports, except your political future depends on the score.

The kickoff begins when a key official decides to buck the executive. From that moment, government becomes a high-speed head-counting exercise. Who’s got the power plant, the airport, the police in the capital? How many department chiefs are answering their phones? Who’s writing tonight’s newscast?

When the KGB in 1991 tried to reassume control of the crumbling Soviet Union by placing Mikhail Gorbachev under arrest and attempting to seize Moscow, logistics ruled. Boris Yeltsin’s crew drove to the Russian White House in ordinary cars, beating KGB coup plotters who were trying to reach the seat of Russian government in armored vehicles. A key moment came when one of Yeltsin’s men, Alexander Rutskoi – who two years later would himself lead a coup against Yeltsin – prevailed upon a Major in a tank unit to defy KGB orders and turn on the “criminals.”

We have long been spared this madness in America. Our head-counting ceremony was Election Day. We did it once every four years.

That’s all over, in the Trump era.

On Thursday, news broke that two businessmen said to have “peddled supposedly explosive information about corruption involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden” were arrested at Dulles airport on “campaign finance violations.” The two figures are alleged to be bagmen bearing “dirt” on Democrats, solicited by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/impeachment-process-political-not-legal/

It’s a political process, not a legal one — and the political climate is anything but static.

What is impeachment for? Seems like a simple question. Constitutionally speaking, it also appears to have a simple answer: to cite and remove from power a president guilty of wrongdoing.

Aye, there’s the rub. What sort of wrongdoing warrants removal from power?

I’d wager that the flames of impeachment were stoked more this week by President Trump’s foreign policy than they have been by any purported impeachable offense his opponents have conjured up over the last three years. By redeploying a few dozen American troops in Syria, the president acceded to a Turkish invasion of territory occupied by the Kurds. Ostensibly, that has nothing to do with the impeachment frenzy over Ukraine, whose government Democrats accuse the president of pressuring to dig up dirt on a political rival. But Turkey’s aggression could crack the president’s impeachment firewall.

There is rage over Trump’s decision. It is rage over a policy choice, not over high crimes and misdemeanors. Only the most blindly angry can doubt the lawfulness of the commander-in-chief’s movement of U.S. soldiers, even though it rendered inevitable the Turks’ rout of the Kurds.