PrairiePundit

NY Times: Trump Lawyers, Skeptical of Engaging on Impeachment, Weigh Hearing Strategy The White House is debating whether to accept an invitation by Democrats to be part of an impeachment hearing next week, calling it a “sham partisan process.” The only reason they might want to participate is to expose the rush to judgment by the Democrats who failed to make their case during the Schiff show.  The media has been too blind to the mess Schiff made and the great job done by Republicans on cross-examination that utterly destroyed the narrative the Democrats were trying to push.  Polling after the Schiff fiasco showed the Democrats losing ground on their political case they tried to make against the President. Both the Democrats and the media lost credibility after that hearing.  The media got exposed as hearing only what they wanted to hear instead of offering a fair presentation of the lack of evidence in support of the Democrats' claims. It is clear that Republi...

Washington Examiner: A new social media platform for supporters of President Trump has emerged as his backers continue to migrate away from traditional forums such as Reddit. The new website, thedonald.win , was created by users of the r/The_Donald subreddit after Reddit became more controlling about what content could be posted in the forum. In June, the company announced that the subreddit would be “quarantined.” The quarantine, which is still in effect, doesn’t ban the forum but removes certain features and restricts how its content is shared. It also includes a warning about viewing the subreddit. The new website is structured similarly to r/The_Donald. It includes features that allow users to upvote and downvote posts and comments as well as filter content by "hot," "new," "rising," and "top." ... “We've been developing this site in secret for the better part of the year,” the moderator wrote. “Believe me, not letting it slip w...

Washington Free Beacon: Voters in Wisconsin, a key 2020 swing state, are uninterested in the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump, according to a report from the Associated Press. "Everything they say, it's so repetitive. To me, it's like they're beating their heads against the wall," a retired factory worker and Trump supporter told the AP. "There's so much information that sometimes it's hard to decide which is the truth and which is just rumors," another voter, who opposes President Trump, said. She added that she just tunes out the impeachment news, which she referred to as a "waste" of her time. "I feel like we've been hearing since the second that he was elected president he needs to be impeached," she said. ... A recent Quinnipiac poll indicated that public impeachment hearings did not improve voters' opinions of the inquiry. Forty-five percent of voters said they believe President Trump sh...

Bill Shanafelt: Amidst the hue and cry and clutter surrounding the impeachment fiasco, one clear obstacle stands out: time.  There just isn't enough time — as in congressional working days — on the calendar to get the job done before the caucus/primary business begins for the Democrats, and doing it after that business is over would be laughable. Our friend,  Sundance , at The Conservative Tree House has done the math for us.  Read the whole  piece , but, in essence, the reality is that: With only eight legislative days left in 2019; and considering  the resolution  as adopted; the calendar doesn’t match the democrat talking points....[or give time to] accomplish all the House tasks. He lays out how Chairman Adam Schiff 's Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which is probably drawing up a report over this holiday week, will, nevertheless, have insufficient time under the rules to allow members to review, vote on, and mo...

Fletch Daniels: Ana Navarro-Cardenas managed to produce one of the most  offensive tweets  of the year in response to the news that multiple polls show black job approval of President Donald Trump now at 34%.  She tweeted, "Zero chance this is accurate.  Zero.  The poll must have only been conducted in the homes of Ben Carson, Kanye, that sheriff guy with the hat and those two Cubic Zirconia & Polyester-Spandex ladies."  You can almost smell the fear oozing from her keystrokes, competing with the hate that was already there.  This is so blatantly racist that only a liberal could have spouted it.  And, to my knowledge, not a single liberal has called her out on it, choosing to  celebrate  her instead.  She wasn't just mocking the polls, as Newsweek suggests.  She was mocking courageous black Americans. First, she charmingly assumes that black Americans have no right to form their own po...

NY Times: Midterm victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin gave Democrats hope of retaking the Rust Belt battleground states that handed the presidency to Donald J. Trump in 2016. Yet success in the midterms might not mean as much for Democratic presidential candidates as the party might think. Nearly two-thirds of voters in six battleground states who voted for President Trump in 2016 — but for Democratic congressional candidates in 2018 — say they intend to back the president against each of his top rivals, according to recent polling by The New York Times Upshot/Siena College. The results suggest that the party’s winning formula in last year’s midterms may not be so easy to replicate in a presidential election. The Democrats’ relatively moderate House candidates succeeded in large part by flipping a crucial segment of voters who backed the president in 2016. If these voters remain open-minded again in 2020, Democrats will have a ready-made blueprint for winning back t...

John Nolte: The latest impeachment polling has come in from HuffPost, CNN, and Politico, and it proves Adam Schiff’s House hearings were a massive failure. This is not just a massive fail on Schiff’s part — it is also a massive media fail. Because, if you recall the last two weeks, Schiff’s kangaroo court was backed by billions and billions of dollars in corporate propaganda through the fake media, including far-left CNN, MSNBC, and even a number of lying morons on Fox News, like Chris Wallace and Andrew Napolitano. What’s more, as a means to give Schiff’s hoax the air of legitimacy, all the major networks broadcast the hearing live throughout the day, which included commentary from their own left-wing analysts. Over and over and over again, Schiff and his confederates in the media screamed BOMBSHELLBOMBSHELLBOMBSHELL, and here are the hilarious results… Most telling, at least to me, is the fact that after all this, after all this gaslighting, the latest polling from HuffPos...

Daily Caller: A small cadre of former journalists and Obama-era operatives is creating a Russian-style propaganda outfit designed to mimic real local news and activate left-leaning voters ahead of the 2020 election. Tara McGowan, a digital producer for Obama for America in 2011, is raising $25 million from wealthy liberals to create a media company called Courier Newsroom that is designed to deliver information favorable to Democrats. Courier is rolling out newspapers in swing states to counter what McGowan believes is right-wing spin on Facebook and across the digital domain. Courier Newsroom does not alerts readers that the publication is actually a liberal project. The project’s primary mission is to craft content that can travel quickly throughout the social media ecosphere, according to a Bloomberg Businessweek report Monday. McGowan launched similar outlets earlier this year for similar purposes, the report notes. She put together the Virginia Dogwood and Arizona’s Copper C...

Washington Free Beacon: The Trump administration will continue to expose and sanction Iranian leaders found guilty of human rights abuses, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Tuesday as protesters across Iran take to the streets to oppose the regime. The Islamic Republic has taken violent action to quell the protests, even going so far as to shut down the country's internet to prevent news of the protests from spreading across the globe. This measure, however, has not stopped images and videos from emerging, according to the State Department, which says it is in possession of nearly 20,000 messages and video clips showing the regime engage in mass human rights abuses. Pompeo delivered a message of solidarity to those protesting the Iranian regime, telling them the United States stands with them and will work to expose those Iranian leaders complicit in suppressing the demonstrators. That message stands in stark contrast to that of the Obama administration when it faced a si...

Washington Free Beacon: As top 2020 Democratic candidates unveil plans to curb or reverse the spread of charter schools, many Black and Latino voters are asking why their voices aren't being heard, according to a New York Times report. "As a single mom with two jobs and five hustles, I'm just feeling kind of desperate," Sonia Tyler told the Times. "They're brilliant; they're curious. It's not fair. Why shouldn't I have a choice?" Tyler is seeking to enroll her children in a suburban charter school outside Atlanta, joining many other parents who have found in charters a lifeline to escape failing public schools. But Senators Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) have put out plans to defund charters, while South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and former vice president Joe Biden have both publicly expressed skepticism about charters. In front of the studio that held the Democratic presidential debate in Atlanta las...

Washington Examiner: Crowd erupts after Trump calls impeachment 'bullshit' at Florida rally His audience apparently agrees with this assessment.

NY Times: Trump Says U.S. Will Designate Drug Cartels in Mexico as Terrorist Groups The comments, made in an interview with the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, came three weeks after nine American citizens, including six children, were killed in Mexico. They are classic terrorist organizations that have been running a criminal insurgency in Mexico for years.  The government has not bee effective at fighting them because of the inherent corruption of law enforcement. 

Houston Chronicle: Living in the refinery town of Pasadena, Sema Hernandez has seen the oil and gas industry up close. Hernandez knows how the sight of flares and the sound of sirens puts her neighbors on edge. She has studied cancer clusters and disasters such as the Texas City refinery explosion. She has asked doctors about the dangers the chemicals pose to her kids. She says her ex-husband, who worked as a contractor for many gas-and-oil outfits in the Houston area, told her of the shortcuts the companies take. And, through him, she’s seen the jobs in the industry disappear, just as fast as they came. “That’s the one thing about fossil fuel jobs,” said Hernandez, a progressive Democrat running for the second time for U.S. Senate. “They’re not permanent jobs. They are temporary jobs.” Hernandez, who brought in roughly a quarter of the vote in her 2018 primary run against former El Paso Congressman Beto O’Rourke, is one of at least three Democrats in the primary election who...

Washington Examiner: Putin foe says Fusion GPS was agent for Russia while helping Clinton in 2016 The company that conducted anti-Trump research for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign also worked for the Russian government, producing material that was used by Moscow to pressure the United States, according to a longtime foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin. ... They were working with the Russian lawyer who also set up the meeting with Donald Trump, Jr..

Daily Wire: Newly released transcripts from the deposition of Mark Sandy, an official the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB), reveal that OMB was allegedly instructed to withhold aid to Ukraine because President Donald Trump was concerned “about other countries not contributing more to Ukraine.” Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) responded to the release of the transcripts from the deposition, which happened on Chairman Adam Schiff’s House Intelligence Committee, by writing on Twitter, “The transcript for OMB’s Mark Sandy was just released. The ONLY reason he was ever given why there was a hold on $ to Ukraine was “the President’s concern about other countries not contributing more to Ukraine.” NOT bribery. NOT quid pro quo or any other WACKY Schiff conspiracy!” The transcript for OMB’s Mark Sandy was just released. The ONLY reason he was ever given why there was a hold on $ to Ukraine was “the President’s concern about other countries not contributing more to Ukraine.” NOT b...

Lifesite News: ... “Immediately after President Trump won election, opponents inaugurated what they called ‘The Resistance,’ and they rallied around an explicit strategy of using every tool and maneuver available to sabotage the functioning of his administration,” Barr said. “Instead of viewing themselves as the ‘loyal opposition,’ as opposing parties have done in the past, they essentially see themselves as engaged in a war to cripple, by any means necessary, a duly elected government.” His first example was that, while it is the opposition party’s prerogative to vote against a president’s nominees, Senate Democrats have moved to “systematically oppose and draw out the approval process for every appointee so as to prevent the president from building a functional government,” to the point where the Republican majority has had to invoke cloture 236 times to proceed to a nomination vote (as opposed to just 17 cloture votes on President Barack Obama’s first-term nominees). As Congr...

Mollie Hemingway: ... Instead of making the case that Trump had committed some sort of high crime or misdemeanor meriting immediate removal, they instead just asserted that an unspecified crime had occurred and that witnesses had testified unambiguously that it had occurred. People who actually suffered through the hearings might be forgiven for not having the same impression. Sure, viewers saw a bunch of hand-selected bureaucrats assert that Bad Orange Man wanted Ukraine to investigate various things, but we already knew that from Trump’s release of the transcript of his call with the Ukrainian president and his many public statements on the matter. The question was never about whether Trump wanted these investigations, or even whether one involved the Bidens, but whether it was criminal, much less impeachable, to want these things from a country that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in American taxpayer funds each year. Trump’s well known efforts were so anodyne and frankl...

Julie Kelly: If a full and fair analysis of the Trump-Russian collusion hoax ever is conducted, it will reveal the collateral damage suffered by innocent people ensnared by the wicked, multi-faceted operation launched by Barack Obama’s White House in the spring of 2016. There are plenty of infuriating passages in The Plot Against the President , a must-read book by journalist Lee Smith. But the description of how the hoax plotters targeted the family of Representative Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) evokes particular outrage. As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Nunes released a memo in February 2018 describing how Barack Obama’s Justice Department misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain permission to spy on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Democrats did not want that memo out. In the days and weeks leading up its distribution, Smith describes how the crusade against Nunes “took an even more dangerous turn.” An orchestrated assault against Nunes’ fa...

Madison Gesiotto: For a party that regularly claims it wants to remove President Trump from office in order to “unite” the country, there was an awful lot of pressure for absolute partisan loyalty on the Democrat debate stage Wednesday night. Senator Kamala Harris, for example, announced her run for president promising to be a president “for all the people” because Americans “have much more in common than what separates us.” On Wednesday, the aspiring “president for all the people” stood on the debate stage and claimed that one of her rivals, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, is not qualified to be the Democratic nominee because she has appeared on Fox News, the most popular cable channel in America, and has occasionally criticized other Democrats. It’s somewhat difficult to be the president for “all” the people if you deliberately ignore half the country while insisting on absolute fealty to a party line, but Harris didn’t see the irony. She closed her attack by saying the Democrats...

Rubin Navarette: ... Yet, Trump is likely to do better than expected with Latino voters. It’s not just because of a strong economy, low unemployment rates among Latinos, etc. It’s also because many Latinos are willing to look past Trump’s anti-Latino bigotry. After all, they tell themselves, the president is not talking about people like them. ... He talks often about how the United States is facing an “invasion” from the south. That’s the same word that 21-year-old Patrick Crusius used in a racist manifesto he penned before walking into a Walmart in El Paso, Texas on Aug 3 to, as he allegedly told police, “kill as many Mexicans as possible.” Crucius killed 22 people, many of them Mexican and wounded 25 others. Several weeks ago, when Trump traveled to New Mexico to court conservative Latinos, he doted on CNN commentator Steve Cortes, a pro-Trump immigrant from Colombia who the president declared “looks more like a WASP than I do.” Trump put Cortes on the spot, asking him, “Wh...