F-35A Lightning IIs from the active duty 388th and Reserve 419th Fighter Wings taxi during an F-35A Combat Power Exercise at Hill Air Force Base, Utah, Jan. 6, 2020.
Impeachment headline of the day, wine edition
Senate Asks Pelosi If She Can Send Over Copy Of Impeachment Articles Without Wine Stains All Over It https://t.co/BXMmDSdVqP
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 15, 2020
Impeachment headline of the day
Priorities
Equal Rights Amendment Passes in Virginia… 37 Years After the Deadline
Can you guess which party recently captured control of both state houses?
Immigration
Illegal Alien Crossings Down an Extraordinary 78 Percent
It looks like Trump’s policies are working.
Biden, he’s running for president
Andrew McCabe, Who Approved Surveillance Of Carter Page, Will Discuss FISA Reform At NYU Event
You can’t make this up!
-
- Andrew McCabe will take part in a forum at New York University to address reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in the wake of the Justice Department inspector general’s report.
- McCabe was the FBI’s No. 2 when the FBI submitted false information to the FISA Court in order to obtain wiretap warrants against Carter Page.
- McCabe also pushed to include the unverified Steele dossier in an intelligence community assessment of Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election.
- Andrew Weissmann, a top prosecutor on the special counsel’s team, will also take part in the event.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Andrew Weissmann, one of the lead prosecutors in the special counsel’s probe, will speak at a New York University event Thursday about reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
The event, called “Reforming the FISA Process: Proposals for the Future,” will address a report from the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general (IG), which found that the FBI made “significant” errors and omissions in its applications for FISA warrants against former Trump campaign aide Carter Page.
McCabe had a front-row seat to the FISA failures that will be discussed at the event.
He was the second-in-charge at the FBI when the bureau submitted false information to the FISA court in order to wiretap Page. He signed off on the third FISA renewal, dated June 29, 2017, when he served as acting director of the FBI.
McCabe was also briefed regularly on Crossfire Hurricane, the code name for the FBI’s counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign.
Who is Pencil Neck?
Just a reminder we live in a bubble. @RepAdamSchiff was the answer on @Jeopardy question tonight, with his picture, and no one knew who he was. pic.twitter.com/VtqHpEQfXF
— Jeremy Art (@jeremyart) January 16, 2020
Trump calls Schiff Pencil Neck, among other things.
Brad Parscale on Democrat debate
The sound you heard after last night’s #DemDebate was the Democrat Media realizing President @realDonaldTrump will dominate any one of their candidates in November.#FourMoreYears pic.twitter.com/1KlEjTVwlq
— Brad Parscale (@parscale) January 16, 2020
Kurt Schlichter on Bernie
Kurt Schlichter:
“…Communist curmudgeon Bernie Sanders is having his moment, threatening to actually win some of the early primaries and maybe even the nomination. This is bad, at least for the Democrats, since the idea of a weird crusty admitted socialist as their candidate is problematic – the problem being Americans aren’t insanely stupid enough to elect this guy president.
We hope.
Also note that I am excluding Vermont, New York and California from that statement, if you have somehow confused those mutant provinces with America.
But with Bernie rising in the polls, and his poisonous ideology gathering steam among the Democrat base, can we really laugh off this Soviet Union-loving crank?…”
Dishwashers, or the results of over-regulation
I & I Editorial Board:
“…The left had another apoplectic fit when President Donald Trump started talking about dishwashers at his Milwaukee rally this week. How dare he focus on something so trivial when House Democrats are busy trying to remove him from office.
But Trump is on to something, and the fact that the liberal elites can’t understand what it is says more about them than it does about Trump.
“Anybody have a new dishwasher?” Trump asked the audience on Tuesday. “I’m sorry for that, it’s worthless. They give you so little water. … So what happens? You end up using it 10 times … then you take them out and do them the old fashioned way, right?”
Trump said that he’s “approving new dishwashers that give you more water so you can actually wash and rinse your dishes without having to do it 10 times.”
“It’s inelegant to talk about it, right? Right? Isn’t it inelegant? I’m talking about dishwashers.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has brought up the impact government energy efficiency mandates have had on dishwashers. But this time, the pundit class responded as if he’d just committed another impeachable offense…
…Not everybody understands that these annoyances are the result of mandates handed down by a few unelected bureaucrats sitting in cubicles in Washington, D.C. By exposing the link, Trump has a better chance of creating legions of small-government advocates than he would by lecturing audiences about Adam Smith.
Just as important, Trump’s dishwasher diatribe exposes just how out of touch today’s liberal elites are with middle America. The more they sneer about how nuts Trump is to bring dishwashers and lightbulbs up, the better Trump looks to the voters who will determine the outcome of the 2020 election…”
More on the Democrat debate
Trump versus Democrat debate
Good Analysis here. Worth clicking over. Here is the meat of it.
Steve Cortes:
“…President Trump returned to Wisconsin as a confident, even triumphal, commander-in-chief. In 2016, he worked relentlessly to flip the state and other supposedly unwinnable ones in the upper Midwest, tearing asunder the Democrats’ assumed “blue wall” of electoral fortification. Through campaign hustle and policy prescriptions that put workers first, he proved that many Obama voters in places like Wisconsin could be persuaded to join the Republican movement, so long as it championed American nationalism, particularly in the spheres of trade and jobs.
Returning to the Badger State as the sitting president — indeed, in the very city where Democrats will hold their nominating convention this summer — he powerfully made the case that the Trump Boom has delivered results to the very voters who vaulted him into the White House. Blue-collar workers thrive in America, at last. By every relevant measure, wages advance fastest now for the economic underdogs, the strivers. American workers who lagged during the tepid Obama recovery now surge to the lead with, for example, 6% wage growth for non-high school graduates, a pace of expansion three times better than during Obama’s second term. In fact, per Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank’s analysis, the wage growth differential for the lowest quartile of earners has exploded to relative outperformance levels unseen since the 1990s. Because of this broadening prosperity, an amazing 40 million fewer Americans no longer reside in households receiving government assistance, compared to just three years ago.
President Trump’s Midwestern audiences benefit mightily from such opportunity. Unlike the Obama years, which narrowly rewarded already-successful populations largely residing on America’s coasts, between 2016 and 2018 the number of workers earning $200,000 or more annually increased 17% in Michigan and 10% in Iowa. In addition to economic success, President Trump rightly crowed to the heartland audience about America’s new trajectory vs. enemies abroad. The surgical military strike against the terrorist menace Qassem Soleimani eliminated a deadly threat to American lives and, like the prior al-Baghdadi raid, proved that the United States stands ready to kill dangerous adversaries abroad without initiating disastrous invasions and the concomitant nation-building. The Trump Doctrine of realism and restraint abroad resonates across the war-weary Midwest. Indeed, the president’s anti-intervention stance helped secure his 2016 victory in these very states, according to a compelling statistical analysis by Douglas Kriner and Francis Shen.
As the UW-Milwaukee arena pulsed with the rock concert-like fervor unique to a Trump rally, a political wake of sorts unfolded Tuesday night at Drake University, site of the CNN Democratic debate. My CNN colleague, Democrat Van Jones, conceded that the event displayed the excitement of “cold oatmeal.” He further observed that “the Democrats are going to have to do better than what we saw tonight” and that no one on stage “would be able to take Trump out.”
Indeed, the debate revealed a party devoid of compelling ideas and a corporate media bereft of journalistic credibility. Among the candidates, the only real competition revolved around just how much federal intrusion into private health care is enough. Instead, these Democratic debates should offer serious fireworks. After all, the canyon-sized gap between the AOC “Squad” wing of the party and the establishment types like Joe Biden should produce fiercely contentious political cage matches. Instead, these snooze-fests resemble pillow fights. Such training will hardly prepare the eventual nominee to face a brawler like President Trump, who has hardened his skills versus adversaries ranging from Democrats in the House of Representatives to the Chinese Communist Party to the corporate media…”
On Mideast policy
Soleimani Killing: A Change for the Better?
Insightful article by Conrad Black. I agree with most of it.
Yes, I’ve known this for years
On Pelosi and impeachment
MICHAEL VAN DER GALIEN:
“…When Pelosi refused to send over the articles of impeachment, progressives everywhere — but especially in the old, corporatist and radical leftist Media Cartel — hailed her for being a master strategist. Oh yes, she was showing Mitch McConnell how it was done. Pelosi was Girlboss. Awesome. Fantastic. Majestic. She was the new and improved Sun Tzu.
Only there was one issue with that talking point: Pelosi is, as Mark Levin frequently explains on his radio show, a horrible strategist. She may not be stupid as such — I highly doubt anyone with an IQ of, say, 65 would become Speaker of the House — but an Intellectual Heavyweight she is not.
Everybody could see that McConnell can do whatever he pleases. The House doesn’t dictate to the Senate how it should approach an impeachment trial. And if the House refuses to send over impeachment articles, well, guess what, the Senate can simply dismiss the impeachment altogether and inform the House that it’s game over. Or the Senate can just wait, and wait, and wait, and wait, and wait… until the end of time. After all, as long as there is no trial, the president remains firmly in the driver’s seat.
Clearly, Pelosi made such a mess out of it that even CNN is now forced to admit that, well, she failed. Miserably.
The good news? It seems likely that Pelosi will remain the Democrats’ leader in Congress for quite a while to come. If that isn’t good news for President Trump, I don’t know what is…”
Tweet of the day on the Democrat debate
