RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

There is a large and growing strain of anti-Americanism in the Democratic Party.  It is rife with incredibly bad ideas– economic, social and otherwise. It now makes no bones about appealing to erstwhile fringe elements. It courts and embraces Antifa members, anarchists, America-haters, gender deniers, extreme hedonists, aspiring Marxist-Leninists, and assorted other radicals. Yet, on the other hand, it similarly appeals to those who would elevate Sharia Law over constitutional rights. The only things it doesn’t tolerate are traditional mores and America’s founding values of limited government of, by, and for the people and their attendant natural rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as granted by the Creator.

Late-term and after-birth abortion, aiding and abetting young children in their tragically misguided attempts to “change sexes,” taxation without proper representation, violation of religious freedoms, suppression of free speech and the right to defend oneself and other core Democratic beliefs explicitly fly in the face of our founding principles and are simply evil.

If politics is indeed downstream from culture, when the culture is polluted, politics will be as well. The Founders would not have put up with the wide-scale poisoning of our culture and the internal annexation of the country they begat us. They would not have tolerated an attempted coup. Deep down, progressives know this. It is largely why they are bashing the Founders now.

Progressives try to skirt these facts by equivocating and asserting that everything is relative. There is no objective truth, they aver, only “my truth” and “your truth.”

https://www.aol.com/article/news/2019/12/07/why-moderates-are-holding-back-on-impeachment/23876261/

BY JONATHAN ALLEN AND LEIGH ANN CALDWELL

Like many of the 31 Democrats from districts President Donald Trump won in 2016, freshman Rep. Elissa Slotkin, D-Mich., is feeling the squeeze of impeachment.

A former CIA, Pentagon and National Security Council before winning election to the House last year, Slotkin helped launch the House inquiry into President Donald Trump’s Ukraine scandal by co-writing an opinion column calling for a probe after an intelligence community whistleblower accused the president of abusing his office.

But now, as the House Judiciary Committee drafts articles of impeachment and Democrats from politically competitive districts wait to see how they are written, Slotkin is being lobbied by Republican colleagues who argue that Trump’s actions — even if imperfect — don’t amount to impeachable offenses and that she should accept, given her background, that the president needs room to use leverage in foreign policy.

“I feel very strongly that in my prior life we often went to other countries and foreign governments when I was at the Pentagon and said, ‘We want you to do X in exchange for Y,’ but that exchange was exclusively for the national security interests of the country, not for Elissa Slotkin’s personal or political gain,” said Slotkin, who hasn’t committed one way or the other on impeachment. “And that’s a pretty fundamental difference and that was the conversation I had with one of my peers.”

While the GOP push hasn’t been persuasive, moderate Democrats are worried that liberals in their own party are going to put forward articles of impeachment that are hard to vote for and even harder to explain voting for.

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/12/06/trumps-unexpected-jobs-boom-leaves-dems-incoherent/

Job growth in November came in 79,000 higher than economists had expected, something that has become a regular occurrence under President Trump, where the economy has repeatedly defied what the “experts” forecast.

Just how big that gap is becomes clear when you look at longer-term forecasts these same experts made.

Take that jobs number. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are now a total of 152.2 million jobs in the U.S.  That’s an increase of 6.8 million since Trump took office. Backers of President Obama will say that during the same 35-month stretch of Obama’s last term in office, the economy created 7.7 million jobs, so Trump is actually doing worse.

That’s misleading, at best. The economy was still coming back from a deep recession, which is when job growth should be robust.  (In truth, post-recession job growth under Obama was one of the worst on record since the Great Depression.)

What matters is where economists saw the economy heading when Trump took office.

The Congressional Budget Office provides the answer. At the start of 2017, it released its 10-year economic forecast, which the CBO always boasts is right in the meaty part of the consensus of economists.

When it made its forecast, which assumed that nothing would change in terms of tax, regulatory, spending or any other policies, the CBO figured that the number of jobs created between January 2017 and today would be 2 million.

So Trump is doing better than expected on jobs by 4.8 million.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-inquiry-democrats-abuse-of-power-standard/

We know an impeachable offense when we see one — or do we?

T o put it mildly, the 1960s were not notorious for juridical modesty. They might compare favorably, though, to Wednesday’s episode of “The Lawyer Left Does Impeachment” at the House Judiciary Committee. Oh, I have no doubt that the three progressive constitutional scholars spotlighted by Democrats yearn in their hearts (and their classrooms) for the Warren Court, that apex of make-it-up-as-you-go-along lawyering. But even those jurists had the occasional convulsion of modesty.

The most instructive one for present purposes belonged to Justice Potter Stewart. The question before the High Court in the 1964 case of Jacobellis v. Ohio was how to define hard-core pornography for purposes of setting the elusive boundary where protected free expression transmogrifies into criminal obscenity. Assessing the terrain, Justice Stewart confessed that he could not “intelligibly” provide a workable definition … “but I know it when I see it.”

Impeachment has an eye-test, too.

You would never know that from listening to the law profs. Not that it matters much: The most memorable moment in the hearing turned out to be the mind-bogglingly moronic decision by Stanford’s Pamela Karlan to use 13-year-old Barron Trump in one of her many snarky jabs at the president. This, naturally, ignited an explosion of indignation from the pro-Trump right, whose sensibilities did not seem quite so tender when the president was tweeting about 16-year-old Greta Thunberg. That, just as naturally, inspired an even more embarrassing performance by Professor Karlan: So advanced is her Trump derangement that she is incapable of apologizing for her own poor judgment without taking another snide shot at the Bad Orange Man, lest we forget how morally superior she is.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15247/trump-congress-checks-balances

The president, as head of the executive branch, is entitled to challenge in court legislative subpoenas that demand material that may be subject to claims of privilege. He is also entitled to insist that the legislature obtain a court order before the executive branch complies. That is how checks and balances work.

Even if the president were wrong in challenging these subpoenas, his being wrong would not come close to being an impeachable offense. What do the Democratic experts claim it is? Treason? Bribery? A high crime? A high misdemeanor? It is none of the above and is, therefore, not a basis for impeachment.

For Congress to impeach President Trump for abuse of Congress would be an abuse of power by Congress. So despite the partisan opinions of the Democratic academic experts, Congress should not include abuse of Congress among its list of impeachable offenses. Nor should it include any counts that do not fit the specified Constitutional criteria. Since the evidence adduced thus far fails to establish treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors, Congress should not vote to impeach. If it does vote to do so along party lines, it will be acting unconstitutionally and placing itself above the supreme law of the land.

Congress is not above the law. It cannot simply ignore the words of the Constitution even if a majority of its members want to impeach the president. Pictured: Members of the House Judiciary Committee in a hearing on December 4, 2019 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Images)

Among the grounds for impeachment being considered by the House Judiciary Committee is that President Trump obstructed Congress by refusing to have members of the executive branch comply with Congressional subpoenas without orders of the court. This ground was given the imprimatur of the academic experts who testified for the Democrats. These experts, however, were not only wrong; their opinions pose a real danger to civil liberties and checks and balances. Moreover, it is highly questionable that these experts would have said that citizens must always comply with Congressional subpoenas without a judicial order if the political shoe were on the other foot.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-vs-schiff-is-a-clash-of-one-titan-11575672861?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Hearings were hardly necessary to show that Donald Trump, in all too characteristic a fashion, took interest in his administration’s Ukraine policy only when he saw a chance to lard on Ukrainian announcements that he could throw back in the face of domestic critics who questioned his 2016 legitimacy.

So why does Adam Schiff feel the need to stretch every truth beyond the breaking point in a House Intelligence Committee impeachment report released this week?

A media transcript plainly shows that acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney was not referring to a Ukraine quid pro quo when he said politics will influence foreign policy and that critics should “get over it.” Ambassador Gordon Sondland merely “presumed” that Mr. Trump sought a quid pro quo from Ukraine. Why falsely characterize these men’s statements, as the Schiff report does, when doing so is unnecessary to convince anyone that Mr. Trump nevertheless envisioned a quid pro quo?

Mr. Schiff claims Mr. Trump delayed “critical military aid” to Ukraine, but offers no evidence that the aid was critical. (The missiles discussed in Mr. Trump’s supposedly incriminating call with Ukraine’s president were not even part of the holdup.) He insists Mr. Trump’s dealings undermined U.S. national interests, but a president is perfectly entitled to differ with Mr. Schiff over what constitutes the national interest. With a casualness you expect only from the media, he relies on the fallacy that wishing to examine Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 election is tantamount to denying Russian meddling.

Mr. Schiff must gild the few lilies in his possession to distract from a glaring omission in his own proceedings. “Fact witnesses” were called to discuss whether there was a quid pro quo, but none were called to give evidence on whether the “quos” Mr. Trump sought from Ukraine were unfounded or illegal.

Don’t underestimate this sign of Mr. Schiff’s disingenuousness. However much the media lies about it now, a Ukrainian official allied with the then-Poroshenko government spoke openly to the Financial Times in 2016 of his work to ensure Mr. Trump’s defeat.   CONTINUE AT SITE

https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/05/rep-rashida-tlaib-headlined-anti-semitic-fest/

Democratic Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib was the featured attraction at a Chicago conference last Friday that was congested with anti-Semitic voices and organized by American Muslims for Palestine (AMP).

Tlaib, a member of the Democratic “squad,” known for her inflammatory statements about Israel, was the keynote speaker at the American Muslims for Palestine  summit that focused on her ability to influence the 2020 elections. Anti-Israel activist Linda Sarsour, a supporter of Democratic presidential candidate and Independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, was also in an attendance, the Washington Free Beacon reported Thursday.

The AMP views Israel as an enemy and its work is well-documented by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), an organization  that documents groups and individuals who foster and disseminate anti-Semitic propaganda. The ADL describes the AMP as promoting “extreme anti-Israel views” and creating “a platform for anti-Semitism.”

Tlaib is well-acquainted with fringe groups that market an anti-Israel or anti-Semitic agenda. The congresswoman supports the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement that seeks to undermine Israel. Because of her support for the movement, Israel refused Tlaib entry to the country.

The representative was also an editorial contributor to a Nation of Islam publication run by the notoriously anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan. Maher Abdel-qader, who peddles conspiracy theories about Jews and Israel, vigorously fundraiser for Tlaib’s congressional campaign and acted as her scheduler in the 2018 midterm elections.