The Daily Gouge Archive, Monday, January 20th, 2020

On January 21, 2020, in Uncategorized, by magoo1310

It’s Monday, January 20th, 2020…but before we begin, a correction is in order: Adam Schiff-for-Brains was indeed named one of eight House impeachment managers. Our initial impression Pelosi had named six House managers, and Schiff was not among them, was a regrettable error. Word is now Nancy may want Eberhard Adam in the Senate chamber so as preclude his being called as a witness. More as events unfold.

Speaking of corrections, the following irrefutable evidence of some last minute headline hijinks at Politico demonstrates why the term “fake news” was coined in the first place:

Politico Changes Its Headline About USMCA’s Senate Passage

Further proof, as if any were needed, why you can’t spell “Liberal” without an “L”, “I” and an “E”.

Now, here’s The Gouge!

First up, in a related item of Liberals attempting to rewrite history, either through commission or omission, as Jim Freeman records at Best of the Web…

Trump Receives Another Postcard from the Swamp

Now the bureaucrats at the Government Accountability Office are opining on Ukraine.

“The House impeachment hearings ended a month ago, but congressional Democrats aren’t done inviting bureaucrats to share their negative opinions of President Donald Trump. Now it’s the turn of the Government Accountability Office.

Traditionally GAO does its best to serve its congressional bosses. This is not a swipe at these particular swamp dwellers. Yes, the current head of GAO was nominated by President Barack Obama after a congressional commission presented a list of candidates. But the Supreme Court has explicitly found that GAO is subservient to the legislative branch. The 1986 decision is called Bowsher v. Synar. GAO staff try their best to satisfy requests from legislators.

At the urging of Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D., Maryland), GAO now says that Trump administration delays in sending aid to Ukraine were illegal. For people who aren’t students of the Washington bureaucracy, it should be noted that few people consider GAO the authoritative word on legal issues. The Justice Department and ultimately of course the federal courts make the big calls.

In a new letter GAO’s general counsel argues that even though the Trump administration made aid for Ukraine available last September 12—before the Sept. 30 deadline for obligating funds—it still should have happened earlier. It’s not entirely clear which date would have made GAO happy but in the agency’s view the White House did not have an unavoidable “programmatic delay” which prevented funds from going to Ukraine.

Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume that GAO is correct now. Wouldn’t the logic of this decision also apply to Vice President Joe Biden’s famous withholding of Ukraine aid until the local prosecutor investigating his son’s company was fired?

Since this latest GAO missive is being used by those arguing for the removal of a President, it’s also worth reviewing a few recent episodes which did not result in the removal of a President.

In 2014 the Associated Press reported:

The Pentagon broke the law when it swapped Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, a prisoner in Afghanistan for five years, for five Taliban leaders, congressional investigators said Thursday.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office said the Defense Department failed to notify the relevant congressional committees at least 30 days in advance of the exchange – a clear violation of the law – and used $988,400 of a wartime account to make the transfer. The GAO also said the Pentagon’s use of funds that hadn’t been expressly appropriated violated the Antideficiency Act.

“In our view, the meaning of the (law) is clear and unambiguous,” the GAO wrote to nine Republican senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., and various committees. “Section 8111 prohibits the use of ‘funds appropriated or otherwise made available’ in the Department of Defense Appropriations Act, 2014, to transfer any individual detained at Guantanamo Bay to the custody or control of a foreign entity’ except in accordance” with the law.

It’s also difficult to remember any ceremonial pens or somber walking of impeachment articles after Eric Lipton and Michael D. Shear of the New York Times reported in 2015:

The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded.

The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.

“I can guarantee you that general counsels across the federal government are reading this report,” said Michael Eric Hertz, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York who has written on social media and the government.

This column can’t guarantee that any U.S. citizens remember where they were the moment they learned about another Associated Press report in 2016. According to the A.P.’’s Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar:

The Obama administration failed to follow its own health reform law in a $5 billion dispute over compensating insurers for high costs from seriously ill patients, Congress’ investigative arm says.

The opinion from the Government Accountability Office is a setback for the White House and bolsters Republican complaints that administration officials bent the law as problems arose carrying out its complex provisions.

As for today’s opinion, the relevant facts were known to Members of the House when they drafted their impeachment articles. If duly elected officials in neither party were willing to allege the President broke the law, why should we take the opinion of the bureaucrats?“

Which highlights, as Andy McCarthy recounts at NRO…

The Hole in the Impeachment Case

Something is missing from the charges against Trump: An impeachable offense.

“Thought experiment No. 1: Suppose Bob Mueller’s probe actually proves that Donald Trump is under Vladimir Putin’s thumb. Fill in the rest of the blanks with your favorite corruption fantasy: The Kremlin has video of the mogul-turned-president debauching himself in a Moscow hotel; the Kremlin has a bulging file of real-estate transfers through which Trump laundered racketeering proceeds for Putin’s favored mobsters and oligarchs; or Trump is recorded cutting a deal to drop Obama-era sanctions against Putin’s regime if Russian spies hack Democratic accounts.

Thought experiment No. 2: Adam Schiff is not a demagogue. (Remember, this is fantasy.) At the very first televised hearing, when he alleged that President Trump told Ukrainian president Zelensky, “I want you to make up dirt on my political opponent…lots of it,” Schiff was not defrauding the public. Instead, impeachment’s Inspector Clouseau can actually prove that Trump was asking a foreign government to manufacture out of whole cloth evidence that Vice President Biden and his son were cashing in on the former’s political influence (as opposed to asking that Ukraine look into an arrangement so objectively sleazy that the Obama administration itself agitated over what to do about it).

What do these two scenarios have in common, besides being fictional? Answer: If either of them were real, we’d already be talking about President Pence’s upcoming State of the Union address.

This is the point that gets lost in all the endless chatter over impeachment strategy and procedure. Everything that is happening owes to the fact that we do not have an offense sufficiently grave for invocation of the Constitution’s nuclear option. If we had one, the machinations and the posturing would be unnecessary — even ridiculous (Perhaps McCarthy meant “even more ridiculous”?!?)…”

Perhaps this explains why, even in the comfortable, Communist-coddling confines of CNN, one of the Dims’ own eight House impeachment managers could not directly answer one very basic question:

Besides, isn’t the crime Crow cannot seemingly explain actually “extortion” rather than “bribery”?

Next up, FOX News reports how a supremely self-important Progressive (do they come any other way?!?)…

Minnesota ‘Teacher of the Year’ kneels during anthem at college football championship

“I think the current environment that is being created and has been created in his tenure definitely adds to my feelings of wanting to support individuals who are not being supported,” she said, adding: “I really feel like our country is not serving the needs of all its inhabitants…so many humans right now that are not being given the respect and the rights that they deserve.”

In a tweet recounting the event, Holstine quoted Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., writing: “No one is free until we are all free.“

Would it be too much to ask Ms. Holstine…not to be confused with, bein’ she’s from the Twin Cities and all, a “Holstein“…

…or any of her kindred spirits, to give us one example…just one…of a single American being denied under The Donald the same rights enjoyed by their fellow citizens?

Before you respond, puh-LEASE don’t give us the patent, politically-correct, 1984-echoing bullsh*t speech codes aren’t in place requiring others to address/reference transgenders by their preferred pronouns on a given day…or about Trump forcing the separation of illegal immigrant families in “concentration camps” Obama constructed at the border…or that Black men are incarcerated at a level disproportionate to their percentage of the population, yet completely in keeping with their rate of commission of criminal acts.

Here’s the juice: let’s deal in FACTS, not FEELINGS, because THAT’S when all your arguments come up empty!!!

And in the Throwing Good Money After Bad segment, we learn the…

First 2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray auctioned for $3 million

“The rights to the first 2020 Chevrolet Corvette Stingray off the production line were auctioned at the Barrett-Jackson event in Scottsdale, Ariz., on Saturday night for $3 million. The base price for the model is just $59,995.

As the first-ever mid-engine Corvette, the coupe is set to be one of the most historic examples of the model ever built. NASCAR team owner Rick Hendrick was the winning bidder. Hendrick has one of the largest Chevrolet sports car collections in the world and has purchased several significant examples at past charity auctions…”

“All of the proceeds from the sale were earmarked for the Detroit Children’s Fund, which is aimed at improving the city’s schools.“

Yeah…

Truth be told, Detroit’s school children would be better served if Hendrick’s largesse took the form of 3 million $1 bills burned for their heat value rather than thrown away in an utterly vain attempt to solve the issues facing our inner city schools. Otherwise, the money will undoubtedly end up in the pockets of those whose livelihood is dependent upon perpetuating said problems.

Since we’re on the subject of heat and the truth, in today’s installment of the EnvironMental Moment, courtesy of Jeff Foutch, Watts Up With That details the deliberately deceptive hype behind claims the planet’s just experienced its…

Hottest Decade Evah!!!

“…A couple of years ago, Ed Hawkins came up with idea to make a meme-style temperature art piece for the graph-challenged. I’ll have to say that it was brilliant, because serial regurgitators all over the world shared the hell out of it. They even got TV weather people to wear ties depicting it.

However, Josh, creative as ever, decided to make a new set of stripes that went back in time a little further, for some…uh perspective that time myopic climate scientists like Hawkins seem to miss…”