Schiff’s Surveillance State The Democrat demands, and then discloses, the call logs of his opponents.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/schiffs-surveillance-state-11575506091?m

The impeachment press is playing this as if the calls are a new part of the scandal, but the real outrage here is Mr. Schiff’s snooping on political opponents. The Democrat’s motive appears to be an attempt to portray Mr. Nunes, a presidential defender and Mr. Schiff’s leading antagonist in Congress, as part of a conspiracy to commit impeachable offenses.

“It is, I think, deeply concerning, that at a time when the President of the United States was using the power of his office to dig up dirt on a political rival, that there may be evidence that there were members of Congress complicit in that activity,” Mr. Schiff told the press on Tuesday. Complicit in what? Doing his job of Congressional oversight? Talking to Mr. Trump’s lawyer to get a complete view of the Ukrainian tale? Apparently Mr. Schiff now wants to impeach Members of Congress too.

This is unprecedented and looks like an abuse of government surveillance authority for partisan gain. Democrats were caught using the Steele dossier to coax the FBI into snooping on the 2016 Trump campaign. Now we have elected members of Congress using secret subpoenas to obtain, and then release to the public, the call records of political opponents.

Nadler’s Impeachment Circus Dem-picked law professors put on a rage-filled clown show. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2019/12/nadlers-impeachment-circus-joseph-klein/

The House Intelligence Committee approved its Democrat majority report on Tuesday claiming there was “overwhelming evidence” that President Trump committed misconduct in office and obstruction. The “overwhelming” evidence consisted of no more than an accumulation of hearsay and presumptions. It is contradicted by direct evidence that President Trump demanded nothing from Ukraine. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky also denied that there was any pressure exerted on him by President Trump, and he said recently that he “never talked to the President from the position of a quid pro quo.” On Wednesday, the House Judiciary Committee took over the impeachment circus. The House Judiciary Committee’s first public hearing consisted of a supposedly academic discussion by constitutional law experts on impeachment. Before kicking off the public hearing, Chairman Jerry Nadler summed up his not so scholarly approach in a closed-door session with Democrats as follows; “I’m not going to take any sh*t.” He just likes to dish it out like his comrade, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff.

The professors who testified before the House Judiciary Committee were Noah Feldman (Harvard Law School), Pamela S. Karlan (Stanford Law School),  Michael Gerhardt (University of North Carolina School of Law), and Jonathan Turley (George Washington University Law School). Three out of the four experts called to testify were hand-picked by the Democrats, stacking the deck against President Trump. The Republicans’ single choice was Professor Turley, a Democrat himself but relatively open-minded compared to the Democrats’ choices.

Rep. Matt Gaetz Just Brought a Blow Torch to the Impeachment Hearings and Set a Glorious Bonfire By Victoria Taft

https://pjmedia.com/trending/rep-matt-gaetz-just-brought-a-blow-torch-to-the-impeachment-hearings-and-set-a-glorious-bonfire/

Wednesday’s impeachment hearing in the House Judiciary Committee was comprised of exactly four law professors giving their opinions of what they thought President Trump meant when he spoke with the Ukrainian president last July. In five minutes, Congressman Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) laid down so much cover-fire and hit so many targets, that when he was done, his verbal “smoke” hung in the air.

Gaetz established that all the professors supported Democratic presidential candidates and most had given them thousands of dollars. He asked them to raise their hands if they had any personal knowledge of any material facts from Congressman Adam Schiff’s impeachment report. All hands stayed down. And he noted that at least two of them had been calling for Trump’s impeachment for years:

When Our Guardians Fail Us By Victor Davis Hanson

https://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/when-our-guardians-fail-us/

One symptom of a society in crisis is the unreliability or even corruption of its own auditors.

After all, when the watchmen have lost moral authority to watch, who can be believed or trusted? Or, as the Roman satirist Juvenal famously put it, “Who will guard the guardians?”

It was recently reported that FBI lawyer Kevin Clinesmith altered an email to bolster a suspicious FBI effort to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court warrant authorizing the surveillance of Carter Page, a onetime employee of the Trump campaign.

If true, Clinesmith helped the FBI successfully delude the court into granting what was likely an illegal request to spy on the Trump campaign. Clinesmith was reportedly expelled from special counsel Robert Mueller’s legal team for cheering on opposition to the Trump presidency by writing “Viva la resistance!” in a text message discussion.

After FBI Director James Comey was fired, he leaked his own memos of private and confidential conversations with the president. Whether Comey would go to jail hinged on how the FBI would categorize his memos post facto — as merely “confidential,” or as “secret” or “top secret.”

Two of the adjudicators were Lisa Page and Peter Strzok, former Comey friends and FBI subordinates. The FBI eventually ruled that the leaking of the memos was not felonious. Page and Strzok, who were involved in an amorous relationship, were later dismissed from Mueller’s team for exchanging texts that showed bias and hatred toward Trump, the object of their team’s investigation.

‘Schiff Show’ Roundup: Democrat Fiction Schiff and Co. release their fantastical report of Trump’s supposed corruption and obstruction. Nate Jackson

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67139-schiff-show-roundup-democrat-fiction-2019-12-04

House Intelligence Committee Democrats released their 300-page report on their impeachment inquisition so far. It’s riveting reading if you like works of fiction very loosely “based on a true story.” The far more accurate version is the Republican prebuttal.

“President Trump’s scheme subverted U.S. foreign policy toward Ukraine and undermined our national security in favor of two politically motivated investigations that would help his presidential reelection campaign,” argue Adam Schiff and other House Democrats in their report. Moreover, they aim to bolster their case on “obstruction” by saying, “It would be hard to imagine a stronger or more complete case of obstruction than that demonstrated by the President since the inquiry began.”

Democrats proceed to base their gripes in their longstanding narrative that President Donald Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election. They argue that his Ukraine endeavors were the same kind of corrupt conduct. “In making the decision to move forward, we were struck by the fact that the President’s misconduct was not an isolated occurrence, nor was it the product of a naïve president,” the preface to the report asserts. “Instead, the efforts to involve Ukraine in our 2020 presidential election were undertaken by a President who himself was elected in 2016 with the benefit of an unprecedented and sweeping campaign of election interference undertaken by Russia in his favor, and which the President welcomed and utilized.”

What Happens When Everyone’s Trying to Get Nukes?By Jay Solomon

https://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/294982/everyones-trying-to-get-nukes

For more than 50 years, Israel’s national security has been guided by the Begin Doctrine, named after the country’s sixth prime minister. It holds that no regional enemy committed to destroying the Jewish state can be allowed to obtain weapons of mass destruction. To that end, Israel’s air force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and Syria’s al Kibar plutonium-producing facility in 2007.

Today’s cascade of nuclear technologies across the Middle East, however, is raising serious questions about Israel’s ability to enforce this mandate going forward. The debate over the Begin Doctrine’s viability will not only have a profound impact on Israel, but also on security in the broader Middle East. Israel has proven more than once to be the only regional player willing to curtail by force the spread of nuclear weapons to rogue states, despite the international opprobrium the Jewish state has reaped for its actions. But current concerns inside Israel reflect just how much the threat of nuclear proliferation has increased in recent years as the countries of the Middle East have changed and transformed the region.

Israel views Iran as by far the most likely regional power to acquire nuclear weapons in the near term and has openly vowed to use military force to stop it. But a slew of other Mideast countries, some nominally Israel’s allies or strategic partners, have also made significant advances in their nuclear programs. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan openly warned in September that Ankara could seek to develop atomic weapons in response to its changing relationship with the U.S. and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto leader, Mohammed bin Salman, has said his country would match any nuclear technologies that Iran, Riyadh’s arch rival, acquires.

Israeli officials and analysts say that, as a result of these evolving threats, the tools required to enforce the Begin Doctrine will need to change. Israel deployed cyber weapons, in collaboration with the U.S., to attack Iran’s uranium-enrichment facilities in the late 2000s. The operation destroyed thousands of centrifuge machines, but Tehran’s overall nuclear-fuel production quickly returned to pace. Israel also signed on to the U.S. sanctions campaign that has used financial warfare to pressure Iran into giving up or constraining its nuclear activities. The strategy helped birth the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the Obama-helmed Iran nuclear agreement between Tehran and world powers, which President Donald Trump pulled out of last year with the backing of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both leaders believed the deal offered, at best, only a short-term solution to the Iranian nuclear threat while forfeiting the sources of economic leverage that may have forced Iran to accept more permanent restraints.

But the standard tools of economic and military coercion, even including the high tech instruments of cyberwar, might not be enough any longer to prevent nuclear proliferation in the Middle East as countries like Turkey and Saudi Arabia—both official U.S. strategic allies—grow their own nuclear programs. Israel has diplomatic relations with Turkey, which remains an active member of NATO and houses 50 American nuclear weapons at the U.S. military base in Incirlik. But the Israeli-Turkish relationship has been strained under Erdogan’s Islamist government and by conflicting approaches to the Syrian civil war on their respective borders. Israel has also developed a strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia, with the on-and-off foes, united by a common enemy, now sharing intelligence and technology to try and constrain Iran’s regional activities.

GENETICALLY MODIFIED “GOLDEN RICE” WILL SAVE THE LIVES OF HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS- MATT RIDLEY

https://quillette.com/2019/12/01/gm-crops-like-golden-rice-will-save-the-lives-of-hundreds-of-thousands-of-children/

Any day now, the government of Bangladesh may become the first country to approve the growing of a variety of yellow rice by farmers known as Golden Rice. If so, this would be a momentous victory in a long and exhausting battle fought by scientists and humanitarians to tackle a huge human health problem—a group that’s faced a great deal of opposition by misguided critics of genetically modified foods.

Golden yellow rice ear

Compare two plants. Golden Rice and Golden Promise barley are two varieties of crop. The barley was produced in the 1960s by bombarding seeds with gamma rays in a nuclear facility to scramble their genes at random with the aim of producing genetic mutations that might prove to be what geneticists used to call “hopeful monsters.” It is golden only in name, as a marketing gimmick, with sepia-tinged adverts helping to sell its appeal to organic growers and brewers. Despite the involvement of atomic radiation in its creation, it required no special regulatory approval or red tape before being released to be grown by farmers in Britain and elsewhere. It went almost straight from laboratory to field and proved popular and profitable.

Golden rice

Golden Rice, by contrast, was produced in the 1990s by carefully inserting just two naturally occurring genes known to be safe—from maize and from a common soil bacterium—into a rice plant, disturbing no other genes. It is quite literally golden: its yellow color indicates that it has beta carotene in it, the precursor of vitamin A. It was developed as a humanitarian, non-profit project in an attempt to prevent somewhere between 200,000 and 700,000 people, many of them children, dying prematurely every year in poor countries because of vitamin A deficiency. (Vitamin A deficiency causes children to go blind and lose immune function.) Yet the rice has been ferociously opposed by opponents of GM foods and, partly as a result, has been tied up in red tape for 20 years, preventing it from being grown. One study in 2008 calculated that in India alone 1.38 million person-years of healthy life had been lost for every year the crop has been delayed.

Golden Rice was the brainchild of two scientists, Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer, aimed at helping the 250 million children—predominantly in Asia—who subsist mainly on rice and suffer from vitamin A deficiency. Telling the parents of these children to grow vegetables (most don’t have land), or distributing vitamin capsules—the preferred alternative of some environmental activists—has not proved remotely practical.

Potrykus hit upon the idea of awakening the molecular machinery in the seed of a rice plant—it is active in the leaves—to make vitamin A while casting around for something he could do to help the world towards the end of his career. Within a few years, and with Beyer’s help, he had succeeded. With additional assistance from scientists at the agricultural company Syngenta, organized by Adrian Dubock, they eventually produced a version of Golden Rice that was sufficiently rich in beta carotene to supply all the vitamin A a person needs. (Dubock wrote about the development of Golden Rice here.) With some difficulty, they cleared the many intellectual property hurdles, getting firms to waive their patents so that the rice could be sold or given away. Potrykus and Beyer insisted that the technology be donated free to benefit children suffering from vitamin A deficiency and Syngenta gave up its right to commercialize the product even in rich countries.

Given the scale of human suffering Golden Rice could address, there may be no better example of a purely philanthropic project in the whole of human history. Yet some misguided environmental activists still oppose Golden Rice to this day.

Why Are Taxpayers Subsidizing Get-Trump Propaganda? Adam Mill

https://amgreatness.com/2019/12/03/why-are-taxpayers-subsidizing-get-trump-propaganda/

A recent NPR segment is a microcosm of the whole thing: an echo chamber of Trump derangement through which reality cannot penetrate.

The name “All Things Considered” would suggest a wide-ranging survey of viewpoints on today’s issues. That’s the name of the taxpayer-subsidized nightly evening show that National Public Radio broadcasts to a national audience. So it is particularly maddening when NPR broadcasts yet another segment featuring a discussion among three anti-Trump pundits who seem unable to consider anything that doesn’t help NPR’s quest to take down the president.

Before turning to impeachment, the segment began with NPR host Ari Shapiro, New York Times columnist David Brooks, and Vox writer Matthew Yglesias finding something nasty to say about the president visiting the troops in Afghanistan for Thanksgiving. (A heartwarming video of the event can be seen here.)

It was a perfect little echo chamber.

“President Trump is back in the U.S. after just a few hours on the ground in Afghanistan, and the trip was not the only surprise,” Shapiro said. “He also unexpectedly announced that peace talks are back on between the U.S. and the Taliban.”

DEMOCRATS DID NOT QUESTION JONATHAN TURLEY A DEMOCRAT…..

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dem-counsel-suggests-three-possible-articles-of-impeachment/

EXCERPT

“Democrats did not ask the only Republican witness Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, whether he thinks Trump committed impeachable offenses.

Turley cautioned Democrats about the speed at which the impeachment inquiry is moving, saying neither the case for bribery nor the case for obstruction against the president is airtight.

“The record does not establish obstruction in this case,” Turley said. “If you accept all of their presumptions, it would be obstruction. But impeachments have to be based on proof, not presumptions.”

He went on to reject the Democrats’ “boundless” definition of bribery, which he argued has been rejected by the Supreme Court.

“You can’t accuse a president of bribery and, then, when some of us note that the Supreme Court has rejected your type of boundless interpretation, say, ‘Well, it’s just impeachment; we really don’t have to prove the elements,’” Turley said. “This isn’t improvisational jazz. Close enough is not good enough. If you’re going to accuse a president of bribery, you need to make it stick, because you’re trying to remove a duly elected president of the United States.”

If the Republican Party Is Dying, Why Are Their Governors So Popular? By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/if-the-republican-party-is-dying-why-are-their-governors-so-popular/

A new St. Leo’s poll in Florida shows Governor Ron DeSantis sporting an approval rating of 68 percent (with a disapproval of 20 percent). What’s most impressive about these numbers is that in every demographic that matters, DeSantis is polling above 50 percent — with both sexes, Hispanic (67 percent approval) and black voters (63), and among both parties.

When it comes to governorships, Florida isn’t an outlier. The last time the Morning Consult poll tabulated a list of the most popular governors, the top 14 — and 18 of the top 20 — were Republicans. These Republicans govern in states that have highly diverse electorates, from Alabama to Vermont.

Which is weird, because this very week, progressives at the New York Times and the Atlantic were assuring us that the GOP was so reviled nationally — and its agenda so toxic to the average American — that the party has been compelled to hide from “democratic accountability.”

Naturally, Charlie Baker can’t support the same policies in Massachusetts that Mark Gordon can in Wyoming. And some of these governors have their agendas tempered by Democratic legislatures, while others do not. But, like DeSantis, all of them tend to govern with a conservative disposition, and most of them openly advocate a conservative agenda.

How many progressive governors do you see near the top of the list? Kate Brown of Oregon, perhaps the most progressive governor in the country, is also one of its least popular. Gavin Newsom, who’s pushed a slate of left-wing policies, owns an approval rating in heavily liberal California that’s on par with Donald Trump’s national numbers. “Rational, pragmatic, progressive” J. B. Pritzker’s polls are horrible. Andrew Cuomo’s numbers are brutal. The only Democrats in the top 20 are Steve Bullock and John Carney, two of the most moderate liberal governors in the country.