RUTHFULLY YOURS

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

Rudy Giuliani told House Democrats via a letter from his lawyer that he will not be complying with their subpoenas related to their impeachment inquiry.  Last week, Rick Perry was also summoned and hints that he will also resist the Resistance Party’s subpoenas.

The letter obtained by The Hill from Giuliani’s attorney, Jon Sale, states that the subpoena is “overbroad, unduly burdensome, and seeks documents beyond the scope of legitimate inquiry.”

What should be added to that list is that they’re not really subpoenas anyway.  They are nothing more than sternly worded letters with a request calling themselves “subpoenas.”  The House must vote first to authorize a committee investigation if its members want the judicial authority to enforce these letters.  The kangaroo court that Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi are running has yet to do so.  And so, because they’re not really subpoenas in any legal sense, there is zero penalty for not complying with them.  Giuliani having his lawyer send a response is already beyond what he had to do.

The Democrats are clearly planning something with the illegitimate and ever changing impeachment operation.  While they may think they’re clever and strategic, their modus operandi has never been more obvious.

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/14/democracy-dies-in-darkness-adam-schiff-just-banned-a-gop-lawmaker-from-attending-key-ukrainegate-deposition/

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., just banned a key Republican lawmaker from the deposition of a former anti-Trump national security official believed to be at the center of ongoing Ukraine proceedings, sources tell The Federalist. Schiff tossed Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., out of the deposition.

Although the U.S. House of Representatives has not approved a resolution authorizing a formal impeachment investigation, House Democrats have nonetheless insisted that they have full authority to subpoena all documents and testimony they desire, even if specific committees lack the jurisdiction to demand particular information. Schiff, whom Pelosi tapped to lead her party’s anti-Trump impeachment efforts, chairs the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), which only has jurisdiction over the federal government’s intelligence agencies and related components.

According to the Congressional Research Service, formal impeachment proceedings are typically referred to the House Judiciary Committee. Gaetz sits on that committee; Schiff does not. The House has yet to approve a resolution granting broad impeachment investigative authority to any of its committees.

Several officials told The Federalist that they believe Fiona Hill, who was subpoenaed last week to share her knowledge of allegations of wrongdoing against Trump regarding a phone conversation he had with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25, is one of the unnamed sources for the anti-Trump whistleblower whose August 12 complaint fanned congressional impeachment fires. Hill was reportedly planning to testify about her knowledge of the ouster of Marie Yovanovitch, a controversial figure who was removed from her post as U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in May.

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

The ejection of Rep. Matt Gaetz from House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s witness testimony hearings for the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, as J.R. Dunn noted here, was pretty outrageous, given the right Gaetz had to be there as a member of the House Judiciary Committee and do nothing but listen.  He wasn’t some Code Pinko type disrupting the closed-door affair by yelling obscenities and hurling bags of urine.  He was ejected because he was a Republican.

It kind of tells you about the “fairness” of this entire inquiry.

Now the Washington Post is reporting that having done that, Democrats have now gotten into a huddle, whispering together behind closed doors like Renaissance plotters, the better to accelerate the impeachment of President Trump.  Presumably, they want to get it out of the way before the next election, which of course would be to serve their own political purposes.  Those, of course, are what this whole lunacy is really about — removing Trump and not having to face the wrath of the American voters.

It’s why impeachment for them needs to be done so secretly.  And the whole thing is being done in secret now, meaning it’s not just Republicans being shut out; the entire electorate isn’t allowed to be in on it, either.  Schiff and his fellow plotters, who apparently ran an intelligence operation of their own against the White House earlier to set the whole thing up, are now setting up a trial with a predetermined outcome, making themselves spy, cop, judge, jury, and executioner, with a pliant mainstream media to give exclusively their cherry-picked propaganda output from it as news.

And they know it’s a winner of sorts — now some polls show a public that favors impeachment and removal.  Keeping it all secret and releasing just their version of events, despite the president’s transparency about the matter, seems to be the plan in action.  They’re convinced it’s working.

It’s possible it’s working, given the disturbing content of at least a few polls.  But a lot of things say it isn’t.  There was the brutal Louisiana wipeout of the Democrats just this weekend.  There also was a bad-news focus group for Democrats cited by center-left Axios, noted by J.R. Dunn here, about how Ohio swing voters aren’t happy.  Their reaction to impeachment-obsessed Democrats matches what former governor John Kasich (who’s not a Trump fan), said earlier that “nobody is talking about this” in Ohio.  Axios also had warnings from political experts a few days ago that the whole thing was bad news for Democrats no matter what.  I wrote about that here. 

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2019-10-14-the-more-public-money-spen

San Francisco is the latest American city to try to solve the problem of “homelessness” by throwing more and yet more taxpayer cash at it. Should we check in on how it’s going?

You may recall that I last visited the issue of homelessness in San Francisco about a year ago, October 2018, in a post titled “The Morality Of Our Progressive Elite.” At that time, the number of “homeless” in San Francisco was estimated at about 7000, but there was an initiative on the November 2018 ballot, known as Proposition C, calling for a new payroll tax on large employers in San Francisco, intended to raise some $300 million per year to solve this homelessness problem once and for all. On October 25, 2018, one Marc Benioff, co-CEO of Salesforce, had an op-ed in the New York Times supporting Proposition C. My post noted that Benioff was only too happy to advocate that others should be forced to spend hundreds of millions on this project through a new tax, while he himself offered to put up none of his own personal fortune, estimated at $6 billion, for the purpose.

So where are we now, a year later? The payroll tax initiative passed last November with 61% of the vote, and the new tax started getting collected. Opponents then brought litigation that has prevented the spending of the money so far. (The opponents’ claim — that a special tax like this requires a two-thirds majority — was rejected by a trial-level court in July; but appeals are ongoing.)

https://www.steynonline.com/9785/a-cure-worse-than-the-disease

“As we see in the UK, Canada, Europe and elsewhere, a permanent state power is ever more comfortable suppressing the possibility of political change. But in America the active partnership between the most lavish and secretive agencies on the planet and the Democrat-media complex is a threat of an entirely different order. Matt Taibbi understands that America can survive a “bad president”, but that it cannot survive the normalization of the Comey-Brennan-Clapper-McCabe rogue state.”

Happy Thanksgiving to our Canadian readers, Happy Columbus Day to our American readers, Happy First Day of Sukkot to our Jewish readers. We would wish our Ukrainian readers a Happy Defender of Ukraine Day, but we’re worried it might be the annual celebration of Hunter Biden’s latest oligarch-kissing sinecures.

~Matt Taibbi is a man of the left, but he is an iconoclastic one and The Washington Post’s recent attempt to #MeToo him has probably made him more so. He’s also a much better writer than most lefties, hobbled as they are by the Downton-Abbey-for-progressives rules of identity politics. Ten years ago, I was very admiring of his evisceration of The New York Times’ beloved comic figure Thomas Friedman:

Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: ‘I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, “We need better headlights for our tri-plane.”‘ And off he goes.

Indeed Taibbi can do Friedman rather better than the original:

After Thomas Friedman correlates (on the back of a napkin) freedom and the price of oil, Mr Taibbi correlates, rather more plausibly, happiness and the size of Valerie Bertinelli’s ass (with accompanying graph).

A lot of us were content to do low comedy a decade back. But these are ever more fevered times and Matt Taibbi has written a sobering piece after three years of what he calls “a permanent coup”. The nub of his argument:

My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/10/14/no-james-comey-america-doesnt-want-your-help/

With so little to unite Americans on the Left and Right, our shared rejection of further assistance from the former FBI director just might be the salve the country needs.

America is a dangerously divided nation. Democrats, unable to accept the results of a presidential election three years ago, would now undo the constitutional expression of American voters by pushing a half-cocked impeachment inquiry. Democratic presidential candidates offer outlandish ideas such as free healthcare to illegal immigrants and subsidized gender reassignment surgery for inmates while Democratic voters fret their field of candidates is too old, too left-wing, and too sluggish to oust Donald Trump in 2020.

Republicans want the House of Representatives back, especially after witnessing the Democrats’ nonstop assault on the president. They also are impatiently awaiting the outcome of multiple investigations into how the Obama Administration weaponized the most powerful government agencies in the world to sabotage Trump’s campaign and destabilize his presidency. (Don’t miss my review of Ball of Collusion, the excellent book by Andrew McCarthy.)

But despite our deep partisan differences and, at times, raging animus toward our political foes, there is one thing on which nearly all Americans can agree:

No, James Comey, we don’t need your help.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/buddy-dyer-and-his-multicultural-committees-joe-kaufman/

This past July, Orlando Mayor Buddy Dyer convened the first meeting of his newly formed Committee on Multicultural Affairs. According to the group’s website, “This appointed committee is comprised of 17 community leaders that represent diversity in race, gender, age, religious beliefs, national origin, cultural background, profession, sexual orientation and gender identity.” Part of the Mayor’s diversity appears to, as well, include extreme bigotry against Jews and the state of Israel, as fourth down on the list of the 17 member names (on the Orlando government page devoted to the committee) is none other than rabid anti-Semite Rasha Mubarak.

Rasha Ahmad Mubarak has an intense hatred of Israel. As a result, she has affiliated and continues to affiliate herself with radical Muslim groups associated with Hamas, including: CAIR, which has foundational and financial ties to Hamas; Islamic Relief (IR), which the Israeli government has labeled a Hamas front and has banned; and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund (PCRF), which has coordinated activities with the Holy Land Foundation (HRF), a now-defunct Hamas financing wing that the US government named a Specially Designated Terrorist (SDT) in December 2001. Mubarak is currently the President of the PCRF Orlando chapter.

Beyond her radical affiliations, Mubarak has exhibited her own support for Hamas. At the end of the 2014 Israel-Gaza Conflict, along with photos of a jubilant Hamas, who had, bizarrely, just declared victory, Mubarak tweeted, “Thousands of people celebrating in the streets of Gaza for the victory. Alhamdulillah. #VictoryForGaza.” And following continued Hamas rocket attacks against Israel, in November 2012, Mubarak retweeted her fellow CAIR operative, Laila Abdelaziz, who had tweeted, “Don’t worry ya Gaza, we’re working hard for you in Florida.” Mubarak emphatically added, “Yes we are!”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/10/ukraine-was-investigating-hunter-biden-trumps-matthew-vadum/

Officials in Ukraine reportedly opened an investigation into an energy company that employed former Vice President Joe Biden’s son long before President Donald Trump’s July 25 nothing-burger of a telephone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that spurred the Democrats’ haphazard, increasingly Kafkaesque impeachment inquiry.

The time element of the revelation, devastating as it is to the 2016-election-nullification push disguised as an impeachment process, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media which is overly preoccupied –as usual— attacking President Trump.

The information came last week from investigative reporter John Solomon, who recently was hired as a Fox News contributor, after Ukraine’s new prosecutor general, Ruslan Ryaboshapka, said Oct. 4 he plans to review previous corruption investigations into Hunter Biden and his former employer, Ukraine-based Burisma Holdings. Hunter got the job in 2014 while his father was the Obama administration’s point man on Ukraine.

Solomon’s growing prominence in the media ecosystem means that leftist journalists –when they’re not busy making excuses for the secretive un-American Star Chamber-like impeachment process initiated by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi– now feel obligated to engage in character-assassination efforts against him.

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

Americans were furious in 2001 when they saw that the Taliban had destroyed Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan. Less than two decades later, destroying monuments is becoming a national sport in America with little outcry and support from the media.

Columbus Day brought a refreshing reminder that leftists are effectively erasing America’s heritage as an important step in transforming America into a socialist state. 

As I look, “Happy Indigenous Peoples” day is approaching 100K tweets, which is simply advancing the narrative that was already set in motion by leftists across America. 

A teacher posted some of the proud pictures from her propagandized little ones with sayings like “Christopher Columbus didn’t find America,” and “Christopher Columbus is a really mean man.”  How charming. 

A Christopher Columbus statue was torn down in Los Angeles in 2018 and several others were vandalized this year. 

Americans were furious in 2001 when they saw that the Taliban had destroyed Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan.  The prevailing cultural zeitgeist at the time ran clearly against toppling statues.  Don’t these third-world barbarians know that they are destroying world culture?  It helped elevate the Taliban’s evil in the eyes of the world. 

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.”