Happy Halloween

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Fox News Fail

Yesterday’s blog linked to Sundance’s close analysis of the upcoming vote on the impeachment “inquiry.”  If you were watching Fox News @Night with Shannon Bream yesterday evening, you might have been further confused.  Here’s Sundance correcting the record.  Again.

Fox News host Shannon Bream promoted a segment on her news program outlining the pending House ‘Impeachment Inquiry’ resolution scheduled for tomorrow.

During the broadcast segment Bream stated, falsely, that President Trump would be granted the following participatory measures as an outcome of the resolution:

Fox News Screenshot via Conservative Treehouse

This is deliberately false information.  The resolution does not convey any of the outlined measures to the Executive Branch.  Rather, as previously outlined, the resolution provides the possibility for executive branch participation -AFTER- the intelligence committee sends their report to the Judiciary Committee at some unknown future date.

You can read the resolution and truthful explanation here.

Not good.

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Impeachment vote? Sundance explains

image credit: thecollegefix.com

Everyone has read that Speaker Pelosi is holding a vote on Thursday to authorize impeachment proceedings against President Trump.  If you are suspicious of the announcement, you should be.  Sundance at ConservativeTreehouse explains what is really going on, and the bottom line is that this vote is intended as a sleight-of-hand.  It intends to create the impression of following the requirement to vote to begin the impeachment process, while actually not voting to authorize – as a Constitutional authorization would give the President and his defense team due process -- to face his accusers, subpoena their own witnesses, cross-examine witnesses, and so on. Here’s Sundance getting into the weeds:

The rules for an “impeachment investigation” would provide rights for the minority and also rights for the Executive branch.

So instead of having a House vote to authorize an impeachment investigation, with subsequent rights for the minority; they are having a House vote to affirm the “impeachment inquiry” with an entirely different set of House rules that do not include rights for the minority.

. . .

Lawfare is hoping that through this Thursday vote scheme they will be able to twist the legal process into providing their House inquiry judicial enforcement authority, or punishment possible for the executive not complying with a House committee subpoena.

. . .

Pelosi, Schiff, Nadler and Lawfare are attempting to create “judicial enforcement authority” without having an actual and constitutional vote to authorize an official “impeachment investigation”.   That’s what this Thursday House resolution is all about.

The Thursday House resolution is intended to authorize and validate the pre-existing Pelosi “impeachment inquiry”, and then expand the authority within the rules to create the impression of a full House impeachment investigation; without actually having a House  “impeachment investigation vote”…. because that would open-up rights to the minority and rights to the executive.

. . .

Pelosi et al have the full support of the complicit media to promote this charade.  Read the whole thing here.

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Guilty By Reason of Insanity

book cover via Regnery Publishing

We tuned in to Mark Levin’s interview yesterday, as his guest was David Limbaugh. Mr. Limbaugh is making the rounds to promote his book Guilty By Reason of Insanity, due out this week from Regnery Publishing. It was a compelling interview. And over the weekend, he published a column at PJ Media summarizing parts of his book. Here’s an extract from his column:

. . .

Take Rep. Adam Schiff, for example. How many times did this reckless, malicious buffoon swear, unchallenged, that he had solid evidence of Trump's "collusion" with Russia? Has he ever been held accountable for his lies? Has anyone in the liberal media showcased his misconduct?

To the contrary, Schiff is conducting secret hearings in a private room in the congressional basement in hot pursuit of another witch hunt. His Star Chamber proceeding facilitates his selective leaking of witness testimony to make third-hand hearsay sound like smoking guns and create the impression that this time, they really do have the goods on Trump.

Democrats act this way while not in control of both legislative chambers or the executive branch. Can you imagine what they'll do if they defeat Trump and capture the Senate in 2020?

Well, I can imagine, and it horrifies me, which is why I have written my new book, "Guilty by Reason of Insanity: Why the Democrats Must Not Win," to be released Oct. 29.

In the very beginning of the book, I dispel the myth that the political left and conservatives share the same goals for America but just have different ideas about how to achieve them. If this were ever true before, which I highly doubt, it is demonstrably false now. The left shows every day that it rejects the American idea and seeks to radically transform our system of government, our economy, and our culture.

The two parties have distinctly different visions for America, based on conflicting worldviews. I write: "Some will object that all Americans want everyone to be prosperous, safe, free, and to live in harmony, but I'm not sure that's even true anymore, given the left's anti-Americanism, its intolerance and authoritarianism, its romance with socialism, its hysterical environmentalism, its preoccupation with identity politics, its radicalism on race and gender, its attempts to erase our borders, its culture of death, its devaluation of the Constitution, its hostility to Second Amendment rights, and much more.

"The Democratic Party is a vehicle of leftist extremism that poses an existential threat to America as founded -- because it is at war with our first principles and traditions. It is anti-capitalist and rejects equality of opportunity in favor of a hierarchy of privileges for identity groups ranked according to their levels of alleged historical oppression. It's a brazenly anti-life party that promotes gender anarchy, militant feminism, and hostility toward traditional male roles and masculinity itself. It prosecutes a vicious culture war punctuated by an ongoing assault on Christians' religious liberty."

I go into great depth about the leftists' agenda and how they are conducting themselves, not only providing myriad examples of their insanity but exploring the intellectual and moral fallacies underlying their ideas on socialism, gender identity, race, immigration, abortion, and America's quintessential founding principles of liberty and limited government.

. . .

We ordered the book.

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Re-visiting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau

Many in the Cleveland Tea Party became aware of the mis-named Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when Ohio’s Richard Cordray was appointed as the Bureau’s first Director in 2012. I was hoping that President Trump would find a way to eliminate this agency, since it is not accountable to Congress or the Executive branch. This agency is now back in the news, since Elizabeth Warren has a chance at becoming the Democrat Party’s nominee for President. Lloyd Billingsley at Front Page Magazine has an update:

As announced this month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear Seila Law v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The case involves constitutional issues such as the separation of powers, but there’s a lot more going with this agency. As Judicial Fortitude author Peter J. Wallison notes, the CFPB is “the brainchild of Sen. Elizabeth Warren,” and that makes a case for closer examination.

Her claims to Cherokee ancestry have been exposed as a fraud, yet Warren remains a leading contender for the Democrat nomination for president. In her 2014 A Fighting Chance, Warren maintained the fake Cherokee claims and also billed herself as an economic expert.

Nobody in this country “got rich on his own,” she explains. Rather, “you moved goods on the roads the rest of us paid for” and used workers “the rest of us paid to educate.” You were safe in your factory “because of police and fire forces the rest of us paid for.” And so on, the same Big Brother view as POTUS 44. If people are in financial distress, Warren blames their problems on the banking industry, portrayed as the flywheel of capitalist greed and trickery. That view comes across in the structure of the CFPB.

As Wallison notes, the CFPB was given plenary authority to enforce all federal laws that apply to financial transactions with consumers, and more. CFPB power was “broadened beyond existing laws” to take enforcement action on any action it finds “unfair, deceptive, or abusive.” Since “abusive” is not defined, this served up “a vast field for the agency to define and pursue.” Wallison finds this a “dangerous step in support of an even more powerful and uncontrolled administrative state.”

For example, the CFPB director gets a five-year term fully protected from removal by the president other than for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” This places the director outside the control of the president, “whose ability to pursue the policies he was elected to implement depends crucially on the ability to remove and replace the senior officials of executive agencies.” Trump nominee Brett Kavanaugh is already on record that the CFPB director is the most powerful person in the federal government, aside from the president. And it gets worse.

The CFPB gets funding not from Congress but the Federal Reserve, and the money comes at the request of the CFPB director. And under the enabling Dodd-Frank legislation, the Fed has “no ability to affect the agency’s actions.” So Warren’s CFPB is beyond the control of Congress, and if the Supreme Court upholds the status quo, “it would be possible for Congress to create other agencies that are beyond the control of any elected body.”

. . .

The full article is here. Scary stuff.

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The Media Threat to America

Daniel Greenfield analyzes the insidious influence of the mainstream media on American values and culture. In his article at Front Page Magazine (“The Media is a Threat to America: and it’s destroying the country”), he concludes:

The media has gone from taking part in a political debate to turning into a James Bond villain.

The problem is not, as the media insists, the First Amendment, or Russian bots, or Facebook. The problem is an industry that built monopolies around investments in outdated technology. These technologies, from the printing press to radio to cable news, were revolutionary at the time.

The internet killed their monopolistic power, and they’ve been trying to rebuild it ever since.

The media would rather have a monopoly in a broken country, than live in a thriving country where internet content is too diversified to support traditional media organizations. Like Milton’s Satan, it would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. And it’s turning the country into its own private hell.

The First Amendment was meant to protect speech, not industries. The media industry is trying to kill speech and is willing to kill the country to make it happen. 

But it’s the industry that needs to die.

Full article is here.

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Propaganda vs expanded sources of news

image credit: vectorstock.com

Cherie Zaslawsky’s article, “Trump Derangement Syndrome: A Misdiagnosis” starts off:

Listen to Fox News, and you'll hear phrases such as “Trump derangement syndrome” and “liberal heads are exploding” on a daily basis. 

Conservative newscasts are peppered with comments like these: “They're delusional!”  “The Democrats just can't seem to accept that they lost the 2016 election.”  “They've gone crazy!”

Crazy like a fox.

. . .

From the beginning of its “long march through the institutions,” the Left has been playing the long game.  That hasn't changed.  Leftists are playing it today.

Why did they take over the media?  The universities?  Hollywood?  To get their hands on the key levers of propaganda.  Add to this the leftward tilt of Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and we're looking at a virtual lockdown on the primary sources of information and public influence.

. . .

What can be done?

I suggest that, rather than only responding to each of the Left's baseless attacks on our president, those on our side change the debate by exposing the radical leftists' use of propaganda — by shining a light into the dark recesses of their strategy.  This may wake up some of their followers and maybe even begin to free America from the dark power of the Left.

I have had limited success pointing the media’s corruption to people I know who still rely on The New York Times or NPR or CNN for their news. One suggestion that has worked a few times is to propose that a person expand their sources of news. Tuning in to conservative talk radio can be traumatic, but browsing through aggregators and at least comparing headlines has made a difference with some friends and relatives. These days my go-to sites are Politipage, Instapundit, Lucianne, and a few others (but not Drudge any more). Full American Thinker article is here.

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