NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Chief Justice Roberts Blocks Question From Sen. Paul About Ciaramella, Allows Question About Schiff Staffer Debra Heine

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/30/chief-justice-roberts-blocks-question-from-sen-paul-about-ciaramella-allows-question-about-schiff-staffer/

For the second day in a row, Chief Justice John Roberts refused to read a question submitted by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) that mentioned the name of Eric Ciaramella, the alleged “whistleblower” at the center of the case who was outed by RealClearInvestigations.

Senators have been submitting questions to Roberts who asks them on behalf of the senators. The legal team and impeachment managers each have five minutes to respond to each question. On Wednesday, Roberts blocked Paul from posing a question that would have named the alleged whistleblower, as well.

After receiving Paul’s question card, Thursday afternoon, Roberts said, “The presiding officer declines to read the question as submitted.”

The Chief Justice did not explain why he rejected the question, which did not identify Ciaramella as the whistleblower.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Brexit: Nigel Farage takes Britain out of Europe with a stellar flourish By Monica Showalter

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

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

Brexit goes through today, and Britain is finally independent, free from the clutches of the European Union.  It’s a great event regardless of how it happens, but in this case, it was cool beyond description. 

It all ended with a pretty amazing flourish, one that told us a lot about both the European Commission and newly sovereign Britain itself.  Chief Brexiteer Nigel Farage made his last speech before the European Commission, which was a great scolding and call to shut down the whole operation altogether, which was subversive enough.  But he drove it even farther. 

Here was the great final moment:

Farage and his buddies ended the whole thing by explicitly waving the British flag of sovereignty right in the faces of all the angry little European Commission eurocrats, even as they sputtered and cut off his mic.

Metaphor, anyone?  It was the mother of all metaphors, a Britain that asserted its sovereignty in waving its symbolic flag as its soulless eurocrat masters got angry and tried to stop it, not on political grounds, not because they were afraid the other member-states might follow, but on petty rules grounds, little administrative state foot-stamping, insisting on cookie-cutter order and obedience, no exceptions, in the face of a newly freed state that just asserted that it can do what it wants.

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Washington needs to anticipate Iran’s next provocation By Lawrence J. Haas

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/480649-washington-needs-to-anticipate-irans-next-provocation

Signs are mounting that in Tehran, which faces rising pressures at home and abroad, the country’s powerful hardline conservatives are circling the wagons, raising the odds of still more Iranian global provocations. The question is whether Washington – which continues to tighten the economic screws on Tehran – is ready for what might come next.

In the latest conservative effort to solidify power, the country’s Guardian Council recently barred 9,500 prospective candidates (almost two-thirds of the 14,500 prospective candidates) in next month’s parliamentary elections, from running. The 12-member Guardian Council – an unelected body that includes six designees of the nation’s ultimate authority, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – routinely bars hundreds if not thousands of would-be candidates from elections because they’re not conservative enough or committed enough to the regime’s revolutionary goals. This time, however, the barred candidates include nearly a third of the current parliament. The signal was clear. The Council not only wants to prevent new reformist candidates from winning office; it also wants to purge the parliament of members it considers too moderate.

CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Warren’s ill gotten fortune. Schiff’s dealing with “whistle blower” Eric Ciaramella

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

Peter Schweizer Explains How Warren Built Her Fortune by Aiding Big Corporations She Routinely Rails Against

www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/01/30/exposed-peter-schweizer-explains-how-warren-built-her-fortune-by-aiding-big-corporations-she-routinely-rails-against/

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) made millions of dollars through her role in rewriting portions of U.S. bankruptcy law and assisting big corporations in navigating the laws she helped write at the expense of the victims of their practices, Government Accountability Institute (GAI) president and Breitbart News senior contributor Peter Schweizer revealed during a discussion on his book Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite on Breitbart News Daily.

https://theothermccain.com/2020/01/30/eric-ciaramellas-name-is-not-a-secret-and-teamtrump-only-hires-winners/

Eric’s Ciaramella’s Name Is Not a Secret, and #TeamTrump Only Hires Winners

This report consists of a long thread of Twitter posts. Fascinating and highly expositive. EVERYONE knows that Ciaramella is the ‘whistleblower’!! – The nasty hound dog Schiff insists that his ‘ID must be protected’ when he knows full well that Ciaramella is a household word among everyone involved in this disgusting farce.
Click on URL above to scroll down through the Tweets.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Two Reasons Why Continuing A Little With Impeachment Might Not Be Such A Bad Thing  Francis Menton

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-1-30-two-reasons-why-continuing-a-little-with-impeachment-might-not-be-such-a-bad-thing

As of this writing it looks like the impeachment farce in the Senate may end as early as tomorrow. The Democrats’ “more witnesses” gambit appears to be fizzling out — although that is not a certainty until the vote is taken. I suppose that ending this thing is for the better. However, I do have a couple of reasons why having it continue for at least a little while longer may not be so bad.

The first is that there is an obvious witness for the President’s side to call, someone whose testimony could be the first real “bombshell” in this whole matter. No, it is not Joe or Hunter Biden. I have seen the Bidens mentioned dozens of times as potential witnesses to be called by the President, and it doesn’t make any sense to me. As indefensible as the Bidens’ conduct in Ukraine may be, calling them as witnesses would likely turn into a net negative for the President. As a general matter, if you can avoid it, you never want to call a well-prepared hostile witness who is devoted to defeating your case. When you start questioning such witnesses, they will almost certainly follow the strategy of ignoring whatever questions you may ask and delivering pre-prepared self-serving monologues justifying their own position. Rarely will a judge give you any meaningful relief to get the testimony focused on what you want.

The President’s counsel calling Joe or Hunter Biden would be like the House managers seeking to call the President himself, or somebody like William Barr or Mike Pompeo. Those people are just not going to say anything unfavorable to the President if they can possibly avoid it. Instead you call people like Alexander Vindman and Marie Yovanovich. People who think that their stellar performance in office has been ignored. Even better, people (like Yovanovich) who have been fired by your target, and maybe have also been insulted by your target and have a powerful motive to use their testimony to get revenge.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Misuse of Whistleblower Law Created Impeachment Farce Roger L. Simon Roger L. Simon

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/misuse-of-whistleblower-law-created-impeachment-farce_3222948.html

Who is the whistleblower, the man or woman who launched a thousand Schiffs?

Okay, bad joke. In any case, anyone with the slightest interest already knows who he or she is, although some pretend they don’t, like the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts and the very Adam Schiff.

Nevertheless his (let’s be at least that honest) identity is being hidden because that is allegedly required by the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989. It’s unclear whether that is true.

But let’s be honest a second time. Congress (if it’s still awake) and legal scholars should look immediately into revising the Whistleblower Protection Act because it appears to have been turned on its head and used as a weapon for some of the most despicable behavior in American history. Something’s drastically wrong with its language that it could be exploited that way.

The misuse of this act is the proximate cause of the embarrassing impeachment charade that has been numbing minds across our republic for weeks, almost always ignoring the sublime and going straight to the ultra-ridiculous—Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar debating the law with Alan Dershowitz on “The View.”

America deserves to know how [name redacted] was able to manipulate this law for such egregious ends, who manipulated it with him (was it the inspector general? Schiff personnel? Schiff himself? Others?), and when did it start? That last may take us way back into 2015-2016, back to the days of the Steele dossier. So many things are connected now.

We need to know the answer. Was [name redacted] really a whistleblower or just another low rent, stomach-turning political operative, the kind of people who—while assuming they know better than the rest of us—are like termites undermining the fabric of our republic?

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Winston Churchill speaking on the dangers of socialism in 1945, just as relevant today Mark Perry

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/winston-churchill-speaking-on-th

From Winston Churchill’s first election broadcast on June 4, 1945:

….there can be no doubt that Socialism is inseparably interwoven with Totalitarianism and the abject worship of the State. …liberty, in all its forms is challenged by the fundamental conceptions of Socialism. …there is to be one State to which all are to be obedient in every act of their lives. This State is to be the arch-employer, the arch-planner, the arch-administrator and ruler, and the arch-caucus boss.

A Socialist State once thoroughly completed in all its details and aspects… could not afford opposition. Socialism is, in its essence, an attack upon the right of the ordinary man or woman to breathe freely without having a harsh, clumsy tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.   

But I will go farther. I declare to you, from the bottom of my heart that no Socialist system can be established without a political police. Many of those who are advocating Socialism or voting Socialist today will be horrified at this idea. That is because they are shortsighted, that is because they do not see where their theories are leading them.

No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp, or violently-worded expressions of public discontent. They would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.

And this would nip opinion in the bud; it would stop criticism as it reared its head, and it would gather all the power to the supreme party and the party leaders, rising like stately pinnacles above their vast bureaucracies of Civil servants, no longer servants and no longer civil. And where would the ordinary simple folk—the common people, as they like to call them in America—where would they be, once this mighty organism had got them in its grip?

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Democracy Dies In Diverse Societies Ilana Mercer

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/30/democracy-dies-in-diverse-societies/

By using their police powers to swamp their already fractious populations with alien nations, governments have undermined existing ethnic balance in Western democracies and the fellow feeling so essential to democracy’s endurance.

Dissatisfaction with democracy within developed countries is at its highest level in almost 25 years,” say researchers at the University of Cambridge. “The UK and the United States had particularly high levels of discontent.”

No wonder. Certainly, America is a severely divided country. “Severely divided societies are short on community,” and “community is a prerequisite for majority rule,” argues Donald L. Horowitz, a scholar of democracy, at Duke University.

Having studied “constitutional engineering” in divided societies like South Africa, Horowitz has concluded,

In societies severely divided by ethnicity, race, religion, language, or any other form of ascriptive affiliation, ethnic divisions make democracy difficult, because they tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. An ethnic party with a majority of votes and seats can dominate minority groups, seemingly in perpetuity.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

ELECTIONS ARE COMING: THESE ARE ALL THE INCUMBENT SENATORS

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

Maine
Susan Collins
1996 36.2
Massachusetts
Ed Markey
2013 22.8
Michigan
Gary Peters
2014 13.3
Minnesota
Tina Smith
2018 10.6
Mississippi
Cindy Hyde-Smith
2018 7.2
Montana
Steve Daines
2014 17.7
Nebraska
Ben Sasse
2014 32.9
New Hampshire
Jeanne Shaheen
2008 3.3
New Jersey
Cory Booker
2013 13.5
New Mexico
Tom Udall
2008 11.2
North Carolina
Thom Tillis
2014 1.5
Oklahoma
Jim Inhofe
1994 39.5
Oregon
Jeff Merkley
2008 18.8
Rhode Island
Jack Reed
1996 41.4
South Carolina
Lindsey Graham
2002 15.7
South Dakota
Mike Rounds
2014 20.9

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Yes, the Senate Should Call Witnesses Republicans should keep pulling this thread until they get to the first stitch. We may never get this chance again. Julie Kelly

Posted By on January 31st, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/01/30/yes-the-senate-should-call-witnesses/

The prevailing opinion of Republican lawmakers and most pundits on the Right is that the Senate impeachment trial should end without calling witnesses. Time to get back to the business of the American people, fair-minded people argue in defense of that view. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), especially, appears ready to move on.

But Democrats, led by their resident rock star, Representative Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), have no intention of getting back to any other business than continuing their scorched earth crusade against Donald Trump.

On Wednesday, Schiff hinted at his next move. “There are going to continue to be revelations that members of both sides of the aisle will have to answer a question each time it does,” Schiff told the trapped senators. “We are going to continue to see new evidence come out all the time.”

Schiff claimed the tell-all book by former National Security Advisor John Bolton, set for a March release, will disclose more damaging evidence against the president.

Rahm Emanuel, Barack Obama’s former chief of staff, was characteristically blunt about the Democrats’ pre-election strategy. Emanuel explained that an incomplete impeachment trial would not just be used against Trump but is central to the Democrats’ effort to win back the Senate.

“A vote to acquit . . . will force every senator to own Trump’s emboldened rhetoric of being exonerated,” the former Chicago mayor wrote in the Washington Post on Thursday. “Which means they’ll have to defend Trump when the next embarrassing audio recording hits the airwaves, or when another witness surfaces to speak, or when John Bolton’s book comes out, or when internal memos about the ‘drug deal’ come out via the Freedom of Information Act.”