I have maintained Joe Biden has never been right about anything major since leaving the crib. Trump had every right to be concerned about corruption in Ukraine, Ukraine's former government colluding with Russia to destroy Trump and then what Giuliani discovered about the Biden's family's connection to Ukraine.
The State Department is full of ideologues whose policies they feel compelled to defend and when Trump disagreed with them they thought it was their duty to become president and run the show. Even Lt Col Kindman got on his high horse as America's Ukraine genius.
The facts are, after withholding aid Trump agreed to do so and the only thing he asked is the Ukraine Government go public and state they would investigate alleged corruption. That is not an impeachable offense. That is what a president should do, ie. see that our tax dollars are given where deserved and then spent as they are intended to be spent.
The testimony of Schiff's witnesses were either flawed and based on hearsay or were based on those who had Democrat leanings and were biased and hated Trump.
Schiff, himself, hates Trump and lied about his own actions and even went to the length of restating/slanting everything Trump said when the President released his conversation with the president of Ukraine.(See 1 written by a dear friend and memo reader - edited and 1a below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Vote for him in a heartbeat. (See 2 below.)
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Will Iran get the message? (See 3 below.)
And:
Trump's lack of a foreign policy is working.
Every more reason to impeach him because blind hate overcomes rational thinking. (See 3a below.)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
DORIS
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
1)If ever there were a more worthy politician to circle the drain to oblivion it is Joe Biden. He has been feeding at the public trough since 1972. That equates to 47 years out of his present 76 years of age.
After graduating 506 out of a class of 688 at the University of Delaware, he entered Syracuse University of Law. During his first year there, he was accused of having plagiarized five of 15 pages of a law review article. Biden said it was inadvertent due to his "not knowing the proper rules of citation", and he was permitted to retake the course after receiving an "F" grade, which was subsequently dropped from his record. This incident would later attract attention when further plagiarism accusations emerged in 1987. He received his Juris Doctor in 1968, graduating 76th of 85 in his class.
Joe and the truth were often times strangers, let's explore how after a life in "public service" the notoriously cheap Joe Biden has amassed a net worth of 9 million dollars. That's right: $9,000,000.00! And in case you think his current wife has been a big money maker, she is a school teacher. That "Dr." she so proudly displays before her name is merely academic and has nothing to do with medicine. AND it turns out his Ukrainian scheme was not the first time Creepy Joe strong armed his way into hush money for him and his cocaine loving son. Which is exactly why Robert Hunter Biden, secured a prestigious direct commission to the U.S. Naval Reserves in 2012 as a public affairs officer. The program recruits civilians without prior military service who have “special skills that are critical to sustaining military operations.” Hunter Biden's primary qualification for the cushy part-time job was his last name. The power of nepotism came in handy when he was forced to seek not one, but two waivers, to secure the job.
Ordinary applicants have to meet age restrictions (under 40 at the time he sought the position, now 42). He was 43. Then Hunter needed a second waiver to get a pass for prior cocaine use. Granted! Only six public affairs officers received such direct appointments from the Navy Reserves that year. Amazing, isn’t it, that there wasn’t a single other applicant in America (population: 327 million) with a clean drug history and proper age eligibility to take the slot.
But for all that string-pulling effort, Hunter Biden barely served a year. After testing positive for cocaine during a random drug test, he was discharged quietly in February 2014. The hush-hush deal, undisclosed until a whistleblower told The Wall Street Journal eight months later, was yet another perk of Biden patronage. So was his immunity from any investigation or review of his law license by the Connecticut bar. And so, too, was his quick career bounce back.
A month after his humiliating discharge from our military, Biden’s coke-abusing party boy was appointed to the board of director of Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, Burisma Holdings, owned by a powerful Russian government sympathizer, who had fled to Russia that year. It’s also the same company a top Ukranian prosecutor was investigating for corruption before he was fired — at the behest of Creepy Joe, according to Joe himself, who bragged about threatening to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees to Ukraine during a Council of Foreign Relations speech in 2018.
Ukrainian officials are still probing the shady company and its dealings with Baby Biden, The Hill’s John Solomon proposed these pointed questions for the Democratic presidential front-runner: “Was it appropriate for your son and his firm to cash in on Ukraine while you served as point man for Ukraine policy? What work was performed for the money Hunter Biden’s firm received? Did you know about the Burisma probe… (and) should you have recused yourself?”
Similar queries apply to Hunter Biden’s other position at investment firm Rosemont Seneca, which snagged a $1 billion deal in 2013 with the Communist Bank of China, just days after Creepy Joe had met with China’s president Xi Jinping.
This is all part of crooked pattern in the Biden family finances. Hunter’s first job, acquired after Joe Biden won his 1996 Senate re-election bid in Delaware, was with MBNA, the credit card conglomerate and top campaign finance donor to then Sen. Biden. The elder Biden secured his custom-built, multimillion-dollar house in Delaware’s ritziest Chateau Country with the help of a leading MBNA corporate executive. Biden went on to carry legislative water for MBNA in the Senate for years.
Hunter became a “founding partner” in the lobbying firm of Oldaker, Biden and Belair in 2002. William Oldaker was Papa Biden’s former fundraiser, campaign treasurer and general counsel. Under Oldaker’s tutelage, Hunter lobbied for drug companies, universities and other deep-pocketed clients to the tune of nearly $4 million billed to the company by 2007.
Hunter held a top position at Paradigm Global Advisors, a hedge fund holding company founded with Creepy Joe's brother, James, and marketed by convicted finance fraudster Allen Stanford. Hunter oversaw half a billion dollars of client money invested in hedge funds while remaining a D.C. lobbyist. The ill-fated venture went bust amid nasty fraud lawsuits.
Hunter also served on the board of directors of taxpayer-subsidized Amtrak, for which his father secured a $53 billion high-speed train initiative.
After a life filled with fraud and service, is running for our nation's highest office. Ever the narcissist he positions himself in front of the camera almost daily and lies his head off about anything he thinks will secure his nomination. Except for now. Get ready for the big flush, Joe!
1a)
1a)
Winning Was Trump’s High Crime and Misdemeanor
His conflict with his staff over Ukraine was nothing compared with Obama’s decision to leave Iraq.
When I don’t get the feeling Adam Schiff is secretly working for the Russians, I get the feeling he’s secretly working for Donald Trump. The latter feeling predominated during two weeks of impeachment hearings. The case, which doesn’t strike me as strong, should be that Mr. Trump withheld, or threatened to withhold, congressionally mandated military aid for Ukraine for an illegal purpose. But the witnesses who were supposed to be harmful to Mr. Trump weren’t. They failed to establish, or even argue, that Mr. Trump’s concern with the Biden role in Ukraine, or Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election, was illegitimate.
State Department witness George Kent testified that he himself upbraided Ukrainian officials for ending an investigation of Burisma, Hunter Biden’s employer, which U.S. taxpayer dollars had helped support. He called for—guess what?—an investigation: “I would love to see [Ukraine’s government] find out who the corrupt prosecutor was, and who took the bribe, and how much he was paid.”
William Taylor, another presumably hostile State Department witness, was sufficiently open to the agenda of his outsider president to propose that an official other than Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky make the wished-for announcement, “in coordination with Attorney General Barr’s probe into the investigation of interference in the 2016 elections.”
Like a dinner-theater detective, Mr. Schiff shouts “Aha!” at every confirmation of what has been obvious since the White House released its own transcript of the Trump call with Mr. Zelensky. The Trump administration was keen on arming Ukraine and supporting its new government to exact a cost from Vladimir Putin. That is, everybody in the Trump administration except the president himself, who was cool or indifferent to this agenda but intruded only occasionally to push the Biden talking point.
His staff, apparently appreciating who actually received votes from the electorate, busied itself at times trying to reconcile Mr. Trump’s agenda with their own. And yet, in the manner of factotums everywhere, the agenda they ended up delivering was their own—Ukraine got its arms and presidential meeting—while Mr. Trump’s fell through the cracks.
Mr. Trump is chaotic, unschooled and politically motivated, but only the first two qualities differentiate him from other presidents. He cares only about “the big things,” Ambassador Gordon Sondland testified. Isn’t that the job description? If President Obama’s staff had been as successful as Mr. Trump’s, U.S. troops would never have left Iraq. Yet Mr. Obama was entitled to make the trade-off he did, unfortunate as it was. Securing re-election is the first thing any president owes his supporters. It’s what makes our system go ’round.
Unfortunately, the media, in the grip of narrative-itis and its own partisan myopia, leaves no fact or logical premise unmolested. Numerous outlets peddle the fallacy that election meddling is what economists call a rivalrous good: If Russia engaged in it, Ukraine couldn’t have. An NBC reporter, lacking any bombshells, proclaims that a “bombshell” is the word “more” in an official’s recollected impression that Mr. Trump “cared more” about investigations than he did about Ukraine.
The national media is an idiot at this point to keep the name of the whisteblower, which they’ve known for weeks, from the public. His identity and motives are unquestionably newsworthy. The media exists to report newsworthy information. All the press does is sow distrust about what other news it’s hiding.
Most tellingly, any number of journalists, including the New Yorker’s David Remnick, distinguished themselves by mocking the opening statement of Rep. Devin Nunes without bothering to recognize what the Intelligence Committee’s ranking member was driving at. In fact, Mr. Nunes unloaded a partisan blast that accurately and relevantly reprised Mr. Schiff’s greatest hits during the Russia collusion folly, including outing Mr. Schiff as the likely source behind false stories retracted by CBS, CNN and MSNBC based on a lie about the date on a Don Jr. email.
Why this matters is obvious to half of America. The House can impeach for any reason it wants. In the hierarchy of reasons not to impeach Donald Trump, first and foremost is that it would be terrible for the country. It would be seen by many as an extension of a persistent campaign to invalidate an election and delegitimize a president who, whatever his opponents think of him, has acted with uncustomary fidelity to the promises he made to voters.
If we would not stir up bitterness to last a generation, matters need to be resolved with an election. Of course, incumbent upon Democrats is picking a candidate who offers a referendum on Trump and Trumpism, rather than one hoping to exploit a disturbed moment in our history to advance an agenda most Americans don’t want.
Another wild card is the media itself, in this peculiar moment in its institutional life. A stupefying corollary of its lapse into Trumplike dishonesty is its stupefying inability to see the damage it has done to its own credibility. A sick feeling tells me this will be a factor too, and perhaps dangerously so, in how the 2020 race comes out.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2)
Rust Belt voters on Trump: ‘I’d vote for him again in a heartbeat’ By Salena Zito
Bonnie Smith no longer sets her alarm for 1:45 a.m. so she could head into town to make her heavenly pastries, cookies and cakes. It’s the only thing she doesn’t miss about her bakery, which she had to close last June.
“My eyesight was failing. I just couldn’t do it anymore, or at least until the doctors could figure out what was going on,” said Smith, who hopes that eye surgery will allow her to bake professionally in her home kitchen sometime next month.
While Smith’s personal life has suffered a setback since Donald Trump was elected in 2016, her support for the first Republican president she ever voted for hasn’t budged an inch. If anything, she says her loyalty to Trump has increased since the Election Day result that seemed to take everyone by surprise — except people like her.
Smith says she was born into the Democratic Party and voted for Barack Obama twice. For the 2016 Ohio primary, she said she even voted for Bernie Sanders to be the party’s nominee. But when it came time to pick a president, she voted with her neighbors in Ashtabula County, helping it swing from a 12-point victory for Barack Obama in 2012 to a 19-point win for Trump.
Smith is among the scores of people I interviewed in 2016 for my book, “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics,” along with my co-writer Brad Todd. In it, we examined the unique coalition of voters who helped sweep Trump into office.
Click here for the full story.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
3) Syria strikes are Israel's way of sending Iran a very clear message
The IDF has been pursuing an active campaign of removing threats as it detects them, relying on intelligence and precision firepower to deal with ongoing Iranian challenges from Syria. The goal? To nip hazards in the bud.
Israel launched a broad wave of precision airstrikes early on Wednesday morning, hitting dozens of Iranian and Syrian military targets, and sending a very strong message that Israel is rejecting Iran’s attempt to force new “rules of the game” against it.
Most of the Iranian military targets that were hit were situated within Syrian military bases, underlying the Iranian tactic of embedding and disguising its threatening presence within the Syrian Arab Army.
According to international media reports, 23 people, including 16 “foreigners” – an apparent reference to Iranian operatives – were killed in the strikes.
The Israeli action came in response to an Iranian-directed rocket attack on Tuesday morning, in which projectiles were launched from the Damascus area in the direction of Israel. An Israeli Iron Dome battery intercepted the four rockets, which set off warning sirens in northern Israeli communities.
That rocket attack could be linked to a reported Israeli strike on a key Iranian military installation in the Damascus area this week, though Israel has not commented on such reports.
Iran is continuing its efforts to build a war machine in Syria and entrench itself militarily by moving weapons, military forces, militias and building missile bases on the territory controlled by the Bashar Assad regime. The goal of Iran is to build a second Hezbollah in Syria and to move its own military capabilities into the area so that it can threaten Israel from multiple fronts.
Israel has been pursuing an active campaign of removing these threats as it detects them, taking the initiative, and relying on high-quality intelligence and precision firepower to deal with the ongoing Iranian challenge from Syria. The goal is to nip the threat in the bud and not wait until it takes on monstrous proportions, as Hezbollah’s rocket and missile arsenal has become in Lebanon.
The Quds Force, Iran’s overseas special operations unit, is in charge of the Iranian expansion program in Syria. Its commander, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, has attempted to enforce new rules on Israel, according to which any Israeli preemptive strike will result in Iranian retaliation.
This Iranian equation is essentially designed to deter Israel from taking the initiative and removing threats to its security preemptively. Iran wants to impose a “price tag” on Jerusalem for the active defense campaign that Israel has been pursuing with much success. Hundreds of Israeli airstrikes in recent years have prevented the Iranians from achieving most of their goals in Syria, leading to frustration in Tehran, though its confidence has been rising recently.
The successful Iranian cruise missile and drone attack on Saudi state-oiled oil fields on Sept. 14 were a display of highly advanced, long-range firepower. The Iranian attack was a threat directed at Israel as much as it was to Iran’s other regional arch-foe: Saudi Arabia. Israel heard the message and sent one of its own on Tuesday, rejecting Iran’s attempt to deter it from taking action in the region to defend itself.
It appears as if the Iranians absorbed a painful blow in Syria, just as they did in May 2018 during “Operation House of Cards,” when Israel struck a series of Iranian targets in response to an Iranian truck-mounted rocket attack.
Iran now has three options going forward: It can choose not to respond, launch a minor response or order a more significant response.
The fact that the regime is under pressure at home due to domestic unrest, that its economy is bleeding due to biting American sanctions, and that it is facing unrest in other zones of influence – like Lebanon and Iraq – means that Iranian decision-making may become more unpredictable going forward.
‘We are prepared for any scenario’
Speaking to reporters on Wednesday after the strike, Israel Defense Forces’ spokesman Brig. Gen. Hadi Zilberman stressed that the IDF still has the initiative. “We will not allow Iran to entrench itself in Syria,” he said. “We prepared a battle procedure that included the deployment of air defense and attack preparations. The wave of strikes was broad in its targets.”
According to an IDF statement, dozens of targets were struck in the Damascus area, south and west of Syria’s capital, and on the Syrian Golan Heights near the Israeli border.
In addition, the Israeli Air Force destroyed Syrian surface-to-air missile batteries that are considered advanced after they fired at Israeli aircraft. Syrian weapons storage facilities, military headquarters, and observation posts were all destroyed by Israeli aircraft.
When it came to the Iranian assets, the IAF demolished Iranian military buildings, a headquarters situated in Damascus International Airport and an observation post on the Golan Heights.
“We acted against the Syrian host and the Iranian guest,” said Zilberman.
Outlining Israel’s posture, he assured that “we are prepared for defense and offense, and we will act with severity against any attempt to respond. We are prepared for any scenario. We will not accept Iranian entrenchment. This is a red line.”
It also appears as if the Assad regime keeps failing to heed Israel’s warnings to refrain from joining the Iranian-Israeli showdown, and Syria’s decision to fire surface-to-air missiles resulted in a loss of a number of its air-defense batteries.
Referring to Tuesday’s rocket attack on the Israeli Golan, the IDF stated, “Yesterday’s Iranian attack towards Israel is further clear proof of the purpose of the Iranian entrenchment in Syria, which threatens Israeli security, regional stability and the Syrian regime. Furthermore, the IDF holds the Syrian regime responsible for actions taken in its territory and warns it from operating or allowing hostilities against Israel. Such actions will be followed by a severe response. The IDF will continue operating firmly and resolutely against the Iranian entrenchment in Syria.”
Israel has heard Iran’s message and sent its reply. The ball now returns to Iran’s court.
Reprinted with permission from JNS.org
3a)Thanks to Trump, the Mullahs Are Going Bankrupt
The critics of President Trump's Iran policy have been proven wrong: the US sanctions are imposing significant pressure on the ruling mullahs of Iran and the ability to fund their terror groups.
Before the US Department of Treasury leveled secondary sanctions against Iran's oil and gas sectors, Tehran was exporting over two million barrel a day of oil. Currently, Tehran's oil export has gone down to less than 200,000 barrel a day, which represents a decline of roughly 90% in Iran's oil exports.
Iran has the second-largest natural gas reserves and the fourth-largest proven crude oil reserves in the world, and the sale of these resources account for more than 80 percent of its export revenues. The Islamic Republic therefore historically depends heavily on oil revenues to fund its military adventurism in the region and sponsor militias and terror groups. Iran's presented budget in 2019 was nearly $41 billion, while the regime was expecting to generate approximately $21 billion of it from oil revenues. This means that approximately half of Iran's government revenue comes from exporting oil to other nations.
Even though Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, boasts about the country's self-sufficient economy, several of Iran's leaders recently admitted the dire economic situation that the government is facing. Speaking in the city of Kerman on November 12, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani acknowledged for the first time that "Iran is experiencing one of its hardest years since the 1979 Islamic revolution" and that "the country's situation is not normal."
Rouhani also complained:
"Although we have some other incomes, the only revenue that can keep the country going is the oil money. We have never had so many problems in selling oil. We never had so many problems in keeping our oil tanker fleet sailing.... How can we run the affairs of the country when we have problems with selling our oil?"
Thanks to the US policy of "maximum pressure," the Islamic Republic's overall economy has taken a major beating as well. Lately, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has again adjusted its forecast for Iran's economy and pointed out that Iran's economy is expected to shrink by 9.5% rather than 6% by the end of 2019.
One of the reasons behind IMF's gloomy picture of Iran's economy is linked to the Trump administration's decision not to extend its waiver for Iran's eight biggest oil buyers; China, India, Greece, Italy, Taiwan, Japan, Turkey and South Korea. Instead of showing economic growth in 2019, Iran's economy would be 90% of its size by the end of 2019 in comparison to two years ago, based on a recent report from the World Bank.
Iran's national currency, the rial, also continues to lose value: it dropped to historic lows. One US dollar, which equaled approximately 35,000 rials in November 2017, now buys you nearly 110,000 rials.
In addition, the Islamic Republic appears to be scrambling to compensate for the loss of revenues it is encountering. A few days ago, for example, Iran's leaders tripled the price of gasoline. It appears a sign of desperation to generate revenues in order to fund their military adventurism in the region and support their proxies and terror groups.
This increase immediately led people to rise up against the government. In the last few days, several Iranian cities have become the scenes of widespread protests and demonstrations. The protests first erupted in Ahvaz and then spread to many other cities in the Khuzestan province as well as in the capital Tehran, and Kermanshah, Isfahan, Tabriz, Karadj, Shiraz, Yazd, Boushehr, Sari, Khorramshahr, Andimeshk, Dezful, Behbahan and Mahshahr.
Tehran's diminishing resources have also caused Iranian leaders to cut funds to the Palestinian terror group Hamas and the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah. Hamas was forced to introduce "austerity plans" while Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Iran's proxy, Hezbollah, has also called on his group's fundraising arm "to provide the opportunity for jihad with money and also to help with this ongoing battle."
To the likely dismay of Washington's critics, President Trump's Iran policy has been heading in the right direction. By escalating economic sanctions, the ruling mullahs and their proxies are going bankrupt. Other nations now need to join the US by also adopting a "maximum pressure" policy -- even if they would rather continue to do business with Iran and undermine President Trump's administration -- to them, a "twofer". If Iran succeeds in developing its nuclear weapons breakout capability, in the end it will be used to blackmail precisely them.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a business strategist and advisor, Harvard-educated scholar, political scientist, board member of Harvard International Review, and president of the International American Council on the Middle East. He has authored several books on Islam and US foreign policy. He can be reached at Dr.Rafizadeh@Post.Harvard.Edu
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment