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POLITICS

GOP senator: Romney trying to ‘appease the left’ with impeachment witnesses By Jordain Carney

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/480118-gop-senator-romney-trying-to-appease-the-left-with-impeachment-witnesses

Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) on Monday lashed out at fellow GOP Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah) over his apparent openness to call witnesses as part of President Trump’s impeachment trial.

Loeffler — who was just sworn into the Senate earlier this month after being appointed to succeed Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), who was popular among members on both sides of the aisle — tweeted that it was “time to move on” from the impeachment effort. 

“Sadly, my colleague [Romney] wants to appease the left by calling witnesses who will slander the @realDonaldTrump during their 15 minutes of fame. The circus is over,” Loeffler tweeted.

Officials for Romney didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Loeffler, in her tweet, didn’t specify what comment from Romney had sparked the public call out of her colleague, but it comes after Romney reiterated his interest in hearing from former national security adviser John Bolton on Monday, though he specified that he would make a final decision after opening arguments and questions from senators.

“It’s pretty fair to say John Bolton has relevant testimony,” Romney said. “I think it’s increasingly likely that other Republicans will join those of us who think we should hear from John Bolton.”

Islamist groups making inroads in local politics in America By Hesham Shehab

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/islamist_groups_making_inroads_in_local_politics_in_america.html

When Sadia Gul Covert was elected in 2018 and sworn into the office of Dupage County commissioner, she took her oath on the “Quran, Torah, and the Bible,” in what seemed at the time like a symbol of unity and moderation.

But Covert’s decision to cast her lot with the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) raises questions about the extent of her moderation.

Covert will be a speaker at the CAIR-Chicago 2020 Banquet fundraiser in February, among other Islamist speakers.

CAIR was connected to the terrorist organization Hamas during the terror-financing trial against the Holy Land Foundation (HLF).

According to the Justice Department report published in 2009, “HLF became the chief fundraising arm for the Palestine Committee in the U.S. created by the Muslim Brotherhood to support Hamas.”

In 2010, former assistant attorney general Ronald Weich sent a letter to four members of Congress in which he “included trial transcripts and exhibits” “which demonstrated a relationship among CAIR, individual CAIR founders, and the Palestine Committee.”

Hold onto your hats: Hillary says she’s got the urge to run again By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/hold_onto_your_hats_hillary_says_shes_got_the_urge_to_run_again.html

Thanks to a 4-hour documentary about herself, which premiered to great Progressive buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, Hillary’s in the news again. More than that, she’s doing so at a time when Democrats are panicking about Bernie’s increasing lead in New Hampshire and the general pressure he’s putting on “mainstream” candidate Joe Biden. Sane Democrats strongly suspect that, while Bernie’s manna for the base, most Americans are not going to vote for a candidate who still adores socialism despite the Gulags, the reeducation camps, and those nasty National Socialist gas chambers.

Because of the buzz, a scrubbed, buffed, injected, stretched, and actually pretty fine looking Hillary got herself an interview with Variety magazine, which is still one of the premier magazines in the entertainment world. Inevitably, Hillary blamed misogyny for her loss:

After “Hillary” premiered at Sundance, you spoke at the Q&A about the misogyny that women candidates face online, particularly women running for president. Why do you think there’s so much hatred for women who are seeking leadership positions?

It’s a great question. I don’t think it’s in any way limited to women trying to run for president. But because of the high visibility of women who try, misogyny that is directed not only to women themselves but to their supporters is so shocking. And I remember in 2016 — look, I have tough skin. I put myself out there. I was the one running. But what was said and done to my supporters, men and women — but predominantly women — who spoke for me or proclaimed their support for me, it was just so vile. And some of the groups, like Pantsuit Nation, they had 4 million members. And people were targeting individual members all over the country, insulting them and threatening them. So I’m seeing the same right now. Some of the organized efforts to undercut, demean, belittle the women who had been running and still are running in this election.

Joe Biden ups the ante in the woke sweepstakes with his latest about transgenderism By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/joe_biden_ups_the_ante_in_the_woke_sweepstakes_with_his_latest_about_transgenderism.html

Anybody who says Joe Biden isn’t a follower is a stone-cold liar. At the macro level, Biden’s been disavowing his 47-year history in Congress and the White House by moving as hard to the Left as he can. At the macro level, it’s all pander, pander, pander. His latest attempt to out-do his fellow Democrats is his push for peak woke with the all-important transgender lobby, a group that, in a comprehensive 2016 study, was estimated to make up 0.6% of the American population.

To be fair to Joe as he competes in the “most woke on transgender issues” category, he’s already said that one of his top legislative priorities would be to pass the Equality Act which, among other things, forces schools to let biological males compete on girls’ sports teams. That’s woke but the competition has been getting tough.

Elizabeth Warren has long been sounding the transgender horn. Already back in 2017, she was sending out tweets on Transgender Day of Remembrance, something she was careful to do again in 2019 when the Democrat primary was heating up. Warren outdid herself, though, when she got endorsed by Black Womxn, an organization for “all black folks that do not claim male identity,” including “black trans & cis women, gender non-confirming folks and others.” Proving that she had read Black Womxn’s web page, Warren tweeted back, “Black trans and cis women, gender-nonconforming, and nonbinary people are the backbone of our democracy.” Who knew?

Are swing states swinging towards Trump? By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/are_swing_states_swinging_towards_trump.html

While the media focus on two power-hungry, low-wattage men — one a stone-cold communist candidate and the other an “I’ll say anything to win” candidate — that’s not the real news. The real news, as two articles illustrate, is in the swing counties around America.

The Wall Street Journal looks at Howard County, Iowa, which swung wildly from Democrat to Republican in 2016. In 2012, Obama won the county by 20%; in 2016, Trump won the county by the same margin. This year, though, voters in Howard County still like Trump and are planning to stick with him:

Recent interviews with dozens of voters here suggest that most of Mr. Trump’s 2016 supporters, including Mr. Wacha [one of 2016’s swing voters], plan to stick with him, even though some said they have grown weary of his personal behavior and trade fights. Among those who previously voted for Mr. Obama and Mr. Trump, many said they are reserving judgment until they see who wins the Democratic nomination.

As for Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial, now under way in the Senate, most voters said they haven’t followed the case closely and don’t expect it to weigh heavily in their decisions. Several said they view it as just more Washington partisanship.

What such swing voters do in 2020 will have national implications. Before Mr. Trump, Howard County hadn’t backed a Republican for president since Ronald Reagan in 1984. It is one of the 31 counties in Iowa—the most of any state—that backed Mr. Obama twice and then switched to Mr. Trump.

Trump’s Beltway Critics Failed in Afghanistan Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/23/trumps-beltway-critics-failed-in-afghanistan/

Turns out, the same class of experts that claims the president is the biggest threat to global security in 70 years has been the legitimate threat.

As I wrote earlier this week, Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden has plenty of explaining to do and not just about his son’s sweet gig with a corrupt Ukrainian energy company.

Biden, in the wake of an explosive exposé by the Washington Post, needs to account for his nearly two-decade involvement in the disastrous war in Afghanistan.

Few politicians in Washington have more fingerprints on the war’s failed planning and execution than Joe Biden: As the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee for 10 years, then vice president for eight, Biden supported the 2001 invasion; co-authored the 2002 bill to authorize reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan (at a cost of least $130 billion in U.S. tax dollars and climbing) and went along with Barack Obama’s surge of U.S. troops, which began a decade ago this month.

Despite his possessing almost the reverse of a Midas Touch when it comes to foreign affairs—Afghanistan is just one of Biden’s many and storied mishaps—Biden is earning endorsements from the Beltway’s national security crowd, Democrats and Republicans alike. Coincidentally, many of Biden’s supporters populate the same disgruntled diplomatic corps that has opposed Donald Trump since he announced his candidacy and now are attempting to oust him from the White House: The House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry was animated by the self-righteous musings of career State Department bureaucrats who think they, not the president, should set foreign policy.

David Marcus:National Review’s Dangerous Third Way On Impeachment

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/23/national-reviews-dangerous-third-way-on-impeachment/

An editorial at National Review badly misunderstands the Republican position on impeachment and the future of the conservative movement.

The editors at National Review published a baffling editorial today on the impeachment saga, one which, if its advice is taken, could snatch defeat from the jaws of victory for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.

The article makes three basic points. One, Republican senators actually think what Trump did was wrong and want a way to say so; two, the GOP ought to admit what Trump did was wrong but does not justify removal; and three, the argument that without a crime a president can’t be removed is legally unsound.

Let’s take each in their turn and then examine the effect that taking on this entire suite of positions would have on impeachment and the general political climate.

The first assertion is that “Senate Republicans, by and large, have reached an unspoken consensus about President Trump and Ukraine,” namely that he should not have delayed aid, or dared suggest investigations that might impact potential political rival Joe Biden, and should not have kept insisting that his call was perfect. Frankly, there is no evidence of such a consensus among Republican senators, and much to suggest that it simply does not exist.

Since the beginning of this recent unpleasantness we have been hearing that behind closed doors Republicans in Congress are very worried. Prominent members of the Never Trump movement had assured us that their intel promised more than a few GOP votes to impeach Trump in the House existed. In reality, there were none. Now National Review, without any proof, appears to be making the same calculation for the Senate.

There is sparse evidence of this. Take Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, who said this week that what Trump did didn’t amount to a speeding ticket. He went on to say that what came out of the House was an abuse of the Constitution for political purposes. This does not sound like somebody waffling on whether Trump committed some foul act. And let’s face it, Cruz is far more representative of the GOP Senate caucus and the voters they represent as opposed to a Susan Collins or Mitt Romney, who sometimes take the bold stance of hinting at being troubled.

Another Bernie supporter is outed as a Marxist with a lust for blood By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/another_bernie_supporter_is_outed_as_a_marxist_with_a_lust_for_blood.html

Last week, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, doing the investigative reporting the media refuses to do when Democrats (or “socialist democrats,” aka Marxists) are involved, uploaded two videos introducing people to Kyle Jurek, a Bernie field organizer in Iowa. Jurek openly supports a communist takeover, dismisses Soviet gulags as mere “re-education camps,” and thinks it would be a fine thing to have similar camps in America for Trump supporters. Jurek also assured the undercover journalist that he was not alone; there are others, he said, who shared his goals.

Bernie never commented on the video nor did his campaign dismiss Jurek.

Today, Project Veritas released a third video proving that Jurek was right when he said he was not an anomaly within the Bernie campaign. Project Veritas’s latest video looks at Martin Weissgerber, a South Carolina Field Organizer for the Sanders Campaign. Weissgerber is a red diaper baby, who boasts about his Belgian father’s participation in the 1968 French civil unrest and bemoans the fact that his mother has to tone down her politics a bit for her work at an NPR affiliate.

Weissgerber is cut from the same cloth as Jurek, for he insists that the gulags weren’t that bad and openly describes himself as a Marxist who wants “anarcho-communism. His big dream is to send all of America’s billionaires to his gulag camps where they can “build roads . . . rebuild our roads, rebuild our dams, rebuild our bridges. Let’s force them,” he says. He thinks it would be an equally good idea for all Republicans to get re-educated too.

Other goals that Weissgerber hopes that Bernie can realize are the dissolution of the American government with a Bernie dictatorship (although he worries that Bernie is not strong enough to make the best of it); the women’s rights the Soviet Union offered (because it was the “most Progressive place to date in the world); and the seizure of all private property for total nationalization.

Hillary Clinton finally gets her revenge against Bernie Sanders By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/01/hillary_clinton_finally_gets_her_revenge_against_bernie_sanders.html

2008 was supposed to be Hillary’s year – except that she was overtaken by a charismatic, young black man unburdened by her decades of scandals. Hillary swallowed her resentment and made nice with Obama.

By 2016, her time had come. She’d earned it.

This time, though, an open socialist who looked like a crazy uncle, but appealed to hard-left young voters, threatened to end her inevitable coronation. Hillary and the DNC, however, worked together to rig the system so Bernie didn’t have a chance. Fortunately for America, it turned out Hillary didn’t have a chance either.

What may have helped Hillary’s defeat was that passionate Bernie supporters – the “Bernie Bros” – weren’t good sports. With Bernie gone, they didn’t throw their support to Hillary. Instead, they sat out the election. To conservatives, Hillary lost because she was an arrogant, tin-eared, corrupt candidate. Hillary, though, thinks she lost in part because of Bernie and misogyny.

These themes emerged in a lengthy interview Hillary gave to the Hollywood Reporter, while shilling a new documentary about herself. Hillary was plain mean about Bernie:

In the doc, you’re brutally honest on Sanders: “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” That assessment still hold?

Yes, it does.

Feel the Purge . . . er, Bern The statements captured by Project Veritas do not damn Bernie Sanders. But they are an accurate snapshot of a significant portion of this following. Ray McCoy

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/21/feel-the-purge-er-bern/

On January 14, the investigative outlet Project Veritas released undercover footage of dialogue between one of their embedded journalists and a senior member of the Iowa field operation for the Bernie Sanders 2020 presidential campaign.

In the video, Kyle Jurek predicts with relish violence in the event of a Democratic convention in which the Vermont senator is denied the nomination. And, of course, cities will burn if Donald Trump wins reelection. Jurek also praised the approaches of Joseph Stalin and the government of Fidel Castro in Cuba toward counterrevolutionaries, and said Sanders could not campaign by openly espousing views such as his own.

As usual, Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe teased at the end that this was not even the most inflammatory footage of Jurek. The campaign staffer, in fact, was arrested in Iowa earlier this month for driving while intoxicated and related offenses.

If recent history is a guide, it would be a mistake to give journalists the standing of rock stars. Nevertheless, O’Keefe’s track record would make him the Jimmy Page of investigative reporting, at least on the Right.

But O’Keefe’s latest scoop could use some perspective. Jurek’s private statements do not necessarily reflect the views of Sanders, other campaign staffers, volunteers, or reporters. Certainly some of Jurek’s disparaging remarks about his candidate—particularly calling him a poor judge of character for retaining long-time campaign manager Jeff Weaver as an advisor—shouldn’t be ascribed to the campaign.