RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/432595-trumps-approval-rating-on-economy-hits-new-high-gallup

President Trump’s approval rating on the economy has reached a new high, according to a Gallup poll published Tuesday.

The poll showed that 56 percent of adults in the U.S. approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, the best mark of Trump’s presidency and the highest approval rating for Trump on any of the 14 issues in the poll.

The poll also found that a majority of voters approve of Trump’s handling of unemployment and of the situation with North Korea, with 54 percent approving of Trump’s job with unemployment and 51 percent approving on North Korea.

But the president’s overall approval rating still sits at just 43 percent, according to the poll. Another 54 percent of adults, meanwhile, disapprove of Trump’s performance as president.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/03/04/no-collusion

By all accounts, even from his most devoted propagandists in the news media, Special Counsel Robert Mueller soon is expected to release a report that will devastate Trump antagonists who have been convinced his investigation would result in the president’s removal from office.

They are bracing themselves to hear two words from the special counsel that just a few months ago seemed inconceivable: No collusion.The idea that a nearly two-year long probe conducted by a team of partisan, Trump-hating prosecutors empowered with an unending supply of public resources and shielded from any legitimate scrutiny will come up empty-handed is causing great angst in the Acela Corridor.

The List of Shame—journalists, editors, cable news contributors, Democratic lawmakers, and NeverTrump operatives who’ve foisted this outrageous farce on the American people—is long and ignominious.One man who in many ways sits at the center of this manufactured storm is Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire founder of eBay. After Trump won the election, an outcome Omidyar tried to prevent by spending hundreds of thousands of dollars against Trump in 2016, the Hawaiian-based mogul ratcheted up his opposition to the president through a network of nonprofits.

One of his missions has been to stoke the Trump-Russian collusion conspiracy in an effort to derail Trump’s presidency. “Over the past two years, I have seen alarming and sometimes unprecedented violations of our country’s democratic norms,” wrote Joe Goldman, president of Democracy Fund, one of Omidyar’s well-funded foundations, last summer. “For an organization committed to strengthening democracy on behalf of the American people, this isn’t just disturbing—it’s humbling.”

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/04/nadler-trump-investigation-1201488

A key House committee with the power to impeach President Donald Trump kicked off a sweeping new investigation on Monday with document demands from the White House, Trump’s namesake company, charity, transition, inauguration and 2016 campaign, as well as several longtime associates and the president’s two adult sons.

Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat, opened his much-anticipated probe with letters to 81 individuals, companies and government entities seeking a wide range of materials that go to the heart of allegations against the president — including abuses of power, corruption, and obstruction of justice.

“This is a critical time for our nation,” Nadler wrote to each recipient, all of which his staff noted have already been ensnared in investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller or other federal prosecutors. “President Trump and his administration face wide-ranging allegations of misconduct that strike at the heart of our constitutional order.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/trump-russia-steele-dossier-claims-old-news/

It spun old facts. It didn’t give us new ones.
Ross Douthat had an excellent column in Times on Sunday about the state of the Trump-Russia investigation. He homed in on the Steele dossier and its four major claims (or, as he put it, the four “big possibilities” it raised). The first of these “was that Russian intelligence was behind the hacks of the Democratic National Committee and the release of stolen emails through WikiLeaks.” Ross adds that this big possibility was “soon well corroborated.”

I want to take issue with both the suggestion that Steele should get any credit for this claim and the implication that the corroboration of it is in any way a corroboration of Steele. On the matter of Russia’s culpability for hacking the DNC emails published by WikiLeaks, Steele was just following the crowd. His vaunted Russian sources clearly gave him no foreknowledge about it, notwithstanding that he’d been poking around for Trump–Russia conspiracy evidence for well over a month by July 22, 2016, when publication of the DNC emails began.

This is worth exploring because it highlights an insidious aspect of the dossier that has gotten too little attention: This opposition-research screed produced by the Clinton campaign did not, through Steele’s purportedly well-placed sources, foretell events. Rather, after events occurred, Steele wove them into the Democrats’ Trump-Russia conspiracy narrative.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/03/did_ilhan_omar_actually_like_it_when_farrakhan_called_her_sweetheart.html

You want to hope she didn’t, but the Minnesota socialist’s new round of Jew-hating statements and her failure to apologize for them suggests some kind of influence from the famous anti-Semitic pariah.

Here’s here latest controversy over what a Democratic congressional leader called her vile anti-Semitic slur:

Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) is facing new accusations of making anti-Semitic remarks, this time rebuked by a senior member of her party who says the House freshman’s words conjured a “vile anti-Semitic slur.”

Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has demanded an apology over comments Omar made Wednesday, less than a month after she was condemned by bipartisan leadership for suggesting pro-Israel lobbying groups and Jewish politicians influence American politics.

[For Rep. Ilhan Omar, 2 apologies in 3 weeks for ‘anti-Semitic tropes’]

Her comments came during a town hall in Washington while speaking about liberal issues. “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country,” Omar said.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/03/takeaways-from-the-house-democrats-cohen-hearing/

It was cinéma not so vérité.

‘Lanny Davis Productions.” That should have been the credit on this week’s big Michael Cohen drama. It’s a better fit than “House Oversight Committee.”

Knowledge may be power, but electoral victory is subpoena power. That’s of more practical use when the objective, under all the chatter about “collusion” and impeachment, is to render Donald Trump unelectable. Expect another 18 months of this.

The Democrats are entitled to the spectacle orchestrated Wednesday by Chairman Elijah Cummings and Cohen lawyer (and, not coincidentally, sharp Democratic strategist) Lanny Davis. They won the midterm elections, not just fair and square but going away. The spoils that go to the victor include the authority to compel the appearance of witnesses who will support the 2020 narrative: Trump as “racist, conman, and cheat,” the theme of Cohen’s opening statement — which we may suspect the rough-edged, ambulance-chaser-turned-wannabe-Trump-bullyboy had just a tad of Lanny’s help writing. Chairman Scorsese, um, I mean Cummings, gave Cohen an extraordinary half hour to read it to America without interruption.

Republicans are not nearly as good at this stuff, mainly for reasons beyond their control. While in the House majority, they tried their best to put the Obama legacy Justice Department and FBI under the microscope for politicization and abuses of power in the investigations that bore on the 2016 election. But the anti-Trump press didn’t care, which meant the public never heard much about it.

http://edition.washingtonexaminer.com/infinity/article_popover_share.aspx?guid=213c

Even if Mueller’s report is a dud, Washington will freak out. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report is said to be close to completion and ready for submission to the Justice Department.

There is even conjecture that it is already finished, but Mueller decided, or was perhaps persuaded by newly confirmed Attorney General William Barr, to delay submission until President Trump returns from the Southeast Asia talks with North Korean strongman Kim Jong Un.

In a perfect world, the final report would be a nonevent. Alas, that is not our world, so Mueller’s conclusion will be only the beginning of a free-forall, featuring Washington hypocrisy at its worst.

The special counsel has conducted a legal probe, but the Trump-Russia narrative has always been political, more about ramifications for 2020 than accountability for 2016.

In that imaginary, perfect world, the Mueller report would be a nonevent for three reasons.

First and foremost, the report should not tell us much that we do not already know. Of course, there are fascinating facts to be learned. What was the precise nature of “collusion” between the Kremlin and the Trump campaign? What exactly happened at the Trump Tower meeting between top campaign officials and a lawyer connected to the Putin regime — the meeting at which Donald Trump Jr. expected to receive information that might devastate Hillary Clinton’s candidacy, but that we’ve been led to believe was a dud? Did the president obstruct the Russia investigation by firing FBI Director James Comey? Did he obstruct justice by earlier leaning on Comey to drop the investigation of retired Gen. Michael Flynn, the national security adviser Trump had just fired for allegedly misleading Vice President Mike Pence about his conversations with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.? All interesting questions. But they’re not supposed to be answered publicly unless charges are filed.

The media-Democrat complex has been extremely supportive of Mueller in hopes that he would transcend what, in the end, is his modest role: that of prosecutor. Democrats prefer to see him as counsel to a congressional impeachment committee, on the hunt for high crimes and misdemeanors, unconstrained by the federal penal code.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/02/28/where-

During his grudge-airing, redemption-seeking spectacle on Wednesday, Michael Cohen admitted he was in cahoots with Democratic lawmakers prior to giving his congressional testimony.

“We spoke with Chairman [Elijah] Cummings and the [Democratic] Party,” Trump’s former lawyer confessed to Representative Jody Hice (R-Ga.). “We spoke with Chairman [Adam] Schiff and his people as well.”

Under further questioning by Rep. James Jordan (R-Ohio), Cohen acknowledged he “spoke to Mr. Schiff about topics that were going to be raised at the upcoming hearing.” Jordan clarified that rather than simply discuss the logistics of the hearing, Schiff coached the witness on “what [he was] going to talk about.”

It wasn’t the only attempt by Schiff to influence Cohen’s testimony: In an interview with George Stephanopoulos on “This Week” last Sunday, the Southern California congressman signaled that he expected Cohen to disclose information about alleged crimes committed by the president, including money-laundering and obstruction of justice.

It all amounted to the latest ethical misstep by the Democratic chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; unfortunately, none of Schiff’s bad behavior has caught the attention either of the media or congressional watchdogs. Unlike his predecessor, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), who was subjected to a fruitless, eight-month House Ethics Committee investigation in 2017, Schiff continues to escape scrutiny for lying to Congress, misleading the public about imaginary crimes related to Russian collusion, and now, witness-tampering.