If there is anything in the sordid impeachment saga that is laugh out loud funny, the video compiled for White House Counsel Pat Cipollone’s closing argument on behalf of President Trump in the Senate this afternoon might be it (below). In the video somebody seems to have opened the door of the Dem clown car — the car carrying the once and future Dem clowns — and sent them out to perform. On Twitter Mollie Hemingway notes: “The laughter at the end is from Senators…”
Quotable quote (Chuck Schumer): “I expect history will show we’ve lowered the bar on impeachment…My fear is that when a Republican wins the White House, Democrats will demand payback.”
“At this particular juncture in America’s history, the Senate is being called to sit as the high court of impeachment all too frequently.” (LEGAL INSURRECTION)
Pam Bondi, the former attorney general of Florida who is a member of the Trump impeachment legal team, outlined on Jan. 27 the concerns she said the president had about potential corruption on the part of the Bidens in Ukraine. Bondi pointed to numerous news reports raising questions about Hunter Biden’s appointment to the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
A Facebook friend posted a link to the following story from PATHEOS saying Limbaugh said Trump “owned” Evangelicals… (more below audio):
A Patheos article was just published saying Rush Limbaugh said “Trump owns Evangelicals,” then it made reference to Christ owning us by Calvary, etc. Here is an excerpt (“A Fresh Warning for Evangelical Trump Supporters”):
…On Friday, one of Trump’s media sycophants and enablers, Rush Limbaugh, made a statement on air that was both alarming, and in a sense, prophetic.
To paraphrase, Limbaugh stated that Donald Trump “owns” American evangelicals.
Yes, he did use the word “owns.”
For those of us who are evangelical and recognize our freedoms come from God, paid for by the shed blood of Christ, the idea of being “owned” by any worldly politician is rather repugnant….
The full context is this (the fuller is in the audio):
“Because the Republicans Party cannot win anything without their votes. There are at bare minimum 24,000-million Evangelical votes in America, and maybe more… and guess who owns them? And long before today, Donald Trump.”
Rush Limbaugh was merely saying the Pro-Life movement (Evangelicals) took over the Party platform and transformed the GOP. The Republicans since Reagan have essentially owned the GOP, and the Republicans can trust/depend [own] their votes. And this wasn’t repugnant under Dubya, Reagan, etc… only “the bad orange man.”
This attack on Rush reminds me of Chuck Todd asking “why you do not trust the CIA” to a Republican who merely said he did not trust John Brennan. As if Brennan encapsulates the totality of the CIA. Or Democrats repeating ad nauseum that Republicans and Trump do not believe Russia attacked the 2016 election [when it was Republicans who first warned Obama of this upcoming event in 2014] because they say Ukraine attacked our 2016 election. As if both cannot be true (FOOTNOTE 565).
People with bias do not take a break and think things through. The above political positions are reminiscent of Many have built a straw-man argument out of the teaching of literal interpretation, alleging that we have to take everything in the Bible literally, e.g., “the trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12). The Bible as well as politicians and talking heads, contains, and use definite types of figurative language, including metaphor, simile, hyperbole, and anthropomorphism. But all of these are easily detectable and separable from the literal text itself. Unless you have a bias.
I also made the point of a very recent tragic event to drive home the point:
…you miss the point of my OG article. I have a very committed Christian friend (5-pointer to the max). He said, “RIP Koby. You were the greatest.” Susan Wright’s linked article could apply “just as forcefully” to him and the many other people praising Koby. // “We true Christians know who the greatest is…. The Alpha and Omega…. The Greatest bought us on Calvary with His she’d blood…” — etc., etc.
Everything you have posted from her (that I have seen at least), runs along similar veins. She just emotes here dislike of Trump.
The New York Times has issued an absurdly written correction to a story about President Trump and Russian meddling.
White House reporter Maggie Haberman falsely claimed in her report that 17 intelligence agencies all agreed Russia tried to interfere in the presidential election, reiterating a thoroughly debunked liberal talking point.
[….]
Haberman’s story repeated a claim liberals began circulating following a declassified report from the Director of National Intelligence in October on the Russian influence campaign. Since the DNI heads up 17 agencies, it was easy to frame the declassified report as a consensus built on 17 separate assessments. In fact only the three agencies who reviewed the matter signed off on that consensus.
The former director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said as much in a May Senate hearing. The assessment was a “coordinated” product from the FBI, the NSA and the CIA, he said, working under the “aegis” of the DNI. It was not signed off on by 17 agencies. That makes sense, as some of the agencies — Coast Guard intel perhaps most obviously — would have little to do with election hacking.
The Daily Caller News Foundation also addressed the claim in a fact check of a Hillary Clinton interview in May where she again repeated the phrase. Certainly, none of the other agencies disagreed on the record, but that’s to be expected if they didn’t conduct a separate analysis…..
More on the second claim regarding the Steele Dossier being Russian propaganda — even though it was touted for over 2-years in the pages of the NYT:
Who knew? …On Saturday, the New York Times published a story about how the “Mueller Report [was] likely to renew scrutiny of the Steele Dossier.” The Times reports that the dossier’s contents could even have been a Russian disinformation operation aimed at then-candidate Trump. Which comes as no surprise to conservatives who have been following the story.
Remember, the Steele dossier came about because the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC paid a law firm, which then hired Fusion GPS to dig up dirt on Trump. Fusion GPS then paid a former British intelligence officer, Christopher Steele, who leaned on contacts close to the Kremlin to get information that was used in the preparation of the dossier.
Is it any wonder that those Russians, who wanted to sow discord in the United States, would jump at the opportunity to provide misinformation, knowing that the media would eat it up?…
As it turns out, back in January 2018, New York Times reporter Scott Shane, the lead reporter on this story, was a member of a panel that somewhat resembled the Star Wars cantina scene at the International Spy Museum titled “Unpacking the Russia Story with the Experts Who Have Covered It.” The video is cued up to the appropriate cut for your convenience:
And regarding the New York Times correction to a story about Trump’s tax plan:
The New York Times issued an embarrassing correction after a report that attacked President Donald Trump’s recently passed tax plan got the numbers about as wrong as could be.
The lengthy Feb. 23 feature, headlined, “Get to Know the New Tax Code While Filling Out This Year’s 1040,” sought to detail how Trump’s tax plan would hurt middle-class families. A hypothetical couple — christened Sam and Felicity Taxpayer — would see their tax bill rise by nearly $4,000, according to the story.
Then came the correction saying the family would actually see taxes go down.
The Wall Street Journal’s James Freeman mocked the Times piece before the Old Gray Lady issued the correction.
“Even perennial tax-increase advocate Warren Buffett is now acknowledging the economic benefit of the Trump tax cuts, but The New York Times newsroom still won’t concede the point,” Freeman wrote on Feb. 27. “Will criticism from a liberal law professor persuade The Times to reconsider?”
Well, The Times did reconsider — but it may still not be 100 percent accurate…..
The New York Times had to issue an embarrassing correction to its story about another decades-old accusation of sexual misconduct against US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh — because it failed to tell readers that the alleged victim doesn’t even remember the incident.
As The Post reported in its front-page story Monday, the Times piece omitted that crucial fact.
The Times article had been adapted from a book on Kavanaugh by two of its reporters, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly. The newspaper claimed that Max Stier, a former classmate of the justice years ago at Yale University, had allegedly seen Kavanaugh pull his pants down at a party, and his friends then pushed his penis into the hands of a female student….
The New York Times was forced to issue four corrections to a failed hit piece against Foundation for Defense of Democracies founder Mark Dubowitz.
Last week, the Times published a piece aimed at portraying Dubowitz as corrupt, unethical, and incompetent because he opposed former President Barack Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran and applauded President Donald Trump for withdrawing the U.S. from the horrendous pact.
The embarrassing article falsely claimed that a GOP donor with financial ties to the United Arab Emirates gave FDD $2.7 million to fund an anti-Qatar conference; that Dubowitz “paid himself” twice as much as others who head think tanks; that Dubowitz created his own salary to far exceed his peers in the industry; and that the FDD is connected to Israel’s Likud Party.
Every single one of those claims is completely false, and the Times was forced to issue a lengthy correction admitting that its error-ridden piece had to be updated.
As noted by the correction, here’s the truth: Dubowitz’s compensation is determined by a board of directors, meaning he doesn’t arbitrarily create his own salary; his annual salary is almost identical with other think tank leaders; the FDD is not directly tied to the Likud Party in any way; and GOP donor Elliott Broidy gave $360,000 for the FDD conference, not $2.7 million….
These weren’t minor errors where someone’s name was misspelled or the date of an event was wrong. This was intended to be a disgusting, salacious, hit piece against Dubowitz because he gave credit to Trump for pulling out of the Iran deal.
The piece is uniquely embarrassing because of the volume of the embarrassing errors and how easy it should have been for editors to catch the erroneous claims.
First a post by ACE OF SPADES, with a large excerpt from the NY POST article:
The breathless reporting from pretty much every source, with the exception of Michael Fumento in the NY Post is typical of the no-nothings in the media and their tenuous relationship with logic and the Scientific Method and pesky little things like data and numbers and statistics.
And the facts are very, very thin. We don’t know much other than what the Chinese government is telling the world, and I believe them about as much as I believe that Epstein killed himself. Maybe it’s worse than they are reporting. Maybe it is overblown to deflect attention from other things in China, like Hong Kong! And maybe it is just like most of the other diseases that emerge from China and then fizzle in developed countries because we are healthier, cleaner, have better medical care and more efficient ways to get that care to the people who need it.
I have no idea how this will shake out. Is it the next pandemic, with hundreds of millions dead? Maybe, but I doubt it. Is it the next SARS? Probably. And how many Americans died of SARS? From the CDC:
In the United States, only eight persons were laboratory-confirmed as SARS cases. There were no SARS-related deaths in the United States. All of the eight persons with laboratory-confirmed SARS had traveled to areas where SARS-CoV transmission was occurring.
For all of American medicine’s faults, we do a pretty good job of minimizing the severity of things like the flu and TB and Measles and Pertusis and all sorts of diseases that are major killers in other parts of the world. Will I take a trip to Wuhan? hell no. But until there is evidence of this virus being a significant health threat in the developed world I will not worry too much.
A CNN reporter broadcasts from Wuhan, China, on the recent viral outbreak. There is nobody near who could possibly infect him — unless the cameraman has Guinness Book of Records coughs and sneezes. So why does he insist on wearing a blue surgical mask while talking?
It’s called “drama,” which is badly needed, because there appears to be nothing very special about this outbreak of the 2019-nCoV or Wuhan virus. It should actually be called the DvV, or Déjà vu Virus, because we have been through these hysterias before. Over and over. Heterosexual AIDS, Ebola repeatedly, the H1N1 swine flu that was actually vastly milder than the regular flu and, especially, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in 2003.
Once you start debunking mass hysteria over outbreaks, it gets easy, because the same patterns repeat themselves.
The best remedy for all epidemic hysteria is perspective. How is this new outbreak different and thus potentially more dangerous from other diseases we have dealt with in the past or are dealing with now?
Wuhan is repeatedly labeled “deadly” — but so is every other virus most people know about. But especially deadly? Nearly 600 cases have been confirmed with at least 17 reported deaths.
[….]
What we can say for sure is that Wuhan will be a lot worse in China, simply because health care there is vastly inferior. It appears that, like flu, Wuhan usually kills through often treatable secondary infections. Well, treatable in the West. You’d be surprised at how many potentially deadly diseases (malaria, TB) Americans get that wreak havoc in much of the world but kill essentially none of us.
It also appears those most likely to die of Wuhan virus fit the same profile as flu fatalities: people over 65, those with compromised immune systems and those with serious pre-existing conditions. Two of the 17 Wuhan dead were 89-year-olds with pre-existing conditions; the youngest was 48 and suffering from diabetes and a stroke.
Contagiousness is highly important, of course. But so far, there is no evidence that Wuhan, first reported more than three weeks ago, is more contagious than influenza or spreads differently.
Those are the important factors; everything else is noise and tinfoil-hat paranoia.
[….]
It’s inherently bad because it’s new, we’re told. So were swine flu and SARS.
Chinese health officials warned it could mutate further to either become more deadly or more contagious. Same was said about the aforementioned outbreaks. Actually, viruses usually mutate to become less deadly, to preserve the host body and hence themselves.
The media are correct in saying the closest comparison here is SARS. It also was first reported in China and was what’s called a coronavirus. But while they want you to remember SARS as akin to the Black Death with cries of “Bring out your dead!,” fact is, there was a grand total of only 8,098 cases, of whom 774 died. Then the disease simply disappeared. More than 7,000 of those cases and about 650 of the deaths occurred just in mainland China and Hong Kong. The United States had just 75 cases and zero deaths.
By contrast, the CDC estimates about 80,000 Americans died of flu two seasons ago.
So if you want, buy a (probably worthless) surgical mask to play “twins” with those “courageous” TV newsmen. Or you may consider that flu shots are still available.
And HUGH HEWITT notes footnote 565 from Trump’s legal team’s legal briefing as evidence for Trump’s concern with Ukrainian interference with our 2016 election:
Video Description:
Hugh Hewitt reads footnote 565 from Trump’s legal team’s brief (PDF can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/rjh9dst). Hewitt then brings it up with Byron York when he was on to discuss his article: “As Trial Begins, the White House Strikes Back” (https://tinyurl.com/utv35mm). As an aside, here is the full extent of Russian interference with the 2016 election, and why (rightly or wrongly) Mueller indicted 13 Russians:
President Donald Trump rejects the narrative that Russia wanted him to win. USA Today examined each of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, the company that employed 12 of the 13 Russians indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for interfering with the 2016 election. It turns out only about 100 of its ads explicitly endorsed Trump or opposed Hillary Clinton. Most of the fake ads focused on racial division, with many of the ads attempting to exploit what Russia perceives, or wants America to perceive, as severe racial tension between blacks and whites…. (must read the entire article at LARRY ELDER’s SITE | see my post as well: FIONA HILL’S FALSE DILEMMA)
(Click To Enlarge)
(Text with Links)
President Trump also raised concerns about corruption. He first raised these concerns in connection with reports of Ukrainian actions in the 2016 presidential election. Numerous media outlets have reported that Ukrainian officials took steps to influence and interfere in the 2016 election to undermine then-candidate Trump, and three Senate committee chairmen are currently investigating this interference.565
This alongside this audio where you can hear former Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (put in place by Obama/Hillary State Department), Artem Sytnyk, admitting that he “helped” Hillary during the 2016 U.S. presidential election (see more at WAYNE DUPREE) — is devastating to the House Managers case!
What follows are some strong arguments (I think) against the Democrats case against Donald J. Trump’s impeachment. However, FIRST and FOREMOST, here is the Trump Legal Team’s first day in the Senate defending Trump and responding to the House Managers for impeachment of a sitting President:
PJ-MEDIA has a must read for those interested, they explain each one succinctly… which I merely:
10.Ambassador Volker testified there was no effort to pressure Ukraine to investigate the Bidens 9.Ambassador Taylor testified there was ‘no linkage’ between military aid and investigations 8.Ambassador Taylor testified Ukraine was unaware the lethal aid was being withheld 7.Ambassador Sondland testified Trump didn’t want anything from Ukraine, no quid pro quo 6.Ambassador Sondland testified he had no evidence of a quid pro quo other than his ‘own presumption’ 5.Lt. Col. Vindman admitted Hunter Biden wasn’t qualified to be on Burisma’s board 4.Lt. Col. Vindman and Jennifer Williams both agreed Hunter’s position at Burisma had the potential for the appearance of a conflict of interest 3.Ambassador Taylor basically admitted Hunter Biden’s position at Burisma ‘raises questions’ 2.Marie Yovanovitch confirmed that there was concern in the Obama State Department about Hunter Biden’s conflict of interest at Burisma 1.George Kent said there were legit concerns about Hunter Biden, and Burisma should be investigated
ARI MELBER
RIGHT SCOOP sets this clip with the followin: “This is pretty great. Ari Melber actually told the MSNBC panel and their audience that the Democrats did not prove their case that Trump committed obstruction of Congress, and everyone flipped out.” By “flipped out,” they mean Lefties responses to this commentary, which you should see on RS’s site:
JOHN BARRASSO
This, however, was great… via GATEWAY PUNDIT who said “Deputy White House Counsel Mike Purpura opened the White House defense of President Donald Trump with video of Adam Schiff’s fake call and transcript he read during the House impeachment proceedings. Mike Purpura played the video immediately after taking the podium on Saturday. And there Schiff was lying his face off for the whole world to see….”
LEGAL INSURRECTION discusses the first day of the Trump teams response to the House managers. In this first day they challenged the credibility of Schiff, which the above commentary shows as well. LI says this: “It seemed that almost every time I turned on the TV, he was talking and talking and talking. Schiff is the person most behind the impeachment push and the biased House proceedings. We all know that. But the Republican trial team, particularly Patrick Philbin, skewered Schiff today with Schiff’s own prior lies and deceptions. Philbin addressed Schiff’s prior claim to have knowledge of evidence of collusion by the Trump campaign with Russia, evidence that not even Mueller found, showing Schiff’s opinion’s and claims to have evidence to be unreliable…”
JONATHAN TURLEY
Professor Jonathan Turley notes WELL a major misstep by the House Managers accusing the Senate (among others) of a cover-up… bombastic presentations in the House may be the norm. But not in the Senate:
And HUGH HEWITT notes footnote 565 from Trump’s legal team’s legal briefing as evidence for Trump’s concern with Ukrainian interference with our 2016 election:
Video Description:
Hugh Hewitt reads footnote 565 from Trump’s legal team’s brief (PDF can be found here: https://tinyurl.com/rjh9dst). Hewitt then brings it up with Byron York when he was on to discuss his article: “As Trial Begins, the White House Strikes Back” (https://tinyurl.com/utv35mm). As an aside, here is the full extent of Russian interference with the 2016 election, and why (rightly or wrongly) Mueller indicted 13 Russians:
President Donald Trump rejects the narrative that Russia wanted him to win. USA Today examined each of the 3,517 Facebook ads bought by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency, the company that employed 12 of the 13 Russians indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for interfering with the 2016 election. It turns out only about 100 of its ads explicitly endorsed Trump or opposed Hillary Clinton. Most of the fake ads focused on racial division, with many of the ads attempting to exploit what Russia perceives, or wants America to perceive, as severe racial tension between blacks and whites…. (must read the entire article at LARRY ELDER’s SITE | see my post as well: FIONA HILL’S FALSE DILEMMA)
(Click To Enlarge)
(Text with Links)
President Trump also raised concerns about corruption. He first raised these concerns in connection with reports of Ukrainian actions in the 2016 presidential election. Numerous media outlets have reported that Ukrainian officials took steps to influence and interfere in the 2016 election to undermine then-candidate Trump, and three Senate committee chairmen are currently investigating this interference.565
This alongside this audio where you can hear former Director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (put in place by Obama/Hillary State Department), Artem Sytnyk, admitting that he “helped” Hillary during the 2016 U.S. presidential election (see more at WAYNE DUPREE) — is devastating to the House Managers case!
(UPDATE: I had to edit out the name of Eric Ciaramella in the description in order for YouTube to publish this audio. The monolithic thought is amazing to me, and the 1984 beginnings are unmistakable. Obviously no Federal or State law says a person’s name cannot be used… and, in fact, the “whistleblower” statute merely protects the person from on the job harassment by superiors. Not to nix his name from the public. Weird.)
Real Clear Investigations and Red State (linked below respectively) have great stories on these two colleagues (comrades?) discussing how to remove Trump from office 2-weeks after he was inaugurated — insurance policy 2.0 two-weeks after Trump was inaugurated (!):
……Source 1 said, “Just days after he [Trump] was sworn in, they [Ciaramella and Misko] were already talking about trying to get rid of him. They weren’t just bent on subverting his agenda. They were plotting to actually have him removed from office.”
Sources told Sperry that Misko had been the Schiff staff member whom Ciaramella had “reached out to” for “guidance” before submitting his complaint with the Intelligence Community Inspector General, Michael Atkinson.
The coordination between the official believed to be the whistleblower and a key Democratic staffer, details of which are disclosed here for the first time, undercuts the narrative that impeachment developed spontaneously out of the “patriotism” of an “apolitical civil servant.”
Two former co-workers said they overheard Ciaramella and Misko, close friends and Democrats held over from the Obama administration, discussing how to “take out,” or remove, the new president from office within days of Trump’s inauguration. These co-workers said the president’s controversial Ukraine phone call in July 2019 provided the pretext they and their Democratic allies had been looking for.
[….]
Source 1 said, “They were popping off about how they were going to remove Trump from office. No joke.”
[….]
He had also heard Ciaramella tell Misko, “‘We can’t let him enact this foreign policy.’“
Source 2 said he reported what he’d overheard to his superiors. “It was so shocking that they were so blatant and outspoken about their opinion,” he recalled. “They weren’t shouting it, but they didn’t seem to feel the need to hide it.”
The co-workers, [sources 1 and 2] didn’t think much more about the incident…..
(This will be a repost every 9/11) Bob Beckwith is the FDNY firefighter who stood next to George W. Bush during his famous bullhorn speech at Ground Zero, just days after September 11th, 2001. His story is incredible, and he shares it with Glenn in a perfect tribute to remember the first responders and other lives effected by 9/11/2001.
