BY JOHN SHAFFER Those of us of a certain age might recall the last time a US President faced impeachment. It was back in 1998, when President Bill Clinton’s impeachment was being considered by the US House of Representatives, and many of President Clinton’s fellow Democrats did not like it. Rep. Patrick Kennedy termed it “a political lynching.” Rep. Charles Rangel decried the House’s “lynch-mob mentality.” Sen. Joe Biden called it “a partisan lynching.” Rep. Jerrold Nadler called the House’s action a “lynch mob” on multiple occasions. Rep. Danny Davis and Rep. Gregory Meeks both used the term “lynching” to describe President Clinton’s impeachment. Rep. Jim McDermott said, “We are taking a step down the road to becoming a political lynch mob. Find a rope, find the tree, and ask a bunch of questions later.” Rep. John Conyers, Rep. Nadler, Rep. Eliot Engel, and Rep. Maxine Walters went a bit further, calling it a “political coup d’etat.” Well, that’s just some of the Members of Congress who used the term “lynching” back in 1998, and since the American voter still has not seen fit to employ term limits, many of those folks are still in Congress today, and, you guessed it, many of those folks had a conniption when President Trump said this last week, “So some day, if a Democrat becomes President and the Republicans win the House, even by a tiny margin, they can impeach the President, without due process or fairness or any legal rights. All Republicans must remember what they are witnessing here – a lynching. But we will WIN.”
BY JOHN SHAFFER We will begin by asking some questions. Why is it acceptable for “Administration A” to use pressure to compel a foreign government to terminate an investigation that would prove very embarrassing to the Vice-President in that Administration; but it is an impeachable offense if “Administration B” asks that foreign government to reopen the investigation?
Furthermore, why is it OK for “Candidate A” to pay Ukrainian and/or Russian sources for fictitious, false, and malicious information against her opponent, the candidate who eventually would form “Administration B,” yet is is an impeachable offense for “Administration B” to inquire for true information from a foreign government? The furor had its origins in Presidential candidate Joe Biden’s boast that he had threatened to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees to Ukraine unless they fired the prosecutor who happened to be conducting an investigation of corruption in that government, and so was sniffing around some deals that had netted some major cash benefits to Mr. Biden’s son’s company. This did not please Mr. Biden, who happened to be Vice-President at the time, so he threatened to withhold said loan guarantee. Sure enough, his threat had the desired effect. Let’s be clear: it was not “alleged” or “claimed” or “reported” that Mr. Biden did this – no, he revealed it, he bragged about, he was proud of it. This apparently stimulated President Trump’s interest in the matter. BY JOHN SHAFFER As you will remember, this series of columns was inspired by Congressman James Clyburn, who was quoted as saying that, if proposed today, the Bill of Rights might not be ratified.
We resume our review of the Bill of Rights with the Third Amendment: “No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner prescribed by law.” This amendment recalled the practice of the British, which quartered soldiers in homes during the French and Indian War, and again in Boston in 1774. Six of the original 13 states also banned quartering of soldiers, and some of the Anti-Federalists insisted this amendment be included in the Bill of Rights, likely as a means to restrain the newly-formed central government and to establish the primacy of individual rights. If this amendment were not to be ratified now, it would be because of its irrelevancy, because today, there is no need to quarter soldiers in private homes, and no one wants to do so. Its significance is that it limits the power of the central government, as do all of the original ten amendments (the Bill of Rights) . BY JOHN SHAFFER According to the TV ratings, the recent “Climate Change” townhall that featured the Democrat candidates for president wasn’t viewed by very many people, but just because most of the viewing population chose to ignore it or tune to something else doesn’t mean that nothing important took place. One candidate after another vowed to take some heroic measure to “save” the world from Climate Change! Specifically, they mean from man-made climate change, which are those actions that humans take that allegedly have a dire influence on climate, such as causing temperatures to increase, ice to melt, seas to rise, more rain to fall, wind to blow harder, terrible storms to become more numerous and worse, snow to vanish, and other accusations, which border more and more on the hysterical with each passing mention. Yep, they blame man’s influence – chiefly burning of fossil fuels – for all those things; and for more besides, each more dire and deadly, and each condition so dangerous that we have (they claim) a mere handful of years to correct the situation.
Of course, when places such as the United States or the world experience falling or steady temperatures, increased ice pack, seas maintaining at sea level, the wind to blow as hard or not so hard as it ever did, storms becoming rarer and less powerful, snowpack increasing – all of which have been occurring over the last couple of decades – emotional demands for immediate action lose their urgency. Yes, you read it right, none of those things that the “Climate Change crowd” have been screaming about have actually been taking place, particularly when one considers the “heat island” effect on the temperatures that are allegedly rising. Factor out the concrete and asphalt effect on thermometers, and things are pretty much as they have been for the past few hundred thousand years. Of course, we have no accurate way to go back in time and measure temperature variations to the tenth or hundredth of a degree that they are so fretful over, but let’s put it this way: why end our economic system as we know it in order to “prevent” temperature increases that if they occur at all, would be less that the average variation in temperature hour-by-hour, or as small and transient as when a cloud blocks the sun from a given point? And our economic system would surely end, for with the forced abandonment of fossil fuels (including oil, natural gas, propane, coal and its variants, oil shale, tar sands) modern society could not exist. All but a small fraction of our heat and electricity is generated from those sources, and most of what is not so generated comes from wood, hydro-electric power, and nuclear power – none of which finds favor with the Climate Change zealots either. That leaves it to wind and solar, and although it isn’t of much importance to the Climate Change fanatics, the wind doesn’t blow all the time and the sun doesn’t shine all the time, so how do we provide energy during those “down times?” Sure, there is geothermal, and similar sources, and they have their place, but one cannot power a modern industrial society by those means alone, nor can we heat or cool all our houses or industries, or power our vehicles. That reminds us, almost every car, truck, and motorcycle on the road burns gasoline or diesel fuel, and remember, natural gas is a fossil fuel whether it is compressed or not, so vehicles powered by it will be banned too. And it is really unlikely that we could develop solar-powered aircraft that could transport several million passengers, or find a method of powering ships that doesn’t employ fossil fuels or nuclear power, or some way to power locomotives without using fossil fuels. And yet, every major Democrat candidate for president, and most of the minor ones, too, have signed onto some form of the “Green New Deal,” and have vowed to ban fossil fuels – and that includes good ol’ middle class, practical, Joe Biden. It is pretty hilarious to hear the likes of Robert Francis O’Rourke carry on about fossil fuels making our cities “uninhabitable,” when too many of our cities today are overflowing with uncollected garbage or trash; rats; disease; feces on the street; to say nothing of crime and homelessness. It is more than a bit over-dramatic to hear Pete Buttigeig compare “global warming” to the Second World War; or to hear Kamala Harris call for ending the production and consumption of meat. It is really distressing to hear any of them pretend that we can “phase out” automobiles in ten years and fossil fuels in less than thirty years. BY JOHN SHAFFER Let’s take a trip down memory lane, all the way back to July 1, 2015. The place: Pier 14 on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. It was then and there that Kate Steinle, 32, her father and a friend went for a stroll on the pier. Those three all had the legal right to be on that pier, as did, presumably, most of the folks who were there that day. One who did not have that right was Jose Inez Garcia Zarate, an illegal alien, sitting there on a bench. He might have been a bit drowsy, for he had told investigators that he had taken some sleeping pills that he found in a dumpster. (Not the safest or wisest of practices, but considering that Mr. Garcia Zarate had already been deported five times, most recently six years earlier in 2009, his regard for US law and for safe practices is none too high.) He found a firearm, wrapped in a cloth, underneath the bench, and “accidentally” fired the weapon. Perhaps he was shooting at sea lions, which also would have been illegal, but in any event, the weapon discharged, the bullet struck concrete, ricocheted, and hit Miss Steinle in the back, puncturing her aorta. She was rushed to the hospital where she succumbed to her injuries and died. No one contends that the man who pulled the trigger intended to shoot Miss Steinle, but nonetheless, shoot her he did, and under normal circumstances would have been charged with her accidental death and convicted of manslaughter or negligent homicide or some comparable crime.
By John Shaffer For a billionaire who loves business and should know what’s best for the American economy, President Trump has an unfortunate habit of tweeting and texting in such a way as to tank the stock market indices. It happened a couple of times in the last two weeks, most recently on Friday when he “ordered” US businesses to find a source other than China for its manufacturing and supply chains. We couldn’t agree more with the intent of finding a non-Chinese source, because we have never thought it wise to do business with Communist countries, for the exchanges with them are unlike those between free economies in the free world. The Chinese government controls, directly or indirectly, the major levers of the Chinese economy, and their influence goes far beyond the things that everyone complains about - the currency manipulation, the theft of intellectual property, and the enlisting of US and European companies to “cooperate” in ways those companies would justifiably balk at in their home countries.
That said, the President should be capable of finding less dramatic and disruptive methods of achieving his defensible goal of reducing our involvement with China. And while we are on the subject, we believe that President Trump’s boosting of tariffs on Chinese products (and on some from other countries as well) is a means to an end. It is not that he loves tariffs, but that is the most effective way of getting the Chinese to pay attention. For too many years and through too many administrations, America has allowed China to get away with those things listed above, as well as undercutting our costs of production so dramatically as to make it unprofitable for American companies to compete, allowing the Chinese to flood our markets with their goods. It is high time that America acted to turn things around. BY JOHN SHAFFER All the people who are mad all the time about all of the things President Trump says or does have more fodder this week because of his latest outrage, relative to which we quote directly from the notice of proposed rulemaking issued by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services: “The US Department of Homeland Security proposes to prescribe how it determines whether an alien is inadmissable . . . because he or she is likely at any time to become a public charge. . . Aliens who seek adjustment of status or a visa, or who are applicants for admission, must establish that they are not likely at any time to become a public charge, unless Congress has expressly exempted them . . . DHS proposes to require all aliens seeking an extension of stay or change of status to demonstrate that they have not received, are not currently receiving, nor are likely to receive, public benefits."
This proposed rule has everyone hot under the collar, but the current law states that “an alien is inadmissable if, at the time of application for a visa, admission, or adjustment of status, he or she is likely at any time to become a public charge.” It goes on to explain that DHS “seeks to better ensure that aliens subject to the public charge inadmissability ground are self-sufficient, i.e., do not depend on public resources to meet their needs, but rather rely on their own capabilities, as well as the resources of family members, sponsors, and private organizations.” And before the Perpetually Outraged among us become more so, the exclusion under this provision would apply only to those who used welfare, etc. for more than twelve months during a three-year period. BY JOHN SHAFFER The news was filled with reports of several mass shootings in the past couple of weeks, and filled to an even greater extent it seems with reactions to them. Judging from those reactions that come from the Democrat candidates for president, the progressive politicians, and the liberal commentators, here are the most important things to remember, according to them:
. . .If a mass shooting occurs while a Republican is President, the shooting is his fault. If a mass shooting occurs while a Democrat is President, the shooting is the fault of some Republican somewhere, if not all of them. And even though it is hard to find a mass shooter who is a member of the NRA, the NRA is to blame for all shootings. As we have pointed out many times, these folks express far more anger at Republicans in general, the President specifically, and the NRA repeatedly than they ever do at the shooters themselves; and they never put any blame on weak enforcement of laws, or “turn ‘em loose” judges and juries that look hard for reasons not to incarcerate violent criminals. To sum up: President Trump is to blame. Republicans are to blame. The NRA and other gun rights organizations are to blame. The three groups listed in the second sentence above probably would like us to stop right here, for, they feel, what more needs be said? However, we think there is quite a bit more to say. For one thing, if President Trump is to be blamed because a shooter believed there are too many illegal immigrants in the USA, why wasn’t Sen. Bernie Sanders blamed for the shooting of Rep. Stephen Scalise on the ballfield a couple of years ago? After all, the shooter was a “Bernie volunteer.” Or the Dayton shooter last week – he was a strong supporter of Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Why is she not held to blame? And before we go any further, we want to make it completely clear that we are not blaming Senators Warren or Sanders for those shootings, nor should they be blamed, nor did they have anything to do with the shootings. But, in the same light, neither did President Trump have any association with the El Paso shooter, and the President should not be blamed for that shooting. There is a belief, popular among the progressives and the news media, that all mass shooters are “angry white males.” Certainly, some of them are, but if, for what it’s worth, one looks at the faces of all 98 persons charged with shooting four or more people in a single incident in 2019, one will see faces that are black, white, brown or yellow – Hispanics, African-Americans, and Caucasians, with the “white males” constituting fewer than 40% of those charged. In the past decade there also have been quite a few committed by immigrants from the “Third World,” which should not be used to slur all immigrants from the third world but should be considered as evidence that not all mass killings are committed by “white males.” BY JOHN SHAFFER As the trendy parlance has it, President Trump continues to live rent-free in the heads of his critics, who can’t seem to talk about anyone or anything else without digging him with their spurs. As we, and many others have been saying for over two and a half years, the President’s texts and tweets and off-hand remarks seem to get him more attention, and into more trouble, than any of the policy changes he has made. An apt example came on July 14, when the President tweeted this: “Democrat Congresswomen, who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, the worst, most corrupt and inept anywhere in the world (if they even have a functioning government at all), now loudly...... ....and viciously telling the people of the United States, the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came. Then come back and show us how.... ....it is done. These places need your help badly, you can’t leave fast enough. I’m sure that Nancy Pelosi would be very happy to quickly work out free travel arrangements!” Of course, such remarks are the type often made by politicians, and are seldom taken very seriously, but the progressives have a pretty high opinion of themselves, are always looking for insults, and don’t have much of a sense of humor, so they took this very seriously. The US House voted to condemn the President’s remarks, although the circumstances of that vote saw the Speaker of the House also chastened by the House, and her temporary successor gave up the gavel at his inability to accomplish anything, but few care about that.
BY JOHN SHAFFER Yes, we were surprised at the recent Supreme Court ruling which prevented the Trump Administration from asking the “are you a citizen?” question on the 2020 census form. After all, the court said that the administration had the constitutional authority to ask the question, which in normal times should have led to a 9-0 decision in favor of the administration. But needless to say, these are not normal times, for the court, by a 5-4 vote,decided by Chief Justice John Roberts, determined that the administration’s “sole stated reason” for including the question was “pretextual” or “contrived.” Again, it should be obvious that an administration has the power to include any question that it has the power to include. Pardon the tautology, but if it has the power to include the question, but cannot include it, then it doesn’t really have the power, does it? And what was the “pretext”? Enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The government said that it wanted the question on the form in order to obtain an accurate count of the citizens in order to protect citizens against discrimination, namely, using gerrymandering to dilute their votes. It was noted that numerous federal court decisions have said that the population of citizens of voting age should be the means for determining if a district has been properly apportioned and drawn. However, the court decided that although the authority exists, the rationale for the question was insufficient. Up to this point, each Commerce Department of each Administration has prepared the census forms according to its own motivations, within limits expressed by Congress. Never has a court prohibited a question, nor does the court generally review each question on the form. To do so would be a violation of the separation of powers. Our hypothesis that President Trump gets in more trouble and causes himself more grief by tweeting, texting or making unguarded comments than he does for the policies he implements and for the changes he makes received support this week from, as usual, the President himself. Mr. Trump, in an interview with former Democratic Party and Clinton Administration insider George Stephanopoulos, allowed that he would want to listen to negative allegations concerning opposition politicians, even if those allegations came from foreign sources. Perhaps this is the same motivation that drives people to read People magazine, or “Page Six” in the tabloids, or watch reality TV – hoping to see something juicy or naughty. Or it could be that the information is accurate and verified, which could indeed prove useful to any politician or prosecutor under certain circumstances. Or, the information might be inaccurate and unverified – such as for example the information that the Clinton campaign “obtained” on Mr. Trump. No need to remind anyone how useful that phony information was to certain politicians or prosecutors in 2016.
In the Stephanopoulos interview, the President did not say he would purchase such information, nor did he say he would make use of the information; he also was not asked about “stolen” or “hacked” information. Of course, the hearing of the Democrats running for President is far more acute than that of the average person, for every one of them heard that the President would condone stolen or hacked information – you know, much as the Democrats and the Clinton campaign condoned and in some case paid for, from foreign sources, in 2016. They all swear up and down that they would instantly refer directly and immediately to the FBI such an attempt to “interfere with the election,” just as they did in 2016 – when they sicced the Justice Department, through FISA warrants and by other means, on the Trump Campaign – even though the information in question was false, and was, “dirt” accusing Mr. Trump of various malfeasance and improper behavior. Of course, then it was “their” Justice Department, and fresh from its recent clearing of Hillary Clinton even though it was conceded that she had done wrong, the FBI was primed to find someone guilty, even if they had done nothing wrong. By John Shaffer The House Democrats had John Dean, corrupt player in the Watergate scandal from 47 years ago, to “testify” on parallels between that Watergate scandal and the Trump/Russia collusion scandal. No two scandals, it may be said, are the same, but Mr. Dean didn’t have to exercise his imagination very much to come up with comparison likening Mr. Trump to Mr. Nixon. Of course, it was Nixon and Dean who did the Watergate spying, and Trump was the one spied on in the present scandal, but everyone is entitled to an opinion. From where we sit, Mr. Dean (who was convicted of obstruction of justice and was disbarred as an attorney for his “involvement” in Watergate) missed the most obvious and most significant comparison of all: both the Watergate scandal and the Trump/Russia collusion scandal illustrate the dangers when a powerful government decides to conduct an investigation of its political opponents. Just as the Nixon administration did to the Democrats back in 1972, so too did the Obama administration do to the Trump campaign in 2016 – and the Obama effort made Watergate look like a “third-rate burglary.”
By John Shaffer Graduation speeches have the reputation of either being forgettable or being rehashes of platitudes, or a chore that the graduates must endure before they can receive that diploma, but the 2019 graduates of Morehouse College will always remember their address, not necessarily for the words spoken by billionaire investor Robert F. Smith, but for his amazing generosity, for he announced that his family would cover the student debt of each member of the class. The expected sum of this magnanimity is expected to be around $40 million. Mr. Smith's gift should be praised and appreciated, and if nothing else it proves that venture capitalists are not all evil and wicked.
It also shows that, given there were only 400 members of this year's Morehouse class, college education is way too expensive, and massive debt is too easily taken on. At $100,000 per graduate, that $40 million accumulates rapidly; and let's not forget that we are in a time of federalized student loans. Can’t blame this cost on the banks, although Congresswoman Maxine Walters did exactly that at a hearing last month. Confronting CEOs of several large banks, Cong. Walters demanded they explain why there was such a huge amount of student debt. Amused, one said that his bank hadn’t made a student loan since 2007; another politely reminded Madame Chairwoman that the federal government took over the student loan programs in 2009. Not quite sharp enough to understand the significance of their answers, Cong. Walters plowed ahead, oblivious, as she is in so many cases, to reality. BY JOHN SHAFFER The Mueller probe into possible means used by Russia to interfere in the 2016 presidential election via the Trump campaign lasted over two years, and for that entire period of time, as various Congressional committees found no such interference using the Trump campaign, the Democrats told one and all to “wait for the Mueller report,” “the Mueller report will be the final word,” or similar sentiments. Of course, at that time they fully expected that the Mueller report would show some type of malevolent relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia, and this gave them confidence that the Mueller report would be the blow that brought down the Trump administration. (And this is as good time as any for an aside – it was not only committees in the previous, Republican-led, Congress that refuted and invalidated the claim that the Russians changed the outcome of the election, but also several prominent Democrats, namely President Obama, Vice President Biden, Minority Leader Pelosi, Attorney General Lynch and Homeland Security Secretary Johnson, all of whom said that very thing.)
Lo and behold, when the Mueller report finally emerged, it completely cleared the Trump campaign of coordinating or conspiring with Russia (let’s face it, if the Mueller team couldn’t find any “collusion” after looking for about two years, there probably wasn’t any to find). That should have been the end of it, and might have been, except the Mueller report also discussed “obstruction of justice” charges. Now the facts that Mr. Mueller served his full term as Special Counsel and that his report was issued, indicates that the President did not obstruct his report. The fact that a report was issued is pretty good evidence that the subject of the report did not keep it from seeing the light of day. Mr. Mueller, for reasons that are baffling, discussed obstruction by saying that he could not make a determination as to whether the President’s conduct was obstructive; the report did not exonerate him nor did it charge him. The President’s enemies are making a big deal of the fact that the report did not “exonerate” him, but when has such a report ever “exonerated” anyone? That is not how such investigations work. Either the investigator(who had the power to indict and charge) finds enough evidence to bring a charge, or he does not. If he does find it, he makes the charge; if he doesn’t, he does not charge – but his purpose is not to “exonerate” but to investigate for the purpose of charging whatever crimes are discovered. The fact that Mr. Mueller neither charged nor indicted should be enough to convince anyone, not that Mr. Trump is “a good guy,” or “clean,” or “exonerated,” or “innocent,” but only that he was not charged. The typical language is that “there was no evidence” or “we were unable to make a charge,” not, “he is innocent.” There is a school of thought that says that Mr. Mueller was constrained by a legal opinion that a sitting president cannot be charged with obstruction of justice and therefore he explicitly left it up to Congress to do so – but we think what Mr. Mueller said was that Congress has the power to rewrite the laws to cover such a contingency that could arise in the future; not that he was kicking this specific case to Congress for it to look into the specifics of the charge against this president. BY JOHN SHAFFER With their numbers already above the one score mark, it isn’t surprising that another Democrat has announced his candidacy for President, but the way that Mr. Joe Biden announced was especially unusual. The announcement was delayed a few days and instead of a splashy debut in Charlottesville, Virginia, the former Vice-President and Senator instead made a previously recorded video/internet announcement at 6 am on Friday, followed by a fawning “interview” on the View, where Democrats never have to fear an unsafe question. His “first public” appearance as a candidate came on Monday in Pittsburgh, arranged to display “blue-collar Joe” as he sees himself – champion of the workingman, etc.
We are more interested, however, in his taped announcement and his interview, because in them he told what in more civilized times were known as lies. The bulk of his video announcement had to do with the “riot” at Charlottesville, caused by a largely unsupervised clash between white supremacists on one side and on the other, thugs from Antifa and other violent groups from the far left. These two groups hijacked what would otherwise have been a peaceful demonstration by people who objected to the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee, and by people who thought the statue should be removed. Sadly, those peaceful people were overwhelmed by others whose opinion on the statue was merely a shoehorn for a violent demonstration. Sadly, one of the peaceful opponents of the statue was killed when struck by an automobile driven by a white supremacist who was fleeing violent left-wing thugs. Sadly, Mr. Biden chose to lie about what President Trump said about that day’s events. |
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