Illinois Democrat Claims ‘Hearsay Can Be Much Better Evidence Than Direct’ Evidence

Karin McQuillan:

“…It’s hard to think of a major Democrat issue and proposed solution that is not a fake. It’s an emergency. What’s the emergency? Everything. The planet, white privilege, transgender rights, Nazi policies on the border, killer cops. A health care crisis so dire the government must ban private insurance, private doctors, and private hospitals.

Most of all President Trump is a walking emergency. His voters are hate-filled bigots who love his authoritarian tendencies. They are a danger to our democracy.

Democrat fixes are a list of economic and physical impossibilities. Ban oil, gas, and coal; make health care and college “free”; hand out reparations for slavery. They promise they will raise all the money from billionaires’ spare change…”

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James Piereson:

“…Now they propose to impeach the President on the basis of testimony from a cia plant in the White House, Democratic partisan, member of the Obama administration, and friend and ally to former Vice President Biden, who heard third- or fourth-hand about the President’s call with the President of Ukraine, and then worked hand-in-glove with Rep. Schiff to concoct a “whistleblower” complaint that he proposes to use as a basis for impeachment. The phone call in question took place the day after Robert Mueller’s embarrassing congressional testimony about his “Russia” investigation. Plainly some Democrats concluded, once Mueller’s testimony sunk in, that “we have to make another run at this guy.” The “whistleblower” complaint followed as night the day.

This gambit is never going to fly with Republicans or with Republican-leaning voters. It is plainly absurd, and a desperate follow-up to the failed Russia investigation. Still, they are determined to proceed—and no doubt will get a majority of the House to vote for impeachment, because they decided long ago that this might be the only way they can get rid of a President they despise. This is a measure of their faith in American voters.

In a time of norm-breaking, Democrats are breaking new ground on impeachment: they are using impeachment as a campaign strategy to weaken President Trump in the hope they can elect a Democrat to the presidency next November. They also think that by impeaching him they will discredit his election victory in 2016. This is also a piece of their campaign strategy: he never should have been elected in the first place.

Say what you will about impeachment, that it will always be political and not narrowly legal in nature—it has never been deployed as a feature of an election strategy, or as a means of reversing an election result. This is a new step, and one that will only reinforce partisan polarization that has already crossed beyond the limits of rationality. In the annals of cynicism and norm-breaking, this scheme deserves a prominent place…”

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Michael Goodwin:

“…If Schiff, the zealous California chair of the intelligence panel, has a compelling vision about how to persuade the public that the president committed crimes or anything approaching crimes involving Ukraine, it escapes me. The first day of hearings and the first witnesses should have at least been able to produce facts and tantalizing hints that would leave viewers wanting more.

Instead, the performances of acting Ukraine Ambassador William Taylor and State Department official George Kent left the impression there is little or nothing more to want. Everything to come likely will offer only more detail about the things we already know.As several GOP members argued, it is impossible to prove the allegations of a quid pro quo when Ukraine got the American aid even though it never promised to investigate that country’s role in the 2016 election or the hiring of Hunter Biden by an energy company for $50,000 a month when his father was vice president.

That idea was captured best when Ohio Republican Jim Jordan got Taylor to acknowledge he had three meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky over a 55-day period after the Trump phone call. Not once, Jordan said and Taylor agreed, did Zelensky complain that Trump was pressuring him to do the investigation or that there had been a holdup in aid.

“And you’re the star witnesses,” Jordan said, which got a laugh out of Taylor and many in the room.

It was a compelling moment that underscored the difficulty — and maybe the insanity — of what Democrats are trying to do. Moreover, even if they could prove a quid pro quo, would the American people find it impeachable just 11 months before an election? Would the Senate convict and remove Trump on such thin gruel?…”

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Impeachment Whistleblower May Be Abusing His Office to Enrich Himself, ICIG Complaint Alleges

STEPHEN KRUISER:

“…Climate Church theology is the only religion taught in American public schools. The proselytizing is working. The indoctrination mills are spewing out kids who are in the throes of despair because they’ve been taught that their futures will be full of pointless misery, all because their parents used the wrong kind of lightbulbs.

If the Climate Church succeeds in seizing all the government power that it lusts after and establishing its New Global Order, the Ayatollahs in Iran may end up seeming like some of the most cheerful and lenient world leaders.

Let’s all go buy old trucks and drive them a lot…”

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CHARLIE MARTIN:

“…But now consider what happens if they do prepare Articles and have them actually voted out of the House. (Which isn’t actually a foregone conclusion given the polling.)

They have to go to trial in the Republican-dominated Senate. Where Eric Ciaramella can be called for public testimony under oath. Where Alex Vindman can be challenged by a former JAG about his violations of the UCMJ. Where people can be called to testify in public what they’ve said in the Star Chamber: that Ukraine never knew about aid being suspended, and that the president of Ukraine denies any pressure. And where House Members can’t be threatened with ethics complaints for asking inconvenient questions.

Where what already looks like a shady investigation of a made-up crime can’t be controlled.

My guess is that this will hang on until after Thanksgiving, especially if the ICIG report comes out. Then they will announce in high dudgeon that because of GOP obstruction and the risk to the (still “secret”) whistleblower, along with the proximity to the election, they can’t press on in the Senate where the evil Mitch McConnell will drag out the trial and thwart the will of the People.

They might even try to continue the “inquiry” into the New Year, although the risk grows every day that Republicans will start leaking seriously, or filing more ethics complains against the Democrats — or, of course, starting subpoenas in the Senate.

But an actual impeachment trial? They can’t risk it…”

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JOSEF JOFFE:

“…Greta Thunberg, the teenager from Stockholm, is the prophet of a new religion sweeping the West. Call it Climatism. Like any religion worthy of the name, it comes with its own catechism (what to believe) and eschatology (how the world will end). Thunberg’s bible is the latest report of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which gives us 12 years to save civilization as we know it.

We have prayed to the false gods of fossil-fired growth, runs Thunberg’s indictment. Guilty are the adults who have “lied to us” and given us “false hope.” But her children’s crusade—no-school “Fridays for Future”—will show the path to redemption…

…For the believers, the debate is closed, and exhortation has segued into excommunication. No more catty humor, like that on display in the unforgettable bumper sticker from the 1970s: “Save the Planet! Kill yourself!” Those who reject the faith are “climate-change deniers,” as in “denying the Father and the Son” (1 John 2:23). Relate Climatism to Judeo-Christianity, and the psycho-structural analogies abound…

…Today, the harbingers of doom are armed with assumptions, models, and data. Melting ice will raise sea levels, swallowing coasts and islands. What the floods spare will be devastated by droughts or hurricanes. The most recent sign from up high is the darkened skies over the Amazon’s rain forests, the “lungs of the world,” which presages collective death by asphyxiation. For the first iteration of this threat, one need only go back to Revelation 6:13: “The sun became black, and the whole moon became as blood.”…

…if you “repent and believe” (Mark 1:15), Armageddon will yield to hope and salvation. But deliverance demands sacrifice, an idea going back to the earliest days of humanity. You could once expiate your sins by burying your baubles. Today, you must trade cars for bicycles. Stop gorging on meat whose production destroys forests and poisons the atmosphere with methane. Shrink your carbon footprint by using trains instead of planes. Ditch plastic in favor of hand-knitted shopping bags. Turn down the thermostat and pay a price for CO2 emissions. Such a levy makes economic sense by putting a market price on profligacy, but one can’t help recalling the indulgences condemned by another prophet, Martin Luther, in the 16th century…

…It is critical to keep fear and faith from dividing the world into disciples and heretics. “I am holier than thou” is not a compelling argument. If climate trumps civil conversation, the world will not become smarter. Inspired by Aristotle and David Hume, the philosopher of science Karl Popper wrote: “All theories are hypotheses; all can be overthrown. The game of science has no end. Those who decide that scientific propositions are final retire from the game,” leaving behind “pseudo-science or faith.”…”

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ANDREW C. MCCARTHY:

“…Vindman, of course, is one of the House Democrats’ star impeachment witnesses. His haughtiness in proclaiming the policy community and his membership in it grates, throughout his 340-page House deposition transcript. I couldn’t agree more, though, with our experts’ apparent consensus that Moscow is bad, should be challenged on various fronts, and would best be seen as the incorrigible rival it is, not the potential strategic partner some wish it to be — the “some” here known to include the president. Ukraine, for all its deep flaws, is valuable to us as a check on Russia’s aggression, another conclusion about which the president is skeptical.

That is, on the critical matter of America’s interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin’s anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions.

But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.

And that’s where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him — not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts — in charge of making policy. If we’re to remain a constitutional republic, that’s how it has to stay…”

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AOC Suggests We Need to Fight ‘White Supremacy’ to Combat Climate Change

You just can’t make this stuff up!

Robert Spencer:

“…Rex Tillerson and John Kelly failed as well. They’re out of the administration and Trump is still president, although there are no doubt many others still inside the government who think they know better than the president how the country ought to be run, and are doing their level best to implement their vision, without having had to go to the trouble to submit their plans to the judgment of the voters. The voters! Who needs them? Who knows better than Tillerson, Kelly and their ilk how to steer our increasingly fractious nation back to safety, peace, and prosperity?

As Daniel Webster and the other members of John Tyler’s cabinet, William H. Seward, and Lyndon Johnson demonstrate, Rex Tillerson and John Kelly are by no means the first egotistical elitists who thought their judgment so impeccable that they were willing to dare to impose it on the nation, even though no one had empowered them to do so. Nor will they be the last. But it was good of Nikki Haley, whatever her faults, to become a real whistleblower in this instance, just so we know where we stand. President Trump should be reelected or rejected by the voters in 2020 based on what he has done and intends to do, not on what a swarm of unelected bureaucrats has decided he should do instead…”

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Think about how much time and money is wasted on this kind of nonsense each year.

J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS:

“…Reugebrink is a federal employee and is the “Mindfulness & Resiliency Program Manager” with the Work Environment & Performance Office at the United States Department of Agriculture. Her job is, in her words, “to teach mindfulness and compassion practices that enable all of us to not just survive but also grow from exposure to stress.”

Reugebrink’s presentation quoted Anais Nin: “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.”

Reugebrink also speaks at for-profit seminars sponsored by Forest Bathing International and the Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides. The certification program for this organization says “the forest itself is the therapist. We don’t train therapists; we train guides. By slowing people down and facilitating sensory experiencing, guides open the doorways through which the forest can accomplish its healing work.”

Tuition for a six-month “Guide Training and Certification Program” is $3410.

In 2018, Reugebrink’s federal salary was $101,794 per year. She teaches “mindfulness” and forest bathing to thousands of federal workers each year at agencies such as the Secret Service, IRS, TSA and more…”

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Post Editorial Board:

“…President Trump’s determination to break with past policies has prompted outrageous “resistance” not only from Democrats but even by some in his own administration.

Former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley offers the latest evidence of that, accusing ex-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and ex-Chief of Staff John Kelly of trying to “undermine” Trump.

In her new book and interviews about it, Haley says the men claimed “they were trying to save the country and that if they did not do something, people would die.” They believed “it was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interest of America.”

Yet Kelly’s and Tillerson’s gripes didn’t fit the model of “a rogue president.” They simply disagreed with specific policies, like withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and the Iran nuclear deal and moving the US Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

That’s not “out of control” — it’s refusing to be bound by conventional wisdom, which in fact proved to be false.

On the embassy move, Haley notes, the two predicted “the sky would fall.” For decades, critics warned that the “Arab street,” and perhaps the entire Middle East, would explode if Washington took this step. Yet Trump went ahead, and “the sky is still up there.”

Nixing the Paris accord and the Iran deal similarly failed to bring the promised disasters. The establishment was wrong.

More important, Haley is 1,000 percent right to say Tillerson’s and Kelly’s duty was to let Trump know their concerns — and quit if they didn’t like his final decisions.

Yes, Democrats in Congress have every right to oppose Trump’s policies, as Republicans did his predecessor’s. Yet Dems’ drive to impeach him has given a lot of play to various diplomats objecting to Trump’s “shadow” Ukraine policy.

Sorry: The State Department works for the president, not vice versa. Trump’s completely free to use outsiders like Rudy Giuliani as envoys, as presidents always have.

If Democrats can’t show Trump cutting foreign deals that benefit him personally rather than serving the nation’s interest, impeachment is just a giant waste of time…”

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Daily Northwestern Apologizes to Students for Journalism

Deep state actors upset with the President’s approach to foreign policy and choices regarding policy, this is the heart of the current impeachment farce. And farce it is. This article is an excellent analysis of one of the Democrat’s top witnesses. Click over for a good read.

Byron York:

“…Still, Vindman was deeply upset when Trump, relying on Rudy Giuliani and others, turned his attention to Ukraine. “In the spring of 2019, I became aware of outside influencers promoting a false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the interagency,” Vindman said in his opening statement. The outside influencers, he suggested, were undermining the work of his “interagency colleagues.” In the words of the Washington Post, Vindman was “deeply troubled by what he interpreted as an attempt by the president to subvert U.S. foreign policy.”

Vindman’s discussion of the interagency, while dry as dust, might contain the key to his role in the Trump-Ukraine affair. In the last few years, the bureaucracy with which he so clearly identified has often been at odds, sometimes privately and sometimes publicly, with the president. Former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, writing in a new book, said two top officials, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and White House chief of staff John Kelly, sought to undermine Trump to “save the country.”

“It was their decisions, not the president’s, that were in the best interest of America, they said,” Haley wrote. “The president didn’t know what he was doing.”

That view extended deep into some areas of the government. Now, parts of the foreign policy bureaucracy are in open war with the president, channeling their grievances through the House Democrats’ drive toward impeachment. When he testifies in public, Vindman will be the living embodiment of that bureaucratic war…”

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Victor Davis Hanson:

“…For a variety of reasons, the 2020 election is going to be a referendum beyond Donald Trump’s record and his Democratic opposition.

The furor that Trump has incurred, and the radical antithesis to his agenda and first term, have redefined the looming election. It is becoming a stark choice between a revolutionary future versus American traditionalism.

The choice in reductionist terms will be one between a growing, statist Panopticon, fueled by social media, a media-progressive nexus, and an electronic posse. Online trolls and government bureaucrats seek to know everything about us, in Big Brother fashion to monitor our very thoughts to ferret out incorrect ideas, and then to regiment and indoctrinate us to ensure elite visions of mandated equality and correct behavior—or else!

In other words, the personality quirks of a Trump or an Elizabeth Warren or a Bernie Sanders will become mostly irrelevant given the existential choice between two quite antithetical ideas of future America. In 2020 we will witness the penultimate manifestation of what radical progressivism has in store for us all—and the furious, often desperate, and unfettered pushback against it

We are also well beyond even the stark choices of 1972 and 1984 that remained within the parameters of the two parties. In contrast, the Democratic Party as we have known it, is extinct for now. It has been replaced since 2016 by a radical progressive revolutionary movement that serves as a touchstone for a variety of auxiliary extremist causes, agendas, and cliques—almost all of them radically leftwing and nihilistic, and largely without majority popular support.

When Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and a number of Democratic presidential candidates sympathize with the New York subway jumpers who openly threaten the police, then what or who exactly is the alternative to such chaos?

When the media proves 90 percent partisan according to its own liberal watchdog institutions, or reports things as true that cannot be true but “should” be true, what are the forces behind that?

When the violence of Antifa is quietly—or sometimes loudly—condoned, who are those who empower it and excuse it?

If a late-term abortion results in a live baby exiting the birth canal only to be liquidated, who exactly would say that is amoral?

If the leading Democratic presidential candidates openly embrace the Green New Deal, reparations, abolishing the Electoral College, welfare for illegal aliens, open borders, amnesties, wealth taxes, a 70-90 percent income tax code, Medicare for all, and legal infanticide—what is the alternative vision and who stands between all that and a targeted traditional America?…”

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Cal Thomas:

“…If you are paying attention to the Washington circus that is the impeachment inquiry into President Trump’s handling of the much maligned Ukraine call, this is what real collusion looks like: A media largely committed to advancing the goal of Democrats to severely damage or remove him from office, a series of at first private testimonies by people who appear to have similar motives and connections to Democrats and/or anti-Trump forces, and now a new book by “Anonymous,” which claims the president has a bad attitude and is difficult to work with…”

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“…Legal expert Alan Dershowitz commented on the “scary” impeachment inquiry being led by House Democrats against President Trump Sunday morning in an interview with John Catsimatidis on the “Cats Roundtable” radio show on 970 AM in New York City.

Dershowitz said the effort to get Trump on any crime reminded him of Stalin’s secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria who famously said: “Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime.”

“Whether you’re from New York or the middle of the country, you should be frightened by efforts to try to create crimes out of nothing,” Dershowitz said. “The latest twist was people on television, particularly CNN and MSNBC, are saying that if the president or somebody else were to name the whistleblower in the Ukrainian situation that person would be guilty of a crime.”

“Well, I spent the afternoon yesterday searching the federal criminal statutes from beginning to end. I couldn’t find the crime.”

“First they made up collusion… I searched the statute books. There’s no crime of collusion… with a foreign country. After that, they said obstruction of Congress,” Dershowitz said. “In a desperate effort to try to find crimes [committed by] President Trump, they’re just making it up. And that means we are all in danger.”…”

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