RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/12/the-articles-of-impeachment-are-very-weak/

The charges range from insignificant to implausible to inane.

Democrats rolled out two articles of impeachment against President Trump on Tuesday, alleging abuse of power and obstruction.

As noted over the weekend, I had to correct myself when writing that the impeachment inquiry that led to this point was a “rush to judgment.” The judgment was made long ago. The president has been Impeached Man Walking for “The Resistance” since before he took the oath of office. The House proceedings have been a matter of rushing the process until it catches up to a judgment of three years’ standing.

The two impeachment articles were produced by the House Judiciary Committee, chaired by Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.), cribbing from the report spearheaded by Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff (D., Calif.). The abuse-of-power allegation is confined to the Ukraine episode, a kerfuffle that emerged three months ago and was promptly magnified into a scandal. The claim of obstruction relates to the president’s refusal to cooperate with the partisan impeachment inquiry, the outcome of which was foreordained even as Democrats refused for weeks to conduct a vote endorsing it — for fear of antagonizing voters, which, of course, would not be a fear if there were an obvious, egregious impeachable offense.

It was the lack of an identifiable crime that settled Democrats on “abuse of power,” taking advantage of the fact that the Framers did not require a penal offense for impeachment . . . but ignoring the Framers’ caution against an ambiguous standard that would invite politicized impeachments based on trifling misconduct. Here, Democrats say the abuse involves Trump’s converting of presidential power to his “personal political benefit” — recall the mantra of placing “self above country,” which was chanted throughout Monday’s farcical Judiciary Committee hearing (an often catty partisan duel, mainly between staff attorneys, with no testimony from actual fact witnesses).

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/is-trump-the-only-adult-in-the-room/

Donald Trump certainly is mercurial at times. He can be uncouth.

But then again, no president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

Do we remember the effort to subvert the Electoral College to prevent Trump from assuming office?

The first impeachment try during his initial week in office?

Attempts to remove Trump using the ossified Logan Act or the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution?

The idea of declaring Trump unhinged, subject to removal by invoking the 25th Amendment?

Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 22-month, $35 million investigation, which failed to find Trump guilty of collusion with Russia in the 2016 election and failed to find actionable obstruction of justice pertaining to the non-crime of collusion?

The constant endeavors to subpoena Trump’s tax returns and to investigate his family, lawyers and friends?

Now, frustrated Democrats plan to impeach Trump, even as they are scrambling to find the exact reasons why and how.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-incredible-shrinking-impeachment-11576109728?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

They shouldn’t get off that easy. By defining impeachment down, they are turning what should be a rare and extraordinary constitutional remedy into a routine tool of partisan warfare. They are harming constitutional norms, as the liberals like to say.Americans will decide in 11 months whether Mr. Trump deserves to remain in office. But they should also keep the impeachment vote very much in mind when they decide whether Democrats deserve to keep the House.

So that’s it? That’s all there is? After all the talk of obstruction of justice, collusion with Russia, bribery, extortion, profiting from the Presidency, and more, House Democrats have reduced their articles of impeachment against President Trump to two: abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. Honey, we shrunk the impeachment.

Democrats on the Judiciary Committee will vote as early as Thursday on the text of the two articles they unveiled Tuesday, and then they will rush it to the floor next week. It’s enough to suspect that Democrats understand they are offering the weakest case for impeachment since Andrew Johnson, that the public isn’t convinced, and so they simply want to get it over with.

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https://www.axios.com/america-blows-past-the-world-in-oil-and-natural-gas-72a3fd6

Data: Oil Change International and the Global Gas and Oil Network, with data from Rystad Energy; Chart: Danielle Alberti/Axios

America is poised to produce far more oil and natural gas over the next five years than any other country in the world, according to a new report.

Why it matters: It shows how America, already the world’s largest oil and gas producer, is poised to cement that position, with pivotal implications for geopolitics and climate change.

By the numbers: The United States could produce just over 24 billion barrels of oil equivalent over the next five years, according to a report by two advocacy groups, the Global Gas and Oil Network and Oil Change International, which analyzed projection data from research firm Rystad Energy.

This works out to be roughly 13.2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day, a figure that includes both oil and natural gas.
For context: The U.S. currently producing about 12 million barrels of oil a day.
Much of this growth is coming from the Permian Basin across West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, which the report says would account for nearly 40% of new U.S. oil and gas production in the next 30 years.

How it works: The accompanying chart, adapted from the groups’ report, is looking at projected production over this five-year time period from currently undeveloped reserves. This includes industry data, such as projects expected to receive final investment decisions.

https://clarionproject.org/nyc-muslim-patrol-bullying-reported/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=ab684208b5-

“Bullying” and “gangster-like” tactics have been reported by locals in New York areas where the Muslim Community Patrol & Services operates.

These tactics are beginning to create a backlash against the self-described “civilian patrol organization” among local residents.

The Muslim patrol gained international attention in the fall of 2018 after several of its patrol cars — which look like New York Police Department (NYPD) cars –were spotted in Brooklyn and Staten Island.

The patrol originally said its purpose was to serve as a liaison between Muslims and the NYPD.  But after two consecutive mosque shootings in New Zealand last March, where a gunman live-streamed his murder of 51 Muslims on Facebook, the patrol publicly altered its purpose.

It now describes itself as a law enforcement organization, claiming its goal is to “protect members of the local community from escalating quality-of-life nuisance crimes.”

It’s precisely that “law enforcement” definition that is now landing the Muslim patrol into hot water with New York City residents, particularly those living in the Brooklyn area of Bedford-Stuyvesant.

“They are bullying people and getting out of their patrol cars looking like gangsters,” said one resident, who asked to remain anonymous. “The people in Bed-Stuy don’t want them there.”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/10/what-about-the-fisa-court/

The Justice Department’s inspector general has concluded that, although officials of the FBI, the Justice Department, and the CIA made copious “mistakes” in their four requests to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to spy on Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, those officials did nothing that warrants punishment. They mostly followed procedures and, after all, the court considered their motions good enough to grant them.

In so concluding, Inspector General Michael Horowitz rejected the charge that those “mistakes,” including silence about the known falsehood of the supporting evidence and the omission of exculpatory evidence, had been intentional, and hence a fraud on the court. Horowitz stated that looking at these officials’ intentions—i.e., noticing the variance between their claim and the facts behind it—was not his job.

Given that such scrutiny is quintessentially the inspector general’s job, his retreat into what we must now call the Comey-Clinton crouch—detail the misdeeds, relabel them, and decline to do anything about them—means that the deep state has closed ranks.

Hence, any remedy must come from above, and must inflict rough Roman justice.

Alas, such a remedy must now include eliminating the judiciary’s role in intelligence gathering. That means recognizing that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) was a bad idea all along, an irresistible temptation to cover abusive surveillance with the cloak of pretend-legality.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2019/12/san-fran-loses-64-mil-after-convention-moves-due-daniel-greenfield/

I’m not up on corporate speak, but is “poor street conditions” a euphemism for wallowing in human waste while being assaulted by crazy people?

Oracle’s OpenWorld conference, one of the biggest annual technology events in San Francisco, is moving to Las Vegas in 2020 and will remain in Sin City for at least three years.

According to an email that the San Francisco Travel Association (SFTA) sent to its members on Monday, Oracle has signed a three-year agreement to bring its flagship event to the Caesars Forum in Las Vegas.

“Oracle stated that their attendee feedback was that San Francisco hotel rates are too high,” the email, which was viewed by CNBC, said. “Poor street conditions was another reason why they made this difficult decision.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-ig-nunes-and-schiff-11576022741?mod=opinion_lead_pos3

Monday’s Justice Department Inspector General report on the FBI’s Trump -Russia probe is illuminating in many ways, not least the light it casts on the previous claims by politicians when they were telling the public about what they saw in classified documents. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff in particular has been exposed for distortions and falsehoods.

Americans first learned about the FBI’s abuse of the FISA process in a February 2018 memo from then House Intelligence Chair Devin Nunes. The memo disclosed that the FBI had obtained surveillance warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court against former Trump aide Carter Page ; that the dossier written by ex-British spook Christopher Steele and financed by the Clinton campaign had formed an “essential” part of that application; and that the FBI failed to tell the FISA court about Mr. Steele’s political and media ties.

https://nypost.com/2019/12/09/democrats-latest-impeachment-line-investigating-corruption-is-election-interference/

Here is what you need to understand the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings on Monday: According to Democrats, any investigation of possible Democratic corruption, or of Democratic collusion with foreign officials to interfere in our elections, is itself impeachable interference in our elections.

Seriously.

Numerous problems mar the impeachment process — not least the rush to judgment. Democrats have been rushing congressional proceedings until they catch up with the judgment that the president must be impeached, a judgment House Democrats have already drawn. The haste rubs many Americans the wrong way.

Democrats have also had trouble identifying a crime. That’s why they appear to have settled on a vague “abuse of power” standard that would make every future president impeachable. Without being able to articulate egregious executive misbehavior, they are nevertheless racing ahead.

The public wonders: What’s the rush? After all, Democrats apparently didn’t think the “crisis” was so dire that their Thanksgiving holiday should be postponed. In 11 months, the American people will be able to boot President Trump from office if they believe he is unfit. So why should the political class be permitted to pre-empt voters?

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-does-this-impeachment-not-feel-like-a-defeat-for-trump/

On paper, the speaker of the House and chairmen of the relevant committees announcing they will impeach the president should feel like a historic moment and a rarely equaled disgrace for the presidency. This day should feel momentous, grim, and solemn. In this presidency, it feels like “Tuesday.”

On paper, the impeachment hearings did everything House Democrats wanted them to do. While some of the key testimony was second-hand, the witnesses painted an ugly picture of the administration and president, focused on farfetched tales of a lost server and obsessed with the Bidens and not seeming to give a fig about what the military aid meant to Ukraine. The major television networks covered the hearings live. The objections of House Republicans were largely ridiculed by the media. The GOP was unable to introduce witnesses to interrupt the Democrats’ narrative or divert attention to the Bidens or other topics.

And yet the polling is about where it was at the start of October. As of this writing, in the FiveThirtyEight aggregation, 47.1 percent support removing the president, and 44 percent don’t support removal. That’s not good for the White House, but that’s nowhere near where Democrats wanted it to be. There’s nothing resembling the bipartisan consensus that Democrats had previously called a prerequisite for moving forward with the removal of a president. In fact, impeachment could well be hurting Democrats’ chances in key swing states. A recent survey found removal is opposed by 50.8 percent of voters in Michigan, 52.2 percent of voters in Pennsylvania, and 57.9 percent of voters in Wisconsin. Whether or not you think the hearings were persuasive, the evidence suggests they didn’t persuade many people who didn’t already support impeachment.