🧐 What’s Up Wednesday❔

 

 

What’s going on now that we’ve reached mid-week?

I’ll give you some stories I found interesting and a little off the beaten track.

And of course, since this is me, there will be cartoons!

Bharara Cautions Resistance: It’s Not the Southern District’s Job to Get Rid of Trump

Former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Preet Bharara advised opponents of President Donald Trump Tuesday not to put their hope into being “delivered from him” by law enforcement officials.

Bharara appeared on Deadline: White House and cautioned the “resistance” to focus on defeating Trump in the 2020 election. Many progressives were already disappointed last month with the report that Mueller’s probe would produce no further indictments and cleared Trump on collusion with Russia in 2016.

“I also want to caution people. Maybe not everyone will love hearing this,” Bharara said. “Lots of people don’t like the president, think he should not be president, and they want to be delivered from him, and I get that, and I may be one of those people also. It doesn’t mean that you’re going to be delivered from that in some place other than the ballot box. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be delivered from that by Bob Mueller, as good as he is, because his job was not to get the president.”

“The Southern District’s job, the place I used to lead, is not to get the president,” he added. “Maybe they’ll find evidence of a crime, maybe they’ll think they have something to say in a courtroom, whether it’s about the hush money payments or something else or the Trump Organization, but if people don’t like the direction of the country and they think we’re moving away from the ideals of the country should be about, whether it’s on immigration or decency or rule of law, then they should set their sights and their energy on doing things politically.”

Jim Jordan Blasts Oversight Dems for ‘Reckless Decisions’ Regarding Security Clearance Whistleblower

Rep Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) on Tuesday blasted the House Oversight and Reform Committee Democrat majority’s handling of the explosive testimony of a White House Personnel Security Office employee. The whistleblower, 39-year-old Tricia Newbold, is accusing the  Trump White House of grossly mismanaging security clearances.

Although former White House personnel security director Carl Kline has already agreed to testify voluntarily, the Oversight panel met Tuesday morning to mark up a resolution to authorize a subpoena compelling him to testify on the Trump administration’s security clearance process. The resolution was passed on a party-line vote, with Republicans voting against what they deemed an unnecessary subpoena.

Kline has already said he’d testify voluntarily. Did we really need a subpoena, @RepCummings? https://t.co/AE1yHdfRRL

— Oversight Committee Republicans (@GOPoversight) April 2, 2019

In recent days, Newbold has leveled a series of so-called bombshell allegations against the Trump White House, claiming it had overruled national security concerns of career officials to grant up to 25 high-level security clearances to people who were initially denied that access.

10 Little Known Facts about the U.S. Constitution

Here are 10 curious facts you may not be aware of regarding the Constitution:

1. The U.S. Constitution is the shortest national constitution in the world at 4,400 words.
2. The word ‘democracy’ is not used once in the U.S. Constitution.
3. Over 11,000 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed, only 27 have been ratified.
4. Benjamin Franklin was the oldest signer of the constitution at 81. He died at age 84.
5. George Washington initially proposed a ‘day of thanks’ or Thanksgiving Day as a way to honor the Constitution.
6. While drafting, the Constitution included a clause that would abolish slavery 20 years after its implementation.
7. Only 12 of the 13 colonies were present during the drafting of the Constitution. Rhode Island did not want to participate and was the last to sign on May 29, 1790.
8. Independence Hall, where the Constitution was signed, is also where the Declaration of Independence and Articles of Confederation were signed several years earlier.
9. The iconic first words of the Constitution, ‘We the people of the United States,’ originally listed each individual state from north to south instead of ‘the United States.’
10. Gouverneur Morris, a delegate from Pennsylvania is usually credited as the ‘Penman of the Constitution.’ Actually, a man named Jacob Shallus – assistant clerk of the Pennsylvania State Assembly – penned most of the document.

Daniel Greenfield: What If You Launch a Presidential Campaign and No One Shows Up?

Welcome to the worst 2020 kickoff rally in America.

Senator Kirsten Gillibrand was going to launch her kickoff rally right in front of President Trump’s front door. “No other candidate has done something like this,” she bragged. “We’re rallying at Trump’s doorstep to send a message loud and clear: We’re together, we’re brave.”

 

By the time she showed up in front of “Trump’s doorstep” at the Trump International Hotel off Manhattan’s Central Park, the President of the United States was traveling back from Florida to Washington D.C. He was nowhere near the hotel where Gillibrand had decided to “confront” him.

There was nothing “brave” about venturing into the Upper West Side, where the locals would rather commit ritual suicide with a spork or shop at Walmart, before voting for Trump. Starting your rally in a place where Hillary Clinton won 80% of the vote isn’t brave. It’s cowardly. Gillibrand would have shown more courage by going back to her old district where Hillary only won 54% of the vote.

But instead her campaign threw up a giant American flag and then brought out two illegal aliens.

“Our next president will lead with bravery. Our next president with be Kirsten Gillibrand,” declared Monica Sibri, an illegal alien who won’t be able to vote for Gillibrand.

It was a balmy spring day in the Big Apple with sunshine and a high of 60. The NYPD, out in force, had roped off blocks to accommodate the crowds of the brave expected to turn out on Trump’s doorstep.

The actual audience barely filled half a block according to photojournalist Pamela Hall. The Washington Times estimated that the turnout amounted to 1,000 people. The New York Times offered no estimates, but conceded that the crowd was “small”. It was so small that most of the media coverage consisted of close-up photos to avoid exposing just how few people had bravely showed up to the 2020 kickoff rally.

Bruce Thornton: Joe Biden and Progressive Hypocrisy

Why the allegations against him aren’t about predatory masculinity.

One of the more interesting fronts in the Democrat internecine struggle between the rich, old People of Pallor and the “woke,” young People of Color centers on Joe Biden and his penchant for inappropriately touching women. Biden’s bad habit of invading the personal space of women and girls in sexually suggestive ways has long been known and dismissed as a personal quirk of his regular-guy persona.

But with Biden making noises about entering the 2020 presidential race, many Dems on the left are suddenly having epiphanies about Uncle Joe’s sexist sins. With a dozen candidates vying for the nomination, Biden’s long-forgiven antics are now coming back as “woke” political karma.

Once more, for Democrats, claims of alleged identity-politics principle come down to questions of whose political ox is being gored.

Take Lucy Flores, a former Nevada assemblywoman, who claims that five years ago at a political event Biden stood close behind her and kissed her hair, leaving her feeling “uneasy, gross, and confused. She made no bones about her political motivations, telling CNN, “The reason why we’re having these conversations about Vice President Joe Biden is because he’s considering running for president.” Flores supported Bernie Sanders in 2016, and has attended a campaign rally for “Beto” O’Rourke, the Irish gringo with a culturally appropriated nickname.

 McConnell: Due to Endless Democratic Obstruction, It’s Time to Fast-Track Trump Nominees 

McConnell recites some powerful statistics that justify his course of action, pointing out the truly extraordinary abuse of forced, time-consuming cloture votes by Senate Democrats during President Trump’s first two years on the job:

<blockquote>Across the first two years of each of the six presidents preceding President Trump, the Senate only had to hold 24 total cloture votes on nominations. That’s the once-rare procedural step that unlocks an up-or-down confirmation vote even though a minority has sought to block it. And in President Trump’s first two years? We had to hold a stunning 128 cloture votes to advance nominations. Our Democratic colleagues made the Senate jump over five times as many hurdles as in the equivalent periods in the Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations combined. Because of this obstruction, the Senate’s progress in filling important executive branch positions has been insufficient. Crucial jobs are still being held empty out of political spite. More nominees whom I suspect would be confirmed without opposition are still being delayed indefinitely because our colleagues cannot finish grieving their loss in 2016.

</blockquote>

It Is Outrageous that Supporting Trump Is Dangerous

By Lloyd Marcus

My car, which has a “Trump/Pence” bumper sticker, was keyed. While pumping gas, a motorist seemed impressed by my courage to have a Trump bumper sticker. People have told me they are afraid to wear a MAGA cap or have a Trump sign on their lawn.

Having to feel so afraid to express our political views is outrageous. Democrats and fake news media have so twisted the meaning of “MAGA” and generated such hatred for Trump that citizens are afraid to publicly support the president of the United States. This is still America. Thugs who physically attack us for expressing our First Amendment right to free speech must be prosecuted.

Antifa, Black Lives Matter, and other Democrat domestic terrorists routinely beat up Trump supporters. Meanwhile, fake news media promotes their lie that the Tea Party is the violent movement. The Tea Party is totally nonviolent. Brothers and sisters, it requires courage to stand with Trump in his quest to bring America back from Democrats’ destruction. I am grateful that God is on our side.

In the Clint Eastwood movie, Pale Rider, an evil businessman with an army of thugs tried to force small landowners to sell him their land. If the landowners did not sell, the businessman threatened to kill them and take their land. The small landowners voted to stay and fight for their land. They asked Preacher (Eastwood) to lead them. Preacher said, “If I lead you, some of you will die.” In other words, Preacher was saying freedom ain’t free.

As we join Trump in the battle to restore America’s greatness and recover our freedoms, MAGA cap wearers will be beaten, cars will be keyed. Freedom ain’t free.

Ben Shapiro: When You Don’t Appreciate Your Civilization

Last week, former Vice President Joe Biden spoke at the Biden Courage Awards ceremony in preparation for his presidential campaign launch. There, in an attempt to forestall claims that as a white man, he simply isn’t intersectional enough to compete in the Democratic primaries, he critiqued a central pillar of Western civilization as inherently racist. “Back in the late 1300s, so many women were dying at the hands of their husbands because they were chattel, just like the cattle, or the sheep, that the court of common law decided they had to do something about the extent of the deaths,” Biden fibbed. “So you know what they said? No man has a right to chastise his woman with a rod thicker than the circumference of his thumb. This is English jurisprudential culture, a white man’s culture. It’s got to change. It’s got to change.”

Biden’s take was, as always, historically illiterate. The “rule of thumb” story has been circulating for years — and it has been repeatedly debunked. There was no “rule of thumb,” as feminist scholar Christina Hoff Sommers points out. “On the contrary,” she writes, “British law since the 1700s and our American laws predating the Revolution prohibit wife beating.” In actuality, the phrase originated in craftsmen so expert that they could perform tasks without precise measuring tools.

  Dennis Prager: How the Left Keeps Me Religious. Yes, the LEFT. 

Nothing keeps me religious more than the left, not even religion itself.

I am not even particularly “spiritual.” My religiosity is overwhelmingly rational (the title of my Bible commentary is “The Rational Bible”). I believe in G od because creation rationally suggests a Creator.

The force that has most propelled me to religion is the great (secular) religion of the last hundred years: the left. If most people of the left (the left, not liberalism) — people who have not only rejected but scorned G od, Judaism, Christianity and the Bible — were decent individuals, were committed to intellectual honesty and had produced some great art and works of wisdom, leftism would have constituted a serious challenge to my religious beliefs.

But the very opposite is the case. While liberals have done some good, everything the left has touched it has ruined. The most obvious example is universities. As Harvard professor Steven Pinker, a liberal and an atheist, put it, the left has rendered the universities a “laughingstock.”

The most G odless, religion-free and Bible-free institution in the West, the university, has become the both the stupidest and most morally corrupt institution in the West. That is what first awakened me to the indispensability of G od, religion and the Bible. I first wrote about it some 25 years ago (“How I found G od at Columbia”).

I hope you have a great day. Be well!

This is an open thread.