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January 2020

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Colorado Republican Cory Gardner Is a ‘No’ for New Impeachment Witnesses By Tobias Hoonhout

By on January 30th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trump-impeachment-trial-senator-cory-gardner-does-not-believe-additional-witnesses-necessary/

Senator Cory Gardner (R., Colo.) said in a statement Wednesday that he does “not believe” additional witnesses in President Trump’s impeachment trial are necessary, casting doubt on a Tuesday claim that at least four Republicans were willing to call additional witnesses.

“I do not believe we need to hear from an 18th witness,” the Colorado Republican told Colorado Politics in a statement. “I have approached every aspect of this grave constitutional duty with the respect and attention required by law, and have reached this decision after carefully weighing the House managers and defense arguments and closely reviewing the evidence from the House, which included well over 100 hours of testimony from 17 witnesses.”

Gardner’s public stance comes after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) told his caucus that at least four Republicans wanted testimony from more witnesses. Republicans hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, with 51 votes needed to call more witnesses.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Above the Law? Hillary Clinton Refuses to Get Served Tulsi Gabbard’s $50M Lawsuit By Tyler O’Neil

By on January 30th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/trending/above-the-law-hillary-clinton-refuses-to-get-served-tulsi-gabbards-50m-lawsuit/

Last week, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii), a Democratic presidential candidate, sued former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for defamation, requesting $50 million in damages. Yet Clinton has twice refused to accept the lawsuit, trying to weasel her way out of a legal battle.

Gabbard’s attorney, Brian Dunne, told The New York Post that Clinton’s staff twice snubbed a process server attempting to deliver the defamation lawsuit.

“I find it rather unbelievable that Hillary Clinton is so intimidated by Tulsi Gabbard that she won’t accept service of process,” Dunne told The Post. “But I guess here we are.”

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Cult of Western Shaming By Victor Davis Hanson

By on January 30th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/the-cult-of-western-shaming/

An ancient habit of Western elites is a certain selectivity in condemnation.

Sometimes Westerners apply critical standards to the West that they would never apply to other nations.

My colleague at the Hoover Institution, historian Niall Ferguson, has pointed out that Swedish green-teen celebrity Greta Thunberg might be more effective in her advocacy for reducing carbon emissions by redirecting her animus. Instead of hectoring Europeans and Americans, who have recently achieved the planet’s most dramatic drops in the use of fossil fuels, Thunberg might instead turn her attention to China and India to offer her “how dare you” complaints to get their leaders to curb carbon emissions.

Whether the world continues to spew dangerous levels of carbons will depend largely on policies in China and India. After all, these two countries account for over a third of the global population and continue to grow their coal-based industries.

In the late 1950s, many elites in the United States bought the Soviet Union line that the march of global communism would “bury” the West. Then, as Soviet power eroded in the 1980s, Japan Inc. and its ascendant model of state-sponsored industry became the preferred alternative to Western-style democratic capitalism.

Once Japan’s economy ossified, the new utopia of the 1990s was supposedly the emerging European Union. Americans were supposed to be awed that the Euro gained ground on the dollar. Europe’s borderless democratic socialism and its “soft power” were declared preferable to the reactionary U.S.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Impeachment Questions That Need Answering By Andrew C. McCarthy

By on January 29th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/impeachment-questions-that-need-answering/

Trump’s accusers and defenders need to think some things through.

We have at last reached the impeachment trial phase in which senators are given the opportunity to address questions to each side. Questions by the Republicans and Democrats are to be submitted and vetted by their respective leadership to avoid duplication and irrelevancy. They will then be submitted to Chief Justice John Roberts, who will pose them alternately to the House impeachment managers and President Trump’s defense team.

Each side presumptively has five minutes to answer, with the caveat that, on rare occasions when a question truly demands it, the party’s time to respond may be expanded slightly. This process will go on for no more than 16 hours – eight hours over the next two days.

Everyone who has been observing the Ukraine kerfuffle through the House impeachment inquiry and the Senate trial probably has some questions. I doubt close watchers will have very many, though.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump’s Peace Plan Is A Rejection Of Obama’s Anti-Israel Pivot Unsurprisingly, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has already said ‘a thousand nos’ to Trump’s plan, and Palestinian-Arabs have begun the usual playbook of rioting in the streets. Erielle Davidson

By on January 29th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/29/trumps-peace-plan-is-a-rejection-of-obamas-anti-israel-pivot/

Yesterday, President Trump announced his administration’s much-anticipated “Peace to Prosperity” plan, referring to the policy proposal as a “realistic two state solution” to the Arab-Israeli conflict. Accompanying the announcement came a 180-page document, detailing the political aspects of a plan that the administration had remained largely mum on since first announcing its existence last summer.

Despite the hysterics to which we will inevitably be subjected, this plan is an astute return to normalcy after the heretical anti-Israel pivot that had defined the Obama administration’s foreign policy approach in the Middle East. In fact, many of Team Obama’s policy choices involved an abandonment of our traditional allies in the region, combined with an empowerment of our historical adversaries, in an attempt to “rebalance” the Middle East (whatever that nebulous term means).

A statement released from Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) office captured this sentiment well, noting, “Today’s plan marks another important step by the Trump administration to undo the sad legacy of the Obama administration, specifically by rendering United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 null and void, and in doing so, advances the cause of peace in the Middle East.” UNSC Resolution 2334 declared Israeli settlements — or more simply, the presence of Jews — in Judea and Samaria, as well as in East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, to be a “flagrant” violation of international law.

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

New York Times Downplays Crucial Arab Support Of Trump’s Mideast Peace Plan The foreign policy media crowd minimizes the fact that Trump’s plan for peace in the Mideast is supported by many Arab countries. Erielle Davidson

By on January 29th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/29/new-york-times-downplays-crucial-arab-support-of-trumps-mideast-peace-plan/

In a totally predictable ploy aimed at salvaging the remnants of the Obama foreign policy legacy, the New York Times published a report on Tuesday titled “A Muted Arab Response to Trump’s Mideast Peace Plan.” The caption read, “The U.S. is banking on Arab leaders to help make its plan for ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict work. It is not clear how realistic that is.”

The feigned skepticism is a masterful stroke the media often employs in order to project disaster upon a given foreign policy maneuver with little to no evidence. It’s what the national security media did vis-à-vis Iran, the Embassy move to Jerusalem, and now, Trump’s peace plan meant to bring to an end the decades-long conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. They are never right, and we should stop listening to them. But just how wrong are they? The Jerusalem Post offered a handy list of those who have echoed support of the new plan.

Let’s start with the Saudis. “In light of the announcement, the Kingdom reiterates its support for all efforts aimed at reaching a just and comprehensive resolution to the Palestinian cause,” the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia wrote on Twitter. As the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad Bin Salman told Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, “The establishment of a just and comprehensive peace must be worked for.”

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ISRAEL Comments turned off

Trump Offers Blueprint for Eventual Conceivable Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict By P. David Hornik J

By on January 29th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/trending/trump-offers-blueprint-for-eventual-conceivable-solution-to-the-israeli-palestinian-conflict/

Today, January 28, 2020, President Trump made history by formally announcing a plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace that breaks decisively with the previous, dogmatically upheld paradigm whereby Israel cedes virtually all West Bank land to Palestinian sovereignty, turns its capital Jerusalem into a divided, unmanageable, strife-ridden city, and reduces itself to a nonviable, indefensible entity devoid of strategic depth that is nine miles wide in its heavily populated coastal strip.

For his part, Prime Minister Netanyahu, a leader hailing from the pragmatic right, made history by formally accepting the plan as a basis for negotiations.

The plan does not, in principle, say no to the vaunted two-state solution; it modifies it in a way that could be compatible with Israeli security if the Palestinians were truly seeking accommodation (on which more later). Rather than being a sop to Israel, this plan, like previous ones, asks Israel to cede a lot—namely about 80 percent of the West Bank, the biblical lands of Judea and Samaria. But it does so with important caveats that could make that concession feasible for Israel.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

Media’s NeverTrump Voices Drown Out Republican Perspective By Mark Hemingway

By on January 29th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/01/29/medias_nevertrump_voices_drown_out_republican_perspective.html

Over the weekend, Washington Post columnist Max Boot had a novel take on President Trump’s impeachment. According to Boot, what Trump said on the phone call with Ukraine’s president was in some ways worse than Andrew Jackson’s forced relocation of Native Americans or FDR’s internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“Other presidents — from Andrew Jackson with the Trail of Tears during the 1830s, to Franklin D. Roosevelt with the internment of U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II — have trampled our values, but they always had a public purpose and usually had congressional support,” Boot wrote.

Either Boot or someone at the Post came to their senses, because the sentence was later amended (stealth-edited) to clarify that Native American genocide and racist imprisonment were “far worse things” than Donald Trump’s alleged misdeeds. But by then, Boot was already being roasted on social media.

There are many more examples of open mouth, insert Boot. Back in October, after the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Trump said the terrorist was “whimpering and crying” at the end of his life. Boot couldn’t let stand this defaming of the world’s most prominent practitioner of sex slavery and beheadings. He retorted in his column, “The assertion that Baghdadi died as a coward was contradicted by the fact that rather than be captured, he blew himself up.” (For what it’s worth, Baghdadi killed three children when he detonated his suicide vest, and once again, Boot’s column was edited ex Post facto.) Trump supporters scouring Boot’s Twitter feed will find a riches of embarrassment, e.g., his contentions that “The Steele Dossier is way more credible than the Nunes memo” and that Nixon was impeached.

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ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

An Action Plan for a New Jewish Leadership by Charles Jacobs and Avi Goldwasser

By on January 29th, 2020

https://www.algemeiner.com/2020/01/29/an-action-plan-for-a-new-jewish-leadership/

The chickens have come home to roost. Years of neglect and misguided policies by mainstream Jewish leaders have helped enable a shocking surge of Jew-hatred in America. It is encouraging to see some concern and support from the public and media, and it is heartening to see the Jewish community come together. These are critical first steps. It is sad and frustrating that this required the hunting and murder of Jews.

There have been multiple analyses of the nature and extent of the failure of mainstream Jewish leaders. The community’s major donors need to recognize that they too have failed by their selection of academic, legal, social worker types or diplomats as leaders in a time of conflict. The times require “wartime” leaders who can develop a clear vision of the crisis and a plan of action for the future.

New leaders will have to jettison some of the fundamental premises of Jewish communal policies that have clearly failed. They will also need to pivot from their 100-year-old mission of gaining acceptance of Jews in American society to ensuring the safety of the community.

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, POLITICS Comments turned off

Joe Biden says he’d want Michelle Obama to be his running mate By Emily Jacobs

By on January 29th, 2020

https://nypost.com/2020/01/29/joe-biden-says-hed-want-michelle-obama-to-be-his-r

Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden this week reaffirmed his desire to have former first lady Michelle Obama be his running mate.

“I sure would like Michelle [Obama] to be the vice president,” Biden said Tuesday at a campaign stop in Muscatine, Iowa.

The comment came after the former vice president was asked if he would consider nominating former President Barack Obama to the Supreme Court.

“Yeah, I would, but I don’t think he’d do it. He’d be a great Supreme Court justice,” Biden responded.

The questioner followed up with the question, “Which Obama?”

Biden responded: “They’re both incredibly qualified people and they’re such decent, honorable people.”

The pairing would be a first in American politics; there has never been a presidential ticket that included a former first lady in the VP slot.

This isn’t the first time Biden had mentioned the idea of the former first lady being his running mate or the former president being on the Supreme Court.

In September, Biden joked during an appearance on “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” that he had “only [asked Michelle] to be my vice president,” when asked if he had asked her for advice.

The former vice president said in December at another Iowa campaign stop that he’d nominate President Obama to the nation’s highest bench “if he’d take it.”

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