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The Impeachment Schiff Show Just as his impeachment drive is heating up, the California Democrat’s Ukrainian chimera is falling apart. Julie Kelly

Posted By on November 1st, 2019

After preparing a failed bill of particulars against the president—Russian election collusion, porn star payoffs, income tax evasion, obstruction of justice, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the Charlottesville rally, the two Michaels (Avenatti and Cohen), Deutsche Bank, Alfa-Bank, and Orange Man Bad—Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) finally has Trump dead-to-rights: A quid pro quo without the quid, the pro, or the quo.

The House of Representatives voted Thursday largely along party lines, with only two Democratic defectors, to begin impeachment proceedings against President Trump. Schiff, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, will manage the initial stage of the sham inquiry; hearings are expected to begin in a few weeks. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), departing from tradition, handed off the impeachment grunt work to her most dependable grunt rather than to the House Judiciary Committee.

Pelosi pleaded the Democrats’ case on the morning of Hallowe’en, titillating her caucus of ghouls, witches, tramps, and thieves with tales about the scary monster in the White House.

“Sadly, this is not any cause for any glee or comfort,” Pelosi assured her gleeful Democratic colleagues. “This is something very solemn, something prayerful.”

But ringing in the ears of every Democrat and NeverTrumper across the land were the iconic words of #TheResistance hero Rep. Rashida Talib (D-Mich.): “We’re gonna impeach the motherfucker!” You will recall that the freshman Democratic congresswoman from Michigan didn’t waste any time before uttering that profundity. She shouted it on January 4, 2019, just hours after she was sworn in.

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The worst piece of advice ever to Trump By Jack Hellner

Posted By on November 1st, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/11/the_worst_piece_of_advice_ever_to_trump_.html

Jonah Goldberg, writing at National Review, says that President Trump is guilty and should apologize.

In l’affaire Ukraine, the president is guilty as charged. And the best strategy for him to avoid impeachment by the House and perhaps even removal by the Senate is to admit it, apologize, and let voters make their own judgment. It’s also the best way to fend off a disaster for Senate Republicans.  

This is one pathetic piece of advice which could have been written by any of many NeverTrumpers like Boot, Noonan, Rubin, Brooks and Romney, who like to pretend they still are conservatives. 

President Clinton signed an agreement with Ukraine in 1999 to cooperate to root out corruption, but according to Goldberg, most journalists, other Democrats and several Republicans, the only corruption Trump could ever ask about would be corruption by people other than Americans (does that make sense?).  Otherwise, Trump is guilty and could be impeached. 

We know from Politico and other sources that the Democrats worked with Ukraine to defeat Trump in 2016, but if Trump or Barr wants to investigate that absolute corruption they should be removed from office and apologize for even bringing it up.

We know that Obama/Biden withheld military aid from Ukraine and Trump gave them the aid but somehow Trump is the problem. 

After watching most of the media and other Democrats the last three years, I have some advice for all current and future politicians. If you want to enrich yourselves and your families while you are in office, make sure you take your kickbacks on foreign soil from foreign sources because that would be off limits on all investigations. 

Here is some advice to all Republicans: Don’t listen to pretend conservatives, journalists and other Democrats when they give advice on what you need to do to win the vote. They won’t vote for you no matter what. They have been giving advice my whole adult life that Republicans must move left to win.

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The Brexit Mess The darkness ahead — if we fail in our task. Katie Hopkins

Posted By on November 1st, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/11/brexit-mess-katie/

“Katie – what on earth is happening with Brexit?”

It’s a question I have been desperate to answer and have found myself unable to answer — as one day of uncertainty has led into the next. The word ‘unprecedented’ is commonplace in the UK right now.

Trying to give an accurate update on Brexit has been like trying to sell yogurt in the desert. It is past its shelf life even before it reaches the store.

But despite the attempts by our Remain-leaning Parliament to frustrate the will of the people, Prime Minister Boris Johnson has finally found a way forward, albeit a long way from the “Leave” we were promised for Oct. 31. Even the ceremonial 50p coins minted for the occasion will be smelted down in despair.

Bojo has called a General Election for December 12, 2019 in the hopes of breaking the endless deadlock over Brexit. And despite a desperate effort by the opposition to allow 16-year-olds and 3 million EU foreigners (who do not have British citizenship) to vote, Boris has prevailed.

The British people will go back to polls and vote for a new government to take them into 2020. Boris believes it will give him the majority he needs and a fresh mandate to Get Brexit Done and get us out of the European Union — his battle cry since he entered the House of Commons.

MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Synonymes – A Review By Marilyn Penn

Posted By on November 1st, 2019

This Israeli movie won the Golden Bear Award at the Berlinale Film Festival this year, also getting rave reviews from Manhola Dargis (NYT) and Joe Morgenstern (WSJ). Written and directed by the Lapids, pere et fils, it purports to be a movie about an Israeli soldier who has completed his service with a profound hate for the militaristic nature of his country and the determination to abandon it for France. Along with becoming an expat comes the decision to forego his mother tongue and speak only French, carrying a pocket thesaurus for assistance, hence the title.

The film begins with a quick-moving camera following legs walking down a Paris street – an homage to French New Wave cinema of the sixties. Unfortunately, Yoav, the protagonist, reminded me more of Adam Sandler than Jean Paul Belmondo and the actress who plays the love interest has none of Jean Seberg’s combination of rebelliousness and beauty. Instead of an actual plot, there is a do-it-yourself grab-bag of scenes that the audience can try to figure out. Among these are the hero’s near death from extreme cold, a mysterious decision by a neighbor to give Yoav ongoing financial support, an extended and gratuitous scene of pornography, an inscrutable scene of men going at each other viciously, a puzzling scene of a man with a yarmulke accosting people with declarations of his Jewishness, an unseen wedding, a classroom of immigrants being taught the French ethos of secularity above all.

Missing from this picture is an over-riding sense of time, place and history. There is no mention of the massive Muslim influx into France and its attendant consequence of violent anti-semitism. There is no indication of how many French Jews have already fled their country, many going to Israel to find safety. We aren’t told that the French government urges Jews not to wear yarmulkes in public. There is no background for the necessity of Israeli military strength in a middle-east determined never to accept a Jewish state in its midst. Are we to believe that Yoav is so uninformed that he knows nothing about the rising tide of anti-semitism in France and Europe? Are we to assume that he isn’t aware of how many wars Israel has fought defensively and what threats it faces now from Iran and its terrorist subsidiaries?

Ultimately, this is a movie about a young man’s rage – we could call it PTSD but that’s too simplistic for all the elements that are tossed at us. The film that’s playing at the Elinor Bunin theater has an introduction by Nadav Lapid, the director, explaining that it’s partly autobiographical. The fact that he had this experience of deserting Israel is not a sufficient substitute for an intelligent presentation of reality in his chosen art form. As is, this movie remains a jumble of free-floating emotional ejaculations – perhaps the reason for the presence of pornography.

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NOVEMBER 2, 1917 THE BALFOUR DECLARATION

Posted By on November 1st, 2019

November 2nd, 1917

Dear Lord Rothschild,

I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet.

“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”

I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation.

Yours sincerely,

Arthur James Balfour

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VICIOUS ANTI-SEMITISM IN BELGIUM

Posted By on October 31st, 2019

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/10/yes-virginia-there-is-famous-belgian.html

Yes, Virginia, There is a Famous Belgian …
… Or, rather, an infamous one.

His name’s Christoph D’Haese.  He’s Burgomeester (mayor) of the Belgian city of Aalst in old East Flanders, and a member of the Nieuw-Vlaamse Alliantie, which, being translated, means New Flemish Alliance.

Once upon a time, in another city in what is now Belgium, live cats were thrown from a belfry tower to their deaths on a carnival day held during Lent.  That vile barbarism, a product of the Middle Ages, apparently persisted until 1817.

In Aalst during Lent there is also a carnival day.  

No, they don’t sacrifice cats. 

But they do sacrifice all pretensions to human decency by (would you believe this, post-Shoah!?) including hideous depictions of Jews in the carnival parade, depictions that would do credit to Julius Streicher and the rest of the Nazi fiends were those monsters still alive. 

Here’s how a senior American academic, Eliot A, Cohen, calling it out for the antisemitism that it is, described the obnoxious spectacle from last year:

“On Sunday, a float rolled down the streets of Aalst, a Belgian town, for carnival. It featured two grotesque caricatures of Hasidic Jews, hooked noses, hands reaching out for money, and a rat sitting on money bags. That’s 2019. A second float … —in Marburg, Germany, in 1936—featured celebrants dressed as Orthodox Jews. The only real difference is that the former was more elaborately and professionally executed, and if anything more grotesque.”
 To quote The Independent newspaper at the time:

 ‘A carnival parade which featured Jewish caricatures standing amid piles of money has been compared to Nazi antisemitic propaganda and provoked fierce criticism in Belgium. One float in the city of Aalst’s annual feast on Sunday was decorated with two huge figures of men with large sideburns, crooked noses and wearing shtreimels, a fur hat worn by some Orthodox Jews. One had a rat on his shoulder.

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Whistleblower Eric Ciaramella: Is this the best they’ve got? By Monica Showalter

Posted By on October 31st, 2019

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

Well, Happy Halloween.

The whistleblower is now pretty well outed by investigative journalist Paul Sperry, and it’s underwhelming.  He’s been identified as one Eric Ciaramella, 33, prep school grad, Yalie, Obama backwash, political operative, and fanatic Trump-hater.  Hardly the Mister Probity concerned about national security that’s been painted.

Sperry did the digging but pointed out that that the man’s identity had been an open secret in the Beltway, with mainstream media doing their darnedest to keep his name from being attached to his rather spectacular charges.

Federal documents reveal that the 33-year-old Ciaramella, a registered Democrat held over from the Obama White House, previously worked with former Vice President Joe Biden and former CIA Director John Brennan, a vocal critic of Trump who helped initiate the Russia “collusion” investigation of the Trump campaign during the 2016 election.

Ciaramella’s name should be out there because it’s relevant whether all the hearsay in his legally couched charge was actually made in good faith or was just another leftist smear job under cover of government mechanisms, same as the Steele dossier.

Based on Sperry’s digging, it certainly looks like the latter. 

From Sperry’s reporting, we learn that this creep wasn’t trying to make anything better within government, which is what whistleblower protections are for.  He was just another leftist trying to overturn the 2016 election, and it dated from way back, starting with his propensity to leak.

In May 2017, Ciaramella went “outside his chain of command,” according to a former NSC co-worker, to send an email alerting another agency that Trump happened to hold a meeting with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office the day after firing Comey, who led the Trump-Russia investigation. The email also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had phoned the president a week earlier.

Contents of the email appear to have ended up in the media, which reported Trump boasted to the Russian officials about firing Comey, whom he allegedly called “crazy, a real nut job.”

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Palestine Misunderstood written by Petra Marquardt-Bigman

Posted By on October 31st, 2019

https://quillette.com/2019/10/31/palestine-

From my home on the southern outskirts of Tel Aviv, I hear the Muslim call to prayer every day as it issues from a mosque half a mile away in neighboring Jaffa. Jewish Israelis see Arabic on their money, on street signs, on buses, and on the labels adorning foodstuffs that provide consumers with nutritional information. They hear Arabic in the stores, shopping malls, and cafes they routinely frequent. And if they visit a clinic or hospital, Jewish Israelis will hear Arabic spoken by their fellow patients, and by the doctors and nurses who tend to them. Israel may be the world’s only Jewish state, but Arabs account for roughly 21 percent of its population, so the sounds and sights of the Arabic language are simply part of daily life in this corner of the Levant.

So I was surprised to learn, from an article written by Michael Humeniuk for Quillette, that “when Jewish Israelis hear spoken Arabic, which they perceive as screams, they don’t know if a bomb is about to go off or one guy is simply complimenting another guy’s shoes.” Humeniuk is from Toronto, and his article is a well written and (presumably) well intentioned attempt to look beyond the “solemn stereotypes” he and other Westerners have absorbed of Palestinians “as freedom fighter or terrorist—geopolitical character actors within the grand narrative of what is vaguely described as ‘the Middle East conflict.’” Others, like him, who have travelled to Middle East because they are “touched and troubled by the plight of the Palestinians,” are so preoccupied by the politics of the conflict that they forget to notice “the Palestinian people themselves—how they cook and eat, how they tease and flirt, how they celebrate and mourn.” It is to this unenlightened view that Humeniuk wishes to offer a corrective.

Unfortunately, as Humeniuk relates his experiences in Palestine’s de facto capital, it becomes increasingly evident that he knows little about the region, its people, or its complexities. And so his lesson (audaciously entitled “Ramallah for Beginners”) soon lapses into tiresome clichés that contrast a heavily fortified and paranoid Israeli state with a portrait of peaceable donkey-riding Palestinians quietly tending their picturesque olive groves or enjoying the city’s party life (“cheaper and more welcoming,” we are told, than that offered by Tel Aviv). This perspective not only misunderstands the fraught history and political present of the region, but it unhelpfully caricatures Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs on both sides of the Green Line that separated Israel and the Jordanian-annexed West Bank before the Six Day War of 1967.

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The Rules Of The Democrat-Backed Impeachment Inquiry Are Stacked Against Trump By Tristan Justice

Posted By on October 31st, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/10/31/the-rules-of-the-democrat-backed-impeachment-inquiry-are-stacked-against-trump/

House Democrats rubber-stamped an ad hoc anti-Trump investigation Thursday aimed at overturning the results of the 2016 election after the spectacular failure of the grand Russian collusion hoax collapsing earlier this year.

The text of the resolution lays the framework for the official impeachment proceedings going forward led by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who has been operating an illegitimate process since Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., announced the beginning an investigation in September.

Despite Democrat claims that the resolution would mean an open and transparent process, House members are still holding hearings in secret even after its passage.

The Democrat passed rules for impeachment also bar Republican lawmakers from calling witnesses or subpoenaing evidence without prior approval from Democrats. Members of the minority party were granted these rights in both the Nixon and the Clinton impeachment proceedings.

Schiff, whose credibility was shattered by his peddling of the Russian conspiracy theory for the last three years, has run an unfair process from the start. Behind closed doors, Schiff interviewed witnesses and selectively leaked parts of their testimonies to frame the president while Trump’s legal counsel has been barred from participating, denying the president rights to due process.

On Wednesday, House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., exposed Schiff for directing witnesses testifying not to answer questions asked be Republican members.

“He’s directing witnesses not to answer questions that he doesn’t want the witness to answer if they’re asked by Republicans,” Scalise told reporters on Capitol Hill. “He’s not cut off one Democrat. He’s not interrupted one Democrat and told a witness not to answer Democrat members’ questions but today he started telling witnesses not to answer questions by certain Republicans.”

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Poll: Nearly Half of British Jews Say They Would ‘Seriously Consider’ Fleeing the Country If Corbyn Is Elected PM By Zachary Evans

Posted By on October 31st, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/poll-nearly-half-of-british-jews-say-they-would-seriously-consider-fleeing-the-country-if-corbyn-is-elected-pm/

Forty-seven percent of British Jews would “seriously consider” emigrating if Labour party head Jeremy Corbyn is elected prime minister, according to a poll by Survation commissioned by the Jewish Leadership Council (JLC), a British-Jewish advocacy group.

The poll, which was shared with the Jewish News, also found that 87 percent of respondents believed Corbyn to be anti-Semitic.

Corbyn has a long history of association with Islamists and other anti-Semitic figures. In 2009, he invited Hamas members to speak in Parliament, while on Holocaust Memorial Day in 2010 he hosted an event at Parliament during which a Jewish Holocaust survivor compared the Israeli government to Nazis. He also reportedly laid a wreath at the grave of a Black September terrorist who participated in the murder of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich.

Corbyn has also failed to tackle anti-Semitism within the Labour party, according to an expose published in April of this year. The party received 863 complaints of anti-Semitism as of March but took action in only 101 of those cases. Members who have said such things as “Heil Hitler,” “F**k the Jews,” and “Jews are the problem,” have remained in the party despite complaints against them.

Two Jewish politicians have so far quit the Labour party, one of whom, Louise Ellman, wrote that anti-Semitism has “become mainstream in the Labour Party. Jewish members have been bullied, abused and driven out. Anti-Semites have felt comfortable and vile conspiracy theories have been propagated…The Labour Party is no longer a safe place for Jews.”

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