Peter Schweizer on Joe Biden

Secret Empires: 

How the American Political Class 

Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends

(image credit: Washington Times)

Trent Baker had three paragraphs at Breitbart summarizing Peter Schweizer’s appearance on Mark Levin’s show last night:

Breitbart News senior contributor and Secret Empires author Peter Schweizer joined Life, Liberty & Levin Sunday on Fox News Channel to explain Joe and Hunter Biden’s Ukraine connections.

Schweizer told host Mark Levin that the former vice president’s son was being paid by Ukraine despite not having expertise in the energy sector while Joe Biden was the “point-person” on former President Barack Obama’s administration in dealing with Ukraine.

“The key question here that nobody seems to want to ask in the media is: What was he being paid for? He wasn’t being paid for his expertise. What was he being paid for? And what were the Ukrainians expecting to get in return?” Schweizer stated. “I think when you overlay the financial payments with the fact that Joe Biden as point person on Obama administration policy to Ukraine was steering billions of dollars of Western money to Ukraine it becomes crystal clear exactly why they were paying him money. They wanted access and they wanted to influence Joe Biden. And Joe Biden has been around a long time here, and he had to know exactly why his son was being paid.”

Schweizer’s book Secret Empires is an excellent resource. If you are interested in his column-length reports, click here.

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Sarah Palin’s Lipstick

photo credit: American Thinker

Gordon Wysong at American Thinker vividly remembers Sarah Palin’s speech at the GOP convention in 2008. Mr. Wysong’s recollection will resonate with many Cleveland Tea Party readers:

The Democrats don’t have lousy Presidential nominee candidates merely because the good ones were keeping their powder dry.  A Black Swan candidate of 2008 is appreciably responsible for it, and no one seemed to notice.  When Sarah Palin became the focus of the hopes of committed conservatives, the swamp did everything in its power to destroy her.  Venal Republican operatives were so beset with personal jealousy, they were willing to crash the ship on the rocks to ensure against her ascendancy.

They won their battle, sadly.  But, a single line -- just one -- provided the foundation for conservatives.  Mrs. Palin told America “Do you know the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?  Lipstick!”

In one succinct line she captured the commitment and determination of conservatives seeking to protect something they love.

Fast forward a year, and those same conservatives saw Obama trying to destroy that which they love and without hesitation, these conservatives jumped into a new political movement.  Bolstered by their belief that Sarah Palin was an everyday somebody like them, and infuriated by her maltreatment, they populated the ranks of the Tea Party.  They were determined to protect America. Within months, they were activists.

As I recall, Sarah ad-libbed the joke because for some reason (???), the teleprompter went down for a few moments. Mr. Wysong's full article is here.

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Life After Fox News

Paul Ryan cartoon from Cagle Comics at Utah Independent 

Yes, Fox is moving relentlessly leftward, and in our household, we click the “Mute” button during prime time viewing -- or turn the channel. Judi McLeod at Canada Free Press quotes Breitbart to begin her report:

. . . Former House Speaker Paul Ryan, who currently sits on the board of Fox News Corp., and who, according to Vanity Fair, is reportedly urging Fox News to “decisively break” with President Donald Trump—news in the magazine’s report documenting the network’s “management bedlam”. (Tony Lee at Breitbart, Sept. 26, 2019)

Ryan, the longtime Trump antagonist, has reportedly been suggesting to Murdoch that “Fox should decisively break with the president” as Murdoch holds “strategy conversations with Fox executives and anchors about how Fox News should prepare for life after Trump.”

Downright laughable that while “strategy conversations” are taking place to decide how Fox News “should prepare for life after Trump” that legions in the unwashed masses are already preparing themselves for life after Fox News.

. . .

Full report is here. 

Related: While I find Mark Levin abrasive most of the time, he dials it down on his Sunday evening program on Fox. This Sunday, Peter Schweizer is the scheduled guest. Having read his books Clinton Cash, Extortion, and Secret Empires, I plan to tune in. Mr. Schweizer is the go-to source on the Joe Biden scandals.

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Heather MacDonald: False Testimony

Heather MacDonald recently testified before the House Judiciary Committee on alleged racial bias in law enforcement. It is not a pretty report (“False Testimony: Sworn statements at a recent congressional hearing on policing veered sharply from the truth; here are the facts”). Here’s her opening and closing paragraphs:

The anti-police narrative depends on suppression of facts, and the duplicity of anti-cop forces reached a shameless new high at a congressional hearing last week. Committee members should sanction the false testimony, given under oath, and publicly correct the record.

The House Judiciary Committee, now controlled by Democrats, had called a hearing to address a “series of deaths of unarmed African-American men while in police custody” as well as the “mistrust between police and marginalized communities.” Throughout the four-hour session, a photo array of blacks killed by the police played continuously on video screens around the room, interspersed with statistics allegedly proving that the police harbor lethal racist bias. Committee chairman Jerry Nadler claimed in his opening remarks that the “frequency of these killings and the absence of full accountability for those responsible send a message to members of the African American community that Black Lives Do Not Matter.” Nadler invoked the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Freddie Gray in Baltimore, as examples of “police misconduct against African-Americans,” though Barack Obama’s Justice Department found no misconduct in the first case, and criminal charges against the Freddie Gray officers were dismissed either before or after trial.

. . .

The Republicans on the committee failed to push back against this narrative of systemic police bias, choosing instead to tell feel-good stories about “our brave men and women in uniform.” Such tales do little to rebut Black Lives Matter ideology, since both statements could be true:  individual officers display heroism, and policing is infected by “structural racism,” in Davis’s words. The only way to dislodge the “endemic racism” argument is to challenge its factual basis directly. I was the only witness at the hearing with the ability to do so, but the Republicans asked me not one question. This is not a matter of personal ego but rather of the public battle of ideas.

The Democratic committee members and their witnesses clearly laid out their agenda should they retake the White House and Senate: mandatory implicit-bias training for cops, a huge waste of money that could be spent instead on tactical and de-escalation training; mandatory racial-profiling data collection, which will be measured, misleadingly, against a population benchmark; racial quotas for police hiring, which require lowered standards; and more federal consent decrees for police departments, which cripple the ability of cops to engage in proactive policing and divert millions of dollars into the pockets of federal monitors. As inimical as these policy items are to effective policing, the narrative that drives them—that the police are a threat to black communities—is more dangerous still. That narrative rests on duplicity, as amply demonstrated at last week’s hearings. Republicans, who invoke patriotism on a regular basis, are doing the country no favors by ceding the criminal-justice narrative to the activists and race-baiters.

Her full report is here. Sad to say, GOP members of the House Judiciary Committee include Jim Jordan and Steve Chabot of Ohio; Louie Gohmert of Texas; Matt Gaetz of Florida; and Andy Biggs of Arizona. (E-mail links for Jordan and Chabot are embedded in case you would like to email them with the link to MacDonald's report.)

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Cleveland Tea Party Goes to Washington

Meeting Sen. Jim DeMint

Good news, bad news. . .

So there we were last Tuesday, sitting in the lobby of the Trump Old Post Office Hotel in DC, minding our own business, when who should walk by but Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Mark Meadows. I gave Rep. Jordan a thumbs-up, and they both stopped to shake hands with us and exchange pleasantries. Unfortunately, I missed the golden opportunity to ask Rep. Jordan a question that is probably on all our minds, and they carried on.

But then, who should I spy at the next table but former Senator Jim DeMint. So I went over and barged into his conversation. And I asked him point blank: will there be any indictments?  He responded that he had just had lunch with Reps. Jordan and Meadows and that they had discussed that very issue.  Sen. De Mint told me that they were guessing that some indictments would be coming down in 2 to 3 weeks, but that there would not be enough indictments. And he gave my husband a copy of his and Rachel Bovard’s new book, Conservative: Knowing What to Keep.  

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Ohio HB 6: keep it or repeal it

Is this mailer true or false?

The other day, I was asked to sign a petition to get a Repeal of Ohio HB 6 on the ballot. You may be asked also. Here’s one report from about a week ago posted at JD Supra:

. . . a group called “Ohioans Against Corporate Bailouts” (OACB) has begun the process of placing a referendum on the November 2020 ballot to repeal the law. OACB took the initial required steps of submitting at least 1,000 signatures along with a summary of the proposed referendum to the Attorney General, and after revising and resubmitting the summary it was approved as of August 30, 2019, as “fair and truthful” with the necessary valid signatures as required by law. The petitioners must now submit 265,774 signatures of registered Ohio voters (from at least 44 of the 88 Ohio counties, with at least 3 percent of total voters from each of those counties) by October 21, 2019, to place the referendum on the November 2020 ballot. If OACB meets these requirements, HB 6 is stayed until Election Day 2020.

Read the rest of the JD Supra report with some analysis here. The ads and mailers about this controversial legislation are confusing – especially the claim that

China’s Communist regime could gain control of Ohio’s electricity grid if voters repeal House Bill 6

Both sides are spending a ton of money, the media is making a lot of money, and Cleveland.com concluded its editorial on the subject as follows:

The aggressive tactics and scaremongering by those who want to deny Ohioans a statewide vote on HB 6 must stop.  Now.  Chinese business loans don’t threaten Ohio. But demagogic campaigning unquestionably does.

Yes, but if the Editorial Board of cleveland.com is in favor of something, I am usually against it. Still, I found the comments section somewhat helpful. And I expect the campaigning will only increase over the next few weeks.

I’ve read through five or six other reports/analyses, pro and con, of the repeal vs enacting HB 6, and I confess I am still not clear as to which side has the better argument. This may be an instance when neither HB6 nor its repeal is good for Ohio. At any rate, I'll post again if I find a more accessible analysis.

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Sen. Portman votes to obstruct again

cartoon by Michael Ramirez

  

Sean Moran at Breitbart reports:

Senate Passes Democrat Motion
to End Border Wall National Emergency

Senate Democrats passed Wednesday a motion to end President Donald Trump’s national emergency declaration to build a wall along the southern border.

The Senate passed S.J. Res. 54, 54-41, which would terminate President Trump’s national emergency declaration on the southern border. The resolution was created by Sen. Tom Udall (D-NM) and co-sponsored by Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Susan Collins (R-ME).

Sen. Collins said the bill is not about “whether you’re for or against a border wall.” The Maine senator, who is up for a tough reelection fight in 2020, claimed that she has “consistently supported” funding for physical barriers on the southern border.

However, Congress has failed to provide significant funding to help secure America’s southern border by building a border wall. With Congress’ failure to provide funding, President Trump declared a national emergency to build the border wall, which diverted military funding so that the president can build a wall along the southern border.

The Republicans that voted for the resolution to end the national emergency to build a border wall are Sens. Collins, Lamar Alexander (R-TN), Pat Toomey (R-PA), Mitt Romney (R-UT), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), Mike Lee (R-UT), Rob Portman (R-OH).

. . .

Congressional Democrats failed to pass the resolution to override Trump’s national emergency in March, which failed to override the president’s veto.

This latest attempt will probably also fail despite the RINOs and the media’s best efforts.

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