Give, Don't Govern

John Stossel

by John Stossel: This week, children may learn about that greedy man, Ebenezer Scrooge. Scrooge is selfish until ghosts scare him into thinking about others' well-being, not just his own.

Good for the ghosts.

But the way Scrooge addresses others' needs matters.

Today's advocates of equality, compassion, increased spending on education, health care, etc., say "we care" but demand that government do the work.

Controlling other people with the power of government doesn't prove you care.

If you want to help the poor, clean the environment, improve the arts. Great! Please do.

But if you are compassionate, then you'll spend your own money on your vision. You will volunteer your work and encourage others to volunteer theirs, by charity or commerce. You don't force others to do what you think is best.

But government is not voluntary.

Government has no money of its own. Whatever it gives away, it first must take from others through taxes.

If you vote for redistribution of wealth, welfare benefits, new Medicare spending or free education, you can tell yourself you're "generous."

But you're not. You're just forcing others to pay for programs you think might help.

That's not generosity. That's control. The more programs you demand, the more controlling you are.

In fact, you are worse than greedy old Ebenezer Scrooge.

With Scrooge, people have a choice. They can work for Scrooge or quit. They can do business with someone else.

Governments don't offer us choice. Governments say: "Comply or we will lock you up. Pay taxes and we will decide whom to help. No one may escape the master plan."

Why, then, do people react to big government ideas as if they're generous instead of scary?

Because most people don't think clearly about what it means to tell government to use force against their fellow citizens. They think about society the way their ancestors did.

"Our minds evolved tens of thousands of years ago, when we lived in small groups of 50-200 people," says HumanProgress.org editor Marian Tupy. "We would kill game, bring it back, share it."

The idea of everyone getting an equal share still makes us feel warm and cozy.

Some of you may feel that coziness this week, sharing a Christmas meal. Great. But remember that if you decide that society's resources should be redistributed, that's much more complex than passing meat around a family table.

Seizing control of a big society's resources has unforeseen consequences -- ripple effects that are hard to predict.

Back in the cave, you stood a pretty good chance of noticing which hungry relative needed a bigger share of meat. In the tribe, that sort of central planning worked well enough.

It doesn't work as well once the tribe numbers thousands or millions of people. No tribal elder knows enough to plan so many different people's lives.

Today's politicians, for instance, don't know how many workers will be laid off if they raise taxes on Walmart.

They don't know what innovation will never happen if they cap CEOs' salaries.

They don't know how much wealth creation will be lost if they tax investors' money in order to fund another government program.

Government's built-in ignorance explains how it can spend trillions on failed poverty programs, and then respond to the failure by demanding more funds to continue the same programs.

You stand a better chance of getting good results if you do real charity, close to home, where you can keep an eye on it -- and without coercing anyone else to do things your way.

We can invent new ways to give to each other. Philanthropy evolves, much the way markets do, harnessing new technologies and social networks that span the globe.

Innovative ideas, like microlending, start in one kitchen. If they work, they grow.

By contrast, government grows even when it doesn't work. It bosses people around even when it's not really helping them.

Big hearts are a good thing. Big government is no substitute for them.
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John Stossel is author of "No They Can't! Why Government Fails -- But Individuals Succeed." Article shared by Rasmussen Reports.

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Will Supporting Trump Ruin My Witness?

by Mario Murillo Ministries: One of the arguments made by the editor of Christianity Today Magazine was that supporting Trump ruined our witness to America. No one yearns to win souls more than I do, therefore, I will tackle this argument, beginning with a story that seems to be analogous.

After the United States Army liberated the German concentration camps, General Eisenhower viewed the incomprehensible horror. His reaction was to make every soldier in the area come and see it for themselves.

When he was asked why he had subjected these men to such savagery and why he forced them to view images which they could never wash from their minds, he said this, “We are told that the American soldier does not know what he was fighting for. Now, at least he will know what he is fighting against."

Millions of Christians look at Trump and see a man who is not perfect. He is not their model of a true believer. They reject him because they know what they are striving for: gentleness, civility and increased church attendance. What they do not know is what they are fighting against.

I know this, because whenever they attack Trump they offer no alternative for the office of President. They can’t tell you who else they would rather vote for. Or they assume it doesn’t matter if Democrats win. They only know they are offended by Trump’s behavior. But how does his behavior appear when compared to the horror of what the Left will do to this nation?

No doubt American soldiers had heard of the atrocities committed by Hitler and the Nazis, but they had not witnessed it first-hand. That is, not until they saw with their own eyes the ovens, the mountains of bones, and hundreds of rotting corpses.

Likewise, it is one thing to see leftists selling candles that say “Abortions are magical” and quite another to witness a baby being dismembered in an abortion clinic. Or to see a baby survive an abortion and then overhear an impossibly inhuman conversation, such as, “We’ll keep it comfortable until the doctor and the mother can decide what to do next.” How worried are you now, about how ‘rude’ Trump appears?

Does it ruin my altar calls in the tent when I support President Trump? Please, don’t reveal your ignorance if you don’t realize what an inner city is actually like. It is a cruel, disgraceful, soul-crushing place. And it’s the total property and legacy of the Left. They have crushed all decency in every city they control. Hopes and dreams die daily on an unprecedented scale.

California’s inner cities scream of injustice and abhorrent abuse. Not only is the machinery of government not stopping homelessness—they are actually causing it!

When I stand in the tent and proclaim the miracle of new life in Jesus, I declare the hope, the power, and the love that awaits them. I challenge them to break free. Of course, they need to be freed from sin. They need to be freed from addictions. But they also must be set free from something else.

It’s a funny thing that no one in the church attacked me when I preached against heroin. No one criticized my messages against violent gangs. But when, by the Holy Spirit, I identified a drug worse than meth, which is socialism, and a gang worse than MS-13, the baby slaughtering, corrupt, Left, suddenly I was surrounded by timid souls who tried to hide behind empty platitudes.

Will supporting Trump ruin my witness? Not for the masses who crowd our altars for Jesus. They couldn't care less about political correctness.

Wake up Christian! Don’t be like those reluctant recruits who served under Patton and hated him because they thought him a crude and nasty leader but they forgot the monster he was trying to kill. Be honest! Do you not see the blatant abuse of power? Do you not see how power is being centralized under tyrants who hate God, who hate freedom, hate your faith, and want to dominate your children’s future? Can you not see how vicious they are, how deviant they are and how determined they are to manipulate every aspect of American life?

I never neglect to preach a scripture-laden message to lost souls. They understand what I mean when I tell them to get off drugs. But, I also tell them they need to get out of the mental-slave-plantation of the Left. It’s lukewarm Christians who don’t get it. Is it because they don’t want to?

You may know what you are fighting for, but I am for Trump because he knows, like I know, what we are all fighting against, and what the stakes are if we lose America.
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Mario Murillo is an evangelist Mario Murillo, minister, blogger.

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The Plot Against the President

Lee Smith’s new book exposes the biggest political scandal in American history.

by Daniel Greenfield: The Five W’s are the essential infrastructure of good journalism. It’s important to be able to tell a good story. But if the story doesn’t contain answers to who, what, where, when, and why, it’s meaningless.

Fortunately, Lee Smith’s The Plot Against the President digs into the origin of the coup against President Trump in the old-fashioned Five W’s sense. While the book still leaves plenty of questions buried in reams of classified documents, it’s an excellent resource for organizing and making sense of the mess.

Rarely has a government investigation been clouded in this much secrecy or required so many investigations of the investigation. The points of the spiderweb between private contractors, the media, and government figures still vanish into darkness. But Smith follows the work of Rep. Devin Nunes and his team (the subtitle for the tome is The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History) and that comes with its own infrastructure of the Five W’s.

The ‘why’ isn’t hard to grasp, but the ‘when’ remains elusive. Smith makes a good case for the smear campaign associated with the Steele Dossier predating the former British operative whose continental credentials and FBI connections were used to sell a political assault ordered by the Clinton campaign.

Instead, Smith describes a series of ‘protodossiers’ which were used to eventually shape the Steele Dossier. These protodossiers were works in progress, bits of opposition research focusing on Trump’s international business connections, put together and fed to the media in a conventional fashion. There’s nothing especially controversial (or palatable) about this type of opposition research. But, even from the very beginning, these work products were not merely opposition research intended for the public.

Their real audience can be assessed from the linkages to Nellie Ohr, the wife of senior Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr, and a friend of Steele’s, who would act as a conduit for the Steele dossier, and the warnings that Trump was a national security threat. Accusing Trump of Russian ties was not a strategy meant to win an election. It was a justification for an unlimited investigation of Trump and his associates using methods and degrees of secrecy that would otherwise be off limits against Americans.

This is what Smith describes as a “paper coup” or “a bureaucratic insurgency waged almost entirely through the printed word”. Trump’s international business affairs wouldn’t have interested voters. Opposition research focusing on those ties had only one true vector and purpose. The protodossiers were also a protocoup. The Steele dossier, sloppy and incompetent as it might have been, was the final product. A piece of work that could be used to bring the full weight of FISA warrants, informants, and unmaskings down on the political opposition, even while the media manufactured a parallel reality.

Smith also traces how the protodossiers evolved into Russiagate. As he notes, "a key difference between the protodossiers and Steele's seventeen memos is that the former discuss Trump's supposed connections to Russian and Eastern Bloc figures alleged to have ties to organized crime and also possibly to Russian state interests. Steele's documents by contrast deal almost exclusively with alleged ties connecting Trump and his associates to Russian government officials and figures publicly known to be close to Kremlin leadership." The narrowing of the focus on Russia from the protodossiers into the dossier, winnowed down and focused the regional opposition research into the most useful narrative.

The usefulness of a narrative that moved past organized crime figures to the Kremlin lay not in its public appeal, where allegations of organized crime might have been more damaging, but its surveillance uses. The Steele dossier had emerged as the product of a political campaign, but had never been intended for public use. Instead it was a piece of opposition research that had been aimed directly at the FBI.

The uniqueness of such a thing also testifies to the uniqueness of the conspiracy against Trump.

The media echo chamber fed by the dossier and the protodossiers had not come into being to merely pursue a negative, smear Trump, but to uphold a positive, the investigation of Trump. Their stories were used internally, as in the FISA warrant, to support the tactics and the purpose of targeting Trump.

The evolution of the ‘Paper Coup’, its stages, and the roles of a variety of familiar figures from James Comey to Glenn Simpson, from Peter Strzok to Rod Rosenstein, are at the center of Smith’s Five W’s book. Even as it remains mired in paper, the reams of documents have real consequences, leading to arrests, interrogations, legal bills, surveillance and, eventually a pushback by, among others, Rep. Devin Nunes.

Smith pays careful attention to the interplay of personalities, the timing of bureaucratic maneuvers, and the evolution of narratives to produce a carefully studied and documented reading of his original research and the work of the Nunes investigation. The plot that is the book’s subject takes place in a world governed by these rules, by motives telegraphed through maneuvers, by an intimate knowledge of procedures, and by a formidable array of contacts, and that is world that Smith and Nunes know.

As the book progresses, Smith and Nunes and his team dig into not just the lines of the documents, but the story between the lines, explaining not just why the players did what they did, but why they did it when they did it, and what the various moments that drove the disparate news cycles underlying this story really meant.

As the political dominoes keep falling, the lies that brought us from the murky origins of the Russia smear to the Ukraine impeachment are being exposed. And Smith’s book is an important resource for understanding where those lies came from, how they were employed, and what they were meant to accomplish. We already know, as its title testifies, the plot against President Trump was the biggest political scandal in American history. But The Plot Against the President explains how it was exposed.

The Plot Against the President: The True Story of How Congressman Devin Nunes Uncovered the Biggest Political Scandal in U.S. History is ultimately a study of a war fought with paper, in which both sides warred with investigations, one to seize power under the guise of a lie and the other to protect the power of the people with the truth.
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Daniel Greenfield (@Sultanknish) is Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an investigative journalist and writer focusing on radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

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2020 Update, Buttigieg Politicizes Christmas, Enough Is Enough

Gary Bauer

by Gary Bauer, Contributing Author: 2020 Update
As 2019 comes to a close, the 2020 campaign kicks into high gear. And there's growing anxiety among Democrats about the state of their presidential primary. Just consider these headlines:

"Democratic Insiders: Bernie Could Win The Nomination" -- Politico

"Could Four Different Democrats Split The First Four States?" -- USA Today

"Democrats Brace For 'Bloody' Primary Season" -- The Hill

"Why a Contested Democratic Convention Is Possible" -- RealClearPolitics.com

While former Vice President Joe Biden continues to maintain a healthy lead in most national polls, he's not particularly strong in the early voting states, except for South Carolina.

In Iowa, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders are battling it out for first place. Biden is third.

In New Hampshire, Sanders and Buttigieg are neck-and-neck, with Warren nipping at Biden's heels.

In Nevada, Biden is leading, but there hasn't been a poll conducted there for six weeks. Moreover, Sanders did surprising well in Nevada's 2016 caucuses, and pollsters are noting that his support this time around is surprisingly solid in spite of his recent heart attack.

It is easy to see why USA Today suggests that the four early states could produce four different winners, and how the primary contest turns into a 'bloody' battle that drags on into a contested convention.

Buttigieg Politicizes Christmas
The left politicizes everything -- the courts, the Boy Scouts, fast food, football, even bathrooms. On Christmas morning, Mayor Pete Buttigieg tweeted this:

"Today I join millions around the world in celebrating the arrival of divinity on earth, who came into this world not in riches but in poverty, not as a citizen but as a refugee. No matter where or how we celebrate, merry Christmas."

Wow! Millions of Christians were celebrating the birth of Jesus, our Messiah, the son of God, the perfect lamb, and some leftists were trying to "draft" the Christ Child into the progressive movement.

Few things make me angrier than trying to use Jesus as an advocate of abortion, open borders and government confiscation of people's hard-earned money.

Buttigieg, who has emerged as a frontrunner in the Democrat primary, has been using this tactic throughout the campaign. While always claiming the mantle of tolerance, he has regularly questioned the Christian faith of Vice President Mike Pence. He once said that his marriage to a man brought him closer to God.

A few things about Buttigieg's tweet jumped out at me. It is curious how seldom Buttigeig says the name "Jesus." But let's put that aside for now.

The tweet is a brazen attempt to confuse Christians into believing that our faith requires us to support the left's big government agenda. Jesus was no fan of big government. Big government (Rome) did not treat Jesus well.

By the way, there's no biblical evidence that his family was poor for the times they lived in. Nor did Jesus come into the world as a refugee . . . from Heaven.

Buttigieg should stick to policy issues and stop trying to hijack Christianity for his narrow political ambitions.

The chutzpah here is breathtaking!

Buttigieg and his fellow progressives are trying to divide Christians going into the election year. Yet they fully embrace abortion on demand for any and no reason at all. Choosing death is the exact opposite message of the Gospels.

All the major Democrat competitors have made it clear that they will appoint judges like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, whose animus toward religious liberty is legendary. If it had been up to Ginsburg, the Bladensburg Peace Cross would have been demolished.

How could anyone forget that under President Obama the Little Sisters of the Poor were threatened by the Justice Department because they refused to subsidize abortion? How could anyone forget that evangelical business owners were bankrupted for refusing to participate in same-sex weddings?

The political left in America has swung so far against religion that a majority of delegates at the 2012 Democrat National Convention booed when the party leadership tried to insert God into the party platform. Far-left big city mayors have tried to silence pastors.

There are many reasons that all those leftists were crying on the night of November 8, 2016. There are scores of excuses for the three-year temper tantrum they have been throwing since then.

The most important is that the left thought it was on the verge of controlling the Supreme Court. It was so close to ripping America out of the rich soil of our Judeo-Christian heritage by using the courts to inflict its secular agenda on the country.

That is exactly what the left will attempt to do if Buttigieg, Sanders, Biden or Warren walks into the White House in January of 2021.

While American Values does not support or oppose candidates for public office, it does provide me with a platform to defend our cherished values, including religious liberty. Please stand with American Values now as we fight the good fight for faith, family and freedom!

"Enough Is Enough"
New York City is experiencing a rash of anti-Semitic attacks. The Wall Street Journal reported over the summer that in the first five months of the year, there had been an 83% increase in hate crimes compared to the same period in 2018. Sadly, 59% of them were anti-Semitic in nature.

The raw Jew-hatred is apparently getting worse. So far, there have been at least six anti-Semitic attacks during Chanukah.

Evan Bernstein, a spokesman for the Anti-Defamation League, blasted the attacks as "particularly heinous" as the Jewish community is still "reeling from the deadly attack in Jersey City on December 10th." Bernstein added, "Enough is enough."

These vile and vicious attacks coming during holiday season are heartbreaking. Men and women of faith have an obligation to speak out and to stand with our Jewish brothers and sisters.

As Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel so aptly put it, "Anti-Semitism is not just a Jewish problem, it's everyone's problem. And it is not just the world's oldest hatred, it is sin."
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Gary Bauer (@GaryLBauer)  is a conservative family values advocate and serves as president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families

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Hard Rock Covfefe . . .

. . . Democrats are using their weak Impeachment in hopes it will shield them from Trump 2020 and the Durham investigation.

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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We're Living in the (Almost) Best of Times

Michael Barone

by Michael Barone: The best of times, the worst of times. Your instinct on which one we're living through is affected by your basic temperament, but it also depends on how well you're observing -- and quantifying -- things in the world around you.

Temperamentally, in the United States -- or at least in that loud, if not large, part of it dominated by political tweets -- the overwhelming weight of opinion, crossing party lines that are unusually rigid in this period of American history, is that we live in the worst of times.

President Donald Trump, enjoying all-but-unanimous support from Republicans in polls, tells us that we are living on the brink of disaster, at risk of being sucked under the sludge by vicious creatures of the swamp.

Trump opponents including almost the whole of the Democratic Party and a tattered but still loudly chirping fragment of the Republican Party assure us that we are entering the dark night of Nazism, racism and violent suppression of all dissenting opinion.

To which I say: Nonsense.

As does, in more elegant terms, science writer and British House of Lords voting member Matt Ridley in the British Spectator. "We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history," he writes of the decade just ending.

Olden times -- multiepisode dramas of Edwardian noblemen or statistics showing a narrower pay gap between 1950s CEOs and assembly line workers -- may look better in warm memories. But cold hard statistics tell another story.

"Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world's population for the first time," Ridley writes. "It was 60 per cent when I was born," which was in 1958, a year that some of us can actually remember.

Of course, you may say economic progress made since China and India discovered the magic of free markets has helped people over there but that over here, in advanced countries, we're not growing, just gobbling up and wolfing down more of the world's limited resources.

Not so, replies Ridley. Consumers in advanced countries are actually consuming less stuff (biomass, metals, minerals or fossil fuels) per capita, even while getting more nutrition and production from it. Thank technological advances and, yes, in some cases, government regulations.

We're also experiencing, as a world and in advanced countries and domestically, less violence and more in the way of peace. That's the argument of Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker in his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature." Wars are infrequent and less deadly than in the past.

So is violent crime in the United States and other advanced nations. It used to be taken as given that disadvantaged young males, especially those minorities discriminated against, were hugely likely to commit violent crimes. Now, thanks to improved policing and changed attitudes, far fewer do so.

The natural tendency of most people is to ignore positive trends. They are neither the lead stories on your local newscast nor mentioned in shouting matches on cable news. People usually focus on complaints and grievances. And there are worrying negative countertrends, like the opioid abuse that has cut life expectancies down for some demographic groups.

And we tend to focus on negative trends, even after they've been reversed. Illegal border crossings peaked just before the 2007-08 financial crisis and are much fewer -- though not zero -- today. Low-skilled workers' wages for years rose little or not at all, as politicians of both parties complained. Since 2016, they've been rising faster than average, but only Trump's fans seem to have noticed; Democrats probably will if the trend continues when their party has the White House.

One can even make the case that where we lament sluggish economic growth -- Japan since 1990, continental Europe since 2001, the U.S. from 2007 up through 2017 -- judged in any historic perspective, living standards remain more than comfortable.

That's a reminder that the positive force of democratic politics tends to produce the negative force of cynical partisanship, visible today not just in Donald Trump's America but in most of Europe and much of Asia. But nationalistic politics has not undermined civil liberties, and the center-left's fumbling attempts to sell economic redistribution suggest that people are actually better off than their grumbles to pollsters suggest.

Of course bad things can happen in even the best of times, and a minor cloudburst can spoil a bright summer day. But at year's and decade's end, our grumbling society is closer to the best of times than to the worst of times.
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Michael Barone is a Senior Political Analyst for the Washington Examiner and a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a Fox News Channel  and co-author of The Almanac of American Politics Shared by Rasmussen Reports.

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Is ‘Little Rocket Man’ Winning?

by Patrick Buchanan: If U.S. sanctions are insufficient to force Kim to “denuclearize,” as seems apparent, is Trump prepared to force him to do so?

As of Dec. 26, Kim Jong Un’s “Christmas gift” to President Donald Trump had not arrived. Most foreign policy analysts predict it will be a missile test more impressive than any Pyongyang has yet carried off.

What is Kim’s game? What does Kim want?

He cannot want war with the United States, as this could result in the annihilation of the Kim family dynasty that has ruled North Korea since World War II. Kim is all about self-preservation.

What he appears to want in his confrontation with Trump is a victory without war. In the near-term, Kim seeks three things: recognition of his regime as the legitimate government of North Korea and its acceptance in all the forums of the world, trade and an end to all U.S. and U.N. sanctions, and a nuclear arsenal sufficient to deter a U.S. attack, including missiles that can strike U.S. bases in South Korea, Japan, Guam, and the Western Pacific. And he seeks the capability to deliver a nuclear warhead on the U.S. mainland.

Nor is this last goal unreasonable from Kim’s vantage point.

For he knows what became of the two other nations of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil” that failed to develop nuclear weapons.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was invaded, and he was hanged and his sons hunted down and killed.

The Ayatollah’s Iran negotiated a 2015 nuclear deal with America and opened up its nuclear facilities to intrusive inspections to show that Tehran did not have a nuclear weapons program.

Trump came to power, trashed the deal, reimposed sanctions and is choking Iran to death.

Moammar Gadhafi surrendered his WMD in 2004 and opened up his production facilities. And in 2011, the U.S. attacked Libya and Gadhafi was lynched by a mob.

Contrast the fate of these regimes and rulers with the Kim family’s success. His father, Kim Jong Il, tested nuclear weapons and missiles in defiance of U.S. warnings, and now the son is invited to summits with the U.S. president in Singapore and Hanoi.

If Kim did not have nuclear weapons, would American presidents be courting him? Would U.S. secretaries of state be visiting Pyongyang? If Kim did not have nuclear weapons who would pay the least attention to the Hermit Kingdom?

Undeniably, with his promised “Christmas gift,” possibly a missile capable of hitting the U.S., Kim is pushing the envelope. He is taunting the Americans. We have told him what he must do. And he is telling us where we can go.

But by so doing, Kim has put the ball squarely in Trump’s court.

The question Trump faces: Is he prepared to accept North Korea joining Russia and China as a third adversarial power with the ability to launch a nuclear strike on the continental United States?

And if U.S. sanctions are insufficient to force Kim to “denuclearize,” as seems apparent, is Trump prepared to force him to do so? Is Trump prepared to use “fire and fury” to remove Kim’s nukes?

With 28,500 U.S. troops and thousands of U.S. citizens in South Korea, many within artillery range of the DMZ, is Trump prepared to risk a clash that could ignite a second Korean War in the election year 2020?

Is the president prepared for whatever that might bring?

How does this confrontation play out?

A guess: The U.S. has lived with North Korea’s nuclear weapons for a decade, and Trump is not going to risk a second Korean conflict with a military attack on Kim’s nuclear and missile arsenals. Kim Jong Un and his father have created a new reality in Korea, and we are going to have to live with it.

Where does East Asia go from here?

South Korea has twice the population of the North and an economy 40 times as large. Japan has a population five times that of North Korea and an economy 100 times as large.

If the U.S. treaty guarantees, dating to the 1950s, to fight for these two nations come into question as a result of America’s reluctance to face down Pyongyang more forcibly on its nuclear arsenal, these nations are almost certain to start considering all options for their future security.

Among these are building their own nuclear arsenals and closer ties to the one nation that has shown it can discipline North Korea — China.

Much is on the line here.

Kim’s challenge is ultimately about the credibility of the United States, which has treaty commitments and issued war guarantees to scores of nations in NATO Europe, the Mideast and East Asia, but whose people have zero interest in any new war, especially a second Korean War.

If the world sees that America is reluctant to face down, or fight a North Korea that is threatening us, will they retain the old confidence that the United States will risk war for them?

What Kim is undermining is not just U.S. security but U.S. credibility.
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Patrick Buchanan (@PatrickBuchanan) is currently a blogger, conservative columnist, political analyst, chairman of The American Cause foundation and an editor of The American Conservative. He has been a senior adviser to three Presidents, a two-time candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, and was the presidential nominee of the Reform Party in 2000.

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Aliscia Andrews, Virginia Republican, Running To Become First Female Marine Elected To Congress

Aliscia Andrews

by Ryan Saavedra: Aliscia Andrews, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps (USMC), is running for U.S. Congress in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District as a Republican, seeking to unseat freshman Democrat Rep. Jennifer Wexton, and if elected, would become the first female Marine elected to the U.S. Congress.

In an interview with The Daily Wire, Andrews, who has an MBA and Certificate in Cybersecurity Strategy Management from Georgetown, explains what inspired her to run for Congress and what goals she hopes to accomplish if elected.

Andrews, who was motivated to join the USMC after a high school friend of hers was killed while serving in the Army, served in the USMC across multiple continents including Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Andrews currently works with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as a contractor and focuses on issues related to securing America’s borders.

As the 2019 year comes to a close #TEAMAndrews is ready to show up for #VA10 and take back the HILL. We need your help to make this happen join our fight, donate today, help flip VA Red because #WEmatter ➡️https://t.co/T348wFfDPV pic.twitter.com/8NZyOS6ZYa

— Aliscia Andrews VA10 (R) Congressional Candidate (@alisciaandrews) December 26, 2019

1. What inspired you to get into politics?
I served our country in the Marines and I currently work with the Department of Homeland Security and Intelligence community focusing on border security issues. Commitment and service to our Country has always been in my blood. But every day I see more and more problems and less solutions. For me, running for office is just one more way I can serve my nation and solve the problems we face as a country, whether that’s guns, healthcare, immigration or national security. We’ve seen, over the course of the past few years, this dangerous and lawless ideology pushed by the socialist-wing of the Democrat Party. Our law enforcement officers go out there every day to protect and serve our communities yet elected officials and the government don’t have their backs. We are a nation of law and order and it’s time to remind everyone of that.

2. Talk a little about your experience as a Marine. What led you to become a Marine? What specifically did you do in the Marines?
I grew up in a military family. My father was in the Air Force. It was instilled in me at an early age to have a servant’s heart. I’ve always felt a calling to serve. When I was younger, a high school friend made the ultimate sacrifice. For me, that was the deciding moment to join USMC. I was deployed with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit. I traveled to the Haiti, the Middle East, the Horn of Africa and Europe during my service to our country. I’ve seen firsthand the freedoms that we enjoy and just how precious they are.

3. You are running to unseat Democrat Rep. Jennifer Wexton in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District. In what areas do you think she has fallen short in serving the people of your district?
Most importantly she doesn’t represent the issues that matter to the people of Northern Virginia. She’s taken on radical leftist positions when the people that sent her to Congress don’t share the same ideology. The single biggest issue is immigration. She’s out there advocating for open borders and lawlessness. A couple months ago a law enforcement officer was suspended for turning an illegal immigrant with deportation papers over to ICE. Jennifer Wexton was nowhere to be found. She’s promoting a society that encourages anarchy over the rule of law. I am unapologetically a supporter of our 2nd amendment. Jennifer Wexton wants to violate our 4th amendment rights and require credit card companies to notify the government if someone legally purchases a firearm, essentially creating a government database of gun owners. She enables partisan politics and obstructionism. She doesn’t want to find a common ground solution and she would rather side with the fringes of her party than allow our country to solve problems and unify.

4. What are the top three issues for voters in your district and how do you plan on addressing those issues?Issue #1 — Immigration: I will vote for any bill that allocates funding to securing our border, whether that be a wall, technology or personnel. I will support legislation that allows local law enforcement to cooperate with their federal partners and allow them to do their jobs without restraint. We also need to end sanctuary cities to get illegal criminal aliens off our streets.

Issue #2 — National Security: The primary responsibility of the federal government is to protect its citizens. It is of the utmost importance that we have a fully-funded and operational military. Our armed forces are the greatest deterrent we have. When we are strong abroad, we’re strong at home. We need to make sure we maintain our military dominance over China, Russia North Korea, and Iran.

Issue #3 — Economy and Trade: Our economy is booming thanks to President Trump. The stock market is hitting record highs; unemployment as a whole and for minority groups is at an all-time low. We need to continue to find ways to allow Americans to keep more of their money, as well as cut regulation on small businesses so companies can grow and aren’t restricted.

Issue #4 — Second Amendment: With Democrats taking control on the state legislature, and the radicals of the national Democrat Party telling law-abiding citizens they are going to forcibly confiscate our guns, we need a strong advocate of our 2nd amendment in office. I will never vote to infringe on our God-given right. I support the counties in Virginia who are in favor of becoming 2nd amendment sanctuaries and have rallied in support of doing so.5. What are the issues that are the most important to you on a personal level?
Immigration to me is the most important. I work with DHS and see firsthand the violence and horror that occurs at our southern border. We’ve seen countless stories where illegal immigrants commit crimes where American citizens are killed. We have criminal gangs pouring across our border, an unmitigated flow of drugs that plague communities. And to top it off, our law enforcement isn’t even allowed to turn illegals over to the feds to deport those with federal detainers. This is not the country I want my children to grow up in.

6. Why should minorities, women, and young people vote Republican and how do you plan to reach them?
Everyone should vote for Republicans for one simple reason: individual liberty and freedom. I served in the Marines to defend these sacred rights. Democrats want one thing: government control over every aspect of life and to control the value of each citizen. It’s up to us to educate and explain what that means to everyone. High taxes, government-run healthcare and industry, no ownership of private or intellectual property and a globalist agenda that puts America and its citizens last.

7. How should the GOP respond to some of the issues, like healthcare and student debt, that Democrats propose addressing with socialist policies?
Make sure everyone knows this is fantasy and not reality. We cannot tax our way to solving problems. For healthcare, we should educate young voters on the VA. That’s a government-run healthcare system and veterans are left hanging out to dry because of its inefficiency and wasteful spending. That’s what Democrats want for the everyday Americans. For education, we need to invest in our trade schools and make sure students know their options before taking out a loan they will struggle to pay off. Most importantly, we need to lay out the harmful results of AOC’s socialist answers – Medicare-for-All and free tuition will not solve the problems. They will only put the price tags on the backs of everyday working Americans.

8. What do you view as the greatest threat the United States both from a foreign and a domestic standpoint?
The greatest threat to America is the rise of socialism in our country. These people want a total government take-over with no regard for the freedoms so many of us take for granted. They want to take away our way of life. Their victory guarantees a globalist agenda, lawlessness and the inability to protect ourselves from tyrants. If we do not fight back against this narrative, our country is on a dangerous path.

9. If elected, what do you hope to accomplish with respect to policy?a. First and foremost, immigration, and that starts at our border and support of our federal officers. We need to reform our asylum loopholes and invest in border personnel and technology to curb the flow of drugs, counterfeit goods and illegal immigrants entering our country.

b. I would make sure our military is properly funded and we never sequester our military’s budget again. We are only as safe as those who are defending us are strong.

c. Ensure our police officers and law enforcement officials aren’t restrained by unreasonable laws as they protect our communities.10. A lot of the narrative surrounding the climate has come from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and her proposed “Green New Deal,” which her former chief-of-staff even admitted was about implementing socialism. The “Green New Deal” is a socialist vision that the Democrat Party is trying to sell to America. How do you counter that? What is your vision for America?

To start we need to tell people that $93 trillion dollars doesn’t appear out of thin air, that we can’t ban air travel or stop cows from flatulating, and it is not the government’s responsibility to guarantee you a job. I have three young children; I want this country to be the safest and most prosperous it can be. For me, that means protecting our freedoms and ensuring every American understands how that relates to our society. We are the greatest country in the world. We can find solutions to healthcare and immigration or gun violence and student debt just as we’ve solved problems in the past. But that requires everyone to work together instead of playing obstructionist.

11. What areas of the Republican Party’s platform do you think need to be addressed, and/or changed?
I think we need to refocus our platform when it comes to the federal budget. We campaigned for years about our national debt being too high, but it is still rising. We need to get serious about cutting wasteful spending and reducing the deficit before it’s too late. We also have to start talking to groups that haven’t heard from Republicans. President Trump has done great things for women and minority candidates. We need to do a better job of relaying those successes and giving those voters a reason to be Republican.

12. What do you think about what is going on in your state where Democrats are promoting extreme anti-gun policies? What are your views on the Second Amendment? How do you plan on protecting the rights and freedoms of your constituents?
It is an assault on our freedoms and Constitution. There is no other way to put it. We have thousands of gun owners in Virginia that are law-abiding citizens. You wouldn’t even know they were gun owners unless they told you. I believe in and support our Second Amendment. Guns are a line of defense against intruders, attackers and in the worst-case scenario, a tyrant. But this is what happens when you have one-party rule. The rush to a problem is always the extreme. I’ve attended the rallies in support of our sanctuary counties. Unlike sanctuary cities, we’re defending a right we have, not the nonexistent rights on non-citizens. I will support legislation that prohibits the restricting of our 2nd amendment and I will vote against any legislation that does restrict our right.
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Ryan Saavedra @RealSaavedra is a reporter at The Daily Wire who covers a range of subjects, particularly focusing on media bias, politics, and the convergence of politics and culture.

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Pelosi’s Impeachment Gamble Is Unconstitutional

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.

by GianCarlo Canaparo & Thomas Jipping: One of the Constitution’s clearest provisions is also one of its least-used: the process for removing the president for serious misconduct. Some politicians and lawyers, however, are trying to complicate this straightforward constitutional process, inventing things that simply aren’t there.

The Constitution’s impeachment process has two steps: Article 1, Section 2 gives the House of Representatives the “sole power of impeachment” and Section 3 gives the Senate the “sole power to try all impeachments.”

The House did its part on Dec. 18, adopting two articles of impeachment. All that’s left is for the House to appoint a few members to act as the prosecutors and, as the Senate’s trial rules put it, notify the Senate that these impeachment “managers” are “directed to carry articles of impeachment to the Senate.”

If this sounds a little familiar, it’s not really different from the indictment and trial you might have watched on any episode of “Law & Order.” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., however, appears to be making up a process of her own. She says she won’t appoint impeachment managers or send the articles to the Senate until the Senate agrees to conduct its trial the way she dictates.

In other words, Pelosi is holding the impeachment for ransom, keeping the county in impeachment limbo.

The House has impeached, but the Senate cannot conduct a trial unless it agrees to Pelosi’s demands or is able to change its impeachment trial rules (which requires a two-thirds vote) so it can at least start a trial on its own.

In response, Harvard law professor Noah Feldman, who argued strongly for impeachment as one of House Democrats’ hearing witnesses, wrote an article objecting to Pelosi’s gambit. President Donald Trump, Feldman insists, is not actually impeached until the House sends formal notice to the Senate.

Feldman is wrong. He claims that, in the past, “‘impeachment’ occurred—and occurs—when the articles of impeachment are presented to the Senate for trial.” But asserting this is all he does. He offers nothing to suggest that America’s Founders designed impeachment this way. His claim actually contradicts the language of the Constitution. While the House has the “sole” power of impeachment, Feldman says that impeachment cannot occur without the Senate.

Feldman tries to blur the lines by saying that “impeachment is a process,” but that’s not really true either. Just like there is a process that results in an indictment, there is a process for producing an impeachment, a process that occurs entirely within the House of Representatives.

But an impeachment itself, like an indictment, is a thing. The Constitution, after all, gives the Senate the power to “try all impeachments.” The Senate’s impeachment trial rules refer to “managers of an impeachment” and their first trial responsibility as “exhibit[ing] articles of impeachment.” In other words, the articles of impeachment adopted by the House are the impeachment.

The House itself agrees. Its website includes a list of “individuals impeached by the House of Representatives.” The first name on the list is Sen. William Blount of Tennessee. The Senate literally refused to recognize the impeachment as valid, choosing instead to expel him. The House still says he was impeached.

The list also includes U.S. District Judge Mark Delahay, who is listed as being impeached even though the House appointed no impeachment managers and the Senate conducted no trial at all.

Feldman’s claim is like saying that, though a grand jury has voted to indict, a criminal defendant is not really indicted until that action is presented to the trial jury.

To his credit, Feldman is correct that an indefinite delay in appointing managers and sending notice that they are ready to participate in the impeachment trial “would pose a serious problem.”

The House impeachment process, and the impeachment itself, were purely partisan. Now that the impeachment is finished, however, trying to manipulate how the Senate conducts its trial would only taint this whole drama even more and further distort the Constitution’s impeachment framework.

Since Feldman is such a strong Trump critic, he likely came up with this novel theory to push the process ahead toward, he hopes, Senate conviction and Trump’s removal from office. His ends, however, do not justify his means.

The House has done its part by impeaching Trump. The House must appoint managers and notify the Senate not because doing so is necessary to complete the impeachment, but because it’s the House’s clear obligation under the Constitution.
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GianCarlo Canaparo (@GCanaparo) is a legal fellow in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and Thomas Jipping (@TomJipping) is deputy director of the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and senior legal fellow both at The Heritage Foundation.

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Tags: GianCarlo Canaparo, Thomas Jipping, Nancy Pelosi, Impeachment Gamble, Unconstitutional To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Democrats Just Betrayed Working-Class Americans To Appease Environmentalists

by Donald Bryson, Issues & Insights: Congressional Democrats just betrayed America’s working class.

The House recently passed a series of bills banning offshore energy development, a significant source of employment for blue-collar Americans. Fueled by environmental fervor, these lawmakers are willing to sacrifice opportunities for their most important constituents.

There could be up to 90 billion barrels of oil and 328 trillion cubic feet of gas buried beneath federally owned sections of the ocean floor. That’s enough oil and natural gas to power the United States for over a decade. Ideally, energy companies would lease these underwater lands from the government and extract this bounty.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration outlawed energy development in over 90% of federal offshore territories. This policy prevents companies from accessing energy riches in the Arctic, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans — as well as the Gulf of Mexico.

Soon after taking office, President Trump vowed to lift this ban and revamp offshore energy production. But House Democrats are doing their best to stop him. The bills they passed last month would ban energy development off of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Alaskan coasts.

These policies deny working-class Americans prime employment opportunities. Jobs in the offshore sector often don’t require a college degree, are largely immune to outsourcing, and pay an average salary north of $110,000. Even under existing federal constraints, offshore development supports 300,000 jobs.

Opening up offshore territory would create 730,000 additional jobs over the next 20 years. Coastal states like Virginia, Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas would particularly benefit. Increased offshore development would bring 25,000 additional jobs to Virginia and 50,000 jobs to North Carolina within 20 years.

Still, Democrats claim it’s an environmental imperative to ban offshore drilling. Rep. Joe Cunningham, a South Carolina Democrat and lead sponsor of one of the recently passed bills said that offshore drilling would “ruin our vibrant natural resources.” Beto O’Rourke recently echoed that point on the presidential campaign trail, when he told a crowd that “offshore drilling threatens the local wildlife.”

These concerns are entirely unwarranted. Offshore drilling is getting safer by the year. And energy development is tightly regulated to protect the environment. Every rig employs at least one “species observer” who is empowered to stop development if marine animals come too close to operations.

If anything, this anti-offshore campaign could damage the environment by choking off funding for a critical federal conservation program. A slice of tax revenue from offshore operations is earmarked for the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which helps finance environmental preservation and national parks. Offshore operations contribute $900 million to this fund every year. If Democrats have their way, that money will vanish.

Now more than ever, the United States needs access to its domestic oil and gas resources. A drone attack on a major Saudi oil facility recently wiped out 5 percent of the world’s daily crude oil production. Tapping our offshore resources will help insulate Americans from supply shocks like this in the future.

Luckily, these bills won’t get far. The Republican-controlled Senate will never go for such an extreme plan and President Trump has promised to veto any offshore bans that cross his desk.

Still, actions speak louder than words. By moving this legislation, House Democrats have shown that they aren’t serious about improving the lives of the working class. If they were, they wouldn’t pursue policies that make it harder for Americans to find good, stable jobs.
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Donald Bryson is president and CEO of the Civitas Institute, a nonprofit public policy organization based in Raleigh.

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Virginia's Second Amendment Attack

Right to Keep
& Bear Arms

by Dr. Walter E. Williams: Virginia Governor Ralph Northam apologized for his medical school blackface stunt, but he will have much more to apologize for if he signs into law a bill that attacks Virginia citizens’ Second Amendment rights.

The measure is Senate Bill 16, which would ban “assault” firearms and certain firearm magazines. Since Democrats have seized control of Virginia’s General Assembly, they are likely to push hard for strict gun control laws.

Those laws will have zero impact on Virginia’s criminals and a heavy impact on Virginia’s law-abiding citizens who own, or intend to own, automatic weapons for hunting or their protection. As a friend once explained to me, “I carry a gun because I can’t carry a cop.”

I am proud of my fellow Virginians’ response to the attack on their Second Amendment rights. Firearm owners in the state have joined with sheriffs to form Second Amendment sanctuary counties. That means local authorities will be required to protect Second Amendment rights in the face of any attempt by Virginia’s General Assembly to abrogate those rights.

Eighty-six counties — over 90% — in the Virginia commonwealth have adopted Second Amendment sanctuary resolutions. Spotsylvania County’s board of supervisors voted unanimously to approve a resolution declaring that county police will not enforce state-level gun laws that violate Second Amendment rights.

Sheriff Chad Cubbage said, “Be it be known that the Page Sheriff hereby declares Page County, Virginia, as a ‘Second Amendment Sanctuary,’ and that the Page County Sheriff hereby declares its intent to oppose any infringement on the right of law-abiding citizens to keep and bear arms.”

Culpeper County Sheriff Scott Jenkins made a vow during a board of supervisors meeting, where the board unanimously agreed to declare the county a Second Amendment constitutional county, to “properly screen and deputize thousands of our law-abiding citizens to protect their constitutional right to own firearms.”

In an attempt to appease citizen resistance, Northam suggested there would be a ban on only the sales of semi-automatic rifles. He would allow gun owners to keep their current AR-15s and similar rifles as long as they registered them. Otherwise, they must surrender the rifles.

I’d urge Virginians not to fall for the registration trick. Knowing who owns what weapons is the first step to confiscation. Governor Northam further warned, “If we have constitutional laws on the books and law enforcement officers are not enforcing those laws on the books, then there are going to be consequences, but I’ll cross that bridge if and when we get to it.” Some Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill say that local police who do not enforce gun control laws should face prosecution and even threats of the use of the National Guard.

Virginians must heed the words and capture the spirit of their two most distinguished citizens, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, who wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions. These resolutions referred to the federal government but are just as applicable to state governments in principle. They said: “Resolved, That the several States composing the United States of America, are not united on the principle of unlimited submission to their General Government … and whensoever the General Government assumes undelegated powers, its acts are unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”

Too many Americans view the Second Amendment as granting Americans the right to own firearms to go hunting and for self-protection. But the framers of our Constitution had no such intent in mind.

James Madison, in Federalist Paper No. 46 wrote that the Constitution preserves “the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”

Thomas Jefferson wrote: “What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.” Similar quotations about our founders’ desire for Americans to be armed against the possible abuses of government can be found at Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
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Dr. Walter Williams (@WE_Williams) is an American economist, social commentator, and author of over 150 publications. He has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Economics from the UCLA and B.A. in economics from California State University. He also holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Virginia Union University and Grove City College, Doctor of Laws from Washington and Jefferson College. He has served on the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, since 1980. Visit his website: WalterEWilliams.com and view a list of other articles and works.

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Democrats' Favorite GOP Senator Murkowski Breaks with McConnell on Impeachment

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, RINO, AK

by Michael Van Der Galien: Some people thought that Mitt Romney could be the first Republican senator to break with his own party on President Trump's impeachment. Sadly, that dishonor goes to Lisa Murkowski. The senator from Alaska says she doesn't support Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell's approach to the sham. Oh no, he should take it seriously. And communicating about how to move forward with the White House? A big no-no according to Murkowski.

"In fairness, when I heard that, I was disturbed," Murkowski said about McConnell saying there would be "total coordination" with the White House about the upcoming (well, assuming Democrats ever choose to proceed) impeachment trial. "To me, it means that we have to take that step back from being hand-in-glove with the defense, and so I heard what leader McConnell had said, I happened to think that that has further confused the process," Murkowski continued, according to KTUU.

Whereas McConnell has said he sees no reason whatsoever to call in new witnesses to testify, Murkowski says that "[h]ow we will deal with witnesses remains to be seen." She also wants a "full and fair process." Apparently, she considers Bill Clinton's impeachment trial a fantastic template to be used this time around.

When asked whether she plans to vote for or against impeachment, Murkowski said: "For me to prejudge and say there’s nothing there or on the other hand, he should be impeached yesterday, that’s wrong, in my view, that’s wrong." In other words, Murkowski is the first Republican member of the Senate to signal at least an openness to impeaching and removing the democratically elected president of the United States who also happens to be from her party.

Surprising? Not really. Murkowski has quite a reputation to uphold as, as Mark Levin rightfully puts it, "one of the Democrat Party-media's reliably favorite GOP senators."

Murkowski's Conservative Review's Liberty Score is a paltry 24%, or an F. That's pathetic, but considering her voting record, she didn't deserve anything better. On Jan. 17, for example, Murkowski voted against ending taxpayer funding for abortion. On March 23, she voted to "Advance a massive $1.3 trillion omnibus that funds Democrat priorities." But when asked to cut spending by a mere two cents on the dollar, Madam Senator voted nay. She also voted to "surrender on the border wall," and whenever there's a vote to raise the debt ceiling she's all for it.

How this woman is a Republican is beyond me. As such, it doesn't exactly come as a shock that she breaks with McConnell on impeachment. Sad and pathetic? Yes. But shocking? Nope.
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Michael van der Galien  (@GalienMichael) is Editor-in-Chief of Dutch news and opinion website De Dagelijkse Standard, a freelance journalist and columnist, and a regular contributor to several American websites including PJ Media.  RINO added by ARRA News Service editor.

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Tags: Michael Van Der Galien. PJ Media, Democrats' Favorite, GOP RINO, Senator,Lisa Murkowski, Breaks with McConnell, Impeachment To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!

Wingman . . .

. . . Former AG Eric Holder has identified himself as President Obama’s wingman yet says Barr is too political to be Attorney General.

Editorial Cartoon by AF "Tony" Branco

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Tags: Editorial Cartoon AF Branco, Eric Holder, identified himself, President Obama’s wingman, yet says AG Barr, too political, to be Attorney General
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Dems Target Tulsi

. . . “Present” vote on impeachment sparks call for Gabbard to resign from Congress.

by Lloyd Billingsley: Former congressman and Hawaii governor Neil Abercrombie, the Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports, has called for Democrat presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard to resign “the sooner the better” following her vote of “present” on the articles of impeachment against President Trump.

Abercombie is co-chair for the campaign of Kai Kahele, a Democrat running against Gabbard, and the former governor cited Gabbard’s missing votes “on everything” as the reason for his resignation call. On the other hand, fallout from the call has focused on Gabbard’s impeachment stand.

“Throughout my life, whether through serving in the military or in Congress, I’ve always worked to do what is in the best interests of our country,” Gabbard explained last week. “Not what’s best for me politically or what’s best for my political party. After doing my due diligence in reviewing the 658-page impeachment report, I came to the conclusion that I could not in good conscience vote either yes or no.” That aside, Tulsi Gabbard has been a target-rich environment since October, when she made her most controversial statement.

“Trump won the election in 2016,” Gabbard said in the CNN debate that turned out to be more of an impeachment inquest and socialist shout-out. In effect, Tulsi Gabbard was saying, “Hillary Clinton lost the election in 2016,” a clear violation of the Democrat speech code. The former First Lady had been repeating the claim that she defeated Donald Trump, telling PBS “Obviously, I can beat him again,” and that she was panting for a “rematch.” With Tulsi Gabbard, as with Trump in 2016, Clinton saw the evil hand of Russia at work.

“I’m not making any predictions,” she told POTUS 44 retread David Plouffe, “but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party candidate,” a clear reference to Tulsi Gabbard. “She’s the favorite of the Russians,” Clinton said, “They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far.” Plouffe closed out the interview citing Hillary’s “belief that Tulsi Gabbard is going to be a third-party candidate, propped up by Trump and the Russians.”

The former First Lady and Secretary of State cited no evidence for her claim and the Russian bots and such proved elusive. Even so, Clinton’s charge became the new party line for the Democrat-media axis. “If Tulsi Gabbard runs,” tweeted POTUS 44 UN boss Samantha Power, “it would be a huge windfall for Trump, Assad, Putin, Xi.” For her part, Gabbard noted that the New York Times and CNN were also claiming she was a “Russian asset.” This, she said, was “completely despicable.”

Before the impeachment vote, Democrats had been calling for revival of the Mueller report, which focused on Russian collusion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi proclaimed “all roads lead to Putin” and “this has been going on for 2 1/2 years.” California Democrat Eric Swalwell, told reports the latest report on the Ukraine inquiry “ shows that a leopard doesn’t change his spots.” Democrats have not changed their spots, and now mount a multi-front surge.

As she refused to send the articles of impeachment to the house, Nancy Pelosi called Sen. Mitch McConnell a “rogue leader,” adding, “frankly, I don’t care what the Republicans say.” In similar style, Pelosi had previously called President Trump an “imposter,” and as Pelosi withholds the articles from the Senate, putting a trial on hold, Democrats are calling for yet more articles of impeachment.

Over in the Senate, Dianne Feinstein has remained rather quiet on impeachment. That marks a contrast to her performance with Trump Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Feinstein, a favorite of Communist China, scripted the smear show starring Christine Blasey Ford. Kavanaugh gained confirmation but in March Elie Mystal writes a piece in The Nation headlined, “The Time Has Come for Democrats to Impeach Brett Kavanaugh.”

The Democrats believe that under Donald Trump the executive, judicial and legislative branches of government are all illegitimate. When their own presidential contender Tulsi Gabbard acknowledges that Trump won the election 2016, and declines to vote for the president’s impeachment, a fellow Democrat calls for her resignation. The military veteran shows no signs of stepping down, and the campaign against her has reveals the Democrats’ defining dynamic.

As socialists Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders surge to the fore, the so-called “blue dog” Democrats, allegedly dedicated to fiscal conservatism, are an increasingly rare bread. The party is now dominated by those who, in the style of a junkyard dog, bark at anybody and everybody. In that role, the junkyard dog Democrats guarantee escalating conflict down the road.

With the 2020 election less than a year away, U.S. Attorney John Durham continues a criminal investigation into the origins of the Russia hoax, and he wants to know what John Brennan, a former CIA boss and Gus Hall voter, was up to during all that intrigue. As the duly elected President Donald Trump likes to say, we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
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Lloyd Billingsley is a contributor to FrontPage Mag.

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Tags: Lloyd Billingsley, FrontPage Mag,
Dems Target, Tulsi Gabbard To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!