RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-sigh-of-jobs-relief-11570228132

Imagine how well the U.S. economy would be doing with better trade policy. That’s our reaction to Friday’s jobs report for September that showed remarkable resilience despite the headwinds of tariffs, declining business investment and a manufacturing downturn.

The economy created 136,000 new jobs in the month, plus 45,000 more in upward revisions for July and August. That adds up to a monthly average so far this year of 161,000, which is healthy for an expansion that is now into its tenth year though it’s below the 223,000 average in 2018.

Even more surprising, the jobless rate fell to 3.5%, the lowest in half a century. The number of employed Americans surged by 391,000, which drove the overall employment ratio up to 61%, the highest since December 2008. The rising employment ratio shows that Americans who have been on the sidelines since the Great Recession are continuing to stream into the labor market long after economists on Wall Street and at the Federal Reserve concluded the U.S. was at full employment.

The new job seekers include in particular those who are often the hardest to employ. The jobless rate for those without a high-school degree fell by 0.6 percentage point to 4.8%, the lowest since the Bureau of Labor Statistics began tracking this in 1992. The rate for Hispanic Americans fell 0.3 percentage point to 3.9%.

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

The Muslim Educational Cultural Center of America (MECCA) claims that its goals are “to guide young Muslims” and “build bridges of understanding with other cultures and faiths.”  Yet the Chicago-area mosque’s willingness to promote hate preachers and anti-Semitic demagogues reflects the continued influence of its Islamists founders and leaders.  

The Center’s soft talk has duped some politicians into attending the mosque’s events.  Some of them are Burr Ridge mayor Gary Grasso and Dupage County board member Julie Renehan, who attended the Center’s open house last month.  Also, this month, on October 2, U.S. congressman Sean Casten spoke on immigration at MECCA.

But a man is known by the company he keeps.  On September 20, the MECCA Center hosted Imam Zaid Shakir, who delivered the Friday sermon.  Shakir’s writings and speeches show a man prone to conspiracy theories and extremism.  In 2001, Shakir argued that the American Muslim community must consider political options including “guerrilla war.”  Shakir claimed that the United States “inflicted” terrorism on the world and suggested that it would be acceptable for Muslims to attack U.S. military forces.

Shakir also has engaged 9/11 conspiracy theories and blamed “Zionist” forces and the FBI for the February 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing.  Shakir argued that the conspirators were set up as a way of bolstering anti-Islamic sentiment.

On September 29, the MECCA Center hosted Linda Sarsour, who has a well established history of anti-Semitism and promoting extremism.

Sarsour was removed from her position as a leading organizer for the Women’s March out of concerns regarding her public anti-Semitism, including her relationship with the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and support for Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian terrorist deported from the United States for lying about previous terror convictions.  Sarsour is a support of Al-Awda, a pro-Palestinian group that endorses terrorism and calls for the destruction of Israel.  In 2011, Sarsour expressed a desire to “take away the vaginas” of two female activists, Brigitte Gabriel and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, one of whom, Ali, was a victim of female genital mutilation (FGM).

https://pjmedia.com/trending/schiffs-own-ties-to-ukraine-raise-questions/

Rep. Adam Schiff is one of Donald Trump’s fiercest, most relentless critics. He still insists there was collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign and is a primary mover behind the current efforts to impeach the president.

But Schiff has his own connections to Ukraine that may raise troubling questions about a conflict of interest.

Schiff’s ties to a wealthy Russian-American businessman doing business in Ukraine have recently come to light. Igor Pasternak is CEO of Worldwide Aeros Corp., a company that makes blimps for the military and commercial sectors. The company also makes a modified version of the M4 and M16 rifles that are manufactured in Ukraine. His connection to Pasternak, who is doing business with the Ukrainian government, could be construed as being a conflict of interest in his committee’s investigation.

Fox News:

In 2013, Pasternak hosted a fundraiser in Washington for Schiff, who later came to embrace a strong stance in support of the United States sending military aid to Ukraine during its conflict with Russia.

“Before this time, Schiff rarely, if ever, mentioned Ukraine,” Fox News’ Laura Ingraham said on her show Thursday night, after detailing Schiff’s connection to Pasternak. “But after the fundraiser, he used multiple television appearances to basically demand that we send money and arms to them.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/03/the-anesthetic-effect-of-ukrainegate/

There’s a good chance the manufactured scandal already has softened Barr’s expected body blow to the Russiagate culprits by setting up a false equivalence. Justice might finally be served, but a weary American public might not care.

Wary political commentators on the Right have noted that the ginned up outrage over President Trump’s call with the Ukranian president serves two political purposes: One, to supply the impeachment goods that Special Counsel Robert Mueller could not deliver and two, to obfuscate the ongoing investigations led by Attorney General William Barr into how the Obama White House unleashed the country’s most powerful government agencies against the Trump presidential campaign in 2016.

There is, however, a third motive behind the nonstop cacophony over Trump’s call and subsequent “whistleblower” report: To anesthetize the American public when the verdicts of Barr’s inquiries, currently underway by multiple authorities at the Justice Department, are rendered.

“Ukrainegate” is another way to numb the collective shock when Americans finally learn the details of the international sting operation concocted to sabotage Trump’s presidential campaign and later, derail his presidency. The reaction from the Left and NeverTrump Right will be, “So what if President Obama’s CIA, FBI and State Department prodded foreign governments to investigate his political foe and influence an election? Trump did the same thing! Who cares if Obama wanted to damage the Trump campaign? Trump is doing the same thing to the Biden campaign!”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-streets-of-san-francisco-11570143083

The city made a choice to tolerate vagrancy and encourage drug use, with dire consequences.

This city has been conducting a three-decade experiment in what happens when society stops enforcing bourgeois norms of behavior. It has done so in the name of compassion for the homeless. The result: Street squalor and misery have increased, while government expenditures have ballooned. Yet the principles guiding city policy remain inviolate: Homelessness is a housing problem, it is involuntary, and it persists because of inadequate public spending. These propositions are readily disproved by talking to people living on the streets.

“Everyone’s on drugs here . . . and stealing,” an ex-convict named Shaku explains from an encampment of tents, trash and bicycles across from Glide Memorial Church in the heart of the Tenderloin district. A formerly homeless woman living in a city-subsidized hotel, asked if she does drugs, replies: “Is that a trick question?” Jeff, 50, slumps over his coffee cup at 7:30 a.m. A half-eaten muffin sits next to him on a filthy blanket. “I use drugs, alcohol, all of it,” he tells me, his eyes closed. “The whole Tenderloin is for drugs.”

The city sends the message relentlessly that drug use is not only acceptable but expected. The Health Department distributes 4.5 million syringes a year, along with alcohol swabs, vitamin C to dissolve heroin and crack, and instructions on how to tie one’s arm for a hit. Officials have installed 17 needle-disposal boxes and kiosks throughout the city, signaling to children that drug use is a normal part of adult life.

Only 60% of the city’s free needles are returned; the rest end up on the sidewalks or in the sewers. Users dig for veins in plain view. At the corner of Hyde Street and Golden Gate Avenue, steps away from the UC Hastings College of the Law, I was easily able to purchase a 2-gram pellet of fentanyl for $16, a new-customer discount.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffs-shifty-timeline-11570143046

If the latest impeachment push continues to backfire, Democrats can thank their duplicitous House Intelligence chairman, Adam Schiff.

The New York Times reported this week that the “whistleblower” who set off the latest inquisition provided an “early warning” to Mr. Schiff’s committee that he or she was filing a complaint over Donald Trump’s July 25 call to Ukraine’s president. The media is now at pains to stress that whistleblowers do sometimes reach out to Congress, that all “procedures” were followed, and that what really matters is the accusation that Mr. Trump pressured Ukraine to investigate Joe Biden.

Actually, it matters a great deal that Mr. Schiff knew about this early and withheld it deliberately from both the public and his House colleagues. He used his advance information to lay the groundwork steadily for later exploitation of the issue. He went so far as to charge the White House with a coverup—of a complaint he already knew about. The timeline of this orchestrated campaign is another knock to the legitimacy of the so-called impeachment inquiry. If the public can’t trust Mr. Schiff to be honest about the origins of his information, why should they trust his claim that the information itself is serious?

Mr. Schiff on Sept. 13, a Friday night, issued the explosive news that he had been alerted a few days earlier by the intelligence community’s inspector general of an “urgent” yet unspecified whistleblower complaint. But the complaint is dated Aug. 12, and news reports now say the whistleblower interacted with Mr. Schiff’s staff prior to then. So Mr. Schiff knew about the topic of the complaint for more than a month—while the public did not. It is now clear why the intelligence chairman in that month suddenly developed an interest in all things Ukrainian, and began aggressively previewing his impeachment mantra.

On Aug. 23, for instance, Mr. Schiff tweeted that Mr. Trump tried to “get dirt on a political opponent” via personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s interaction with the office of the Ukrainian president. On Aug. 28, the chairman tweeted his newfound concern that Mr. Trump was “withholding vital military aid to Ukraine.” And on Sept. 9, Mr. Schiff suddenly announced his committee would launch a full-fledged investigation into whether Mr. Trump was trying to “pressure Ukraine to help the President’s re-election campaign.” All this was priming the public and the media for what was to come—the better to take full advantage of the whistleblower “news.”

Yet even after news broke of the complaint, Mr. Schiff played dumb. On Sept. 17, he flatly (and falsely) stated on MSNBC: “We have not spoken directly with the whistleblower.” Two days later, he thanked the inspector general, Michael Atkinson, without whom “we might not have even known there was a whistleblower complaint.” Really? Mr. Schiff wanted to make it sound as if the Trump administration was muzzling the complainant, when in fact the process was working and Mr. Schiff knew all about it. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/03/impeachment-is-nothing-but-throwing-more-dirt-and-hoping-some-will-stick/

The process the Democrats have employed to gin up support for impeaching President Donald Trump has been almost as long as Chairman Mao’s long march. It has also been tragically absurdist. It is filled with twists and turns as the Democrats slog through the muck they have raked up in their attempt to obviate the 2016 presidential election by overthrowing the will of the American voter and throwing out President Trump.

Their march commenced with Trump’s historic election in November 2016, which prompted a Texas Democrat to announce his intention to introduce Articles of Impeachment within months of President Trump assuming office.

Democrats have tossed every piece of dirt and dung at the president hoping that something would stick. Well, nothing has. People who just throw anything in the air end up covered with the stuff they are tossing. In other words, if you ever want to know what the Democrats are doing, just observe what they are accusing everyone else of doing.

The Russia Accusations Were Proven False

Take Hillary Clinton. She was so devastated by her loss to President Trump that she joined others to claim the Trump campaign had “colluded” with the Russians to affect the outcome of the election. After 22 months of the Robert Mueller investigation, even his team of politically biased investigators concluded that there had been no “collusion,” conspiracy, coordination, or cooperation.

But we did find the Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee had engaged an opposition research firm with ties to Russia and the United Kingdom to dig up dirt on then-candidate Trump. The now-infamous Steele dossier was created out of whole cloth using those foreign sources to simply make up some of the most outrageous lies against Trump in the history of American politics.

https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/464140-ignore-the-hype-this-is-not-an-impeachment-inquiry

There is no impeachment inquiry. There are no subpoenas.

You are not to be faulted if you think a formal inquest is under way and that legal process has been issued. The misimpression is completely understandable if you have been taking in media coverage — in particular, reporting on a haughty Sept. 27 letter from House Democrats, presuming to direct Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, on pain of citation for obstruction, to cooperate in their demands to depose State Department officials and review various records. 

The letter is signed by not one but three committee chairmen. Remember your elementary math, though: Zero is still zero even when multiplied by three.

What is portrayed as an “impeachment inquiry” is actually just a made-for-cable-TV political soap opera. The House of Representatives is not conducting a formal impeachment inquiry. To the contrary, congressional Democrats are conducting the 2020 political campaign. 

The House has not voted as a body to authorize an impeachment inquiry. What we have are partisan theatrics, proceeding under the ipse dixit of Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.). It raises the profile, but not the legitimacy, of the same “impeachment inquiry” House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) previously tried to abracadabra into being without a committee vote.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/schiffs-deep-state-collusion-matthew-vadum/

Leftist conspiracy-monger Adam Schiff was aware of select details of the Ukraine-Biden allegations against President Donald Trump before a lying CIA snitch reportedly involved in the case filed a complaint under a whistleblower law, according to the intermittently reliable New York Times.

It has been widely reported that the CIA official’s complaint was based on a July 25 telephone conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that the said stoolie somehow learned about.

Rep. Schiff is the California Democrat, now the laughably unqualified chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, a Trump-hater who spent the last three years smearing anyone who doubts the existence of his Trump-Russia electoral collusion conspiracy theory as traitors and agents of the Russian government while apparently leaking secret details of congressional investigations to his friends at CNN and elsewhere in the media at every opportunity.

Trump stands accused by Democrats without any credible evidence whatsoever of trying to muscle the government of Ukraine into investigating a potential 2020 opponent, Joe Biden, in order to discredit his campaign.

This, of course, is the exact opposite of what actually happened. Three Democrat senators urged Ukraine to investigate Trump and a Democratic National Committee operative named Alexandra Chalupa went on a dirt-digging expedition hoping to get usable opposition research on Trump from Ukrainian officials.

The New York Times makes the claim about Schiff’s foreknowledge of the whistleblower report citing “a spokesman and current and former American officials,” so take the report with a grain of salt. The Old Gray Lady lies habitually nowadays so trusting the once-respected media outlet is a risky enterprise.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-whistleblower-executive-11570056633

The impeachment process is barely underway and already some constitutional norms are being trampled without a note of media notice or political concern. To wit, can a whistleblower inside the intelligence bureaucracy override a President’s right to executive privilege merely with an accusation?

That seems to be the default view among Democrats and the press as they luxuriate in news about Donald Trump’s conversations with foreign leaders. First it was the call with Ukraine’s President. Then on Monday the leak was what Mr. Trump told Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Now Democrats want to see the transcripts of other phone calls with other leaders.

“This is a coverup,” declared Nancy Pelosi last week, but if that’s true it is the most incompetent coverup in presidential history. Mr. Trump can’t seem to have any conversation that doesn’t leak, in part or whole, or that can’t be demanded by Congress as if everyone in the executive branch works for the House Speaker. Mr. Trump has released the Ukraine transcript and the whistleblower complaint, and he’s still accused of a coverup.

Last week’s inquisition of acting director of national intelligence Joseph Maguire by House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff captures the prevailing disdain for the separation of powers when Mr. Trump is the political target. Mr. Maguire, who has an impeccable reputation, had received the whistleblower complaint as part of his duties. He then acted responsibly by seeking legal advice about whether the document was subject to executive privilege.

Mr. Schiff berated him for even waiting to turn the document over to Congress: “At any time over the last month that you held this complaint, did the White House assert executive privilege?”