CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB Comments turned off

Barack Obama, the real king of the quid pro quo Cheryl K. Chumley

Posted By on September 27th, 2019

www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/25/barack-obama-king-quid-pro-quo/

Democrats, socialists and others with animosity toward this White House say they’ve found the smoking gun in Donald Trump’s released telephone transcript with Ukraine’s president — the supposed quid pro quo nugget of gold — and that it won’t be long now before impeach, impeach, impeach moves from message to reality.

Clearly, they haven’t. But it’s funny how after eight years of Barack Obama quid pro quo-ing here, there and everywhere, it’s only now Democrats care. 

It’s only with Trump that Democrats seem to have gleaned a sense of conscientiously objecting to what they perceive as abusing one’s high office to obtain political or personal favors.

Where were they with Obama?

Green Biz, in March of 2011, ran this: “Barack Obama, Clean Tech and the Political Quid Pro Quo.”

The piece goes on to recount how the Center for Public Integrity published “a long, in-depth look at how some of the Obama campaign’s most prolific fundraisers have gotten loans, grants and special access to [his] administration,” to include a “deep look at how [Steve] Westly, former California state controller and venture capitalist … landed intimate access to the Obama administration.”

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

U.S. gender ‘A Doll For Everyone’: Meet Mattel’s Gender-Neutral Doll ‘A Doll For Everyone’: Meet Mattel’s Gender-Neutral Doll By Eliana Dockterman

Posted By on September 26th, 2019

https://time.com/5684822/mattel-gender-neutral-doll/?utm_source=pocket-newta

A child opens a box. He starts jumping and screaming with joy—not an unusual sound in the halls of Mattel’s headquarters where researchers test new toys. But this particular toy is a doll, and it’s rare for parents to bring boys into these research groups to play with dolls. It’s rarer still for a boy to immediately attach himself to one the way Shi’a just did.

An 8-year-old who considers himself gender fluid and whose favorite color is black one week, pink the next, Shi’a sometimes plays with his younger sister’s dolls at home, but they’re “girly, princess stuff,” he says dismissively. This doll, with its prepubescent body and childish features, looks more like him, right down to the wave of bleached blond bangs. “The hair is just like mine,” Shi’a says, swinging his head in tandem with the doll’s. Then he turns to the playmate in the toy-testing room, a 7-year-old girl named Jhase, and asks, “Should I put on the girl hair?” Shi’a fits a long, blond wig on the doll’s head, and suddenly it is no longer an avatar for him but for his sister.

The doll can be a boy, a girl, neither or both, and Mattel, which calls this the world’s first gender-neutral doll, is hoping its launch on Sept. 25 redefines who gets to play with a toy traditionally deemed taboo for half the world’s kids. Carefully manicured features betray no obvious gender: the lips are not too full, the eyelashes not too long and fluttery, the jaw not too wide. There are no Barbie-like breasts or broad, Ken-like shoulders. Each doll in the Creatable World series looks like a slender 7-year-old with short hair, but each comes with a wig of long, lustrous locks and a wardrobe befitting any fashion-conscious kid: hoodies, sneakers, graphic T-shirts in soothing greens and yellows, along with tutus and camo pants.

POLITICS Comments turned off

Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee from Outer Space By Kyle Smith

Posted By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2019/10/14/elizabeth-warrens-strange-shifting-identities

/Conservative; liberal; white; Cherokee; Harvard prof; tribune of the people; possibly extraterrestrial

‘Fauxcahontas” and “Lie-awatha” are serviceable enough as one-word descriptors for Elizabeth Warren. But her decades-long phony insistence on Cherokee identity, which is to identity politics what stolen valor is to military service, is just part of her oleaginous, changeling habit of cycling through one persona after another. She’s Chief Spitting Bull, the lady with a J.D. in B.S.

Whether she’s claiming her white parents had to elope because of racism or, five years after the matter was litigated, falsely asserting that Michael Brown “was murdered” in Ferguson, Mo., or stating she was the “first nursing mother to take a bar exam in the state of New Jersey,” as though anyone kept tabs on such strange details (“Excuse me, madam, are you lactating at the moment? I’m making a record book”), Elizabeth Warren is always ready with a load of bull. Warren will say whatever is convenient for her ambitions of the moment. “I am not running for president of the United States,” Senator Warren said last March on Meet the Press. “I am running for the United States Senate in 2018 in Massachusetts.” The month after she was reelected she announced she was forming an exploratory committee to mull a presidential run.

And note the false, strained way she did get in the presidential race, in that infamous video. She starts recording. Then — hello, soon-to-be-conquered Earth people, I understand you like brewed malt beverages on this planet — she immediately takes a break to get a beer. Her programmers in the Nebula 235X star system have told her that ordinary Earthfolk are intimidated by proper grammar, so she phrases this entirely natural and spontaneous decision like this: “Hold on a sec, I’m gonna get me, uh, a beer.” Then she follows up with this classic: “Hey! My husband Bruce is now in here!” Her husband was in her house? Where does she normally keep him, in the shed with the lawnmower? Warren isn’t just phony, she’s creepy and alien and able to change form to play on your nightmares: She’s It of the Charles. Occasionally she lets the mask slip, as when, in Greenwich Village, she positioned herself as the candidate opposed to half the population. “We’re not here today because of famous arches or famous men,” she said. “In fact, we’re not here because of men at all.” Huh? Warren must be the first candidate in history to think that winning the working class means deriding the sex that does most of the grunt labor in this country. Should she make it to the general election, and advisers somberly inform her that she is losing the men’s vote by 97 points and that all of her male supporters wear Capris and live in Brooklyn, I wonder what her Dukakis-in-a-tank response will be. My guess is it’ll involve a misbegotten attempt to imbibe tequila during a show at Bada Bing’s, where she somehow mispronounces the word “bro.” Someone will ask who her favorite member of the New England Patriots is and she’ll say something like “Eli Kaepernick.” 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Double Standards on Ukraine By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/double-standards-on-ukraine/

Democrats in Congress and the media pretend to swoon over conduct they accepted when Obama did it.

House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff’s opening statement at today’s hearing, a grilling of National Intelligence Director Joseph Maguire, was remarkable. To begin with, he recited a parody of the conversation between President Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky that was so absurd, it would not have made it into a Grade-C mob movie. A telling decision by Schiff, a capable former prosecutor: If you have an extortionate conversation, you quote it. If you need to imagine it into something it isn’t, that means it is not an extortionate conversation.

Also telling: Chairman Schiff came flying out of the starting block describing how overwhelmingly dependent Ukraine is on the United States and its president. Of course, this fact must be forced to the fore because it is not obvious from the Trump–Zelensky conversation — again, Schiff does not have evidence that Trump extorted Zelensky for the purpose of aiding Trump’s 2020 campaign.

But more to the point, the relationship of dependency intensified in 2015 due to the flight to Moscow of Ukraine’s president, Viktor Yanukovych. At that point, a new Ukrainian government more to the Obama administration’s liking, under President Petro Poroshenko, came to power. It was desperate for American help, financially and security-wise, which is why Vice President Biden was in a position to pressure it into firing the prosecutor who was conducting a corruption investigation of Burisma, the energy company that had appointed Hunter Biden to its board and was lavishly compensating him.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

Why the Impeachment Frenzy May Only Strengthen Trump By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/why-impeachment-frenzy-may-strengthen-trump/https:

Contrary to suggestions by some, most Trump supporters are not automatons or blind supporters. What bothers them, and should bother others, about the latest Ukraine hysterias is the familiar monotony of this latest scripted psychodrama.

The whistleblower admits to hearsay (“I was not a direct witness to most of the events described”). His term-paper report is laden with anonymously sourced rumors, e.g., “According to multiple White House officials I spoke with,” “I was told by White House officials,” “Based on my understanding,” “I learned from multiple officials,” “I do not know whether similar measures were taken,” “I do not know whether those officials spoke with or met with . . . ”

Between references to Internet news accounts and “I heard from” and “I learned from” and “I do not know” anonymous officials, there is nothing here to launch an impeachment of any president.

In the complaint are all the now-familiar tell-tale signs of pseudo-exactness, in the form of Mueller-report-like footnotes and page references to liberal media outlets such as Bloomberg, ABC, and the New York Times. There is the accustomed Steele-dossier scare bullet points. We see again Comey-memo-like disputes over classification status with capital letters UNCLASSIFIED stamped as headers and footers and TOP SECRET lined out.

Scary references abound to the supposed laws that the legal-eagle whistleblower believes were violated. In sum, there is all the usual evidence of an administrative-state bureaucrat, likely to be some third-tier Brennan or Clapper-like intelligence operative, who is canvassing disgruntled White House staffers, writing a report that imitates intelligence-department formats, combing the Internet, in “dream-team” and “all-star” footnote fashion, for scare quotes and anti-Trump stories, and then likely having it dressed up in legalese by an activist lawyer. Take all that away, and one is left with “I heard.”

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Right from Wrong: From the mouths of mullahs Rouhani’s New York blitz. By Ruthie Blum

Posted By on September 26th, 2019

https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Right-from-Wrong-From-the-mouths-of-mullahs-603058

The ayatollahs in Tehran must have been kvelling this week while watching their puppet, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, receive oodles of undivided attention on the global stage. Not only did Rouhani address the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Wednesday, he was granted even more valuable propaganda time the previous day during a one-on-one interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace.

Both platforms enabled the key figure-head of the greatest state sponsor of international terrorism – and among the world’s worst abusers of the human rights of its own people – to make a case for his evil regime by distorting reality beyond recognition. You know, by accusing America and Israel of being the true terror-masters.

When he took to the UNGA podium, Rouhani came out of the gate running.

“At the outset, I would like to… pay homage to all the freedom-seekers of the world who do not bow to oppression and aggression, and tolerate all the hardships of the struggle for rights, as well as to the spirits of all the oppressed martyrs of terrorist strikes and bombardment in Yemen, Syria, Occupied Palestine, Afghanistan and other countries of the world,” he said. “The Middle East is burning in the flames of war, bloodshed, aggression, occupation and religious and sectarian fanaticism and extremism. And under such circumstances, the suppressed people of Palestine are the biggest victim. Discrimination, appropriation of lands, settlement expansions and killings continue to be practiced against the Palestinians.”

However, he added, “The US- and Zionist-imposed plans, such as the ‘Deal of the Century,’ recognizing Baitul Muqaddas [Jerusalem] as the capital of the Zionist regime and the accession of the Syrian Golan to the other occupied territories, are doomed to fail.”

If anyone was wondering why America and Israel would not succeed in what he implied is a pernicious plot, Rouhani explained, “In contrast to the US’s destructive plans, the Islamic Republic of Iran’s regional and international assistance and cooperation on security and counter-terrorism have been much decisive. The clear example of such an approach is our cooperation with Russia and Turkey within the Astana format on the Syrian crisis, and our peace proposal for Yemen.”

FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Will US, Iranian miscalculation bring war? BY Lawrence Haas

Posted By on September 26th, 2019

https://thehill.com/opinion/international/463077-will-us-iranian-miscalculation-bring-war

In the escalating, multi-dimensional conflict between Washington and Tehran, the growing risk of armed conflict centers around the same danger that plagues international relations in general: miscalculation.

President Donald Trump may believe that in sanctioning Iran’s central bank and sending more U.S. troops to the region in response to the recent suspected Iranian attack on Saudi oil facilities, he’s sending a clear message to Tehran.

But Iran’s leaders may not hear it. Instead, they may think that they can push the envelope of military action further – in light of Trump’s insistence that he doesn’t want war, his failure to respond militarily to Iran’s attack on a U.S. drone in June, his earlier empty threats of military action against Iran and North Korea, and decades of U.S. reluctance to respond forcefully to Iranian and other provocations.

The danger, of course, is that Tehran will push too far, and Trump will feel compelled to take military action, which could escalate quickly into a tit-for-tat of exchanges that lead to all-out war.

Miscalculation. It’s the danger that JFK sought to avoid as he exchanged messages with Nikita Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that George H.W. Bush sought to avoid when he signaled Saddam Hussein during the Persian Gulf War that Saddam’s use of chemical or biological weapons would mean the end of his regime.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

How many cars are there on Mars? by Victor Sharpe

Posted By on September 26th, 2019

The title of this essay may seem odd at first, but read on and all will be revealed.

When President elect, Barack Obama, chose members of his new administration back in 2008, he selected physicist Steven Chu as energy secretary and Carol Browner to lead a White House council on energy and climate. Ms. Browner had headed the Environmental Protection Agency in the Clinton administration. Mr. Chu was director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases.

Carol Browner was described as a “neon-green radical” in an early article by Michelle Malkin titled, “The Trouble with Obama’s Energy Czar.” With both Chu and Browner at Obama’s energy helm, the United States was destined to be in a world of trouble, and that too became clear when Obama later uttered the dread words: “I have come to fundamentally transform America.”

Obama’s notorious Cap in Trade policy thankfully died in the Republican controlled Congress. His baleful eight long year term of “fundamentally transforming America” finally ended but, if President Trump loses the general election in 2020 and the Left come to power, a similar and perilous version of a Cap in Trade policy is almost certain to rise from its erstwhile deathbed. It will inevitably saddle the middle class with higher taxes and cause painful job losses to Americans. 

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Transcript Is Damning — To Biden, Not Trump Thomas McArdle

Posted By on September 26th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/09/25/the-transcript-is-damning-to-biden-not-trump/
Picture the 2020 presidential debate between Donald Trump and the Democratic nominee. The challenger turns to the president and charges: “You asked the Ukrainian president to investigate your opponent’s son’s shady business dealings.”

He adds, “you released the transcript of your phone call last year with him in which you said, ‘there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that, so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.’

“And then you said, and I quote, ‘Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution. So if you can look into it, it sounds horrible to me.’”

Finally, arriving at his rhetorical crescendo, the nominee declares victoriously, “Horrible? What’s horrible wasn’t me as vice president using the threat of withholding $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees that Ukraine needed to stay solvent to get the Ukrainian prosecutor investigating my son’s client fired. No, what’s horrible is a president of the United States using the power of his office to dig up foreign dirt on a political opponent.”

It doesn’t quite work, does it? In fact, it would, if you will, trump Joe Biden’s long history of verbal blunders as the gaffe of all gaffes of the entirety of his four-and-a-half decades in Washington.

Democrats — from high-ranking party operatives to rank-and-file primary voters — know this, which is why the transcript released by the Trump White House on Wednesday dooms Biden’s 2020 chances, not Trump’s.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

The Dems take a swig from The Pickwick Papers Roger Kimball

Posted By on September 26th, 2019

https://spectator.us/dems-swig-pickwick-papers-impeachment/

Compare the anodyne narrative of the transcript to the mad impeachment hysteria that has addled the brains of the anti-Trump sorority in the Democratic party.

I am not thinking of that scene at the beginning of Dickens’s novel where Mr Blotton says he regards Mr Pickwick as a ‘humbug’. That was nice, especially when Mr Pickwick angrily demands to know whether the Rt. Honorable gentleman called him a humbug in its ordinary or ‘common sense’. No, no responded Mr Blotton, he had ‘merely considered him a humbug in a Pickwickian point of view’. Well, that’s all right then, rejoined Mr Pickwick, and peace and amity reigned once more among the members of the Pickwick Club.

There is a lesson in there somewhere for the Democrats, but when it comes to their virulent case of Trump Derangement Syndrome, more pertinent is the episode describing the case of Bardell v. Pickwick. The widow Bardell, ‘fat, fair, and forty’, is Mr Pickwick’s landlady. She willfully misconstrues some innocuous comments he makes. Item: ‘Dear Mrs. B., Chops and tomato sauce. Yours, Pickwick.’ Out such gossamer musing she constructs a proposal of marriage and, when no proposal is forthcoming sues Pickwick for breach of promise. Much hilarity, and not inconsiderable inconvenience, ensues, but it all comes right in the end, at least for Mr Pickwick.

It’s not so great for Mrs Bardell, but what happens to her is nothing like what is about to happen to the Democrats. Yesterday, Nancy Pelosi announced that the House was opening a ‘formal’ impeachment inquiry. Why? Because the president had a conversation with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky in July. President Trump congratulated Zelensky on his recent victory and expressed the wish that the US and Ukraine would work together in a spirit of friendship. He noted that the US had an ongoing inquiry into Ukrainian-based efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election and he asked Zelensky to talk to Attorney General Barr. ‘There are a lot of things that went on,’ Trump said, and ‘I would like you to get to the bottom of it.’ For his part, Zelensky expressed the hope that Rudy Giuliani would be available to help them with the inquiry. Trump is enthusiastic about that idea and notes that ‘there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the attorney general would be great.’