Tuesday, January 21, 2020
Cipollone says obstruction of Congress charge is ‘ridiculous’ | Trump impeachment trial
Cipollone says obstruction of Congress charge is ‘ridiculous’ | Trump impeachment trial
This video is of President Trump's attorney, Pat Cipollone, giving House Democrats a much needed public flogging on the floor of the Senate. It's worth the time to watch it... and it's all true.
'Strong Paper Trail' Leads Durham Investigators to January through May 2017 Time Frame
CBS investigative journalist Catherine Herridge reported on Friday that, based on a “strong paper trail” of documents, investigators from U.S. Attorney John Durham’s team are now focusing on the period between January and May 2017. Herridge specifically addressed last Thursday’s report in The New York Times about a leak possibly made by James Comey during this time frame.
Unlike the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, the Mueller investigation and prior to that, the FBI counterintelligence probe into the Trump campaign, where selected bits of information were strategically leaked in the hope of setting up a desired narrative in the press. This doesn’t happen much with the Durham team, and when it does, the leak usually comes from another agency Durham has encountered during the course of his investigation. For example, Durham’s request for the CIA to turn over all of former CIA Director John Brennan’s communications records, emails, phone logs and texts, was leaked to and reported by The New York Times on December 19th. And in October, the information that Durham was expanding his inquiry and that it had shifted into a criminal investigation was leaked to and reported by NBC.
It is to Durham’s credit that his team does not leak, however, it leaves us clueless as to their progress.
The period between January and May 2017 was a pivotal time in Washington.
Here are a few things that were happening at that time.
1. The Obama Administration reluctantly turned over the keys to the White House to President Trump, a man whom they despised and had worked against.
2. The Obama Administration’s Intelligence Community Assessment was released in January which concluded that the Russians had “” Trump win the presidency by damaging Hillary Clinton.
3. In January, the FBI held their first meeting with Christopher Steele’s primary sub-source and learned that the dossier was bogus. Two additional meetings were to follow in March and in May, but suffice it to say that after the first meeting, they had a pretty good idea the intelligence had been made-up.
4. During this time, then-FBI Director James Comey was trying to build an obstruction of justice case against the new President. After each meeting or phone call Comey had with the President, he write a memo to himself about everything they had discussed.
5. After Trump fired Comey on May 9, using the talking points from a memo he had asked then-Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to prepare, a tumultuous eight day period began. Rosenstein, reeling from the disapproval of his deep state colleagues who were angry over his part in Comey’s firing, was said to have been beside himself. It’s been reported that he had spoken to then-FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe about removing Trump via the 25th Amendment, although he claims he had been sarcastic.
6. Comey gave several of his memos to his law professor friend with instructions to leak them to The New York Times hoping that the outrage would trigger Rosenstein to appoint a Special Counsel to investigate President Trump for collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice because he had asked Comey to lay off General Michael Flynn.
7. Rosenstein obliged and on May 17, he appointed Robert Mueller to the Special Counsel.
Herridge reported, “A single source confirmed the broad outlines of the investigation and said that investigators are looking at a classified leak in 2017 .” And they were trying to determine if Comey or a member of his close circle are responsible.
Herridge played a clip of Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) questioning Comey at a May 3, 2017 Senate Judiciary hearing. The document, provided to the FBI by a Dutch source, is thought to be fake. It was allegedly an email from Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL), who was the DNC Chairwoman at the time, reassuring a George Soros connected operative that then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch would protect Hillary Clinton and “would make sure the FBI investigation didn’t go too far.” Comey said he could not discuss it in that setting. Grassley assured him he would follow up.
(Note: The names on the email and the source comes from Dan Bongino’s 1/20/20 podcast (#1162). I will be reporting on his take tomorrow.)
Herridge said, “There’s always been questions about whether this document was legitimate, or whether this Russian record was part of a disinformation campaign to further confuse and interfere in the 2016 election.”
Herridge was asked if Grassley did indeed follow up and she said that he and a group of other Senators had, but they received pushback and stonewalling.
She said the reason this is important is that the laws don’t appear to be applied equally. “We’ve seen a number of prosecutions here in Washington over a much lesser degree, so the question is, if they identify the source of the leak, will it be held to the full standard under the law?”
The CBS host asked Herridge if it was appropriate to be investigating a leak that is “years-old,” as The New York Times referred to it. Herridge assured her that it was entirely appropriate.
During an interview with NBC in December, the day after IG Michael Horowitz had released his report, Attorney General William Barr offered some clues. He said Durham was looking “at the whole waterfront.” Barr was asked when he thought Durham’s work might be completed, he estimated late spring or early summer.
Investigative journalist Sara Carter reported on Sunday, that according to numerous former and current government sources, “the documents already uncovered by Horowitz and the alleged new documents discovered by Durham are significant. Those documents will expose the intent of those involved in the malfeasance at the FBI and the continued operation to spy on Carter Page, a short term Trump campaign volunteer. Further, Durham’s probe is focused on actions of former senior Obama Administration officials that targeted Trump and his team.”
NY Times Columnist Says Schiff ‘Will Walk All Over’ Dershowitz and Starr, Then it Gets Even Stupider
New York Times columnist David Brooks and political analyst Mark Shields joined PBS’s Judy Woodruff to discuss the Senate impeachment trial. This was going way into enemy territory I know, but it’s important to hear how the other half thinks. I knew it would be bad, but I didn’t count on a trip to fantasyland.
In one exchange, Brooks says Adam Schiff will just walk all over Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz and former Independent Counsel Ken Starr because Schiff has the evidence on his side.😆
DAVID BROOKS: I’m, frankly, struck by the number of people who have joined his defense team, Alan Dershowitz and Ken Starr. I wouldn’t do this.I mean, there’s not — like, whatever you think of Trump or not, there’s like not a lot of good arguments on your side. Like, why would you want to go to a movie where you got nothing but bad lines? And so I think they’re all going to hurt them. I mean, I think they will get through this. But I wouldn’t say it’s a career enhancer for anybody. I don’t know why they’re all signing up for this.JUDY WOODRUFF: You mean because you think they will say things that will hurt the case?DAVID BROOKS: Schiff will just — he will just walk all over them, because he has the evidence on his side. So, it’s not a debate you want to have when you’re on a losing side. And this is basically a political game to get through it.
What evidence might that be? President Trump’s decision to challenge the Democrats’ subpoenas in a court of law just as President Nixon and President Clinton did when they received House subpoenas? Or did Nadler go through the Mueller Investigation documents and finally find proof that Trump colluded with Russia to win the election?
Maybe Schiff will produce another handwritten “to-do” list from the legally challenged Lev Parnas? Oh that’s right, not even the Ukrainians trust him.
Woodruff then asks Brooks if he thinks more information will come out during the trial? He replies, “Yes, no, I have learned to never underestimate the ability of Trump to self-sabotage. So, I assume that he did more, and there’s probably more — even within hours, there might be more Parnas evidence and elsewhere. And so that will continue to come out. In my view, frankly, when we saw the phone call transcript of day one on this whole deal, to me, he was 99 percent guilty at that moment. And now he’s risen to 99.9 percent guilty.”
Shield was asked if he believed Pelosi’s decision to hold the Articles of Impeachment for an extra month was a wise move. Yes, of course it was. He then enumerated all the new information and “evidence” that had come out since the impeachment vote.
1. John Bolton has agreed to testify if subpoenaed.2. Further Russian hacking of Burisma of Ukraine.3. We’ve learned about, allegations at least, of the President’s more deep involvement all the way to the point of charges that operatives friendly to the Trump campaign, a candidate for Congress, was physically surveilling, in a hostile manner, the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and sending messages of the sort that we, for a price, can get something done.
Brooks agreed. Yup. The Democrats have got this case sewn up alright.
This spin never stops on the left.
In a CNN article announcing that Dershowitz and Starr had joined Trump’s legal defense, a reporter wrote, The White House did not mount a formal defense during the House’s investigation as it refused to cooperate with the Democratic-led probe.
That statement is an out and out lie.
The National Review’s always rational Andy McCarthy was interviewed on Saturday by WMAL radio host Steve Malzberg. He said that Schiff is an able prosecutor, but he believes that he will “behave” in front of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I suppose that means no “parodies” on the Senate floor. McCarthy says the Democrats know this will not result in the removal of the President, but they just want to bruise him ahead of the election. He believes that the House Democratic leaders will work with their Senate counterparts with that goal in mind.
Able prosecutor or not, Schiff, Nadler and the rest of the House managers will be in over their heads with the likes of White House counsel Pat Cipillone, Trump’s personal attorney Jay Sekulow, Alan Dershowitz, Ken Starr, Robert Ray, Former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi and Trump’s longtime personal counsel Jane Raskin. Team Schiff will be up against some pretty formidable legal talent this time unlike the proceedings held in the House where they were calling all the shots.
But the main reason why I don’t think it will go well for Democrats is this: President Trump did not commit an impeachable offense.
AOC Gets a Much-Needed Reality Check as Twitter Users React to Her Ridiculous Gun Rights Rally Hot Take
As my RedState colleague Bonchie noted earlier, Democrats and the mainstream media (but I repeat myself) have gone into overdrive today in having conniption fits about the gun rights rally that is taking place in Richmond, Virginia.
Well before it even started, a lot of (false) comparisons were being made of the Richmond rally to what happened in Charlottesville in August 2017, with “journalists”
Fortunately, photo and video reports as well as live-feeds from the event have shown it to be peaceful, with U.S. and Gadsden flags being proudly flownamong the diverse group in attendance to show support for our country and our second amendment rights.
Unfortunately, however, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) took a moment to weigh in on today’s events and her reaction was as predictable as as you might expect:
.@AOC contrasts today’s gun rights march in Richmond with protests against Eric Garner’s killing: "Why were there almost no police officers” despite protesters “flying confederate flags and [carrying] semiautamtic weapons”? pic.twitter.com/JRL9B76EQW
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 20, 2020
First, it’s not uncommon for rallies protesting police officer-involved shootings to get violent. Precedent bears this out. We’ve seen it happen in Ferguson, NYC, and other cities where things have gotten out of hand quickly thanks to protests organized by violent OWS/Antifa thugs and the like. That’s not to say there aren’t legitimate protesters in those crowds, but the professional agitators are usually out front and willing to literally create trouble for The Cause™. And it’s usually captured on video, which is valuable street cred for rank and file social justice warrior types on the left.
Secondly, her remarks assume there were no plain-clothes officers among the crowd to keep an eye on things. Remember, there were widespread but unconfirmed reports that there would be violent counter-rallies organized by The Usual Suspects™ to the gun rights march, so I think it’s a safe bet to say that some of the marchers were probably law enforcement types in regular clothes.
Thirdly, I guess she happened to miss the reports of lookouts or spotters or snipers supposedly being perched on top of buildings in Richmond monitoring the goings on. Where you see this, there are also police officers on the ground to communicate with them about any threatening behavior.
Lastly, I didn’t see a single photo of a Confederate flag today at the rally, nor did I see it in any videos. It’s possible there could have been one or two being carried there but it didn’t appear to be widespread. As AOC often does, she probably just regurgitated talking points from some fanatically left wing website on what to expect, and ran with it. Wouldn’t be the first time.
Here are some of the Twitter reactions to her stunningly ignorant remarks:
I guess it’s just too much to ask AOC to actually know
what she’s talking about before she speaks.
Sen. McConnell’s Impeachment Rules Allow For Motion To Dismiss
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s rules for the impeachment trial leave open the possibility for a motion to dismiss from the White House lawyers. According to Axios, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said a draft of the rules allowed President Donald Trump’s lawyers the right to file a motion to immediately dismiss the charges against the president.
“My understanding is that the resolution will give the president’s team the option to either move to judgment or to move to dismiss at a meaningful time,” Hawley said. Hawley told Axios the resolution granted the White House counsels the ability to file a motion to dismiss at several points throughout the trial, including at the beginning.
Hawley proposed a resolution earlier this month dismissing the case against the president that garnered the support of more than a dozen Republican senators, including McConnell. McConnell has acknowledged, however, that Republicans were not united on the resolution and did not have enough votes to pass it.
Hawley told Axios he would be surprised if the final resolution outlining the rules of the impeachment trial failed to include the right to dismiss the proceedings by Trump’s legal team. The Missouri senator added that if he right to dismiss was absent, he might not support the resolution.
Republicans and the White House are pushing for a quick trial in the Senate, with some expecting the process to be over in the upper chamber as quickly as two weeks.
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi officially transmitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate after weeks of delay in a futile attempt to demand new witness testimony in the coming trial. After failing to extract concessions without leverage, however, Pelosi handed over the impeachment articles as if it were a celebratory occasion.
On Wednesday, Pelosi announced the impeachment managers who would be making the case for removal in the Senate. They consist of several Steele dossier truthers led by California Rep. Adam Schiff, who has repeatedly lied and misled the public about the underlying issues.
The provisions in the impeachment trial rules allowing for the White House lawyers to file a motion to dismiss provide the Senate its only tool to shut Schiff down and prevent the chief perpetrator in Russia hoax from taking over the upper chamber for months.
On Friday, the White House announced additions to its legal team to defend the president throughout impeachment. Trump’s legal team will now include Ken Starr, Robert Ray, and Alan Dershowitz to litigate the case alongside Pat Cipollone, Jay Sekulow, Jane Raskin, and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Even The Army Times Isn’t Off Limits To Leftist Infection
The leftists corrupt everything they touch. They can never just leave well enough alone. Now their grubby claws have managed to gain control of yet another American icon, the Army Times. The Army Times, was started in 1940 by Mel Ryder, just in time for World War II. For over 8 decades and 6 major conflicts, including the Cold War, it has provided news and other objective information to the members of the United States Army…at least until now.
According to the Daily Caller, the Times has appointed a far left radical feminist and avowed Trump hater named Sarah Sicard, as its top editor. From the article
The Army Times appointed as its top editor a 28-year-old feminist from Brooklyn who has repeatedly tweeted that she hates President Donald Trump and worked as a spokeswoman for a New York councilman who describes himself as a “moderate Democrat.
Her former boss might be a “moderate Democrat,” but based on some of the things she’s tweeted, the new hire surely doesn’t fall into that category. Again from the article
“Does anyone else feel like Donald Trump’s endorsement of anything makes the rest of us immediate hate that thing?” Sicard tweeted in May 2019.
Okay I hate @realDonaldTrump” she tweeted in September 2018.
“I mean, I hate Trump,” she tweeted in May 2017.
In January 2019, she tweeted she had lost followers because of “all my callouts of @POTUS.”
This is yet one more example of hatred for Donald Trump being used as an excuse to defy journalistic standards and place a highly biased, leftist hack in what was once a well regarded news source for members of the United States Army.
These people never quit.
Holocaust Memorial Center uses facial recognition to find out what happened to victims, survivors
OAN Newsroom
UPDATED 10:12 AM PT — Tuesday, January 21, 2020
As the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz approaches, a
Holocaust memorial center is working on connecting the past to the
present with the help of new technology.The “Face to Face” program, which is run by the Shem Olam Holocaust Memorial Center, connects descendants of Holocaust victims with the stories of what happened to their families. It uses facial recognition technology to identify people in photos from that time period and track their movements throughout the war.
The program’s director, Avraham Krieger, hopes to provide comfort for families who still don’t know what happened to their loved ones. He said “Face to Face” is aimed, first and foremost, at giving some response to “the chaotic reality created following the Holocaust".
“We think that the reality of the Holocaust is only the reality of six million Jews who were murdered, but it’s not so,” said Krieger. “It’s a reality that cut off any connection for those who survived, almost any connection to their past and not only for them, but also for their future families.”
So far, the center has received thousands of photos from archives around the world and has begun matching those pictured to their families.
Senate Republicans Must Save American Democracy
Today, in the United States Senate, Democrats will launch one of the most cynical attacks on democratic norms our nation has ever endured. That may sound severe, especially given the farcical nature of the impeachment of Donald Trump and the laughable odds that the Senate may remove him. But it’s true. For all the years of breathless accusations that Trump is the norm-breaker in chief, what we will see beginning this morning is the shattering not just of a norm, but of the very basic notion that Americans are a free people who elect their own leaders.
I entered the period of Trump’s presidency not just as a critic of his, but deeply worried about what harm he might cause the country. Three years later, not only do I support the president, but I have come to see that it is the Democratic Party, not Donald Trump, which seeks to undermine the Constitution, defy the will of the voters, and usher in an age in which Congress can remove an elected president for spurious reasons with absolute impunity.
It is imperative that Republicans and, if any of them have enough courage, Democrats come to the defense of the American people and send this sham impeachment where it belongs, into the depths and dungeons of the dustbin of history. This effort to remove the duly elected president of the United States must not only be defeated, it must be mocked, humiliated, and shown for the embarrassment it is.
Last month, when the articles of impeachment were voted on, Trump said at a rally that it didn’t really feel like he had been impeached. It was an astute observation. In fact, nothing feels very real these days. The news cycle takes its predictable perambulations each day, stories here today, gone tomorrow. Outrage and umbrage signifying nothing. A stunned, woozy country pays vague attention as all the stories pass by.
But what must not be lost, what must stay in the focus of the American people and the historians who chart this lowly enterprise is just how despicable this impeachment is. When we step back from the fabulist tales of the Lev Parnases of the world, when we get some distance from the helter skelter back and forth, what we see is a Congress trying to remove a president for delaying aid to a foreign power, a common practice, and then releasing it. That’s it. That’s what happened. Everyone agrees.
For three years now, the Democrats and their communications teams at CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post have painted Trump and his supporters as degenerates who would take this country back to the bad old days because for them, America is nothing but the bad old days. They have held themselves on high as the defenders of a country they don’t even like. And all the while, they have been undermining the most sacrosanct element of our great experiment, the vote itself.
It is not enough for Republican senators to vote against this assault on democracy. They must, rather, fully expose its treachery. We need Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and even Mitt Romney and Susan Collins to be lions, not apologists. They must stare in the eyes of Nancy Pelosi and her minions and forcefully condemn this effort to thwart what lies at the heart of our nation, this foul breech of conduct in which Democrats seek power they cannot gain by votes with chicanery and deceit.
The future of the United States lies in the hands of the Senate, and the fictions of the House Democrats must be held aloft and shown. Let the GOP be clear, this assault on the right of the American people to self-determination will not stand. The impeachment battle is not merely about Donald Trump; it is about the nation itself. It is about who and what we are.
Those who would take away our freedom must never win, and win they will not. When the dust settles, Donald Trump will still be president, and a humiliated Democratic Party will have to answer for why they ever took us down this road to begin with.
Iran blinks
After the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s military and terrorist mastermind, Iranian leaders vowed to retaliate against the United States. And they did, firing 16 missiles at two bases housing American troops in Iraq. No U.S. soldiers were killed, though several missiles came close. But an Iranian official said his country had not sought American casualties. It looked like Iran had blinked in its latest confrontation with the U.S.
Meanwhile, President Trump announced toughened sanctions against Iran, whose economy had already been devastated by earlier sanctions. Iran also got bad news from Britain, France, and Germany, which threatened sanctions of their own unless Iran stopped violating the 2015 nuclear deal.
There’s an unavoidable conclusion in all of this: advantage Trump, Iran’s chief foe. The president’s critics had been surprised by two of his actions. The first was what the president called the elimination of “the world’s top terrorist.” He followed that by changing his strategy. He advocated “a deal with Iran that makes the world a safer and more peaceful place.” Rather than war, he called for a halt to the U.S.-Iran conflict and said he wants Iranians to “thrive and prosper.”
Is a deal possible? Trump has asked for negotiations with Iran before. Iran wasn’t interested. But Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is desperate to avoid an all-out war with America. It would be a fight Iran couldn’t win and one in which the regime would likely be removed or destroyed.
Trump is a special problem for Iran’s leaders. He sounded warlike when he tweeted about attacking Iran’s cultural sites, but he talked like a peacemaker in his speech after the Iranian missile assault. Iranians are bound to be confused. And Trump likes it that way. As early as the 2016 campaign, he said he wouldn’t, as president, want to signal to America’s enemies what he might do next.
There is a way for the U.S. and Iran to meet and talk seriously and very privately, according to Robert Satloff, the executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He posed this question in the Washington Post: “What if U.S. officials took advantage of the moment to ask a trusted third party — say, the Omanis or the Swiss — to test whether Tehran’s leaders were ready for a quiet diplomatic initiative to achieve what the White House has long said was the objective of its ‘maximum pressure’ campaign: a better, broader agreement with Iran than the narrow nuclear deal the administration quit in 2018?”
An earlier episode in which Iran blinked “may be instructive,” Satloff wrote. In 1988, an American warship accidentally shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290. Fearing the U.S. was on the verge of fully supporting Iraq in its war with Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini agreed to a painful ceasefire.
Now, Iran needs the U.S. to lift its economic sanctions and pledge not to use military force or threaten the regime’s survival. To get this, “the price will be a broader agreement than the 2015 nuclear deal … to include verifiable restrictions on Iran’s missile program and its training, funding and arming of proxies, terrorist groups and Shiite militias,” Satloff wrote.
Neither the media nor Democrats are likely to hasten such a deal. They’ve adopted the narrative that Trump recklessly ordered the killing of Soleimani, risking a full-blown, bloody U.S.-Iran war. The New York Times reported that Pentagon officials were “flabbergasted” when Trump decided to take out Soleimani and has referred to his “approach to Iran” as “mercurial.”
But two events may have a more positive influence: 1) the missile attack on military bases without American deaths and 2) Iran’s decision not to turn over the task of attacking Americans in Iraq to proxies.
Retired Gen. Jack Keane, whose advice is taken seriously by Trump, has the best explanation of why there were no U.S. casualties. The retaliatory attacks on the two bases were designed, by the choice of particular missiles, to make casualties as unlikely as possible. The Iranians knew that casualties “would produce an overwhelming American response,” Keane told me.
And “they knew they were dealing with a different president,” Keane said. Killing one American had prompted a strong response. Had even a handful of soldiers died in the missile attacks on the two bases, the blowback ordered by Trump would likely have been far more furious and fatal.
The Far Left's Atheism: Should Americans Care?
Article by Eric Georgatos:
Project Veritas's recent videos of Bernie Sanders's campaign staffers brought an old issue into new focus: the ways in which leftism and its kissing cousin, atheism, end up at violent odds with just about everything good that is America.
To be sure, Sanders's campaign "field director," Kyle Jurek, didn't preface his video remarks with an announcement that he is an atheist, and Bernie Sanders holds himself out as a "secular Jew." But Jurek's viewpoints — and Sanders's campaign planks — track closely and logically with tenets of atheism. The result, as evidenced in Jurek's remarks, is an angry, ugly hostility to America, including to the culture that has developed from the founding ideals.
An important question looms in the background as Americans have watched a Democrat Party taken over by increasingly strident leftists and atheists: can America as founded be sustained under a governing worldview of atheism?
We think the answer to this question is an emphatic no. That emphatic "no" is foremost among the reasons why so many American patriots have a visceral dislike for or distrust of the current slate of Democrat presidential candidates. It's why the prospect of "President Bernie Sanders" sets off alarm bells as a profoundly radical and dangerous threat to this nation.
* * *
Let's
be clear at the outset that many atheists are "live and let live"
productive citizens who are also polite to their friends, family and
neighbors, including those who are practicing adherents of many
different faiths and of no faith. Not all atheists are militant
proselytizers of their unbelief; not all are politically active. And in
any case, in America, atheists have every right to their beliefs (or
unbeliefs).The problem isn't athe-ists; the problem is athe-ism when it is a core animating principle (if "animating principle" is not an oxymoron to an atheist) of a candidate for elective office, including most significantly the president of the United States of America.
Atheism says life is essentially purposeless; men and women are arbitrary collections of stardust with not much more to them than instincts to eat, drink, and procreate. From such a starting point, Creator-endowed unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness may be nice words uttered in a backwater era, but they have no clear meaning or relevance in a godless universe.
Similarly, atheism essentially says the handing down and preservation of generational wisdom and aspiration — i.e., "securing the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity" — are quaint but ultimately silly ideas. Families — as the basic organizing units for successive generations — are highly inconvenient and inefficient artifacts. Test tubes can take care of any need for procreation, and government schools can handle indoctrination of future collections of stardust. There's no need to think with a long-term view for the betterment of humanity; that would imply a purpose to life. The logic of atheism would say: get what you can get now; there may not be a later.
What about that all men and women are "created equal"? Atheism says: give me a break. Look around. The masses are filled with born losers who have no way out or up. The idea of teaching them or anyone else the concept of righteousness, or precepts for moral living, as a way to improve their lot in life over time, is delusional and cruel. Whether the chips fall your way is a matter of chance; life's a b----, and then you die. Basic "secular morality" is all you need and all there is: as long as you don't hurt somebody else, do whatever you want whenever you want with whomever or whatever you want.
And so...atheism substantially undercuts the founding ideals and culture of America.
But that's not all.
When the worldview of atheism sees what it considers as imperfections in the human scene, the default answer to all of them is the immediate hammer of power (called "government") to make things as they ought to be.
Some people have less than others? Forget faith, patience, persistence, and the work ethic, AKA the American Dream. The need is for government-compelled redistribution of wealth, now.
Some people have a billion dollars? All success is random, not earned ("you didn't build that"). The rich are simply collections of stardust who happened to be the lucky winners of "life's lottery."
Nobody should have more than anybody else, and everybody should have everything, equally. So (1) take away those arbitrary, unearned riches, and send the billionaires to rock-splitting prisons to cut them down to size like everybody else, and (2) make the guarantee of free stuff the purpose of government, use those arbitrary riches you grabbed from the billionaires to pay for it, and spend your policy debate time deciding which free stuff should be handed out first and which should be later.
What about law and order? Another quaint but outdated and outmoded concept. The atheist knows that raw power defines what is or isn't law and enforces order. (Just ask our Deep State coup-plotters and Flynn-prosecutors at the DOJ and FBI.) Not truth, because there is no such thing.
And the idea of respecting free people freely choosing or electing their government? Not if the people they elect espouse beliefs, aspirations, or policies not grounded in atheism. Burn it all down if they make the wrong choice. So says Mr. Jurek.
Aren't those prisons/re-education camps/gulags a little harsh for those who don't submit? Mr. Jurek told us, hey, what's so bad about a re-education camp? The Soviet gulags purportedly paid a living wage and allowed conjugal visits. That's about as meaningful as a purposeless life gets — so what's the big concern?
* * *
Bernie
Sanders seems to embrace the scruffy old crazy-uncle-in-the-attic
character to make himself more likeable, and he is savvy enough to know
that overt atheism won't play well with the American electorate. He
tempers his avowed socialism with a nod toward his "spiritual
beliefs." And insert here the standard truism that nobody knows exactly
what's in another's heart. But don't be fooled. Bernie Sanders is a
hardcore leftist, which is essentially equivalent to a communist and is
almost always synonymous, for all practical purposes, with an
atheist. So is Mr. Jurek. And the governing ideas that flow from the
worldview of atheism are poison to America as founded and to America's
future.One more thing: George Soros and his Open Society Foundation and their affiliates are together almost certainly the largest financing source for hard-left candidates and causes throughout the country. Soros's vision: to drive all religion — most especially Judaism and Christianity — out of America, to be replaced by his "open society." Atheism über alles.
If America as founded is to be preserved, Americans need to care about the atheism of the far left. They need to detect their candidates and spokesmen and organizations and policies — and reject all of them, emphatically.
Ted Cruz Trolls Pelosi With a Terrific Switch on Her Own Words About Impeachment
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) has been taking jabs at President Donald Trump, claiming he is now “impeached forever.” Hardly the prayerful or sober effort that she claimed impeachment was.
This, of course, both reveals her political effort to smear him as well as her failure to acknowledge the nature of the Constitution, that yes, indeed there is a trial and there can be an acquittal. It’s saying someone accused in a very unfair process should somehow be tarred even when they’re found not guilty.
Pelosi and other Democrats in the House like House Judiciary Chair Jerry Nadler (D-NY) have shown they refused to accept facts, such as when their Russian hoax imploded on them and was debunked. Nadler was still pushing it. He claimed over the weekend that Trump “worked with the Russians to rig the 2016 election” and was going to rig it again in 2020.
But Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) flattened Pelosi on Sunday when he appeared with Fox’s Maria Bartiromo on “Sunday Morning Futures.”
Bartiromo asked how likely was it that the matter was going to be dismissed in the first 48 hours. Cruz said he didn’t that was very likely because he thought having an acquittal was preferable to a dismissal.
“I think dismissing this case is a much less attractive option than rendering final judgment and acquitting the president,” Cruz said. He then trolled Pelosi with his answer, mocking her claim that Trump would be “impeached forever.”
Once the Senate provides @realDonaldTrump the opportunity to defend himself—which the House didn’t do—I’m confident when we get to final judgment, POTUS will be acquitted forever of @SpeakerPelosi’s bogus #impeachment charges. pic.twitter.com/4NrbpjwNrr
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) January 20, 2020
And the reason is twofold,” Cruz said. “Number one, if you do a dismissal, a dismissal doesn’t reach the merits. An acquittal, a verdict of not guilty, that verdict stands for all time.”
“Nancy Pelosi is going out on TV crowing that the president has been impeached forever,” Cruz continued. “Well, when we get to final judgment, the president will have been acquitted forever of these bogus impeachment charges. That’s a much better outcome for the president and for the country.”
Former Giuliani Associate Lev Parnas Cries that Prosecutors Won’t Even Talk to Him About a Cooperation Deal
Lev Parnas is continuing to keep himself in the news. Recently, he “broke his silence” by going on Rachel Maddow’s conspiracy themed show to spread a bunch of accusations. Those accusations conveniently allowed Parnas to claim he is a victim in the Trump-Ukraine drama.
Facts tell a much different story, showing Parnas had prior dealings with an Ukrainian oligarch and that his desires to oust former Amb. Yovanovitch predate Rudy Giuliani’s machinations. While the media wants to paint the President as an evil genius, it more and more looks like Parnas was trying to use Giuliani for his own gain, feeding bad information to pull the strings he wanted pulled.
Regardless, because Parnas is claiming to have dirt on Trump, he’s suddenly a media superstar, being given instant credibility. There’s a big issue though. Namely that he’s currently under indictment and is facing prison for financial crimes. That means he’s desperate to pull a Michael Cohen and “cooperate.”
Unfortunately for Parnas, prosecutors aren’t showing much interest in talking to him about any kind of deal.
You’ll be shocked to learn that the above reporter is misrepresenting the situation. In reality, the SDNY has already talked to Parnas. The fact that they are now icing him out is evidence that they believe he 1) has nothing to offer 2) doesn’t deserves any kind of deal and 3) isn’t credible even if he had something to offer.
The game here with Parnas and the media response are to paint this as some kind of nefarious plot by Bill Barr to stop a cooperation deal. The truth is that the SDNY is fiercely independent. It’s also an office full of careerist, which statiscallly means most are Democrats. If there was any game playing going on here, they’d be talking, not standing idly by. That says that the reason Parnas isn’t being offered anything is legitimate and not some political move by the DOJ.
Futher, no one should be taking anything Parnas and his lawyer say at face value. This guy is looking for a way out and thinks his last chance is to play prosecutors with wild promises of bringing down the President. It doesn’t look like that’s going to happen though, so he’ll be stuck crying to MSNBC and CNN I guess.
Hypocritical ‘News’ Media Have Done a Complete Flip-Flop on Impeachment
It doesn’t take a skilled code-breaker to figure out the liberal networks’ stance on President Donald Trump’s impeachment: There’s no doubt we need witnesses if the Senate is going to conduct a fair trial; impeachment is necessary to prove that nobody — not even the President — is above the law; and there’s no more pressing task for Congress if we’re to keep this President, and future Presidents, from acting like tyrants.But when the President being impeached was a Democrat, the spin was completely reversed. In 1999, the broadcast networks were reluctant even to cover the Senate trial for any extended period of time. All three major broadcast networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC) cut their live coverage after 90 minutes on the first day, leaving only PBS to run live gavel-to-gavel coverage. But despite the lack of live coverage, there was no shortage of furious political commentary about the reviled process.
Pundits during the Clinton impeachment scoffed that the Congress was wasting everyone’s time even bothering with a Senate trial in the first place. Journalists assured American audiences on a nightly basis that they were witnessing a “bogus” trial, a “political,” “sham” designed only to torment the President. Journalists regularly used terms that today elicit high-pitched shrieks from the news media, like “coup” and “witch hunt.”
■ “Is or is there not some concern of the public perception – concern in some quarters, not all of them Democratic – that this is in fact a kind of effort at a quote ‘coup?’ That is, you have a twice elected, popularly-elected President of the United States and ... [Republicans] having been unable to beat him at the polls, have found another way to get him out of office.”
— CBS anchor Dan Rather during live coverage, January 7, 1999.■ “That herd of managers from the House, I mean, frankly, all they were missing was white sheets. They were like night riders going over.”
— Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group, January 9, 1999.■ “As she watches Republicans in Congress push ahead with impeachment proceedings against President Clinton, Ellen Mendel of Manhattan says she feels the same despair that she did as a girl in Nazi Germany when the efforts of a stubborn group of leaders snowballed, crushing the will of the people.”
— Opening to a New York Times story by Ginger Thompson, January 25, 1999.■ “But ‘uniquely stupid’ is not the word I would describe this process. It’s Stalinist. It seems as though it’s gone on behind closed doors. Everything is according to a script. It’s just arcane and impenetrable in the extreme, and it has nothing to do with what we would consider normal fairness and trial procedure to be.”
— Host John Hockenberry on MSNBC’s Hockenberry, January 28, 1999.
The media have also changed their minds on the need for witnesses. During Clinton’s impeachment, the prevailing wisdom on TV news was that witnesses and depositions were pointless time-wasters. Pundits grumbled that Republicans who insisted on witness testimony just trying to embarrass President Clinton with sound bites from the likes of Monica Lewinsky.
■ “But, Senator, if there’s no way that this is going to turn around, if the votes aren’t there, why is your party dragging this thing out?...Why go through all this business about witnesses? Why not just get it done?...But if you have witnesses, it’s going to add months to this thing and tie up the Senate, isn’t it?”
— Co-host Charlie Gibson to GOP Senator Bob Dole on ABC’s Good Morning America, January 18, 1999.■ “Do we really need more evidence, more witnesses? … Or did today’s votes prove beyond any doubt, as Senator Daschel believers, that there will never be the needed two-thirds majority to convict the President, and that it is, indeed, time to move on.”
— Host Geraldo Rivera on MSNBC’s Rivera Live, January 27, 1999.
Journalists chanted unceasingly that Americans were sick and tired of impeachment — not to mention angry at their government for daring to subject them to it. When a visitor to the Capitol one day shouted his frustration at the process from the Senate gallery, the enthralled news media dubbed him a “hero,” and touted his outburst as “the voice of the people.”
■ “We begin tonight with the voice of the people heard from the Senate gallery today during yet another procedural vote at the President’s impeachment trial....‘God almighty,’ the man said, ‘take the vote and get it over with.’ He was arrested....He may think it was worth it, speaking as he does for so many Americans.”
— Anchor Peter Jennings opening ABC’s World News Tonight, February 4, 1999.■ “You know who the hero if this whole thing is, it’s that guy — what was his name? Richard Llamas, the guy who stood up in the Senate gallery last week and said, ‘Good God, vote and get over with this, will you!’ If they had stretched this out for another two or three weeks… I want to tell you something, I think thee people may have stormed the United States Capitol.”
— Wall Street Journal Executive Washington Editor Al Hunt on a special edition of CNN’s Capital Gang, February 11, 1999.
Even at the height of their outrage at the Clinton impeachment, the media reminded audiences that their primary concern was the President’s ability to govern effectively. After all, they reasoned, wouldn’t a process as time-consuming and unpleasant as impeachment prevent the President and the Congress from tackling issues that actually mattered to the American people?
■ “Saddam Hussein has his aircraft in the air threatening U.S. fighting men and women in the military. There are questions about Social Security, what to do about health care. There’s a long line of the people’s business that seems to have been put aside and apparently is going to be put aside for weeks if not months now.”
— Dan Rather to Bob Schieffer during CBS’s live coverage, January 7, 1999.■ “If we’re going to drag this thing out for months with witnesses, whether it’s the White House line or not, it’s going to take a long time to do that. It’s going to be an enormous distraction to the White House and all kinds of issues that the Congress ought to be considering, and all kinds of foreign policy issues that this country needs to consider, are going to get, eventually put into a pigeonhole until all of this gets done.”
— Co-host Charlie Gibson to Bob Dole on ABC’s Good Morning America, January 18, 1999.■ “Americans must look at this, if 57 million people look at this, and go, ‘Where is impeachment? Why is this happening? Will these people just get down to business and leave this impeachment thing alone?’”
— MSNBC’s John Hockenberry during live coverage following Clinton’s State of the Union, January 19, 1999.
The media love to act as if it’s only politicians who shamelessly shift their positions depending on the partisan needs of the moment. But any fair-minded person could see that many journalists are just as guilty of flip-flopping as any politician.