Scarborough: Obama's FBI had spies inside the Trump campaign

This is not a "debunked conspiracy theory." It is not "Russian misinformation." It is not a bunch of lies propagated by the White House to save Donald Trump from impeachment. It is not the manufactured Fake News based on information obtained by a "source close to the matter."(*)

No, this is the conclusion reached by Inspector General Michael Horowitz and it is reported by Rowan Scarborough, investigative reporter for the Washington Times.

The report discloses that the FBI dispatched against Trump allies multiple unnamed FBI informants known as confidential human sources (CHS). The most publicized was Stefan Halper, a longtime Washington national security figure and Cambridge University professor. He ingratiated himself to George Papadopoulos and Carter Page, while also attempting to engage with a senior Trump campaign official in New York.

Inspector General Michael E. Horowitz’s Dec. 9 report says that rather than hearing incriminating statements, Mr. Halper (whom he did not identify) recorded conversations that could be seen as exculpatory.

Mr. Horowitz rapped the FBI for not including them in four sworn affidavits agents presented to federal judges to authorize Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) electronic and physical spying on Mr. Page. ...

Mr. Horowitz listed that FBI decision as one of 17 glaring omissions or inaccuracies that misled the FISA judges who signed four surveillance warrants on Mr. Page.

“None of these inaccuracies and omissions were brought to the attention of OI before the last FISA application was filed in June 2017,” the IG said. “Consequently, these failures were repeated in all three renewal applications.”

Our once-honest news media is very busy trying to convince you that Horowitz didn't find evidence of political bias in the launch or continuation of Crossfire Hurricane, the clandestine investigation of the Trump campaign's alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 election. Despite the fact that Horowitz noted at least 17 errors or glowing omissions of evidence during the investigation, the media would have you believe that all 17 incidents of oopsie went in favor of the FBI and went against a finding of innocence is... well... just bad luck.

A coin flip coming up tails twice is bad luck. A coin flip going against you 17 straight times has odds of 131,072 to 1.

Paul Sperry at RealClearPolitics.com notes that Horowitz has a well-developed pattern of pulling knockout punches. He's a good bureaucrat and just does what bureaucrats do. But even a history like that can't explain what has happened here.

On October 1, 2019, this blog told you that the current push to impeach the President of the United States is intended to deflect attention away from the Horowitz report. That blog post came more than two months before the Horowitz report was even published on December 9, 2019. I wrote about it again here, and then again right here.

Scarborough's report also confirms what we already knew about where the Horowitz findings are going.

Attorney General William Barr says the FBI started the investigation on flimsy grounds. He has tapped John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, to conduct an inquiry into the origins of Crossfire Hurricane.... Mr. Durham has been looking into Mr. Mifsud and, according to a defense attorney court filing in a criminal case, his office took possession of two cellphones used by the Maltese professor.

Mr. Mifsud is a shadowy figure mentioned throughout the Mueller report. Papadopoulos writes that he believes Mifsud is/was a western intelligence operative; CIA, DIA or FBI CounterIntel. Whoever he is, court records show that Durham has physical evidence on his involvement and was willing to go to Europe to get it.

This blog is not exactly a lone voice in the wilderness, either. For the last two years, Sharyl Atkisson, Sarah Carter, Greg Jarrett, John Solomon and Paul Sperry have all been reporting on the spying that went on in 2016. But since those are conservatives, their work has never been taken seriously.

Read this though, from someone with a very different perspective on President Trump:

Imagine if a similar situation had taken place in January of 2009, involving president-elect Barack Obama. Picture a meeting between Obama and the heads of the CIA, NSA, and FBI, along with the DIA, in which the newly-elected president is presented with a report complied by, say, Judicial Watch, accusing him of links to al-Qaeda. Imagine further that they tell Obama they are presenting him with this information to make him aware of a blackmail threat, and to reassure him they won’t give news agencies a “hook” to publish the news.

Now imagine if that news came out on Fox days later. Imagine further that within a year, one of the four officials became a paid Fox contributor. Democrats would lose their minds in this set of circumstances.

The country mostly did not lose its mind, however, because the episode did not involve a traditionally presidential figure like Obama, nor was it understood to have been directed at the institution of “the White House” in the abstract.

Instead, it was a story about an infamously corrupt individual, Donald Trump, a pussy-grabbing scammer who bragged about using bankruptcy to escape debt and publicly praised Vladimir Putin. Audiences believed the allegations against this person and saw the intelligence/counterintelligence community as acting patriotically, doing their best to keep us informed about a still-breaking investigation of a rogue president.

That's from Matt Taibbi, a senior editor at left wing icon Rolling Stone, writing at his independent site on Substack.com. His is one of the honest liberal voices that people should be listening to instead of parroting the formerly honest mainstream news media. Taibbi et al are very smart people and they are not conservatives.

There were FBI spies inside the Trump campaign. They lied to federal judges to gain access to Trump campaign officials. They repeated those lies in sworn statements even after they knew the truth. They manufactured and altered evidence. And their actions were sanctioned at the highest levels of the Department of Justice.

Anyone who believes Barack Obama didn't know what was happening is a fool.

Doug Jones refuses to commit to acquit; trails most GOP opponents

No Alabama voter in their right mind thinks that a vote to acquit President Trump will let Doug Jones sneak in and be reelected as the junior U.S. Senator from Alabama. No... his vote against Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 has almost certainly sealed that fate. But here he is trying to play the uncommitted juror in an appearance on ABC News this morning. Axios won't let me embed the video but you can click through if you want, and you tell me if that's the face of an honest man.

So... given that the man is fundamentally dishonest and slipperier that a Goat Hill piglet, how can his 2020 electoral fate be almost certainly sealed? Well, we have some recent polling of the 2020 Alabama Senate seat race and Jones trails almost all of his GOP opponents.

Tommy Tuberville beats him 47/40. Sessions wins 46/41, my guy Bradley Byrne beats him 44/40.  Who does he almost certainly not beat?

Jones did beat former Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore in a head-to-head match-up, leading him 47% to 33%, with 20% undecided. He also led Rep. Arnold Mooney, R-Indian Springs, 40% to 34%, with 25% undecided. The incumbent senator also consistently led his opponent among voters under the age of 35; African-American voters, and non-evangelical voters.

There really are only two people who could lose to Doug Jones in November: Me, and Roy Moore. Though Mooney trails Moore in the Advertiser poll, that's simply a function of name recognition. Mooney is a solid conservative with very little (known) baggage.

I'm not running--I missed the primary ballot deadline because my wife grabbed my ankle and wouldn't let me make it to the courthouse.

That leaves Creepy Uncle Roy Moore.

The sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh failed to derail his SCOTUS nomination because they were provably false. The sexual misconduct allegations against Creepy Uncle Roy were credibly true. If things had ever come to a trial, the well of other victims with other lurid and disgusting stories would have never run dry. Let's just say that the women who came forward were the brave ones.

A vote for Creepy Uncle Roy in the March primary is the same as a vote for Doug Jones in the general election. Please don't.

Alabama voters have already made it clear that they'd rather have a dishonest Democrat than a creepy dude who was twice removed from office by members of his profession elected from his own party. If Republican lawyers and judges can't stand the man, Republican voters shouldn't either.

The UK election was a whole cloth rejection of democratic socialism

Yesterday, UK voters handed Tory leader Boris Johnson the biggest Conservative Party electoral victory since the days of "Iron Lady" Margaret Thatcher. The ultra-liberal/socialists in the Labour Party suffered an obliterating defeat. They lost seats that had been comfortably leftist for generations.

The image below comes courtesy of DecisionDeskHQ, a data-driven website that provides real-time election results and analyses. You may need to tap or click the image to get something readable on a mobile device.

In the UK, blue is the color of Conservatives and red is for Labour. The Scots, Irish and Welsh each have their own identities and sometimes governing coalitions involve them with either Conservative or Labour pluralities. For the British left, the image above is the map of destruction. Majorities like the one claimed by Johnson and his Tories are very unusual and have been historic in their impact. 

Along with the loss of this election, British lefties have lost any hope of starting a global democratic-socialist movement. The UK will leave the European Union with or without a negotiated trade deal now. Gone are socialist hopes of the British leading a global new world order. Gone are all the social justice tropes that focused on intersectionalism, identity politics, and destruction of traditional values such as family, hunting, Judeo-Christian faith, patriotism, etc.  

To say this was a devastating loss by the UK's far left might be understating the impact, if for nothing else than for the fact that the left had big hopes and dreams for the future.

Jonathan Chait is an American liberal who writes for the New York magazine. Unlike most lefty American media types, Chait has the rare gift for telling it like it is.

Go here for all of the excerpts from hopeful U.S. lefties who saw Jeremy Corbyn's movement as a precursor to a similar movement on this side of the pond. Here are a few to whet the appetite.

Many writers, not only on the left, detected parallels between the rise of Corbyn and the movement around Bernie Sanders. The latter is considerably more moderate and pragmatic than the former, and also not laden with the political baggage of Corbyn’s widely derided openness to anti-Semitic allies. And yet many leftists have emphasized the similarities between the two, which are indeed evident. Both built youth-oriented movements led by cadres of radical activists who openly set out to destroy and remake their parties. Both lost in somewhat close fashion, Sanders in 2016 and Corbyn the next year. And fervent supporters of both men treated their narrow defeats as quasi-victories, proof of victory just around the corner.

Arguments of this sort tend to quickly devolve into straw-man attacks. So, in order to show that the view I’m describing is widespread, I am sharing lengthy excerpts from a half-dozen essays written by American leftists in recent years:

“Only Socialism Can Defeat Trumpism,” by Nicole Aschoff and Bhaskar Sunkara, The Nation, November 2016

“The past year has shown that millions of ordinary people are ready for an alternative, one pointed to by the success of Sanders and the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn in Britain …

As with the collapsing social democrats in Europe, the Democratic Party’s best bet is to move left and embrace a platform that speaks to the real needs, fears, and aspirations of working people …

For the Democrats, no less than their peers in Europe, where the neoliberalization of social democracy has opened up space for a populist right, the choice on offer might well be either socialism or irrelevance.”

“Jeremy Corbyn’s Success is a Model for American Progressives,” by James Downie, Washington Post, June 2017

“Corbyn’s success provides a model for U.S. progressives in 2018, 2020 and beyond: If you need turnout to win — as liberals in the United States do — you need a bold, uncompromising platform with real solutions …

Why was turnout so high? Because Corbyn was able to generate excitement among Labour voters, especially the young. That’s in no small part because of this year’s Labour manifesto (the British equivalent of a party platform). Unlike other recent versions, mostly incrementalist documents that tweaked what came before, the 2017 edition is the boldest in decades: more money for the National Health Services and other major initiatives, a “jobs first” Brexit and free university tuition, financed by taxing corporations and the wealthiest. The manifesto and the campaign were summed up by their elegantly simple slogan: “For the many, not the few.” …

“Politics has changed,” declared Corbyn Thursday night, “and politics isn’t going back in the box where it was before.” He is right about British politics. If progressives apply the lessons of his success judiciously, U.S. politics will also change — for the better, for the many and not the few.”

“Jeremy Corbyn Is Leading the Left Out of the Wilderness and Toward Power,” by Mehdi Hasan, The Intercept, June 2017

“Last Thursday’s election result in the U.K. is a ringing confirmation that stirring idealism need not be sacrificed at the altar of political pragmatism …

Yes, mainstream center-left parties may have been crushed in recent European elections — think of France or the Netherlands. However, Corbyn — who spent 32 years toiling in obscurity on the backbenches before becoming leader of his party in a shock victory in 2015 — has now a paved a road out of the wilderness …

Here in the United States, meanwhile, the Corbyn-esque Sanders has become the most popular politician in the country and would probably win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination by a landslide if the contest were to be held tomorrow. Some polls also suggest he might have defeated Trump last November, too.”

“The American Left Has Found a New Hero,” Paul Blest, The Outline, June 2017

“American left-wingers like myself have found ourselves looking for an escape over the past few weeks in the stratospheric rise of the Labour Party — led by Corbyn, an unabashed socialist — in the polls ahead of this Thursday’s UK election …

As left wing activist Paul Mason told the New Republic last week: “They assumed Corbyn was their secret weapon. It turns out he is our secret weapon …

The reason that Corbyn is surging now, apart from the discovery that May is extremely bad at campaigning, is that he’s got a clear, progressive vision for the future, one that tackles the big question of making a more equitable society at home and around the world. The Labour Party manifesto unabashedly goes the farthest we’ve seen from a major left-of-center party; not just the Sanders-like social democratic parts like pumping more money into the National Health Service and making college free, but in nationalizing essential public services and raising revenues from increased taxes on the wealthy and corporations to pay for all of it.”

 Those dreams will have to wait for five more years.

Feckless liberal trollop rings wrong bell

How many times have you heard the old saw: "You can't unring the bell?"

Professor Pamela Karlan was testifying in today's impeachment circus before the House Judiciary Committee, when she dropped this obviously planned, obviously rehearsed and obviously staged response to a question from Sheila Jackson Lee:

Prof. Pamela Karlan now invoking 13-year-old Barron Trump to dunk on @realDonaldTrump.

 pic.twitter.com/gXkgzHB910

— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) December 4, 2019

Wasn't that cute and witty? The peanut gallery thought so, but ...

A minor child deserves privacy and should be kept out of politics. Pamela Karlan, you should be ashamed of your very angry and obviously biased public pandering, and using a child to do it.

— Melania Trump (@FLOTUS) December 4, 2019

Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican from Pensacola and in Mornin' Joe Scarborough's old seat:

.@RepMattGaetz to Prof. Karlan:

"You don't get to interrupt me on this time! ... When you invoke the president son's name here, when you try to make a little joke out of referencing Barron Trump, that does not lend credibility to your argument. It makes you look mean." pic.twitter.com/DIgpG5rgSh

— Jason Howerton (@jason_howerton) December 4, 2019

Professor Karlan later offered a conditional apology after being scolded by Gaetz and also after being made aware by her handlers that her little witticism was playing out as well as an Anthony Weiner SMS photo.

But it was too late. You can't unring the bell and this liberal strumpet rang the wrong one. You just don't use minor children as foils against their parents. The Bush daughters were off limits. The Obama daughters were off limits. Therefore, Barron is off limits.

This episode is a perfect metaphor for the unmitigated hatred borne by the professional left for anything related to President Donald Trump. This hatred drives them to extremes and gives way to dehumanizing and objectifying the targets of their vitriol.

These are not rational people, y'all.

There is something else these folks still don't realize. Donald Trump doesn't sit still after stuff like this. He is not George W. Bush, John McCain or Mitt Romney. He retaliates in kind so if you go low, he goes lower. He's going to carefully craft his payback and he's going to make the left look like idiots. Again.

Probably in front of cheering crowds in the midwest battleground states they call flyover country.

Ouch: Former MSNBC anchor slams network, says it has abandoned Bernie, Tulsi and Yang

In an Op-Ed piece at The Hill, former MSNBC news presenter Krystal Ball unloads on her former employer, and makes it clear that the network isn't interested in hearing from the full spectrum of lefty office seekers:

They have gone all in on a fundamentally anti-progressive narrative that a). Spends all day every day fixated on excuses for why Hillary lost to the guy they promised would lose. That would be Comey excuses and Russiagate and Ukrainegate as an extension of Russiagate. b). Fixates on "Trump is bad" as the end all be all of political analysis. Everything that is going wrong in the country and the world is centered on him and him alone because to evaluate the underlying circumstances that brought us Trump would be to question the undying wisdom of that Democratic elite. The people who created the underlying conditions that brought us Trump definitely do not want to talk about those underlying conditions that brought us Trump. and c). They basically devoted the network to the lionization of Bush-era neo-con Republicans and the national security blob. Nicole Wallace, Steve Schmidt, John Brennan, Malcolm Nance etc.

Meanwhile, the network is absolutely shameless in the way that it covers the 3 anti-establishment candidates, Bernie, Tulsi, and Yang. Every interview with Tulsi must include the obligatory "Assad apologist" question and conspiracies about her running third party or being a Russian asset abound. In these times recently did an analysis of Bernie's primetime coverage on the network and found that he is mentioned 1/3 as often as Biden and far more negatively than any other candidate.

She also describes the network's atrocious treatment of Andrew Yang, explaining that they cut him out of debate advertising graphics and even referred to him as 'John Yang.'

So, having a major cable news network embark on an anti-progressive narrative is a good thing, right? After all, MSNBC has seen some growth in viewership with the 'Orange Man Bad' schtick. They're still deeply mired in a distant second place behind cable news king Fox News, but progress is progress, right? (Fox routinely has more viewers than CNN and MSNBC combined.)

Ball is castigating MSNBC for simply being a capitalist-friendly mouthpiece for the Democrat establishment. It's helpful to realize that MSNBC started out as a joint venture between Microsoft Corporation and General Electric's NBC News (NBC is now owned by Comcast). The network veered left during the Iraq War and Microsoft disengaged with both the cable channel and the website in 2005.

The network as it is today doesn't want to hear from people like Bernie or Tulsi because they and candidates like them are doing what Donald Trump did in his 2016 campaign. He ran against the establishment, beat the establishment candidates for the nomination and then beat the establishment candidate offered by the Democrats. MSNBC seems to believe that all the country needs is the right establishment Democrat candidate. Hence their cozying up to establishment figures like Bush era spook John Brennan and former John McCain campaign adviser Steve Schmidt. Keep in mind that these establishment types are cut from the same cloth as the 2000's Democrats who were all for the 2003 invasion of Iraq before they were against it. MSNBC is the television home of the establishment Democrat message.

Krystal Ball is a doctrinaire progressive. She wants to see the Green New Deal, Medicare For All and a Billionaire Wealth Tax get every bit of air time and bandwidth possible. She was a vocal and persistent critic of W during the Iraq War too, so she's on board with Tulsi's anti-war stance. That MSNBC is squelching the dissent from Democrat anti-mainstreamers sticks in her craw.

She's right in one regard, though. The election of Donald Trump was at least in part due to the arrogance of the Democrat-Media complex, who thought that Hillary Clinton was the heir apparent to a festering swamp. MSNBC thinks, as she puts it, "that everything was fine before Trump and everything will be fine again after Trump."

Well, no and yes. No, everything was not fine before Trump but yes, everything will be fine after Trump because by the time he's done President-elect Mike Pence will have a fully drained swamp in cruise control.

It would still be helpful to the country if the Democrats' far left voices received the same coverage that their establishment types get. The radical left is taking over the Democrat party. The wackier the voices, the crazier the ideas and the better we all understand just how nutso they've become.

Donald Trump SUCKS at being a racist

Donald Trump is good at a lot of things. One thing he's not good at all is advancing a racist agenda. In fact, he sucks at it, if that's what he was trying to do. If white supremacists thought they'd have a friend in the White House, they were stupid or weren't paying attention. If his opponents believe that he's a racist fascist Nazi meanie, they're just listening to the wrong people.

Within this post are 10 hyperlinks. Each link documents part of a pattern that Democrats don't want you to discern or understand for yourself. Each link takes you to a site that could never be mistaken as "Trump-friendly."

For starters, his son-in-law Jared Kushner is the grandson of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1949. What white nationalist Nazi racist scum lets his daughter marry a Jew? It gets worse for the Trump-is-a-Nazi crowd. Jared and Ivanka Trump were married in a Jewish ceremony in 2009.  Ivanka has converted to the Jewish faith, which means that the alleged Nazi has a Jew for a daughter. Trump's grandchildren were born Jewish, and they are being raised in a kosher Jewish household.

“Just because you’re a nationalist and you’re white doesn’t make you a white nationalist,” said Katrina Pierson, an African-American who was a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. “Putting Americans first makes you a nationalist and in that case, I’m a nationalist. I think we should take care of our families and our children first.”

In the late 1990's, The Donald dated the drop dead gorgeous model Kara Young, a biracial beauty that white supremacists regard as a mongrel. No self-respecting racist would be caught dead in a romantic relationship with a black girl. “I never heard him say a disparaging comment towards any race of people,” she said.

Before that though, Trump established a rapport with Nelson Mandela, someone he has said he admired. In 1990, Mandela was preparing to embark on a tour of the United States. Legend has it that Trump "donated" a private jet to Mandela and his entourage but the truth is that he allowed his Trump Shuttle 727 to be used at cost: $130,000. Not bad for a grand tour of the States. Scoff if you want, but this is not the action of a racist.

Neither is appointing Ben Carson to be Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Dr. Carson doesn't hold back, either. "I have an advantage of knowing the President very well, and he’s not a racist. ... Look at his policies. Under this president you see the rising tide lifting all boats. You see low unemployment — record low — for blacks, for Hispanics, for all the demographics of our nation.

"When you have somebody spending this much time and this much effort trying to elevate those who are vulnerable and who are suffering in our society, I think we should pay a lot more attention to what they are doing than what anyone is saying," he added.

Working with Secretary Carlson, Trump established the Opportunity and Revitalization Council. The Council dovetails with the Opportunity Zone tax incentive in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act and the Council are having dramatic impact. The effort is intended to un-Baltimore places like Baltimore, and it's working. Black and Hispanic unemployment is at an all-time low. 

White supremacists don't push policies that make black and brown folks better off. They're supposed to be making them miserable. Trump isn't. Why is that?

One of Trump's earliest grants of Clemency was to 64-year old Alice Johnson, the black grandmother who was serving a mandatory federal sentence for nonviolent drug offenses. That wasn't a one-time PR stunt. He also posthumously pardoned Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion boxer who was convicted of transporting a white woman across state lines.

Last December, Trump signed a bipartisan criminal justice reform bill into law. This was important, and it's informative because son-in-law Kushner made it a priority before joining his father in-law's campaign. Kushner negotiated with Congress and shepherded the bill though both houses. Again, not the actions of a criminal racist enterprise.

Nazis also don't deport other Nazis. Donald Trump did just that, and he did it to bipartisan acclaim. George W. Bush didn't deport Jakiw Palij. Barack Obama had eight years to kick him out. Trump made it happen in the first half of his first term. He did it by pressuring Germany to take him back. Eli Rosenbaum, the former head of the U.S. office investigating accused Nazi war criminals, said Palij’s removal “is a landmark victory in the U.S. government’s decades-long quest to achieve a measure of justice and accountability on behalf of the victims of Nazi inhumanity.”

Here's the problem that Democrats and their mouthpieces in the media have with Donald Trump: He's completely colorblind. He doesn't seek or implement policies that chooses winners and losers based on ethnicity or religious background. He's brash. He's abrupt. He's unfiltered. He's uncouth. He's unpresidential, whatever the hell that means to the people who wouldn't give him credit for negotiating a Palestinian peace accord while curing cancer.

If President Trump actually was the white nationalist racist Nazi pig the left claims he is, the opposite of everything written above would be true. Trump would have forbidden Ivanka from marrying Jared. Jared never would have become a senior adviser and the criminal reform bill would never have passed. Nelson Mandela would have had to find his own ride and Alice Johnson would still be stuck in the federal pen.

If you want to hold on to the myth of Trump's racism, go ahead. Keep nodding your head in agreement when socialists Pete Buttigeig, Bernie Sanders, and Elizabeth Warren accuse him of being a monster not seen since Adolf Hitler. Ignore the Jewish family under his roof. Listen instead to the people who really didn't want you to read what you just finished reading. They need you a lot more than we need them.

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When will Democrats give up on impeaching the President?

We thought the closed door, classified depositions were a bad idea. After two weeks of open public 'testimony,' we now see exactly why Democrats wanted to do all this in secret. If this impeachment inquiry had been a circus, half the town wouldn't pay to see it and the curious half that did pay for it would demand a refund. To compare the Democrats' display of high crimes and misdemeanor evidence to a clown show would offend real clowns and trigger Pennywise into a national killing spree.

The question now is, when do the Democrats admit defeat, pull up the stakes and take the circus tents home?

Not one of the Democrats' witnesses offered a shred of evidence that President Trump corruptly withheld aid to a foreign government in exchange for that government doing something that they could have done, would have done or should have done anyway.

Not one witness claimed that President Trump himself made it clear to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy that unless he publicly began investigating corruption Trump wanted uncovered, $400 million in U.S. military aid was being withheld.

Not one witness claimed that President Trump acted outside of the plenary power of Article II of the United States Constitution, which grants sole authority to conduct foreign policy to the President. Not Congress. Not the Judiciary. Not the Foreign Service that serves at the arbitrary discretion of the President.

What almost every one of the Democrats' witnesses did was convince us that there is an entrenched bureaucracy in Washington DC. There is indeed a Deep State. This bureaucracy has convinced itself and the press that they, not the President, formulate and execute U.S. policy. They believe that when the President goes 'off the reservation' and tries to circumvent their desires and beliefs, it is their duty to block or impede the President. This is the arrogance of insulation. They see themselves as indispensable and believe that this country cannot succeed without them.

President Trump was elected to rid our country of these well-groomed, well-connected and well-paid elites. Every one of them should be fired. Today. Not one of them should be allowed to return to their offices on December 1 except to clear out their belongings, turn in their badges, CAC cards and government smartphones and vacate the premises.

If Democrats had any sense (LOL.. IK,R?) they would quit now. Instead of voting on Articles of Impeachment, they should introduce a House Resolution censuring the President for whatever 'violation' they can cook up that might pass the lower chamber along partisan lines. It's their only hope of escaping this political disaster.

They'd better hurry. Independents are deserting this fiasco like viewers fleeing CNN and MSNBC. When the allegedly 'biased' Fox News beats even broadcast TV networks in instant ratings, the gig is up, y'all. Americans are also tuning out of Democrats' pony show of Presidential debates. And now, Republicans are raising money hand over fist due directly to the impeachment circus.

Whether Nancy Pelosi decides to censure or impeach, there is no escaping judgment on November 3, 2020. Barring an act of Providence, Donald Trump's reelection is a cinch. The only uncertainty is whether his coattails give him a simple majority or veto-proof domination.

I would prefer the latter because that might be the only way to truly drain the swamp. Democrats can deny us that satisfaction by giving up. They won't though, will they?

In a party obsessed with hatred, this Democrat is refreshingly hopeful

There are very few respectable liberals left in public view and even those are under assault by the vicious far left progressives that have taken over the Democrat Party. I talked a little about some of them in this post several weeks ago.

Today, I'm adding Hawaii Congresswoman and Democrat Presidential Candidate Tulsi Gabbard to the list. This speech is as refreshing to me as it is poisonous to her campaign. This is a 2:17 segment. Surely you can spare a couple of minutes to hear a message of hope and unity?

Many of our leaders have become so poisoned by their quest for power they've forgotten that the power in our country lies in the hands of the people. As president, my commitment to you will be to make the vision of our Founders a reality — a government of, by, and for the people. pic.twitter.com/2vx8vnp6BL

— Tulsi Gabbard (@TulsiGabbard) November 18, 2019

Unfortunately for her campaign, her party and probably her country, this is simply self-immolation. The party of permanent destruction can't tolerate tolerance and love, y'all.

Ms. Gabbard's message is sheer genius. You don't have to believe in God. She is saying that if you believe in Love then we can work together and do good things. But for today's Democrats, this is heresy.

Though I disagree in principle with Ms. Gabbard on most issues, I can at least be sure that her motives are not rooted in the lust for power and destruction that has permeated the far left. Ms. Gabbard and the few left like her are the kinds of people that Ronald Reagan and the people like him found common ground and worked together. They formed a governing alliance that transformed America into a stronger nation. This nation then transformed the world by winning the Cold War and defeating socialist communism in the 1980's.

The people like Ms. Gabbard have been systematically purged by the ideological elites in the Democrat Party. Gone are the rural Democrats, Blue Collar/Blue Dog Democrats and honest, principled liberals like Howell Heflin and Joe Lieberman. The party is now seriously contemplating the nomination of two people--Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren--who embrace the same political and economic policies that we defeated a generation ago.

The Democrats today are the party of discord. They don't seek unity--they seek destruction. They don't practice the politics of participation. They practice the politics of perpetual unrest. Tulsi Gabbard offers a hand but the rest of her party offer their fists.

President Trump was hired by the American people to rid the Beltway of these impeachment 'witnesses'

Good bye, and good riddance to George Kent, Bill Taylor and Marie Yovanovitch. Thank you for your service to the country and your employment here has ended. You are no longer needed, so please collect your things and turn in your badges at the front desk.

They deserve to be fired because they attempted to circumvent or curtail Trump Administration policy with regards to Ukraine.

Article II of the United States Constitution grants the President sole and exclusive power to appoint 'ambassadors,' which in 1787 meant 'anyone who speaks to foreign governments on behalf of the United States of America.'

The U.S. Supreme Court decided in 1936 that the executive branch has "plenary and exclusive power of the President as the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations" U.S. v. Curtiss-wright Corp, 299 U.S. 304, 320 (1936).

Though it is not explicitly mentioned anywhere in the Constitution that the President has plenary power over foreign affairs, the Supreme Court ruled that the need for tact and secrecy necessitated the President to be able to make decisions without being constrained by the other governmental branches. The Supreme Court ruled that the only limit to the President's plenary power over foreign affairs was that they "must be exercised in subordination to the applicable provisions of the Constitution". U.s. v. Curtiss-wright Corp, 299 U.S. 304, 320 (1936). In other words, the Supreme Court ruled that the President had unlimited power over foreign relations as long as he did not do anything which explicitly violated the Constitution. It is important to note that the Supreme Court was very willing to give the President vast amounts of power at the time of Wright, which was just before the outbreak of World War II. This does not seem like much, but over the years a clear pattern has been established wherein the President's powers over foreign relations are greatly expanded during troubling times.

After the Iranian hostage crisis in 1981, the President made an executive order to seize all Iranian assets in the United States without the approval of Congress. Normally, Congress would have to approve of such an action, but in Dames Moore v. Regan the Supreme Court ruled that "though those settlements have sometimes been made by treaty, there has also been a longstanding practice of settling such claims by executive agreement without the advice and consent of the Senate." Dames Moore v. Regan, 453 U.S. 654, 679 (1981). The Supreme Court allowed the President to make an executive order based on an assumption that Congress would have approved based on similar legislation that it had previously passed. This shows another broadening of the President's power over foreign affairs, as the Supreme Court allowed the President to make an executive order that was not permitted by the Constitution. The Supreme Court's reasoning for allowing the President's power to be broadened was that the Iranian hostage crisis was an emergency situation and that in order to be able to handle the situation quickly and efficiently, the President's power over foreign affairs needed to be expanded. This is yet another example of the President's foreign affairs powers being increased during turbulent times.

Historians may debate when today's 'foreign service' morphed from the apolitical profession envisioned in the Rogers Act into the pit of vipers it is today, but no one can dispute that it has now become too big for its britches. If the 'foreign service' does not execute the President's explicit orders and carry out his foreign policy to his sole satisfaction, then they can be circumvented, fired or otherwise told to STFU and come home.

The foreign service does not formulate foreign policy. The President does. The foreign service may interpret his policy, but if it misinterprets that policy the President has sole and plenary authority to replace or remove the misguided people who don't get it.

What the American people watched on November 13 and 15 was the testimony of three members of the foreign service who don't get it. They also lack the humility required to understand that they serve at the pleasure of the President, even if they find it distasteful that their world view and President Trump's world view are worlds apart. That's too bad. Be the professionals you claim to be and do your job as your President has determined it to be.

There is similar bureaucratic entrenchment with regards to heatlthcare, transportation, environmental regulation, food safety, agriculture even tax policy. All of those are being dealt with too, but Trump has only been President for 33 months and dismantling the federal behemoth is taking a bit longer than expected, ok?

In 2016, Donald Trump made a campaign promise to drain the swamp of Washington DC. How this country dealt with both allies and adversaries was part of the quagmire and the system was broken in the eyes of the electorate. So they elected Donald Trump to do what he said he'd do.

That includes ridding the federal government of people like George Kent, Bill Taylor and Marie Yovanovitch.

Good bye, and good riddance. Who's next?

The media is pushing a false narrative that Republicans are pushing a false narrative

No wonder the American public is confused, disengaged, or both. It's even hard for people following this impeachment circus to figure out which ring the show is in.

In the hearing held today, Republican Ranking Member of the House Intelligence Committee Devin Nunes went into considerable and well informed detail on how Russia wasn't the only former Soviet state to meddle in the 2016 election and how Democrats cooperated with corrupt Ukrainian officials.

The biased media jumped on this, calling it unsubstantiated and a false narrative. It is neither.

Here's what the Associated Press presented today in a meek attempt at a 'fact check:'

Trump himself was told by his officials that the theory was “completely debunked” long before the president pressed Ukraine to investigate it anyway, according to Tom Bossert, Trump’s first homeland security adviser. In testimony at the closed-door hearings that preceded Wednesday’s public session, Fiona Hill, a former special assistant to Trump on the National Security Council, said it was bogus.

“It is a fiction that the Ukrainian government was launching an effort to upend our election,” Hill testified. “I’m extremely concerned that this is a rabbit hole that we’re all going to go down in between now and the 2020 election, and it will be to all of our detriment.”

Broadly, the theory contends that a hack of the Democratic National Committee in 2016 was a setup designed to cast blame on Russia but actually was cooked up by or with the help of Ukrainians. The evidence points conclusively to Russia, not Ukraine.

If that's what Fiona Hill really told Congress last month, she should join all of the folks Robert Mueller successfully prosecuted for lying to Congress. The Ukrainian government in power as of 2016 absolutely sought to prevent Trump's election and I'm not alone in knowing this.

It is no 'theory' that Ukrainians were elbow-deep in election interference and it wasn't the DNC server hack AP (and the New York Times) seems to think it is. It was a direct attempt to get dirt on the Trump campaign and keep Democrats happy with Ukraine.

In a subscribers only post on his site taibbi.substack.com, Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi (no friend of Donald Trump) wrote:

Still, it’s an undeniable fact that Ukraine worked to help Democrats oppose Trump in 2016. A Ukrainian court has ruled that its government “meddled” illegally in the American election, among other things by providing information about payments made to former Trump campaign manager Manafort.

This was after a veteran Democratic operative named Andrea Chalupa traveled to Ukraine in search of Trump oppo, which, not that anyone cares, is a similar story to Ukrainegate, the difference being that Chalupa was not president of the United States when she asked a foreign government for dirt about a presidential candidate. Even making the simple factual observation that the Chalupa/Ukraine transaction took place, however, has become an impossibility in the current media landscape.

The Chalupa story was originally broken by Politico reporter Ken Vogel in 2017 (“Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire”). But Politico now describes Trump being committed to “unsubstantiated allegations… a conspiracy theory that Ukraine aided Democrats in the 2016 election.”

Politico originally reported that conspiracy theory!

Ken Vogel's story from 2017:

Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.

A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.

Taibbi's story, "The New York Times sinks below Fox," is a serious and saddening takedown of what used to be one of the great institutions of American journalism. His site is well worth a subscription, despite the fact that Taibbi is an avowed liberal who detests Donald Trump but has the professional courage to call shitty journalism what it is.

The Financial Times' story is also behind a paywall, but it's entitled "Ukraine’s leaders campaign against ‘pro-Putin’ Trump" and goes into detail how the 2016 Ukraine government worked against Trump, providing the information to DNC contractor, Alexandra Chalupa, that eventually got Paul Manafort caught in an FBI trap.

FT.com and Politico's Ken Vogel puts the AP 'fact check' in a very bad light. Are they being dishonest, or just being shitty journalists?

The Hill's Investigative Reporter John Solomon also documented the pre-Zelensky Ukrainians attempts to influence the 2016 election. Solomon presents evidence that shows:

Sworn statements from two Ukrainian officials admitting that their agency tried to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election in favor of Hillary Clinton. The effort included leaking an alleged ledger showing payments to then-Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort;

Contacts between Democratic figures in Washington and Ukrainian officials that involved passing along dirt on Donald Trump;

Financial records showing a Ukrainian natural gas company routed more than $3 million to American accounts tied to Hunter Biden, younger son of then-Vice President Joe Biden, who managed U.S.-Ukraine relations for the Obama administration. Biden’s son served on the board of a Ukrainian natural gas company, Burisma Holdings;

Records that Vice President Biden pressured Ukrainian officials in March 2016 to fire the prosecutor who oversaw an investigation of Burisma Holdings and who planned to interview Hunter Biden about the financial transfers;

Correspondence showing members of the State Department and U.S. Embassy in Kiev interfered or applied pressure in criminal cases on Ukrainian soil;

Disbursements of as much as $7 billion in Ukrainian funds that prosecutors believe may have been misappropriated or taken out of the country, including to the United States.

The information shown in italics is hotly disputed by Democrats and Democrat-friendly media, but their disputes are made without evidence (they just don't 'believe' them). Solomon has said on the air that he has the records and that the Dept of Justice has them as well.

Solomon also has sworn statements that Ukrainian officials tried to come clean, offering reams of evidence to U.S. State Dept officials, only  to be turned down. WT everlovin' F was that?

It is very easy to lump what Republicans are doing in the impeachment hearings with what's being uncovered by John Durham in an ongoing DOJ investigation. They may be covering the same thing, but to claim that Durham's probe and Republican lines of attack in the hearings are a defense against impeachment is backwards.

The Democrats have been in a panic since May, when Durham started digging. Their impeachment circus is a preemptive strike against the potential criminal indictments Durham is probably going to produce.  They're trying to poison the well and prejudice the jury pool. The jury pool is of course the American public. Last month, AP was deliberately dishonest in its characterization of the July 25 phone call between President Trump and new Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zelensky. Again, poisoning the well.

The media--from the Associated Press through the NY Times--are just carrying the Democrats' water.

On the first day of public impeachmnt testimony... This exchange should be 'Game Over' for Democrats

It should be 'Game Over,' but it won't be. Democrats are all-in, now.

Expect this clip to become front and center during the 2020 Presidential Campaign.

.@Jim_Jordan: You didn’t listen in on President Trump & Zelensky’s call?

Taylor: I did not.

Jordan: You’ve never talked with Chief of Staff Mulvaney?

Taylor: I never did.

Jordan: You’ve never met the President?

Taylor: That’s correct.

Jordan: And you’re their star witness. pic.twitter.com/ebZ6jsEjeB

— Kevin McCarthy (@GOPLeader) November 13, 2019

Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman on the Phil Donahue show in 1979

This is a clip from one of Dr. Milton Friedman's appearances on Phil Donahue's show. Friedman was a Nobel Laureate in Economics and the founder of modern Monetarism.

This video is cross-posted on IBCR's Facebook Page.


Not one single Democrat in Congress or running for President in 2020 can accept what's being taught in this 3:00 segment.

Not many Republicans can either, but which side do you think is more likely to follow an economic philosophy of unleashed personal economic liberty?

Here's the full episode of Donahue.

Fox10tv's exclusive interview with Jeff Sessions on 2020 run

Bob Grip is a Titan in Gulf Coast journalism, so it's not surprising that the semi-retired legendary anchor scored an exclusive interview with former Senator and U.S. Attorney General.

Sessions talks about his decision to run for his old Senate seat, and also opens up a bit about his relationship with President Trump.


Fox 10 News promises more from this interview in the days ahead. This can't be better for Sessions, and can't be worse for either Sessions' primary opponents or more importantly Doug Jones. Grip can't be bought and can't be spun.

Democrats desperately need to hold this seat to have any hope of flipping the Senate and Sessions will obliterate Jones. Democrats know this, so they will go all out to kill his candidacy in the primary. They would rather take their chances with anyone else.

Believe absolutely nothing you hear from national media outlets in the next four months when it comes to this story. There are no "sources close to the matter" who would even take a call from CNN, NY Times, Washington Post, ad nauseum. If those folks tell you a story, believe the precise opposite to be the truth.

If the media says President Trump is torn over how to respond to this race, believe instead that he is indifferent. If they say Sessions is seeking Trump's endorsement, believe instead that they have not spoken about it.

Jeff Sessions has qualified for the U.S. Senate GOP primary

He's in. And he's hit the track running hard for his old spot as the Junior Senator from Alabama. He made his public announcement in very friendly territory, chatting it up with Fox's Tucker Carlson.


He's also gotten some very big guns from the upper chamber behind him, led by the Senior Senator from Alabama, Richard Shelby:

Fox News has learned that Alabama’s senior senator, Richard Shelby, is circulating an “open letter to conservatives” signed by at least 11 Republican senators who are endorsing Sessions’ candidacy. Sessions served in the Senate from 1997 to 2017 until he joined the Trump administration as attorney general.

“Each of us has served in the United States Senate with Jeff Sessions,” the letter, obtained by Fox News, states. “We have seen him work diligently in the public eye and behind closed doors, when things were both good and bad, under stress and in success.”

The letter is signed by Shelby, Oklahoma Sen. Jim Inhofe, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts, Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, Idaho Sen. Mike Crapo, Georgia Sen. Johnny Isakson, Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, Arkansas Sen. John Boozman, Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson and Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer.

Polling with an official Sessions campaign hasn't been done yet. But if the official polling tracks anywhere near the polling on a hypothetical race with Sessions in the mix, he's the new leader in the clubhouse:

In late June, Brent Buchanan’s firm Cygnal surveyed 612 likely Republican voters with a margin of error at +/-3.96%. His ballot test numbers – WITHOUT Sessions in the race – showed:

Tommy Tuberville 29%
Bradley Byrne 21%
Roy Moore 13%
John Merrill 12%
The ballot test – WITH Sessions in the race – showed:

Jeff Sessions 29%
Tommy Tuberville 21%
Bradley Byrne 13%
Roy Moore 9%
John Merrill 8%

Sessions is expected to draw votes from "establishment" lane dwellers, Byrne and Merrill, but also from the "outsider lane" candidates Tubs and creepy Roy Moore. If these numbers hold and Byrne or Merrill can't find a way to get past Tubs, Sessions will face Tubs in the ultimate establishment vs outsider battle.

One way Sessions can get Tubs to suffer a little is by showing up tomorrow with President Trump at the Alabama-LSU game. Tubs can't do that; Sessions can because he's a Capstone Alumnus.

The question is, would Trump do this? Washington Examiner indicates that he wouldn't. Remember folks, Trump is a showman. What better show could there be than having the President and Prodigal Senator reunited before 100,000+ potential Alabama voters and millions more on national TV?

How could Trump not have his heart of hearts warmed by this ad, and how does he resist?

This is a crucial time in our nation's history. The left has become unhinged and they are threatening the very things that make America great. I'm running for U.S. Senate because we have to fight back. Let's go! https://t.co/E1Ti9aYKNT pic.twitter.com/IlueZhTiT4

— Jeff Sessions (@jeffsessions) November 8, 2019

'Urban' impeachment bodes ill for Democrats in 2020

In playing to their base, Democrats are putting the 2020 election right into Republican hands.

This line of reasoning is based on the precedent of the partisan 1998 impeachment of Bill Clinton, the public reaction to that impeachment in the 1998 midterms and three decades of demographic change since the 1988 election.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives.  The charges in the Articles of Impeachment as forwarded to the Senate were lying under oath (perjury) and obstruction of justice in relation to a sexual harassment lawsuit filed against Clinton by Paula Jones.

The American public opposed the impeachment, with polls showing that Americans (1) generally agreed that the President had committed the crimes alleged in the Articles but that (2) they did not warrant removal from office. In perhaps the most revealing study of the events of 1998, Alan Abramowitz wrote that the election results were almost certainly the result of "scandal backlash," and that the only other credible reasons for the unusual election results could be ruled out. The 1998 election was the first time since 1822 that the sitting President saw his party gain seats in the House of Representatives. The election caused then Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to resign. It also saw two staunch impeachment proponents lose Senate seats: Al D'Amato of New York and Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina. Republicans have not won a Senate seat from New York since that contest.

It is worth noting that Abramowitz's "time for change model" has correctly predicted the outcome of every Presidential election since 1988, the same beginning point for the other reason why Democrats are pushing a partisan impeachment at their own grave peril.

Immediately following the 2016 election, two data geeks from RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende and David Byler, published a fascinating scholarly analysis of the demographics. "How Trump Won" examines a shift in the geographic distribution of voters from small rural communities across the spectrum to large mega-metropolitan areas. They begin with the 1988 election and take it through 2016 to describe why the election was part of an ongoing trend.

Trende and Byler (similar to Abramowitz) observe that "elections are determined by fundamental factors like the economy, scandals and incumbency."

Their study introduces another factor to help understand how elections have worked. They split voters and results into six distinct geographic groups: rural, small town, large town, small city, big city and mega city.

Here's a tell-it-all chart from the conclusions section of the report (you may need landscape mode on mobile devices for this image):

It shows the Democratic candidate's share of the two party vote for each of the six groups from 1988 through 2016. Note the dramatic shift in votes for the Democrat over time. In 1988, the share of the vote was fairly evenly distributed across the geographic categories. By 2016, Democrats received a significantly smaller share in the three rural to large town categories; about the same share in small cities; and significantly higher shares in large and mega-cities. The authors write:

In other words, the Democrats’ coalition of the ascendant is very inefficiently distributed. We therefore opted to utilize a demographic (urbanicity) that is easily filtered through a geographic component (CBSAs) and that people intuitively think of in geographic terms. What we discovered is a different dimension to the Democrats’ demographic inefficiency problem: They are becoming far too clustered in urban centers to be effective, even when they win the popular vote. ...

Winning mega-cities by 30 points is great, but [Hillary Clinton's] margin there was mostly (though not entirely) neutralized by her poor performance in large rural areas and small towns alone. Again, her vote in these mega-cities was also inefficiently distributed in already-blue states; the swing states with mega-cities tend to have large amounts of rural land, which is why she lost Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania. Finally, we note that while rural and small-town America are disappearing, that disappearance is happening much more gradually than people appreciate.

Let's put this in the context of the central argument of this post, which is that Democrats are imperiling their 2020 chances by playing to their urban base in the current impeachment. Ed Morrissey blogged about recent polls on the Ukraine impeachment inquiry and has some good observations on the pulse of public opinion:

This does not portend success for Democrats once Republicans get on an even playing field, and especially if Democrats send impeachment to the Republican-controlled Senate. At some point, Republicans will get to expose all of the materials to full public scrutiny and start issuing their own subpoenas, including for the whistleblower and any of the attorneys on Schiff’s committee to detail their involvement in the origins of this scandal. And while that may not cause support for impeachment to collapse, it’s certainly not going to push it any higher.

A month ago, it looked like Democrats had some momentum for impeachment. Now it appears stalled out, circling in a partisan stasis and showing no real movement into the kind of consensus needed for removal. Even more, it looks like a project produced by and for mainly the Democrats’ urban core, an aspect that becomes very clear when looking at impeachment support in the crosstabs:

Urban voters: 58/38
Suburban voters: 46/51
Rural voters: 38/58

The emphasis is mine.

Abramowitz suggests that unsuccessful impeachment risks a "scandal backlash" effect and we can point to the 1998 election as evidence that the phenomenon is a real possibility. Trende and Byler show that the inefficient distribution of the Democrat coalition puts their candidate at a disadvantage without a scandal backlash working against them. Finally, Morrissey's summary of polling shows that the impeachment push by Democrats is unpopular among the geographic regions they should least want to anger.

Pelosi caricature by DonkeyHotie.

Creepy old uncle Roy files for U.S. Senate primary

Disgraced former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy Moore is officially in the U.S. Senate primary.

There are two people who could lose to Doug Jones in the 2020 General Election. Me, and Roy Moore.

Since I’m not running, that leaves Moore.

Anybody but Roy Moore could beat Jones. Jones’ pathetic posturing as an independent thinker has fooled no one. His vote against Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year showed him to be a lockstep Democrat vote on anything of substance coming to a floor vote in the U.S. Senate. A vote for Doug Jones is a vote for Dick Schumer’s radical, leftwing progressive agenda.

A vote for Roy Moore in the Senate Primary next March is a vote for a man who was twice removed from the Alabama Supreme Court. He was removed both times for cause, meaning that after due process of law he was found to have violated his oath of office and had engaged of conduct unbecoming of a Supreme Court Justice.

Not just once—which could be reasonably explained as a misinterpretation of statute or precedence. But twice. Both times he was removed by members of his own judicial and philosophical schools of thought. People of his own kind thought him unfit for office. It's like a bunch of alcoholics expelling a member of their own group of drunks for drinking too much.

Just for clarity's sake: Alabama conservatives removed Roy Moore from office after due process of law. Twice.

A vote for Roy Moore is also a vote for a man who was credibly accused of sexual assault by three different women. None of these women knew each other from Adam’s Housecat, and all three of them independently described being all but forcibly raped by Moore. Two of them were minors, claiming to be 14 and 16 years old at the time of their encounter with Moore.

One accuser can be reasonably explained as a politically motivated smear. Two would be enough for concern. Three would be enough for any reasonable voter to conclude that some other conservative is worthy of their mark on the ballot.

A victory for Roy Moore next March all but guarantees that Doug Jones is reelected next November.

Please, Alabama. Don’t do this again.