Saturday, January 18, 2020

Claim: Women Quitting Jobs in Swedish No-Go Area Mall Due to Harassment from Migrant Men

 Image result for images of immigrant problems in sweden
 Article by Chris Tomlinson in "Breitbart":

Independent journalist Joakim Lamotte has claimed that women working at Stockholm’s Kista Galleria shopping centre are quitting their jobs due to harassment from foreign men who refuse to be served by women.
 
Mr Lamotte has claimed that several women have contacted him about their experiences at the shopping centre, which is located near the notorious no-go Stockholm suburbs of Husby and Rinkeby, stating they were unable to work due to sexual harassment from foreign men, Nyheter Idag reports.

The women also allegedly claimed that many of the male customers would refuse to be served by them, demanding to be served by a male coworker instead. Lamotte published an audio clip of one of the women who alleged that a man with a full beard and white cap would not speak to any female staff.

When the man was told he can go to another shop if he does not want to be served by a woman, the man allegedly threatened to call the police.


Reap. Sow. Run.
Swedish Feminists Flee Suburbs Due to Islamic Fundamentalists==>


“But this is unfortunately not the first time this has happened to me. My female colleagues have also been subjected to the same degrading discrimination and soon this is more or less an everyday thing,” the woman said.

The report comes nearly three years after feminists in nearby Husby and Tensta claimed that they were also harassed by religious fundamentalists, with former Social Democrat parliamentarian Nalin Pekgul stating that Muslim fundamentalists had largely taken over Tensta.

Zeliha Dagli, a former Left Party politician, claimed the same problems existed in Husby, going as far as to say the areas had so-called “morality police”.

In an attempt to combat the issue of women feeling safe in areas like Husby, the local government announced in 2017 that it would be adopting “feminist urban planning” that would include brightening street lights at night.

Despite the plans, a survey released in 2018 revealed that nearly half of the residents of no-go areas were afraid for their safety when going out after dark


Report: Children as Young as One Wearing Islamic Veil in Swedish City
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/01/18/claim-women-quitting-jobs-swedish-no-go-area-mall-harassment/

Regarding Trump: Bill Maher Warns of Civil War After the November Election.

 Image result for cartoons about civil war in 2020

 Article by T. LaDuke in "RedState":

Well, WELCOME BACK Bill Maher.
The host of “Real-Time” on HBO was back in the saddle again after a holiday break and he came out firing. On a side note, what does an avowed atheist do during that time? Watch others light the menorah and celebrate the birth of Christ and do a continuous eye roll?

Maher had on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the show,  fresh from getting her arse handed to her by Mitch McConnell ( Sorry lefties, you can spin until you throw up but that is just what happened) and he had an interesting exchange with her. My colleague Nick Arama covered that HERE.

The part that struck me a bit odd was when he said if Pelosi and her gang of misfit impeachers don’t treat Trump supporters nicely, that there will be a civil war.

All righty then.
His first guest—before welcoming yet another outspoken racist in Joe Walsh on his program—was none other than Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who’s become the leading voice among Democrats with regard to Trump impeachment.
“Well, he gave us no choice. The president was literally self-impeaching every single day,” Pelosi told Maher, adding, “If the president was listening, I’d want him to know that he is impeached forever.”
Later on during their chat, Maher told Pelosi that Dems need to be more forgiving of Trump voters; to blame the shepherd and not the sheep, so to speak.
“You can hate Trump, but you can’t hate [his followers],” announced Maher. “That way lies civil war.”

Now call me a skeptic but I’m pretty sure the left has not been treating Trump supporters with loads of love since never.

Did I miss the internal memo that if the Democrats who just impeached the President don’t start being nice to his supporters that a civil war will start? Where are the meetings for this? Will they have hot cocoa and cider?

As my colleague, Brandon Morse wrote about here about Project Veritas and their latest undercover operation inside the Bernie Sanders camp Project Veritas Releases the First Expose of Its Footage Inside the Sanders Campaign and It’s Disturbing I don’t think Trump gang is that angry.

Yet.

I’m going to have to go with that Bill is relying on his keen sense of intuitive spidey senses to recall that anyone who supports Trump must be for owning all the guns and shooting anything that moves. While I know Hollywood loves that stereotype it might be a bit of an exaggeration.

Nancy and the Democrats do need to figure out how and why they lost out to Trump in 2016 in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and try to correct that. Those states are chock full of blue-collar voters who according to the latest job stats are doing better than they were four years ago. So that is a real concern, not that if you don’t kiss their butt they will start a civil war.

Although if one did start I’m putting my money on the side that the Democrats are not on. The Dems lost the last civil war and currently, their base consists of kids playing Fortnite. Even if they got close enough to get all angsty to riot, the minute they start smelling gun powder they would probably faint. Plus can you imagine those silly Lil bastards calling the police for help?

The irony is so thick it could kill you from laughter.

https://www.redstate.com/tladuke/2020/01/18/regarding-trump-bill-maher-warns-of-civil-war-after-the-november-election./ 

NBC News: It May Be Illegal to Vote for President Trump and the Government Should Take Action




Article by Bonchie in "RedState":

Yes, this could easily be a headline from the Babylon Bee. No, it’s not a parody.

If you are reading this and plan on voting for President Trump, you may be breaking the law according to NBC News. Go lawyer up I guess

"Racist voting is not just immoral, but illegal. The government has the ability, and the responsibility, to address it."

We’ll get into the legalities in a second, but even on the surface, you’ll be shocked to learn that “racist” voting constitutes basically everyone who voted for Trump according to the standards laid out in the article.

If the Trump era has taught us anything, it’s that large numbers of white people in the United States are motivated at least in part by racism in the voting booth.

The author then goes on to list a bunch of misleading, out of context charges (such as the “Mexicans are all rapists” misrepresentation) to make his point that most of the white people who voted for Trump are at least partially motivated by deep racism.

So what’s the reasoning behind the idea that Trump voters have committed an unconstitutional offense by voting for him? The editorial relies on the “legal opinion” of someone named Terry Smith, who stereotypically teaches at a law school in Balitmore. Here’s what he has to say.

This sounds radical. But Smith argues that it’s in line with the Constitution and with years of court rulings. For example, Smith points out that racist appeals in union elections are illegal and that an election in which one side uses racist appeals can be invalidated by the National Labor Relations Board. Similarly, in the 2016 case Peña v. Rodriguez, the Supreme Court ruled that when a juror expresses overt bigotry, the jury’s verdict should be invalidated.
“When voters go to the booth, they’re not expressing a mere personal preference,” Smith told me. According to Smith, voters who pull the levers to harm black people are violating the Constitution. If the Constitution means that overt racist appeals undermine the legality of union elections, it stands to reason that they undermine the legality of other elections, as well.

Indeed, it does sound radical because it’s an absolutely insane assertion. If you are going to make a constitutional argument, citing a study that makes an awful constitutional argument is not how to do it. Yet, that’s what Smith does without even a hint that his assertion isn’t actually factual. Further, it’s clearly a violation of the 1st Amendment for the government to suppress the votes of someone people on what they think or say.

But wait, there’s more. Smith even has ideas of how to target people for their supposed racist voting.

So how can you tell when voters are acting out of prejudice? Again, Smith says, employment discrimination law provides a useful analogy. In discrimination cases, courts look for pretexts. If someone gives a reason for a hiring decision that is obviously false or makes little sense in context, the court has good reason to believe that prejudice or bias may have influenced the hiring decision.
Trump’s unprecedented, compulsive, easily documented lying during the 2016 campaign made him an irrational choice. It’s reasonable to conclude that voters were willing to swallow the falsehoods because they liked what they heard: overt racist appeals and incessant lies about rising crime rates. Research has since suggested that plenty of Trump voters were indeed strongly motivated by racist resentment and anti-immigrant animus.

In other words, anyone who voted for Trump is a racist, and if they give reasons to the contrary, they must be lying because the only reason to ever vote for Trump is racism.

Smith goes on to suggest censure and fines for voting for Trump, but concedes those are really enforcable. He also bats around the idea of nullifying elections, but again says that’s not really doable. At least he’s realistic, right?

Eventually, he arrives at some other ideas, such as creating “Senate districts” in order to weight the black vote higher than the white vote in the south.

Even more ambitiously, Smith suggests expanding the Voting Rights Act to address the racist patterns of voting in Senate elections in the South. Because the majority of white voters in the South vote Republican, and because they outnumber black voters, there isn’t a single Democratic senator from the Deep South other than Doug Jones in Alabama, who may well lose his seat in 2020. Smith argues that we could remedy these disparate, racially motivated outcomes by creating Senate districts. Presumably, that would make it at least possible for black voters to elect a senator who would support their interests.
This is clearly a very controversial proposal, and its constitutionality has been debated in the past. But given obvious disparities in representation in the South, it seems worth considering again.

It’s apparently been lost on Smith (or not so lost, as it’s possible he’s just a massive racist hypocrite) that there are places throughout the country where minority voting continually puts Democrats into office. Should they have their voting power artificially stripped away as well? Of course not, because according to Smith, only Trump voters are racists.

I’m gonna stop there because my brain can’t take anymore. The idea of disenfranchising voters over false charges of racism is vile, fascistic garbage at the highest level. The fact that NBC News actually published this article is more evidence that these legacy news outlets are not vital, needed parts of our discourse. They are awful institutions that perpetuate division and we’d all be better off if they went bankrupt tomorrow. You might even call them the enemy of the people.

These suggestions by Smith (and the author of the NBC News piece) are something you’d expect to hear in mid-30s Germany as a way to target Jews. It’s literally handing government the power to judge thought crimes and change the results of an elections in response. It represents the lowest, most dangerous form of racial politics, where anything goes as long as it meets the goals of a one side.

NBC News should be ashamed for putting out this racist trash as a legitimate opinion piece.

https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2020/01/18/nbc-news-it-may-be-illegal-to-vote-for-trump/ 

Erdogan calls on Europe to support Turkey’s moves in Libya: Politico

January 18, 2020
By Daren Butler
ISTANBUL (Reuters) – Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan has called on Europe to support its work in Libya, where it is providing military support to the internationally recognised government, if it wants to end the conflict there.
Erdogan made his remarks in a column published on the Politico website on Saturday, ahead of a summit in Berlin on Sunday that will try to stabilise the country.
At the meeting, Germany and the United Nations will push rival Libyan camps fighting over the capital, Tripoli, to agree to a truce and monitoring mechanism as first steps towards peace, diplomats and a draft communique said.
Turkey supports the government of Fayez al-Serraj in Tripoli and describes Khalifa Haftar, who heads the eastern Libyan National Army (LNA), as a coup plotter.
“Keeping in mind that Europe is less interested in providing military support to Libya, the obvious choice is to work with Turkey, which has already promised military assistance,” Erdogan wrote.
“We will train Libya’s security forces and help them combat terrorism, human trafficking and other serious threats against international security,” he added.
As the summit loomed, the Turkish president spoke by phone with its host, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to discuss developments in Libya and the region, Erdogan’s office said.

In a sign of tensions surrounding the Libyan issue, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu criticised Greece for hosting Haftar ahead of the summit in a tweet directed at Greek Foreign Minister Nikos Dendias.
“Inviting Haftar to Greece and highlighting Greek national agenda sabotage the efforts to bring peace to Libya. We would like to remind our Greek friends that these futile efforts are in vain. @NikosDendias,” Cavusoglu wrote.
Sunday’s summit will put pressure on Haftar and the LNA to halt a nine-month offensive against Tripoli after a week-long lull in fighting. But it will not try to broker power-sharing between the two sides, said diplomats briefed on preparations.
Haftar and Serraj are both due in Berlin – along with Erdogan and the leaders of Russia, Egypt and other Western and Arab powers. Libya has been in turmoil since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Erdogan said that if Libya’s legitimate government were to fall, Islamist militant groups such as Islamic State and al Qaeda “will find a fertile ground to get back on their feet”.
Haftar is backed by the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Sudanese and Chadian fighters, and most recently Russian mercenaries. France has also given some support.
On the other side, Turkey has supported Serraj by sending troops to balance out recent gains by Russian snipers. Hundreds of pro-Turkey fighters from Syria’s war have also been deployed, diplomats say.

42 Years Ago Today


In our youth, UncleE and I pledged our troth to each other. We have had richer and poorer, sickness and health and yet, here we continue to be together since 3:00PM January 18, 1978.

To celebrate, I thought I would post some martial memes. 







Last and very important 


You are welcome to add your own. 

I, personally, would appreciate it if we could avoid derogatory comments about ex-spouses. 

Being A Brown Immigrant Gives You....


Being A Brown Immigrant Gives You No Pass For Racism Against Trump Supporters

As a long-time legal immigrant, I don’t agree with the view that the country is filled with racism and white nationalism, or that open borders is the answer to past sins.

For much of 2019, our political discourse was filled with assertions that America is a racist, white nationalist country with institutions steeped in racism. The left is leading these charges, with the Democratic presidential candidates trying to one-up one another in these assertions.

In the mix is a new kind of immigrant, the kind who sees racism everywhere in America, and doesn’t see any redeeming qualities in its people or institutions, and who wants open borders as restitution for America’s past sins. Representatives of this mentality include Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and professor and author Suketu Mehta, who wrote a Washington Post op-ed last year arguing that immigration is a form of reparations to the global south for West’s wars and imperial depredations in the past.

As someone who legally emigrated from India and has been here a long time (27 years), I have different views not just toward immigration, but toward America and Americans, and about the way forward to living in relative harmony in today’s greatly divided America.

Two Kinds of Immigrants: 

Grateful and Resentful

There are probably two kinds of immigrants, broadly speaking. The first, where I place myself, is the kind who is grateful to be in America, has a more balanced view of America, and recognizes its historical and contemporary flaws and sins, but also its extraordinary blessings and opportunities. This kind of immigrant sometimes faces racism, but shrugs it off and works twice as hard, operating from the maxim that “success is often the best revenge.”

Although I’ve sometimes faced racism, and though I know there’s some institutional racism, my overall impression is that most native-born Americans are decent, fair-minded people who understand that this is a country of immigrants, and have no problem with legal immigrants who are grateful to be here and want to contribute to this society.

The current problems in immigration have risen over decades because of rampant abuses by our ruling and corporate class: allowing huge numbers of illegal immigrants in to facilitate cheap, exploitable labor, and abusing the H-1B visa, where lower-paid white-collar workers from abroad are preferentially hired over the native-born.

A little empathy is called for here. If a white software engineer was replaced by and had to train his lower-paid replacement from India (something that’s happened often), wouldn’t it be natural for the American to resent the situation? Is it then fair to call him racist for opposing this kind of legal immigration that puts his livelihood in jeopardy?

The second kind of immigrant is the kind who comes here with or later develops a big chip on his shoulder, and makes blanket assumptions and characterizations about the whole of this complex country, and about millions of its white citizens. He or she also wants, in urgent order, an accounting of history’s abuses, and reparations for it. Broadly, Omar, Tlaib, Mehta, media personality Jorge Ramos, and some others fit into this category.

Some broad points of their and the left’s critiques are understandable: that the West’s past sins have visited economic and environmental devastation on many countries, and therefore migrants need to leave their countries. I have two problems, though, with the left’s America-is racist-and-white-nationalist and America-should-atone-for-past-sins arguments.

Calling 63 Million People Racist Is Also Racist

It paints most of white America, or at least all Trump supporters (63 million voters), as outright racists. Excuse me, but that is racist too. To paint large parts of the population as racist is textbook racism. In reality, voting is a complex calculus and all kinds of voters—Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, educated voters—voted for Donald Trump in 2016 for a complex mix of reasons.

Also, being against uncontrolled mass immigration doesn’t automatically make you racist. There are millions of brown and black Americans, both native-born and legal immigrants, who are against it too.

In addition, asking ordinary Americans to pay for their country’s foreign policy sins is a bit too much. Americans aren’t often aware what their CIA is up to except after the fact, and they weren’t and still aren’t often privy to what their foreign policy establishment is up to. Asking them to be responsible for things they can’t control doesn’t seem fair.

As I see it, the real battle isn’t between ordinary Americans and migrants of the world, and the real villains aren’t ordinary Americans but the ruling and corporate elites of America and the West, who have despoiled much of the world through wars and corporate pillaging. Further, it’s not an easy task to take a clear accounting of history’s sins and flaws, or fair to make present-day multicultural, multiethnic America pay for them. There is no clear line from past sins to present-day reparations. There are too many variables, holes, and inconsistencies in the argument.

Who Does America Belong To?

The immigration-is-a-right-not-a-privilege assertion raises an interesting question: Who does America belong to? One line of thinking, which the left increasingly seems to subscribe to, says that this is a land of immigrants belonging to no one in particular, certainly not to the ones who came before us. The other line of thinking, which conservative Americans believe in, is that the white Christian settlers who established America and their descendants deserve credit for the country’s founding principles and ideals, and can lay claim to it.

In the interest of fairness, I tend to the latter view. I do think America would’ve been a different, and probably lesser country, if someone else had settled it. The Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights wouldn’t have just come up on their own. America may be a flawed country, with violence, oppression, and sins present in its founding and its institutions, but it is still admirable in the way it tries to live up to its ideals.

I agree with the Harvard University scholar Samuel Huntington, who said, “Would America be the America it is today if in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it had been settled not by British Protestants but by French, Spanish, or Portuguese Catholics? The answer is no. It would not be America; it would be Quebec, Mexico, or Brazil.”

In our heated identity-politics-driven moment, some immigrants and their advocates display an undeniable whiff of self-righteousness and sanctimoniousness: the presupposition that immigrants are enlightened victims. In reality, immigrants have as many flaws as everyone else. Many can and do game the immigration system any way they can. They can be racist, too. There is brown-on-black and brown-on-white racism too, but in woke philosophy this apparently doesn’t count.

Just like any other person, immigrants can also be notoriously blind to their hypocrisies. For instance, I’ve noticed that many of my Hindu peers love and support the nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi back in India because he protects their Hindu identity, but they hate President Trump for his nationalism here. In other words, nationalism is fine for me, but not for thee.

I hold these views not because I’m a turncoat on my immigrant and Indian American community but because I’m an old-school immigrant, I guess, who believes in decency and fairness. That is why I’m appalled by some of today’s immigrants who come and, in effect, tell those who’ve been here several generations, “I’ve a right to be here, even illegally, and if you object you’re a bigot!”

Money Doesn’t Make You Better than Others

The other issue that comes up in this discussion is the now-fashionable idea of being a “global citizen,” a cosmopolitan who travels often and has footprints in different nations. Probably the top 10 to 20 percent of Americans are the kind who can afford this lifestyle, and one understands the idea that travel can be mind-expanding and can lessen the fear of the “other.”
Allowing free migration to the West as a form of reparation will be destabilizing to these countries and to the world as we know it.
But there is a flip side to this thinking that I’ve sometimes found broadly, and in a few of my Indian American peers. It also came up in Mehta’s essay: a kind of looking down on those who can’t be jet-setting transnationals. This kind of thinking I especially find offensive in my community. Many of us immigrants grew up in humble, middle-class backgrounds in India, immigrated here, and made use of the United States’s educational and economic opportunities, became wealthy, and then started looking down on lesser-educated, lower-income, less-traveled Americans as hicks. Sorry, but this kind of thinking to me is un-American.

News flash to them: You may be, through hard work and good fortune, wealthy enough to be a jet-setting transnational, and good for you, but a majority of Americans aren’t, and that’s okay. For that matter, a majority of ordinary citizens of the world aren’t transnational and can’t afford to be either.

Many native-born Americans, especially in the heartland, are rooted in their communities, and grounded in their love for and commitment to their extended family, local community, church and civic organizations, and that to me is commendable, not something to look down on. Allowing free migration to the West as a form of reparation will be destabilizing to these countries and to the world as we know it.

Most of all, what I find offensive with the new brand of in-your-face immigrant is this: America allowed you in, and you prospered in this supposedly out-and-out racist country , and then you, with changing demographics, choose to spit in America’s face, calling most of its citizenry and institutions racist. That is graceless and classless.

This article has been edited since publication.



Pelosi’s And Putin’s Remarkably Similar Abuses Of Power

Pelosi’s And Putin’s 

Remarkably Similar Abuses Of Power

Jan. 15, 2020, a date which will live in infamy on two continents. How oddly coincidental that the world witnessed massive abuses of constitutional power in both the United States and Russia on the same day.

In Moscow, Russian ruler Vladimir Putin suddenly unveiled changes to the Russian constitution that will for all practical purposes render his unrestrained rule permanent. He was prime minister from 1999 to 2000, president from 2000 to 2008, prime minister again from 2008 to 2012, and now president again since 2012. The changes will transfer to parliament Putin’s presidential powers, which he is expected to give up in 2024, as law requires.

But in crime syndicates, titles bend to the will of the boss; in the Kremlin Crime Family that’s Czar Vladimir.

Putin tapped Russia’s little-known tax chief to become prime minister and he will likely ultimately succeed Putin in a diminished presidency. Like Dmitry Medvedev, who has resigned along with the entire cabinet to facilitate Putin’s restructuring, he can be expected to be essentially a Putin lackey. 

Whether in a formal capacity, or pulling this puppet’s strings behind the scenes, Putin has arranged to be Russian ruler for life.

In America, such a sweeping shift would require a constitutional amendment, which means years of convincing three-quarters of the state legislatures (or convening a new constitutional convention). In Russia, it means Putin waving his hand.

As freedom in the former Soviet Union slipped further from the grasp of the people of the Russian federation, however, the speaker of the House in this country was simultaneously misusing the awesome power of impeachment provided by our Constitution.

Like Putin, Pelosi has timed her move for purposes of aggrandizing power, waiting until mid-January to let the Senate begin its trial – after insisting last year that the impeachment inquiry and subsequent House floor vote had to be hurried to take place before Christmas. Her hope was that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would be intimidated into skewing the rules of a Senate trial to presume President Donald Trump’s guilt, and guarantee that House Democrats’ criteria for witnesses would be accepted. Despite a Republican Senate majority, this would improve the longshot odds of a trial spiraling out of control against Trump, and picking off a GOP senator or two. It would thus hurt Trump’s reelection chances, and help Democrats’ electoral fortunes overall.

McConnell prevailed. But also similar to Putin, Pelosi used a veneer of legitimacy to thwart her nation’s voters. Putin remains in power thanks to widespread ballot-stuffing, repeat voting and other manifestations of election fraud. Pelosi is using the rarely employed, extraordinary power of impeachment not to remedy “high crimes and misdemeanors,” as the Constitution directs, but to undo Trump’s lawful 2016 election – if not in actually removing him from office then by blemishing him enough to prevent his reelection. Or if that proves not possible, then by sabotaging Trump’s second term.

The smiles and ceremonial pens featured in Pelosi’s ill-considered signing ceremony that sent two articles of impeachment to the Senate – aping presidential bill signings – exposed the corrupt motives underneath.

Putin is indeed interested in disrupting U.S. elections, as the establishment media so often remind us. But opening fake social media accounts to spread disinformation, or promoting political rallies and fraudulent political articles, as Russia undertakes, are practices that are no match in influencing voters to one of the chambers of the U.S. Congress conducting a full-blown charade, our hallowed Constitution be damned.

The strongest interference in American elections is from within. If voters recognize that Pelosi and Putin are applying the same debauched principle for purposes of wielding power, they will mark the common date of their deeds come this November as the day of infamy it was.

— Written by Thomas McArdle


Note to Readers: Issues & Insights is a new site launched by the seasoned journalists behind the legendary IBD Editorials page. Our mission is to use our decades of experience to provide timely, fact-based reporting and deeply informed analysis on the news of the day.

We’re doing this on a voluntary basis because we think our approach to commentary is sorely lacking both in today’s mainstream media and on the internet. 

CNN’s bias is now beyond laughable



As Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.) walked through the hallways of the Senate Thursday, CNN senior congressional correspondent Manu Raju asked her if the Senate should consider “new evidence as part of the impeachment trial.” McSally shot back: “Manu, you’re a liberal hack. I’m not talking to you.”

“You’re not going to comment about this?” a dazed Raju asked. “You’re a liberal hack, buddy,” McSally replied as she walked away. Predictably, conservatives cheered, while mainstream media decried McSally’s move as unbecoming.

Whatever your take, the interaction reflects three years of mounting frustration with an overtly partisan media, exemplified by CNN, which has dropped any pretense of fairness and become an organ of the Democratic Party.

The problem isn’t that Raju asked the question — that’s his job, after all. It’s that virtually all questions posed by political reporters these days are framed to support the narratives and assumptions of one political party, the Democrats.

CNN’s Jake Tapper, remarking on the incident, called Raju’s query reasonable, because it was “the question of the day.” Indeed, that’s the problem. Democrats are always dictating the “question of the day.”

As Tapper surely knows, there is no Lev Parnas “evidence” about ­alleged Trump-Giuliani misdeeds in Ukraine. There are only allegations from a sordid character named Lev Parnas. Now, perhaps those allegations will be proved true. But any honest observer of Washington understands that Democrats are stringing out these investigations until the election.

By referring to Parnas’ handwritten notes as “evidence,” Raju is merely perpetuating a talking point. Which would be fine, of course, if reporters were also stalking the hallways of the Senate demanding to know if Democrats were prepared to investigate new “evidence” of alleged wrongdoing by Hunter Biden.

On the whole, mainstream outlets have exhibited deep skepticism about verified and unverified accusations about the vice-presidential son’s Burisma shenanigans. They should do the same in the Parnas case, as well (Tapper, to his credit, has raised some questions).

You’d think that journalists who had recently subjected the nation to a hysterical three-year carousel of botched Russia “collusion” stories, fed to them by partisans, would show a lot more caution, rather than blindly embracing the theories of House Democrats.

In 2017, Raju reported an “exclusive” that Donald Trump Jr. had advance notice of WikiLeaks dumps against the Democratic Party, thus proving criminal conspiracy. It turned out Raju had gotten the date on a supposedly incriminating e-mail wrong: The e-mail apprised Don Jr. of documents that were ­already in the public record.

CNN ran a massively embarrassing correction while insisting the reporter had followed “editorial process.” But Raju never explained how his two supposedly independent sources both got the date on the e-mail wrong.

The Don Jr. e-mail story was just one of dozens of failed scoops that fueled paranoia around the 2016 election results. CNN was perhaps the worst offender, so it really has no business feigning indignation when a Republican senator calls one of its reporters a “hack.”

You only need to juxtapose the McSally brouhaha with Nancy ­Pelosi’s news conference this week to see how liberal journalistic malpractice works. Without any evidence, the House speaker accused Team Trump of sedition and criminality and claimed — again — that the 2016 presidential election had been stolen by Russians, knowing full well no one would really challenge her.

What’s most infuriating about CNN isn’t that hosts like Don Lemon and Chris Cuomo or ­reporters like Raju, Jim Acosta and Jim Sciutto have an agenda — it’s that they pretend they don’t.

Was it a good moment for McSally, who is serving her first term in the Senate after being appointed to take the late John McCain’s seat? Probably not. Losing your cool is rarely a good look for a politician, and independent and moderate voters who will decide her fate are unlikely to understand the context of her frustration.

But that doesn’t render her grievance illegitimate.

The impeachment trial will be a big yawn for millions of Americans



If we could apply AI to IO — artificial intelligence to impeachment obsession — there might emerge the archetype of the impeachment addict, a strange and decidedly outnumbered category of American, part hopeless dreamer and part conspiracy-addicted schemer. Almost certainly a blue-check Twitter hyper-user and one disconnected from the NFL entirely.

Impeachment is a yawner. Except when it’s an obsession. I’m interested as a matter of a triple-professional obligation. “Impeachment, Theory and Practice” is not only an annual lecture in my constitutional law course, but also a subject about which I am occasionally asked to opine by NBC News and this newspaper. My largely center-right radio audience isn’t interested in the specifics of the allegations against President Trump. They long ago dismissed the charges as absurd, resulting from the pumped-up histrionics of an ultrapartisan age. But they are listening intensely to see which Senate Republicans will fight, just as they did during Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. They also want to see who will defend the president, and how vigorously.

But many in the chattering class are obsessed with the charges. Genuinely, thoroughly, wholly obsessed. Never have so few rowed so fervently for a destination that the rest of the world would almost certainly be happy to skip. These are the same people who thought special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was sending a secret message using every fourth word in alternating paragraphs.

Please, liberal and left-wing friends inside the Beltway and cocooned in executive suites in the broadcast industry, please understand: Most Americans don’t care. They care about the election. They care about Iran. They care about whether Trump can keep the economy booming.

Polls may suggest that north of 40 percent of Americans want the Senate to remove Trump, but my strong sense is that the statistic is profoundly misleading. Ask a question such as that, and people will offer a reply, usually one just reflecting their political affiliation. But that doesn’t indicate the degree of their interest in the subject. Far from being fixated, most Americans are, I think, by turns amused, disgusted or bored by this impeachment. And they are in no way seriously expecting anything other than a Senate trial ending in acquittal.

I’ve spent a lot of on-air time interviewing Republican senators over the past week about the concept of “witness reciprocity” — equal at-bats for prosecutors and the defense team alike. Unlike the miasma of Ukrainian charge and counter-charge, the subject is actually interesting, because it goes to the basic concept of fairness. The senators I spoke with — Tom Cotton (Ark.), Ted Cruz (Tex.), James M. Inhofe (Okla.), James Lankford (Okla.) and Rick Scott (Fla.) — all made clear that the sauce/goose/gander standard will apply here.

If the Democrats persuade the four Republicans they need to open the Pandora’s box of calling witnesses in the Senate trial, count on the witnesses also coming in flights of four. If the Democratic prosecutors are first-movers on calling for a witness, the defense should be allowed a reciprocal witness, as well as the opportunity to be the first mover on the next witness round. If former national security adviser John Bolton is a witness, then that means former vice president Joe Biden’s son Hunter, or the so-called whistleblowerwill be as well. Perhaps impeachment manager and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) himself will be called to testify.

So there may be some interesting episodes ahead, and the prospect of seeing senators chained to their desks, obliged to listen to impeachment managers Schiff and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) droning for hours on end is comical, but not watchable. Generally, the trial is going to be a snoozer. The commentariat hates this. Democrats are trying to make it otherwise. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is handing out souvenir pens. “House managers” are solemnly marching from one end of the Capitol to the other. Meanwhile, plenty of observers are choking back laughter.

If witnesses are called, cry havoc and let slip the dogs of unpronounceable names and the details of monthly draws on Burisma checking accounts. We could be here for weeks and weeks.

And we already know the ending. What a charade.

Checkmate, Chuck: Lindsey Graham Has Some Sour News for Schumer On His Impeachment Plan


 

Lindsey Graham doesn’t practice Santeria, and he ain’t got no crystal ball, but if he had a million dollars he’d bet it all on Republicans in 2020, and it’s all thanks to this impeachment circus that has catapulted Trump’s chances this coming election.

Graham was on Fox News’s “Hannity” on Thursday night when he and host Sean Hannity spoke about the impeachment process. Graham told Hannity that he hopes they can wrap this up in a week, but that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer has larger goals in mind.

“If you think Chuck Schumer is trying to find out what happened here, you’re missing a lot. Chuck Schumer is trying to take back the Senate,” said Graham. “He’s trying to make the argument that if you don’t call a witness you’re trying to cover up for the president. The truth of the matter is that Chuck Schumer is willing to destroy executive privilege. I can only imagine what he would be saying if this were a Democratic president.”

But if the Democrats think they’re going to chip away at the level of power held by Republicans in the Senate, Graham has some sour news for them. Graham reminded Hannity that when they impeached Clinton in the ’90s, Republicans lost five seats because the people thought they went too far. Now, Graham believes something similar will happen to Democrats, but on a grander scale:
I think 2020 is going to be a blowout. I think what Nancy Pelosi did, to spike the ball at halftime; the score at impeachment is one to nothing us; they lost one Democratic seat by impeaching the president. By the time the trial’s over and we have an election in November, there’s going to be a backlash and let me tell you why: most Americans jealously guard the right to pick their own leaders. I think they’re going to hold it against politicians who try to take that right away. We’re going to get the House back; we’re going to keep the Senate majority and President Trump’s gonna be reelected, and one of the reasons is the way they’ve conducted themselves.


As it stands, poll after poll has shown that impeachment hasn’t helped the Democrats in the least, and everything from donations to attendance at rallies shows that Trump is going to win in 2020. The question now is if the Republicans can win back the House while growing the Senate.
To be honest, it looks like that’s going to happen too.

Also, I apologize for that Sublime reference, but I can’t promise I won’t do it again.