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BIBI'S plans. (See 1 and 1a below)
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Schiff should be thrown out of Congress at best and censured at least for his scurrilous actions.
Schiff accuses Trump of being above the law while he breaks the law.
For sure, Schiff is the snake in The Garden of Eden. (See 2 and 2a below.)
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Democrats opened the can of impeachment worms and Pelosi has now said feed them to the public.
I cannot wait for The Senate to bring the real culprits before their chamber to testify so voters can learn who the true criminals are.
Bring it on baby!
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As the second section: "Abundant Society" begins in Shlaes' "Great Society" we find the following conditions and, in many ways, similar to where we are politically today.
Moynihan, who had been appointed as Nixon's assistant for domestic policy, was coping with :
a) How to lift the bottom of society which was mainly white but blacks were being difficult claiming they were being slighted.
b) Congress as well as Reuther and other union bosses were also resisting because they resented a conservative Nixon appearing to be seen as stealing the welfare issue which they believed was their baby.
c) Meanwhile, Moynihan came up with a subsidy plan that replaced current welfare but the numbers did not work because every time he gave more up front and reduced welfare everything was blown out of proportion and cost assumptions escalated from 2 to 4 plus billion.
Furthermore, Moynihan's figures caused other issues because why should one who was not working begin to do so when the total free subsidies were not much greater than what was already being received in welfare. There were also income tax issues.
d) While Moynihan was wrestling with an impossible task, Nixon was dealing with increasing student protests regarding the Vietnam War. which was escalating. Universities quickly became the location for many of these protests and then the Kent State killings occurred and that blew everything out of the water. University administrators crumbled as well beginning with Harvard's President Pusey.
e) Moving the clock forward almost 50 years we find America trapped in deficits because prior presidents tried to solve social issues and economic disparities by legislating policies that were impractical and counter-productive, politicians are still beholden to those who finance their re-election campaigns and a large segment of our population remains unwilling to take initiatives, or are incapable of taking them, because they see everything through a racial prism.
Add to this volatile and insoluble mixture an un-orthodx president whose victory cannot be digested which has led to a "Gulag" type impeachment proceeding and you have a sad state of affairs.
I have always maintained if you want more of something throw money at it. Money is a fertilizer.
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This from a dear friend and fellow memo reader who admits he thinks too much. (See 3 below.)
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DORIS
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1) Likud: Netanyahu ready to serve only six more months
By GIL HOFFMAN
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will leave his post by May if an agreement is reached on a unity government that will prevent a third election in under a year by Wednesday's deadline, a Likud spokesman said on Friday.
Netanyahu told reporters at a briefing in Lisbon on Thursday that he would limit himself to six months in office, followed by a year and a half of Blue and White leader Benny Gantz as prime minister, and then Netanyahu would serve the remaining year and a half of the term if acquitted.
''The prime minister stands by the offer of the Likud's negotiating team to concede on him serving the first two years consecutively as is normal in a rotation," the Likud said in an official statement. "This is intended to avoid unnecessary elections and bring about a wide unity government."
A Blue and White official said in response that Netanyahu has still not made the offer publicly.
Meanwhile, the Likud is preparing for an election. The Likud central committee will convene on Sunday to cancel primaries for the Likud's Knesset slate and keep the current MKs.
Former prime minister Ariel Sharon's son Gilad Sharon wrote the 120,000 Likud members on Friday, urging them to reject the proposal and let him run for Knesset.
1a)Barak Ravid of Israel's
1a)Barak Ravid of Israel's
Scoop: U.S. pushing Arab states on non-belligerence pacts with Israel
The White House approached several Arab states to encourage them to reach non-belligerence agreements with Israel, according to Israeli, Arab and U.S. sources.
Why it matters: One of the Trump administration’s main goals in the Middle East has been to promote the normalization of ties between Israel and the Gulf states. Non-belligerence agreements are an interim step between the secret relations Israel has with those countries now and full diplomatic relations.
The Israeli, Arab and U.S. sources tell me President Trump’s deputy national security adviser, Victoria Coates, met last week with the ambassadors of the UAE, Bahrain, Oman and Morocco in Washington. All four countries have secret contacts and cooperation with Israel but no diplomatic relations.
- Coates raised the initiative for non-belligerence agreements, told them the Trump administration supports such a move and asked what their positions were.
- The Arab ambassadors said they would report back to their capitals and return soon with an answer.
That White House request builds off of an initiative led by Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz, Israeli officials say.
- Katz raised the idea in a September meeting at the UN with Omani Foreign Minister Yusuf bin Alawi and Emirati Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash.
The latest: On Monday and Tuesday of this week, a U.S. interagency team led by Coates met at the White House with an Israeli delegation led by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The discussions focused on the initiative for non-belligerence agreements.
- Although the White House is helping to push the initiative, the talks are in a preliminary stage.
- The fact that Israel has an interim government and might be headed for yet another election — and also the desire from the Arab states for progress on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to precede closer relations — will make implementation very difficult.
A senior Trump administration official said the U.S. "would certainly welcome expanding relationships between our critical allies and partners in the Middle East," but would not comment on "private diplomatic conversations" and had nothing to announce at this time.
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2) Schiff Impeaches Biden
Speaker Nancy Pelosi made the least surprising news of the year Thursday by announcing that the House will proceed to impeach President Trump. Once she fired the “inquiry” missile, it could never be called back.
We’ve argued that Mr. Schiff’s definition of bribery wasn’t true for America’s Founders and isn’t true today. And we were pleased to see support this week from impeachment scholar Jonathan Turley in his testimony to Congress. “On its face, the bribery theory is undermined by the fact that Trump released the aid without the alleged pre-conditions,” Mr. Turley said, adding that “this record does not support a bribery charge in either century.”
As for current bribery law, Mr. Turley noted, the “Supreme Court has repeatedly narrowed the scope.” The Court specifically ruled out the promise of a meeting as a corrupt “official act” in McDonnell (2016). Numerous corruption cases have been thrown out as a result, including one against New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. The delay in military funds also fails under bribery law given that the aid was ultimately delivered and there’s doubt Mr. Trump even had the statutory authority to deny it.
His broad definition of bribery would capture Joe’s work in Ukraine.
The Editorial Board
The question now is what precisely the articles of impeachment will say, and in particular we wonder if they will include the charge of bribery. If they do, Joe Biden should prepare for a Senate grilling.
Recall that Adam Schiff, the leading House impeachment advocate, has been floating a capacious definition of bribery that bears no relation to current law. “Well, bribery, first of all, as the Founders understood bribery, it was not as we understand it in law today. It was much broader,” he told NPR. “It connoted the breach of the public trust in a way where you’re offering official acts for some personal or political reason, not in the nation’s interest.”
Mr. Schiff repeated this definition during his Intelligence Committee hearings, and Senator Richard Blumenthal (D., Conn.) made the same point this week when he claimed in the Washington Post that “federal law defines bribery as the solicitation of ‘anything of value personally’ by a public official ‘in return for’ an official act.”
Voila, the charge is that Donald Trump solicited a bribe when he tried to withhold a White House meeting or military aid to Ukraine’s new President in return for investigations into corruption and Joe and Hunter Biden. Mrs. Pelosi says the witnesses summoned by Mr. Schiff “corroborated” the bribery charge.
We’ve argued that Mr. Schiff’s definition of bribery wasn’t true for America’s Founders and isn’t true today. And we were pleased to see support this week from impeachment scholar Jonathan Turley in his testimony to Congress. “On its face, the bribery theory is undermined by the fact that Trump released the aid without the alleged pre-conditions,” Mr. Turley said, adding that “this record does not support a bribery charge in either century.”
As for current bribery law, Mr. Turley noted, the “Supreme Court has repeatedly narrowed the scope.” The Court specifically ruled out the promise of a meeting as a corrupt “official act” in McDonnell (2016). Numerous corruption cases have been thrown out as a result, including one against New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez. The delay in military funds also fails under bribery law given that the aid was ultimately delivered and there’s doubt Mr. Trump even had the statutory authority to deny it.
But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Schiff’s bribery definition is correct and should be the impeachment standard. Why then wouldn’t Joe Biden’s actions in Ukraine in 2015 also be an impeachable bribe?
Mr. Biden has admitted that he threatened Ukrainian officials with the denial of U.S. aid if they didn’t fire a prosecutor who was investigating Burisma, which was paying Hunter Biden some $50,000 a month. That sure looks like an official act that had “some personal or political reason,” under the Schiff definition. It was certainly something “of value personally” under the Blumenthal definition.
Mr. Biden might object that he was representing the Obama Administration “in the nation’s interest.” But defining national interest is in the eye of the beholder. Is it in the U.S. interest for Ukraine officials to see that a company can escape scrutiny for corruption if it hires the son of the U.S. Vice President? Is it in the nation’s interest if other countries and companies observe this behavior and hire relatives of other American politicians?
At the very least, this is a question the U.S. Senate should be eager to explore in Mr. Trump’s impeachment trial. Mr. Biden would be essential to call as a leading witness, perhaps for the Trump defense team.
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Our point isn’t to play a game of political gotcha with Mr. Biden, whom we would hate to see disqualified as a potential presidential nominee because of this. The point is that if Mr. Trump is guilty of bribery for his Ukraine acts, then so are most American politicians. Democrats are defining bribery so broadly for their impeachment purposes that they are also indicting Mr. Biden, Mr. Menendez and probably most previous American Presidents.
To put it another way, Democrats are trivializing impeachment. They are defining down a constitutional “remedy,” to borrow Mr. Schiff’s word, when it ought to be reserved for genuine “high crimes and misdemeanors” that most Americans would readily understand as such. Mr. Schiff and Mrs. Pelosi are putting Mr. Biden as much in the impeachment dock as the President they despise.
2a) Adam Schiff Is Watching
By Kimberley A. Strassel
Obtaining phone logs of political rivals is a stunning abuse of congressional power.
Fanatics can justify any action, and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff this week demonstrated where that mindset leads. In his rush to paint Donald Trump as a lawbreaker, Mr. Schiff has himself trampled law and responsibility.
That’s the bottom line in Mr. Schiff’s stunning decision to subpoena the phone records of Rudy Giuliani and others. Mr. Schiff divulged the phone logs this week in his Ukraine report, thereby revealing details about the communications of Trump attorneys Jay Sekulow and Mr. Giuliani, ranking Intelligence Committee member Devin Nunes, reporter John Solomon and others. The media is treating this as a victory, when it is a disgraceful breach of ethical and legal propriety.
If nothing else, Mr. Schiff claims the ignominious distinction of being the first congressman to use his official powers to spy on a fellow member and publish the details. His report also means open season on members of the press. Mr. Giuliani over months has likely spoken to dozens of political figures and reporters—and the numbers, dates and length of those calls are now in Democrats’ hot little hands. Who gets the Schiff treatment next? If you think politics is ugly now, imagine a world in which congressional partisans routinely track and expose the call lists of their political rivals and disfavored media.
If we’ve never had a scandal like this before, it’s in part because it is legally dubious. Federal law bars phone carriers from handing over records without an individual’s agreement. The statute makes some exceptions, including for federal and state law-enforcement agencies.
But not for lawmakers. “There does not appear to be any basis to believe that a congressional committee is authorized to subpoena telephone records directly from a provider—as opposed to an individual,” former Attorney General Michael Mukasey tells me.
Maybe that’s because no one would have conceived of Congress needing to peruse private phone records. Its mission is writing laws. Or it might have been in recognition that Congress has no outside check on its subpoena powers. Law-enforcement subpoenas generally entail court supervision, helping to ensure they have a valid purpose. Mr. Schiff, working in secret, unilaterally decided he was entitled to see the phone records of private citizens.
Mr. Mukasey notes that the legal problem is “compounded,” in that going after Mr. Giuliani “raises questions of work-product and attorney-client privilege.” Whatever his role in the Ukraine affair, Mr. Giuliani remains the president’s personal lawyer. Law enforcement must present a judge with powerful evidence to get permission to vitiate attorney-client privilege. Mr. Schiff ignored all that, and made himself privy to data that could expose the legal strategies of the man he is investigating.
Mr. Giuliani did have notice that Democrats wanted some of his phone records. The Intelligence Committee sent a subpoena on Sept. 30, and gave him until Oct. 15 to comply. Yet before Mr. Giuliani even had an opportunity to respond, Mr. Schiff separately moved to seize his records from a phone carrier, sending his subpoena to AT&T on Sept. 30 as well.
Mr. Schiff purposely kept that action secret. This guaranteed that the only entity involved with a decision over whether to release the records was AT&T. And that gave Mr. Schiff all the cards, since companies fear political retribution far more than violating their customers’ privacy.
“The subpoenas aren’t related to legitimate congressional oversight,” says constitutional lawyer David Rivkin. Because there’s “no conceivable legislative purpose to obtaining these call logs and publicly disclosing this information, Mr. Schiff would not be able to benefit from the Speech and Debate Clause immunity that otherwise protects members of Congress from civil and criminal liability.” Mr. Rivkin adds that any of the targets could sue Mr. Schiff under state law for invasion of privacy or intentional infliction of emotional distress, and potentially even compel Mr. Schiff to turn over documents in discovery.
Mr. Nunes has already said he’s weighing his legal options. Since House Democrats obviously won’t hold Mr. Schiff accountable for his abuses, let’s hope at least one of the targets demands a court review his tactics. No one should want to live in a world where Adam Schiff has unfettered power to spy on Americans.
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3) I was thinking;
If Donald Trump deleted all of his emails, wiped his server with Bleach bit and destroyed all of his phones with a hammer, would the Mainstream Media suddenly lose all interest in the story and declare him innocent?I was thinking;If women do the same job for less money, why do companies hire men to do the same job for more money?I was thinking;Each ISIS attack now is a reaction to Trump policies, but all ISIS attacks during Obama’s term were due to Climate Change and a plea for jobs.I was thinking;We should stop calling them all ‘Entitlements’. Welfare, Food Stamps, WIC, ad nausea are not entitlements. They are taxpayer-funded handouts, and shouldn’t be called entitlements at all.Social Security and Veterans Benefits are Entitlements because the people receiving them are entitled to them. They were earned and paid for by the recipients.I was thinking;If Liberals don’t believe in biological gender then why did they march for women’s rights?I was thinking;How did the Russians get Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC to steal the Primary from Bernie Sanders?I was thinking;Why is it that Democrats think Super delegates are fine, but they have a problem with the Electoral College?I was thinking;If you don’t want the FBI involved in elections, don’t nominate someone who’s being investigated by the FBI.I was thinking;If Hillary’s speeches cost $250,000 an hour, how come no one shows up to her free ones?I was thinking;
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++If Democrats don’t want foreigners involved in our elections, why do they think it’s all right for illegals to vote?My head hurts, I’m going to quit thinking for a while!
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