‘He’s even taken a tragedy involving his family to try to make it seem more favorable to him…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) Chanel Miller shocked the nation with an account of her 2015 rape while attending a Stanford University fraternity party.
It was followed by a trial that outraged many MeToo advocates when her attacker, Brock Turner, who was discovered molesting the unconscious Miller by a dumpster, served a mere three-month sentence.
Afterward, in his uncanny way of saying exactly the most inappropriate thing on a given occasion, then-Vice President Joe Biden weighed in, offering three words of support to Miller, who was known to the public as Emily Doe.
Biden, who has weathered repeated controversies since announcing his candidacy for president earlier this year, sought to comfort Miller with the words “I see you.”
Miller said she appreciated the sentiment and the fact that Biden had reached out to her.
In her newly published memoir she wrote, “What did it mean that the vice president of the United States of America had stopped every important thing he was doing to write, ‘I see you?’”
Other young women, however, have been far from comforted by Biden’s alarming outreach.
Several have accused Biden of making inappropriate physical contact, which included sniffing the hair of Nevada lieutenant governor candidate Lucy Flores and intimately whispering into the ear of fellow Delaware Sen. Chris Coon‘s teenage daughter.
Joe Biden kissing an uncomfortable little girl/IMAGE: YouTube
While the news cycle on Biden’s creepy behavior already seems to have run its course with no lasting damage, Biden—who is fending off his front-runner status in the Democratic primary against a challenge by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., has continued to be criticized for his tendency to make false or misleading statements on the campaign trail.
Investigative journalist Peter Schweizer noted in an interview with Breitbart on Monday that Biden had even embellished accounts of an automobile accident that killed his first wife.
“Over the course of decades, Joe Biden has added the fact—which is completely false—that this guy was a drunk driver, so he’s even taken a tragedy involving his family to try to make it seem more favorable to him,” Schweizer said.
Meanwhile, despite his own troubles, Biden finds himself at the center of a potential impeachment scandal after President Donald Trump called on the Ukrainian president to investigate corruption involving Biden’s son Hunter, who served on the board of an energy company in Ukraine while his vice-president father was overseeing diplomatic efforts there.
Conveniently, much like Miller’s assailant, Biden has selectively edited out all of the details of the story in which he, himself, is culpable of misconduct.
But he has issued a fiery rebuke of Trump and called on Democrats in the House of Representatives to impeach him.
‘It’s important to know that his was not a personal Joe Biden crusade…’
Joe Biden and Donald Trump / IMAGES via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The Left’s push toward impeaching President Donald Trump reached its latest crescendo on Tuesday as partisan House Democrats seemed poised to move on whistleblower claims that Trump abused power in a July phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
During the call, Trump reportedly urged Zelensky to investigate potential corruption involving former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter.
Left-wing journalists, clinging to the hope of another Watergate in Ukraine, have blindly followed the lead of Democrats like Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who claim Trump “crossed the Rubicon” into impeachment territory.
But instead, their shoddy reporting in the haste to pursue partisan objectives seems more likely to produce another embarrassment of Jussie Smollett proportions.
As with cases like the Smollett hoax and the Covington Catholic defamation scandal, the liberal media faces the unique challenge of trying to push its narrative despite the presence of video evidence that appears clearly to undermine it.
Nothing to See Here…
Many mainstream outlets have claimed “no evidence” exists of wrongdoing on the part of Biden and his son.
However, Biden himself revealed at a 2018 forum with the Council on Foreign Relations that he—much as Trump is alleged to have done—used financial leverage to attempt to influence a Ukrainian investigation.
Biden acknowledged that, while on a diplomacy trip as vice president, he threatened to withdraw a billion-dollar loan guarantee from the country if they did not fire prosecutor Viktor Shokin, who at the time was investigating Ukrainian energy company Burisma.
Oddly, Hunter Biden—while facing a dishonorable discharge from the Navy for failing a June 2013 drug test and with no qualifications otherwise in eastern European energy policy—was invited in April 2014 to assume a paid position on Burisma’s board of directors.
While urging the new Ukrainian president in July to resume the investigation into Hunter Biden and his role at Burisma, Trump’s administration is alleged to have withheld an estimated $250 million in military aid to Kiev.
Yet, somehow, the ‘no evidence of wrongdoing’ on Biden’s part for forcing Ukraine to abandon its investigation became an impeachable offense on Trump’s part for encouraging the country to pursue the very same investigation.
Fake Fact-Checking
Treading the precarious line of hyping the outrage over Trump while downplaying Biden’s culpability, left-leaning CNN was, of course, quick to present Democrats’ talking points as a so-called fact-check.
“It’s important to know that his was not a personal Joe Biden crusade,” insisted CNN analyst Daniel Dale on Saturday.
“This was the position of the United States government, of the International Monetary Fund and of other U.S. allies,” Dale said. “All of them agreed that this prosecutor needed to go.”
Dale even went so far as to call into question the investigation into Burisma’s corruption, so as to ensure that neither Biden was implicated by the taint of scandal.
“We don’t know to what extent even the company was under investigation. … The investigation was essentially dormant at the time that Biden made this push,” he said.
“Regardless, Trump has insinuated that Hunter Biden, himself, the vice president’s son, was personally under investigation—and we have no evidence for that in particular,” he continued.
As far as Biden’s own account, Dale asserted, “Everything he said about it is true as far as we know.”
Ukraine’s Web of Corruption
Widely cited in the false claims that partisan journalists on the Left have used to absolve Biden is a May 16 article published by Bloomberg in which Shokin’s successor as prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, denied any evidence of wrongdoing by either of the Biden men.
“I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of U.S. presidential elections,” Lutsenko said.
Hunter Biden / IMAGE: CNN via Youtube
“Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws—at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing,” he added. “A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”
Given the country’s past efforts to curry favor with Biden and the Obama administration, some may wonder if, perhaps, Lutsenko weren’t himself a politically influenced appointee.
What is evident from the record, however, is that like Hunter Biden’s Burisma resume, Lutsenko’s qualifications for the top prosecutorial role were dubious at best.
In 2010, he was dismissed from his role as Ukrainian interior minister following a drunken scandal at the Frankfurt airport. That same year, Lutsenko was criminally charged with abuse of office, embezzlement and forgery.
In 2012, he was sentenced to two years in connection with the 2004 poisoning of conservative candidate Viktor Yushchenko, who would go on to become the Ukrainian president in that year’s contentious elections, defeating the pro-Russian Viktor Yanukovych.
The following year, Lutsenko was pardoned and released, with health concerns cited as a primary reason.
After re-entering politics and being appointed prosecutor general in May 2016, he resigned in November 2018, facing pressure from human-rights organizations over the assassination of an anti-corruption activist, Kateryna Handziuk.
Investigating the ‘Investigators’
Adam Schiff / IMAGE: CSPAN via Youtube
The former Soviet republic’s strategic location relative to Russia and its energy supply to Europe have only added to the complicated web of pressures, both internal and external, in Ukraine’s struggle to democratize.
Its political parties continue to shift allegiances and reform amid sometimes violent revolutionary forces, making it difficult for casual observers to pinpoint the precise motivations of its leaders.
By contrast, the singular motivation of partisan Democrats in the U.S. House of Representatives has been crystal clear in the period since the November 2016 election: Get the president.
Foremost among the clamorers was House Intelligence Chair Adam Schiff, who has doggedly pursued his impeachment investigations despite the earlier failures of the Mueller Report to yield any actionable offenses.
Schiff fundraised on the promise of a smoking gun in the Mueller proceedings that never materialized, only to backpedal later and insist the report was meaningless when it became evident that there was no collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
Nonetheless, as he continued to investigate potential leads, he disingenuously issued public statements to suggest he was not fully on board with impeachment.
In the wake of the contrived Ukraine scandal, many in the media have now used what they falsely claim to be Schiff’s change of heart as evidence of a building movement.
Others have repeatedly sought to paint House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as being impeachment adverse, suggesting that she has valiantly pushed back against a groundswell of demand among the Democratic ranks rather than engineered it.
But as The Hill reported, the Democratic leadership’s response has been highly calculated. “The Speaker spoke to Schiff several times over the weekend to coordinate their messaging on the Ukraine story.”
For now, the Left’s offensive parry allows it to bury the crucial question—central to any accusations—of whether Trump’s call to investigate the Bidens was justified.
Regardless, Democrats’ incessant efforts to ensnare the president are hardly built upon a principled foundation—and, as the past has shown, their theatrics cannot conceal the flimsiness of the underlying case for impeaching Trump.
‘Everything she said was great, but to me it’s like, right, that’s not going to happen…’
Editor’s Note: Article contains mild profanity.
Elizabeth Warren / IMAGE: The Late Late Show with James Corden via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A familiar refrain is emerging as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., moves to assume front-runner status in the Democratic presidential primary: She’s a bitch.
Axios reported on the findings of a left-leaning focus group of nine women in Appleton, Wisconsin, that it conducted last week with Engagious, a firm closely monitoring several Trump-backing swing states.
Seven of the women had flipped from Obama to Trump, and two others had flipped from Mitt Romney to Hillary Clinton.
While most indicated that they preferred left-leaning policies like Warren’s, they disliked her personal demeanor.
“I like what she had to say, but I still think she’s—sorry—a bitch,” said Jill T., a 56-year-old who backed Obama and Trump.
It did not take long for the comparisons with Clinton to follow. A common liberal trope is that Clinton—and other assertive women like her—are held to an unfair standard because of their gender.
The problematic complaint diminishes other areas in which women benefit from perceptions of gender roles and expectations (e.g. the positive attention Clinton got for being the “historic” first female candidate), ignore the equally offensive ad hominem attacks levied at male and female conservative candidates, and—most of all—deny the objective reality of Clinton’s persona.
Warren seems destined to follow a similar path, faced with the dilemma that she must be hardened enough to meet the current president blow-for-blow in a general election but still empathic enough to sell her radical socialist agenda as a moral imperative while distancing herself from Trump’s style of confrontational politics.
Another of the focus-group women observed that Warren may have to be a “bitch” in order “to win and to survive.”
Others feared she may be too “too emotional” and viewed as a “pushover.”
Perceptions varied widely over Warren’s electability and leadership capabilities—with her gender assuming a central role in the discussion.
Several of the women doubted that she could overcome the handicap of being a woman while running against Trump, working with a predominantly male Congress, and asserting herself with other world leaders or adversaries.
“Warren won’t be looked upon as a leader because she’ll be presiding over a House and Senate full of men,” said Nicole W., a 33-year-old Trump voter. “I’m worried she won’t be taken seriously.”
Not all of the women in the group thought Warren’s policies would be embraced either.
“I think she brought across good points, but it’s whether or not she’ll be able to follow through on what she’s saying,” said Alicia K., 44.
Some were more cynical, saying they expected her charisma to be tempered by the political realities of the Capitol Hill landscape.
“Everything she said was great, but to me it’s like, right, that’s not going to happen,” said Sandy D., a 62-year-old Clinton voter.
And others still lauded her “strong-willed” determination and her message but still preferred Trump as the better leader.
Alicia K. said she liked the idea of student-debt forgiveness and Warren’s hard-line taxation policies—which the candidate has claimed will hit corporations but has refused to answer how middle-class taxpayers may be affected.
Axios noted that the opinions of the nine participants were not statistically significant enough to draw broader conclusions.
Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton / IMAGE: CBS News
However, they did offer a cautionary tale for Warren that Clinton failed to heed, not to take for granted that Midwestern values followed lockstep with those of left-wing urban centers on either coast.
Axios said a March focus group in the same Wisconsin town suggested voters were tiring of Trump, who narrowly won the state by around 22,000 votes. However, that does not guarantee they will prefer the alternative.
As CNN reported recently, Trump is also gaining ground in some Midwestern, blue-collar regions where his rollback of stifling Obama regulations has helped usher in economic recovery.
In Eveleth, a small, Minnesota mining town, residents noted that they were put off by Democrats’ shift leftward and that Republicans, led by Trump, had stepped in to fill the void as the party representing working-class laborers. Trump lost Minnesota in 2016 by just 44,000 votes.
“I don’t think by any means this is a locked down Democratic state it used to be,” said Cindy Rugely, an associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota.
‘Undermining the credibility of the claims behind the brand is much more pernicious than people saying, “OK, let’s all punish this brand…”‘
PHOTO: Twitter
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A new survey revealed that nearly three in 10 Americans had boycotted a brand for political reasons—but despite the vast array of virtue-signaling leftist companies, conservatives were roughly 10 percent less likely to do so.
Higher incomes, advanced degrees and liberal politics seemed to go hand-in-hand, revealing a direct correlation with likelihood to boycott, according to the poll released Monday by Morning Consult.
That included a recent boycott effort of SoulCycle, a pricey gym catered toward affluent idle-classers whose owner, Stephen Ross, was revealed in a Washington Post story to be planning a fundraiser for President Donald Trump.
“While it’s uncertain how much these three traits overlap among people who say they have boycotted services and goods for political reasons, liberal and wealthy both fit the typical customer profile at the latest company to suffer a major boycott—SoulCycle, where one class costs about $34 including tax,” Morning Consult noted.
Just under half of SoulCycle’s bookings come from three of the most liberal cities: New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.
Although wealthy liberals earning more than $100,000 made up only around 4 percent of the respondents, the report noted that their purchasing power still had an impact due to their ability to wage high-profile pressure campaigns that were well covered by sympathetic media, often spreading to other companies.
A prime example may be the effort by San Francisco-based software company Salesforce to refuse to do business with retailers who sold firearms.
While they may garner less exposure, conservatives, too, have been successful in boycotting companies that opposed their values—including those that capitulated to leftist pressure campaigns against gun-rights and other political wedge issues.
After Dick’s Sporting Goods pulled many of its firearms from the shelves, it faced a marked decline in revenue.
Conservatives also have seen success in thwarting attempted boycotts from the Left.
“There are people on the other side that get energized,” Maurice Schweitzer, a management professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told Morning Report. “…They actually might boost sales.”
Many threw their support to Home Depot earlier this year when one of its co-founders, Bernie Marcus, came out in support of the president.
Food chains—including Christian based Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out Burger—also have benefited from counter-boycotts when the Left attempted pressure campaigns.
Even so, the unrelenting nature of Leftist politics—and the widespread influence it exerts over media—has deterred right-leaning business leaders often from broadcasting their views, lest they be doxed and terrorized by activist protestors.
On the other hand, some far-left companies, such as Nike, have decided after analyzing the numbers to take a calculated risk on riling consumers.
The apparel giant’s controversial choice of Colin Kaepernick as a pitchman resulted in widespread backlash—but that, in turn, increased its revenue share among younger and more liberal consumers who viewed it as an iconoclastic rebel for offending public sensibilities.
Although “Gen Z” consumers scored lower than their parents and grandparents on the boycott scale, a separate report released last week by Morning Consult determined younger liberals were more likely to reward a company that espoused their views.
While Morning Consult’s full consumer study was available to subscribers, it did not make its methodology immediately apparent in the analyses, suggesting the possibility of a leftward skew in respondents that may account for the same effect did not apply to right-leaning consumers.
It did, however, offer helpful advice for how to maximize—or counter—the impacts of a politically motivated boycott: By exposing the hypocrisy of a virtue-signaling company whose values did not align with their marketing image.
“Undermining the credibility of the claims behind the brand is much more pernicious than people saying, ‘OK, let’s all punish this brand by not shopping there for a while,’” Thomas Ordahl, chief strategy officer at brand consulting firm Landor. “Because whatever this issue is, people are pretty equipped to get over that quickly.”
Among the companies that have suffered from their inconsistent messaging is Starbucks.
While conservatives have long sought to boycott its leftist virtue-signaling, including its decision to secularize its Christmas packaging, liberals have found objectionable its pro-corporate approaches along with some isolated accusations of racial discrimination in stores.
The threat of founding CEO Howard Schultz, who sought to run as a left-wing “moderate” and potential third-party spoiler, also offended both the right and left before Schultz announced he was taking a medical leave of absence from his campaign early this year.
‘This incredible memo details the conflicted and conniving coup effort against President Trump…’
Andrew McCabe/IMAGE: YouTube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A week after the firing of FBI Director James Comey, in May 2017, then-Acting Director Andrew McCabe sought to enlist new Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein into a sting operation against President Donald Trump.
Transparency advocate Judicial Watch announced Monday that it had received McCabe’s two-page memo outlining the exchange between the top criminal-justice officials, whose ideas for ensnaring the president included Rosenstein wearing a wire into private meetings.
“This incredible memo details the conflicted and conniving coup effort against President Trump,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement.
“It is astonishing and shocking McCabe thought he could have the FBI conduct a ‘counterintelligence’ operation on the president and Rosenstein thought it would be appropriate to wear a wire to secretly record President Trump in the Oval Office,” he added.
Rosenstein was new to the job himself, having been appointed after Obama’s deputy attorney general, Sally Yates, was fired for insubordination when she refused to enforce Trump’s travel ban on terrorist-harboring countries.
Immediately, the new deputy AG was handed responsibility for the looming Russia investigation since then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself two months prior.
Rosenstein ultimately signed off—alongside Attorney General William Barr—on the final determinations of the two-year-long Mueller investigation in March 2019.
The report found no evidence of Russian collusion with the Trump campaign—despite repeated overtures from the Kremlin—and declined to prosecute claims of obstruction of justice stemming from the president’s efforts to quell the fraudulent investigation.
However, the May 16, 2017 memo drafted by McCabe revealed the extent to which the deep-state bureaucrats within the law-enforcement agency sought early-on to fight back against Trump’s executive authority.
“I explained that counterintelligence investigations of this sort were meant to uncover any the existence of any threat to national security as well as whether or not criminal conduct had occurred,” noted McCabe, who was fired a year later for leaking to the media and was reprimanded by the DOJ’s inspector general for his misconduct.
Despite his disclosure to Rosenstein of the FBI investigation, McCabe gave no clear indication in the memo (some of which remains redacted by the DOJ) that he informed him about the true nature of the already leaked Steele Dossier, which provided the basis for the probe.
That the salacious report about Trump’s alleged Russia dealings was questionably sourced, had been commissioned by the Clinton campaign and obtained through back-channel arrangements would be revealed publicly later that year, amid a probe by congressional Republicans.
Using the weight of the investigation he had thusly authorized under false pretenses, McCabe sought to recruit the man who was technically his boss into the resistance movement.
“As our conversation continued the DAG [Rosenstein] proposed that he could potentially wear a recording device into the Oval Office to collect additional evidence on the President’s true intentions,” McCabe wrote.
Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein (screen shot: seattletimesdotcom/Youtube)
“He said he thought this might be possible because he was not searched when he entered the White House,” McCabe continued. “I told him that I would discuss the opportunity with my investigative team and get back to him.”
The memo indicated that both men, like Comey, feared for their jobs—but they seemed to make no connection with their own actions being the basis for dismissal, viewing the efforts as justified.
While Rosenstein had advocated for McCabe to continue as acting director during the search for a permanent director, he related the concerns to McCabe surrounding his partisan activity—namely his support for the Democratic candidacy of his wife, Jill, in a run for the Virginia state senate.
“The DAG said it was a ‘credibility problem’ because after having told him during my May 13 interview that I played no role in her campaign and attended no campaign events, the DAG said a staffer had provided him with a photograph found on the internet of me and my wife wearing Dr. Jill McCabe campaign t-shirts,” McCabe wrote in his memo.
He maintained that this was not a violation of the Hatch Act, which regulates the political activity of government officials.
Nonetheless, the memo did not address the nearly half a million dollars in political contributions given to Jill McCabe’s campaign by then-Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, a close Clinton ally and longtime fundraiser, while McCabe himself was overseeing investigations of both Trump and his opponent, Hillary Clinton.
Inspector General Michael Horowitz later rebuked McCabe, following an investigation, for failing to recuse himself from the Clinton case until shortly before the November 2016 election.
The redacted memo from McCabe came only after a yearlong court battle with the Justice Department, which failed to respond to a preliminary request under the Freedom of Information Act.
“That the DOJ and FBI sat on this smoking gun for a year shows the need for urgent housecleaning at those agencies,” Fitton said.
Rosenstein resigned from his post in May following the conclusion of the Mueller investigation.
Currently, McCabe remains under investigation in the Justice Department for his role in the Russia hoax conspiracy, although it is unclear whether he will face prosecution.
Top partisan officials from the Obama administration have already declared they will go to bat for him should he face trial.
Now, after having been outdone by current President Donald Trump, the Democrat diva is trying desperately to shake the label—and claim Twitter is un-presidential, along with other pop-culture touchstones he once embraced.
While speaking at a conference in San Francisco, Obama offered some pedantic, unsolicited advice to Trump (without directly naming him) on presidential decision-making,” CNBC reported.
“Make sure you have a team with a diversity of opinion sitting around you,” he said. “The other thing that’s helpful is not watching TV or reading social media. … It creates a lot of noise and clouds your judgment.”
Even his supporters acknowledged that he was prone oftentimes to pensive inaction—though euphemistically labeling him with words like “erudite.”
One thing Obama did love: Being doted upon by his legions of admirers and, in turn, incorporating social media as a way to take his message directly to the people—even with the large majority of the mainstream media following lockstep with him like a trail of baby ducklings.
“The biggest lesson that we’ve learned is that the bully pulpit is dead,” then-White House Communications Director Jen Psaki said in January 2017, looking back wistfully in the waning days of the Obama Administration.
“So we have a responsibility as a government and as his staff to come up with a range of ways and levers to communicate information,” Psaki said.
Now, however, publications like the left-wing Independent are insisting he really didn’t use it all that much.
“While Mr Obama was the first sitting president to make use of social media, he did so sparingly,” the British-based paper wrote, while covering his recent remarks. “By contrast, Mr Trump, who has 64.5m Twitter followers, uses it as a way to communicate directly with his supporters.”
It was an Obama staffer, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes (brother of the then CBS News president) who popularized the term “echo chamber” and admitted to exploiting leftist groupthink to misleadingly sell a controversial Iran agreement to the media.
But Obama himself declared that he put a premium on surrounding himself with an array of different viewpoints to foster healthy discussion and debate over policies.
“What it does mean is that if you are susceptible to worrying about what are the polls saying or what might this person say about this topic—or you start mistaking the intensity of the passion of a very small subset of people with a broader sense about your country or people who know something about the topic—that will sway your decision-making in an unhealthy way,” he told the San Francisco audience.
Obama should know. His refusal to acknowledge dissent on the Affordable Care Act resulted in the largest red-wave midterm in modern history.
When later faced with congressional majorities that opposed his agenda, Obama turned instead to his autopen-and-phone doctrine of issuing executive orders, including open-door immigration policies that paved the way for the ongoing border crisis.
That, in turn, became a central them in his successor’s 2016 campaign.
The latest revisionism is not the first time he has tried to selectively curate his legacy. Obama has previously claimed—to much derision—that he presided over a “scandal free” administration and that he was responsible for the economic boom of the Trump years following eight years of stagnation.
“That was me, people,” he told a Rice University audience last November.
The man whose 2012 campaign slogan was “You didn’t build that” continued to chide the audience:
“Have you checked where your stocks were when I came into office and where they are now?” he said. “What are you complaining about? Just say thank you, please.”
‘I looked at them and said, “I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money…”‘
Joe Biden and Donald Trump / IMAGES via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) As information continued to unfold in what the media sought to hype as a massive scandal for President Donald Trump over his alleged conversation with the Ukrainian president, many seemed to ignore that what Trump was being accused of is precisely what he sought Biden to be investigated for.
Trump stands accused of repeatedly urging Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy in July to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden‘s son, Hunter, according to the Wall Street Journal.
But attempting to coerce the Ukrainian justice system is nothing new since Biden openly acknowledged doing the exact same thing while vice president under Barack Obama.
At that time, Hunter Biden was under investigation in a corruption scandal involving the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, whose board the younger Biden was hired to serve on ad a paid consultant.
While vice president, Joe Biden pressured then-Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to pull the plug on the investigation by saying that the U.S. would revoke a $1 billion loan guarantee if Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin were not immediately fired.
“I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’” Biden recounted later in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations. “Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time.”
The complaint came to light after a whistleblower, believed to have been listening in on the call, expressed his concern to Michael Atkinson, the intelligence community inspector general.
Trump backers within the Justice Department pushed back on Atkinson’s claim that the matter should be brought before the attention of the House Intelligence Committee, where partisan, anti-Trump Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif. has desperately sought material that would undermine the president and possibly open the door to impeachment proceedings.
Nonetheless, Atkinson brought the matter to Schiff’s attention, issuing two letters to express his concern.
Trump continued on Friday morning to reject any accusations of impropriety on the call and to dismiss the scandal as yet another partisan witch hunt in a long series of efforts to undermine him.
….statement. Strange that with so many other people hearing or knowing of the perfectly fine and respectful conversation, that they would not have also come forward. Do you know the reason why they did not? Because there was nothing said wrong, it was pitch perfect!
‘It’s clear to me that Kaepernick is running the show to align Nike with a very niche cop-hating, anti-American clientele…’
A Nike ad featuring Colin Kaepernick hangs over Union Square in San Francisco. / IMAGE: ABC7 News Bay Area via Youtube
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A pro-capitalist, libertarian corporate watchdog tried calling Nike to task at a recent shareholder meeting, then demanded its CEO step down in favor of the apparel giant’s true leader: Colin Kaepernick.
Unfortunately, the company known for individualist slogans like “Just Do It” and “Believe in something. Even if it means sacrificing everything” was none too keen on hearing an opposing viewpoint.
His planned confrontation with Nike CEO Mark Parker at its Oregon meeting on Thursday was the 30th such shareholder meeting the FEP has attended this year, according to a press release.
“Since so many of Nike’s recent decisions have harmed the company’s reputation with conservative and patriotic Americans, Danhof planned to offer the company a way to repair this fractured relationship as well as benefit Nike’s shareholders,” said the release.
“However, Nike refused to allow Danhof to speak,” it said.
Danhof intended to criticize Nike over its decision, shortly before Independence Day, to discontinue a special-edition line of shoes that featured the original “Betsy Ross” flag with stars representing the original 13 colonies.
Kaepernick—the controversial pitchman whose NFL career as the San Francisco 49ers quarterback fizzled amid backlash over his kneeling during the national anthem—stepped in to demand that the shoes be pulled over the flag’s ‘racist’ connotations due to the colonies’ support of slavery.
“Your compliance with Kaepernick’s historical revisionism has further muddled your moral authority,” Danhof wrote, addressing Parker in a question that Nike forced him to submit in advance.
Justin Danhof poses during the Nike shareholder meeting in September 2019. / PHOTO: Free Enterprise Project
Wearing an “Stand Up for Betsy Ross” T-shirt issued by conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, Danhof planned to call on Nike to return the shoes to shelves.
“The sales from Rush’s shirt prove that there is a strong market for such patriotic items,” he wrote in the question. “If Nike were to re-issue the Betsy Ross shoe, this would go a long way toward repairing your reputation—and the company would likely sell a lot of shoes as well.”
After intercepting his question, though, Nike pared it down to a single sentence that would cast the brand in its best light, devoid of its original context and purpose: Why did you pull the Betsy Ross shoe from sale over the Fourth of July?
Danhof said the Nike CEO’s response was equally watered-down.
“Y’know we… I’ll just give a simple answer… We saw many people raising concerns and we made the decision to halt the distribution, and we didn’t want to unintentionally offend or detract from the Fourth of July holiday,” Parker said. “And that’s simply the reason that we made that decision.”
Danhof responded in FEP’s press statement by calling on Parker to step aside and let its chief signal-caller, Kaepernick, officially take the reins.
“Today Parker showed as much disdain for Nike investors as the company regularly shows toward conservatives,” he said. “It’s clear to me that Kaepernick is running the show to align Nike with a very niche cop-hating, anti-American clientele.”
Danhof said he questioned the Nike staffers as to how his question got revised and was initially stonewalled. They later acknowledged that Parker himself did it.
“Parker clearly doesn’t have the courage of his convictions,” Danhof said. “A CEO who can’t handle a few tough investor questions one time a year at the annual meeting doesn’t deserve the job.”
‘Words can come and go in a language, but those that show staying power and increasing use need to be recorded and described…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) In the lead-up to next year’s presidential election, Democrats have added a new ally to the “resistance”: Merriam–Webster’s dictionary.
It announced Tuesday that it had formally added 533 new words for the month of September, codifying the once-idiomatic expressions into the American vernacular.
“New words are a happy fact of life for a living language, and taking careful stock of the words that we use is an important part of the work of dictionary editors,” it said in the announcement on its website. “Words can come and go in a language, but those that show staying power and increasing use need to be recorded and described. In other words: they need definitions.”
More than a few of them, however, seem to tie directly to the Left’s political agenda, including: “red flag law,” “they” (as a non-binary gender pronoun), “inclusive” (as in, accommodating to minorities), “colorism” and “Bechdel test” (i.e. an arbitrary standard devised for gender equity in movies, etc.).
The additions appear to be part of a biannual process—with an April update adding other terms like “gender nonconforming,” “bottom surgery” (i.e. the surgical alteration of a transgender person’s genitals) and “vulture capitalism.”
In fairness, the dictionary also added this year a handful of conservative-friendly terms, such as “snowflake” and “deep state.”
Not surprisingly, they’ve received help from academics and media figures—be it the dubiously skewed rules of the Associated Press Stylebook that many journalists abide by or the annual list of “banished words” promoted by Lake Superior State University.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez applauded some of the new Merriam–Webster additions in a tweet following their announcement.
What great news!
Shout out to all our non-binary fam in the world, and the activists who’ve worked hard to let us celebrate the full spectrum of humanity 🏳️🌈 https://t.co/BkpdVPleNe
Many of the top responses on her tweet contended that the linguistic concept of “non-binary” pronouns—suggesting that gender is a mere social construct—pitted it against the scientific understanding that gender is established on a chromosomal level.
Breitbart noted that the push for multiple genders, once considered absurd, continues to gain traction as left-wing activists wage a public-pressure campaign.
“The use of ‘nonbinary’ and ‘gender-neutral’ pronouns has been heavily advocated by the left, resulting in a number of states — like Pennsylvania—moving to offer an “X” option on driver’s licenses,” it said.
“Additionally, states like New Jersey moved to allow a nonbinary option on birth certificates, and D.C. schools have embraced a nonbinary option as well.”
The Associated Press also added “they” as a singular pronoun into its Stylebook, while a BBC children’s education program shockingly asserted that there are more than 100 gender identities.
The acceptance of “they” as a singular pronoun in connection with transgenderism poses a dilemma for grammarians and others who have long corrected its use in a different context, referring to a person whose gender was unspecified but was not necessarily on the LGBT spectrum.
Now, another institution has been added: the “racist” nominating contests that push the wrong candidates to the forefront, lending crucial momentum to their campaigns while deflating the efforts of minority-friendly underdogs like… former Vice President Joe Biden?
“Not a single Democratic candidate for president is racist,” wrote Jessica Tarlov, head of research at Bustle Digital Group and a Fox News contributor, in an opinion piece published Tuesday by The Hill.
“In fact, the majority of them have dedicated their careers to lifting up minority voices,” Tarlov continued. “But the system—like so much of the bureaucracy in America—is [racist].”
Tarlov complained that the sequence of primaries and caucuses diminished minority voices—and black voters in particular.
“It isn’t new to point out and bemoan the fact that the two earliest primaries are in majority-white states where voters don’t reflect the national party,” she wrote. “Narratives and results developed around Iowa and New Hampshire create deep misrepresentation of the 2020 race.”
According to 2010 census data, all but four states (Hawaii, California, Texas and New Mexico) are majority white. Overall, white voters (excluding Latino/Hispanic voters who are technically considered Caucasian) make up 60 percent of the population.
Only two other states—Nevada and South Carolina, both of which have large nonwhite constituencies—are scheduled to precede the March 3 “Super Tuesday” primaries next year.
But those hardly offered consolation for the offenses of their two electoral forebears. Both Iowa and New Hampshire customarily have had citizenries more than 90 percent white—although a recent influx of Latinos has taken Iowa to 85 percent as of July 2018.
“In our quest to quarterback the race, predominantly white electorates bestow ‘surge’ status upon candidates who are out of step with crucial voting blocs,” griped Tarlov. “The result is that the atmosphere of this primary season is divorced from the reality of a) how elections are won for Democrats and b) the values and priorities candidates espouse in campaigning.”
Not satisfied with lumping all nonwhite minorities together under one generic banner of ‘marginalized Democratic voters,’ Tarlov shifted her focus specifically to America’s black population, which comprises 13.4 percent of the total but disproportionately influences the electorate, she claimed.
“After big and important Democratic wins, black voters are lauded for their loyalty and consistency,” Tarlov generalized.
Surprisingly, while radical progressives like Bernie Sanders have complained that the front-loading of more conservative-leaning primaries was unfair to them, Tarlov took the opposite approach.
She said it was Biden, the odds-on favorite and self-declared working-class moderate, who was being victimized by a false narrative that ignored his overwhelming support among blacks.
“African Americans are still the most consistent, loyal Democratic voters,” Tarlov stereotyped, “and they also happen to be the biggest supporters of frontrunner Joe Biden’s candidacy.”
She blamed recent shifts in the momentum not on the 76-year-old’s Biden’s own shortcomings but on the the institutional racism underlying the entire electoral process.
“A perusal of the latest headlines tells you what you need to know about the narratives of the race, which have been far more interested in amplifying candidacies that garner little to no African American support while dismissing Biden’s as dull, gaffe-prone or safe.”
In essence, Tarlov asserted, it was “white privilege” that was oppressing Biden and his candidacy.
“No candidate is above close coverage and no analyst would claim Biden is a perfect candidate,” she said. “White liberals can love Warren or Buttigieg until the cows come home, but the belittling of Biden’s support reeks of privilege. This type of coverage is adding yet another systemic challenge to black Americans’ futures.”
