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U.S. Is the Most Generous Country
in the World
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Redefining ‘The Rule of Law’
by E. DONALD ELLIOTT
{ spectator.org } ~ Our country could survive an impeachment trial of Donald Trump. We’d be wounded and I hope that calamity can be avoided, but we’d survive...The more momentous issue in the current impeachment kerfuffle is how and to what extent the administrative state can bind the president. A quiet revolution, so far bloodless, is underway to redefine “the rule of law” to give unelected officials in the administrative state control over the president. Confucius, the only philosopher I know who was also prime minister of his country, was asked what one thing he would do first to improve the political health of his country. “Get the names of things right,” he responded his statement is also sometimes translated as “the rectification of terms”. He understood the power of determining what people call things. We all agree that “no one is above the law” and we all believe in “the rule of law,” but exactly what those terms mean is now up for grabs. Recently some partisans have claimed that the “rule of law” means democratically elected officials, including the president, are bound by more than the written law duly enacted by Congress and signed by the president or enacted by supermajorities over a veto and the words of the Constitution. Their new definition of “the rule of law” would include the consensus of subordinate expert officials, the so-called “interagency consensus,” and the rules, policies, and procedures promulgated by the “deep state.” Change what “the rule of law” means, and you change who is running the country. A good example is the recent firing of Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer for refusing to abide by a legal presidential order to allow an officer acquitted of murder but convicted of the lesser offense of having his picture taken with an enemy’s dead body to keep one of his medals. This led the former Navy secretary to write a self-indulgent open letter to the press and public claiming that following the president’s order would have violated his oath to defend the Constitution. Exactly where in the Constitution it allegedly says that the commander in chief of the armed forces may not overrule his subordinates on whether or not a particular sailor gets to keep a particular medal is never specified. Spencer’s open letter praising himself for his martyrdom on the altar of the rule of law, as he sees it, merely makes sanctimonious general noises that The rule of law is what sets us apart from our adversaries. Good order and discipline is what has enabled our victory against foreign tyranny time and again, from Captain Lawrence’s famous order “Don’t Give up the Ship,” to the discipline and determination that propelled our flag to the highest point of Iwo Jima. The Constitution, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, are the shields that set us apart, and the beacons that protect us all. Gimme a break, sir. I agree with all of your flag-waving platitudes, but exactly where does the law say that you, as secretary of the Navy, get to overrule the president rather than the other way around? The same question applies to the procession of former ambassadors and national security council staffers who traipsed up to Capitol Hill to accuse the president of the allegedly impeachable crime of refusing to follow the “interagency consensus” on how best to negotiate with Ukraine to reduce its endemic corruption. The president thought we should withhold aid until the incoming administration made a public promise to do better, but the bureaucracy thought we should give them the aid unconditionally and ask nicely afterwards. I do not purport to know which was right, but I do know that historically this kind of judgment call has been the president’s. “The buck stops here,” proclaimed the sign on Harry Truman’s desk in the Oval Office... https://spectator.org/redefining-the-rule-of-law/?utm_source=American%20Spectator%20Emails&utm_campaign=362b6cbc54-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_12_06_02_13&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_797a38d487-362b6cbc54-104608113 .
The Democrat Party: An existential threat
to the U.S. Constitution and the USA
Sher Zieve.
Democrat Congressman Warns His Party:
‘Be Careful What You Wish For’ On
Impeachment, It’s ‘Tearing The Nation Apart’
By Ryan Saavedra
{ dailywire.com } ~ Democrat Rep. Jeff Van Drew (NJ) responded to House Speaker liar-Nancy Pelosi’s decision to move forward with impeaching President Donald Trump on Thursday by cautioning his party... warning them that what they are doing is tearing the United States apart. CNN’s Manu Raju spoke with Van Drew about liar-Pelosi’s decision, writing on Twitter: “Rep. Jeff Van Drew, one of two Democrats to vote against formalizing the impeachment inquiry, told me he plans to vote against all the articles of impeachment ‘unless there’s something that I haven’t seen, haven’t heard before.'” Van Drew told Raju that Democrats should “be careful what they wish for” because impeachment “is tearing the nation apart.” In an interview on Sunday with USA Today, Van Drew echoed similar sentiments, saying that he opposes removing the president. “My job isn’t really to like or dislike him,” Van Drew said. “My job is to exact as much goodwill and help for my district and for this nation and for this world that I possibly can while he’s president.” On the issue of impeachment, Van Drew said, “To some folks, that’s reminiscent of what was done to kings and queens many years ago. Everything our country doesn’t stand for.” Van Drew is not the only Democrat to sound the alarm bells over impeachment... https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-congressman-warns-his-party-be-careful-what-you-wish-for-on-impeachment-its-tearing-the-nation-apart .
The Empire Strikes Back on Kennedy
by SCOTT MCKAY
{ spectator.org } ~ Tucker Carlson is rapidly becoming America’s most important television journalist, because Carlson is willing, where no others are, to call out the abject lies emanating from the mainstream Beltway spin machine... And earlier this week Carlson did the public two important services. First, he provided a measure of accountability, where virtually no one else would, in savaging “vulture capitalist” and GOP mega-donor Paul Singer for what the latter did to the town of Sidney, Nebraska, in 2015. Singer bought stock in the hunting-and-fishing-gear retailer Cabela’s, and from his fresh seat on the company’s board he cajoled its management into agreeing on the company’s sale to Bass Pro Shops. That sale hit Sidney, the home of Cabela’s corporate headquarters, especially hard. Some 2,000 jobs went away in a town of less than 10,000 people, and the economic effects of Singer’s actions there were akin to a nuclear bomb dropping on the town. Carlson spotlighted that episode in hedge-fund shame and noted that Singer has avoided any accountability for what he’s done due to massive contributions to the GOP. The story is of a piece with a not-infrequent pattern wherein major donors to the party have pushed it into policy positions that give heft to Democrat accusations that Republicans don’t care about ordinary folks. Ace of Spades offers a must-read treatment of this story in a post written just after Carlson shined a spotlight on the Singer–Sidney mess, including asking the question why Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who seems to pride himself on being a thoughtful, caring Republican, didn’t seem to have a problem with the Cabela’s sellout coinciding, of course, with a max-out donation by Singer to his campaign. But after he was finished with that essential piece of business, Carlson landed an outstanding interview with a reporter for the Nation, a not-particularly-conservative publication. But Aaron Maté had a lot to say that strayed from the last week’s D.C. media narrative on Ukraine, which more or less consumed U.S. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), who committed the grievous error of basing his public statements on what he thought were established facts. Specifically, Kennedy had commented that there was evidence the 2016 U.S. presidential election didn’t just bear the mark of Russian meddling but that individuals in Ukraine had also left their fingerprints on the process. This wasn’t controversial all that long ago, you know. CBS News, back in 2017: It wasn’t so much the scumbag/liar-Clinton campaign, per se, but a Democratic operative working with the Democratic National Committee did reach out to the Ukrainian government in an attempt to get damaging information about the Trump campaign. That operative’s name is Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American former scumbag/liar-Clinton White House aide who was tasked with ethnic outreach on behalf of the Democratic Party. As Vogel reported, she knew about Paul Manafort’s extensive connections to the pro-Russian regime of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, and decided to dig deeper into possible connections between Moscow and the Trump campaign. As part of that effort, she discussed Manafort with the high-ranking officials at the Ukrainian embassy in Washington, D.C. The Democratic National Committee denies that it was ever in contact with the Ukrainian government. Yanukovych was the guy Paul Manafort was working for before President Trump brought him on as his campaign manager, which probably wasn’t the best decision he ever made. But the Democrats absolutely reached out to Chalupa in an effort to politically monetize that relationship with Yanukovych’s successor Petro Poroshenko against Trump, and when Yanukovych was tossed out of power in 2014, the regime that followed was, through Chalupa, without question dancing with scumbag/liar-Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Hot Air’s Ed Morrissey, writing at the Week back in 2017, did a good job of chronicling what the scumbag/liar-Clinton camp was up to with Ukraine, among other things....
Justice Department Asks Supreme Court
To Allow Execution Of Four Child Murderers
by KEVIN DALEY
{ dailycaller.com } ~ The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court Monday night to clear the way for four federal executions, after a judge in Washington, D.C., put them on hold... The first of the executions is set for Dec. 9. The condemned inmate is Daniel Lewis Lee, who belonged to a white supremacist organization. A jury sentenced him to death for the 1999 murders of three people, among them an 8-year-old girl. Juries also convicted the other convicts — Alfred Bourgeois, Dustin Lee Honken and Wesley Ira Purkey — for the murders of children. Attorney General William Barr revived the federal death penalty after a 17-year hiatus in July. The attorney general directed the Bureau of Prisons to use a single-drug pentobarbital lethal injection protocol for capital punishment, clearing the way for long-stalled executions to proceed. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan said that “uniform procedure” violates a provision of the Federal Death Penalty Act (FDPA). That provision says federal executions must be carried out “in the manner prescribed by the law of the state” in which the death sentence issued. Though all the relevant states allow lethal injection, Chutkan said the word “manner” encompasses both the means used and the procedural particulars. The judge found there are technical differences between the Barr protocol and relevant state practices, such as how the catheter should be inserted. “‘Manner’ means ‘a mode of procedure or way of acting,'” Chutkan’s decision reads. “The statute’s use of the word ‘manner’ thus includes not just execution method but also execution procedure. “That reading is implausible,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco countered in Monday night’s legal filing at the Supreme Court. “For virtually the entire history of the United States, beginning with the First Congress, federal statutory references to the ‘manner’ of execution have been understood — including by this Court — to refer to the mechanism for inflicting the death penalty, not to every ‘procedural detail’ that might be employed in an execution.” Elsewhere in the application, Francisco said Chutkan’s decision would allow states to “effectively veto a federal execution simply by making unavailable state officials or resources that are required by state law for the execution.” Francisco asked the justices to put Chutkan’s ruling on hold or toss it out completely. If the justices agreed, the inmates might be executed before they have a chance to fully litigate their claims. However, the administration says the public has a strong interest in the implementation of criminal penalties and the crux of the dispute is “purely procedural and likely harmless.” The Supreme Court struggled to conceal heated internal rifts over capital punishment during its last term. In one decision, Justice Neil Gorsuch led a five-justice majority that urged lower courts to avoid “unjustified delay” in executions. https://dailycaller.com/2019/12/03/scotus-daniel-lee-death-penalty/ .
scumbag-George Soros: A New Kind of Tyrant?
By Diana Mary Sitek
{ americanthinker.com } ~ The venomous careers of Hitler and Stalin provoked the study of totalitarian regimes as the very epitome of evil, depriving their citizens of freedom and of life itself. A state captured by a demagogue is considered a sure sign of danger ahead... hence the alleged justification by the Left for their hysteria over “rabble rouser” Donald Trump’s election. Overlooked until more recently are the unelected, bloated bureaucratic fiefdoms and regulatory encroachments of both national and global government and non-governmental institutions, which have created the opportunity for a sinister, large scale violation of political power. This new abuse was foreshadowed in the career of FBI architect and director, the corrupt J. Edgar Hoover. It has been notched up to a planetary level of hyper-coordination by scumbag-George Soros as preliminary to the installation of his global Open Society. In this grandiose plan, state governments specifically the USA will be reduced to the level of relay stations for a supranational, Sauron-like centralization of power. What unites the totalitarian and the new tyrant are three personality characteristics, proposed by Professor John D. Mayer in his 1993 article, “The Emotional Madness of the Dangerous Leader.” The first is indifference. The tyrant is consumed by a single-minded, fanatical purpose and has no regard for the suffering wreaked on others during its implementation. The second is intolerance of those whose opinions differ, facilitated through control of the media, secret and insider knowledge, revenge against anyone who thwarts, and a paranoid mania to shut down all opposition. The third character trait the foundation of the previous two, is psychopathic grandiosity. The power-abuser assumes a messianic pose of unifying society under a utopian plan and persuading others to participate. The very intensity of the tyrant’s narcissism is transferred to vulnerable supporters eliciting a narcotic rush of enthusiasm. What is easily overlooked is that the sham scheme is not a political health remedy, but a device for maintaining the megalomaniac’s sense of personal omnipotence. In scumbag-Soros’ own words, “Next to my fantasies about being God, I also have very strong fantasies of being mad. In fact, my grandfather was actually paranoid.” scumbag-Soros seems disarming in his frankness. But delusions of grandeur preclude self-knowledge, as scumbag-Soros’ next statements reveal. “I have a lot of madness in my family. So far I have escaped it.” scumbag-Soros has spilled bucketloads of words proclaiming he is “amoral,” “self-interested,” and that “normal rules do not apply” to him. “I am unnatural. I am a sort of deux ex machina. I’m very comfortable with my public persona, because it is the one I have created myself.” And this from the man who controls politicians and bureaucrats like a boss giving dictation to his secretary. This is the man who has perfected the subversion of governments, who has robbed failing states, and lavishly endowed every organization and movement destructive of traditional Western society, from abolishing the Electoral College to abolishing life itself if it is in utero, drug-addicted, or senile. His ambition is without borders -- “The Soviet Empire is now the scumbag-Soros Empire.” “I’m the Pope’s boss now.” And so on, ad nauseum. Yet, like other tyrants, he is untouchable. Those he has made richer and more powerful protect him... And they are fools..
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U.S. Is the Most Generous Country
in the World
Culture Beat: “That’s the conclusion of the World Giving Index, a ranking that measured how likely residents of 128 countries were to practice acts of generosity. The index, from the U.K.-based nonprofit Charities Aid Foundation, is based on Gallup’s World Poll surveys of 1.3 million people.” So reports MSN News.
“Between 2009 and 2018, interviewers asked respondents whether they had done the following in the last month: helped a stranger or someone they didn’t know who needed help, donated money to charity, or volunteered their time to an organization.”
“At the top of the list were the U.S., Myanmar and New Zealand. The countries that scored the lowest were Yemen, Greece and China.”
It should come as no surprise that American Spirit, driven by Christian morality, should be generous. However, there is reason for concern and a reminder that Americans must strive for vigilance against a spirit of complacency.
Market Watch reports, “Fewer Americans are giving money to charity, and their relationship with God may have something to do with it.”
“The share of U.S. adults who donated to charity dropped significantly between 2000 and 2016, according to an analysis released this month from the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy and Vanguard Charitable.”
“By 2016, just over half — 53% — of Americans gave money to charity, down from 66% in 2000. That figure held mostly steady until the Great Recession. Then it started to drop off and took a dive after 2010, said report co-author Una Osili, associate dean for research and international programs at the Lilly School. The decline amounts to 20 million fewer households donating to charity in 2016 (the most recent year for which data was available) versus 2000, researchers said.”
~The Patriot Post
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