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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Walter E. Williams:

“…According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016, only 37% of white high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 70% of them. Roughly 17% of black high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 58% of them. A 2018 Hechinger Report found, “More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes.”

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, “when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent.” Only 25% of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test’s readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science).

It’s clear that high schools confer diplomas that attest that a student can read, write and do math at a 12th-grade level when, in fact, most cannot. That means most high school diplomas represent fraudulent documents. But when high school graduates enter college, what happens? To get a hint, we can turn to an article by Craig E. Klafter, “Good Grieve! America’s Grade Inflation Culture,” published in the Fall 2019 edition of Academic Questions. In 1940, only 15% of all grades awarded were A’s. By 2018, the average grade point average at some of the nation’s leading colleges was A-minus. For example, look at the average GPA at Brown University (3.75), Stanford (3.68), Harvard College (3.63), Yale University (3.63), Columbia University (3.6), and the University of California, Berkeley (3.59)…”

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PG&E’s Lack of Power Line Maintenance Found to be Cause of the Paradise Wildfire

Ohio Town Votes to Dissolve Local Government Due to Excessive Taxation

Achievement Test Shows No Progress for American Kids in Reading and Math Over Last Decade

This is the result of turning education over to progressive political domination

Stephen Kruiser:

“…Kamala Harris’s biggest problem was always Kamala Harris. Last April I wrote about the progressive unease with both Harris’s time as the district attorney in San Francisco and California’s attorney general. The misgivings were so great that the New York Times had written a preemptive hit piece just before Harris announced her candidacy.

The Kamala Harris campaign story about being a plucky progressive prosecutor never did sync up with her actual record, and that was her Achilles heel in debates, not her skin color or sex.

Her off-putting sense of entitlement didn’t help her either.

After landing some solid blows against Joe Biden in the first debate, Harris had the opportunity to cement a spot in among the leaders of the race. They came after — you guessed it — her AG record in the next debate and she had little to counter with other than smug derision. Her dismissive “top tier candidate” line was her “Howard Dean scream” moment. Harris began declining in the polls shortly thereafter.

By the time the third debate had finished, everyone was sick of her.

Because the Democrats have to look at everything through the prism of diversity politics, there will probably no one among them that does a sober, realistic post mortem about Harris’s failure.

Her wilting on the national stage probably had more to do with the fact that she is a product of the California Democratic party system. The party is so dominant in the Golden State that Democrats need little more than the proper financial backing to advance up the elected office food chain. They don’t exactly get battle-tested when running for office.

Kamala Harris is a United States Senator. It’s patently absurd to even suggest that race and/or sex are somehow an obstacle in her political career…”

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I&I Editorial:

“…Amid falling support for impeachment and worries that it will backfire against Democrats, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff released a 300-page report he says proves that President Donald Trump committed high crimes and misdemeanors worthy of removing him from office.

And if you read only the summary, you might think they’ve got the goods.

The House impeachment report claims to have “uncovered a months-long effort by President Trump to use the powers of his office to solicit foreign interference on his behalf in the 2020 election.” (You can read the report here.)

It says that the “scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign.”

And it argues that “To compel the Ukrainian president to do his political bidding, President Trump conditioned two official acts on the public announcement of the investigations: a coveted White House visit and critical U.S. military assistance Ukraine needed to fight its Russian adversary.”

So the Democrats’ entire impeachment case rests on two pillars. First, that Trump threatened national security by withholding an aid package to Ukraine. And, second, that he did so in order to get Ukraine’s new president to publicly announce investigations into two supposedly bogus scandals – Joe Biden’s son, and Ukraine’s efforts to keep Trump out of the White House – simply to wound Biden politically.

But read into the report, and then look through the Republican response, and you come to realize that the Democrats fail to support either claim. In fact, in some ways, they make Trump’s case for him…”

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Chadwick Moore:

“…In 2014, America’s progressives got a wake-up call. That year, the midterm elections returned the largest Republican majority to the House of Representatives since 1928. President Barack Obama had, by the middle of his second term, proved an ineffective or unwilling conduit for the radical transformation they’d been promised. The hope and change president, whose rhetoric breathed life into the decaying Marxism in America’s cultural institutions, had been a failure. With a new Republican Congress, any last hopes that Obama would accomplish anything significant were dashed.

In the brownstone-lined streets of Park Slope, Brooklyn, however, the progressive flame burned on. Brad Lander, the New York City councilman who succeeded Bill de Blasio to represent Park Slope, had long before realized that Democratic domination in Washington would never lead to radical transformation. On the federal level, there would always be pushback from moderates and red America. So, in 2012, he began mobilizing progressive city leaders across the country to explore what might be accomplished at the local level.

That year Local Progress was born, a national network of far-left activists that today operates in hundreds of locations in 46 states under the umbrella of the Center for Popular Democracy. It has been a model for dozens of similar groups with shadowy funding protected by the rules of a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. Its mission is to scout, fund and insert progressive activists into municipal governments, and it is very good at it…

…The result has been a shift of power into the hands of city leaders who behave more like aloof 17th-century monarchs or smarmy jetsetting televangelists than the 21st-century CEOs their cities desperately need. In a few short years, this new class of leadership has wreaked immense havoc. The gap between the priorities of municipal chiefs and the people they represent couldn’t be starker. The consequence is that America’s once-great cities are dying, their alabaster gleam replaced by a Third World patina…

…Progressive local leaders busy themselves with PC abstractions as their cities fall apart. As San Francisco drowns in human feces, city government pushes through a law to change the term ‘convicted felon’ to ‘justice-involved person’. In Seattle, a city councilman is raising alarm that the pressure washers used to clean human feces from the courthouse steps are reminiscent of water cannons deployed against Civil Rights marchers, and therefore racist. As New York’s subways transform into mobile homeless shelters, the city overhauls the network’s PA system, ordering the gender-neutral greeting ‘Hello, everyone’ to replace ‘Attention ladies and gentlemen’. Dallas law enforcement will no longer prosecute theft of ‘necessary items’, claiming it ‘criminalizes poverty’. Meanwhile, violent crime continues to explode in Chicago, St Louis and Baltimore…

…I’ve spent many years living in poor, mostly black areas of New York City, and my neighbors have always been more open minded about the GOP than your average conservative in Kansas might expect. They do not think you’re irredeemably evil if you’re a Republican. That’s because they don’t listen to white liberals, as no one should. Many of my neighbors today even seem, dare I say it, Trump-curious.

If there were ever a time to shake up the left’s union of socialist city-states, it is the 2020 campaign. No one should expect Los Angeles or Chicago to be painted red anytime soon. But the Democratic platform is shaping up to be so repulsive and the effects of its urban tyranny becoming so clear that the Republican party ought to make city reform central to its message next year…”

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Conrad Black:

“…As the Democrats toil to make their impeachment effort look like something other than a partisan smear job and legal scam, President Trump is at the NATO leaders’ meeting in London, observing the 70th anniversary of that organization, and is able to take some pleasure in the success of his foreign policy. His enemies, who have swarmed in the media every day since he declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination — first in derisive hilarity, then in a rising state of alarm, and finally in seething hatred — claim that he has alienated allies, swaggered absurdly, and generally brought the United States into disrepute while accomplishing nothing useful and giving comfort to the nation’s rivals and opponents. There will be some frictions at the NATO meetings, but the president can reflect on the fact that when he assumed office, only three NATO countries of 27 apart from the U.S. were meeting the agreed target of devoting 2 percent of GDP to defense: the United Kingdom, Poland, and mighty Estonia. Today that number is eight, and commitments are in place to take it up to 18 out of 30 within four years, a total increase in alliance defense spending of $400 billion…

…Precisely 40 percent of NATO’s history, 28 years, has been spent since the collapse of the threat that gave birth to it, and that survival is also a considerable achievement, because NATO has not, since 1991, been an alliance devoted to the achievement of any particular objective, as it had been to containment of the Soviet threat…

…It has been a challenge to define a new role for NATO. Presidents Clinton and George W. Bush allowed NATO to degenerate into “an alliance of the willing,” which in practice meant that the so-called allies would cheerfully accept having their security assured by the United States but would not, except the British and the Poles among the larger countries, lift a finger to defend themselves or support any alliance-wide causes…

…President Trump recognizes that pushing Turkey into the arms of Russia, and Russia into the arms of China, would be terrible mistakes. The two greatest conceivable strategic threats to the U.S. are Russia aligning with China, so that tens of millions of Chinese move to Siberia and tap its resources as a concession power, paying Russia a royalty and rivaling North America as a resources treasure-house; and Turkey joining with Iran to impinge upon Israel and the Arabs, especially Saudi Arabia and Egypt…

…As the NATO meeting takes place, another, more vivid success of Trump’s foreign policy can be seen in the tumult and upheavals in Iran. Where the Obama administration appeased Iran while cold-shouldering Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, giving the ayatollahs a green light to deploy nuclear weapons in ten years, Trump is squeezing Iran with sanctions so severe that the regime is shaking. Efforts to blame the economic shambles caused by a 90 percent reduction in oil exports on America have failed, and in the past week the corrupt medieval theocracy in Teheran has killed over 500 demonstrators. No regime so unsuccessful and unpopular can fire live ammunition at its own civilians without courting a general and irresistible revolt. When Nicolae Ceausescu ordered his security forces to kill demonstrators in Romania in 1989, they seized and summarily executed him and his terrifying wife instead. The ayatollahs are enriching fissile material to try to frighten France, Germany, and the U.K. into demanding that the U.S. lift sanctions. That isn’t working. They aren’t really agitating, Trump won’t do it, and if the ayatollahs get close to a deliverable nuclear weapon, the United States will take it down with air strikes and the Iranian government will collapse — the Iranian people will cheer such a strike. That will crush the windpipe of the Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Gaza), and Houthi (Yemen) terrorists, making peace possible in the Middle East, and will not go unnoticed in Pyongyang…”

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Michael Goodwin:

“…Say this for Rep. Adam Schiff: His imagination is vivid and he has a flair for the dramatic. If only he had more respect for facts and a tighter tether to reality.

The California attack dog is, in real life, a frustrated writer of rejected screenplays, and he’s produced another dud in the Democrats’ impeachment report. Released Tuesday, it offers nothing new of significance, but that didn’t stop Schiff from hyping the contents as something akin to the second coming of Richard Nixon.

While the vast majority of Americans found something other to do than watch the mind-numbing hours of public testimony, Schiff depicts the hearings he orchestrated as pivotal events in modern history. While Trump is in Europe dealing with crucial national security issues and is a growing favorite to win re-election, Schiff insists he’s doing “potentially irrevocable” damage to the system of checks and balances and is a threat to the Constitution…”

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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds