Sorry For Missing a Few Weeks: As many of you noticed and emailed me, I missed the last few weeks after the holidays in putting out our newsletter.
Unfortunately I had a few medical issues come up…all good now…and I’m close to being in full swing.
Thanks for your patience and sorry for any inconvenience.
Impeachment Ending?: One would hope so. But the reality is this is NOT about anything President Trump has done, but rather this is a political maneuver to defeat Trump in the public square because they fear facing voters at the ballot box.
Even if the Senate acquits, the Democrats in the House have already said they will put together another impeachment play…it’s politics and the crazy liberal left just wants to resist and hurt Trump at every step of the way.
Four Facts the Democrats Can’t Change…regardless how often they say so:
First, the released call transcript between Presidents Trump and Zelensky show no link between aid dollars and political investigations.
Second, both Presidents Trump and Zelenksy say there was no pressure.
Third, Ukraine didn’t know the aid was held at the time of the call.
Fourth, Ukraine never launched any action to get the aid released.
Remember, the ONLY first hand knowledge witness BOTH testified there was NO quid pro quo. At best, there is politically biased speculation, hearsay, interpretation and impressions of officials who disagree with the President’s foreign policy. That is NOT an impeachable offence.
Iran – No War: The United States does NOT want war with Iran. However, Iran must stop killing our citizens, arming our enemies and fighting a proxy war against us.
If needed, we should take out their military capabilities, destroy their nuclear research facilities, cripple their oil fields AND then let their citizens deal with the Iranian corrupt government as they see fit.
NO boots on the ground, NO nation building…defend our strategic interests as needed, but stay out of other cultures, countries and ethnic battles…allowing for self determination, regardless of how brutal it may be in the short run.
We don’t need to put American lives at risk and fight every battle worldwide.
-Saul Anuzis
Click Here for Past Commentary from Saul
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Weekly News Video Summary:
The Trump economy, three years in: What the numbers say
FOX Business ran the numbers, comparing basic economic performance measures before and after Trump’s election
Trump to attend March for Life rally
President Trump will become the first president to attend in-person the March for Life.
Joe Biden Snaps On Reporter, Gets Physical Over Bernie Feud At a campaign event in Iowa on Wednesday, Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden lost his cool when a reporter asked him about his apparent feud with fellow candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Watch our Weekly News Summary Video Here
A Tale of Two Rallies: Richmond Left Spotless by 22,000 Gun Owners
Not twenty-four hours after nearly 25,000 people crowded the downtown area of Richmond, local residents are singing their praises.
Instead of leaving trash and a mess in their wake, many people think the downtown area is cleaner than before the gun owners assembled.
Richmond resident Jack Hamilton had nothing but good things to say of the crowd. This was the same same ‘potentially dangerous mob’ that the left intoned could destroy their city. “They picked everything up and made it look nice. It was really good for them to do that and it looks a lot better and good job.”
One pro-gun advocate, Matthew Keisling, brought his own black trash bags just to clean up any loose trash. He said, “I’ve been in the area when there have been other protests and demonstrations and people leave a lot of trash behind and it waters down the message.” Keisling said.
Would Democrats Impeach Obama?
Hypocrisy is common in Washington, but impeachment is bringing out more than its fair share. That’s true of some Republicans, and the mainstream media devotes countless hours to it. What gets much less attention is the hypocrisy of the party that to which most journalists are sympathetic: the Democrats.
Take Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. On Tuesday he demanded the Senate call witnesses, claiming they’re required for a “fair trial” and slamming Republican opposition as a “coverup.” But the GOP position is exactly what Mr. Schumer’s was during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in 1999. Back then he said it “doesn’t make sense” for the Senate to call witnesses.
More important than hypocrisy about the process of impeachment is hypocrisy about the substance. Removing a president is the most draconian act Congress can take. It ill serves America if the party opposed to the president uses impeachment as a political weapon to tarnish his standing and weaken him for the next election.
When considering the Democrats’ high-minded arguments, ask yourself: What if Hillary Clinton won in 2016? After she took office, it would have been revealed that her campaign hired the opposition-research firm Fusion GPS, which assigned Christopher Steele, a former British intelligence official, to reach out to Russian counterparts to solicit dirt on Donald Trump. Recall that the since-discredited dossier Mr. Steele peddled to the media in the fall of 2016 was made up of unsubstantiated rumors from former Russian agents.
It’s naive to believe the Kremlin was unaware that Mr. Steele asked Moscow pals for dirt on Mr. Trump. Those spies are retired, but they rely on Vladimir Putin for their pension checks. Who among congressional Democrats would now be calling for Mrs. Clinton’s removal if she were in the Oval Office? I doubt any. I’ve searched in vain for Democratic criticism for her soliciting foreign involvement in the 2016 election—the principal charge of their impeachment case against President Trump.
State AGs urge Senate to reject impeachment in stinging letter: ‘A dangerous historical precedent’
The attorneys general of 21 states have come forward with a blistering rebuke of the impeachment of President Trump, asserting that it “establishes a dangerous historical precedent.”
The Republican attorneys general, in a letter submitted to the Senate Wednesday morning and obtained by Fox News, urged the chamber conducting Trump’s trial to “reject” the impeachment articles.
“If not expressly repudiated by the Senate, the theories animating both Articles will set a precedent that is entirely contrary to the Framers’ design and ruinous to the most important governmental structure protections contained in our Constitution: the separation of powers,” they wrote.
The letter accuses House Democrats of impeaching Trump as a politically motivated response to the 2016 election and warned that it poses a threat to the 2020 election as well.
“Even an unsuccessful effort to impeach the President undermines the integrity of the 2020 presidential election because it weaponizes a process that should only be initiated in exceedingly rare circumstances and should never be used for partisan purposes,” the letter continued.
Newt Gingrich: Trump impeachment will bring Pelosi and House Democrats condemnation by history
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., seemed giddy Wednesday as she announced the impeachment managers who would go to the Senate and attempt to prosecute a case against President Trump.
“He’s been impeached forever,” Pelosi said. “They can never erase that.”
However, Pelosi has it exactly backward. The Senate is going to refuse to convict President Trump. He will be exonerated, and she and the Democrats will be condemned by history.
The wide repudiation of the House Democratic betrayal of the Constitution is already beginning. As a historian myself, I think it’s important to document these reactions.
Consider historian Victor Davis Hanson’s analysis for the National Review, which was subtitled: “The new normal: Impeachment as a routine partisan tool, endless investigations, lying under oath with impunity, surveillance of political enemies, zero accountability.”
This is hardly an endorsement of Pelosi’s trivialization of the Constitution.
Trump’s Impeachment Trial Will Only Make Us Hate Washington Even More
Today is the day that the impeachment trial of President Donald Trump gets underway. Proceedings start around 1 p.m. in Washington (go here for places to watch) and are expected to last anywhere from a week to a month (Bill Clinton’s trial in 1999 lasted five weeks). In a vote that proceeded along party lines, President Trump has been charged with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. He is widely expected to be found not guilty by the Senate, in a vote that will also proceed largely, if not completely, along party lines.
Come February, or whenever the pompously self-declared “world’s greatest deliberative body” votes on the matter, we will be right back to where we started, only a little bit more in debt, a little angrier, and a little more behind schedule on nuts-and-bolts things like passing a real budget for the current fiscal year, figuring out how to pay for entitlements, and discerning whether we’re technically at war with various countries.
The impeachment process thus perfectly encapsulates everything that is wrong with the federal government. From start to finish, the impeachment is almost purely partisan and political rather than substantive, and it accomplishes nothing other than driving down even further any form of trust or confidence in the presidency, Congress, or even the Supreme Court (Chief Justice John Roberts will preside over the Senate trial). To be fair, impeachment is designed to be a political, rather than legal, process. It’s not about discovering the truth of what happened, or even fully explaining what happened, as you’d expect in a real trial. As Gerald Ford noted just a few years before becoming president himself after the resignation of Richard Nixon (who was faced with his own impeachment trial), an impeachable offense “is whatever a majority of the House of Representatives considers it to be at a given moment in history.”
Anything other than a rapid acquittal will deeply damage the presidency
Every decision is precedent.
That which gets rewarded gets repeated.
Law students should know these basic rules of the U.S. legal system and any common law system. That which has gone before inevitably is used to argue for or against what comes next.
And that argument or tactic that has successfully persuaded a court in the past is likely to be urged on courts of today as precedent that binds its actions.
Both rules should be uppermost in senators’ minds as they consider the presentations of the House Democrats and President Trump’s legal team. Having reviewed the House managers’ trial brief and that submitted by the president’s legal team, I believe anything other than a rapid acquittal will be deeply damaging to the presidency. It will not injure this president at all to have witnesses and weeks and weeks of proceedings. It will damage the presidency.
Debunking Trump’s Impeachment with One Simple Thought Experiment
Are you one of the millions of Sane-Americans who can’t get too worked up about Donald Trump’s impeachment?
It’s impossible to avoid news of the Dems’ Big Sham, which is so “exciting” that CNN spent hours on Monday running a never-ending picture-in-picture livestream of the empty Senate chamber. If that doesn’t get your blood pumping, what could?
Democrats can’t come right out and say they’re impeaching Trump just for being Trump, even though that’s exactly what they’re doing. So they held this big investigation, and found that yes indeed, President Trump had committed foreign policy. They can’t actually impeach him for that, either, so instead they impeached him for defending himself against the charge of having committed foreign policy.
Before we get to my little thought experiment, let’s be clear on exactly what foreign policy Trump is guilty of having committed. For that, let’s go to the indispensable John Solomon:
Charles Schumer’s 1999 letter about impeachment comes back to bite him
On Feb. 11, 1999 — one day before President Bill Clinton was acquitted in his impeachment trial before the Senate — Sen. Charles Schumer penned a passionate letter, outlining why the process had taken an unfair toll on the nation. He noted that the president believed he had not crossed a line, and praised the large threshold needed to get a conviction in the Senate. He also cheered the American people for opposing impeachment. A Gallup poll in December 1998 found that 35 percent of Americans were pro-impeachment, with 73 percent of Republicans and only 12 percent of Democrats in favor. Meanwhile, a Quinnipiac poll this month found that 51 percent of Americans approve of President Donald Trump’s impeachment, with 46 percent disapproving, but the partisan divide is even starker with just 7 percent of Republicans and a whopping 91 percent of Democrats in favor. Though the individual details are different, many of the same points crafted by Schumer more than 20 years ago echo Republican arguments against the impeachment of President Trump. Here is Sen. Schumer’s original letter in full, with some of the more prescient sections bolded by The Post . . .
Statement for the Record of Senator Charles E. Schumer
The Trial of the President
February 11, 1999
Mr. President, this is a day of solemnity and awe. I rise humbled that we are participating in a process that was mapped out more than 200 years ago by the Founding Fathers and that the words we say today will be looked upon by historians and future Congresses for guidance. That is quite a responsibility.
I began this process in the House where it degenerated quickly into bitter acrimony. I would like to say to Majority Leader [Trent] Lott and Minority Leader [Tom] Daschle, and to my new colleagues who have wrestled with this case, that I deeply appreciate your fairness and patience and the way this has been handled with such dignity in the Senate.
Growing up, our country and its government seemed like a mighty oak — strong, rooted, permanent, and grand.
It has shaken me that we stand at the brink of removing a President — not because of a popular groundswell to remove him and not because of the magnitude of the wrongs he’s committed — but because conditions in late 20th century America has made it possible for a small group of people who hate Bill Clinton and hate his policies to very cleverly and very doggedly exploit the institutions of freedom that we hold dear and almost succeed in undoing him.
No Slam ‘Debunk’: Analyzing the Dems’ Repetitive Impeach Text
President Trump must be removed from office “immediately,” Democratic impeachment managers argue in a new brief, because he poses “an immediate threat to the nation and the rule of law.”
Given that the House majority sat on its impeachment referral for almost a month before taking it to the Senate, the sudden urgency may come as a surprise – though not to students of argument and language. The Democratic case against Trump detailed in the much more extensive House impeachment report shows how language can be used to compensate for shortcomings in the evidence. A careful reading of the report shows that its authors – not unlike those who wrote the Mueller report to suggest guilt they couldn’t prove – are convinced that thin allegations can be bulked up if repeated often enough.
The repetitions that immediately stand out in the House report are the adjectives that dismiss the president’s defense well before that defense is made. Assertions or questions involving Ukraine made by Trump or his attorney Rudy Giuliani are typically prefaced with the words “debunked” or “discredited,” and usually followed by the characterization “conspiracy theory.” “Debunked” appears 22 times in the report; “discredited” 15 times; “baseless” 16 times and “conspiracy” 56 times. A few of those uses are by Republicans – Giuliani is quoted as saying the impeachment inquiry is “baseless” – but the vast majority are by Democrats to dismiss Trump’s claims.
The only guilty party during impeachment is Adam Schiff
When during the Nixon administration then-House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino embarked on what he described as the “extremely grave questions, which seriously preoccupy the country” of impeaching a president he had only one preconceived notion from which he dared not deviate — “whatever the result — we are going to be just, and honorable, and worthy of the public trust.”
It was only after I ran major congressional investigations in both the House of Representatives and the Senate that I fully appreciated the wisdom of Peter Rodino.
House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff — the undoubted leader of the Democratic impeachment effort — knows all of this — and knows it well. He is a very skilled Harvard-trained lawyer. He has more knowledge of, and experience with, impeachment proceedings than almost any sitting member of Congress.
Bottom Half of Households Nearly 50% Richer Under Trump
The Trump economy is giving the greatest benefits to those who have been at the bottom, according to new data from the Council of Economic Advisers.
Data released by the CEA shows that over 11 quarters from the end of 2016 through the first half of 2019, the net wealth of the top 1 percent of American households rose 13 percent. However, that rise is dwarfed by the 47 percent increase seen by the bottom 50 percent of America’s households over that same period.
Standoff: U.S. troops block Russian forces from capturing Syrian oil field
U.S. troops last weekend reportedly found themselves in a standoff with Russian forces trying to gain access to key oil fields in northeastern Syria.
The Saturday standoff — first reported by Turkish media outlets, citing unnamed local officials in the Turkey-Syria border region — seems to have ended without any shots being fired or any real risk of violence between the two sides. American military personnel reportedly stopped a Russian convoy near the town of Rmelan, and the Russian forces then apparently turned back and returned to their home base.
Still, the near-clash serves as a reminder of the high stakes in Syria, where the U.S. military’s mission involves guarding oil fields and preventing them from falling into the hands of the Islamic State, Russian forces and other actors.
What Does China Plan to Do With Its New Assault Ship?
Key point: The Type 075 LHD will allow Beijing to land its Marines on hostile shores and to send in helicopters to back them up. The U.S. Navy has many such ships and China is looking to copy those capabilities.
A Chinese shipyard has begun assembling the People’s Liberation Army Navy’s first big-deck amphibious assault ship, or “LHD” in U.S. Navy parlance.
The incomplete hull of the first Type 075 LHD apparently is visible in June 2019 commercial satellite images of the Hudong–Zhonghua shipyard in Shanghai.
LHDs, which combine the functions of helicopter carriers and transport docks, can deploy landing craft, hovercraft, helicopters and vertical-launching fighters while also transporting hundreds of soldiers or marines.
The U.S. Navy possesses nine Wasp- and America-class LHDs and is building several more. In U.S. service, LHDs not only form the core of amphibious groups, they also can embark large numbers of AV-8B or F-35B jump jets in order to double as light aircraft carriers.
China lacks a jump jet, so the country for now doesn’t have the option of deploying LHDs as carriers. But LHDs in Chinese service could help the PLAN assert Beijing’s claims to disputed China Seas territories as well as join smaller Type 071 assault ships in any Chinese assault on Taiwan.
