Lisa Murkowski 'disturbed' by McConnell promise for 'total coordination' with White House; CNN likes this

Voting Female

Washington Examiner  . . .  “And in fairness, when I heard that, I was disturbed,” Murkowski explained to KTUU News Tuesday. “To me, it means that we have to take that step back from being hand-in-glove with the defense, and so I heard what leader McConnell had said, I happened to think that that has further confused the process.”

“ 'How we will deal with witnesses remains to be seen,” she 
added, referencing one of the main reasons the impeachment is at an "impasse."
"Democrats have urged Senate Republicans to agree to call new witnesses, while the White House and many in the GOP want no additional witnesses and a speedy trial. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has so far refused to pass the articles of impeachment along to the Senate until an agreement on terms for a fair trial comes to fruition.While Murkowski called for a “full and fair process,” the Alaska Republican also ridiculed Pelosi's handling of the House impeachment process, saying, “Speaker Pelosi was very clear, very direct that her goal was to get this done before Christmas.”
"Murkowski, who has split from her party on at least one key vote in the past, also made clear she was uncertain as to whether or not she will vote to remove Trump from office." . . .

This from National Review:

The maverick senator, known for breaking with her party on significant issues such as Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court and repealing the Affordable Care Act, said she has not yet decided how she will vote on impeachment.  . . .

McConnell Dismisses Dem Claim That He’s Uniquely Biased: ‘You Think Chuck Schumer Is Impartial?

CNN Analyst Appears to Lobby Lisa Murkowski With Dem Talking Point, but Steps in It in the Process

Elie Honig

Great @lisamurkowski. Now: will you support having key witnesses testify, or do you favor an evidence-free trial?

The 28th Anniversary of the Fall of the USSR is a Time to Remember the Victims of Communism

Daniel Greenfield

"The Soviet Union was dissolved on the 26th of December.
"An empire that once seemed unbeatable and threatened the very survival of the human race with its nuclear arsenal collapsed after popular protests brought down a failing and corrupt regime. 
"Leftists around the world had worshiped at its feet. They had spied for it, conspired on its behalf, and undermined their home countries for it. And when it died, it left behind their detritus in the form of aging Marxists like Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, and their wider circles, who no doubt sigh as the anniversary comes once more.
"The anniversary of the fall of the USSR should be a time to remember the many millions who were murdered in pursuit of the great socialist dream. And the fact that these murders were covered up by the media. The mass murders in the Soviet Union, in Communist China, by Pol Pot and by Che, could not have happened without the active collusion of Western leftists who labored to suppress the stories, discredit political dissidents, and, toward the end, push fake peace efforts meant to help keep failing Communist regimes going.
"All these efforts failed.
"The old Communist regimes collapsed into oligarchies, some, as in China, retained their Communist brand, others, as in Russia, took on a more explicitly nationalist brand, but none of them could sustain the purity of the ideals for which they had massacred, starved, and imprisoned countless millions whose full numbers will never be known. The Black Book of Communism can only tell us so much. Even to this day, Putin's regime continues suppressing efforts to find mass graves from the Stalin era. China censors its own massacres from its internet.
"And our media continues to glamorize Communism while promoting activists who want to see America go down the same path again.
"Leftist theories are unworkable and innately destructive. Their idealism is a hollow shell for narcissism and a lust for power. When they are implemented, millions die."

Why The Democratic Primary Seems Invisible

The Federalist

The Democratic primary has been overshadowed by impeachment, but that's not the only reason so few people are paying attention to it.

"With barely a month to go before the Iowa caucus, the Democratic Party’s presidential primary should be accelerating into the news cycle like a Formula One racecar burning its wheels, but thus far has looked more like a skateboard on the beach. The latest debate was roundly ignored. To steal a joke from Bob Newhart, it practically got a negative rating, which means several people who don’t own televisions were surveyed and said if they did own one they also wouldn’t have watched it.
"Honestly, how can this possibly be? This is, after all, a contest to decide which Democratic hero will square off against a president that most party members view as a combination of Hitler, Darth Vader, and Benedict Arnold. It features the first prominently gay major candidate, and a woman poised to capture the nod for the fairer sex a second straight time. Joe Biden is bringing his “aw shucks guy from Scranton” A game, and Bernie Sanders is yelling as loud as ever.

"There a few plausible reasons why this primary just can’t seem to get much traction. One often cited reason is that Democrats have essentially overshadowed their own primary with impeachment. After all, networks like CNN and MSNBC that should be laser focused on the primary instead spend approximately 58 out of every 60 minutes predicting Trump’s imminent doom, as they have been for three years.
"Given the “historic” nature of this impeachment and all the “bombshells” and whatnot, there’s just not a lot of oxygen left in the green room for primary punditry. Deepening this self-inflicted wound is the fact that several senators who are leading candidates may wind up cloistered in a Senate trial, off the trail, for as long as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., cares to keep them there."  . . .

Happy Kwanzaa! The holiday brought to you by the FBI

Back to the esteemed Cal State professor: Karenga’s invented holiday is a nutty blend of schmaltzy ‘60s rhetoric, black racism and Marxism. The seven principles of Kwanzaa are the very same seven principles of the Symbionese Liberation Army, another invention of The Worst Generation.

Ann Coulter  "Kwanzaa, celebrated exclusively by white liberals, is a fake holiday invented in 1966 by black radical/FBI stooge Ron Karenga — aka Dr. Maulana Karenga, founder of United Slaves, the violent nationalist rival to the Black Panthers. Liberals have become so mesmerized by multicultural gibberish that they have forgotten the real history of Kwanzaa and Karenga’s United Slaves.
"In what was ultimately a foolish gambit, during the madness of the ‘60s, the FBI encouraged the most extreme black nationalist organizations in order to discredit and split the left. The more preposterous the group, the better. (It’s the same function MSNBC serves today.)
"By that criterion, Karenga’s United Slaves was perfect.
"Despite modern perceptions that blend all the black activists of the ‘60s, the Black Panthers did not hate whites. Although some of their most high-profile leaders were drug dealers and murderers, they did not seek armed revolution.
"Those were the precepts of Karenga’s United Slaves. The United Slaves were proto-fascists, walking around in dashikis, gunning down Black Panthers and adopting invented “African” names. (I will not be shooting any Black Panthers this week because I am Kwanzaa-reform, and we are not that observant.)
"It’s as if David Duke invented a holiday called “Anglika,” which he based on the philosophy of “Mein Kampf” — and clueless public schoolteachers began celebrating the made-up, racist holiday." . . .  More...

Trump, sainthood, and Christianity

David Hale  . . . "Think about the war the left wing has prosecuted against Christians and the stifling attacks on the First Amendment they have engaged across the political, law, entertainment and educational spectrum. All against people of faith in the Evangelical world and conversely their support and promotion of those enemies of the cross in the Islamic world who are the actual source of pain, suffering, genocide in the Middle East.

"From every pocket of our social order the left wing has driven Christians from the public square and rained down hell on our American culture. The stripping of Christian Ethic from all areas of public and private life to the point that schoolgirls must be forced to shower with transvestite men in public schools.  Abortion on demand killing children by the millions. Yet a cadre of these leftist Trump-hating Christians want Trump impeached and are attacking those who were upset with a man who thought he was speaking for all of us, when he wasn't.

"Trump isn't a savior. He isn't a saint. He's a flawed man who has reached down into his own soul to uncloud the truth and provide an opening for Christians to once again find a voice and rescue our culture from its death spiral."

The kindness and class of Donald John Trump

Carol Headrick  "Sometimes all it takes is one action to know someone’s kindness and class. 

"President Trump has many such actions: the kiss on the head of the young boy who hugged President Trump while signing the Right to Try Act, the honor bestowed on Miosotis Familia, a New York City police officer killed in the line of duty, and the honor he shows our vets as they respond with serious hugs, no simple pats on the arm for our president.

YouTube screen grab

"The ultimate simple act that displayed President Trump’s kindness and class was his hand on Kim Jong Un’s back guiding him to the right door during the North Korea-United States Singapore Summit.  It takes class to show respect for someone who has not earned it. What Kim earned was a bullet to his head for how he tortured one of our young American men, Otto Warmbier, leaving him brain damaged. 

"During this simple act, I suspect President Trump was thinking of Otto at the hands of this cruel dictator.  For the greater good, at the chance of denuclearization, our president did what he had to do. What we have learned in three years of President Trump’s administration is that he works tirelessly for the American citizens and he does it with kindness and class. We love our president."

Carol Headrick is  author of Obama Elected Trump

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. " . . .

Read more...

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