Jail Time: We are starting to hear conversations and see op-eds written about the idea that if the Russia investigation was nothing more than a political hoax to actually be an “insurance” policy to overturn a Presidential election, that the perpetrators should go to jail.
I agree.
I think this makes sense. The country has endured a never before crisis of confidence and the closest turn of events that teetered on becoming a constitutional crisis. Using the power of law enforcement and our intelligence services, whose justice should be “blind” to politics, is critical to Americans trusting our system which is based on the rule of law. If this was just a partisan, political maneuver by some arrogants partisan bureaucracy in the so called “deep state”, basic principles of due process and faines require these individuals are punished and an example of justice should be severe to make sure this never happens again.
Irony of Ironies from the Washington Post: A classic piece in the Washington Post rhetorically asking “Can Republicans relearn how to accept political outcomes they don’t like?”. Oh my!?! (check it out below)
So just replace Clinton with Bevin, Trump with Beshear, the Presidential race with the Kentucky Governor’s race…and you can change the headline to read Can Democrats relearn how to accept political outcomes they don’t like?
After nearly three years of resist, impeach and political Soviet style show “trials”, you have a classic article written by the mainstream media that just reeks of irony. No wonder the average American doesn’t trust the mainstream news media anymore.
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Trump’s well-oiled campaign has everything planned — except Trump
Trump’s team likes to say his campaign never ended. Field offices have been kept open in critical battleground states since 2015. The reelection bid started in earnest in February 2018, when Kushner tapped Parscale as campaign manager.
Kushner believes that early start laid a foundation for the fundraising and data advantages the campaign enjoys, as a dozen Democratic candidates expend resources battling over their party’s nomination.
Trump has kept a focus on his reelection throughout the entirety of his presidency, and Kushner has served as an intermediary between the White House and the campaign on daily operational matters. Thematic political choices go through the president, but issues related to budgeting, vendor choices, digital projects and major campaign hires go through his son-in-law.
While Kushner sits in the West Wing, Trump’s full-time campaign staff has settled into their headquarters in northern Virginia.
Trump is taking full advantage of incumbency, refueling for a race campaign aides believe will be framed on the front end of the general election — the period immediately after the national conventions — when the two nominees will seek to define each other. That’s where the money comes in.
‘Coup Has Started,’ Claimed Whistleblower’s Lawyer in January 2017, ‘Impeachment Will Follow’
Ten days after President Trump was inaugurated, Mark Zaid, the attorney for the whistleblower who sparked the current impeachment inquiry, said in a tweet that a “coup has started” and that “impeachment will follow ultimately,” Gregg Re of Fox News reported on Wednesday.
This was not the only time Zaid hinted that a plot to overthrow Trump was in progress.
In May 2017, he tweeted, “Johnson (1868), Nixon (1973), Clinton (1998) impeachment hearings. Next up @realDonaldTrump (2017).”
Impeachment Is Going Poorly For Democrats And The Media
Impeachment is going so poorly for the media and other Democrats that “Meet The Press” host Chuck Todd was forced to broadcast false information to support it.
A graphic was posted on Sunday’s show that purported to identify how many people in the president’s party voted in support of an impeachment inquiry in the cases of Presidents Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. It accurately noted that 31 Democrats voted in favor of impeachment proceedings for Clinton. But it inaccurately claimed that a single Republican had voted in favor of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s impeachment rules last week.
There are multiple problems with this graphic. For one thing, zero Republicans voted with House Democrats last week. Zero point zero. Zilch. Nada. None. For another, Todd’s team is hiding the bipartisan nature of the opposition to the vote last week. Not only did not a single Republican vote with Democrats, two Democrats voted with Republicans in opposition.
Todd knows that no Republicans voted for impeachment, despite the graphic he put up on national television. In fact, he said during the show, “I have one with an asterisk here. I don’t know what you do with Justin Amash. It’s not a zero. At the same time, he’s not a Republican anymore.”
I know what you do with that, Chuck. You don’t lie and call him a Republican. Todd himself gave Amash national media attention for leaving the Republican Party in dramatic fashion, interviewing him two weeks prior. In the first six seconds of the interview, he noted twice that Amash was not a Republican.
The Clinton Impeachment Was Fair
Tensions ran high 20 years ago as we stood in the well of the Senate before Chief Justice William Rehnquist, all 100 senators and the nation. As House impeachment managers, we presented our case against President Clinton. We were somber but confident, knowing that we had afforded Mr. Clinton every due-process right to defend himself.
Now we find ourselves on the verge of another presidential impeachment. But this time the process is so fundamentally unfair that justice cannot be served. For the past two months, House Democrats, led by Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, have conducted a sham investigation with predetermined conclusions. It will do unthinkable damage to the credibility of the House and to the nation.
Since President Trump took the oath of office, Mr. Schiff has led a quest to overturn the 2016 election. We have both worked with Mr. Schiff on the Judiciary Committee, and one of us (Mr. Sensenbrenner) has managed two judicial impeachments (of Samuel B. Kent and G. Thomas Porteous Jr. ) alongside him. While in those cases he was fair and reasonable, here he has let his blind hatred of the president poison his conduct and destroy his credibility.
The Last Trusted Prosecutor in Washington
John Durham is the legendary lawman digging into how the intelligence probe of Donald Trump started.
John Durham may be the most consequential and least known figure in Washington right now.
In May, U.S. attorney general William Barr selected Durham, a longtime prosecutor with a résumé so sterling it nearly glows, to investigate the origins of the special counsel’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election, and whether it was properly predicated. Some Trump fans believe there was a vast effort by a “deep state” of high-ranking intelligence and law-enforcement officials to smear Trump or hinder his campaign by creating a perception of corrupt ties to Russia. In late October, the New York Times quoted unnamed sources who said that Durham’s probe had officially become a criminal investigation, meaning he now has the power to subpoena for witness testimony and documents, to convene a grand jury, and to file criminal charges.
Since he is an attorney general appointed by President Trump, almost every decision from William Barr is criticized by Democrats as a partisan abuse of law-enforcement powers. But the appointment of Durham received no backlash, and in fact received praise far and wide.
Who is Durham, this rare-as-a-unicorn figure who can reassure lawmakers, talking heads, and court-watchers on both sides of the aisle, in an era when everything seems destined to turn into a loud partisan food fight?
Trump, the phone call, and consciousness of guilt
In short, Trump appears to be making no effort to conceal what he said to Zelensky, be it about his belief that other countries should bear more of the burden of foreign aid or what he wanted Ukraine to investigate about the 2016 election and about former Vice President Joe Biden and son Hunter Biden.
So what to make of a situation in which one side says the call is a smoking gun, while the other screams READ THE TRANSCRIPT?
“Look at the circumstantial evidence surrounding this,” former independent counsel Kenneth Starr said in a recent interview. “[Did Trump say] Bring him in, bring him in here, and I want to talk to him privately?”
No. Instead, Starr explained, Trump chose a phone call, rather than a one-on-one meeting, to make his points with Zelensky. Remember when the president was accused of being secretive in a one-on-one conversation with Vladimir Putin with no one other than translators within earshot? This wasn’t that.
“There were 17 people on the phone, including the Secretary of State,” Starr continued. “The president was so, shall I say, open and transparent about it that that goes to his intent. There’s no corrupt bargain, or an attempt to achieve a corrupt bargain, as I see it.”
IRONY ALERT!!! Can Republicans relearn how to accept political outcomes they don’t like?
The most important question is: If he’s back at Mar-a-Lago furiously tweeting about how much he was wronged, will anyone care? Or will he succeed in leading his voters to refuse to accept that the election was proper simply because they didn’t like it?
Some of those supporters certainly won’t accept it. They’ve been trained by Trump and other Republicans over and over to reject anything that challenges their faith in Trump’s godlike perfection. Newspaper reports behind-the-scenes chaos in the White House? It’s “fake news.”
Poll says Trump’s approval rating is down? They just made the numbers up. As Trump told supporters last July, “Just remember, what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” They’ve had years of practice constructing a mental world made up only of “facts” that support their existing views. But the new president will take office whether they like it or not. They can take to the streets in their MAGA hats and shout that they’ll never concede that the Democrat is actually president, but that won’t stop the inauguration from taking place. And then what?
Trump could be the most honest president in modern history
Donald Trump may be remembered as the most honest president in modern American history.
Don’t get me wrong, Trump lies all the time. He said that he “enacted the biggest tax cuts and reforms in American history” (actually they are the eighth largest) and that “our economy is the strongest it’s ever been in the history of our country” (which may one day be true, but not yet). In part, it’s a New York thing — everything is the biggest and the best.
But when it comes to the real barometer of presidential truthfulness — keeping his promises — Trump is a paragon of honesty. For better or worse, since taking office Trump has done exactly what he promised he would.
Trump kept his promise to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, something his three immediate predecessors also promised yet failed to do. He promised to “crush and destroy ISIS,” and two years later he is on the verge of eliminating the Islamic State’s physical caliphate. He promised to impose a travel ban on countries that he saw as posing a terrorist threat, and after several false starts the final version of his ban was upheld by the Supreme Court. He promised to punish Syria if it used chemical weapons on its people, and, unlike his immediate predecessor, he followed through — not once but twice.
Britain’s Top Commander: We Are At “War Every Day” with Russia
There has been no formal declaration of war. No rockets landing on London or submarines sinking British ships.
But Britain’s top military commander says Britain is at “at war every day” with Russia and other nations.
The weapons aren’t explosive but digital, the battlefield cyberspace instead of mud. But to General Sir Nick Carter, Chief of Defense Staff, the distinction has come obsolete.
“The changing character of warfare has exposed the distinctions that don’t exist any longer between peace and war,”Carter said during a speech at the Cliveden Literary conference. “I feel I am now at war, but it’s not a war in the way we would have defined it in the past. And that is because great power competition and the battle of ideas with non-state actors is threatening us on a daily basis.”
The Norwegian Secret To Enjoying A Long Winter
As the days get darker and colder in much of the northern hemisphere, it’s easy to indulge in gloom. For the next few months, you’ll be shivering. You’ll be battling foul weather. Thanks to daylight saving time there will be no chance to see the sun after work.
The gloom leads to a common question: What can I do to cope with the dark and cold?
If you truly want to be happy during winter, though, this is the wrong approach to the season. Changing your mindset can do more than distracting yourself from the weather.
That’s the takeaway from research done by Kari Leibowitz, currently a PhD student at Stanford University, who spent August 2014 to June 2015 on a Fulbright scholarship in Tromsø in northern Norway. Tromsø is so far north that from late November to late January, the sun never climbs above the horizon. Leibowitz went to study the residents’ overall mental health, because rates of seasonal depression were lower than one might expect.
How States Like Virginia Go Blue
Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin sent a letter to the intelligence community inspector general Wednesday demanding the government watchdog agency confirm investigations into highly classified leaks.
The letter, addressed to ICIG Michael Atkinson, calls out the inspector general for refusing to acknowledge whether there were any investigations into numerous leaks spilling from U.S. intelligence agencies.
“As we have made clear in previous letters to you, since President Donald Trump’s election there have been a number of leaks of highly sensitive information,” the senators wrote. “These leaks are seemingly perpetrated to achieve partisan political ends at the expense of national security.”
