NY Post Editorial Board:

“,,,Speaker Nancy Pelosi stepped out from behind the curtain Thursday to order up articles of impeachment against President Trump — once again exposing the official process as merely a show.

Her approach has been cavalier from the start, when she announced an “official impeachment inquiry” back on Sept. 24 — yet didn’t allow an actual House vote to make it official until Oct. 31, after weeks of leaked testimony from closed-door hearings had ensured that she’d have the votes.

And it’s only gotten worse. “The facts are uncontested,” she said Thursday — then whipped off “facts” that in reality are vigorously contested.

Namely: “The president abused his power for his own personal political benefit at the expense of our national security by withholding military aid and a crucial Oval Office meeting in exchange for an announcement of an investigation into his political rival.”

That is indeed what Democrats say Trump did. But they haven’t remotely established it as fact, and certainly aren’t trying all that hard to do so. Most important, as law professor Jonathan Turley testified Wednesday, they haven’t shown his intent was corrupt, rather than a sincere effort to get to the bottom of scandals he believed had been covered up. Which means that they haven’t shown he abused his powers in any way…

…For all Democrats’ pretense to be engaging in a solemn constitutional process, they’re turning impeachment into a purely political stunt — an abuse of power worse than what they claim the president’s done…”

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Worth clicking over for the whole thing. There are few voices of reason left.

JONATHAN TURLEY:

“…In my testimony Wednesday, I lamented that, as in the impeachment of President Clinton from 1998 to 1999, there is an intense “rancor and rage” and “stifling intolerance” that blinds people to opposing views. My call for greater civility and dialogue may have been the least successful argument I made to the committee. Before I finished my testimony, my home and office were inundated with threatening messages and demands that I be fired from George Washington University for arguing that, while a case for impeachment can be made, it has not been made on this record.

Some of the most heated attacks came from Democratic members of the House Judiciary Committee. Representative Eric Swalwell of California attacked me for defending my client, Judge Thomas Porteous, in the last impeachment trial and noted that I lost that case. Swalwell pointed out that I said Porteous had not been charged with a crime for any conduct, which is an obviously material point for any impeachment defense.

Not all Democrats supported such scorched earth tactics. One senior Democrat on the committee apologized to me afterward for the attack from Swalwell. Yet many others relished seeing my representations of an accused federal judge being used to attack my credibility, even as they claimed to defend the rule of law. Indeed, Rachel Maddow lambasted me on MSNBC for defending the judge, who was accused but never charged with taking bribes, and referring to him as a “moocher” for the allegations that he accepted free lunches and whether such gratuities, which were not barred at the time, would constitute impeachable offenses.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank expanded on this theme of attacking my past argument. Despite 52 pages of my detailed testimony, more than twice the length of all the other witnesses combined, on the cases and history of impeachment, he described it as being “primarily emotional and political.” Milbank claimed that I contradicted my testimony in a 2013 hearing when I presented “exactly the opposite case against President Obama” by saying “it would be ‘very dangerous’ to the balance of powers not to hold Obama accountable for assuming powers ‘very similar’ to the ‘right of the king’ to essentially stand above the law.”

But I was not speaking of an impeachment then. It was a discussion of the separation of powers and the need for Congress to fight against unilateral executive actions, the very issue that Democrats raise against Trump. I did not call for Obama to be impeached, but that is par for the course in the echo chamber today in which the facts must conform to the frenzy. It was unsettling to see the embrace of a false narrative that I “contradicted” my testimony from the Clinton impeachment, a false narrative fueled by the concluding remarks of Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler of New York quoting from my 1998 testimony. Notably, neither Swalwell nor Nadler allowed me to respond to those or any other attacks. It was then picked up eagerly by others, despite being a demonstrably false narrative…”

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https://youtu.be/wMrPiZslFdo

The Senate Confirmed Four Federal Judges While The House Heard Impeachment Testimony

Kurt Schlichter:

“…Well, the gibbering, babbling left wanted an impeachment, and now they’re getting it good and hard. To the surprise of no one who isn’t a blue city pol, a media hack, or an insufferable Fredocon sissy, the American people are not particularly impressed by the genius idea of replacing our president a year before an election because he allegedly expressed curiosity about why the coke-sniffing, stripper-impregnating, dead brother’s wife-trifling, Navy-rejected loser son of Vice President Gropey O’Definitelynotsenile scored a $50K+ a month gig on a Ukrainian gas board. And it’s just dawning on some of them they maybe this impeachment brainstorm was not the bestest idea there ever was…”

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Dem Rep Laments Absence of Black Impeachment Witnesses: Witnesses were chosen by Democratic committee leadership

You can’t make it up!

Battleground Ohio: Investigation Uncovers Hundreds of Illegally Registered Non-Citizen Voters.

My title is not entirely true, but pretty close

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds

ED MORRISSEY:

“…It’s quite a stretch to compare McConnell’s potential action here to what happened in 1998. In the Clinton impeachment, there was an actual statutory crime established in fact (perjury) that came out of a special-prosecutor investigation by Ken Starr. The investigation was highly controversial, but the House Republican majority used existing precedent to debate and vote on impeachment, with far more deference to the White House than is currently on display by Adam Schiff. The decision to impeach was still a mistake, as it became clear that no consensus for removal was to be found in either Congress or the electorate.

House Democrats have upped the partisan ante even further in this case, pursuing an impeachment without a statutory crime and basing it on hearsay without any sort of direct evidence. McConnell’s warning Schumer that either Democrats had better apply the sauce-for-the-gander rule when it comes to majoritarian rule or prepare to get steamrolled as McConnell’s House colleagues have been.

Of course, this only works if McConnell can get to 51 votes for whatever rules the Republicans plan to implement. He can only afford to lose two, and at least three would probably be in play: Susan Collins, who’s up for re-election, Lisa Murkowski, and Pierre Delecto — er, Mitt Romney. Even a go-it-alone package would have to offer some due process to the minority for McConnell to get one of those three on board, so McConnell’s not likely to go Full Schiff. But McConnell knows he can do plenty of damage with a Half Schiff — and so does Chuck Schumer. Don’t think for a moment McConnell’s main counterpart doesn’t understand what’s at stake here…”

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Hillary: I Am Not A Lesbian

Or answers to questions no one is asking

More Google Searches For “Peloton” Than “Impeachment” Since Saturday

“…Wednesday’s impeachment hearing in the House Judiciary Committee was comprised of exactly four law professors giving their opinions of what they thought President Trump meant when he spoke with the Ukrainian president last July. In five minutes, Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.)…

…established that all the professors supported Democratic presidential candidates and most had given them thousands of dollars. He asked them to raise their hands if they had any personal knowledge of any material facts from Congressman Adam Schiff’s impeachment report. All hands stayed down. And he noted that at least two of them had been calling for Trump’s impeachment for years…”

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Francis Menton:

“…As I have noted many times before, this whole green energy thing is all just so much talk until the point hits where energy shortages start to emerge or consumer prices begin to soar. At that point, the people will notice. And then, how will the politics shift? Will the politicians press forward with green energy — and impose energy deprivation on the people in the process? Or will they promptly back off the green energy blather, and return to the cheap and reliable fossil fuels?

Here in New York, where professing the green religion is the indispensable ticket to entry into polite society, we’re in the early phases of seeing this process play out. Out there in the hinterlands, you may be interested in the dynamics.

Our Governor Andrew Cuomo clearly thirsts to be part of polite society. Same with the members of the legislature. Thus, fealty to green orthodoxy must be regularly demonstrated. Result: We have had one measure after another over the past several years to restrict fossil fuels and promote energy from wind and solar sources. First came an outright ban on fracking in the state for oil and gas, imposed in 2014 despite the fact that a broad swath of upstate sits right atop the rich Marcellus shale formation. Then came the blocking of two major pipeline enhancements across the Hudson River and New York Harbor, most recently a denial in May of this year of a water quality permit for a cross-harbor project. Then there have been announcements of plans for multiple massive pie-in-the-sky wind and solar projects — none of which, however, has actually begun construction. In June the legislature passed a law (signed by the Guv) declaring that the entire state of New York will be “carbon neutral” by 2050!

But is any of this stuff real, in the sense that it will stand up when the crunch hits?

In August, the first inklings of the crunch began to hit. As I reported on September 3, after the cross-harbor pipeline was blocked in May, the natural gas utility named National Grid, which covers Long Island (including the parts of New York City known as Brooklyn and Queens) announced that it could not accept any additional gas customers. By August, some 3000 potential customers in that area had been denied service. These included people who had just renovated a house and now found that they had no functioning heat system, and others who planned to open restaurants but now found they had no functioning stove or oven. Within days, the affected customers were all over their state legislators, and the legislators were demanding action.

In other words, we had upon us a one hundred percent self-inflicted impending crisis…”

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Jack Brewer:

“…James Prince, the most respected man in hip-hop, is among the growing number of black Americans – including me – who are recognizing that President Trump has accomplished some very good things for the African-American community.

I’m one of those who have become full-fledged supporters of the president and want to see him reelected. Others, like Prince, haven’t endorsed Trump for reelection at this point, but support some of the president’s policies and appreciate what he has done.

We also recognized that while Democrats make big promises to black voters in the run-up to every election, too often those promises are forgotten once the polls close. In part that’s because Democrats take our votes for granted – they just assume the vast majority of black people will vote Democratic. If more of us voted for Republicans, candidates in both parties would do more to compete for our votes.

Yet too often, black supporters of President Trump and other Republican candidates are looked down on by many of our fellow African-Americans as sellouts or Uncle Toms – as if voting for Democrats was a requirement for being considered authentically black in America today. This is ridiculous.

White people vote for both Democrats and Republicans, and no one questions their “whiteness” based on who they vote for. So why should being black have such a strong association with voting for Democrats?…”

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