An end to tolerance

Some would have you believe that we must tolerate those who reject our national principles of respect for rights, freedom, and justice. Some would have us allow communists to operate freely in our nation, as they strive to impose their own brand of tyranny, in order to destroy our nation, culture, families, and institutions. But communists have brought their war of national destruction to our doors. And there is nothing tolerable about it.

David L. Rosenthal  "The National Anthem commemorates the struggle of America to remain free from despotic oppression by a foreign power from which America had freed itself only a few decades before, after which the United States Constitution was ratified, including the Preamble and the Bill of Rights, cornerstones of American exceptionalism, defining not exactly what America had become, but what America should become. 
"Today, after 24 decades of history and social turmoil, and struggle to improve social conditions in order better to reflect adherence to the principles expressed in the Preamble, America is at a crossroads, faced on the one hand with the option to continue down the road of respect for individual rights and the great purposes for which America was founded, and on the other hand with the option of permitting Communist madmen to transform America into an enslaved nation oppressed by totalitarian brutes. 
"Communist madmen such as Bernie Sanders want you to accept that just one more attempt at communism will magically lead to its successful administration for the first time in its history of producing genocide, poverty, and degradation of society. Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg are not far behind Bernie in their insane initiatives to destroy freedom, rights, and prosperity. 

"Colin Kaepernick took a knee when the National Anthem was played, ostensibly to protest injustice in American society, influencing the unthinking to imitate his protest. But his protest was ignorant, insincere, and ridiculous. While he apparently objects to injustice in America, he goes about wearing tee shirts that glorify some of history's greatest murderous psychopaths, promoters of the most egregious oppression of humanity that the world will ever know. " . . .

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At Christmas, Remembering the Battle of the Bulge

Men of the 504th Parachute Regiment, 82nd Airborne Division, supported by a tank. The division fought hard to hold the Germans in the area under thick layers of snow in December 1944

Power Line  "Victor Davis Hanson recalls the Battle of the Bulge, which I hadn’t realized was the bloodiest battle in U.S. history:

Seventy-five years ago, at the Battle of the Bulge (fought from Dec. 16, 1944, to Jan. 25, 1945), the United States suffered more casualties than in any other battle in its history. Some 19,000 Americans were killed, 47,500 wounded and 23,000 reported missing.

The American and British armies were completely surprised by a last-gasp German offensive, given that Allied forces were near the Rhine River and ready to cross into Germany to finish off a crippled Third Reich.

The Americans had been exhausted by a rapid 300-mile summer advance to free much of France and Belgium. In their complacency, they oddly did not worry much about their thinning lines, often green replacement troops or the still-formidable German army. After all, Nazi Germany was being battered on all sides by Americans, British, Canadians and Russians. Its cities were in ruins from heavy bombers.

Yet the losing side is often the most dangerous just before its collapse.

"The Battle of the Bulge has a special resonance for me, because my father almost died in it. He was a college student when World War II broke out. He graduated, then enlisted in the Army. He was sent to one of the big Army bases in the South for basic training. In those days, they gave every enlistee an IQ test; maybe they still do. My father’s performance on the test was good enough that he was pulled out of the ranks and sent to graduate school to become an engineer. (Drill Sergeant, with privates lined up: “Hinderaker! Who’s Hinderaker?” My father, wondering what he could have done to get in trouble already, stepping forward: “I’m Private Hinderaker.” Drill Sergeant: “Congratulations, Private Hinderaker. You just got the highest score on the IQ test of anyone who has ever gone through this base.” That is how my mother told the story, 40 years ago.)

"Many, if not most, of those who qualified for the engineering program were Jews, and my father, who came from a town of 200 in South Dakota, became a lifelong philo-Semite. All proceeded according to plan until June 1944 and the D-Day invasion. The Army concluded that the war wouldn’t last long enough to need another class of engineers, so they terminated the program and sent its participants to the front.

"My father found himself in Belgium, assigned to divisional headquarters. One morning he was eating breakfast in the mess tent, along with many others, when someone ran breathlessly into the tent and shouted something like: “The Germans are attacking! The front has crumbled. They will be here in a matter of hours. Get to the rear any way you can, every man for himself!” My father was in the midst of eating the first real eggs he had tasted since joining the Army, so he delayed a few minutes before following the order." . . .

Cold killers: ‘Boy’ SS soldiers, Nazis stealing boots from dead US troops and innocent civilians gunned down – harrowing images from new book show cruel reality of 1944 Battle of the Bulge, which inspired TV's epic Band of Brothers

Harry Reid justice: to accuse is to convict

Rich Terrell

Harry Reid accuses Romney from Anonymous source.   . . . "So the word is out that he has not paid any taxes for 10 years. Let him prove he has paid taxes, because he has not."

An impeachment is an accusation — nothing more  . . . "Thus, President Trump does not have to prove anything.  The burden of proof that crimes have been committed lies solely and entirely on the accuser, the House of Representatives. 

"Democrats and the media would have us all believe that President Trump has in fact committed crimes, that he has violated the Constitution.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  He has been accused, but neither accusation has been proven, nor has he been given a constitutionally mandated "speedy" trial.  By denying a speedy trial, the real violation of the Constitution has been and is being committed by the House of Representatives and its speaker." . . .

CNN Is Not a News Network

From an anti-trump, anti-Fox News site that holds no brief for Donald Trump, we get this analysis of the premier hate-Trump network. TD

National Review

And Jim Acosta is no reporter

Watching CNN try to push an obvious political agenda while retaining sufficient space for plausible deniability is akin to watching a two-year-old child try to steal a much-coveted chocolate bar without getting caught by his parents; one can only shake one’s head and laugh at the incompetence. 

"When ThinkProgress announced that it was going out of business, a few observers wondered aloud, “Why didn’t anybody buy it?” But why would they have, when we have CNN?
"As a child, I was aware of CNN in part because its introductory bumper featured the sinister voice of Darth Vader, and in part because it was both the prototype and the stereotype of the 24-hour news channel. CNN showed up in movies, either as itself or in parodies that imitated its role. It was on in the airports and the hospitals and the hotel lobbies, and in the waiting room at the dentist’s office. When something bad or exciting was happening, you would tell your friends, “Turn on CNN.' ”
"CNN was careful and self-consciously nonpartisan — or, at least, it was keen for viewers to believe that it was. Its slogans were “This is CNN” — well, yes — and “The most trusted name in news,” and it cultivated its position within the firmament in much the same way as does Wikipedia today. It could be sensationalist and intrusive at times, but it was sensationalist and intrusive in the way that the paparazzo is rather than in the way that protesters who bang drums in your face and insist that you give up gasoline are. In short, it was what it said it was: a news network.
"It is no longer that. These days, CNN is a peculiar and unlovely hybrid of progressive propaganda outlet, oleaginous media apologist, sexless cultural scold, and frenzied Donald Trump stalkerblog. When news breaks, it is no longer useful or appropriate to tell someone, “Turn on CNN,” because if he did, he would be as likely to be presented with a wall of advocacy and obsession as with the headlines of the hour. Today, CNN does not broadcast the news; it broadcasts what it wants you to think the news is. At long last, it has become Fox.
. . . 
" . . . Even more transparent a player than Acosta is Don Lemon, who is a “news anchor” in the same sense as that in which Nick Saban is a referee. In recent years, Lemon has become famous for refusing to accept when he is wrong — in 2014, having been informed that he did not know the difference between a semiautomatic and an automatic firearm, he tried to make the distinction a matter of personal taste with a desperately deployed “for me . . .” — and for his routine inability to control his emotions during interviews. The best — well, the worst — illustration of the latter tendency came in August of 2019, when Lemon invited the Reverend Bill Owens onto his show and then grew angry as Owens, an African-American pastor who had just met with President Trump to work on improving conditions in inner cities and wanted to talk about that rather than about Trump’s ridiculous tweeting, repeatedly refused to call the president a racist.  When it became abundantly clear that Owens was not going to take the bait, Lemon instantly and dramatically switched tack, accusing Owens of homophobia, questioning whether he was sufficiently “Christianly or godly,” and implying that Owens was “condoning” Trump’s attacks on figures such as Representative Elijah Cummings. As Lemon did this, the technical team at CNN changed the chyron at the bottom of the screen so that it ceased to describe Owens as an “African American faith leader” and labeled him instead as a “controversial pastor.” From honored guest to enemy of progress in five minutes flat."
. . . 
"Having displayed a weird Trump-campaign tweet that portrayed the president as the supervillain Thanos from the Avengers, Don Lemon sputtered and twitched and shook his head on his show last week, before saying, “I can’t even believe I’m even having to report this on the news.” 
      'But you know what, Don? You don’t have to report that. Nobody has to. There are many words that one might use to describe what Fox, MSNBC, and CNN are doing in the year 2019, some of them unprintable in this magazine. “News,” alas, is not among the first 50 that come to mind.

On Christmas

Liberals at Yuletide  . . . "For these liberals, it's just not cool to say "Merry Christmas" because Christmas marks the birth of Christ, and if there's one thing liberals agree on, it's that Christianity must be driven out of the public arena.  Not Islam, not Buddhism, not Kwanzaa, but Christianity.  The faith of 245 million Americans must be suppressed because liberals judge it to be a repressive religion with a past (and present) of intolerance and domination.   
. . . "That is the same message as in Lennon's even better known song "Imagine," the unofficial anthem of liberals everywhere.  What Lennon seeks is a "perfect" world with no belief in God or afterlife, no love of country, no "possessions" — in other words, a world of atheism, universalism, and communism." . . .

The Golden Era of Christmas Songs

. . . "Providing the cheerful, winsome, moving background music of the holiday is these artists’ enduring gift to all of us. Merry Christmas."

The story of the Incarnation we celebrate on this and every Christmas may seem too good to be true, but how could it not be?   . . . "A timeless God enters time itself only to die by the hands of men whose hairs He can count and whose every thought He knows. He was born to die, Fulton Sheen said — the only such man in history.

“ 'He is the One through whom all things have been made and, on Christmas, Who has been made in the midst of all things. He is the Revealer of His Father and the Creator of His mother, the Son of God through His Father without a mother and the Son of Man through His mother without a father,” says Saint Augustine." . . .

‘Twas The Night Before Impeachmas

An impeachment is an accusation — nothing more  . . . Thus, President Trump does not have to prove anything.  The burden of proof that crimes have been committed lies solely and entirely on the accuser, the House of Representatives." . . . 


American Thinker
'Twas the night before ‘Impeachmas,’ when all through the House

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
Allegations were slung without any care,
In hopes that the president soon would despair;

Democrats were nestled all snug in their beds,
While visions of impeachment danced in their heads;
But Pelosi -- in her dress -- soon set her trap,
And simply settled down for a long winter's nap,

Then on the TV there arose such a clatter,
I sprang from my chair to see what was the matter.
And then he appeared, he was there in a flash,
It gave me the shudders, My teeth I did gnash.

Well he looked like a liar, had a manner so stiff,
I knew in a moment it was Chairman Schiff.
More eager than beavers his minions they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;

"Now, NANCY! now, RASHIDA! now, OMAR you vixen!
On, WATERS! on CLYBURN! on, SWALWELL! (And Wolf Blitzer)?
It is Trump we will scorch! Forget about the wall!
Now bash away! trash away! Slapdash away all!"

His eyes -- how they blazed! his features unmerry!
His cheeks were like roses, his nose almost scary!
His sad little mouth was drawn taught as a crossbow,
His words imprecise, his delivery slow;

He was spindlier than Trump, a nasty old grump,
And I groaned when I saw him, and thought  ‘What a chump’;
The mania in his eyes, and slight twist of his head,
Soon filled me with nothing -- nothing but dread;

He spoke feckless words, in front of the Clerk,
And lied through his teeth; oh, what a jerk,
Flipping his finger and thumbing his nose,
He tried to run roughshod over those he’d oppose;

He sprang from his chair, to his team gave a whistle,
And they all fell in line as the president bristled.

 I heard him exclaim, ere he was done for the night,
HAPPY IMPEACHMAS TO ALL, AND TO ALL A GOOD-NIGHT!

by Eric Utter

The bad-faith impeachment

Byron York: As Pelosi plays games with impeachment, what next for GOP?

. . .  "Withholding the articles, Tribe said, would strengthen Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer's hand as he negotiates with Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the terms of the trial. It would do so, Tribe speculated, "because of McConnell's and Trump's urgent desire to get this whole business behind them."  "Without McConnell's concessions, Tribe urged Democrats to withhold the articles indefinitely because a trial dominated by majority Republicans "would fail to render a meaningful verdict of acquittal.. " . . .

Impeachment Consequences Coming Home to Depraved Democrats  "For every action there is a consequence, and Democrats in congress and running for the presidency are feeling the consequences of their zeal to impeach President Donald Trump this weekend. – Let’s use Twitter to illustrate: . . ."

"President Trump traveled to Philadelphia on Saturday to witness the grand annual football clash between Army and Navy. There, he met players and coaches from both teams prior to the contest, signed an executive order allowing players from military academies to immediately pursue professional sports careers upon graduating, received a rousing ovation from everyone in the stadium when he was introduced, and performed the coin toss while wearing a red “Keep America Great” cap.  Awesome: . . ."
"Democrat New Jersey congressman Jeff Van Drew has informed his staff that he is so fed up with the Democrats’ impeachment sham that he is switching parties. Welcome to the real Party, pal.: . . ."
"Oklahoma voters remind Democrat congresswoman Kendra Horn that “there’s not one county – not one county – in Oklahoma that voted for Hillary Clinton.” Horn is the only Democrat member of congress from Oklahoma. Next November, she will become a former Democrat member of congress: . . .

The bad-faith impeachment  . . . "To summarize: Many Democrats wanted to impeach Trump from the get-go. Frustrated at their inability to get it done, they jumped on their last, best hope, taking shortcuts to ensure their preferred result and racing to beat the political deadline imposed by their party's presidential contest. Through it all, they have insisted they are acting only with great reluctance and sorrow.

"The question now is whether the public will believe it."

The Real Reason Obama Won’t Destroy ISIS Oil Wells

My question had been, as we watched video daily of ISIS convoys of troops moving on more of the middle east, was why not bomb the troop convoys?

D'Souza Media, 2015  "On Tuesday, in an interview with television talk show host Charlie Rose, former CIA director Mike Morrell revealed the decision making processes that were undertaken by the Obama administration while Morrell was serving as a chief adviser to the president. The revelations from the interview provides a clear picture of the reasons given for decisions made in the fight against ISIS.

Rose began his interview summarizing the latest relevant news, from the State Department’s global travel alert, the Russian plane shot down by Turkey, and President Obama’s meeting with President Hollande. Rose then asked Morrell, “Where do we stand after Paris?”
. . .
"Morrell told Rose that Obama’s concern for environmental hazards and damage to the environment were the perceived reasons why Obama did not allow oil wells to be bombed. Stating that he’s not in the situation room any longer but in reflection on Obama policies, Morrell said, “Prior to Paris…there seemed to have been a judgement that look we don’t want to destroy these oil tankers because that’s infrastructure that’s going to be necessary to support the people when ISIS isn’t there anymore and it’s going to create environmental damage. And we didn’t go after oil wells. We didn’t actually hit any oil wells that ISIS controls because we didn’t want to do environmental damage and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure…So, now we’re hitting oil in trucks…Maybe you get to the point where you say we have to hit oil wells. So those are the kind of tough decisions you have to make.' ” . . .

AOC and Greta! Save us from ourselves!

Which is it?! Obesity causes ‘global warming’ — BUT ‘Global warming’ also causes starvation! – Problem solved?!

WebMD: Obesity Epidemic May Contribute to Climate Change - 2019

But wait, climate change will cause starvation -- potentially solving the obesity problem!

2013: UK Guardian: ‘Millions face starvation as world warms, say scientists’ — UN urges: ‘We must act quickly’

Turn to these ladies for help:

Biden Says He’s Willing To Sacrifice Hundreds Of Thousands Of Blue-Collar Jobs In Oil And Gas  “ 'We have enormous opportunities,” Biden continued Thursday. “There are so many things we can do. We have to make sure we explain it to those people who are displaced – that their skills are going to be needed for the new opportunities.' ” . . .

The Copenhagen Accord dashed the hopes of those who believed it would begin the fightback against global warming. Yet we appear to be no further forward now.

"In short, in the ten years since Copenhagen, little has really changed:

• Emissions continue to climb, and look likely to carry on doing so.
• Transition to a renewable energy world is painfully slow, and not even keeping up with rising energy demand.
• Promises of $100bn a year in climate aid remain pie in the sky
• There is no prospect of a treaty which binds all countries to specific emission reductions.
• Above all, there is absolutely no possibility that global emissions will reduce fast enough and far enough to the levels demanded by climate scientists.

The Climate Agenda Off the Rails: Sarah Myhre at the American Geophysical Union

. . . "You all are smart, resourceful people. Organize with one another. Start a union. Plan a protest. Outfit a lactation room. Stand in profound solidarity and interconnectedness. Share your power, platform, and resources. And do not settle for anything less on this path towards climate justice and integration, because a better world is possible and we are on our way." . . .

A Contemptible Tissue of Lies Surrounds Impeachment

Conrad Black

Impeachment is just an effort to strengthen the Democrats as they make the uphill battle to persuade the voters to evict President Trump next year for confected moral turpitude, since he can’t be challenged on his accomplishments in office.

"Even as the House Democrats voted to impeach the president this week, there was universal recognition that the effort to remove him was a dead pigeon on arrival at the Senate (assuming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi summons the courage to apprise the Senate officially of the results of the House vote).
"The battle, for some time already, has been at the public relations level, and there the president is winning. USA Today, an anti-Trump newspaper with regular anti-Trump polling results, reported a five point decline in the numbers of people who approved impeaching the president, and other polls indicate that this is a clear trend; he is now ahead of where President Obama was in the polls eight years ago. These polls also probably reflect the gathering disquietude of the country about revelations of unprecedented political skulduggery by the FBI in the Horowitz report. 

No one is above the law!

"The pathetic spectacle of tie-less former FBI director James Comey being transformed into Swiss cheese like Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty at the end of “Bonnie and Clyde”—and by Chris Wallace who is no Trump-admirer—is of a piece with the general unease generated by that report. The inspector general of the Justice Department acknowledged that there could have been political bias in starting the Trump-Russia investigation, and though he didn’t find proof of it, all of the many shortcomings he found in the improper FISA surveillance of the Trump campaign were on the anti-Trump side of the election.
"The lowering clouds of that sequence of outrages raised grave questions about the politicization of the FBI and the intelligence networks and they do not create an optimal atmosphere for the orgy of righteousness of the Democrats and the anti-Trump media now. Rarely have the denizens of a thinly-walled and roofed glass house hurled such a torrent of stone projectiles." . . .

Shhhhh…Just Let the Democrats Schiff Themselves

Kurt Schlichter

"Military guys – and I am a graduate of the Army War College, which is not the one with noted expert on expertise Tom Nichols – try to abide by the apocryphal advice of Napoleon, who counseled that you should never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake. But this doesn’t apply to the Democrats because they are not only too dumb to listen to your warnings but their weird dogma actually makes it impossible for them to imagine that they are heading for disaster in 2020. So, I’m going to mock these losers mercilessly, safe in the knowledge that even though I am telling that anime lollipop-looking twerp Adam Schiff and Jerry the Oompa Loompa Nadler exactly what is going to happen, they are powerless to stop it.
"Nancy Pelosi, who is no dummy, knows. She gets it. That’s why she’s not taking questions on her solemn, sad impeachment thing. She gets that she’s trapped by the Commie Caucus’s resolute determination to please their blue enclaves at the expense of alienating everyone else. So she’s trying to make it fade away. Yeah, hold onto that impeachment for a while. It’ll get better with age, just like Jennifer Rubin has. 
"It’s fun to tell No Exit Nancy exactly what misery will befall her crummy party, and to know that she knows it’s all true, and that she also knows there’s not a damn thing she can do about it.
"Remember how Colin Powell, back before he went all Never Trump and we stopped caring what he thought, went on TV and told Saddam Hussein exactly what the American military was going to do to his army? First, we were going to cut it off, then we were going to kill it. That was the ultimate power move (and I was over there when we made it happen). Well, Trump’s been doing that to the Dems lately. He’s been warning them they’re screwing up. He’s been telling them he’ll crush them in 2020. They won’t listen. They can’t listen. And so, they can’t get off the tracks before the Trump Train crushes them into pink pinko goo.
"Let’s review some data points. Agonizingly painful data points for the Democrats." . . .

De Niro bags it

Peter Skurkiss  "In an hour-long Podcast, Rumble with Michael Moore, two-time Academy Award–winner Robert De Niro said: "I'd like to see a bag of s--- right in his [President Trump's] face like that, and let the picture go all over the world, and that would be the most humiliating thing." 

"Interestingly, no Democrat has yet seen fit to call out De Niro on this.  Nor has any of the NeverTrump conservatives who tut-tut about Trump's supposed crudeness in his tweets.  Silence is a form of consent, and no doubt many of them would like to see De Niro's wish fulfilled. 

"This brings us to another point.  De Niro evidently does not have the mental strength to separate Robert De Niro the actor from the thuggish characters he plays in the movies.  The 76-year-old actor thinks he's some sort of a combination of boxer Jake LaMotta (Raging Bull), gangster Jimmy Conway (Goodfellas), and Al Capone (The Untouchables).  Like Lazy Joe Biden, De Niro actually imagines himself to be a tough guy.  One has to wonder how long that delusion would hold up if De Niro had to confront someone without his bodyguards, lawyers, accountants, and public relations people on call.  

"Most relevant is perhaps this.  Doesn't De Niro realize that he's begging to be treated in the same manner as he calls for the president to be?  He is more likely to have pictures of him with poo thrown in his face sent around the world than is Donald Trump.  If so, one has to wonder what kind of Academy Award–level performance De Niro would give then." . . .