RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2019/09/27/presidential_abuse_of_power_or

The impeachment furor is a purely political fight, not a legal one. The essential question, which the Democrats have raised continuously since Donald Trump was elected, is whether he is fit for office. Trump’s response has essentially been: “I was duly elected. I’ve done nothing wrong. You are using congressional committees, deep-state bureaucrats, a partisan special prosecutor, Democratic state attorneys general, nationwide injunctions from left-wing judges, and friendly media to prevent me from governing.”

Trump and his allies see the same basic strategy in play over the Ukrainian phone call. Where the Democrats see presidential abuse of power for personal and political gain, Trump and his supporters see zealots overreaching, trying to nullify a popular election.

This political fight boils down to four issues.

No. 1: Did President Trump abuse the U.S. Constitution so badly that he should be thrown out of office for asking “a favor” from his Ukrainian counterpart?

Career officials at the Department of Justice scrutinized the phone call transcript and determined that Trump violated no laws. Did he seek “something of value” from a foreign source, in violation of campaign laws? That is the “quid pro quo” issue, and 
DoJ rejected it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/trump-urging-ukrainian-probe-biden-breaks-no-laws-matthew-vadum/

A treaty from 2000 between the Ukraine and the United States requires the two countries to cooperate on law enforcement matters, a factor that may help to explain why President Donald Trump felt comfortable questioning the involvement of Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, in Ukrainian affairs, during a telephone conversation two months ago with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The American and Ukrainian governments, it turns out, are legally required by treaty to render mutual legal assistance in criminal matters.

The treaty, signed at Kiev on July 22, 1998, provides in Article 1 that “[t]he Contracting States shall provide mutual assistance, in accordance with the provisions of this Treaty, in connection with the investigation, prosecution, and prevention of offenses, and in proceedings related to criminal matters.” As every schoolchild used to know before teachers’ unions, New Age thinking, and identity politics dumbed down the educational system, under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, properly ratified treaties are the supreme law of the land.

The document states that each “Contracting State shall have a Central Authority to make and receive requests pursuant to this Treaty.” For the U.S., it is “the Attorney General or a person designated by the Attorney General.” For Ukraine, it is “the Ministry of Justice and the Office of the Prosecutor General.”

During the presidency of Bill Clinton, the U.S. Senate approved the treaty on Oct. 18, 2000, on a division vote. This means that senators rose from their seats to vote and how each of them voted was not recorded. It is, therefore, unclear, how then-Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware voted.

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-impeachment-frenzy-may-strengthen-trump/https:

Contrary to suggestions by some, most Trump supporters are not automatons or blind supporters. What bothers them, and should bother others, about the latest Ukraine hysterias is the familiar monotony of this latest scripted psychodrama.

The whistleblower admits to hearsay (“I was not a direct witness to most of the events described”). His term-paper report is laden with anonymously sourced rumors, e.g., “According to multiple White House officials I spoke with,” “I was told by White House officials,” “Based on my understanding,” “I learned from multiple officials,” “I do not know whether similar measures were taken,” “I do not know whether those officials spoke with or met with . . . ”

Between references to Internet news accounts and “I heard from” and “I learned from” and “I do not know” anonymous officials, there is nothing here to launch an impeachment of any president.

In the complaint are all the now-familiar tell-tale signs of pseudo-exactness, in the form of Mueller-report-like footnotes and page references to liberal media outlets such as Bloomberg, ABC, and the New York Times. There is the accustomed Steele-dossier scare bullet points. We see again Comey-memo-like disputes over classification status with capital letters UNCLASSIFIED stamped as headers and footers and TOP SECRET lined out.

Scary references abound to the supposed laws that the legal-eagle whistleblower believes were violated. In sum, there is all the usual evidence of an administrative-state bureaucrat, likely to be some third-tier Brennan or Clapper-like intelligence operative, who is canvassing disgruntled White House staffers, writing a report that imitates intelligence-department formats, combing the Internet, in “dream-team” and “all-star” footnote fashion, for scare quotes and anti-Trump stories, and then likely having it dressed up in legalese by an activist lawyer. Take all that away, and one is left with “I heard.”

The title of this essay may seem odd at first, but read on and all will be revealed.

When President elect, Barack Obama, chose members of his new administration back in 2008, he selected physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner to lead a White House council on energy and climate. Ms. Browner had headed the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration. Mr. Chu was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.

Carol Browner was described as a “neon-green radical” in an early article by Michelle Malkin titled, “The Trouble with Obama’s Energy Czar.” With both Chu and Browner at Obama’s energy helm, the United States was destined to be in a world of trouble, and that too became clear when Obama later uttered the dread words: “I have come to fundamentally transform America.”

Obama’s notorious Cap in Trade policy thankfully died in the Republican controlled Congress. His baleful eight long year term of “fundamentally transforming America” finally ended but, if President Trump loses the general election in 2020 and the Left come to power, a similar and perilous version of a Cap in Trade policy is almost certain to rise from its erstwhile deathbed. It will inevitably saddle the middle class with higher taxes and cause painful job losses to Americans. 

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/23290/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-zero-population-growth

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The Humanitarian Hoax series has discussed the Humanitarian Hoax of Globalism, The Humanitarian Hoax of Socialism, The Humanitarian Hoax of Climate Change, The Humanitarian Hoax of Climate Change II, The Riddle of Climate Change, and the Humanitarian Hoax of the United Nations. Now it is time to examine the Humanitarian Hoax of Zero Population Growth and see how these hoaxes are all connected.

The humanitarian hoaxes are globalist cons designed to redistribute the world’s wealth and the world’s population to establish a new internationalized world order of one world government under the corrupt auspices of the United Nations. The 2020 American presidential election is a domestic political contest between Americanism and globalism that reflects the worldwide political contest between national sovereignty and globalism.

President Donald J. Trump stunned the world 9.24.19 with his brilliant speech to the 74th United Nations General Assembly. It was a calm, measured, powerful statement of purpose and resolve highlighting the 21st century conflict between the United States demand for national sovereignty under the Trump administration, and the United Nation’s increasing efforts to globalize the world. President Trump presented his proud, America-first leadership unapologetically and with equal respect for the national sovereignty, cultures, and religions of the nations of the world represented in the general assembly saying:

“In America, the people govern, the people rule, and the people are sovereign. I was elected not to take power, but to give power to the American people where it belongs. In foreign affairs, we are renewing this founding principle of sovereignty. Our government’s first duty is to its people, to our citizens, to serve their needs, to ensure their safety, to preserve their rights, and to defend their values. As president of the United States, I will always put America first. Just like you, as the leaders of your countries, will always and should always put your countries first.”

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/25/here-are-a-bunch-of-charts-that-prove-the-world-is-better-than-ever/

In a recent column, I noted that young people like Greta Thunberg should be thankful for the uniquely peaceful and wealthy world they’ve inherited.

Of course, whenever I write pieces that point out that life has vastly improved for billions of people despite climate change, angry readers inundate me with links about glaciers and coral reefs and heat waves. These events are allegedly apocalyptic proof that we’ve left a rickety planet to our kids. Never once do any of these emailers consider the tradeoffs that accompany the authoritarian system they propose to fix climate change. For many, of course, the authoritarian system is the point.

Now, I can’t disprove forecasts about our impending collapse. But I can point out that Malthusian environmentalists have been consistently and spectacularly wrong going on five decades and that even in a warming planet, nearly every quantifiable measure of human existence is improving. The retreat of socialism — exactly the kind of system environmentalists would like to bring back to fight global warming — has led to extraordinary gains in the most important aspects of human existence over the past 30-40 years.

Here are just a few:

Capitalism is eradicating extreme poverty.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/peter-schweizer-trump-is-right-to-call-for-probe-o

As Congress and the White House wrestle over a whistleblower’s complaint against President Trump, the story took a new turn late Friday when the Wall Street Journal reported that, in a July phone call, Trump “repeatedly pressured the president of Ukraine” to investigate the dealings of Joe Biden’s family in Ukraine.

Trump’s call is reportedly the source of a complaint by a whistleblower against the president that has sparked a furor among Democrats in Congress, who are demanding to see the complaint.

If, as multiple news organizations are reporting, the whistleblower’s complaint centers on Ukraine, there is strong evidence that it relates to President Trump’s urging the Ukrainian government to investigate Hunter Biden, the former vice president’s son.

The story behind that story is itself worthy of serious scrutiny.

The proposed investigation involves Hunter Biden’s involvement with a controversial Ukrainian natural gas company while then-Vice President Biden was overseeing America’s Ukraine policy.

Critics of the president have accused Trump of attempting to “extort” Ukrainian officials for “dirt” on Biden, the current front-runner for the Democratic nomination to run against Trump next year.

But why would Ukraine have dirt on Joe Biden? For answers, one must look at Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company which, until earlier this year, employed Hunter Biden.

http://swtotd.blogspot.com/

The title of this essay is silly. Of course, Connecticut has a future. The question is, will it be one that strengthens economic development and reassures residents, especially the retired, to continue to live within its borders. Will it still have, as Mr. Burghoff asks, “the people I’ve known,” or will my family and friends move to more favorable environs. Connecticut has been in the vanguard of those states marching to the tunes of “woke” progressives, who put identity politics and income and wealth distribution ahead of personal liberty, opportunity and individual responsibility. The consequence has seen an exodus of people and businesses, a slow-growth economy and per-capita state debt that is fourth highest in the nation.

Hatred permeates the political landscape: The ugly language of those in the media who have called for the decapitation of the President; elected Representatives who use their office to pursue personal vendettas against Mr. Trump and their influence to enrich themselves; presidential candidates who call for an end to all fossil fuels; the promise of free college, a basic income and socialized medicine – in short, President Obama’s 2012 “Life of Julia” – all to be paid for with a wealth tax and higher income taxes, which would stifle innovation and hamper economic growth. Is it possible progressives have overplayed their hand?

There have been signs of spring’s renewal against this bleak, wintery landscape. Michael Bloomberg recently penned an op-ed in the New York Post, “Rage is Destroying Us”: “…political rage seems to be crowding out political engagement.” His column concluded: “Restoring the ability to disagree without becoming mortal enemies is a new and urgent civic imperative.” Richard Cohen, a syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, wrote a week ago that he felt “marooned” within the Democratic Party, that he was “…stuck with a party that would replace the segregation of the past with the segregation of the present.” He wrote of his ideal: “My political party would embrace the uniqueness of every individual and not consider him or her (or any other pronoun)[1] a member of a group first, an individual second and use the excuse of past prejudices to create a racial or ethnic patronage system.” My sentiments exactly; yet both he and Mr. Bloomberg are liberal Democrats who have soured on the progressive tilt of their Party.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/privileged-scolds-should-lead-by-example-before-lecturing-others/

Let them lead by example before they lecture the country on carbon emissions, gun ownership, and ‘white privilege.’

One theme of the Democratic debates is collective furor — at whom or what is not always clear, other than at Americans who voted for Trump. Or perhaps at America itself for failing the expectations of our moral betters? Yet such rage is so deeply embedded in hypocrisy that it is not merely hard to take; it’s even harder to believe it’s serious.

So upset are our woke progressive candidates that they insist that the rich, the privileged, the white, and the native-born must now pay ever more penance. Amid such acrimony is an inconvenient truth, though one that remains utterly unspoken: Most of those on stage who are so livid at the exploitive “system” have become wealthy and quite privileged through it — especially since they have spent so much of their adult lives gaming supposedly poorly compensated political service.

Multimillionaire, mansion-living, ethnic-identity-stealing, and formerly house-flipping Senator Elizabeth Warren talks nonstop about corporate greed, endemic racism, and the need for executive fiats to deal with right-wing American pathologies. In Warren’s reductionist world, every sin originates with some Snidely Whiplash corporate CEO with a black top hat and handlebar moustache who trumped the success of her own past cynical efforts several hundred times over.

Beto O’Rourke, born into privilege and wealth, and married into greater influence and riches, was so pampered and well connected as a teen that his prior burglary and drunk-driving arrests were either dismissed or white-privileged away. Otherwise, had he been treated as others — including poor working-class whites from southern Ohio or central California — he might now be an ex-felon, and certainly might not be eligible to buy or own a firearm under the regimens that he now blasts as too weak.

Naturally, the multimillionaire Beto lectures the country on its racism, its original and permanent sins of white supremacy, and the need to confiscate some models of guns and to restrict the ownership of most all others. As in the case of erstwhile Native American Elizabeth Warren, Beto is so concerned about the asymmetry between the haves and the have-nots that he pushed a fake ethnic identity to do something about it.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/09/diversity-inc-becoming-even-more-dangerous-bruce-thornton/

Back in the Eighties when “diversity” and “multiculturalism” were starting to invade the universities, critics like me used to ask proponents if they wanted to apply “diversity” to selecting brain surgeons and airline pilots. Seems our common sense was naïve. According to an op-ed by Stanley Goldfarb, a professor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, medical schools are under pressure to include in its curriculum  “social justice” shibboleths like gun-control, climate change, and eliminating racial disparities.

We are reaching new levels of dangerous absurdity when the study of medicine––perhaps our most practical, science-based discipline with concrete outcomes easily visible even to laymen––is being diluted to satisfy progressive ideology and dubious scientism.

Yet we should have expected that this day would come. From the moment that the Supreme Court in the 1978 Bakke case enshrined into federal law a concept the vagueness of which was exceeded only by its complete lack of empirical evidence that it provided any measurable benefits. More important, “diversity” as progressives understand it, is an ideological and political weapon divorced from reality.

To start, true diversity is a fact of human history, one oversimplified and corrupted by our continuing reliance on the modern concept of “race,” which was given scientific pretensions by “scientific racism” starting in the late 19th century. A term like “white” is useless, for example, when it comes to the ancient Mediterranean where Western civilization began. Europe at the time of Roman expansion was fragmented into hundreds of tribes with distinct languages and dialects, cultures and mores, religions and cults, geographical circumstances and available resources. Constant warfare, enslavement, and trade promoted continuous intermingling of these peoples and the creation of hybrid cultures that belie the notion of a unified, distinct “race.” To say all those peoples were “white” is to say nothing meaningful for understanding them.