RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/u-s-jobs-report-breaks-expectations-unemployment-at-50-year-low/

The U.S. Labor Department’s jobs report released on Friday showed accelerated hiring and unemployment at a 50-year low.

Employers added 266,000 jobs for the month of November, surging past expected gains and continuing growth from October, which saw 156,000 new hires.

The unemployment rate fell to 3.5%, the same as in September of this year and matching the lowest rate since 1969, according to the Labor Department’s report.

“It’s a significant surprise because economists were ready to go with the idea that payroll growth was slowing down because the job market had gotten tight,” Stephen Stanley, chief economist for broker-dealer Amherst Pierpont, told Bloomberg. “The whole tenor has changed in terms of job growth. We’re back at steady-as-she-goes at a robust pace.”

November was the first full month after the United Auto Workers union called a 40-day strike at General Motors factories. The end of the strike saw over 41,000 workers added to auto manufacturing jobs.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/adam-schiff-attack-on-free-press/

Even if John Solomon’s reporting on Ukraine was misleading or destructive, it wouldn’t warrant being unmasked by the government.

Where are all the self-styled champions of the free press now that Adam Schiff has used the surveillance powers of the state to smear not only his political rivals but a journalist?

With the release of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment report Tuesday came the revelation that Giuliani and his Ukrainian affiliate Lev Parnas, whose metadata Schiff apparently subpoenaed, had exchanged calls with former The Hill columnist John Solomon, ranking Intelligence Republican Devin Nunes, and attorney Jay Sekulow. Even if we allow that the California congressman had genuine national-security concerns when he subpoenaed metadata from AT&T so he could snoop on his political opponents, what possible national-security concerns would justify unmasking them?

This was an impeachment inquiry, not a criminal investigation. If Nunes had conducted himself similarly with Hillary Clinton’s personal lawyers, the D.C. press corps would have exploded into a raging panic. Rest assured, if Schiff had unearthed anything meaningful — and the subpoenas reportedly went out before the impeachment inquiry even began — he would have shared the evidence during the inquiry rather than using it as partisan chum in a post-inquiry report.

None of those unmasked by Schiff were the target of the inquiry, and, as far as we know, none of their conversations he exposed were unlawful. Nor were any of these conversations relevant in making a case for the impeachment of Donald Trump, especially without information beyond the time, dates, and lengths of the phone calls.

Schiff’s decision to unmask a journalist, though, was especially disconcerting. It meets none of law enforcement’s typical standards.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/november-jobs-report-employment-data

U.S. hiring surged in November, as the economy added 266,000 jobs and unemployment returned to a half-century low, a sign the U.S. is powering through a global slowdown.

The payroll number easily topped the estimate of 180,000 from economists surveyed by Refinitiv, who also saw the unemployment rate holding steady from October’s 3.6 percent.

It marks the 110th month of straight gains.

Unemployment ticked down slightly to 3.5 percent as more people were looking for work, matching a 50-year low. The labor force participation rate was little changed at 63.2 percent. Average hourly earnings, meanwhile, rose by 3.1 percent over the past year to $28.29.

Revisions, meanwhile, added 41,000 jobs for the prior two months, bringing the three-month average to 205,000, a 10-month high. (September increased by 13,000 to 193,000, and October jumped by 28,000 to 156,000). Still, job growth on average is slower than it was in 2018: The 2019 monthly average is 180,000 jobs per month, compared with an average gain of 223,000 last year.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/05/foggy-bottom-has-the-sadz-and-thats-a-very-good-thing/

The real “crisis” for former State Department bureaucrats and their colleagues who have been recycled back to the Ivy League campuses from whence they came is not that Trump poses an existential threat to national security—it’s that he poses a legitimate threat to their professional sinecures.

As House Democrats invited Ivy League shrews to publicly grind their Trump-hating axe during Wednesday’s disastrous impeachment charade, President Trump returned home after confronting our allies again about their lagging financial support of NATO. The stale pact turns 70 this year and like too many Boomers these days, NATO is out of fresh ideas and still listening to worn tracks of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” while the rest of the world is listening to Drake.

Also like so many Boomers, NATO members have made financial promises they won’t keep, stacking up IOUs for someone else to pay and hoping no one notices. But Trump, a Boomer himself, is having none of it.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau struggled to explain his country’s failure to fulfill the alliance’s agreement to earmark two percent of gross domestic product for defense spending—according to a NATO report, Canada only spent 1.2 percent of its GDP on defense in 2018: The United States spent nearly triple that amount. (While dismal, Canada’s expenditure last year is an improvement over 2014 when it only spent 1 percent.)

So Trump used a press conference to challenge Trudeau. “We’ll put Canada on a payment plan, I’m sure the prime minister would love that,” Trump jabbed when asked by a reporter about Canada’s reneging on their NATO pledge.

After Trump pressed for a percentage—Trudeau had to refer to an aide for the exact number—the Candians claimed they were at 1.4 percent. “They’ll get there. They know it’s important,” the president added.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/dream-team-redux/

If Nadler had any sense, he would simply fold his tent and stop the damage he is doing to House candidates in 2020.

There was a lot of pre-hearing hype about the Democrats’ supposedly stellar academic experts, sort of analogous to the giddiness about the “dream team,” “all-stars,” and “hunter-killer” legal eagles that Robert Mueller supposedly had assembled to pick apart the Trump carrion — and they likewise proved a complete dud.

There were a number of errors that reminded us why Pelosi had originally outsourced the impeachment gambit to the duplicitous but cunning Schiff rather than to the bumbling and clueless Nadler and his Judiciary Committee, who has now all but blown up his inquiry in just its initial hours.

1) By stacking the witnesses 3–1 and ignoring Jonathan Turley, the Democrats only hyped the writ against them that they are biased and unfair. Worse still, the Republicans’ witness Turley, former Bush administration critic who had voted against Trump, came across as the far more disinterested. Could not the Democrats have found one pro-Trump professor who had soured on him and now favored impeachment? Does the self-described “snarky” Karlan have any common sense at all — or even an associate with common sense who might have warned her that her canned, preplanned smear of Barron Trump was not just boorish, but a public relations disaster?

2) We are reminded that, outside small captive audiences on campus, academics are not very good public speakers and usually argue on the basis of presumed authority rather than facts and analysis. The three partisans came across as nasal, whiney, emotional, biased, and self-referential — and their past anti-Trump tweets, and partisan careers, clips, and interviews only confirmed the current stereotypes. On Ukraine, they said the same old, same old thing in mostly the same old ways.

And the three came off like those talking academic heads in documentaries, who sometimes wish to make the most of their 2 minutes of fame by turning up the volume and animation. Turley, in contrast, is a cool veteran of televised news analysis. His op-eds are sober and judicious. And he is a skilled public debater, who knows how to keep calm and analytical. He quickly eviscerated the three with apologetic ease — and deferential smiles. So whose bright idea was it to allow three partisan mediocrities to gang up against Turley, whose  rapier thrusts are well known? Americans love underdog odds, but Turley didn’t even break a sweat in leaving gaping holes in almost every argument advanced by the experts and House panel. He may have given the best solo congressional witness performance in modern memory.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/trump-impeachment-hearings-presidential-misconduct-historical-perspective/

If you think Trump’s behavior is the worst in American history, you might be insane.

This week, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee trotted out a trio of dispassionate legal experts to explain why the impeachment of Donald Trump was justified. They were there to bring a veneer of gravitas and erudition to what’s been, until now, a highly partisan affair.

But however smart people such as Michael Gerhardt, distinguished professor of constitutional law at University of North Carolina, might be, they aren’t immune from peddling partisan absurdities. Once Gerhardt argued that Trump’s conduct was “worse than the misconduct of any prior president,” we no longer had any intellectual obligation to take him seriously on the topic.

Because while I’m certainly not a distinguished professor, I am very confident that history began before 2016. Which means that, even if I concede Gerhardt’s framing of Trump’s actions — bribery, extortion, etc. — I can rattle off at least a dozen instances of presidential misconduct that are both morally and constitutionally “worse” than Trump’s blundering attempt to launch a self-serving Ukrainian investigation into his rival’s shady son.

Let’s ignore for a moment that American presidents have owned their fellow human beings, and focus instead on the fact that in 1942, the president of the United States signed an executive order that allowed him to unilaterally intern around 120,000 Americans citizens of Japanese descent. Not only was the policy deliberately racist, it amounted to a full-bore attack on about half the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold. Such an attack was a specialty of FDR’s, despite the all the hagiographies written about his imperial presidency.

Woodrow Wilson — who regularly said things like, “a Negro’s place is in the corn field” — didn’t merely re-segregate the civil service, personally firing more than a dozen supervisors for the sin of being black; he first pushed for, and then oversaw the enactment of, the Sedition Act. Wilson threw dissenters and political adversaries into prison, instructed the postmaster to refuse delivery of literature he deemed unpatriotic, and a created an unconstitutional civilian police force that targeted Americans for political dissent.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/adam-schiff-is-watching-11575591692?mod=opinion_lead_pos8

Fanatics can justify any action, and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff this week demonstrated where that mindset leads. In his rush to paint Donald Trump as a lawbreaker, Mr. Schiff has himself trampled law and responsibility.

That’s the bottom line in Mr. Schiff’s stunning decision to subpoena the phone records of Rudy Giuliani and others. Mr. Schiff divulged the phone logs this week in his Ukraine report, thereby revealing details about the communications of Trump attorneys Jay Sekulow and Mr. Giuliani, ranking Intelligence Committee member Devin Nunes, reporter John Solomon and others. The media is treating this as a victory, when it is a disgraceful breach of ethical and legal propriety.

If nothing else, Mr. Schiff claims the ignominious distinction of being the first congressman to use his official powers to spy on a fellow member and publish the details. His report also means open season on members of the press. Mr. Giuliani over months has likely spoken to dozens of political figures and reporters—and the numbers, dates and length of those calls are now in Democrats’ hot little hands. Who gets the Schiff treatment next? If you think politics is ugly now, imagine a world in which congressional partisans routinely track and expose the call lists of their political rivals and disfavored media.

If we’ve never had a scandal like this before, it’s in part because it is legally dubious. Federal law bars phone carriers from handing over records without an individual’s agreement. The statute makes some exceptions, including for federal and state law-enforcement agencies.

But not for lawmakers. “There does not appear to be any basis to believe that a congressional committee is authorized to subpoena telephone records directly from a provider—as opposed to an individual,” former Attorney General Michael Mukasey tells me. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiff-impeaches-biden-11575591017?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the least surprising news of the year Thursday by announcing that the House will proceed to impeach President Trump. Once she fired the “inquiry” missile, it could never be called back.

The question now is what precisely the articles of impeachment will say, and in particular we wonder if they will include the charge of bribery. If they do, Joe Biden should prepare for a Senate grilling.

Recall that Adam Schiff, the leading House impeachment advocate, has been floating a capacious definition of bribery that bears no relation to current law. “Well, bribery, first of all, as the Founders understood bribery, it was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader,” he told NPR. “It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you’re offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation’s interest.”

Mr. Schiff repeated this definition during his Intelligence Committee hearings, and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) made the same point this week when he claimed in the Washington Post that “federal law defines bribery as the solicitation of ‘anything of value personally’ by a public official ‘in return for’ an official act.”

Voila, the charge is that Donald Trump solicited a bribe when he tried to withhold a White House meeting or military aid to Ukraine’s new President in return for investigations into corruption and Joe and Hunter Biden. Mrs. Pelosi says the witnesses summoned by Mr. Schiff “corroborated” the bribery charge.

We’ve argued that Mr. Schiff’s definition of bribery wasn’t true for America’s Founders and isn’t true today. And we were pleased to see support this week from impeachment scholar Jonathan Turley in his testimony to Congress. “On its face, the bribery theory is undermined by the fact that Trump released the aid without the alleged pre-conditions,” Mr. Turley said, adding that “this record does not support a bribery charge in either century.”

As for current bribery law, Mr. Turley noted, the “Supreme Court has repeatedly narrowed the scope.” The Court specifically ruled out the promise of a meeting as a corrupt “official act” in McDonnell (2016). Numerous corruption cases have been thrown out as a result, including one against New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. The delay in military funds also fails under bribery law given that the aid was ultimately delivered and there’s doubt Mr. Trump even had the statutory authority to deny it.

https://spectator.us/impeachment-pathetic-clown-show/

First it was COLLUSION! Can you believe it? Trump was colluding with the Russians to steal the election from its rightful owner, H.R. Clinton. For a brief and shining moment, ‘collusion’ filled the airwaves and cyberspace. The president of the United States was colluding with Vladimir Putin, whose puppet he was. John Brennan, the excitable talking head who somehow became director of the CIA despite voting for Gus Hall, perpetual candidate for the US presidency on the Communist ticket, declared that Trump’s behavior was ‘nothing short of treasonous.’ Yikes.

That show had a good run, almost two years. But it collapsed like an abused soufflé after Robert Mueller’s expensive fishing expedition failed to hook any fish, at least any implicating the president in wrongdoing, to say nothing of treasonous wrong doing. Mueller’s pathetic performance before Congress probably counts as a form of elder abuse. This was supposed to be the spectacle that delivered the coup de grâce to the impossible orange man. Instead, it was a demonstration of the liabilities of senile incapacity. We spent $34 million for this?

In any normal world, that would have put paid to the Democrats’ greatest ever expedition, the unremitting search for a crime to which their preordained verdict — impeachment! — could be attached.

But this is not a normal world, it is our world, one in which such Soviet style of justice — show me the man and I will show you the crime — applies to anything involving Donald Trump. Still, though the animus remained, ‘collusion’ had to be retired.

Next up was Ukraine and a supposed ‘quid pro quo’. Repetitio mater memoriae: for a couple of weeks, the blank spot in the media’s script that had been occupied by ‘collusion’ now featured this new tort: Trump promised to give the Ukrainian president something in exchange for something. Exactly what those somethings were was a vague and shifting series of conjectures, undercut by denials on the part of all the principals that anything was offered for anything. 

https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/473171-turley-democrats-offering-passion-over-proof-in-trump-impeachment

The most dangerous place for an academic is often between the House and the impeachment of an American president. I knew that going into the first hearing of the House Judiciary Committee on the impeachment of Donald Trump. After all, Alexander Hamilton that impeachment would often occur in an environment of “agitated passions.” Yet I remained a tad naive in hoping that an academic discussion on the history and standards of it might offer a brief hiatus from hateful rhetoric on both sides.

In my testimony Wednesday, I lamented that, as in the impeachment of President Clinton from 1998 to 1999, there is an intense “rancor and rage” and “stifling intolerance” that blinds people to opposing views. My call for greater civility and dialogue may have been the least successful argument I made to the committee. Before I finished my testimony, my home and office were inundated with threatening messages and demands that I be fired from George Washington University for arguing that, while a case for impeachment can be made, it has not been made on this record.

Some of the most heated attacks came from Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Representative Eric Swalwell of California attacked me for defending my client, Judge Thomas Porteous, in the last impeachment trial and noted that I lost that case. Swalwell pointed out that I said Porteous had not been charged with a crime for any conduct, which is an obviously material point for any impeachment defense.