'Impeachment Takes a Holiday' -- Starring Nancy Pelosi

'Impeachment Takes a Holiday' -- Starring Nancy Pelosi

Frank Miele. Real Clear Politics 

Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House of Representatives, called Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a “rogue leader” on Thursday, but based on what we saw last week, a more accurate assessment would be that Pelosi is the rogue leader presiding over a runaway Congress.

In her actions and words, Pelosi looked more like a wannabe Third World dictator than the hope of her nation, or even of her party. It was not enough for her to try to cut the president off at the knees with her sham impeachment vote; she also had to insult the Senate leader and try to assert House authority over the constitutionally mandated Senate role in trying any federal impeachment. To top it off, she implicitly dismissed the third branch of government by bypassing the judiciary’s traditional role as the broker between the legislative and executive branches.


That was the week that was, and it should be the final nail in Pelosi’s political coffin.

Dressed appropriately in black, she engineered the third impeachment of a president in United States history on a party-line vote with little evidence and a magical mystery timeline that oscillated between “clear and present danger” and “no big deal.”

Remember, Pelosi has been telling us for months that it was an urgent matter to unseat President Trump before he did permanent damage to the nation. Her designated impeachment czar, fellow Californian Adam Schiff, invented two non-criminal charges to be brought against the president — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — and rammed them through three committees and the full House. We were told that the nation could not possibly wait for a court to decide on the legality of the president’s assertion of executive privilege. Too long! Too late! Trump would collude with some new foreign power to interfere in our sacred elections — possibly with Latvia now that he has used up Ukraine and Russia! It was like a giant version of Risk, the game of world domination. Pelosi was going to roll the dice until she took all of Trump’s armies off the board — at least the ones in Eastern Europe.

But then something remarkable happened. As soon as Pelosi had Trump where she supposedly wanted him, skewered by impeachment, she reversed course. Within minutes of her victory in delivering a one-party vote, she announced that the House would not transmit the historic articles of impeachment to the Senate for trial anytime soon. The problem? Well, it seems Pelosi found something more urgent than impeachment — Christmas break. (Someone get Chevy Chase on the phone. He can’t pull off Nancy Pelosi,  but he will be perfect as bumbling Joe Biden. Isn’t it time for a sequel to “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”? Maybe “Impeachment Takes a Holiday”?)

Of course, we shouldn’t have been surprised by the delay. Turns out that during the urgent mission to save the nation from the dire threat of Trump’s wicked sense of humor, there had also been time for a weeklong Thanksgiving break as well. Maybe Nancy thought the Donald would retreat to Mar-a-Lago with his tail between his legs and never come back. She must have been very disappointed. But maybe she thinks Trump didn’t really return at all. Didn’t she call the president an imposter? Or is that just another debunked conspiracy theory?

Doesn’t matter. If anything, Pelosi’s stated reason for refusing to transmit the articles of impeachment to the Senate on a timely basis was even more ludicrous than my “National Lampoon” scenario. The bottom line is that in trying to circumvent the constitutional role of the Senate and trying to delegitimize its leader, she has entered territory that is radical even for a “rogue” (her word again) political party.

“We are not sending it ... because it is difficult to determine who the managers would be until we see the arena in which we will be participating,” Pelosi said on the night when the articles were passed on a strictly partisan vote. Of course, she knew the arena because it is spelled out in the Constitution. (It’s the Senate, stupid!) And though Pelosi had a moment of clarity when she acknowledged, “It is up to the Senate to say what their rules will be,” she did everything in her power to shame, cajole and extort McConnell into running the trial according to the House’s rules — namely, that Trump gets no due process and the coddled whistleblower shall not be named.

Unbelievably, Pelosi told the truth the following morning when she admitted the entirely partisan reason why she is not transmitting the impeachment to the Senate: “Just to get this off the table right away, if we impeach the president immediately, everybody moves on to the next thing.”

D’oh! You already did impeach the president, Madam  Speaker. And since when did “moving on to the next thing” become a problem? Are you admitting that the Democratic House is really just an obstructionist tool of “the Resistance”?

Trump’s subsequent summation on Twitter was concise and on point.

"So after the Democrats gave me no Due Process in the House, no lawyers, no witnesses, no nothing, they now want to tell the Senate how to run their trial. Actually, they have zero proof of anything, they will never even show up. They want out. I want an immediate trial!"

Pelosi made one other mistake in her political gambit. In her zeal to attack McConnell, she apparently forgot the Constitution mandates that the Senate trial of a president shall be presided over by the chief justice of the Supreme Court. So she’s also thumbing her nose at John Roberts by suggesting he’s unable or unwilling to run a fair trial. Based on what?

This is no surprise. There is no such thing as “obstruction of Congress” as a high crime — or even a low crime. Obstructing Congress is what all presidents do when they think Congress is wrong. It’s called the balance of power. The arbiter of that never-ending battle between the executive and legislative branches is the judiciary. Yet, as I mentioned at the outset, the House Democrats refused to seek court guidance on how to proceed when President Trump invoked executive privilege to prevent the delivery of documents and testimony to the Congress. That’s because the Supreme Court has long upheld that the executive branch does not automatically have to submit to congressional subpoenas or demands.

If Pelosi took Trump to court, she would very likely lose, and then be left with nothing but her stupid “abuse of power” complaint against Trump when clearly it is Pelosi and the House Democrats who have abused their power time and again.

Verdict: Trump wins again.

Frank Miele, the retired editor of the Daily Inter Lake in Kalispell Mont., is a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His books — including “The Media Matrix: What If Everything You Know Is Fake?” — are available from his Amazon author page. Visit him at HeartlandDiaryUSA.com to read his daily commentary or follow him on Facebook @HeartlandDiaryUSA or on Twitter @HeartlandDiary.

Tucker Carlson: Dems have no choice but...

Dems have no choice but to march forward on Trump impeachment – although it will destroy them

Tucker Carlson: Fox News


It is here. After months of false starts and threats and endless posturing by some of the saddest, most ineffectual people in America, impeachment apparently is imminent. Barring some last-minute plot twist -- and that could happen -- Donald Trump will join Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton as the third American president ever impeached by the House of Representatives.

So Democrats have been promising to do this since before the president was even elected as president, and yet still, it feels kind of weird, surprising -- surreal, even -- that it's finally going to happen. Why?

Because impeachment -- and there's really no disagreement about this -- is a terrible idea for the country.

At this point, there's no question that Democrats can't actually remove the president, and in trying, they will only hurt themselves.

The polls are clear, and yet -- and here's the fascinating point -- they're doing it anyway. Here's Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin explaining why they're doing it: 

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.: The president's continuing course of conduct constitutes a clear and present danger to democracy in America.  We cannot allow this misconduct to pass.  It would be a sellout of our Constitution, our foreign policy, our national security and our democracy.

See if you can follow the logic chain -- maybe you can spot the missing link. Here's what he's arguing: Leaving a president in office until voters can decide to remove him from office if they want, is "a danger to democracy."  It's a "sellout of our Constitution." OK.

So, in case you've forgotten, what is the crime that undergirds this impeachment proceeding? What is the president accused of doing?

Well in case you've forgotten, it's that Donald Trump may have delayed military aid to the government of Ukraine.

Now, keep in mind that the only purpose of aid to the government of Ukraine is to antagonize Russia. Keep in mind also that Russia is a country with more nuclear weapons than any other country on the globe.

But according to Rep. Jamie Raskin, not giving weapons to Ukraine is a clear and present danger to America. It's a "sellout," he says, of our national security to pause in our relentless attacks on Russia, even for a moment.

That's a remarkable assertion.  Hard to believe he could defend that in a rational conversation but it doesn't even stand out under the current standards of political rhetoric.

There's a lot of talk like that all of a sudden. The entire impeachment saga, in fact, has become detached from reality.

Here are the most basic facts about it:

Democrats do not have the votes to remove President Trump from office. They never will have the votes to remove the president.
The point of impeachment is to remove a president. They cannot do that.
This process is doomed before it even begins. And by the way, they don't have the votes because voters don't support it.
The irony is that our democracy is working just fine.

Voters support it, in fact, less than they did. After a full month of watching public hearings on impeachment, Democrats have not gained support, they have lost it. In late October, when this began, about half the country backed impeachment. Forty-four percent said they were opposed to impeachment In the most recent polling. Those numbers have inverted.

In other words, the more people learned about impeachment, the less they wanted impeachment. That's not one person's opinion, that is the sum total of the polling. -- The numbers could not be clearer on this question. And yet, even in the face of all that data, elite Democrats still will not admit it. They're literally in denial.

Watch Democratic Party cheerleader and CNN analyst Jeffrey Toobin attack his own company's polling when it doesn't match what he believes must be true.

David Chalian, CNN political director: You see a decline from our last poll in Democratic support from 90 percent down to 77 percent.  

Jeffrey Toobin, CNN legal analyst: Can I just say, my twin brother, that I don't believe that poll for one second.  

Chalian: What part?  

Toobin: The 90 to 77 percent. It's just I don't believe it. It makes no sense that that number would change like that. I mean, you know, life has shown us that polls are sometimes wrong, and David, that poll is wrong just because I said so, OK?
  
"Why don't you believe?"  "Because I don't! Because I look out my window and I see the horizon that means it's flat. You can tell me the Earth is round, but I just don't believe it.  Enough with your dumb numbers in your scientific theories. I just don't believe it," says the legal analyst. OK.

What you're watching, obviously, is one man degrade himself. But it's bigger than that. It's the definition of ideological extremism -- and that's the inability to change course, no matter what the evidence tells you.

So, that's the point at which this is no longer politics, of course, we left that a long time ago. What you're looking at is religion. And of course, being the Democratic Party, their religion it's always the exact opposite of what they claim it is.

So, as President Trump noted in a recent letter to Nancy Pelosi: “You are the ones interfering in America's elections. You are the ones subverting American democracy. You are the ones bringing pain and suffering to our republic for your own selfish, personal, political and partisan gain.”

The public, whether they like Trump or not, agrees with that. The polling shows it, but the Democrats can't acknowledge that; they're stuck. So, in 2016, they went all-in on denouncing Trump -- remember this -- before the election and every one of his supporters, you, as beyond-the-pale racist, worthy of being hated. Not reasoned with or talked to, but hated and dismissed -- and physically assaulted in some cases.

But they lost anyway. And when they did lose, they refused to learn. They refused to even think for a moment about why they may have lost and instead moved seamlessly from racism into a conspiracy about Russia so bizarre they could never even fully explain its outlines. "What are you saying?" you would ask?  "Russia," they would say. OK.

That collapsed. You watched happened on live television. But what hasn't changed is the rage storm they created with years of propaganda.

They whipped their voters into such a frenzy that the voters can't be pulled back now. They want blood. And so Democrats have no choice but to march forward, despite the fact that it will inevitably destroy them. And they know it will. It's almost poignant.

Adapted from Tucker Carlson's monologue from "Tucker Carlson Tonight" on Dec. 17, 2019.Tucker Carlson currently serves as the host of FOX News Channel’s (FNC) Tucker Carlson Tonight (weekdays 8PM/ET). He joined the network in 2009 as a contributor.

When our guardians fail us

When our guardians fail us

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

One symptom of a society in crisis is the unreliability or even corruption of its own auditors.

After all, when the watchmen have lost moral authority to watch, who can be believed or trusted? Or, as the Roman satirist Juvenal famously put it, "Who will guard the guardians?"

It was recently reported that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith altered an email to bolster a suspicious FBI effort to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant authorizing the surveillance of Carter Page, a onetime employee of the Trump campaign.

If true, Clinesmith helped the FBI successfully delude the court into granting what was likely an illegal request to spy on the Trump campaign. Clinesmith was reportedly expelled from special counsel Robert Mueller's legal team for cheering on opposition to the Trump presidency by writing "Viva la resistance!" in a text message discussion.

After FBI Director James Comey was fired, he leaked his own memos of private and confidential conversations with the president. Whether Comey would go to jail hinged on how the FBI would categorize his memos post facto -- as merely "confidential," or as "secret" or "top secret."

Two of the adjudicators were Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, former Comey friends and FBI subordinates. The FBI eventually ruled that the leaking of the memos was not felonious. Page and Strzok, who were involved in an amorous relationship, were later dismissed from Mueller's team for exchanging texts that showed bias and hatred toward Trump, the object of their team's investigation.

We are awaiting the results of investigations being conducted by the Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz and federal prosecutor John Durham. Both are examining whether the nation's top investigators at the FBI, CIA, and DOJ were themselves corrupt.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, recently wrapped up an impeachment inquiry to discover whether President Trump committed impeachable offenses.

Schiff himself has lied about the prior relationship between the so-called whistleblower and his own staff. He read into the congressional record his version of a transcript of a presidential conversation that was so inaccurate and misleading that Schiff was forced to relabel it a "parody."

In surreal fashion, Schiff stated that he did not know the whistleblower's identity. Then, during the hearings, he claimed that he wanted to protect whistleblower's anonymity by halting all questions about direct communications with the whistleblower -- whose identity Schiff supposedly did not know.

The whistleblower, we were initially told, was a civic-minded, nonpartisan civil servant who risked his or her career to report alleged presidential misconduct. Although the whistleblower's identity has not been confirmed, what has been reported in the press suggests the very opposite of such a glowing nonpartisan portrait.

The whistleblower went first to the House Intelligence Committee staff for guidance on how to lodge a complaint. The whistleblower's lawyer was a known anti-Trump activist who had previously boasted about the effort to remove Trump, which he compared to a coup.

The whistleblower relied on hearsay and had no firsthand knowledge of presidential wrongdoing. Critics allege that the whistleblower will not come forward to testify, as promised by Schiff, because under cross-examination the whistleblower would have to detail a collaborative association with anti-Trump partisans and Schiff's staff.

It is easy for our legal and ethical custodians to hound unpopular politicians whom the media despises, and who incur strident political opposition. Investigators and inquisitors know that any dirt they can dig up, even if questionably obtained and of dubious truth, will earn them praise.
In the case of Trump, our watchmen embraced any means necessary to reach the supposedly noble and popular ends of weakening or removing him.

But the reason we have auditors in the first place is for precisely the opposite purpose: to examine evidence fairly even if the final conclusions are likely to exonerate someone deemed boorish and crude by most of federal officialdom.

In other words, our investigatory agencies should function like the First Amendment, which primarily serves not to protect free speech that we all admire but to protect unpopular speech that most prefer not to hear.

The moral test of our Justice Department, the congressional opposition and the FBI was to give even an often unpopular president some semblance of a fair audit.

All three so far have flopped miserably.

Their failures remind us why nearly 2,000 years ago Juvenal believed that society could not outsource to supposedly exalted moral officials the final authority to judge others.

Instead, we must count only on ourselves.

Victor Davis Hanson is the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow in Residence in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, a professor of classics emeritus at California State University at Fresno, and a nationally syndicated columnist for Tribune Media Services.

On Brexit, why are Americans so against democracy for Britain?

The resistance in America comes from the establishment left, that doesn't honor elections...

On Brexit, why are Americans so against democracy for Britain?
Brexit was voted on by U.K. citizens. We need to respect the voice of the people. 
John Phelan, Star Tribune 

Once, democracy was considered a good thing. People making decisions on political matters affecting them, peacefully at the ballot box, was celebrated.

During the Cold War, and in the hot war against the Nazis before that, the fact that we were democracies was one of the things that made “us” in the West (I’m an immigrant from Britain) better than “them.” When the Berlin Wall fell 30 years ago and communism collapsed, we in the West cheered when the long-oppressed peoples of Eastern Europe and even Russia itself went to the ballot box for the first time.

But times change, it seems (“Stakes are high in U.K.’s snap election,” Nov. 5). Recently, electorates have developed the habit of voting in ways that elite classes don’t like. Consequently, we’ve witnessed a strange phenomenon — an uprising of well-off, powerful elites against the average Joe and his use of pen and ballot paper. Brexit, and much reaction to it in America, is a classic case.

In Britain’s 2015 general election, David Cameron’s Conservatives were unexpectedly elected on a manifesto promising “a straight in-out referendum on our membership of the European Union by the end of 2017.” Parliament duly passed the European Union Referendum Act 2015, legislating for this referendum.

The government sent a leaflet to every home in Britain titled “Why the Government believes that voting to remain in the European Union is the best decision for the UK.” It read: “This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.”

The referendum was conducted June 23, 2016, asking the question: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” The options were: “Remain a member of the European Union” and “Leave the European Union.”

“Leave” won with 17.4 million votes — the most ever cast for anything in British history — 52% of those cast.

In the 2017 general election, 579 Conservative and Labour MPs — 89% of all those elected — were returned on manifestos explicitly committing them to honoring the result of the referendum. But, once back in Westminster, the promises made to the proles on the stump were discarded and Parliament has since done everything it can to veto the people’s vote of 2016.

The pro-E.U. Liberal Democrats, praised in the recent Star Tribune editorial “Stakes are high in U.K.’s snap elections” (Nov. 5), were the most brazen of all. They had spent years calling for such a referendum, indeed, such a commitment was in their manifestos for the 2010 and 2015 elections. In 2007, party leader Vince Cable wrote that they wanted to table a parliamentary motion calling “for a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union.” In 2008, they again called for a referendum and party leader Nick Clegg said, “Nobody in this country under the age of 51 has ever been asked that simple question. That includes half of all MPs. We’ve been signed up to Europe by default: two generations who have never had their say.”

Jo Swinson, who is now party leader (the Liberal Democrats have a penchant for regicide that would make a Roman emperor queasy), said that “the Liberal Democrats would like to have a referendum on the major issue of whether we are in or out of Europe.”

They got it. They lost it. And now they want to ignore it. Swinson has called for the referendum to be rerun, even while saying that she would ignore the result if “leave” won again. They do not see elections as opportunities for electorates to make decisions, but for electorates to OK decisions which have already been taken for them. And if they don’t, they can vote again until they do.

These people are neither very liberal nor particularly democratic.

The Star Tribune Editorial Board is right that there is much at stake in Britain’s election. This year marks the bicentenary of the Peterloo Massacre, in which yeomanry, police and soldiers attacked a Manchester demonstration demanding the vote for the working classes. Up to 700 people were injured, 18 were killed. The British people took a long and occasionally bloody road to secure their right, not only to vote, but to have that vote count. Among the journey’s highlights were the Peasant’s Revolt, the Civil War, the Chartist movement and the Suffragettes.

They have earned the right for their democratically expressed wishes to be acted upon, even when the Editorial Board thinks they are wrong.

John Phelan, a graduate of Birkbeck College, University of London, is an economist at the Center of the American Experiment.

Adam Schiff's 'ham sandwich': Not an inquiry, just a show

Adam Schiff's 'ham sandwich': Not an inquiry, just a show
Andrew C. McCarthy, The Hill

The most familiar metaphor about criminal investigations is, of course, that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich. Like all good metaphors, there’s enough exaggeration in it to make a strong impression. It resonates, though, because it conveys the entirely accurate sense that a grand jury is a one-sided affair. We’re wired to believe there are two sides — at least — to every story. That’s why the grand jury rubs us the wrong way.

And that’s why the impeachment show — not inquiry show — that Democrats are running should really rub us the wrong way. 

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and his House Intelligence Committee are taking the show public this week. The inquiry he’s been running is, he claims, analogous to a grand jury investigation: It’s a preliminary investigative stage before the inquiry’s transfer to the Judiciary Committee for the formal consideration of articles of impeachment.

Grand juries, however, never go public. And that is precise because they are intentionally one-sided. They are kept secret by law to avoid prejudicing the suspect.

Prejudice is exactly what Schiff is aiming for, however. The point is not impeachment; it is to wound President Trump politically.

To be clear, Schiff’s grand jury analogy is bogus. Congress is not a grand jury. Grand juries are designed to be at least somewhat objective — a body of impartial citizens who, by constitutional mandate, must be satisfied there is probable cause that a crime has been committed before the state is permitted to indict and try a citizen presumed to be innocent. In theory, the grand jury is there to protect the suspect from an overbearing prosecutor. Here, House Democrats are the overbearing prosecutor, not the protective grand jurors.

What is happening in the House is a political exercise. Schiff is a hyper-partisan. With the anti-Trump media leaving his absurd grand jury analogy unchallenged, he exploits it when it is useful, namely when telling Republicans they will not be permitted to call their witnesses, and he puts the analogy aside when it is not useful, namely, in convening one-sided public hearings.

As a matter of due process, Schiff’s made-for-TV spectacle is a bad joke. That was underscored this past weekend when (a) Democrats gave Republicans a ridiculously short deadline to propose their own witnesses, whom Chairman Schiff reserved the right to veto; (b) Republicans duly proposed witnesses on the issues of Democrats’ collusion with Ukraine in the 2016 election campaign and in possible corruption; and (c) Schiff, as predictably as sunrise, ruled the GOP’s witnesses irrelevant.

In point of fact, the witnesses that Republicans seek to call are entirely relevant to what would be at issue in an impeachment trial, to wit: Is any misconduct by the president alleged in an article of impeachment sufficiently egregious that he should be removed from power?

But, see, a grand jury is not a trial. 

The ham sandwich metaphor is apt because the grand jury protection, though constitutionally required, is modest. The grand jury is not the forum for trying the case. Its sole role is to determine whether the prosecutor has enough evidence — just probable cause at this early stage — to warrant filing a formal allegation (the indictment), which transfers the case to a judicial court for a full-blown trial at which the prosecutor must bear the much higher, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt burden of proof.

In the grand jury, the prosecutor is not required to tell the defendant’s side of the story. The law does not even call for the prosecutor to share with grand jurors exculpatory evidence in the government’s files. The only matter up for consideration is: Does the prosecutor have enough proof of misconduct to proceed to the real ballgame — the trial?

In our system, because of the dictates of fundamental fairness, it is at the trial that things go public. That is because, at the trial, the accused is armed with all the Constitution’s due process guarantees — the right to counsel, to confront witnesses, to call witnesses and present a defense, the presumption of innocence and the high burden of proof imposed on the prosecutor.

So here is what Schiff is being allowed to pull off. 

He is claiming, “I’m just like the grand jury,” in order to confine the hearings to witnesses who will be most damning in portraying an abuse of power by the president — the exploitation of his foreign affairs power to squeeze a foreign government into helping his 2020 political campaign by investigating a potential Democratic rival. The grand jury analogy is Schiff's rationale for excluding witnesses Republicans want to call — witnesses who could put the president’s demands in context by establishing that Democrats colluded with Ukrainian officials in connection with the 2016 campaign and that prominent Democrats, such as Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, corruptly cashed in on his father’s political influence over Ukraine’s government.

That would all be fine if Schiff would be consistent with his grand jury pretense and do all of this behind closed doors. Then, when we finally got to a public stage, the president and Republicans would have equal time and equal right to present their side of the case. But that is not what Schiff is doing. He is using his control over a kangaroo-court process to publicize his dark version of events and to muzzle the other side.

This is a deeply un-American process.

I am not a knee-jerk Trump partisan. I am open-minded that the president may have abused his power, as all presidents do from time to time. I have always thought his best defense is that, in the scheme of things, the abuse was inconsequential: The Ukrainians got their defense aid without having to commit to investigating the Bidens; the president was within his rights to ask for Kyiv’s help in examining Ukraine’s role in the Obama administration’s controversial Trump-Russia investigation; the Trump administration has provided lethal aid in supporting Ukraine against Russian aggression, which the Obama administration would not do.

All of that matters because, in an impeachment case, the issue is not merely whether the president abused his power but whether the abuse, on balance, was so egregious that the president should be removed from power.

Congress is supposed to explore both of those questions — was there an abuse, and how egregious was it? It should be doing so in the light of day: Both issues, in public, with full due process rights for the president.

Adam Schiff and the Democrats are not a grand jury. They should not have been permitted to take the process behind closed doors and make it one-sided. But if they are going to keep it one-sided, like a grand jury, they should stay behind closed doors the way a grand jury does.

If the case is going on national television, fundamental fairness dictates that it be the whole case. Otherwise, it’s just a show, produced and directed by partisan Democrats.

Former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy is a senior fellow at National Review Institute, a contributing editor at National Review, and a Fox News contributor. His latest book is “Ball of Collusion.” Follow him on Twitter @AndrewCMcCarthy.

Tomi Lahren: We can't save California if conservatives keep leaving

Tomi Lahren: We can't save California if conservatives keep leaving

After delivering a speech on "American values" at the Fox Nation's first-ever "Patriot Awards" on Wednesday, Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren urged on Thursday for conservatives to stay in California and fight for the state.

Joshua Nelson, Fox News


Following an appearance on Fox Nation's first-ever "Patriot Awards," where she delivered a powerful speech on American values, Fox Nation host Tomi Lahren stopped by “Fox & Friends” and urged conservatives to stay in California and fight for the state.

“Why did we stop trying in California? That’s why I’m there,” Lahren said Thursday.


“If we keep leaving, we’re not going to save it. I get why people leave but I would say to conservatives out there, please stick around, it’s worth fighting for, it’s a great state,” Lahren said.

Last month, a poll showed that half of California's registered voters – including 74 percent of conservatives – have considered leaving the state.

The poll, conducted by the Institute of Governmental Studies at UC-Berkeley, found 71 percent of residents considered leaving California due to the cost of housing. The poll also found that 84 percent cited the "political culture" and 76 percent identified high taxes as the biggest reason.

Republicans and conservatives were three times as likely to strongly consider leaving than Democrats and liberals, the study found.

Meanwhile, massive crowds of Fox News and Fox Nation fans lined up Wednesday outside the Mahaffey Theater in St. Petersburg, Fla., as ticket holders waited excitedly to take part in Fox Nation's "Patriot Awards."

The highly anticipated red carpet event featured a lineup dubbed the "Golden Globes of conservative media," as attendees were treated to a live "Final Thoughts" commentary by Lahren.

Lahren said there are many reasons people are leaving California, but high on the list is rising taxes, specifically to pay for illegal immigrants. She said many people wonder how Gov. Gavin Newsrom, a Democrat, got elected.

"Many people tell me, 'How did this guy get in there? He's destroying the state,'" she said, adding that the problems with homelessness in major California cities may cause more and more residents to "wake up" and support conservative policies.


Joshua Nelson is a freelance reporter for Fox News.

Is California becoming premodern?

Is California Becoming Premodern?

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review

More than 2 million Californians were recently left without power after the state's largest utility, Pacific Gas and Electric -- which filed for bankruptcy earlier this year -- preemptively shut down transmission lines in fear that they might spark fires during periods of high autumn winds.

Consumers blame the state for not cleaning up dead trees and brush, along with the utility companies for not updating their ossified equipment. The power companies in turn fault the state for so over-regulating utilities that they had no resources to modernize their grids.

Californians know that having tens of thousands of homeless in their major cities is untenable. In some places, municipal sidewalks have become open sewers of garbage, used needles, rodents, and infectious diseases. Yet no one dares question progressive orthodoxy by enforcing drug and vagrancy laws, moving the homeless out of cities to suburban or rural facilities, or increasing the number of mental hospitals.

Taxpayers in California, whose basket of sales, gasoline and income taxes is the highest in the nation, quietly seethe while immobile on antiquated freeways that are crowded, dangerous and under nonstop makeshift repair.

Gas prices of $4 to $5 a gallon -- the result of high taxes, hyper-regulation and green mandates -- add insult to the injury of stalled commuters. Gas tax increases ostensibly intended to fund freeway expansion and repair continue to be diverted to the state's failing high-speed rail project.

Residents shrug that the state's public schools are among weakest in the nation, often ranking in the bottom quadrant in standardized test scores. Elites publicly oppose charter schools but often put their own kids in private academies.

Californians know that to venture into a typical municipal emergency room is to descend into a modern Dante's Inferno. Medical facilities are overcrowded. They can be as unpleasant as they are bankrupting to the vanishing middle class that must face exorbitant charges to bring in an injured or sick child.

No one would dare to connect the crumbling infrastructure, poor schools and failing public health care with the non-enforcement of immigration laws, which has led to a massive influx of undocumented immigrants from the poorest regions of the world, who often arrive without fluency in English or a high-school education.

Stores are occasionally hit by swarming looters. Such Wild West criminals know how to keep their thefts under $950, ensuring that such "misdemeanors" do not warrant police attention. California's permissive laws have decriminalized thefts and break-ins. The result is that San Francisco now has the highest property crime rate per capita in the nation.

Has California become premodern?

Millions of fed-up middle-class taxpayers have fled the state. Their presence as a stabilizing influence is sorely missed. About one-third of the nation's welfare recipients live in California. Millions of poor newcomers require enormously expensive state health, housing, education, legal and law-enforcement services.

California is now a one-party state. Democrats have supermajorities in both houses of the legislature. Only seven of the state's 53 congressional seats are held by Republicans. The result is that there is no credible check on a mostly coastal majority.

Huge global wealth in high-tech, finance, trade and academia poured into the coastal corridor, creating a new nobility with unprecedented riches. Unfortunately, the new aristocracy adopted mindsets antithetical to the general welfare of Californians living outside their coastal enclaves. The nobodies have struggled to buy high-priced gas, pay exorbitant power bills and deal with shoddy infrastructure -- all of which resulted from the policies of the distant somebodies.

California's three most powerful politicians -- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Gov. Gavin Newsom -- are all multimillionaires. Their lives, homes and privileges bear no resemblance to those of other Californians living with the consequences of their misguided policies and agendas.

The state's elite took revolving-door entries and exits for granted. They assumed that California was so naturally rich, beautiful and well-endowed that there would always be thousands of newcomers who would queue up for the weather, the shore, the mountains and the hip culture.

Yet California is nearing the logical limits of progressive adventurism in policy and politics.

Residents carefully plan long highway trips as if they were ancient explorers charting dangerous routes. Tourists warily enter downtown Los Angeles or San Francisco as if visiting a politically unstable nation.

Insatiable state tax collectors and agencies are viewed by the public as if they were corrupt officials of Third World countries seeking bribes. Californians flip their switches unsure of whether the lights will go on. Many are careful about what they say, terrified of progressive thought police who seem more worried about critics than criminals.

Our resolute ancestors took a century to turn a wilderness into California. Our irresolute generation in just a decade or two has been turning California into a wilderness.

Time For The Press To Do Its Job

Time For The Press To Do Its Job
Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel, co-founders: Daily Caller


The press hates Donald Trump. That’s not a newsflash. The bias the press shows toward most Republicans turns to outright hostility when it comes to Trump. Once you’ve convinced yourself your opponent is an evil racist, it’s not hard to justify doing anything you can to stop him. Many in the press corps have admitted this. Most haven’t, but it’s definitely the prevalent attitude in the dominant liberal media. How can we have a fair election in this environment? That question is coming to a head now with regard to Joe Biden and his son’s alleged corruption.

The Biden campaign has decided that their best strategy for handling allegations of corruption is to shame the press out of covering it. They have labeled any such allegations against Biden as Trump-inspired conspiracy theories and pushed newsrooms in an unprecedented way to ignore them. So far, it’s largely working.

But based on the agreed facts known to date, it’s clear there’s something worthy of investigation when it comes to Hunter Biden’s shady foreign business dealings. Here’s what we know: Hunter Biden received massive payments from shady foreign companies. Nobody denies this. He has had a turbulent and troubled professional career. From admitted substance abuse to an involuntary military discharge for drug use to failed companies, it hasn’t been a good run for him. The Bidens’ claims that Hunter was hired for corporate governance expertise don’t pass the laugh test. He has absolutely zero track record of any such expertise.

Burisma, the Ukrainian energy company, paid both Hunter Biden and his business partner Devon Archer a total sum allegedly in the millions of dollars over a number of years. Chinese private equity firm BHR reportedly sold Hunter Biden’s company a 10% stake for $420,000. This seems like a remarkable discount for a firm managing over $2 billion in assets and therefore likely raking in tens of millions of dollars in fees every single year.

Barring some other explanation — not offered to date — it sure seems that the only reason these deals took place was to curry favor from or influence over Joe Biden or other top government officials around him. To be clear, the fact that foreign firms wanted to hire his son to influence Joe Biden does not mean that Joe Biden was himself corrupt at all. It could be that these firms went into these deals in hopes of influencing Joe and that Joe, in the end, never did anything wrong.

There’s only one thing to date that we’re pretty certain Joe did wrong, and even that is likely not illegal. Joe Biden flew his son Hunter to China in December 2013 on Air Force Two. On that trip, Joe met with the founder of BHR. Weeks later, BHR apparently closed on a deal for a $1.5 billion investment from Chinese state-backed investors. This all happened while Joe Biden was the Obama administration’s point man on China. Allowing Hunter to tag along with him to China on an official visit, where all this went down, at a minimum showed very bad judgement on Vice President Biden’s part. 

Was there anything more than bad judgment to these shady-looking Biden business dealings? Nothing more has been proven to date. The question at this stage isn’t whether corruption has been proven but whether it’s worth investigating. A functioning press corps would be all over this story. Maybe there’s nothing more to it. But until someone thoroughly investigates, we won’t know.

A massive number of Americans do not trust the media. The best way to counteract that is for the media to do its job.

But today, we have a very different situation. The entire establishment press corps, under direct pressure from the Biden campaign, has concluded that these clearly dubious business dealings are not worthy of investigation at all. Conclusory statements that there’s no “proof” of corruption have been copy-pasted into every Biden article in The New York Times and The Washington Post since this story first broke. That’s not enough. It’s time for the press to do its job and get to the bottom of why in the world these foreign companies paid Hunter Biden millions of dollars. Did they get anything back for their investment? It’d be nice to know.

Tucker Carlson and Neil Patel co-founded The Daily Caller, one of America’s fastest growing online news outlets, which regularly breaks news and distributes it to over 15 million monthly readers. COPYRIGHT 2019 CREATORS.COM

Elizabeth Warren (or “Elizanomics”) is absolutely CRAZY!

Elizabeth Warren (or “Elizanomics”) is absolutely CRAZY!

Col Mike Walker, USMC (retired)

Here is reality in four numbers:

            

(1) American household wealth: $100.8 trillion 2018 (that is a “T”!)

(2) Combined wealth of all 2,153 US billionaires in 2019: $8.7 trillion

(3) Projected Federal expenditures for 2019: $4.7 trillion

If we took everything from the billionaires and threw them out homeless on the streets of San Francisco then their total wealth would only run the US Government for about twenty-two (22) months.

(4) Add in the Green New Deal cost that includes Medicare-for-all, free college tuition, free jobs, etc, etc and you add a whopping $51 Trillion at the low end or $93 Trillion at the high end over ten years.

That cuts the 22 months down to 11 or 9 months – less than one (1) year!

After that, we would be right back in the same fiscal mess of unsustainable BIG GOVERNMENT overspending – or far worse with New Green Deal!

The bad news is that America would go broke and the world would fall into a Great Depression like the 1930s.

The good news is that future generations would avoid big government socialism like the plague.

For us it would be the worst disaster in American history.

Elizanomics is stone-cold CRAZY!

Giants in the Earth

Giants in the Earth

Members of previous generations now seem like giants

Victor Davis Hanson, Jewish World Review 

Many of the stories about the gods and heroes of Greek mythology were compiled during Greek Dark Ages. Impoverished tribes passed down oral traditions that originated after the fall of the lost palatial civilizations of the Mycenaean Greeks.

Dark Age Greeks tried to make sense of the massive ruins of their forgotten forbearers' monumental palaces that were still standing around. As illiterates, they were curious about occasional clay tablets they plowed up in their fields with incomprehensible ancient Linear B inscriptions.

We of the 21st century are beginning to look back at our own lost epic times and wonder about these now-nameless giants who left behind monuments that we cannot replicate, but instead merely use or even mock.

Does anyone believe that contemporary Americans could build another transcontinental railroad in six years?

Californians tried to build a high-speed rail line. But after more than a decade of government incompetence, lawsuits, cost overruns and constant bureaucratic squabbling, they have all but given up. The result is a half-built overpass over the skyline of Fresno -- and not yet a foot of track laid.

Who were those giants of the 1960s responsible for building our interstate highway system?

California's roads now are mostly the same as we inherited them, although the state population has tripled. We have added little to our freeway network, either because we forgot how to build good roads or would prefer to spend the money on redistributive entitlements.

When California had to replace a quarter section of the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Bay Bridge, it turned into a near-disaster, with 11 years of acrimony, fighting, cost overruns -- and a commentary on our decline into Dark Ages primitivism. Yet 82 years ago, our ancestors built four times the length of our singe replacement span in less than four years. It took them just two years to design the entire Bay Bridge and award the contracts.

Our generation required five years just to plan to replace a single section. In inflation-adjusted dollars, we spent six times the money on one quarter of the length of the bridge and required 13 agencies to grant approval. In 1936, just one agency oversaw the entire bridge project.

California has not built a major dam in 40 years. Instead, officials squabble over the water stored and distributed by our ancestors, who designed the California State Water Project and Central Valley Project.

Contemporary Californians would have little food or water without these massive transfers, and yet they often ignore or damn the generation that built the very system that saves us.

America went to the moon in 1969 with supposedly primitive computers and backward engineering. Does anyone believe we could launch a similar moonshot today? No American has set foot on the moon in the last 47 years, and it may not happen in the next 50 years.
Hollywood once gave us blockbuster epics, brilliant Westerns, great film noirs, and classic comedies. Now it endlessly turns out comic-book superhero films or pathetic remakes of prior classics.

Our writers, directors and actors have lost the skills of their ancestors. But they are also cowardly, and in regimented fashion they simply parrot boring race, class and gender bromides that are neither interesting nor funny. Does anyone believe that the Oscar ceremonies are more engaging and dignified than in the past?

We have been fighting in Afghanistan without result for 18 years. Our forefathers helped to win World War II and defeat the Axis Powers in four years.

In terms of learning, does anyone believe that a college graduate in 2020 will know half the information of a 1950 graduate?

In the 1940s, young people read William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pearl Buck and John Steinbeck. Are our current novelists turning out anything comparable? Could today's high-school graduate even finish "The Good Earth" or "The Grapes of Wrath"?

True, social media is impressive. The internet gives us instant access to global knowledge. We are a more tolerant society, at least in theory. But Facebook is not the Hoover Dam, and Twitter is not the Panama Canal.

Our ancestors were builders and pioneers and mostly fearless. We are regulators, auditors, bureaucrats, adjudicators, censors, critics, plaintiffs, defendants, social media junkies and thin-skinned scolds. A distant generation created; we mostly delay, idle and gripe.

As we walk amid the refuse, needles and excrement of the sidewalks of our fetid cities; as we sit motionless on our jammed ancient freeways; and as we pout on Twitter and electronically whine in the porticos of our Ivy League campuses, will we ask: "Who were these people who left these strange monuments that we use but can neither emulate nor understand?"

In comparison to us, they now seem like gods.

We're all still trapped in Dems' Russia delusion

We're all still trapped in Dems' Russia delusion
Rich Lowry, Jewish World Review 

After three years, we're still on the Russia story. The locus has shifted 500 miles west from Moscow to Kiev, and now we are consumed with the Ukraine controversy rather than the Russia probe, though it's essentially the same thing — a battle over President Trump's legitimacy fought out with allegations of foreign interference.

Democrats are trying to widen the Ukraine controversy, which centers on Trump's mention of the Bidens on his call with his Ukrainian counterpart. They want to drag in his urging Ukraine, Australia and others to cooperate with William Barr's investigation of the origins of the Russia probe.

There's nothing wrong or unusual about a US president asking foreign leaders to provide information useful to his attorney general in an investigation. Why would there be? Except the president's detractors don't consider Barr's investigation above-board. In fact, they consider it another form of Trump's perfidy.

In its report on Trump's call with the Australian prime minister, The New York Times says — in a news report, mind you — that the call "shows the president using high-level diplomacy to advance his personal political interests." Trump is pleased with Barr's ¬≠investigation and would be even more pleased if it unearthed anything untoward. That doesn't make it merely a pet political project or mean that there isn't a genuine public interest in knowing in greater detail how and why the Russia story got started.

The Times of London reported of Trump's call to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson that he wanted "to gather evidence to undermine the investigation into his campaign's links to Russia." There's not really anything to undermine, though, since the investigation has been over for months.

Trump is basically being accused of the entirely new offense of obstruction after the fact. There were many novel theories of obstruction advanced during the special counsel probe, but this is the most creative.

The Russia investigation figures into the Ukraine story in another way. It's not clear that even Democrats would consider his Ukraine call impeachable if it weren't for their belief that Trump has gotten away with so much previously, as catalogued in the Mueller report.

There was already backing in the House for impeachment prior to the Ukraine whistleblower, and House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler already said he was conducting an impeachment inquiry.

Even the framework of the Ukraine matter reflects the Russia story. Trump's critics say he was asking for Ukrainian "interference" in our elections, when what was really going on was that he and Rudy Giuliani were interfering in Ukrainian politics. They were pushing the Ukrainians to undertake investigations, including, of course, into Joe Biden's actions in the country.
Trump publicly urges Ukraine, China to investigate Bidens If you accept the premise that any information developed in a foreign country and used in American politics is election interference, then Trump's opponents themselves were masters at leveraging Ukrainian interference during the 2016 election.

As Politico reported in 2017, Ukrainian government officials "helped Clinton's allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers."

Giuliani's Ukraine adventure was motivated, in large part, by the desire to get to the bottom of this activity in 2016 and turn the tables on Trump's critics. (Instead, he appears to have turned the tables on himself.)

There will be lots of comparisons with the 1990s as the House moves toward impeachment. Yet, the 1790s might be the more apt comparison. Back then, at the outset of the republic, each nascent political party was consumed with the idea that the other was a tool of a foreign power, either France or Britain, and believed that the other was a fundamental threat to American democracy. It made for particularly vitriolic politics.

Today, the Democrats still have not gotten beyond the idea that Trump is somehow a tool of Russia, while Republicans point to Democratic coordination with shadowy foreign forces to get the Russia investigation rolling. Books fly off the shelves about Trump being an alleged fascist, and Republicans are gripped by a Flight 93 mentality that fears if they lose a presidential election, they will never win another one again.

The Russian story contributed to and fed off this feverish atmosphere. For the longest time, it offered Democrats the hope of deliverance from a president whose election they never truly accepted. When Robert Mueller didn't have the goods, House Democrats were at sea for a while, until Trump's call and the whistleblower complaint brought impeachment deliciously back into play.

Ukraine is more an epilogue of the Russian investigation than the beginning of a new book.