Tuesday Noon ~ thefrontpagecover

TheFrontPageCover
~ Featuring ~
Giving Thanks for Our Bonds of Affection
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by SHMUEL KLATZKIN
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Tuesday Top News Executive Summary
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Media Editors:  Above the Fold


WRAPPING UP: Trump impeachment report could drop next week, though summoning additional witnesses isn’t being ruled out (AFP)

GOP RETORT: House Republicans drafting rebuttal to counter Democrats’ impeachment report (Washington Examiner)

Government & Politics


MUST COMPLY: Former White House counsel Donald McGahn must testify to Congress, judge rules; administration will appeal (The New York Times)

TRUMP FINANCIALS SHIELDED: Supreme Court blocks House committee from immediately reviewing Trump’s financial records (The Washington Post)

SILENCE SPEAKS VOLUMES: Ex-Pentagon aide Guy Snodgrass evades answering if he’s anonymous author of anti-Trump book A Warning (Fox News)

OBSTRUCTIONISTS AT THE HELM: Three years into Trump administration, a quarter of embassy slots are vacant, leaving State Department bureaucrats in charge (The Daily Caller)

AN AFFRONT TO FREE SPEECH: Justice Samuel Alito pens fiery dissent after Supreme Court declines to hear dispute between climate professor Michael Mann and National Review (Fox News)

ON CROSS-EXAMINATION: Four big questions about the inspector general report on FBI surveillance of the Trump campaign (The Daily Signal)

Other Notables


MOVING ON: Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher to retire from active duty, will not take part in a review board (Fox News)

REVENUE BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY: California Department of Motor Vehicles makes $50 million a year selling drivers’ info to private companies (National Review)

Closing Arguments


POLICY: Disaster looms for Democrats as Trump goes “bigly” with blacks (Roger L. Simon)

POLICY: In 2020, the world should pay more attention to the South China Sea (The Economist)

HUMOR: Local man who’s never given a dollar to charity mad Jeff Bezos only donated $98.5 million to homeless (Genesius Times)  

~The Patriot Post
https://patriotpost.us/articles/67009?mailing_id=4690&utm_medium=email&utm_source=pp.email.4690&utm_campaign=snapshot&utm_content=body     
'He gave me the order': Esper says Trump
directed that Eddie Gallagher
keep his SEAL Trident
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by Russ Read
{ washingtonexaminer.com } ~ Secretary of Defense Mark Esper confirmed on Monday that President Trump ordered him to make sure Eddie Gallagher kept his Navy SEAL Trident... “He gave me the order,” Esper told reporters at the Pentagon. Esper fired Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer on Sunday after the Navy announced it would conduct a review of Gallagher’s status in the SEAL community before his pending retirement. “This dismissal is not about Eddie Gallagher. It’s about Secretary Spencer and the chain of command,” Esper said. Spencer reportedly attempted to broker a deal with the White House that would have allowed Gallagher to retain his SEAL Trident but also enable the Navy to conduct its review. Spencer had denied rumors that he was going to resign over Trump’s interference in the case but had hinted to Esper that he would do so. Esper said he could not “reconcile” the personal statements with what Spencer said publicly. Gallagher, who was found not guilty of all but one war crime in July, has fought to retain his Trident and rank prior to his retirement. Trump has intervened on his behalf on both accounts and also aided him before and after his trial. Gallagher’s legal team expects he could be allowed to retire as early as Nov. 30.   https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/he-gave-me-the-order-esper-says-trump-directed-that-eddie-gallagher-keep-his-seal-trident?utm_source=breaking_push&utm_medium=app&utm_campaign=push_notifications&utm_source=WEX_News%20Brief_11/25/2019&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=WEX_News%20Brief&rid=5261   
In blow to PM’s immunity prospects, 
Liberman says graft cases must go to court
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By RAOUL WOOTLIFF
{ timesofisrael.com } ~ Israel Beytenu head Avigdor Liberman said Monday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must face prosecution for the charges against him in a court of law... signaling he would not support efforts for the Knesset to grant Netanyahu parliamentary immunity. Without the support of Liberman’s eight-strong Yisrael Beytenu party, Netanyahu would be unlikely to gain the necessary backing from the current Knesset for parliamentary immunity from prosecution. “I hope that at the end of this process the prime minister will come out clean as snow, but the only place for that to happen is in court,” Liberman said at the opening of his party’s faction meeting in the Knesset. “I think the only thing that will be acceptable to the citizens of Israel will be a decision in court. Any other attempt to solve this in the Knesset will damage public trust in the system and the very system itself,” the Yisrael Beytenu chief claimed. On Thursday, Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit, a Netanyahu appointee, announced he would charge the prime minister with bribery, breach of trust and fraud in three cases against him. The announcement marked the first time in Israel’s history that a serving prime minister faces a criminal indictment. The charges have not been formally filed, however, because Mandelblit must first wait to see whether the prime minister will seek, and gain, Knesset immunity from prosecution. Mandelblit formally told Knesset speaker Yuli Edelstein on Thursday that he intended to charge Netanyahu; the prime minister had 30 days from that point to decide whether to seek parliamentary immunity. Netanyahu has not yet announced a decision, but is widely assumed to be seeking it...  https://www.timesofisrael.com/seemingly-killing-pms-immunity-hopes-liberman-says-cases-must-go-to-court/?utm_source=The+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=daily-edition-2019-11-25&utm_medium=email  
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Why the ‘Whistleblower’ Should Testify
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by Thomas Jipping and GianCarlo Canaparo
{ dailysignal.com } ~ Democrats and Republicans have been fighting over whether the person who filed a complaint about President Donald Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy... sparking the impeachment inquiry now underway against Trump– should be called to testify publicly. We believe the person, who is not technically a whistleblower, should be required to testify before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Democrats who control the committee disagree. They killed a motion to subpoena the so-called whistleblower, who has said through his attorney that he wants to remain anonymous. Here’s why the person filing the complaint should testify: Impeaching and removing a president is perhaps the most consequential thing Congress can do, short of declaring war. Impeachment and removal turns our representative democracy on its head, nullifying the last election. In the case of a first-term president, impeachment deprives the American people of the chance to pass judgment on his actions and decide if they want to reelect him. Impeachment is designed to be a constitutional failsafe, a measure of last resort to save the republic from imminent harm posed by the executive. Public understanding of such a grave step and confidence in its legitimacy demand that Democrats show that the impeachment proceedings now underway are more than simply an exercise of raw partisan politics...
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College Students Erect Memorial 
for Jihadi Terrorists
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by clarionproject.org ~ Students at Oberlin College in Ohio erected a memorial for jihadi terrorists on school grounds. The terrorists the students were memorializing were members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ)... a violent Islamist group and Iranian proxy in the Gaza Strip. Palestinian Islamic Jihad was designated a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. in 2001. Other countries, including Canada, Japan and the entire European Union, have also designed the group as a terrorist organization. The PIJ terrorists were killed after the group launched an onslaught against Israeli civilians, shooting 450 rockets and mortars into Israel and injuring 60 over the course of a few days in November. The barrage was a response to the targeted killing of senior Palestinian Islamic Jihad commander Baha Abu al-Atta on November 12 by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) after Israel learned that Atta was planning an imminent attack. According to Palestinians sources, 34 people were killed in the IDF’s response to the firing of rockets and mortars on Israeli citizens. By the end of the episode, the IDF said 25 of those killed were members of Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The student group at Oberlin – Students for a Free Palestine –which erected the memorial for the jihad terrorists wrote in a sign next to the memorial that stated, “Last week, Israel unleashed violent airstrikes on the Gaza Strip to assassinate Bahaa Abu al-Atta and his wife on Tuesday, November 12th. In the process, killing 34 unarmed Palestinian civilians, including 8 children.” In fact, the killing of Atta was a precision strike that only damaged his third-floor apartment. Although the students are demanding a “free Palestine,” Palestinian Islamic Jihad is based in the Gaza Strip, an area Israel fully withdrew from in 2005. By 2007, the terror group Hamas became the elected government of the Gaza Strip. Since that time, Islamist terror groups have used the territory to launch attacks on Israel... What is wrong with these students. Don't they have any sense of what is right.  https://clarionproject.org/college-students-erect-memorial-for-jihadi-terrorists/?utm_source=Clarion+Project+Newsletter&utm_campaign=f9da05fede-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_11_25_03_00&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_60abb35148-f9da05fede-6442509&mc_cid=f9da05fede&mc_eid=b83b13a9b5  
The Dark Art of Framing
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by Jeff Myers 
{ prageru.com } ~ Why do intelligent people—sometimes our friends and family members, sometimes even ourselves—continue to fall for the left’s false narratives?... Jeff Myers, president of Summit Ministries, offers compelling insight into what you can do to effectively counter this frequently-employed tactic. This video was made possible through our partnership with Summit Ministries. Click here to learn more and get your free e-book: 5 Steps to Making Convincing Arguments.  
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Espaillat: I Think ‘We Will 
Impeach’ Trump in the House
by IAN HANCHETT
{ breitbart.com } ~ On Saturday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Up,” Representative  Adriano Espaillat (D-NY) predicted that the House Judiciary Committee will “draft articles of impeachment”... against President Trump, “and we will impeach him in the House of Representatives.” Espaillat said, “There’s still some loose ends out there. Maybe Bolton comes in and wants to testify. Of course, you know, there’s still information that we must get that we have not gotten. And then we’ll submit the body of evidence to the Judiciary Committee, and they will, I think, draft articles of impeachment, and we will impeach him in the House of Representatives.” These dems are really sick and need to be replaced.  https://www.breitbart.com/clips/2019/11/23/espaillat-i-think-we-will-impeach-trump-in-the-house/#  
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Giving Thanks for Our Bonds of Affection
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by SHMUEL KLATZKIN

{ spectator.org } ~ Nearly 20 years ago, in the wake of the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, the masterful Wendell Berry wrote an impassioned essay. The “only result,” he wrote, of the wrenching confrontation, sponsored by the majority of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee, was “damage to all participants and to the nation. Public life obviously cannot be conducted in that way and neither can private life. It was a public procedure that degenerated into a private quarrel. It was a private quarrel that became a public catastrophe.”

Decades later, catastrophe seems to be the accepted mode of what passes for normal political life. All of our national life is now fraught with the suspicion that it is damaged. How severe that damage is and how lasting we may not know clearly.

The core of the damage, as Berry identified it back then, was that we had lost sight of perhaps the most crucial part of our national life: our sense of being a community. Community and government are not the same thing. The most important things in our lives are things that are shared but are not really meant to be ruled or adjudicated by public processes. First among these things are our affections, both for those close to us and for those in the circles of affection that radiate outwards to eventually include the whole of our national life and, ultimately, the entire world.

Lest you dismiss as unreal the necessity of affection in politics, it is worth noting that even those tyrants whose power is based solely on fear still seek to be loved, much as a rapist will often force the ultimate degradation on a victim by forcing her to say that she loves him. Similar cases are the North Koreans sent to prison camps for not showing sufficient enthusiasm for Beloved Leader and the crowning horror of Orwell’s 1984, when Winston Smith realized that “he loved Big Brother.”

Perhaps no one in our national history addressed this problem more urgently than Abraham Lincoln. Facing an unprecedented national emergency in the cascade of seceding states, Lincoln concluded his First Inaugural Address by directly addressing his disaffected fellow Americans. His focus during this supreme crisis was precisely and powerfully on those things that are not ruled or adjudicated by government, but which nonetheless make the sovereign determination of the kind of life the people will be capable of having together. “We are not enemies, but friends,” Lincoln pleaded. “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.”

We see how fragile the bonds of the Constitution were then, for they did not halt the plunge into civil war — four years of carnage. Today, the bonds reveal their fragility in a different way, as we see before us a dark path leading towards a chaos of distrust and alienation.

Lincoln’s plea remains as relevant today as it was then.

The Constitution realized something gained from bitter experience. The government cannot create the nation. The people in their freedom, able to speak freely and assemble freely, and, most of all, able to worship freely, will create it themselves and make it work. As John Adams said to the veterans of the Massachusetts militia, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Common to the religious traditions which nourished our country’s Founders is the instruction to love our fellows as ourselves. The Constitution could not require that of us; no police could enforce it of us. But without it, as Adams saw, it can’t work.

As we as a nation approach Thanksgiving, let us make space in our politics again for Lincoln’s words and pull back from catastrophe. Let us argue passionately, by all means, for great issues are at stake, and we should do no less. But as we move to grapple with the issues, let us not break the bonds of affection. Let us listen to the better angels of our nature. And let us give our effective support to those who put themselves at the service of this civic love, not those who merely master ideas that must be imposed by force because they do not and cannot earn affection.
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