Why this political nightmare never ends

image credit: medicalxpress.com

Victor Davis Hanson argues that the radical Democrats have boxed themselves in – they have no choice but to keep on their path to a “slow motion suicide” :

Democrats don’t talk up their alternate agenda because they know that more regulations, open borders, trade appeasement, banning fracking, and the green new deal, would be the very opposite of Trump’s plan and likely achieve the very opposite of Trump’s results. In this context, destroying Trump is not just the only viable trajectory for the Left, but it is also the only possible narrative. Again, to focus on the current left-wing agenda is slow-motion suicide.

The Democrats know that impeachment will not lead to a conviction. They accept that they are not gaining traction in the polls. They fear that Trump’s wounds heal quickly and what doesn’t destroy him can make him stronger.

So why continue? Again, there is little other alternative. Moreover, addicts do not act logically and the Left is hooked on Trump and cannot quit him. Finally, they hope to destroy Trump physically. He will be 74 in June. By the standards of senior medicine, they feel Trump is locked in a self-destructive cycle: little sleep, little exercise, poor diet, too heavy, too stressed.

Hanson’s column at American Greatness is here.

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Dilbert watches the impeachment hearings . . .

…so you don’t have to. Scott Adams’s (Dilbert creator) tweet via Lifezette:

“If you can’t watch the Democrats’ impeachment argument, I summarize them here: Blah, blah, muh documents, watch this hoax video, blah, blah, muh documents.”

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Impeachment vote vs Battle Creek rally: competing photographs

Favorite take-away of the day was by William Jacobson at his blog Legal Insurrection:

Note the disconnect between Democrat triumphalism in D.C., and a packed 10,000-seat arena in a key battleground state.

Despite the Democrat-Media-NeverTrump vapors of how historic tonight’s vote to impeach Trump is, it’s being met mostly with a shrug of the shoulders by a nation that has heard Democrats demand impeachment since before Trump took office, and every day since then.

Tonight is the real start of the 2020 campaign.

. . .

Jacobson posted another photograph of rally-goers lined up hours earlier in the freezing cold:

Read the report here. Brad Parscale posted his head-count on Twitter:

Incredible Rally tonight in Battle Creek Michigan!

20,202 voters identified (92.2% from MI)

15% haven’t voted in last four elections, WOW!

15% have voted in only one of the last four elections

17% Democrats

Dems play theater while @realDonaldTrump is winning!

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Our President's letter to Speaker Pelosi

image credit: Babylon Bee

Link of the day to: the report on Breitbart by Charlie Spiering, "Read Donald Trump’s Historic Impeachment Takedown Letter to Nancy Pelosi". Click here and scroll down to the bottom for the scribd download of the 6-pg letter.  

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Victor Davis Hanson on impeachment and TDS

Gary Varvel cartoon via indystar.com

Historian Victor Davis Hanson’s article “Is Trump the Only Adult in the Room?” has been linked on multiple web and blogsites. Here’s an extract via Fox News:

Democrats addicted to attacking Trump –

even if impeachment drive hurts them

. . . [N]o president in modern memory has been on the receiving end of such overwhelmingly negative media coverage and a three-year effort to abort his presidency, beginning the day after his election.

. . .

The common denominator of all this petulance is exasperation over the inability to derail Trump.

Trump’s many enemies fear he will be reelected in 2020, given a booming economy and peace abroad. They know that they cannot remove him from office. And yet they fear that the more they try to stain him with impeachment, the more frustrated and unpopular they will become.

Yet, like end-stage addicts, they simply cannot stop the behavior that is consuming them.

Full article is here.

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Ukraine and Washington corruption: re-broadcast schedule on OAN

image credit: the DefuniakHerald

Yesterday, I posted a report about One America News Network’s (OAN) special investigative reports. Reporter Chanel Rion interviewed Rudy Giuliani and several witnesses from Ukraine, all of whose testimony undermines the framework for the “impeachment” process. The report did not break through today to the MSM, but OAN will be re-broadcasting parts 1 & 2 as well as premiering part 3 this weekend.   Mark your calendars or set your recording devices.  The programming is not showing up yet on the TV schedule for this weekend on ATT-TV, but the OAN website has this:

Catch All 3 Parts of One America News Investigates with Chanel Rion THIS SATURDAY Starting at 9am ET/6am PT

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Ukraine and Washington corruption exposed

image credit: the DefuniakHerald

Most of the blogging here concentrates on local and state level developments as well as national news that affects core Tea Party values.  But this is so newsworthy that I decided to post anyway.  It was Sundance at Conservative Treehouse that tipped us off to the program.  Our household watched OAN’s 2-part investigative report this evening, with reporter Chanel Rion interviewing Rudy Giuliani and several witnesses from Ukraine. It was an eye-popper, and I hope it is picked up by headlines all over the place tomorrow.  Mark Tapscott at Instapundit was on it this evening:

ONE AMERICA NEWS (OAN) GOES WHERE MSM WON’T: Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko tells OAN all about former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovich’s “untouchables” list. If OAN can go to Ukraine and interview principals in the impeachment scandal, why can’t ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, New York Times, etc. etc.?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Answer: Because they’re not interested in knowing what actually happened.

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’m bumping this up because it’s very important, undercutting the thesis of the whole impeachment endeavor. And this is the evidence that the House prosecutors will be confronted with if there’s a trial in the Senate.

I did not see that OAN was re-running the two-hour broadcast this coming week, so I have emailed them to see if it will re-run the two programs or make them accessible at their website. If you’ve been frustrated by the “impeachment” testimony and all the scandals that never lead to indictments, you’ll be glued to this. Meantime, I will be on the lookout for excerpts and footage. And you can read Sundance's report here.

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Who do you know who still trusts the media?

image credit: woodylewis.com

I am always on the lookout for reports to share with liberal friends and relatives – on why they should be skeptical of what they read in the New York Times or cleveland.com -- or what they watch on TV.  Today, Joel B. Pollak at Breitbart dissects the lazy, not to say dishonest reporting on the impeachment “inquiry” – and it’s worth printing out and taking to your Thanksgiving dinner for another attempt to change minds. A brief sample:

The Media Neither Read the Transcripts 

Nor Watched the Hearings

The media seem not to have watched the impeachment hearings: they stopped paying attention the moment the witnesses’ prepared statements were leaked and the Democrats’ talking points were posted.

Nor did many journalists bother to read the transcripts of the witnesses’ depositions in the earlier, closed-door hearings.

Partly that was because Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) rushed the public hearings before some of the most important transcripts were ready. Partly that was because the sheer length of the transcripts — hundreds of pages each — was daunting for journalists working on deadline.

But partly it was because some journalists are simply lazy, and others share the Democrats’ goal of bringing down President Donald Trump by any means necessary.

That’s why the media reports of the hearings were so inaccurate. 

. . .

On Wednesday afternoon, I was at the media center outside the Democrat debate in Atlanta, Georgia, co-hosted by MSNBC and the Washington Post. In the hours prior to the debate, MSNBC’s live coverage of the impeachment inquiry was showing on all the screens. Many journalists in the hall seemed not to be watching at all. They were mailing about, chatting to colleagues, or enjoying refreshments.

Some of them were top correspondents for leading media outlets — the ones who pose questions to candidates, and shape public opinion on their panel discussions and Sunday shows. Yet they were ignoring the hearings.

. . .

And what kind of journalist decides what the verdict should be before the other side has even had a chance to make its case?

Schiff and the Democrats broke from tradition and refused to let the president be represented by legal counsel, or to give Republicans near-equal control over the witness list. They held the hearings in the Intelligence Committee so they could use a secret room. Not one media company in the House press gallery bothered to sue for access — the way they sue the Trump administration for any small inconvenience, like the suspension of Jim Acosta’s press pass.

The media did not report what actually happened in the impeachment hearings, but what they want to have happened. They have enlisted themselves in a distortion of due process that threatens the constitutional rights of all Americans. If the president himself is not safe from abuse, none of us can be.

Read the whole thing here – and print it out!!!

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If it's not close, they can't cheat

Brian C. Joondeph at American Thinker is as impatient as any of us – where oh where are the indictments?

Where is the IG report on FISA abuse? Where is the promised declassification of the documents which originated this coup? This has all been imminent every week for the past year, yet it remains as elusive as bigfoot. 

However, and also at American Thinker, Patricia McCarthy has a take on the Russia Hoax, the Ukraine hoax, and now the Impeachment Circus that offers a glimmer of hope. Here are a few extracts:

It is all backfiring since they are trying to impeach Trump for what Obama/Biden actually did.  We have all seen Biden's little bit of bragging about threatening Ukraine that $1B would be withheld unless a certain prosecutor was fired within six hours.  That prosecutor was charged with investigating the corrupt Burisma energy company on whose board sat Hunter Biden.  Biden intervened in Ukraine's state government to protect the bribery that was blatantly making his own family fabulously wealthy.

And Ukraine was not the only foreign nation that the Bidens, the Kerrys, the Pelosis, the Clintons, and the Feinsteins tapped for millions of dollars that went directly into their own pockets.  See Peter Schweizer's books, Clinton Cash and Secret Empires. [Aside: I’ve read both books and they are documented to a fare-thee-well. –D]

. . .

It is almost impossible to believe that Trump has not been on to this cabal's fraudulent scheme for a long time now.  Adm. Mike Rogers clued him in to the Obama administration's listening in (wiretapping) on his phones at Trump Tower in 2015.  That was when he moved his campaign headquarters to New Jersey.  He has known since then what they were up to, so isn't it possible that he has been setting them up for the past three years?  Could he be manipulating Pelosi, Schiff, and their henchmen into a world-class implosion?  It is beginning to seem that this may be true.  As the actual transcripts of Schiff's not-witnesses are released and when actual journalists read them, it becomes clearer and clearer that they have nothing.  This attempt to impeach is all about covering up their own crimes.  If this is true, then Trump will have kept his ultimate and most important promise: to drain the swamp.

The swamp is much, much muddier and more corrupt than any of us knew. That Trump has withstood their three-plus-year calculated attack on him, his family, his friends, and his presidency is a testament to his phenomenal strength of character.  That is why he was elected and will be re-elected if the Left can't cheat enough. The Left always cheats, as they did to elect JFK.

This 2020 election will be consequential. They will cheat in 2020 too. That is what open borders and no voter ID is all about. All Americans who love this country and our Constitution must vote to defeat these criminals. As Hugh Hewitt has always said, "If it's not close, they can't cheat." 

Read Ms. McCarthy’s entire column here.

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If you like René Magritte

If you like René Magritte, then you’ll love this by Tom Stiglich at Townhall:

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Conrad Black on the sham impeachment

Wood Print by Will Bullas via fineartamerica

Conrad Black sums it up:

A shabby fraud launched by a partisan whistle-blower who is acting on hearsay about an innocuous telephone call whose summary, though perhaps not entirely complete, was immediately released to the public cannot go much farther. It has been kept alive by a Star Chamber in which the president is not represented and the Republican questioning and calling of witnesses is done at the behest of the Democratic leadership.

. . .

Under any scenario, the wheels are coming off this disgraceful Democratic garbage cart in all directions. Impeachment will fizzle ignominiously while the former administration is arraigned on serious charges from the Russian scandal, and the Democrats will wallow in their squalid failure to produce a feasible candidate for the White House. Normalcy, for which the country longs, is not dead; it is reawakening at last.

I hope he’s right. Read the entire column here.

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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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Weekend fun at Powerline’s Week in Pictures

Cartoon credit: Mike Harris Artwork

(click to embiggen or scroll down at the link below)

And this weekend, it’s the “Powerline Week in Pictures LeBron 2020 Edition.” Click here.

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Kasich: our former Governor on impeachment

A.F. Branco cartoons at Legal Insurrection

Being the son of a mailman does not inoculate you from corruption. Here’s The Hill on Kasich and impeachment:

Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R) said Friday he would back President Trump's impeachment if he were in the House. 

“Look, I fought with people on air over, ‘Is there a quid pro quo’ and ‘Does this rise to the level of impeachment.’ I now believe that it does,” Kasich said during an interview on CNN. “And I say it with great sadness. This is not something I really wanted to do.”

Such a surprise.  And he is relying on bad reporting by the media on Mick Mulvaney's press conference. The link to The Hill report is here.  

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Impeachment theater

image credit: the superfins.com

Some pundits see this feeding frenzy over the House’s plan to Impeach President Trump as a deliberate attempt to distract from anticipated indictments and now the Biden Ukraine/China scandal.  Neither Adam Schiff nor Nancy Pelosi is specifying what might be presented formally as Articles of Impeachment, which is why Andy McCarthy calls the whole thing an “impeachment show for television.”  David Catron at the Spectator has another take:

It should by now be obvious to the meanest intelligence that the Democrats are determined to impeach President Trump with or without credible evidence that he has committed any act resembling “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The “whistleblower complaint” that Nancy Pelosi used as the pretext for launching her ersatz impeachment inquiry contains little but hearsay and fabrication, while her claim that it proves Trump has “violated the Constitution” fails the laugh test. In the end, however, impeachment is less about offenses committed by the president than the desire of the Washington establishment to put down what they see as a peasants’ revolt.

Impeachment is, in other words, an attempt to restore the old order that the voters overturned in 2016. It seeks to annul that election and return us to the nascent totalitarianism of the Obama era, an incipient autocracy the Democrats expected to be nurtured during the presidency of Hillary Clinton. Thus, when the hoi polloi got above themselves and put Donald Trump in the White House, his removal from office became the primary objective of Washington’s self-appointed Optimates. They began planning Trump’s impeachment before he was inaugurated because he is the leader of the insurrection, and they know full well that it can’t be put down until he is gone.

House Democrats must impeach the president despite the near impossibility of securing a conviction in the Senate. Indeed, their need to do so is more urgent now than ever because of the booming Trump economy and the weakness of their Democratic presidential candidates. As Rep. Al Green (D-Texas), who has introduced several abortive impeachment resolutions, put it in May, “I’m concerned that if we don’t impeach this president, he will get re-elected.”

Mr. Catron's full article is here.

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Speaker Pelosi rules out impeachment?

photo credit: (apologies to) paradigmsanddemographics.blogspot.com

Headline news! Joshua Caplan at Breitbart reports:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) is ruling out impeaching President Donald Trump, arguing in an interview with the Washington Post Monday that “he’s just not worth it.”

“Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it,” Pelosi told the Post.

Translation: Speaker Pelosi must know that Robert Mueller's upcoming report has nothing. Full Breitbart report is here. 

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