“Biden’s campaign likely coming to an end — thanks to Clinton-linked Ukraine bombshell, Nunes says”
“California Rep. Devin Nunes predicted on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that Joe Biden’s campaign is likely coming to an end — all because of newly resurfaced reports about his possible misconduct in Ukraine that “first originated back when Hillary Clinton was trying to make sure Biden didn’t get in the race.”
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee made the claim as The Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll showed Sen. Elizabeth Warren surging ahead of Biden as the first choice of 22 percent of the voters surveyed, while Biden was the first choice of 20 percent of the voters. Biden held a 9-point lead over Warren in the poll as recently as June.
Nunes, speaking to anchor Maria Bartiromo, said a whistleblower’s allegation that President Trump had acted inappropriately during a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will ultimately backfire, and shine a light on Biden’s own possible misconduct. CNN later acknowledged that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the call, and a top Ukrainian official on Saturday defended Trump’s actions.”
————-
And right on cue…..
Joe Biden brags about how he threatened to pull $1 billion in loan guarantees from Ukraine if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin.
The prosecutor, who was fired, was leading a corruption investigation into a company that employed Biden's son, Hunter pic.twitter.com/xZd3vIMbuL
“Joe Biden and Ukraine is “Hillary’s Emails” all over again
The more the media and Democrats attack Trump while trying to protect Biden from scrutiny of his family dealings abroad, the more the media focuses attention on Biden and raises the same sort of questions that turned Hillary Clinton’s campaign into a campaign about her emails.”
“We are in the middle of a media feeding frenzy over a supposed intelligence community whistleblower complaint on Trump’s conversation last summer with the Ukrainian president.
We know almost nothing about the complaint or the conversation, but that has not stopped a full-blown “we’ve got him now!” type joyfulness throughout the mainstream media and Never-Trump-land.
Lack of actual facts has not stopped Democrat candidates and various pundits from declaring that this is further ground for impeachment.
The initial claim was that Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine if it didn’t investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, while Joe was Vice President. Then the story changed, and maybe there wasn’t a quid pro quo, and maybe the whistleblower never actually heard the conversation. And so on and so on, a classic case of how the media tries and convicts Trump based on anonymous, shifting, and usually misinformed leaks.
The foreign minister of Ukraine is now on record that there was no pressure put on the Ukrainian president in the conversation.
We’ve been here, done that, dozens of times. Is this time different? Will they “get” Trump on this? As with the Russia Collusion claims, I’ll take it seriously when there is actual evidence. Until then, it’s just politically driven mischief masquerading as news.
As an aside, there is a pernicious effect to leaking conversations a U.S. president has with the leaders of foreign countries, something that has plagued Trump since the start of his administration. But that’s a post for another time.
There is an important story here that may take down a candidate. That candidate isn’t Donald Trump, it’s Joe Biden.”
Joe Biden gets fired up when Fox News' Peter Doocy asks him how many times he discussed overseas business dealings with Hunter, insisting that he's "never spoken" with his son about that before demanding that Doocy "ask the right questions" as it relates to Trump. pic.twitter.com/UU78mddkxC
“US Embassy pressed Ukraine to drop probe of George Soros group during 2016 election”
“While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC).
The focus on AntAC — whose youthful street activists famously wore “Ukraine @#$% Corruption” T-shirts — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted.
The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, where the Obama administration took the rare step of trying to press the Ukrainian government to back off its investigation of both the U.S. aid and the group.
“The investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center (sic), based on the assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced,” then-embassy Charge d’ Affaires George Kent wrote the prosecutor’s office in April 2016 in a letter that also argued U.S. officials had no concerns about how the U.S. aid had been spent.
At the time, the nation’s prosecutor general had just been fired, under pressure from the United States, and a permanent replacement had not been named.
A few months later, Yuri Lutsenko, widely regarded as a hero in the West for spending two years in prison after fighting Russian aggression in his country, was named prosecutor general and invited to meet new U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
Lutsenko told me he was stunned when the ambassador “gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute.” The list included a founder of the AntAC group and two members of Parliament who vocally supported the group’s anti-corruption reform agenda, according to a source directly familiar with the meeting.
It turns out the group that Ukrainian law enforcement was probing was co-funded by the Obama administration and liberal mega-donor George Soros. And it was collaborating with the FBI agents investigating then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business activities with pro-Russian figures in Ukraine.
The implied message to Ukraine’s prosecutors was clear: Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an America presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.
“We ran right into a buzzsaw and we got bloodied,” a senior Ukrainian official told me.”
“At a 2017 briefing, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said:
If you’re looking for an example of a campaign coordinating with a foreign country or a foreign source, look no further than the DNC, who actually coordinated opposition research with the Ukrainian Embassy.
Very few people believed her.
For three years, Democrats and the mainstream media have flooded the airwaves with stories about President Trump’s collusion with Russia or his attempts to obstruct the investigation. There were a few voices, very few, who began pointing out the real foreign collusion that occurred throughout 2016. Fox News’ Dan Bongino and The Hill’s John Solomon were two of the earliest to recognize the coordination between corrupt pro-Hillary Clinton Ukrainians and the Democratic National Committee. Although Clinton lost the election, the effects of their interference can still be felt today. Especially for Paul Manafort.
To gain a better understanding of what happened, it’s helpful to know the backstory. No one does a better job of this than writer/commentator Dan Bongino in his book “Spygate.” If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. But I will include relevant excerpts.
A pro-Western Ukrainian lawyer and activist named Alexandra Chalupa stands at the center of this story. She hated Manafort for his role in the re-election of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010 and his subsequent work for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine.
In early 2016, Manafort reached out to Trump and soon became the chairman of his campaign. Bongino wrote that “due to Manafort’s connections to Russian billionaires and Ukrainian politicians close to Putin, his hiring by Trump fueled whispered speculation that Russian forces controlled the campaign.”
Bongino added that “allegations of Trump-Russia collusion started to gain steam” once Manafort joined the team and that much of this narrative was driven by Alexandra Chalupa.
Chalupa had worked as a consultant for the DNC and for Democratic politicians including several Clinton campaign officials. Between 2004 and 2016, she had earned $412,000 from the DNC, but left to focus on researching or rather “destroying” Manafort. Chalupa had “watched him since 2014.””
“Now that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is somehow legitimately in contention for the nomination, I suppose we should get more familiar with the policies she’s planning on implementing should this train wreck of a candidate end up in the Oval Office. One area of immediate concern is her antipathy toward capitalism in general and how she plans on making sure employers are “responsible stewards of their communities.” (You might want to make sure you’re sitting down for this one.)
Elizabeth Bauer at Forbes has an informative deep dive into a couple of Warren’s policies that will not only have a dramatic effect on employers but on your personal retirement plans as well. It mostly revolves around her grand scheme known as “Accountable Capitalism.” Let’s see how that’s supposed to work.
It’s a proposal that’s a repeat of legislation she proposed in 2018, the “Accountable Capitalism Act,” which, as it happens, I dug into at the time on another platform. The most nebulous part of the proposal is the notion that large corporations would be obliged to pursue the “best interests” of a long list of entities, not merely shareholders but also employees, suppliers, customers, the local communities where the companies locations are based, and others, with the fundamental premise that such a corporation “shall have the purpose of creating a general public benefit.”
But however much writers such as Kevin D. Williamson decried this as “the wholesale expropriation of private enterprise in the United States” this all appears to be aspirational and symbolic, without any enforcement mechanism included in the legislation, or administrative agency named to ensure the corporation is indeed “creating a public benefit.”
The first thing you might notice, as Bauer points out, is that this anti-capitalist notion of mandating companies to create a “public benefit” is rather toothless on the surface. If there is no enforcement mechanism or punishment for companies that fail to comply, perhaps the damage will be minimized. Also, how does a hypothetical Warren administration plan to define what constitutes a public benefit and how much will each corporation have to spend on that effort? It all sounds more like leftist word salad than any sort of public policy.
But when you look deeper, some aspects of this plan definitely would have a very real impact on taxpayers. Buried in that proposal is a plan to force all corporations with more than $1 billion in revenue to staff up at least 40% of their board of directors with representatives elected by the employees. Traditionally, board members are major stockholders and their focus is on maximizing corporate revenue to deliver the best return on investment for shareholders.
Under this new scheme, the board could look into more esoteric aspects of corporate policy and stop worrying quite so much about pesky details like making a profit. As the article notes, Germany already has laws along these same lines and it’s resulted in slower growth and lower stock prices. One estimate suggests that share prices at affected American companies could fall by as much as 25%.
So how would that impact your average voter? As it turns out, somewhere between 37 and 50 percent of US stocks are held by retirement investment accounts. You know… the people who manage your 401K accounts? If the companies take a 25% hit, so does your retirement nest egg. On top of that, companies making less profit tend to lay people off rather than hiring more. Sounds like Warren has a real recipe for success here. Oh, sorry… I meant to say disaster.”
3 public schools in San Francisco took kids as young as 5 to march in a “Close The Camps” leftist protest. Kids had been taught @realDonaldTrump is a racist that hates immigrants, prepared protest signs at school & had scripts of anti-Trump chants! WATCH NOW! 👀 pic.twitter.com/wEiHNXoR7T
“Some Of Our Senators Have A Lot Of Money Invested In Companies They Oversee”
“Well, it’s really not just some of our Senators. It’s more than half of them. Some fine investigative work by Sludge in partnership with the Guardian has produced a deep dive into the investment portfolios of United States Senators and their spouses, finding troubling alignments between the companies they are profiting from and the ones they are charged with overseeing. Does that sound like it should be illegal to you? Would you be terribly shocked if I told you it wasn’t? (insider.com)
Fifty-one US senators and their spouses have up to $96 million invested in corporate stocks, raising conflict of interest concerns because many of them could pass laws that help those businesses and thus enrich themselves.
An analysis by Sludge and the Guardian — a deep dive you can check out here— looked at the senators’ disclosed stakes totaling $28 million to $96 million across finance, defense, health, communications and electronics, and energy and natural resources companies.
Members of Congress aren’t legally barred from owning stock in companies they oversee, but having a vested interest in their success could affect their impartiality and willingness to pass laws that hurt those businesses.
This is not a red problem or a blue problem. It’s a bipartisan green problem that spreads across both sides of the aisle. Alabama Republican Senator Sen. Richard Shelby comes in near the top of the pack (or should that be bottom?) with somewhere between one and five million dollars worth of stock in private real estate insurance firm Tuscaloosa Title Company. Shelby sits on both the Senate housing and insurance subcommittees, so he’s responsible for oversight of that industry and his decisions have a direct impact on that company’s fortunes.
Quite a few members of the Senate Banking Committee hold stocks in the financial sector. The report lists Doug Jones (D-AL), John Kennedy (R-LA), and Robert Menendez (D-NJ).in that category. Really? Bob Menendez has this sort of potentially profitable conflict of interest? Who could have seen that one coming?
What’s rather ironic in this story is that some of these Senators are the same ones that have been very keen on investigating President Trump’s business holdings to make sure that he’s not profiting from being in office. Of course, that’s a proper question to raise because of the emoluments clause if we’re talking about foreign holdings or cash. But we don’t seem to have a specific rule preventing the members of Congress from holding investments in the same industries they hold regulatory power over.”
Being a Democrat means the NY Times will always carry your water for you.
Two men died in the home of Ed Buck, a small-time Democratic donor and political activist. Now federal prosecutors say they have detailed a disturbing pattern in which he exchanged drugs and money for sexual favors, citing at least 11 victims. https://t.co/5d1utUPzPFpic.twitter.com/zcoSyUbfQI
“Anyone with even a vague sense of who Buck is knew the idea that he was a “small-time” donor was ludicrous. A quick search of the Open Secrets database shows Buck has donated at least $100,000 to Democrat candidates and groups over the past decade. A Fox News review of federal records showed that “Buck also contributed more than $500,000 to Democratic groups, including $1,500 to the Obama presidential campaign and $2,950 to the Hillary Clinton campaign.”
The Times’ tweet was not an error outside of the article behind it. The article, written by four reporters, called Buck “a small-time Democratic donor and political activist” in its lede.
The reporters do not address Buck’s donations until the end of the article, where it again claimed he “was not a major Democratic donor, but he handed out tens of thousands of dollars to California Democrats.”
More head busting is necessary. It’s the only way they’ll learn.
After the “climate strike” march ended, masked antifa amassed at a park near the Portland ICE facility. They began to throw rocks and projectiles at police officers. pic.twitter.com/UHJNCYHlWZ
After the "climate strike" protest in Portland yesterday, around 50 masked antifa militants descended near the local ICE facility. They threw projectiles and rocks at officers. This is what happened when (federal, not local) police initiated an arrest. https://t.co/lxM8TglxNNpic.twitter.com/nsyxhMWZUM
“The media has spent the last week reporting on a whistleblower complaint against a conversation President Donald Trump had with a foreign leader. We don’t know the exact details of the complaint, but reports have centered around a call with the president of Ukraine.
Despite this focus on allegedly terrible news for Trump’s presidency, the Republican National Committee highlighted multiple news stories favoring Trump’s re-election that flew under the radar.
CNN sent a reporter to “Democratic strongholds” in Minnesota and learned that more and more residents have found themselves aligning with Trump. “Folks here say they didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” CNN’s Martin Savidge reported, “the party left them.” Much of the reason Trump has earned their trust is his support for mining.
Trump’s re-election campaign also appears hopeful for their chances in New Mexico. Campaign Manager Brad Parscale tweeted last Tuesday that more than 45,000 people registered for the president’s rally in New Mexico, 94% of whom were from the state. He also revealed that 48% of the attendees were women, and 40% were Latino.
The campaign is actively seeking to court New Mexico in 2020. Trump lost the state by 8 points to Hillary Clinton in 2016, yet campaign officials and some political analysts believes it’s in play for 2020. Rhiannon Samuel, director of the nonpartisan group Viante New Mexico, told a local news outlet last week that she would argue New Mexico is in play for Trump, adding that it “has been known to be a bellwether state.”
The RNC raised more than $23 million in August, The Daily Wire’s Molly Prince reported Saturday. They currently has 6.5 times as much cash-on-hand than the Democratic National Committee. The RNC has said it can use its additional cash to expand Trump’s re-election bid to states like Minnesota, New Mexico, and others.
The problem for Democrats, outside of reduced resources, is the implication that they have lost touch with the American people, just as CNN reported from Minnesota. McClatchy reported last week that swing-district Democrats are alienating large swaths of the population:”
“It’s our choice.
Here is a news lead that begins with a bang and ends with a whimper: “The strike on the heartland of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including damage to the world’s biggest petroleum-processing facility, has driven oil prices to their highest level in” — here, Reuters should have used some ellipses of irony — “nearly four months.”
Four months!
If the United States declines to go to war against Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia, our increasingly troublesome client state, one of the reasons for that happy development will be: because we do not need to. It is no longer the case that the world sneezes when the Saudis catch a cold. U.S. interests and Saudi interests remain aligned, broadly, but they are severable.
The high-tech method of mining shale formations for oil and gas colloquially known as “fracking” — though hydraulic fracturing is only a part of it — has been a game-changer for more than one game. While countries such as Germany set headline-grabbing, politics-driven carbon-reduction targets only to woefully fail to achieve them (it is very difficult to greenwash 170 million tons of brown coal), the United States has been relatively successful on that front, reducing energy-related carbon emissions by 14 percent from 2005 to 2017, thanks to natural gas; put another way, fracking has helped the United States to what climate activists ought to consider one of its greatest environmental victories.
When the United States intensified its attention to the Middle East in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the country was heavily dependent on petroleum imports. Today, the United States is the world’s largest exporter of petroleum — thanks to fracking. The pointy-headed guys in the Washington war rooms spend a lot less time worrying about whether tankers can get through the Strait of Hormuz these days. And that means the United States has a much more free hand — and more realistic options — when dealing with Riyadh, Tehran, or any of the other pits of vipers that pass for national capitals in that part of the world.
“No war for oil!” they chanted when George W. Bush’s administration prepared to invade Iraq. It was always a stupid slogan — if we’d wanted to get our hands on that Iraqi oil, we could simply have bought it at a discount rather than pay a horrifying blood premium for it — but now that chant can reasonably be turned back on its authors: If you want less war, then you should want a lot more fracking.”
I often do not agree with the writings of Max Boot or Jennifer Rubin as I think both are about as liberal as Trump, just in different ways. In the old days Boot and Rubin would have been Henry Jackson Democrats. DJ and Chas will remember that group. McGovern drove the Jackson Democrats out of the Democrat Party. Now Trump has made them Democrats again.
Nevertheless, Boot’s column in the Washington Post is the best explanation of the Ukraine matter.
I am really starting to feel sorry for Pelosi. She knows that she is really like a 2nd grade teacher, presiding over a nation of people who can’t understand obstruction of justice and can’t begin to understand what Trump did wrong with Ukraine. However, circumstances are forcing Pelosi to attempt to teach a high school government course to a nation of 7 year olds. I wish her luck. It is not going to help that she will have AOC as a teaching assistant while people like Devin Nunes hurl food at the walls.
Most Americans can not define obstruction of justice or collusion. Most (and this one is not an indictment of the people) have no idea where to find good, objective news. If you doubt those conclusions, look who won the last three presidential elections. If you are still in doubt, look who got the most votes in the last three presidential elections.
Nevertheless, Pelosi needs to “make a record”. This is done in a trial, for example a guardianship hearing, when both lawyers know the outcome of the case. The lawyer for the side destined to lose still brings in a court reporter and requires the other lawyer to prove his winning case on the record. Then the lawyer makes the best arguments and produces any available evidence for his client who is destined to lose. This is done, in part, so that years later any party can see that the lawyer for the losing side did his job.
Years from now, historians will look back at this moment. Trump deserves to be impeached much more than did Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. If Pelosi protects Trump from impeachment she will have failed to do her job, regardless of what we know the Senate might do in the trial. She is a political animal, but I think she is beginning to understand the historic nature of her decision.
As a politician, she also needs to put all the Senators on the record. Their vote in an impeachment trial would be a defining vote in their careers.
Clueless Democrats and Never-Trumpers? The NY Slimes?
Big deal.
I can’t believe you’d even post that Ricky, given all the evidence points to exactly the opposite conclusion. But then again, you’re all in, totally invested now, huh?
Oh well. Eventually you’ll tire of being wrong constantly.
9:40 By the way, Trump’s recent dealings with Ukraine are not examples of collusion. They are examples of extortion and a particularly nasty type of extortion at that. He withheld needed (and Congressionally approved) aid from an ally while pressuring the ally to take action against his most likely political opponent.
It is bad, bad stuff. But no, I don’t think most Americans will be able to understand it, and that is why Pelosi hesitates. She knows her 7 year olds. She herself has been conning them and pandering to them for over 40 years.
Have you considered writing for The Babylon Bee or The Onion?
‘Cuz that has to be a satire of a parody you wrote there.
No crime has been proven, no evidence has been shown that even justifies their baseless allegations, it’s all anonymous trash from an anon source, and yet he’s guiltier than the men already convicted and impeached?
I’m glad you’re not Trump’s lawyer. You don’t seem very good at this at all.
Yeah, except everyone admits there was no quid pro quo, so no crime, no money was withheld, except for a brief review audit which is SOP, the foreign leader in question says there was no pressure, and yet you keep harping on about it.
Biden did what you allege. Trump did not. You’re getting delusional now. And desperate.
When I asked him about it, Hunter Biden told me that he had been given the diamond by the Chinese energy tycoon Ye Jianming, who was trying to make connections in Washington among prominent Democrats and Republicans.https://t.co/X9dIKxkMcO
— Robert Faturechi (@RobertFaturechi) July 1, 2019
How the Experts Say We Should Fix Our Politics
SEPTEMBER 23, 2019 BY GENE VEITH
We keep discussing our political and governmental woes, but what do the experts say? The online political news site Politico has a feature in which dozens of experts from across the political spectrum are asked to give brief statements about what they think we should do to fix America’s problems.
Reading their prescriptions fills me with reassurance about our country at the knowledge that these experts are not in charge, making me realize that, by contrast, our messy democracy is not as bad after all.
Politico’s feature is entitled How to Fix Politics, with the explanatory deck, “Everyone agrees something is broken. Can we make it better? POLITICO Magazine asked dozens of big thinkers to tell us their boldest solutions to America’s problems.” …
… The “boldest solution” is to impose “A Voting System That Accounts for Ignorance”:
~ Here’s how it works. On Election Day, everyone (even children) gets to vote as an equal. But when they vote, they do three things. First, they tell us what they want (which party, candidate or position they support). Second, they tell us who they are (they give us their demographic information, such as sex, gender identity, income level, ethnicity and so on). Third, they take a quiz asking them basic political information, such as which party controls Congress, who their representative is, what the unemployment rate is and so on.
This quiz doesn’t determine who gets to vote and who doesn’t. No one gets excluded. Rather, once we have all three sets of data (what the people want, who they are and what they know), the data is anonymized and released to the public. We can then estimate, using basic and easily verifiable statistical methods, what a demographically identical public would have voted for if they had gotten a perfect score on the knowledge quiz. In other words, we can estimate what the public would have wanted, if only it were fully informed. ~
Wouldn’t that be a revival of the Jim Crow-era literacy tests? …
___________________________
Actually a noteworthy point. When the damaging Russia collusion hoax was perpetrated using selective leaks to push a false narrative, *many Republicans* fell for it or were too scared to stand up against it or display even slight skepticism. This time, just Romney. https://t.co/5Dpeph9iUr
“I’ve been working on this since back in May. So I can tell you this is just not a Russian hoax. This is a Ukrainian hoax, and it’s not even by a legitimate whistleblower.
… my sources are telling me that not only did he not give that money, Joe Biden, our taxpayer money until the prosecutor was fired, but he had a hand in saying who the second prosecutor was.
You know, there’s another person, Judge and I know that perhaps we’re not prepared to go here. But there was also a D.N.C. operative, Miss Chalupa that was paid in 2016 dollars to work with Ukraine. And you know what they said that she was doing, working on a women’s outreach in Ukraine.
Here is the interview:
Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina was interviewed by Judge Jeanine Pirro over the weekend, and he had a lot to say about Joe Biden and Ukraine. The former chair of the Freedom Caucus and member of the House Foreign Relations Committee has a lot of connections and made some excellent points in colorful language. The entire interview is embedded below, but consider these excerpts (transcript via Breitbart) as teasers and make up your mind if you want to invest 9 minutes of your time:
Can you imagine if the prosecutor in Ukraine, if his name was Bob Mueller, what would have happened[?]
I’ve been working on this since back in May. So I can tell you this is just not a Russian hoax. This is a Ukrainian hoax, and it’s not even by a legitimate whistleblower.
… my sources are telling me that not only did he not give that money, Joe Biden, our taxpayer money until the prosecutor was fired, but he had a hand in saying who the second prosecutor was.
You know, there’s another person, Judge and I know that perhaps we’re not prepared to go here. But there was also a D.N.C. operative, Miss Chalupa that was paid in 2016 dollars to work with Ukraine. And you know what they said that she was doing, working on a women’s outreach in Ukraine.”
“In 2016, candidate Trump implored a foreign power to interfere in the U.S. election on his behalf (‘Russia, if you’re listening…’)….”
Anybody who ever believed that’s what Donald Trump was doing making that comment should be kept away from sharp objects, computer keyboards, and impressionable young minds.
11:04 I’m only gone 5 hours to hike to a waterfall, and in the meantime Trump has:
A. Tied the withheld aid to the investigation of the Bidens; and
B. Said that Biden’s mythical crimes deserve “the electric chair”.
"why would you give money to a country that you think is corrupt"—seems like Trump is admitting that $$ to Ukraine was on the table during that call, in which he asked Zelensky to investigate Biden. https://t.co/qMeddr6p5G
This may be helpful to those trying to catch up on the facts.
"It’s like when you’re watching a horror movie and the psychopath is creeping up on some clueless dupe with a chainsaw and you scream, 'HE’S. RIGHT. BEHIND. YOU.' You know it’s going to turn out badly…but AGGH you want to try to help anyway."https://t.co/N8tnDVXcAH
This is all happening at the UN. It sort of reminds me of Nikita Khrushchev taking off his shoe and banging it on the table. Last year the other world leaders broke up laughing during Trump’s speech. This year they are already laughing in restaurants and hotels all over Midtown Manhattan.
SICK: Trump calls Biden “corrupt” and says he’d be getting the “electric chair” if he was a Republican.
REMINDER: Ukraine’s Prosecutor General says Biden did nothing wrong. Trump admits to pressuring Ukraine to investigate Biden while withholding aid. pic.twitter.com/mpuGsKrcDy
The stakes in the Presidential race seem to be quickly escalating.
GOP presidential candidate Bill Weld accused Trump of committing 'treason' and said death 'is the only penalty' for that crime https://t.co/tSPhrIGfTs via @businessinsider
As for North Korea's launch of several short range missiles, Pres Trump said he'd be discussing that with Pres Moon. @POTUS again said if he weren't president, US and North Korea would be at war. pic.twitter.com/SE0pweGhjc
Nunes claims to have explosive material to ruin Biden…..Nunes making over hyped claims. Yawn…what else is new.
Biden has a conflict of interest?? It better be good because the entire Trump presidency has been a conflict of interest. A president owning a hotel in Washington is a conflict of interest. Adult children of the president working in both the family business and in the govt is a conflict of interest. Any time the president visits his golf course is a conflict of interest. The term no longer has any meaning.
No. Some experts speculate that implementing parts of the German Rhine model will lower stocks and thus lower the value of a 401K.
The German Rhine model implemented by Americans as part of the Marshal Plan is responsible for one of the most stable successful world economies. Built on a reputation for high quality manufactured goods it has the second highest trade surplus with a huge export market. Yes it has a boring stable stock market with no speculative bubbles. Perhaps the 401k will have slower but safer growth. Interestingly Germans dont have to rely on their own individual pensions. The Rhine model ensures a comfortable retirement on a govt and company penson.
Perhsps the so called experts have an other worry; worker reps have been responsible for keeping CEO executive pay and bonuses far lower than the US. I wonder if the experts have a confkuct of interest…
One of AJ’s links called the Saudis a client state of the US. Realistically it might be the other way around. The US is an oil exporter. They don’t need Saudi oil. In fact these attacks raised the prices (and profits) of American oil exports. They should back the Houthi not protect the Saudis. Yet the US has sent troops….so who is the client state? Who runs this relationship?
Of course, Trump has no self interest here….only the Saudis own floors of his New York condos and Trump hotels are being builtin Saudi and the Emirates. No conflict of interest here.
Hello, HRW! My wife and I were really close to your country yesterday on our way to Many Glacier. This is pretty country. The mountains are very steep. Next visit, we will cross into Alberta.
I have no doubt Hunter Biden’s business interest in Ukraine is tainted with corruption. Inhale the air in Kiev and you are tainted with corruption. Ukraine is more corrupt than Pakistan. However, taking advantage of this corruption to hurt your political opponent back in the US is far worse.
Speaking of congressional corruption, the list of beneficiaries of Trump’s farmer bailout is quite long. Trump starts a trade war, bankrupts farmers and then approves bailout which benefits a long list of mostly Republican Congresspersons. Its almost if he used a cisis he created to pay off politicians to support him…..a bit of a stretch but money makes a lot of friends.
Its been a long time since Ive been there. I now have relatives in Montana and Alberta perhaps I should spend a summer there. You’d like Alberta…Canada’s version of Texas.
I think we would like Alberta. My wife is already lobbying for us to spend summers up here out of the Texas heat.
Kalispell is an interesting place. The downtown is vibrant and there are nice, safe, middle-class neighborhoods all around downtown. People leave their children’s toys and bicycles on their front porches.
We have met many Montanans from other parts of the state. I think you could have a fun summer here.
You wouldn’t know it from all the attention given to AOC and her group, but many of the freshman Democrats are moderates from formerly Republican districts. For these 7 freshmen, Trump’s Ukraine Extortion is a game-changer.
NEW. A significant development — Seven freshman Democrats, all of whom have national security experience, write in an op-ed for the @washingtonpost: These allegations are a threat to all we have sworn to protect https://t.co/C4jydserKe
Interesting to see how many Ds and liberal reporters are rusing to defend Obama from the charge he asked Putin to help his re-election. But that's precisely what O did. On missile defense, O asked for "space" until the election. That ask was an inappropriate request for help. https://t.co/t48sCivaF5
Maybe Pelosi and the Dems will wimp out. If they don’t, in all probability the Senate will acquit.
Mueller has given the Dems the blueprint for the 11 obstruction of justice charges. The Dems need to get the whistleblower’s complaint quickly. To insure that happens, they need to get the courts including the Supreme Court to move quickly as they did during Bush v Gore. That should be doable.
Then everyone needs to follow Amash’s advice. Will 20 Republican Senators listen to the evidence and vote to convict. Right now, that is very doubtful. But Pelosi needs to make a record and every Congressman needs to cast a vote on impeachment. If Trump is impeached, every Senator needs to cast a vote to convict or acquit.
“Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Just Put Another Bullet Into The Latest Trump “Scandal””
“Just how much can a story targeting Donald Trump implode? Apparently, this much.
If you are short on background, on Wednesday of last week, a story broke that a “whistle-blower” had filed a complaint against President Trump. The assertion was that Trump had threatened Ukraine’s newly elected president on a phone call over investigating Joe Biden. The threat supposedly involved $250 million in military aid. After a day of full blown meltdowns on the left and in the media, the impeachment train was stopped in its tracks when it was revealed Trump had in fact not threatened Ukraine, nor offered any kind of quid pro quo.
In the end, we are left with Biden admitting to extorting Ukraine on tape and Trump simply asking if it could be looked into. Worst scandal ever.
Now, Ukraine’s foreign minister, who has read the read out of the call, just dumped even more cold water on this story.”
““I know what the conversation was about and I think there was no pressure,” Prystaiko told Hromadske. “There was talk, conversations are different, leaders have the right to discuss any problems that exist. This conversation was long, friendly, and it touched on many questions, sometimes requiring serious answers.”
This is correct. Whether Democrats and the media want to admit it or not, presidents talk to foreign leaders. They inquire on many different things and it would certainly be in bounds to ask why a former VP is on tape admitting he extorted Ukraine’s former administration. There was no promise made or pressure applied here. How do I know? Because no investigation happened and the money ended up being released anyway. We are once again left arguing hypothetical nonsense, much like during the Mueller probe.”
President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.
Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had “concerns” and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent.
Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11.
I don’t think it really matters . . . whether the president explicitly told the Ukrainians that they wouldn’t get their security aid if they didn’t interfere in the 2020 elections,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “There is an implicit threat in every demand that a United States president makes of a foreign power. . . . That foreign country knows that if they don’t do it, there are likely to be consequences.”
Trump administration again pushes limits of authority in shielding whistleblower complaint from Congress
Trump on Monday repeated his denial of doing anything improper and insisted that his July 25 conversation with Zelensky was “a perfect phone call.” He also hinted that he may release a transcript of it.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said late Monday that the allegations were false. “But because the media wants this story to be true so badly, they’ll once again manufacture a frenzy and drive ignorant, fake stories to attack this president,” Gidley said.
It appears the Ukrainian leader came away from the discussion with a different impression. Murphy, who spoke with Zelensky during an early September visit to Ukraine, said Monday that the Ukrainian president “directly” expressed concerns at their meeting that “the aid that was being cut off to Ukraine by the president was a consequence” of his unwillingness to launch an investigation into the Bidens.
Wandering Views 
Buh-bye.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bidens-campaign-coming-to-an-end-thanks-to-ukraine-story-linked-to-hillary-clinton-nunes-says
“Biden’s campaign likely coming to an end — thanks to Clinton-linked Ukraine bombshell, Nunes says”
“California Rep. Devin Nunes predicted on Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” that Joe Biden’s campaign is likely coming to an end — all because of newly resurfaced reports about his possible misconduct in Ukraine that “first originated back when Hillary Clinton was trying to make sure Biden didn’t get in the race.”
The top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee made the claim as The Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll showed Sen. Elizabeth Warren surging ahead of Biden as the first choice of 22 percent of the voters surveyed, while Biden was the first choice of 20 percent of the voters. Biden held a 9-point lead over Warren in the poll as recently as June.
Nunes, speaking to anchor Maria Bartiromo, said a whistleblower’s allegation that President Trump had acted inappropriately during a July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will ultimately backfire, and shine a light on Biden’s own possible misconduct. CNN later acknowledged that the whistleblower had no first-hand knowledge of the call, and a top Ukrainian official on Saturday defended Trump’s actions.”
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And right on cue…..
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The backfire….
Stop me if you heard this one before…..
https://legalinsurrection.com/2019/09/joe-biden-and-ukraine-is-hillarys-emails-all-over-again/
“Joe Biden and Ukraine is “Hillary’s Emails” all over again
The more the media and Democrats attack Trump while trying to protect Biden from scrutiny of his family dealings abroad, the more the media focuses attention on Biden and raises the same sort of questions that turned Hillary Clinton’s campaign into a campaign about her emails.”
“We are in the middle of a media feeding frenzy over a supposed intelligence community whistleblower complaint on Trump’s conversation last summer with the Ukrainian president.
We know almost nothing about the complaint or the conversation, but that has not stopped a full-blown “we’ve got him now!” type joyfulness throughout the mainstream media and Never-Trump-land.
Lack of actual facts has not stopped Democrat candidates and various pundits from declaring that this is further ground for impeachment.
The initial claim was that Trump threatened to withhold aid to Ukraine if it didn’t investigate the business dealings of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, while Joe was Vice President. Then the story changed, and maybe there wasn’t a quid pro quo, and maybe the whistleblower never actually heard the conversation. And so on and so on, a classic case of how the media tries and convicts Trump based on anonymous, shifting, and usually misinformed leaks.
The foreign minister of Ukraine is now on record that there was no pressure put on the Ukrainian president in the conversation.
We’ve been here, done that, dozens of times. Is this time different? Will they “get” Trump on this? As with the Russia Collusion claims, I’ll take it seriously when there is actual evidence. Until then, it’s just politically driven mischief masquerading as news.
As an aside, there is a pernicious effect to leaking conversations a U.S. president has with the leaders of foreign countries, something that has plagued Trump since the start of his administration. But that’s a post for another time.
There is an important story here that may take down a candidate. That candidate isn’t Donald Trump, it’s Joe Biden.”
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Lather, rinse, repeat.
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The first he’d heard about it was in the press. 🙂
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https://twitter.com/dmartosko/status/1175447818900783104
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https://twitter.com/dmartosko/status/1175480222164160512
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And here’s a fun flashback for ya’.
This would be the Obama/Biden admin, doing exactly what they accuse Trump of without any facts like these to back it up…….
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/435906-us-embassy-pressed-ukraine-to-drop-probe-of-george-soros-group-during-2016
“US Embassy pressed Ukraine to drop probe of George Soros group during 2016 election”
“While the 2016 presidential race was raging in America, Ukrainian prosecutors ran into some unexpectedly strong headwinds as they pursued an investigation into the activities of a nonprofit in their homeland known as the Anti-Corruption Action Centre (AntAC).
The focus on AntAC — whose youthful street activists famously wore “Ukraine @#$% Corruption” T-shirts — was part of a larger probe by Ukraine’s Prosecutor General’s Office into whether $4.4 million in U.S. funds to fight corruption inside the former Soviet republic had been improperly diverted.
The prosecutors soon would learn the resistance they faced was blowing directly from the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, where the Obama administration took the rare step of trying to press the Ukrainian government to back off its investigation of both the U.S. aid and the group.
“The investigation into the Anti-Corruption Action Center (sic), based on the assistance they have received from us, is similarly misplaced,” then-embassy Charge d’ Affaires George Kent wrote the prosecutor’s office in April 2016 in a letter that also argued U.S. officials had no concerns about how the U.S. aid had been spent.
At the time, the nation’s prosecutor general had just been fired, under pressure from the United States, and a permanent replacement had not been named.
A few months later, Yuri Lutsenko, widely regarded as a hero in the West for spending two years in prison after fighting Russian aggression in his country, was named prosecutor general and invited to meet new U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch.
Lutsenko told me he was stunned when the ambassador “gave me a list of people whom we should not prosecute.” The list included a founder of the AntAC group and two members of Parliament who vocally supported the group’s anti-corruption reform agenda, according to a source directly familiar with the meeting.
It turns out the group that Ukrainian law enforcement was probing was co-funded by the Obama administration and liberal mega-donor George Soros. And it was collaborating with the FBI agents investigating then-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s business activities with pro-Russian figures in Ukraine.
The implied message to Ukraine’s prosecutors was clear: Don’t target AntAC in the middle of an America presidential election in which Soros was backing Hillary Clinton to succeed another Soros favorite, Barack Obama, Ukrainian officials said.
“We ran right into a buzzsaw and we got bloodied,” a senior Ukrainian official told me.”
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Hey look, we finally found some collusion, but it keeps coming from Democrats.
“The Real Foreign Collusion Occurred Between Pro-Clinton Ukrainians And The DNC”
https://www.redstate.com/elizabeth-vaughn/2019/09/22/real-foreign-collusion-occurred-pro-clinton-ukrainians-dnc/
“At a 2017 briefing, White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said:
If you’re looking for an example of a campaign coordinating with a foreign country or a foreign source, look no further than the DNC, who actually coordinated opposition research with the Ukrainian Embassy.
Very few people believed her.
For three years, Democrats and the mainstream media have flooded the airwaves with stories about President Trump’s collusion with Russia or his attempts to obstruct the investigation. There were a few voices, very few, who began pointing out the real foreign collusion that occurred throughout 2016. Fox News’ Dan Bongino and The Hill’s John Solomon were two of the earliest to recognize the coordination between corrupt pro-Hillary Clinton Ukrainians and the Democratic National Committee. Although Clinton lost the election, the effects of their interference can still be felt today. Especially for Paul Manafort.
To gain a better understanding of what happened, it’s helpful to know the backstory. No one does a better job of this than writer/commentator Dan Bongino in his book “Spygate.” If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. But I will include relevant excerpts.
A pro-Western Ukrainian lawyer and activist named Alexandra Chalupa stands at the center of this story. She hated Manafort for his role in the re-election of pro-Russian Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in 2010 and his subsequent work for the pro-Russian party in Ukraine.
In early 2016, Manafort reached out to Trump and soon became the chairman of his campaign. Bongino wrote that “due to Manafort’s connections to Russian billionaires and Ukrainian politicians close to Putin, his hiring by Trump fueled whispered speculation that Russian forces controlled the campaign.”
Bongino added that “allegations of Trump-Russia collusion started to gain steam” once Manafort joined the team and that much of this narrative was driven by Alexandra Chalupa.
Chalupa had worked as a consultant for the DNC and for Democratic politicians including several Clinton campaign officials. Between 2004 and 2016, she had earned $412,000 from the DNC, but left to focus on researching or rather “destroying” Manafort. Chalupa had “watched him since 2014.””
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Elizabeth Warren wants at your 401K.
https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2019/09/22/elizabeth-warrens-plan-slash-retirement-funds/
“Now that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren is somehow legitimately in contention for the nomination, I suppose we should get more familiar with the policies she’s planning on implementing should this train wreck of a candidate end up in the Oval Office. One area of immediate concern is her antipathy toward capitalism in general and how she plans on making sure employers are “responsible stewards of their communities.” (You might want to make sure you’re sitting down for this one.)
Elizabeth Bauer at Forbes has an informative deep dive into a couple of Warren’s policies that will not only have a dramatic effect on employers but on your personal retirement plans as well. It mostly revolves around her grand scheme known as “Accountable Capitalism.” Let’s see how that’s supposed to work.
It’s a proposal that’s a repeat of legislation she proposed in 2018, the “Accountable Capitalism Act,” which, as it happens, I dug into at the time on another platform. The most nebulous part of the proposal is the notion that large corporations would be obliged to pursue the “best interests” of a long list of entities, not merely shareholders but also employees, suppliers, customers, the local communities where the companies locations are based, and others, with the fundamental premise that such a corporation “shall have the purpose of creating a general public benefit.”
But however much writers such as Kevin D. Williamson decried this as “the wholesale expropriation of private enterprise in the United States” this all appears to be aspirational and symbolic, without any enforcement mechanism included in the legislation, or administrative agency named to ensure the corporation is indeed “creating a public benefit.”
The first thing you might notice, as Bauer points out, is that this anti-capitalist notion of mandating companies to create a “public benefit” is rather toothless on the surface. If there is no enforcement mechanism or punishment for companies that fail to comply, perhaps the damage will be minimized. Also, how does a hypothetical Warren administration plan to define what constitutes a public benefit and how much will each corporation have to spend on that effort? It all sounds more like leftist word salad than any sort of public policy.
But when you look deeper, some aspects of this plan definitely would have a very real impact on taxpayers. Buried in that proposal is a plan to force all corporations with more than $1 billion in revenue to staff up at least 40% of their board of directors with representatives elected by the employees. Traditionally, board members are major stockholders and their focus is on maximizing corporate revenue to deliver the best return on investment for shareholders.
Under this new scheme, the board could look into more esoteric aspects of corporate policy and stop worrying quite so much about pesky details like making a profit. As the article notes, Germany already has laws along these same lines and it’s resulted in slower growth and lower stock prices. One estimate suggests that share prices at affected American companies could fall by as much as 25%.
So how would that impact your average voter? As it turns out, somewhere between 37 and 50 percent of US stocks are held by retirement investment accounts. You know… the people who manage your 401K accounts? If the companies take a 25% hit, so does your retirement nest egg. On top of that, companies making less profit tend to lay people off rather than hiring more. Sounds like Warren has a real recipe for success here. Oh, sorry… I meant to say disaster.”
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Indoctrination, not education.
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This is why Congress is a joke. It’s all corrupt, both sides.
https://hotair.com/archives/jazz-shaw/2019/09/21/senators-lot-money-invested-companies-oversee/
“Some Of Our Senators Have A Lot Of Money Invested In Companies They Oversee”
“Well, it’s really not just some of our Senators. It’s more than half of them. Some fine investigative work by Sludge in partnership with the Guardian has produced a deep dive into the investment portfolios of United States Senators and their spouses, finding troubling alignments between the companies they are profiting from and the ones they are charged with overseeing. Does that sound like it should be illegal to you? Would you be terribly shocked if I told you it wasn’t? (insider.com)
Fifty-one US senators and their spouses have up to $96 million invested in corporate stocks, raising conflict of interest concerns because many of them could pass laws that help those businesses and thus enrich themselves.
An analysis by Sludge and the Guardian — a deep dive you can check out here— looked at the senators’ disclosed stakes totaling $28 million to $96 million across finance, defense, health, communications and electronics, and energy and natural resources companies.
Members of Congress aren’t legally barred from owning stock in companies they oversee, but having a vested interest in their success could affect their impartiality and willingness to pass laws that hurt those businesses.
This is not a red problem or a blue problem. It’s a bipartisan green problem that spreads across both sides of the aisle. Alabama Republican Senator Sen. Richard Shelby comes in near the top of the pack (or should that be bottom?) with somewhere between one and five million dollars worth of stock in private real estate insurance firm Tuscaloosa Title Company. Shelby sits on both the Senate housing and insurance subcommittees, so he’s responsible for oversight of that industry and his decisions have a direct impact on that company’s fortunes.
Quite a few members of the Senate Banking Committee hold stocks in the financial sector. The report lists Doug Jones (D-AL), John Kennedy (R-LA), and Robert Menendez (D-NJ).in that category. Really? Bob Menendez has this sort of potentially profitable conflict of interest? Who could have seen that one coming?
What’s rather ironic in this story is that some of these Senators are the same ones that have been very keen on investigating President Trump’s business holdings to make sure that he’s not profiting from being in office. Of course, that’s a proper question to raise because of the emoluments clause if we’re talking about foreign holdings or cash. But we don’t seem to have a specific rule preventing the members of Congress from holding investments in the same industries they hold regulatory power over.”
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Being a Democrat means the NY Times will always carry your water for you.
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Small-time you say?……
https://www.dailywire.com/news/52071/new-york-times-claims-ed-buck-was-small-time-ashe-schow
“Anyone with even a vague sense of who Buck is knew the idea that he was a “small-time” donor was ludicrous. A quick search of the Open Secrets database shows Buck has donated at least $100,000 to Democrat candidates and groups over the past decade. A Fox News review of federal records showed that “Buck also contributed more than $500,000 to Democratic groups, including $1,500 to the Obama presidential campaign and $2,950 to the Hillary Clinton campaign.”
The Times’ tweet was not an error outside of the article behind it. The article, written by four reporters, called Buck “a small-time Democratic donor and political activist” in its lede.
The reporters do not address Buck’s donations until the end of the article, where it again claimed he “was not a major Democratic donor, but he handed out tens of thousands of dollars to California Democrats.”
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More head busting is necessary. It’s the only way they’ll learn.
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More good news for Trump.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/52088/recent-reports-show-good-news-trump-re-election-ashe-schow
“The media has spent the last week reporting on a whistleblower complaint against a conversation President Donald Trump had with a foreign leader. We don’t know the exact details of the complaint, but reports have centered around a call with the president of Ukraine.
Despite this focus on allegedly terrible news for Trump’s presidency, the Republican National Committee highlighted multiple news stories favoring Trump’s re-election that flew under the radar.
CNN sent a reporter to “Democratic strongholds” in Minnesota and learned that more and more residents have found themselves aligning with Trump. “Folks here say they didn’t leave the Democratic Party,” CNN’s Martin Savidge reported, “the party left them.” Much of the reason Trump has earned their trust is his support for mining.
Trump’s re-election campaign also appears hopeful for their chances in New Mexico. Campaign Manager Brad Parscale tweeted last Tuesday that more than 45,000 people registered for the president’s rally in New Mexico, 94% of whom were from the state. He also revealed that 48% of the attendees were women, and 40% were Latino.
The campaign is actively seeking to court New Mexico in 2020. Trump lost the state by 8 points to Hillary Clinton in 2016, yet campaign officials and some political analysts believes it’s in play for 2020. Rhiannon Samuel, director of the nonpartisan group Viante New Mexico, told a local news outlet last week that she would argue New Mexico is in play for Trump, adding that it “has been known to be a bellwether state.”
The RNC raised more than $23 million in August, The Daily Wire’s Molly Prince reported Saturday. They currently has 6.5 times as much cash-on-hand than the Democratic National Committee. The RNC has said it can use its additional cash to expand Trump’s re-election bid to states like Minnesota, New Mexico, and others.
The problem for Democrats, outside of reduced resources, is the implication that they have lost touch with the American people, just as CNN reported from Minnesota. McClatchy reported last week that swing-district Democrats are alienating large swaths of the population:”
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The lady or the tiger?
You choose.
“More Fracking, or More War?”
https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/more-fracking-or-more-war/#slide-1
“It’s our choice.
Here is a news lead that begins with a bang and ends with a whimper: “The strike on the heartland of Saudi Arabia’s oil industry, including damage to the world’s biggest petroleum-processing facility, has driven oil prices to their highest level in” — here, Reuters should have used some ellipses of irony — “nearly four months.”
Four months!
If the United States declines to go to war against Iran on behalf of Saudi Arabia, our increasingly troublesome client state, one of the reasons for that happy development will be: because we do not need to. It is no longer the case that the world sneezes when the Saudis catch a cold. U.S. interests and Saudi interests remain aligned, broadly, but they are severable.
The high-tech method of mining shale formations for oil and gas colloquially known as “fracking” — though hydraulic fracturing is only a part of it — has been a game-changer for more than one game. While countries such as Germany set headline-grabbing, politics-driven carbon-reduction targets only to woefully fail to achieve them (it is very difficult to greenwash 170 million tons of brown coal), the United States has been relatively successful on that front, reducing energy-related carbon emissions by 14 percent from 2005 to 2017, thanks to natural gas; put another way, fracking has helped the United States to what climate activists ought to consider one of its greatest environmental victories.
When the United States intensified its attention to the Middle East in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the country was heavily dependent on petroleum imports. Today, the United States is the world’s largest exporter of petroleum — thanks to fracking. The pointy-headed guys in the Washington war rooms spend a lot less time worrying about whether tankers can get through the Strait of Hormuz these days. And that means the United States has a much more free hand — and more realistic options — when dealing with Riyadh, Tehran, or any of the other pits of vipers that pass for national capitals in that part of the world.
“No war for oil!” they chanted when George W. Bush’s administration prepared to invade Iraq. It was always a stupid slogan — if we’d wanted to get our hands on that Iraqi oil, we could simply have bought it at a discount rather than pay a horrifying blood premium for it — but now that chant can reasonably be turned back on its authors: If you want less war, then you should want a lot more fracking.”
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Meanwhile …
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Increasingly, Pelosi is seen as a coddler of Trump.
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Justin Amash explains the structural problem which predates Pelosi and Trump:
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I often do not agree with the writings of Max Boot or Jennifer Rubin as I think both are about as liberal as Trump, just in different ways. In the old days Boot and Rubin would have been Henry Jackson Democrats. DJ and Chas will remember that group. McGovern drove the Jackson Democrats out of the Democrat Party. Now Trump has made them Democrats again.
Nevertheless, Boot’s column in the Washington Post is the best explanation of the Ukraine matter.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/22/trumps-ukraine-gate-extortion/
I am really starting to feel sorry for Pelosi. She knows that she is really like a 2nd grade teacher, presiding over a nation of people who can’t understand obstruction of justice and can’t begin to understand what Trump did wrong with Ukraine. However, circumstances are forcing Pelosi to attempt to teach a high school government course to a nation of 7 year olds. I wish her luck. It is not going to help that she will have AOC as a teaching assistant while people like Devin Nunes hurl food at the walls.
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Most Americans understand what a collusion hoax is, and what actual collusion is (involving Dems, Clinton, Biden and foreign governments).
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Most Americans can not define obstruction of justice or collusion. Most (and this one is not an indictment of the people) have no idea where to find good, objective news. If you doubt those conclusions, look who won the last three presidential elections. If you are still in doubt, look who got the most votes in the last three presidential elections.
Nevertheless, Pelosi needs to “make a record”. This is done in a trial, for example a guardianship hearing, when both lawyers know the outcome of the case. The lawyer for the side destined to lose still brings in a court reporter and requires the other lawyer to prove his winning case on the record. Then the lawyer makes the best arguments and produces any available evidence for his client who is destined to lose. This is done, in part, so that years later any party can see that the lawyer for the losing side did his job.
Years from now, historians will look back at this moment. Trump deserves to be impeached much more than did Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. If Pelosi protects Trump from impeachment she will have failed to do her job, regardless of what we know the Senate might do in the trial. She is a political animal, but I think she is beginning to understand the historic nature of her decision.
As a politician, she also needs to put all the Senators on the record. Their vote in an impeachment trial would be a defining vote in their careers.
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Pressure from who?
Clueless Democrats and Never-Trumpers? The NY Slimes?
Big deal.
I can’t believe you’d even post that Ricky, given all the evidence points to exactly the opposite conclusion. But then again, you’re all in, totally invested now, huh?
Oh well. Eventually you’ll tire of being wrong constantly.
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9:40 By the way, Trump’s recent dealings with Ukraine are not examples of collusion. They are examples of extortion and a particularly nasty type of extortion at that. He withheld needed (and Congressionally approved) aid from an ally while pressuring the ally to take action against his most likely political opponent.
It is bad, bad stuff. But no, I don’t think most Americans will be able to understand it, and that is why Pelosi hesitates. She knows her 7 year olds. She herself has been conning them and pandering to them for over 40 years.
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Ricky at 10:42……
Have you considered writing for The Babylon Bee or The Onion?
‘Cuz that has to be a satire of a parody you wrote there.
No crime has been proven, no evidence has been shown that even justifies their baseless allegations, it’s all anonymous trash from an anon source, and yet he’s guiltier than the men already convicted and impeached?
I’m glad you’re not Trump’s lawyer. You don’t seem very good at this at all.
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Yeah, except everyone admits there was no quid pro quo, so no crime, no money was withheld, except for a brief review audit which is SOP, the foreign leader in question says there was no pressure, and yet you keep harping on about it.
Biden did what you allege. Trump did not. You’re getting delusional now. And desperate.
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Darn that criminal Trump!
Oh wait…. not Trump…..
https://twitter.com/GPollowitz/status/1175385727917592578
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“He withheld needed (and Congressionally approved) aid from an ally…” What’s your evidence of that, the WashPost?
Now address the actual extortion that Biden engaged in…
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Meanwhile, Trump pulls in his first endorsement from a foreign leader.
They love him in Texas……
Well….. most of them. 🙂
https://twitter.com/kevincorke/status/1175813372832571392
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From Veith:
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2019/09/how-the-experts-say-we-should-fix-our-politics/
__________________________
How the Experts Say We Should Fix Our Politics
SEPTEMBER 23, 2019 BY GENE VEITH
We keep discussing our political and governmental woes, but what do the experts say? The online political news site Politico has a feature in which dozens of experts from across the political spectrum are asked to give brief statements about what they think we should do to fix America’s problems.
Reading their prescriptions fills me with reassurance about our country at the knowledge that these experts are not in charge, making me realize that, by contrast, our messy democracy is not as bad after all.
Politico’s feature is entitled How to Fix Politics, with the explanatory deck, “Everyone agrees something is broken. Can we make it better? POLITICO Magazine asked dozens of big thinkers to tell us their boldest solutions to America’s problems.” …
… The “boldest solution” is to impose “A Voting System That Accounts for Ignorance”:
~ Here’s how it works. On Election Day, everyone (even children) gets to vote as an equal. But when they vote, they do three things. First, they tell us what they want (which party, candidate or position they support). Second, they tell us who they are (they give us their demographic information, such as sex, gender identity, income level, ethnicity and so on). Third, they take a quiz asking them basic political information, such as which party controls Congress, who their representative is, what the unemployment rate is and so on.
This quiz doesn’t determine who gets to vote and who doesn’t. No one gets excluded. Rather, once we have all three sets of data (what the people want, who they are and what they know), the data is anonymized and released to the public. We can then estimate, using basic and easily verifiable statistical methods, what a demographically identical public would have voted for if they had gotten a perfect score on the knowledge quiz. In other words, we can estimate what the public would have wanted, if only it were fully informed. ~
Wouldn’t that be a revival of the Jim Crow-era literacy tests? …
___________________________
Um, yeah, pretty much.
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Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.
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Calling out the actual cultist.
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Lather, rinse, repeat….
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/09/the_ukraine_hoax_is_replacing_the_russia_hoax.html
“The Ukraine Hoax is replacing the Russia Hoax
——
“I’ve been working on this since back in May. So I can tell you this is just not a Russian hoax. This is a Ukrainian hoax, and it’s not even by a legitimate whistleblower.
… my sources are telling me that not only did he not give that money, Joe Biden, our taxpayer money until the prosecutor was fired, but he had a hand in saying who the second prosecutor was.
You know, there’s another person, Judge and I know that perhaps we’re not prepared to go here. But there was also a D.N.C. operative, Miss Chalupa that was paid in 2016 dollars to work with Ukraine. And you know what they said that she was doing, working on a women’s outreach in Ukraine.
Here is the interview:
Rep. Mark Meadows of North Carolina was interviewed by Judge Jeanine Pirro over the weekend, and he had a lot to say about Joe Biden and Ukraine. The former chair of the Freedom Caucus and member of the House Foreign Relations Committee has a lot of connections and made some excellent points in colorful language. The entire interview is embedded below, but consider these excerpts (transcript via Breitbart) as teasers and make up your mind if you want to invest 9 minutes of your time:
Can you imagine if the prosecutor in Ukraine, if his name was Bob Mueller, what would have happened[?]
I’ve been working on this since back in May. So I can tell you this is just not a Russian hoax. This is a Ukrainian hoax, and it’s not even by a legitimate whistleblower.
… my sources are telling me that not only did he not give that money, Joe Biden, our taxpayer money until the prosecutor was fired, but he had a hand in saying who the second prosecutor was.
You know, there’s another person, Judge and I know that perhaps we’re not prepared to go here. But there was also a D.N.C. operative, Miss Chalupa that was paid in 2016 dollars to work with Ukraine. And you know what they said that she was doing, working on a women’s outreach in Ukraine.”
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From the aforementioned Boot piece in the WaPo:
“In 2016, candidate Trump implored a foreign power to interfere in the U.S. election on his behalf (‘Russia, if you’re listening…’)….”
Anybody who ever believed that’s what Donald Trump was doing making that comment should be kept away from sharp objects, computer keyboards, and impressionable young minds.
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11:04 I’m only gone 5 hours to hike to a waterfall, and in the meantime Trump has:
A. Tied the withheld aid to the investigation of the Bidens; and
B. Said that Biden’s mythical crimes deserve “the electric chair”.
Someone in The Cult needs to run out and gag Dear Leader.
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This may be helpful to those trying to catch up on the facts.
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This is all happening at the UN. It sort of reminds me of Nikita Khrushchev taking off his shoe and banging it on the table. Last year the other world leaders broke up laughing during Trump’s speech. This year they are already laughing in restaurants and hotels all over Midtown Manhattan.
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Yawn.
Once again, you have nothing. 🙂
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Kilgore Trout wins Twitter today.
https://twitter.com/kt_so_it_goes/status/1176237576656740352?s=21
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The stakes in the Presidential race seem to be quickly escalating.
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Someone is really into those alternative ‘facts’…
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5:34 Absolutely! All the funny stuff today came straight from Trump’s mouth.
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Speaking of hilarious alternate facts:
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So how long did the imbecile speak today at the UN?
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Vastly amused reading the posts here;
Nunes claims to have explosive material to ruin Biden…..Nunes making over hyped claims. Yawn…what else is new.
Biden has a conflict of interest?? It better be good because the entire Trump presidency has been a conflict of interest. A president owning a hotel in Washington is a conflict of interest. Adult children of the president working in both the family business and in the govt is a conflict of interest. Any time the president visits his golf course is a conflict of interest. The term no longer has any meaning.
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Warren is coming for your 401!!!.
No. Some experts speculate that implementing parts of the German Rhine model will lower stocks and thus lower the value of a 401K.
The German Rhine model implemented by Americans as part of the Marshal Plan is responsible for one of the most stable successful world economies. Built on a reputation for high quality manufactured goods it has the second highest trade surplus with a huge export market. Yes it has a boring stable stock market with no speculative bubbles. Perhaps the 401k will have slower but safer growth. Interestingly Germans dont have to rely on their own individual pensions. The Rhine model ensures a comfortable retirement on a govt and company penson.
Perhsps the so called experts have an other worry; worker reps have been responsible for keeping CEO executive pay and bonuses far lower than the US. I wonder if the experts have a confkuct of interest…
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One of AJ’s links called the Saudis a client state of the US. Realistically it might be the other way around. The US is an oil exporter. They don’t need Saudi oil. In fact these attacks raised the prices (and profits) of American oil exports. They should back the Houthi not protect the Saudis. Yet the US has sent troops….so who is the client state? Who runs this relationship?
Of course, Trump has no self interest here….only the Saudis own floors of his New York condos and Trump hotels are being builtin Saudi and the Emirates. No conflict of interest here.
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Hello, HRW! My wife and I were really close to your country yesterday on our way to Many Glacier. This is pretty country. The mountains are very steep. Next visit, we will cross into Alberta.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babb,_Montana
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I have no doubt Hunter Biden’s business interest in Ukraine is tainted with corruption. Inhale the air in Kiev and you are tainted with corruption. Ukraine is more corrupt than Pakistan. However, taking advantage of this corruption to hurt your political opponent back in the US is far worse.
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Speaking of congressional corruption, the list of beneficiaries of Trump’s farmer bailout is quite long. Trump starts a trade war, bankrupts farmers and then approves bailout which benefits a long list of mostly Republican Congresspersons. Its almost if he used a cisis he created to pay off politicians to support him…..a bit of a stretch but money makes a lot of friends.
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Its been a long time since Ive been there. I now have relatives in Montana and Alberta perhaps I should spend a summer there. You’d like Alberta…Canada’s version of Texas.
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I think we would like Alberta. My wife is already lobbying for us to spend summers up here out of the Texas heat.
Kalispell is an interesting place. The downtown is vibrant and there are nice, safe, middle-class neighborhoods all around downtown. People leave their children’s toys and bicycles on their front porches.
We have met many Montanans from other parts of the state. I think you could have a fun summer here.
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You wouldn’t know it from all the attention given to AOC and her group, but many of the freshman Democrats are moderates from formerly Republican districts. For these 7 freshmen, Trump’s Ukraine Extortion is a game-changer.
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Here we go …
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“Nunes claims to have explosive material to ruin Biden…..Nunes making over hyped claims. Yawn…what else is new.”
You have him confused with Shifty Schiff, who has yet to present his evidence that he swore he had proving Trump guilty of obstruction and collusion.
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And either way, clean up your own house first. Don’t you have a PM to hose multiple coats of black face off of?
You should get to it. 🙂
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Ricky,
This is me pointing and laughing at you again. 👉👉😂🤣😂🤣👈👈
Calling for impeachment without an impeachable offense to convict anyone of. Who needs evidence or a crime, right?
We know, we know….. Orange Man Bad.
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Peace Prize Now! 🙂
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Rule #1 Dummy….
NEVER….. EVER…… touch a cop’s gun.
https://twitter.com/NevilleD35/status/1176232024073527297
Lesson learned. 🙂
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—————
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Let’s see what happens.
Maybe Pelosi and the Dems will wimp out. If they don’t, in all probability the Senate will acquit.
Mueller has given the Dems the blueprint for the 11 obstruction of justice charges. The Dems need to get the whistleblower’s complaint quickly. To insure that happens, they need to get the courts including the Supreme Court to move quickly as they did during Bush v Gore. That should be doable.
Then everyone needs to follow Amash’s advice. Will 20 Republican Senators listen to the evidence and vote to convict. Right now, that is very doubtful. But Pelosi needs to make a record and every Congressman needs to cast a vote on impeachment. If Trump is impeached, every Senator needs to cast a vote to convict or acquit.
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Facts?
Yes, let’s…….
Your narrative just got busted.
https://www.redstate.com/bonchie/2019/09/23/ukraines-foreign-minister-just-put-another-bullet-latest-trump-scandal/
“Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Just Put Another Bullet Into The Latest Trump “Scandal””
“Just how much can a story targeting Donald Trump implode? Apparently, this much.
If you are short on background, on Wednesday of last week, a story broke that a “whistle-blower” had filed a complaint against President Trump. The assertion was that Trump had threatened Ukraine’s newly elected president on a phone call over investigating Joe Biden. The threat supposedly involved $250 million in military aid. After a day of full blown meltdowns on the left and in the media, the impeachment train was stopped in its tracks when it was revealed Trump had in fact not threatened Ukraine, nor offered any kind of quid pro quo.
In the end, we are left with Biden admitting to extorting Ukraine on tape and Trump simply asking if it could be looked into. Worst scandal ever.
Now, Ukraine’s foreign minister, who has read the read out of the call, just dumped even more cold water on this story.”
““I know what the conversation was about and I think there was no pressure,” Prystaiko told Hromadske. “There was talk, conversations are different, leaders have the right to discuss any problems that exist. This conversation was long, friendly, and it touched on many questions, sometimes requiring serious answers.”
This is correct. Whether Democrats and the media want to admit it or not, presidents talk to foreign leaders. They inquire on many different things and it would certainly be in bounds to ask why a former VP is on tape admitting he extorted Ukraine’s former administration. There was no promise made or pressure applied here. How do I know? Because no investigation happened and the money ended up being released anyway. We are once again left arguing hypothetical nonsense, much like during the Mueller probe.”
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Napolitano is correct.
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From the WP article:
President Trump told his acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to hold back almost $400 million in military aid for Ukraine at least a week before a phone call in which Trump is said to have pressured the Ukrainian president to investigate the son of former vice president Joe Biden, according to three senior administration officials.
Officials at the Office of Management and Budget relayed Trump’s order to the State Department and the Pentagon during an interagency meeting in mid-July, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. They explained that the president had “concerns” and wanted to analyze whether the money needed to be spent.
Administration officials were instructed to tell lawmakers that the delays were part of an “interagency process” but to give them no additional information — a pattern that continued for nearly two months, until the White House released the funds on the night of Sept. 11.
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More from the article. The dam is breaking.
I don’t think it really matters . . . whether the president explicitly told the Ukrainians that they wouldn’t get their security aid if they didn’t interfere in the 2020 elections,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “There is an implicit threat in every demand that a United States president makes of a foreign power. . . . That foreign country knows that if they don’t do it, there are likely to be consequences.”
Trump administration again pushes limits of authority in shielding whistleblower complaint from Congress
Trump on Monday repeated his denial of doing anything improper and insisted that his July 25 conversation with Zelensky was “a perfect phone call.” He also hinted that he may release a transcript of it.
White House spokesman Hogan Gidley said late Monday that the allegations were false. “But because the media wants this story to be true so badly, they’ll once again manufacture a frenzy and drive ignorant, fake stories to attack this president,” Gidley said.
It appears the Ukrainian leader came away from the discussion with a different impression. Murphy, who spoke with Zelensky during an early September visit to Ukraine, said Monday that the Ukrainian president “directly” expressed concerns at their meeting that “the aid that was being cut off to Ukraine by the president was a consequence” of his unwillingness to launch an investigation into the Bidens.
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Wow! 8:36 a.m. seems like a long time ago.
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Yawn.
Nothing. That’s what ya’ got.
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