“With a Senate impeachment trial likely just days away, President Trump and Democrats are locked in a cycle of mutual trolling over whether the trial should include testimony from witnesses.
Democrats are pressing Republicans to accept witnesses — they’ve made public a list of four, led by former national security adviser John Bolton. Some Republicans are countering that the Senate should summon Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, whose suspicious paychecks from a corrupt Ukrainian company were part of the beginning of the Trump-Ukraine affair.
…One key figure in the Ukraine affair, however, appears to have faded from view, even as impeachment reaches a climax. The whistleblower who started the whole investigation remains anonymous.
Well…sort of anonymous!
The details of his actions — by which he brought the Ukraine matter to the attention of the intelligence community, to House Democrats and ultimately to the world — remain unclear.
Democrats, who once hoped to feature public testimony by the whistleblower, argue that his account is no longer needed given the other evidence which they say proves Trump pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Hunter Biden and the 2016 election. The whistleblower would have nothing to add, Democrats say, and could suffer recriminations and possibly physical danger if his identity were known.
On the other hand, is the Senate really going to try the president and take a vote on his removal on the basis of an investigation with such murky origins?
It’s not an academic question…”
It’s worth noting, as the whistleblower’s identity is as much a secret as the purpose of Iran’s nuclear program, we’ve seen no reports of either Mr. Ciaramella’s employment or health suffering since his name joined the list of the poorest kept secrets in Washington.
Here’s how it likely went down:
“This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”
“Oh,…we mean, we…”
“What we’re trying to say is this conversation…
…never happened!”
We note, his prior prosecutorial experience notwithstanding, Adam Schiff-for-Brains wasn’t named one of the six House managers…likely because the last thing Nancy wants is this nincompoop’s presence inside the Senate chamber, where he might be compelled to recount his early, illegal contacts with Ciaramella.
“Below is my column in The Hill Newspaper on the blunder by Speaker Nancy Pelosi of not submitting the impeachment case to the Senate — a mistake that now threatens not just the trial but the rules for impeachment trials.
On Sunday, Pelosi went largely unchallenged in her obviously incorrect claim that the House is still in court seeking witnesses in the impeachment. The House is litigating pre-impeachment witnesses, but has never sought to subpoena, let alone compel, key witnesses in the impeachment from John Bolton to Rudy Giuliani to others with direct knowledge of any alleged quid pro quo. Indeed, the House has done nothing for four weeks after the vote – a vote that I strongly discouraged in favor of spending a couple months seeking these witnesses and/or court orders. Now Pelosi is actually suggesting that they could still seek the witnesses while the House does nothing. It remains the most baffling blunder of the impeachment.
Here is the column:
“Situation quiet. The captain has been put away for the night.” The words from the movie “The Caine Mutiny” came to mind on Friday when House leaders announced that Speaker Nancy Pelosi would not move until next week in submitting the impeachment of President Trump to a Senate trial. While various Democrats have publicly grumbled about the delay, going into its fourth week, without any sign of success in forcing the Senate to call witnesses, Pelosi continued a strategy that could jeopardize not just any trial but the rules governing impeachment. Indeed, Pelosi may force the Senate into a couple of unprecedented but well deserved rulings.
From the outset, the ploy of Pelosi withholding the House impeachment articles was as implausible as it was hypocritical. There was no reason why Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell would make concessions to get an impeachment that he loathed.More importantly, just a couple of days earlier, House leaders insisted that some of us were wrong to encourage them to wait on an impeachment vote to create a more complete record. Pelosi previously insisted that House committees could not pursue direct witnesses like former national security adviser John Bolton because there was no time to delay in getting this impeachment to the Senate. She then waited a month and counting to send the articles over to the Senate.
The delay now seems largely driven by a desire to preserve the image of Pelosi as a master strategist despite a blunder of the first order. Senator Dianne Feinstein expressed the frustration of many members in saying, “The longer it goes on, the less urgent it becomes. So if it is serious and urgent, send them over. If it is not, do not send it over.” But she and other members were quickly pressured to “correct” their earlier statements by stating the exact opposite and praising the brilliant strategy of Pelosi.
Perhaps the most pathetic change was House Armed Services Committee Chairman Adam Smith, who correctly stated, “At the end of the day, just like we control it in the House, Mitch McConnell controls it in the Senate. It does not look like that is going to happen. I think it is time to send the impeachment to the Senate and let Mitch McConnell be responsible for the fairness of the trial. He ultimately is.” It took just a few hours for Pelosi to get Smith to say that he “misspoke” and praise her inspired strategy.
Now what started as a demand to guarantee Senate witnesses has been downgraded to a demand to “know the rules” while waiting for the Senate to take a vote that it indicated weeks ago. In the alternative, sympathetic media figures insisted that Pelosi succeeded in “forcing a discussion” of Senate witnesses despite the fact that we had the same discussion in the trial of Bill Clinton without the House deciding to withhold the articles.
The fact is that Pelosi played into the hands of McConnell by first rushing this impeachment forward with an incomplete record and now giving him the excuse to summarily change the rules, or even to dismiss the articles. Waiting for the House to submit a list of managers was always a courtesy extended by Senate rules and not a requirement of the Constitution. By inappropriately withholding the articles of impeachment and breaking with tradition, Pelosi simply gave McConnell ample reason to exercise the “nuclear option” and change the rules on both majority voting as well as the rule for the start of trials. That is a high price to pay for vanity.
It could get even worse…”
It just got worse:
As Ted Cruz commented, “Given the circus in the House, I’m surprised she didn’t use crayons.”
For those too young to have experienced past impeachments first-hand, Ann Coulter offers a VERY informative summary of the very tangled webs Slick Willy weaved the first time he was caught trying to deceive, as well as why his impeachment really wasn’t about sex at all…The Left’s propaganda campaign to the contrary notwithstanding.
“Government planning and subsidies will make America the world’s green-energy superpower, create millions of jobs, and supercharge the economy—or so we’re told. The reality is closer to Crescent Dunes, a Nevada solar-energy plant that has gone bust after receiving a $737 million federal loan guarantee.
An inconvenient truth is that the sun sets each day, but the Obama Administration’s green planners had an app for that. They decided to invest in the Crescent Dunes facility that would use molten salt to store heat from the sun, produce steam, and generate electricity even at night. The utility NV Energy had already agreed to buy the electricity. Government support would carry the project to sunny success.
In September 2011, the Energy Department described how the 110-megawatt facility would “be the first of its kind in the United States and the tallest molten salt tower in the world,” powering more than 43,000 homes a year. The precedent was Solar Two, a small pilot plant decommissioned in 1999 that had shown it was technically feasible to use molten salt to store and generate power. But in a 2006 report the Energy Department said the 10-megawatt facility “was never expected to be a viable commercial-scale plant and, in fact, did not validate economic feasibility.”
No worries.It’s only taxpayer money, and the feds jumped into Crescent Dunes anyway…”
It’s as this meme forwarded by Mark Foster suggests:
Which brings us, appropriately enough, to The Lighter Side:
Then there’s this string of memes from Balls Cotton…
…along with this one from Shannon…
…as well as these two from Ed Hickey:
And though we’ve refused to waste our time either following or covering a story we deemed not worth your time, we felt compelled to reprint this series of Megxit memes, again courtesy of Balls:
Finally, we’ll call it a week with our The More History Changes the More It Remains the Same segment, courtesy today of a “startling new study” which may be new, but certainly isn’t startling, at least to anyone…like us…with even a passing knowledge of the subject at hand:
“A startling new study suggests that Germany could have won a key battle in World War II and perhaps changed the outcome of the war ifthey had made a few small strategic changes.
Researchers at the U.K.’s University of York created a computer model using a technique known as “weighted bootstrapping” and determined that the Battle of Britain could have been won by the Germans if they attacked the Brits immediately after Winston Churchill delivered his famous “Finest Hour” speech on June 18, as opposed to July 10, more than three weeks later.
One other grave mistake was not continuing the attack on British airfields after the initial blow on Aug. 13, 1940…”
And to think someone actually paid money for a “new study” which reaches conclusions we learned some 45 years ago! We can hardly wait for the University of York to discover other new and startling “what-ifs” any other historian worth their salt already knew which might have changed the course of WWII!
FYI, like misleading headlines offering an false accounting of the facts…i.e., fake news…fabricated or revisionist history hits our hot button.
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