Sunday, October 13th open thread: ‘The Sentinel’
“This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:24 KJV)
Here is this week’s open thread. Please feel free to post links to interesting articles and to discuss whatever issues arise during the course of the day. Nothing is off-topic here.
You can subscribe to America’s Watchtower to receive email updates and you can also follow America’s Watchtower on Facebook and Twitter by clicking the links on the right.
Here is Judas Priest performing “The Sentinel” from 1984.
Hunter Biden’s company paid Joe Biden $900,000 in lobbying fees
Well, well well…it seems as if good ole Uncle Joe was not being entirely truthful when he said he never talked business with his son before he used his influence to have a Ukrainian prosecutor fired.
According to this story Hunter Biden’s company paid Joe Biden $900,000 in lobbying fees for CONSULTANT SERVICES, here is more:
Derkach publicized the documents at a press conference at the Interfax-Ukraine agency Wednesday as he said the records, “describe the mechanism of getting money by Biden Sr.”
“This was the transfer of Burisma Group’s funds for lobbying activities, as investigators believe, personally to Joe Biden through a lobbying company. Funds in the amount of $900,000 were transferred to the U.S.-based company Rosemont Seneca Partners, which according to open sources, in particular, the New York Times, is affiliated with Biden. The payment reference was payment for consultative services,” Derkach said.
“Using political and economic levelers of influencing Ukrainian authorities and manipulating the issue of providing financial aid to Ukraine, Joe Biden actively assisted closing criminal cases into the activity of former Ukrainian Ecology Minister Mykola Zlochevsky, who is the founder and owner of Burisma Group,” he said.
“Biden’s fifth visit to Kyiv on December 7-8, 2015 was devoted to making a decision on the resignation of [then Ukrainian Prosecutor General] Viktor Shokin over the case of Zlochevsky and Burisma. Loan guarantees worth $1 billion that the United States was to give to Ukraine was the point of pressure. Biden himself admitted exerting pressure in his speech at the Council of Foreign Relations in January 2018, calling Shokin ‘son of a bitch who was fired’,” Derkach said.
Once again it looks as if a Joe Biden Presidential bid will go down in scandal and would think that the Democrats would have checked with himbefore opening an impeachment inquiry to make sure nothing like this was going on. But then again they probably already knew and were willing to throw the former Vice-President under the bus if it meant the possibility of taking down Donald Trump and I am not so sure the Democratic establishment wanted him as the nominee anyway.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
When Robert Mueller’s Russia collusion investigation failed to yield the results the Democrats had so longed for they moved on to another scandal, this one between the President and Ukraine and it again supposedly involves Donald Trump colluding with a foreign government to help him win an election.
Washington is now in the grips of impeachment frenzy and all the while there is still an ongoing investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation and the abuse of the alleged FISA warrants which is getting little attention. And now it is being reported that investigation is expanding.
Here is more:
John Durham, the U.S. attorney reviewing the origins of the 2016 counterintelligence investigation into Russia and the Trump campaign, is probing a wider timeline than previously known, according to multiple senior administration officials.
Fox News previously reported that Durham would be reviewing the days leading up to the 2016 election and through the inauguration.
However, based on what he has been finding, Durham has expanded his investigation adding agents and resources, the senior administration officials said. The timeline has grown from the beginning of the probe through the election and now has included a post-election timeline through the spring of 2017, up to when Robert Mueller was named special counsel.
That is a very interesting turn of events because we learned yesterday that Robert Mueller lied to the Congress about why he was in Washington in 2017. According to the report he was interested in becoming director of the FBI after James Comey was fired but he told the Congress under oath he was not there looking for a job. And then after he did not get the job he ends up as Special Counsel investigating the President. Things that make you go hmm…
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Lindsey Graham tweets about the possibility of opening an investigation into Joe Biden’s Ukraine scandal
What has been lost by the left–purposely–in the impeachment frenzy which has gripped Washington is the fact that Joe Biden admitted he threatened to withhold aid from Ukraine if the country refused to fire a prosecutor who was investigating the actions of a company that his son worked for.
While Donald Trump is being investigated because he wanted an investigation into the allegations made against Joe Biden and his son, the former Vice-President has received a free pass–until now.
Lindsey Graham tweeted today about possibly opening up an investigation into Joe Biden, here is what he tweeted:
It is about time!
From what I understand, if the House votes to impeach the President and he goes on to face trial in the Senate the Republicans in the Senate will be able to call whomever they wish to testify. That would most likely mean Joe Biden would have to take the stand, and that could lead to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton taking the stand as well.
For this reason I do not think the House is ever going to hold an impeachment vote. They just want to be able to hold this over Donald Trump’s head during the election. Therefor I believe it is imperative for the Republicans to begin an investigation into Joe Biden while all of this is going on.
The left is sure to claim this is nothing but a diversion to take the attention away from the impeachment inquiry but of course the impeachment inquiry was a diversion from the Joe Biden scandal in the first place.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Elizabeth Warren caught lying about being fired from a teaching position for being pregnant
Elizabeth Warren is one of those politicians who have a fleeting relationship with the truth. I am not even going to mention about how she lied about being a minority in order to further her career, or how she was caught lying about her own #MeToo moment when that movement was all the rage. I am talking about a story she has been repeating on the campaign trail about being fired as a special needs teacher because she was pregnant.
The story she has been telling goes like this:
“By the end of the first year, I was visibly pregnant, and the principal did what principals did in those days. Wish me luck and hire someone else for the job.” It’s a story she’s repeated many times on the campaign trail, always repeating the line that the “principal did what principals did” with regard to her leaving teaching.
This story serves two purposes to the leftist agenda; first, it shows that Elizabeth Warren was a victim of unfair workplace policies against women back in the day, and second; it is an example of why unions are so important. Now I am not denying that this was a problem at one point in time and I am not claiming there are no uses for unions today but it turns out Elizabeth Warren was telling a different version of the story before she was running for office.
Here is what she said in 2007:
“I was married at nineteen and then graduated from college [at the University of Houston] after I’d married, my first year post-graduation, I worked — it was in a public school system but I worked with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I actually didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an ’emergency certificate,’ it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, ‘I don’t think this is going to work out for me,’ I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years, and I was really casting about, thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’ My husband’s view of it was, ‘Stay home. We have children, we’ll have more children, you’ll love this.’ And I was very restless about it.”
In this version of the story Elizabeth Warren did not have enough credits for the teaching job she had so she went back to school on an emergency basis and decided on her own there was more money to be made flipping houses on the less fortunate she did not want to be a special needs teacher. If anything this story shows us that instead of the principal being the misogynist the misogynist was actually her husband because it sure sounds like he wanted her barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.
Once again Elizabeth Warren is trying to play the victim card and once again she has been exposed as a fraud.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Sunday, October 6th open thread: ‘People are People’
“This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.” (Psalm 118:24 KJV)
Here is this week’s open thread. Please feel free to post links to interesting articles and to discuss whatever issues arise during the course of the day. Nothing is off-topic here.
You can subscribe to America’s Watchtower to receive email updates and you can also follow America’s Watchtower on Facebook and Twitter by clicking the links on the right.
Here is Depeche Mode performing “People are People” live from 1986:
Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi have ties to Ukraine
It seems like there is quite a bit of money to be made in Ukraine. So much so that politicians and their family members have connections to the country. In addition to the Biden family there are a couple of others who have done business in Ukraine, and interestingly enough they are some of the loudest critics of Donald Trump’s phone call to Ukraine’s President.
We already know about Adam Schiff’s ties to a Ukrainian arms dealer so first up today is Mitt Romney and it looks like he has a direct connection to Hunter Biden’s company. Here is more:
Senator Mitt Romney may have a connection to Joe Biden’s alleged corruption scandal in Ukraine. According to a report released on Thursday, Romney’s top aide in the 2012 presidential campaign, J. Cofer Black, has served on the board of Ukrainian energy company Burisma Holdings since 2017.
And then there is none other than Madame Speaker and her son. It turns out Nancy Pelosi’s son has made a trip to the Ukraine for an energy company and Nancy Pelosi actually appeared in a commercial for the company. Here is more on that:
It is all starting to make sense now, they all seem to have a vested interest in making sure there is no Ukrainian investigation…
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
Donald Trump to refuse to cooperate with impeachment hearing until Nancy Pelosi calls for a vote
If the House holds an impeachment hearing and nobody voted on it is it still an impeachment hearing? A little twist on an age old question about trees and forests but is it still a hearing?
The Democrats are telling the American people that they are holding an official impeachment inquiry but there has been no vote on it so it really just seems like business as usual for the do-nothing obstructionist Democrats–they have been investigating the President since they won the majority in the House.
This maneuver allows the Democrats to throw around the word “impeachment” during the election cycle and scare the American people out of voting for Donald Trump without actually trying to impeach him or putting their members on record, and now Donald Trump is calling their bluff if this story is true.
The White House is planning to send Speaker Nancy Pelosi a letter as soon as Friday arguing that President Trump and his team can ignore lawmakers’ demands until she holds a full House vote formally approving an impeachment inquiry, 2 sources familiar with the letter tell Axios.
By putting in writing the case that Trump and his supporters have been making verbally for days, the White House is preparing for a court fight and arguing to the public that its resistance to Congress’ requests is justified.
- Trump wants to force House Democrats in vulnerable races to be on the record if they favor pursuing impeachment, these sources tell us.
- Republicans also say the minority party can exert more influence over hearings and other aspects of an inquiry once it is formalized with a vote.
- By calling this an inquiry without holding a vote, Pelosi and the Democratic committee chairmen are having it both ways, one official said. “They want to be a little bit pregnant.”
This is an interesting move but I am not sure how it will play out. The Constitution provides no set guidelines for how the House is supposed to conduct itself in regards to impeachment, it only gives the House power to impeach, so I suppose this falls along the lines of whether or not Nancy Pelosi is following House rules as they are in place.
It would seem to me that the House would have a set procedure for deciding if and when to hold an impeachment inquiry and would not simply let the leadership dictate to the members what they are going to do, but I honestly do not know.
If House rules require a vote to proceed than this is nothing but a show investigation akin to the fake investigations the Republicans held during the Obama administration that went nowhere. Will this one go nowhere? Only time will tell, I am not sure a judge will rule the President can ignore a subpoena but we will see.
Adam Schiff kept whistleblower complaint from Republicans on the Intelligence Committee
Yesterday we learned that Adam Schiff met with the whistleblower before this person filed a complaint. I did not think anything about this in and of itself as long as he did not coordinate with the person. It seemed to me that a potential whistleblower could possibly come to a member of the Intelligence Committee beforehand to ensure he or she was going by the law, but today we are learning that once this person came forward Adam Schiff decided not to tell the Republicans on his committee about it.
Here is more:
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff (D-CA) did not notify Republicans on the committee of an intelligence official who came to one of his aides with concerns about President Trump before filing an official whistleblower complaint, according to the top Republican on the committee.
Here is what Devin Nunes had to say about this news:
We learn from the press today that Chm Schiff had prior knowledge and involvement in the [whistleblower] complaint. He withheld this info from the American people and even from the Intel Cmte. In light of this news, it’s hard to view impeachment as anything aside from an orchestrated farce.
And here is a quote from New York Representative and Intelligence Committee member Elise Stefanik:
Re-upping my tweet from last week given the breaking news today that Adam Schiff had early access to the whistleblower & DID NOT share it with his own committee – instead he manipulated this information & played partisan political games. He should immediately step down as Chair.
This is apparently a violation of committee rules and between this and the accusation set forth by Elise Stefanik that Adam Schiff manipulated the whistleblower information and coordinated with that person, coupled with his making up a phone conversation between Donald Trump and Ukraine despite having the actual transcript, it might be time for him to step down from the committee or at least remove himself from the investigation. It is clear there is a political agenda behind Adam Schiff’s actions.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
I think it is safe to say Donald Trump’s Presidency is crashing down all around him and I also think it is safe to say that if he survives this onslaught it will be tough for him to get anything done legislatively before the election. (The good news here is that the Democrats have decided to sacrifice their precious gun control legislation in return for the possibility of impeachment.)
So with everything going wrong and with the President showing signs of cracking up Donald Trump could use a little good news and he got some today from California. California passed a law back in July designed to force Donald Trump to release his tax returns or become ineligible for the ballot in the Golden State.
In September a Federal Judge blocked the legislation pending his decision and today that decision came down. Here is what he said:
He wrote that “allowing individual states to potentially adopt disparate and inconsistent qualifications for presidential primary candidates tramples the framers’ vision of having uniform standards for the qualifications of those individuals running for president.”
The judge’s written ruling repeated a concern expressed during oral arguments — that long-standing and less stringent federal financial disclosure rules preempt any additional mandates. Even then, England wrote, there’s no basis to believe claims made by state attorneys that the disclosure of tax returns is tantamount to minor requirements that have previously been allowed by the courts.
“At base, the Act seeks to punish a class of candidates who elect not to comply with disclosing their tax returns by handicapping their access to the electoral process. This is plainly impermissible,” wrote England
California plans to appeal the ruling but for now Donald Trump got a little good news in an otherwise dreary day.
malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
America's Watchtower 