Last night, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training who has been a <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/11/19/alexander-vindman-condemned-himself-in-his-impeachment-testimony/">frequent</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/11/26/why-trumps-ukraine-demands-werent-remotely-illegal/">commentator</a> on Democrats’ current partisan <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge/">impeachment</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/19/pelosis-newest-dirty-trick-putting-trumps-senate-trial-on-hold/">effort</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fR6O_a8m-8A">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network (OANN) to discuss the Democrats&#8217; increasingly hard push to ensure that <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-bad-trump-presidents-dismissal-john-bolton-josh-hammer">former</a> National Security Advisor John Bolton is called to testify during the Senate impeachment trial of President Donald Trump.
&#8220;Democrats may decide to call Bolton to testify about a possible quid pro quo between Trump and Ukrainian officials regarding an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter, even though the articles of impeachment are already published.&#8221; The Daily Wire&#8217;s Emily Zanotti <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/pelosi-threatens-to-call-john-bolton-to-testify-in-house-even-as-dems-vote-to-send-impeachment-articles-to-senate">reported</a> earlier this month. &#8220;Senior Democrats raised the possibility of subpoenaing Bolton last week, after Bolton himself admitted that, if asked to testify by the Senate, he would comply (though he did not speak on whether he would do the same for a House subpoena, and referenced Republicans specifically).&#8221;
&#8220;The theory seems to be, according to a plan of action outlined by former advisors of President Barack Obama on the left-leaning site, <a href="https://crooked.com/articles/subpoena-john-bolton-democrats/">Crooked</a>, if Bolton is called to testify in the House and provides information critical to the case against the President, that Senate Republicans will have no choice but to allow witnesses at Trump’s Senate impeachment trial,&#8221; Zanotti continued.
Last week, The Federalist&#8217;s David Marcus <a href="https://thefederalist.com/2020/01/14/john-boltons-testimony-would-not-be-the-smoking-gun-democrats-need/">argued</a> that even if Bolton testified, his testimony would hardly be the smoking gun that Democrats seem to think it would be. &#8220;[W]hat can John Bolton possibly say that would prove Trump’s intent was malicious, and not genuine concern about taxpayer dollars falling into corrupt hands?&#8221; Marcus asked rhetorically. &#8220;Is he really going to say, &#8216;The president told me he doesn’t care about corruption, he just wanted to get that pesky Joe Biden and get him good?&#8217; Is there anyone on the face of the planet who thinks that such a conversation could have taken place?&#8221;
Hammer joined Wheeler&#8217;s OANN program to discuss the same topic. Hammer agreed with Marcus that there is no plausible scenario in which Bolton&#8217;s Senate testimony would be a smoking gun.
<blockquote>[Bolton] is clearly not going to provide any kind of smoking gun testimony for the reasons that you just outlined. &#8230; [M]y boss at The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, had a good, pretty lengthy <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/10/the-two-theories-of-trumps-actions-in-the-ukraine-affair/">column for National Review</a> back in October [on this]. There are two theories as to what happened on the now-infamous July 25th phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky. The first theory Ben calls the &#8220;Get Biden Theory&#8221;; the second theory is what Ben calls the &#8220;Miasma of Corruption Theory.&#8221;
So on the first hand, Trump is just trying to politically &#8230; get his opponent, Joe Biden. The second hand, he&#8217;s actually trying to attach corruption-related strings to the doling out of taxpayer aid. My reading of everything that&#8217;s happened so far is that this second theory, the &#8220;Miasma of Corruption Theory,&#8221; is more likely. Possibly, the &#8220;Get Biden Theory&#8221; is right, but as you say, the only reason — or the only way that we would ever be shown that is right — is if John Bolton was literally told by Donald J. Trump, president of the United States, &#8220;I am doing this to get Joe Biden.&#8221; That&#8217;s not going to happen.</blockquote>
Hammer also elaborated on Twitter earlier today.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Schiff is gaslighting us. What “evidence” is being hidden?<a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@benshapiro</a> laid it out well at <a href="https://twitter.com/NRO?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@NRO</a> in Oct. There is the “Get Biden Theory” and the “Miasma of Corruption Theory.” There is one thing and one thing only distinguishing the two: Subjective intent. <a href="https://t.co/0wPsbGalBv">https://t.co/0wPsbGalBv</a>
&mdash; Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1219692018668130304?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2020</a></blockquote>
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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Any purported “evidence” that does not directly speak to that subjective intent — what lawyers call mens rea — is, in actuality, no evidence at all.
&mdash; Josh Hammer (@josh_hammer) <a href="https://twitter.com/josh_hammer/status/1219692427335950343?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 21, 2020</a></blockquote>
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WATCH:
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Hammer OANN 1.20.10

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: John Bolton Is No Smoking Gun

Democratic Party

Donald Trump

Impeachment

John Bolton

U.S. Senate

Ukraine

Volodymyr Zelensky

On Friday, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training who has been a <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/11/19/alexander-vindman-condemned-himself-in-his-impeachment-testimony/">frequent</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/11/26/why-trumps-ukraine-demands-werent-remotely-illegal/">commentator</a> on Democrats&#8217; current partisan <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge/">impeachment</a> <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/19/pelosis-newest-dirty-trick-putting-trumps-senate-trial-on-hold/">effort</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-HnMAHs3-c">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network (OANN) to discuss the recent report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) purporting to show that, by initially withholding the disbursement of foreign aid money to Ukraine last summer, President Donald Trump violated the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 (ICA). It is this withholding of Ukrainian foreign aid money that forms the crux of the Democrats&#8217; impeachment push.
As The Daily Wire initially <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/read-it-gaos-report-on-white-house-withholding-ukraine-aid-violated-law">reported</a> last Thursday, the officially nonpartisan GAO claimed that Trump violated the ICA and, by implication, also the <a href="https://www.heritage.org/constitution/articles/2/essays/98/take-care-clause">Take Care Clause</a> of Article II of the Constitution. “Faithful execution of the law does not permit the President to substitute his own policy priorities for those that Congress has enacted into law,” the GAO report asserted, as The Daily Wire reported. “[The Office of Management and Budget (OMB)] withheld funds for a policy reason, which is not permitted under the [ICA]. The withholding was not a programmatic delay. Therefore, we conclude that OMB violated the ICA.”
Hammer penned an <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/17/trumps-ukraine-money-holdup-doesnt-make-for-an-impeachable-breach-of-the-law/">op-ed</a> in Saturday&#8217;s New York Post in which he argued that &#8220;Trump likely did not violate the ICA,&#8221; but that &#8220;even if he did breach it, that law itself comes with its own remedy baked in — and it is a far less draconian remedy than impeachment.&#8221; He then elaborated:
<blockquote>
To be sure, expressly directing a subordinate to violate federal law is inconsistent with the Take Care Clause. But the president also has other obligations under Article II of the Constitution. The very first clause of Article II vests the president with “the executive Power.” The doling out of foreign aid is an integral part of conducting foreign affairs, and, according to a 2001 Yale Law Journal article by legal scholars Saikrishna Prakash and Michael Ramsey, 18th-century English common law — which helped form the Framers’ thinking — had an “ordinary &#8230; meaning of executive power” that “included foreign affairs power.”
Similarly, in the 1936 Supreme Court case U.S. v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., the justices describe the president as “the sole organ of the federal government in the field of international relations — a power which does not require as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress.” &#8230;
[Furthermore,] as my boss at The Daily Wire, Ben Shapiro, quickly observed after news of the GAO report hit, the ICA prescribes a precise remedy for a situation in which the president allegedly violates it. Specifically, 2 U.S.C. § 687 provides for a cause of action by the comptroller general in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. But since the funds have been released, any legal action would be moot.
</blockquote>
On Friday&#8217;s OANN appearance, Wheeler began by asking Hammer whether the alleged ICA violation is impeachable. Hammer strongly opined that it should not be viewed as impeachable, and went on to describe the current Democratic mentality and antics as &#8220;desperate,&#8221; &#8220;reckless,&#8221; and &#8220;borderline dangerous&#8221;:
<blockquote>
The Impoundment Control Act in 1974 actually provides for a precise remedy within the statute. So a lot of people are talking about this as a possible impeachment vehicle, but it is a deliberate, disingenuous, bad faith effort to attempt to impeach as a draconian remedy where the statute itself has the savviness and the foresight to provide for a much lesser remedy.
And let&#8217;s talk about that remedy. It&#8217;s [title] two of the United States Code, then sub-section 687, I believe. The remedy is the Comptroller General of the United States is allowed to file suit in the federal trial court in the District of Columbia to force the president, essentially, to disburse the funds. Liz, here&#8217;s the problem with that: The funds have already been disbursed! They were released and there was barely any delay. So even according to the statute&#8217;s own remedy — according to the statutory structure &#8230; it&#8217;s a moot case. In law school, you learn this is called a moot lawsuit because the funds were disbursed. Ukraine didn&#8217;t even know that the funds were being withheld.
So all of this is starting to remind me a lot of the whole [Brett] Kavanaugh [Supreme Court nomination] fiasco, where they would just throw mud at the wall and see what sticks. You know, we talked about [how] the Democrats first were talking about quid pro quo, [but] that didn&#8217;t poll-test well. Then they were publicly flirting with bribery and they knew they didn&#8217;t have the legal gravitas to make that argument. They are just so desperate, at this point. Swing state poll after swing state poll shows they&#8217;re gonna lose next November — Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, all these voters are starting to turn against the Democrats. And this is really starting to get reckless; it&#8217;s actually borderline dangerous, at this point, I would say.
</blockquote>
Wheeler agreed, saying that the Democrats do routinely &#8220;move the goalposts.&#8221;
WATCH:
<iframe title="The Truth About The GAO Report" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/G-HnMAHs3-c?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Hammer OANN 1.17.20

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: The Truth About The GAO &#8216;Bombshell&#8217;

Congress

Constitution

On Thursday night, Daily Wire Senior Editor Ashe Schow joined The Heritage Foundation’s Charmaine Yoest on EWTN’s “Pro-Life Weekly” with host Catherine Hadro to discuss Planned Parenthood’s annual report regarding its services and organization.
Hadro opened the segment by explaining that Planned Parenthood performed 13,000 more abortions in 2019 than in 2018, for a total of 345,672 abortions, for an increase of 3.88% over 2018. These staggering numbers caused Yoest to refer to Planned Parenthood as “Abortion, Inc.” Schow noted that while the organization increased the number of abortions it performed, all other major services actually declined.
“As abortions go up for Planned Parenthood, all of their other services that they like to saying, ‘no we’re not just [about] abortion,’ have gone down,” Schow said, citing numbers from the report <a href="https://www.lifenews.com/2020/01/06/planned-parenthood-annual-report-shows-it-killed-345672-babies-in-abortions-more-than-ever-before/">and LifeNews</a>. “You’ve got contraception down 2%, pap smears and tests down 7%, breast exams down 11%, cancer screenings down 8%. Prenatal care? Down 68% since 2010, and to put that in perspective, for last year, Planned Parenthood killed 35 babies for every one woman it helped with prenatal care. Adoption referrals down year over year and again, killed 80 babies for every one adoption referral.”
Many of the services listed by Schow had dropped, but were still provided at a higher rate than abortions. Contraception services, for example, dropped 2% to 2,556,413 in 2018, but far outpaced the nearly 350,000 abortions provided by the organization.
Schow also discussed the fact that Planned Parenthood’s annual report completely glossed over the fact that it underwent a leadership crisis in 2019 after firing Dr. Leana Wen because she tried to get the organization to focus on more than just abortion.
“She was trying to get the organization to actually focus on women’s health and other things. She tried talking to pro-life groups and people who weren’t necessarily for abortion but didn’t like medical intrusion in medical health,” Schow said. “She wanted more services for maybe mental health and addiction but within Planned Parenthood it was just, ‘no, abortion’s our thing [and] we’re sticking to it.’”
Schow also bemoaned the constant messaging surrounding abortions, suggesting women can only succeed if they abort their child.
“People know: ‘If I need an abortion, I can go to Planned Parenthood.’ And it says a whole lot about the culture. You’ve got Democrats and progressives just constantly – just recently at the Golden Globes, you had a pregnant Michelle Williams saying the only reason she was able to accept this award was because she aborted a child,” Schow said. “You’ve got this constant messaging to women that if they have a child, their life is over and they can never succeed. And it’s working, it’s clearly working. Abortions are going up even though polls show Americans don’t agree with abortion. By and large, Americans want it at least limited to just the first trimester, and yet you have all this messaging that you should have an abortion in order to succeed in life.
You can watch the full video below:
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Ashe

WATCH: Schow On ‘Pro-Life Weekly’: As Abortions Rose At Planned Parenthood, All Other Major Services Declined

Abortion

Planned Parenthood

Last night, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRvUG6NTn78&amp;feature=youtu.be">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network to discuss the latest twists and turns in Democrats&#8217; ongoing partisan impeachment saga, as well as to recap the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-the-new-york-post-obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge">deeply flawed nature</a> of House Democrats&#8217; two finalized articles of impeachment.
&#8220;House Democrats emerged from a closed-door meeting Tuesday morning to finally announce the much-delayed vote on sending their articles of impeachment against President Trump — passed nearly a month ago without a single Republican vote — to the Senate,&#8221; The Daily Wire&#8217;s James Barrett <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/defeated-democrats-announce-vote-on-sending-impeachment-articles-but-not-wholl-be-running-the-show">reported</a> earlier today. &#8220;The big vote will take place Wednesday, though one particularly important detail has yet to be determined: who exactly from the House is going to be presenting the Democrats’ case against the duly elected president during the Senate trial,&#8221; Barrett continued.
In a <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/13/obstruction-of-congress-is-an-utterly-ridiculous-impeachment-charge/">New York Post op-ed</a> last month, Hammer explained why House Democrats&#8217; second article of impeachment, &#8220;obstruction of Congress,&#8221; is &#8220;an utterly ridiculous impeachment charge&#8221;:
<blockquote>
Our tripartite separation-of-powers edifice was hardly devised for the purpose of ensuring amiability between the legislative, executive and judicial branches. On the contrary, the Framers envisioned a national government in which the three branches existed in a state of continuous, unyielding tension with one another.
In particular, the two political branches — Congress and the executive branch — were meant to be jealous guardians of their own ambits and spheres of influence. Ceaseless tussling between them was to be the norm. “Ambition,” James Madison told us in Federalist 51, “must be made to counteract ambition.” &#8230;
That is how our separation of powers is supposed to function — in a state far closer to animosity than to geniality. Which is precisely why House Democrats alleging “obstruction of Congress” as an article of impeachment makes no sense.
</blockquote>
Wheeler began the segment last night by asking about that deeply problematic second article of impeachment. Wheeler noted that the Democrats accused the president of &#8220;obstructi[ng]&#8221; Congress without even waiting for the judiciary to weigh in with respect to congressional subpoenas issued for Trump administration officials. Hammer agreed and also reiterated, in similar fashion to the Post op-ed, that the article of impeachment is also non-sensical from the broader perspective of structural constitutionalism:
<blockquote>[T]his impeachment charge is so risible. &#8230; The entire separation of powers construct is built around tension. The three branches of government — the legislative branch, the executive branch, the judicial branch — are not &#8230; intended to exist in some state of harmony. &#8230; No, that&#8217;s not what the Framers envisioned.
James Madison, in The Federalist No. 51, maybe the most famous Federalist Paper of them all, clearly says &#8220;ambition must be made to counteract ambition.&#8221; They&#8217;re supposed to be zealous guardians of their own idiosyncratic spheres of influence. They&#8217;re supposed to butt heads. They&#8217;re supposed to use all the various tools at their disposal to push back and try to encroach upon each other&#8217;s spheres. They&#8217;re [each] supposed to want to be the most dominant branch. Each one is supposed to not get along with the others. &#8230;</blockquote>
Wheeler agreed, noting that the second impeachment charge is therefore &#8220;both practically and philosophically ridiculous.&#8221;
WATCH:
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Hammer OANN screen grab 1.13.20

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: A Senate Impeachment Trial Looms

Federalist

Mitch McConnell

Nancy Pelosi

U.S. House of Representatives

On Tuesday, CNN International and PBS host Christiane Amanpour conducted two interviews, one with U.S. Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and another with Iranian VP for women and family affairs Massoumeh Ebtekar, and the contrast in Amanpour’s attitude toward the interviewees could not have been more stark, as she targeted Esper while lobbing softballs at Ebtekar.
As Curtis Houck of Newsbusters <a href="https://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/curtis-houck/2020/01/08/cnn-pbs-host-amanpour-shows-more-deference-iranian-vp-sec-esper">pointed out</a> in a comprehensive report, Amanpour started her interview with Esper by suggesting that the threat that the Trump administration cited for its airstrike killing Iranian general Qassem Doleimani was based on evidence that was “razor thin and the chatter was nothing out of the ordinary.” She challenged Esper to look at “the world down the barrel of this camera straight in the eye and say that there was a ticking time bomb evidence.”
Esper fired back that the evidence was “more than razor thin, and it&#8217;s persuasive,” that  Solemani aimed “to synchronize and plan additional attacks on American forces, diplomats or facilities.”
Amanpour segued to claiming that in Iran there was “not just an outpouring of grief from the people there and rallying around a regime that had been unpopular, but that it&#8217;s also a message” of revenge. As Houck noted, Amanpour posited that allies of the U.S. were calling on the U.S. to deescalate, and thus, &#8220;You are being put in the same boat as Iran. I don&#8217;t recall this ever happening before, where the United States and a nation like Iran, are both being put in the same boat, both being asked to de-escalate. How does that make you feel?”
Esper answered, “Well, I guess I disagree with your premise, Christiane. I will tell you — and I&#8217;ve talked to all these allies and partners — the ones in the region are fully, 100 percent supportive of what we&#8217;ve done and what we&#8217;re prepared to do. They see the removal of Soleimani, this known terrorist and head of a terrorist organization, his removal from the battlefield as a great victory and they know what it means — and it&#8217;s a game changer for the region.”
Amanpour then launched into a tirade attacking the decision to target Soleimani, saing:
<blockquote>&#8230; senior Americans have told me that intelligence officials in — you know, your own intelligence officials — predicted precisely this kind of Iranian escalation after the maximum pressure campaign that followed the withdrawal from the nuclear deal. They predicted attacks on shipping in the Gulf — it happened. They predicted attacks on Saudi Arabia — it happened. They suggested it might happen against U.S. bases, U.S. targets — it did happen. You talk about Soleimani, but what is the strategy here? I mean, you knew that this was possibly going to happen. Was it wise — you talk about Soleimani — nobody is claiming that he was a good guy, no — none of your allies are — and everybody knows what his role in the region was, but by the same token, previous U.S. administrations, when they could, did not take him out. Israel, when it could, did not take him out, for fear of the consequences. I guess I want to ask you, do you regret putting that extreme option on the table for the President? Wouldn&#8217;t some of the other options have sufficed in this period to send a very strong message of deterrence?</blockquote>
Esper replied, “Well, Christiane, I would say many experts, going back a few years now, predicted and were proven true, that in the wake of the JCPOA, which did not cover ballistic missiles, which did not cover Iran&#8217;s hostage-taking, which did not cover Iran&#8217;s malign behavior, that such activities would pick up — particularly when we opened up the economic spigots and we returned to them tens of billions of dollars — we saw this activity pick up across the region, again, spanning from Africa, through the Middle East to Afghanistan and what&#8217;s happened in the last few years, in Iraq in particular, in the last 12 months, is just a manifestation of an Iranian regime that is bent on exporting its revolutionary beliefs.”
In 1979, Ebtekar, who was 18 and a spokeswoman for the Iranian hostage-takers who seized 52 Americans, was <a href="https://twitter.com/HanifJazayeri/status/1214667445694275584">asked</a> about the American hostages if she could “personally lift up a gun and put it to the head of one of these people and kill him” if there were an attack on the U.S. embassy to save the hostages. As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/28/world/top-woman-in-iran-s-government-once-spoke-for-hostage-takers.html">The New York Times</a> reported, she answered, “Yes. When I&#8217;ve seen an American gun being lifted up and killing my brothers and sisters in the streets, of course.&#8221; Here are some samplings of how Amanpour, who did not mention Ebtekar’s 1979 role, treated Ebtekar:
When Amanpour asked whether Iran would “respond” to American “call[s] for descalation,” Ebtekar cited “millions who are marching in support and in commemoration of&#8230;the Commander of the Hearts” against the Americans having “taken a terrorist action” in killing Soleimani. Amanpour stated she found it “interesting” that Ebtekar called the reaction in Iran to Soleimani’s death a “revival of the Islamic revolution.”
Ebtekar delightedly suggested there was a “wave of awakening” in the U.S. on social media “understand[ing] very well what has happened and the terrible actions of the American government.”
Amanpour concluded by insinuating that the Iranian leadership was moderate and “took a gamble negotiating with the United States, saying:
<blockquote>I have heard that message coming out of Iran from the days since this targeted killing, that the final response should be from your perspective to remove American forces, but what I want to ask you is this because you were and are a committed revolutionary. You were very prominent during the early days of the Islamic revolution, but you became more of a reformist as well, and you supported the negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal, and diplomacy to, you know, settle some issues.
My question to you now is, is that completely out of the window? Are people like you and Foreign Minister Zarif, even President Rouhani, who took a gamble negotiating with the United States, are they sidelined? Is it now those who believe that America can never be discussed with, for want of a better word, hard-liners, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps? Are they more in the ascendancy? Is there any hope for any negotiations, very briefly, if you wouldn&#8217;t mind?</blockquote>
Interviews below:
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2019 International Emmy Awards Gala

WATCH: CNN’s Amanpour Targets Def Sec Esper, Goes Soft On Iranian VP Who Once Said She&#8217;d Shoot U.S. Hostages In The Head

Last night, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, an attorney and former federal judicial law clerk, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cup29nPmOgo">joined</a> “Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler” on One America News Network to discuss New York state&#8217;s extraordinarily controversial new &#8220;bail reform&#8221; legislation. The law, which the New York Post editorial board <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/07/with-lives-at-stake-albany-must-bail-reform-failure-now/">decries</a> today as a flat-out &#8220;bad law,&#8221; eliminates the possibility of judge-imposed cash bail for the overwhelming majority of crimes committed in the Empire State.
Here is how the Post <a href="https://nypost.com/2020/01/07/with-lives-at-stake-albany-must-bail-reform-failure-now/">describes</a> some of the problems with the law:
<blockquote>One huge problem: The new law prevents judges from ordering most criminal suspects jailed, or even requiring them to post bail, no matter how clear a threat to public safety they pose. Judges retain discretion only if the charges include a handful of very violent crimes and they deem the suspect a clear flight risk.
This guarantees a revolving door for serious perps: Caught for a minor holdup, you’ll be charged and released — and can do it again, get caught again and be released again, time after time after time.</blockquote>
The Daily Wire has also <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-bail-reform-woman-involved-in-anti-semitic-attack-arrested-released-for-3-crimes-in-5-days">previously reported</a> on the law&#8217;s noxiousness. The Daily Wire&#8217;s Amanda Prestigiacomo recently <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/democrat-bail-reform-woman-involved-in-anti-semitic-attack-arrested-released-for-3-crimes-in-5-days">reported</a> on a serial anti-Semitic assaulter who astoundingly committed three separate crimes in a span of five days due to the law&#8217;s inordinate leniency. As also reported by Prestigiacomo, all five borough district attorneys in New York City have gone on the record stating that the law goes too far in favoring defendants.
Hammer has consistently been very critical of this type of pro-criminal, &#8220;jailbreak&#8221;-style legislation. Last weekend, Giancarlo Sopo of TheBlaze <a href="https://www.theblaze.com/news/virginia_weak_on_crime_democrats">quoted</a> him in the context of a similar partisan Democratic initiative in Virginia:
<blockquote>Reached by telephone, constitutional law attorney and Daily Wire editor-at-large Josh Hammer told TheBlaze that [the proposed Virginia] bill is part of a pattern among Democrats and like-minded &#8220;weak-on-crime&#8221; Republicans.
&#8220;Across the country, we see so many leftist Democrats — joined by no small share of libertarian-leaning Republicans — subscribing to the same weak-on-crime agenda,&#8221; Hammer, who has been critical of similar so-called &#8220;criminal justice reform&#8221; efforts, said.
&#8220;New York&#8217;s harrowing recent &#8216;bail reform&#8217; proposal is a shining example, and this Democratic proposal in Virginia fits in neatly, as well. Americans have historically cherished law and order, and it is devastating to see these kind of jailbreak, pro-criminal policies take hold as we descend further into mass lawlessness,&#8221; he added.</blockquote>
Wheeler began the segment by asking Hammer about the New York lawmakers&#8217; purported aim — to reduce inequality and promote justice — and why the law&#8217;s authors do not seem to care about equality and justice for the actual victims of crime. Hammer launched into a rant about how the Left is able to effectively wield seemingly anodyne language, such as &#8220;bail reform,&#8221; as a cudgel to advance their lawless agenda:
<blockquote>The problem with the Left is the Left speaks about justice and compassion and all these fancy words. They never focus on the people who actually suffer &#8230; from their policies. So in the case of border security and amnesty, there is no one who suffers worse from an open border and the human trafficking by drug cartels than the aliens themselves who are trafficked. In the case of &#8220;criminal justice reform,&#8221; &#8220;bail reform,&#8221; no one suffers more than victims of crime.
Where is anyone speaking for the victims of crime? But you know what the Left also does, Liz? The Left is amazing at getting the right version of language for their policies. &#8220;Bail reform,&#8221; it sounds so innocuous, right? What they&#8217;re doing is they&#8217;re throwing out a system of bail that has existed since at least 13th century England! That is how far back bail goes — cash bail, monetary bail. This is literally a centuries-old phenomenon that they are just throwing out.</blockquote>
WATCH:
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Hammer OANN 1.07.20

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: New York’s Insane Pro-Criminal Bail Law

Anti-Semitism

Crime

Hate Crime

Jail

Leftism

New York

New York City

Prison

Progressivism

On Monday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about how Ricky Gervais exposed the gap between Hollywood and the American people for all to see. Video and partial transcript below: 
Far more cold-blooded, far more brutal than the killing of Soleimani were Ricky Gervais’ attacks on Hollywood last night at the Golden Globes. The Golden Globes — opening up awards season here in Hollywood — awards season is so irrelevant these days that I didn&#8217;t even know it was happening. I forgot. 
I have worked professionally in show business, I live in Hollywood, I am right here at the center of it, and I forgot that it was going on. I didn&#8217;t know until yesterday when someone said, “You know, the Golden Globes is on.” Oh, really? Okay, who cares? That is how out of touch these people are. 
They decided to become relevant this year that the Golden Globes is going to go vegan. So they served dinner at this particular awards show, and it was going to go completely vegan to help the environment because that&#8217;s that&#8217;s the way that they&#8217;re going to finally turn their failing ratings around and relate to the American people. No, probably not. 
Ricky Gervais gets up there, he&#8217;s hosted this a number of times in the past, he said this would be his last time hosting, and Ricky Gervais didn&#8217;t care. He went for the necks of Hollywood and he — wow, I just realized the pun there because he opened up the night with an Epstein joke, so the pun was not intended. But all of Ricky Gervais’ attacks were intended. He said, I don&#8217;t care. I&#8217;m leaving nothing on the table. 
I think his monologue was pretty much the only shot that the award season has to relate in any way to the American people. It was great, and it was great at the expense of the audience in the room. The Hollywood stars, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, he open[ed] the night with a joke about Jeffrey Epstein. 
<blockquote>GERVAIS: Spoiler alert, Season 2 is on the way, so in the end, he obviously didn&#8217;t kill himself — just like Jeffrey Epstein. Shut up. I know he&#8217;s your friend, but I don&#8217;t care. You had to make your own way here in your own plane, didn’t ya?</blockquote>
Oh my gosh, what a great one-two. He opens up with the Jeffrey Epstein joke, right? That would have been enough, but Hollywood can&#8217;t laugh about Jeffrey Epstein. They didn&#8217;t laugh, they kind of stayed a little quiet. They kind of groaned, which set up Gervais for the actual punchline of his joke, which is, “Oh, shut up, I know you&#8217;re all friends with the guy” — because they are! They are all friends with the guy and they&#8217;re all friends with all the MeToo perpetrators and they&#8217;re friends with all of these sex criminals. 
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They pretend that they&#8217;re not, they clutch their pearls and they pretend to be so nice and wonderful and high and mighty. He says, “Yeah, you had to take your own plane here tonight, didn&#8217;t you?” That one finally got the lights so awkward. It was so brutal and the attacks only got harsher. From there, he went after every single person in that room for hypocrisy, and at many points, you could pretty much hear a pin drop. 
<blockquote>GERVAIS: A superb drama about the importance of dignity and doing the right thing, made by a company that runs sweatshops in China. So when you say you’re woke but the companies you work for — I mean, unbelievable. Apple, Amazon, Disney — if ISIS started a streaming service, you&#8217;d call your agent, wouldn&#8217;t you? So, if you do win an award tonight, don&#8217;t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You&#8217;re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world.Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. So if you win, alright, come up accept your little award, thank your agent, and your god, and [expletive] off. </blockquote>
That little bit that we had to bleep out there at the end is where, Ricky Gervais told people where they could go after they had received their award. It was a wonderful spectacle. It was great, Ricky Gervais is an international treasure. 
Why? Because he showed the gap between Hollywood and the American people. He showed the gap between the Hollywood foreign press, the international press — the big makers of culture and the consumers of culture. And you can&#8217;t deny that gap, because these awards shows have been tanking in the ratings for years now, every single year. Hollywood cannot even laugh at an Epstein joke — a joke about an international sex trafficking, criminal, pedophile — everything. They can&#8217;t laugh at it because they know him — because they were friends with him. They don&#8217;t understand.
The more interesting level of analysis here is whether or not Ricky Gervais was brave to do this set. The conventional wisdom is it was so brave of Gervais to do this set in front of Hollywood. Now, in many ways, it was because this will hurt his employment prospects in Hollywood. He was telling these people that they&#8217;re degenerates to their face, right? It was absolutely hilarious. In that way, it was courageous to do it. 
But in another sense, it wasn&#8217;t brave at all &#8230; [Gervais] knew that the audience would love this, that they would lap this up, that they would say, “Finally, Rickey Gervais, this guy is so good. This guy gets us.” 
He deserves credit because it really will irritate his employers, but this will make him so much more popular among the audience. The only reason that any person is talking about the Golden Globes today is because Ricky Gervais had this great, killer set. Looking ahead on the political scene to 2020, it shows you how absolutely worthless celebrity endorsements are that the Left, they&#8217;re always shocked. They say, “Oh, Hillary Clinton got all the endorsements of Hollywood, all these big-time movie stars and TV stars. How did she lose? John Kerry got all the big endorsements. Bruce Springsteen. Puff Daddy, all these guys. How did they lose?” Because none of us like Hollywood, we don&#8217;t like these people.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-michael-knowles-show/id1266577963?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Michael Knowles Show” on iTunes. 
</a><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/show/the-michael-knowles-show">Watch “The Michael Knowles Show” on-demand!</a>

NBC&#8217;s &#8220;77th Annual Golden Globe Awards&#8221; &#8211; Arrivals

KNOWLES: Ricky Gervais’ Opening Monologue: The Most Relatable Part Of Awards Season

Golden Globes

Hollywood

MeToo

Ricky Gervais

On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about the Democrats’ response to the death of Iranian terrorist, Qassam Soleimani. Video and partial transcript below: 
I&#8217;m rarely shocked by whatever nonsense politicians do or say. Sometimes they annoy me, but mostly they just crack me up. But I was legitimately shocked by the Democrat reaction to Trump&#8217;s triumphant destruction of one of the worst people on the planet, plus the head of the terrorist group Hezbollah and a bunch of their terrorist pals.
Not only did The Washington Post talk about how revered Soleimani was, a reporter for The New York Times, a former newspaper, tweeted out video of Soleimani reciting wistful poetry about how his friends had gone away while he was left behind. Well, now he no longer has that problem, and he and his friends are reunited in the eternal flames of a just and terrible damnation and we should all be glad. 
But we&#8217;re not all glad. In our now almost completely-useless House of Representatives, shapely knucklehead Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared the targeted killing of a known killer an act of war. It wasn’t; it was a totally legal act of self-defense against a man who, according to our State Department, orchestrated 17% of all deaths of U.S. personnel in Iraq from 2003 to 2011. That&#8217;s over six hundred of our troops. 
[Ocasio-Cortez] went on to call the president a monster for letting the Iranians know they&#8217;d be sorry if they tried to strike back. Anti-semitic terrorist supporter Ihlan Omar — and that&#8217;s not hyperbole, she openly supports the Council on American Islamic Relations, which has close ties to Hamas and was named an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to funnel money to Hamas — Omar said she was outraged by what she called Soleimani’s assassination. Bernie Sanders also called it an assassination, and refused to criticize Soleimani at all. Elizabeth Warren began by criticizing him, then stopped when she came under fire from the Left, and began proposing a conspiracy theory about how Trump was trying to distract from the make-believe impeachment [that] no one was paying attention to anyway.
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Let me be honest about this: When Osama bin Laden was taken out during the administration of Barack Obama, it cost me something to sing Obama&#8217;s praises. But I did it; he deserved it — and the press dutifully echoed the Democrat talking point that Obama had made a, quote, “gutsy call.” Someone ought to make one of those montages of the number of times journalists use that phrase: “gutsy call.” But if we&#8217;re in dangerous new territory with Iran, Obama can take a lot of the blame. 
He failed to support the Green Revolution there because he was too busy negotiating the absurd nuclear deal with the mullahs, and to get that worse-than-useless deal in place, he bribed the Iranians with nearly two billion dollars in untraceable cash — cash that no doubt funded Soleimani’s murder of our guys. And if Trump is a monster for fighting back against terrorism, what about Obama in 2016 alone? Obama dropped more than 26,000 bombs on seven Muslim-majority countries, his drone strikes killed countless civilians, including children and some American citizens, one of them a terrorist supporting 16-year-old. There was no outrage from the Democrats then, and you know what? There was no outrage from me either. We do what we have to do to break the back of this awful Islamist movement. Then, of course, there was the Hillary Clinton-engineered overthrow of Moummar Gadhafi in Libya. Remember how Hillary laughed about that and a CBS reporter laughed right along with her. Here&#8217;s the videotape:
<blockquote>CLINTON: We came, we saw, he died. </blockquote>
Hilarious. That led to the fatal attacks on our compound in Benghazi, where the Obama administration failed to increase security or send help in time, and then lied and lied and lied about the resulting American deaths. Some Democrats called the recent attack on our compound in Baghdad Trump’s Benghazi because Trump sent help, instantly prevented any American deaths, and then struck back by taking out Soleimani — so it was exactly the same. 
Again: Hypocrisy, lies, corruption — these were all part of politics, but not in matters like this. Democrats should grit their teeth, sing Trump&#8217;s praises, then move on to their other arguments. But they&#8217;ve fallen for the deadliest political error of them all. Reaction isn&#8217;t if Trump does it, it&#8217;s bad; if Republicans like it, they hate it. That way lies insanity — we all do that, sometimes it&#8217;s part of politics, too. But at some point, at the point where Americans are dying, being murdered, at the point where terrorists are on the loose — that&#8217;s got to stop. 
Democrats today show zero sign of liking this country at all. They say the U.S. was founded in racism, which is a stone lie. They attack the First and Second Amendments because they promote individual freedom over socialist schemes. They attack constitutional protections of our federal system like the Electoral College, and if the Supreme Court rules against them on constitutional grounds, they start threatening to pack the court. They&#8217;ve lost the plot of America, and that&#8217;s bad. But if they will not put our safety first, our lives first, our service men and women first, what claim do they have to be our fellow citizens at all? Shame on them. 
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. 
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Bernie Sanders Returns To The Campaign Trail With A Rally In New York City

KLAVAN: Democrats Show Zero Sign Of Liking This Country

On Monday&#8217;s episode of &#8220;The Ben Shapiro Show,&#8221; the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about Ricky Gervais&#8217; best jokes at the Golden Globes, and Hollywood&#8217;s reaction. Video and partial transcript below: 
Ricky Gervais’ final joke [at the Golden Globes] was the best joke — he was so irritated with the whole process and it was quite wonderful. He is talking here about the movies that have been nominated in the horror category, I believe, he&#8217;s talking about &#8220;Bird Box,&#8221; and he just levels Hollywood. It&#8217;s fantastic. 
<blockquote>GERVAIS: Netflix’s &#8220;Bird Box,&#8221; a movie where people survive by acting like they don&#8217;t see a thing. So, like working for Harvey Weinstein — You did it. I didn’t, you did it. </blockquote>
You can hear people like “Ohhhh.” What are you “ohh-ing” about? He’s right, you did it, you pieces of crap. You&#8217;re the ones who spent 30 years taking Harvey Weinstein&#8217;s checks while allowing him to peek down your blouse, and/or allowing him to peek down other people&#8217;s blouses. Then some of you come forward — again, I have nothing but sympathy for the women who have actually come forward — but there are a bunch of women who didn&#8217;t come forward and/or protected Harvey Weinstein knowing that he did this stuff, or he did it to them and then they came out and protected him for years because he was signing checks to them. 
Hollywood does not get to stand on its high horse about MeToo, Hollywood does not get to stand on its high horse about global warming. Honestly, the only person who was even decent in these political speeches last night was Joaquin Phoenix, got played off the stage when he suggested that people in Hollywood stopped taking private jets everywhere. Joaquin Phoenix may be a nut, but at least he&#8217;s a nut who&#8217;s trying to hold himself to a standard. 
Ricky Gervais’s hit on Hollywood, it does underscore what our politics truly is about these days, because it really is not about the complexity of politics. It really is about this cultural divide. 
The culture wars have become extremely hard fought now, a lot more hard fought in the last 20 years — 25 years — than they were for many decades before that. Why? Well, culture is usually the last vestige of unity. So when you have a common philosophy, culture, history, then culture tends to be the easiest place to unify because you can argue about TV or argue about sports really, and argue about like the products that you&#8217;re wearing — that&#8217;s the stuff that&#8217;s easy. 
The stuff that&#8217;s hard is philosophy and history and all the stuff that undergirds a successful civilization. But when all of those other things fall away and the last thing that we can unify about is culture, and then culture starts to be polarized, we end up in these culture wars we&#8217;re fighting. You can see with each successive Oscars, each successive Golden Globes, you can see that Hollywood is exacerbating those Culture Wars and Ricky Gervais just put a pin in it last night. I mean, he really just exposed it — ripped it wide open. 
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He made another joke that I don&#8217;t think we actually had a chance to pull where he was talking about the Woke nature of Hollywood, and he was saying that he was gonna do an “In Memoriam” segment last night, but he saw that there are too many dead white people. So he said, “I&#8217;m not going to do that. That&#8217;s not diverse enough. I&#8217;m not going to be the one who does that,” and people in the audience didn&#8217;t know whether to laugh or not, because what he is laughing at is their ridiculous insistence that every single part has to be given to a person who is of the actual physical description in the script. 
So if it’s a disabled person, it can’t be a person who is non-disabled playing a disabled person — which is called acting. He&#8217;s laughing at the fact that Hollywood has declared that the only way that they can find some sort of moral recompense for what they do is by hiring a certain percentage of black or gay or female actors, and that you have to have a certain percentage of black or female or gay lines in a particular script in order to make that script morally praiseworthy. 
Ricky Gervais is right about all this. Hollywood has been at the forefront of the Culture Wars and then they declared themselves on the defensive. “Oh, how dare these right-wingers like Trump, they&#8217;re always involved in the Culture Wars.” You launched it, Trump is just responding, so is the rest of America and Gervais — Honestly, like people on the Right were cheering last night — Gervais is not a Republican. 
I’ve seen no evidence that Gervais is conservative 0r Republican. He just has eyes, that&#8217;s all. He has eyes, and he has a brain, and so he can see how ridiculous these people in Hollywood are, and they are ridiculous pretending to be our moral betters. Just absurdity.
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ben-shapiro-show/id1047335260">Listen to full episodes of “The Ben Shapiro Show” on iTunes. </a>
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NBC&#8217;s &#8220;73rd Annual Golden Globe Awards&#8221; &#8211; Show

SHAPIRO: Ricky Gervais’ Best Jokes Of The Golden Globes

Ben Shapiro

Harvey Weinstein

On Thursday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief reviews “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker,” and talks about how the film provides a fantastic ending to a trilogy that otherwise shouldn’t have happened. Video, partial transcript, and spoilers below: 
If you&#8217;ve been familiar with the show at all, you know I&#8217;ve been incredibly critical of the new trilogy. I don&#8217;t like the new trilogy; I think it was unnecessary, I think they were fools, I think they tried to split the baby. So there were two things they could&#8217;ve done originally — I have to preface my take on “Rise of Skywalker” with the other two movies because it doesn&#8217;t work as a standalone film, nor is it really meant to.
This film, “Rise of Skywalker,” was designed specifically to retcon — meaning to go back in time and change the fact that “Force Awakens” and “Last Jedi” ever happened. It basically revises the entire story in a much more satisfying way.
So here was my original take on this new trilogy: There are two ways that Disney could have gone. Disney, number one, could have recast the entire original “Return of the Jedi” — they could have recast somebody as Luke, recast somebody as Leia, recast somebody as Han — which by the way, they did, they recast somebody as Han [when they] did Solo —they could have recast the entire cast and then they could&#8217;ve just picked up where “Return of the Jedi” left off with the Admiral Thrawn series. If you’ve read any of the Star Wars books — as I have — that&#8217;s actually a really good storyline. It could&#8217;ve just picked up where they left off and moved on into the future that way and would&#8217;ve gotten all of their new adventures.
Alternatively, they could have landed the Star Wars universe in like a different place, and they&#8217;re actually doing this on Disney Plus with the Mandalorian, which is kind of great — Mandalorian is really fun, Jon Favreau director. They could have gone back and they could have used some of these characters and put them somewhere else in the Star Wars universe. So Disney actually has done this with a couple of their other series, right? “Star Wars: Clone Wars,” they did this with, also “Star Wars: Rebels,” and some of the stuff is really pretty fantastic. They could&#8217;ve done any of those things.
Instead, what they chose to do was split the baby. “We’ll introduce new characters, but we&#8217;ll live off the nostalgia for the first films.” You can&#8217;t do that, and the reason you can&#8217;t do that is because if you&#8217;re nostalgic for the first films, you don&#8217;t want to see bad things happen to your favorite childhood characters. No one wants — spoiler alert — no one wants to see Han Solo die at the hands of his son like a loser divorced dad after leaving Leia alone for 20 years and flying around the galaxy smoking pot with Chewie in the Millennium Falcon. No one wants to see that, and that&#8217;s what happens in “Force Awakens.” No one wants to see Luke, who is this hero who goes from being a whiny teenager to being this mature Jedi who is able to control himself to save his father, nobody wants to see Luke become a misanthrope who milks aliens on a foreign planet while whining about his life and disparaging the Jedi tradition. No one wants to see that.
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So the new series basically took all of your favorite characters, your favorite old characters, and proceeded to ruin them, except for Leia, because Kathleen Kennedy has this feminist streak where the only characters were allowed to be competent or good are apparently the female characters. So that was the critique of this trilogy — it basically took all of my favorite characters from my childhood and they wrecked them so they could promote a bunch of characters who sucked.
Rey was a terrible character because you didn&#8217;t know — not only you didn&#8217;t know where she came from, but she was amazing at everything right off the bat. This was the biggest critique of the first part of this trilogy. The biggest critique was that Rey, who had not trained in the force for half a second, was suddenly unbelievably good at it, and Ben Solo —Kylo Ren, who is Leia’s kid with Han [and has] been training with the Force since childhood, can be overtaken in a lightsaber battle by somebody who picked up a lightsaber half a second ago. That&#8217;s not a thing. It&#8217;s stupid, and everybody who watched the series knew it was stupid.
Meanwhile, you had Poe, who was utterly incompetent, they tried to create kind of a new Han Solo character. The difference is that Han Solo in “Empire Strikes Back” — the entire story of “Empire Strikes Back” is Han Solo demonstrating that he is wildly competent at a lot of things. The entire Poe Dameron story is [that] the dude is wildly incompetent until he&#8217;s suddenly promoted to the head of the Rebel Alliance. Finn has no story arc at all. His entire story arc is that he was a stormtrooper, end of story arc, nothing happens to him for the next three movies.
So all of the new characters are completely boring, random, they should have killed Finn in “Last Jedi” when he makes that heroic run. They should&#8217;ve killed him off. They probably should&#8217;ve killed Poe in “Last Jedi,” they should have had him pull the Admiral Holdo maneuver. Instead, they bring in Laura Dern to wear weird hair and do a lightspeed trick that, by the way, if anybody could have figured that one out, they could&#8217;ve blown up the Death Star that way, like in “Star Wars: New Hope,” as well as “Return of the Jedi.” So all of this is preface to say I hated “Force Awakens,” and I hated “Last Jedi.”
“Rise of Skywalker” is an attempt to buy all of that back, and understanding that this trilogy never should have happened and understanding all the flaws of “Force Awakens” and “Last Jedi” — now you understand why I liked “Rise of Skywalker” — because they attempt to correct as many of these problems as they can while apologizing for the series, which is basically what this was. All of the stuff with Finn and Poe, no one cares about. All that stuff was dumb. No one cares about [it], it&#8217;s a waste of time. You have to do it, it&#8217;s like the worst of J.J. Abrams, it’s not a spoiler to say the film opens with the Millennium Falcon lightspeed jumping, which just turns it into like a silly prop. It&#8217;s ridiculous. It&#8217;s ridiculous.
The entire “Empire Strikes Back,” which is the best Star Wars film unquestionably — this is fact, this is known. “The Empire Strikes Back” is all about basically three, maybe four topics. One is the Millennium Falcon, it&#8217;s the entire thing in Empire Strikes Back is that the Millennium Falcon&#8217;s hyperdrive is broken. That is the central plot device. In this movie, in the new movie, in “Rise of Skywalker,” the Millennium Falcon is fully on fire and they fix it inside of 5 seconds flat. All of it. Also, “Empire Strikes Back” is about Luke growing and realizing that he is insufficient, so that&#8217;s the other topic, and also it&#8217;s about Han Solo being wildly competent. Poe and Finn, they&#8217;re wildly incompetent, the Millennium Falcon is made into a prop, like all that stuff is sort of the worst of J.J. Abrams.
The stuff that&#8217;s really good [in this movie is] actually quite good. The stuff that&#8217;s good is that they buy back Han Solo’s death, they give him sort of a new exit scene where he&#8217;s not being killed by a son where they cheat, he can&#8217;t be a Force ghost because he didn’t have the Force, but he basically is a Force ghost, he comes back. All these are spoilers. You&#8217;ve been warned one thousand times. You don&#8217;t want to hear about it, you haven&#8217;t seen the movie yet, don&#8217;t listen.
So Han Solo comes back and he talks with Kylo and he basically woos Kylo back to the light side of the Force. You find out that Leia, who uses the Force in new and bizarre ways in “Last Jedi” that are never explained — like she literally pulls herself back into a ship after being blasted out into space and you’re like where the hell did that come from Luke hasn&#8217;t even done that — you&#8217;re told in this movie that Leia was trained as a Jedi by Luke, which makes sense, right? In the book, she actually is, in the book she actually is trained as a Jedi by Luke, and [in the movie] she decided not to become a Jedi at the last minute because she foresaw, using the Force, that if she became a Jedi then her lightsaber would be used to kill Ben.
That all makes sense, so they retcon that. Then, the biggest retcon of all, the one that actually matters and that answers why Rey is cool. Answers the biggest question, why is Rey even a thing? And the answer is because she&#8217;s Palpatine granddaughter, which is fantastic. That&#8217;s a great reveal, that’s great because the most underrated Force ability person in the Star Wars series — because everyone&#8217;s focused on Anakin Skywalker, on Vader and Luke, on Leia, on Yoda, on Obi Wan — nobody&#8217;s focused on the fact that Palpatine is an unbelievable badass with the Force. Palpatine is so strong in the Force that he basically defeats Yoda, he is able to conceal his identity as the emperor for three movies, he’s able to turn Anakin to the dark side. Palpatine is an utter badass, and so they bring Palpatine back from the dead, which they sort of had to do — Palpatine is a great character — they bring in all the old musical cues, they bring in all of the old stuff, which is the stuff that I like.
So if you&#8217;re a nostalgia person, if you&#8217;re pissed at the series because you feel like it ruined your childhood, then this movie was an attempt to restore that, it was an attempt to make Han cool again — fairly successful. There&#8217;s an attempt to make Leia cool again — successful. There&#8217;s an attempt to make Luke cool, there&#8217;s a great scene where Luke does, even though he&#8217;s dead, Luke does this thing that Yoda does while he&#8217;s alive in Empire. Remember in Empire, there&#8217;s this call, there&#8217;s this scene where Yoda raises the X-Wing from the swamp because Luke fails to do so. Here, Luke is able to do that as a force ghost to hand over the X-Wing to Rey. That&#8217;s great.
The callback scene where they find the old Death Star from “Return of the Jedi,” and Rey has to confront herself, which is another callback to Empire, and then when they&#8217;re playing the old musical cues and all that stuff is great. What they do with Kylo Ren, bringing him back to the light side is pretty great.
J.J. Abrams does a great job in setting up a good reveal. So for several movies, you&#8217;ve been seeing basically Kylo and Rey Force-Skyping one another, they can talk over long distances in this movie, they can actually sword fight sort of telepathically, but it has real world ramifications. One is in one place, one is in the other place, and they&#8217;re having these lightsaber battles, but it actually has physical ramifications in the places where they&#8217;re having the lightsaber battles, and so that ends with a really fantastic reveal. All that stuff is great. Everything with Kylo, everything with Rey, everything with Palpatine is great, everything with Leia and Han is really good, like all that stuff is good. Finn and Poe continue to be disposable, all the other fringe characters end up being disposable.
There is this lesbian moment that&#8217;s been much talked about because at the very end of the movie they show a lesbian couple kissing, and it&#8217;s obviously Disney trying to shoehorn in the “Okay GLAAD, we know you&#8217;re there.” It&#8217;s very silly, and it&#8217;s sort of like that moment at the end of the “Avengers: Infinity War” where all the females land in one part of the battlefield and you’re like, “Okay, really? Was that like, c&#8217;mon.” That&#8217;s it, that&#8217;s sort of the same thing here. None of the couples are kissing except this one lesbian couple. All right, I get it, Disney, you&#8217;ve fulfilled your PC quota for the day. Whatever, man. But it&#8217;s pretty shoehorned in, it&#8217;s not a big deal, it&#8217;s just silly.
But overall, the critics are savaging this film. All it tells you about critics, all you need to know is they gave the “Last Jedi” like 92% on Rotten Tomatoes and they gave this one like 53%. They didn&#8217;t understand Star Wars, didn&#8217;t understand that this movie understands better how the Force works, this movie understands better how the weapons work, this movie understands better the dynamics between the light and the dark side; it understands Palpatine.
I&#8217;ve heard a lot of objections that this film basically makes the Skywalker-Vader interaction completely irrelevant. But that&#8217;s true the minute that Palpatine lives, and by the way, that&#8217;s true the minute that the Rebel Alliance fails. Once the Republic falls again to the First Order, then that whole thing became irrelevant. The new trilogy made that irrelevant, which is why they should&#8217;ve fast forwarded and taken it to some other part of the universe. But once you&#8217;re in the trilogy, this was the best way to end it.
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&nbsp;

Star Wars Marathon Hosted By Nerdist

SHAPIRO: My Long-Awaited Review Of ‘Star Wars: The Rise Of Skywalker’

Disney

Star Wars

On Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles addresses the U.S. military&#8217;s response to the Iranian-backed terrorists trying to take control of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq. Video and partial transcript below: 
The year started off in a pretty auspicious way, it was actually a pretty good start to the year. Why? There was an attack on a U.S. embassy — that&#8217;s not a good start — [but the] good start was the response. It shows you the difference between the 2020s — between right now — and the Obama administration. Maybe there&#8217;s a difference in these two decades?
On New Year&#8217;s Eve, Iran-backed terrorists tried to attack the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. This was a replay of the Benghazi attack on September 11, [2012]. You remember that during Obama administration, in Libya, there was attack on the U.S. Embassy, four Americans killed, including the ambassador — it was an absolute disaster. When the militants started to attack, nobody responded, there was no reaction from the political leadership in Washington, they just let the consulate be attacked over there and unfortunately, these Americans died. 
Then there was a cover-up afterward: Barack Obama sent his national security adviser on national television to lie about the attack. They said that it was a spontaneous uprising caused by a YouTube video that virtually nobody had seen. Of course, it wasn&#8217;t that. It was a terrorist-plotted, -planned, and -executed attack. It led to years of investigations. Hillary Clinton famously testified about it and said [paraphrasing], “Who cares? What difference at this point does it make if they were terrorists or YouTube video demonstrators? Who cares? It&#8217;s no big deal.” Of course, it does matter.
This attack in Baghdad failed because of decisive leadership. So what happened is hundreds of terrorists, of militiamen and their supporters, showed up to this embassy in Baghdad. They broke into the compound, they destroyed a reception area, they smashed windows, smashed up the whole building, put graffiti all over the walls. This was to protest U.S. airstrikes against an Iran-backed militia that ended up killing 25 terrorists.
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So now they&#8217;re protesting this, there is going to be a response because the United States is fighting with Iran through these proxies. Now, why didn&#8217;t it turn into this disaster of Benghazi? It didn&#8217;t turn [into it] because the U.S. responded immediately, and yesterday, the militiamen, the terrorists, withdrew — they withdrew after two days of clashes with American security forces because the minute the attack began, the United States sent 100 Marines, the United States sent in 750 paratroopers to the region, they deployed troops out there, and they said you are not taking our embassy. Of course, eventually after that show force, the terrorists withdrew. 
President Trump was asked about this on New Year&#8217;s Eve at Mar-a-Lago. So he&#8217;s there in his tuxedo — looking great by the way — and Melania is standing there looking significantly better, just like the picture of elegance and grace, and they&#8217;re being asked about this attack. Trump has one clear message for the terrorists, for the international community and for the American people. He says this will not be another Benghazi.
<blockquote>TRUMP: I think it&#8217;s been handled very well. The Marines came in, we had some great warriors come in and do a fantastic job, and they were there instantaneously. As soon as we heard. I used the word immediately, they came immediately and it&#8217;s in great shape. As you know, this will not be a Benghazi — Benghazi should never have happened — this will never, ever be a Benghazi. But we have some of our greatest warriors there. They got in there very quickly, as soon as we saw, there was a potential for problem, they got in and there was no problem whatsoever. I also want to thank the Iraqi government. They really stepped up. I spoke to the prime minister today, I thanked him, but they stepped up very nicely.  </blockquote>
This story tells you two important things. It shows you, for one, the absolute corruption of the media, which was basically taking the side of the terrorists and sort of lamenting the fact that this wasn&#8217;t turning into Benghazi. That’s the first part. The second thing it shows you is the importance of political leadership. It shows you something that I predict will possibly define this decade, which is the importance of taking control of your own political destiny. The ability of us to use our will, to use our decision-making powers, to come in and take control of our political destiny. We are not simply leaving ourselves up to circumstance, we have the ability to shape our political future.
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US-POLITICS-TRUMP

KNOWLES: Trump Just Showed That The U.S. Controls Its Own Political Destiny

Hillary Clinton

Iran

Iraq

On Wednesday night, a rocket launched from Gaza seemingly targeted Israeli Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu while he was speaking at a Likud primaries conference in Ashkelon, Israel. Netanayu was taken off the stage to a bomb shelter, but returned later to speak to attendees, where he told them, “The last terrorist who ordered the rocket fire toward Ashdod when I was there is not with us anymore; the one that ordered this attack should pack his bags quickly.”
The <a href="https://www.jpost.com/Breaking-News/Rocket-sirens-sound-in-Ashkelon-area-612138">Jerusalem Post</a> reported, “A similar incident happened in Ashdod in September when rocket sirens were fired as Netanyahu held a campaign event in the city … Gazan reports indicated that Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) leader Khalil Batanai is the one behind the rocket fire on Wednesday night, according to Channel 12. The rocket fire in September was ordered by former PIJ official Baha Abu Al Ata, who was assassinated in November.”
Blue and White leader Benny Gantz, Netanyahu’s chief opponent for the position of prime minister, took advantage of the rocket attack to attack Netanyahu, tweeting, &#8220;The situation in which the citizens of Israel are given to the grace of terrorists and the prime minister of the Israeli government can&#8217;t tour part of his country is a badge of shame for the security policies in the south and the loss of deterrence that no sovereign state can allow. We will flip the government, change the policies and return the deterrence and quiet to the residents of the south.”
Ashkelon is only 26 miles from Gaza. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/gazas-homemade-rockets-still-stretch-israels-sophisticated-defenses/2019/05/06/2ca3a46a-700c-11e9-9331-30bc5836f48e_story.html">The Washington Post</a> reported last May, “ … experts who track the weapons arsenals of Hamas and Islamic Jihad estimate that they have managed to stockpile between 5,000 and 20,000 rockets. Over the weekend, the militant groups fired a tiny fraction of them toward Israel — nearly 700 rockets and mortars, according to the Israeli military — and the unusually ferocious barrage at times overwhelmed Israeli air defenses. The key to the weapons’ effectiveness is not their sophistication in terms of range or precision but just the opposite. Many of the rockets are so cheap and easy to manufacture, in some cases requiring little more than metal casing and an explosive, that the groups have been able to accumulate them in significant numbers.”
Boaz Ganor, director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, commented, “When it’s not a precise missile, it’s quite easy to prepare a rocket if you don’t really care where it’s going to fall.” Last May four Israelis died under rocket fire from Gaza, the Post noted. A rocket that hit Tel Aviv last March had a range of 75 miles. Hamas has been manufacturing rockets in Gaza since 2001, during the Second Intifada, when a bloody rampage by Palestinians that included myriad bombings that murdered hundreds of Israelis.
After the rockets last May, former ambassador of Israel to the United States Michael Oren stated, “Hamas must go. Right after our holidays and Eurovision, Israel must evict Hamas from Gaza. The U.S. should back us militarily and diplomatically and, together with Arab states, commit to Gaza’s renewal.”
&nbsp;

Gaza Rocket Targets Area Where Netanyahu Is Speaking. Netanyahu Has A Message For The Terrorist Launching It.

Benjamin Netanyahu

On Monday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about Liz Warren’s answer at the Democratic debate, in which she dismisses economic criticisms of her plans. Video and partial transcript below: 
Elizabeth Warren’s had all the big momentum going in for the past two months now. Elizabeth Warren came out of nowhere, she was pretty much dead in the water because she&#8217;s Liawatha and because she published that DNA results that show that she&#8217;s 1/1024th Native American — maybe. 
She lied about her record at Harvard, she lied about her ancestry, she lied about sending her child to public schools. I mean, she&#8217;s just a weak candidate. She&#8217;s a damaged candidate. She has that awful voice, and yet she was rising in the polls because Biden was collapsing, because Bernie Sanders had a heart attack, because there is nobody else. She wasn&#8217;t rising out of her own talent, she was rising because the field was so weak.
So Elizabeth Warren puts out her economic plans — she basically wants to promise everybody the world and then pretend that their taxes aren&#8217;t going to go up. To their credit, the moderators at this debate came out and said, “Senator Warren, how do you respond to economists who say your plan isn&#8217;t going to work?” This is Liz Warren&#8217;s answer. This is the best she could do:
<blockquote>MODERATOR: How do you answer top economists who say taxes of this magnitude would stifle growth and investment? 
WARREN: Oh, they&#8217;re just wrong.</blockquote>
That&#8217;s it? That&#8217;s the best you got? This reminds me of this moment in 2012 when Herman Cain, the former CEO of Godfather&#8217;s Pizza, Herman Cain comes out and he&#8217;s got his 9-9-9 Tax Plan, and the 9-9-9 Plan is going to totally revolutionize the economy and we&#8217;re going to have a ton of growth.
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A moderator [at] one of these debates said, “Excuse me, Mr. Cain, what do you say to the economists who analyzed your plan and they say it doesn&#8217;t work? Like, what do you make of that analysis?” Herman Cain issued [what] I think is my favorite quote from any presidential debate ever. He said, “Well, the problem with their analysis is that it is incorrect.”
That sums it up, that&#8217;s perfect: The problem with their analysis is that it is incorrect. Liz Warren is using the same line here and guess what? It didn&#8217;t work very well for Herman Cain, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s gonna work out well for Elizabeth Warren. You need a more serious answer than that. You can only channel populist rage so long, and Liz Warren&#8217;s not even good at doing it because she&#8217;s actually just a lying Harvard professor establishmentarian fraud, so she doesn&#8217;t even get the kind of thrill of popular support. She&#8217;s more like a scolding librarian. 
It&#8217;s not going to work well for her, she needs to come up with an answer to these economists who are pointing out that her plan is going to completely destroy growth. I mean, if you just look at the healthcare plan alone, it&#8217;s $52 trillion total over 10 years. If you took all the wealth away from every single billionaire in the entire country, all 621 of them. If you stole the shirt off their backs, you would pay for basically three-fifths of one year of that plan. And then what?
Obviously, people&#8217;s taxes are going to go up, businesses are going to get crushed, growth is going to stop, the economy very likely would recess. You&#8217;ve got to answer that. If she&#8217;s not going to answer that, she&#8217;s not really going anywhere.
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Presidential Candidate Elizabeth Warren Holds A Town Hall In South Carolina

KNOWLES: Liz Warren: If You Disagree With Her, You’re Just Wrong.

Tuesday night, famed attorney Alan Dershowitz met President Trump at Trump’s annual Christmas Eve dinner in the ballroom at Trump&#8217;s Mar-a-Lago estate, fueling more speculation that he may join Trump’s legal team, which is dealing with the impeachment proceedings against the president. As <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7825703/Donald-Trump-Melania-attend-Baptist-church-Christmas-Eve.html">The Daily Mail</a> reported, “Trump got up from his table, where he was seated next to first lady Melania Trump, to walk over and talk to Dershowitz after reports his legal team has discussed bringing Dershowitz on board to help with the president&#8217;s impeachment trial in the Senate.
When The Daily Mail queried him about his appearance, Dershowitz responded, “I was a guest of friends of mine. Not part of the Trump Christmas party. The president came over to say hello to me and my wife. We wished each other happy holidays.”
In May, Dershowitz contributed an opinion piece at <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/446394-dershowitz-supreme-court-could-overrule-an-unconstitutional-impeachment">The Hill</a>, in which he defended Trump’s comments in which he stated that if he were indeed impeached by the House, he might “head to the Supreme Court.” Dershowitz wrote:
<blockquote>Two former, well-respected justices of the Supreme Court first suggested that the judiciary may indeed have a role in reining in Congress were it to exceed its constitutional authority. Justice Byron White, a John F. Kennedy appointee, put it this way: “Finally, as applied to the special case of the President, the majority argument merely points out that, were the Senate to convict the President without any kind of trial, a Constitutional crisis might well result. It hardly follows that the Court ought to refrain from upholding the Constitution in all impeachment cases. Nor does it follow that, in cases of presidential impeachment, the Justices ought to abandon their constitutional responsibility because the Senate has precipitated a crisis.”
Justice David Souter, a George H. W. Bush appointee, echoed his predecessor: “If the Senate were to act in a manner seriously threatening the integrity of its results … judicial interference might well be appropriate.”</blockquote>
Dershowitz continued:
<blockquote>It is not too much of a stretch from the kind of constitutional crises imagined by these learned justices to a crisis caused by a Congress that impeached a president without evidence of “high crimes and misdemeanors.” The president is not above the law, but neither is Congress, whose members take an oath to support, not subvert, the Constitution. And that Constitution does not authorize impeachment for anything short of high crimes and misdemeanors.  Were Congress to try to impeach and remove a president without alleging and proving any such crime, and were the president to refuse to leave office on the ground that Congress had acted unconstitutionally, there would indeed be such a constitutional crisis. And Supreme Court precedent going back to Marbury v. Madison empowers the justices to resolve conflicts between the executive and legislative branches by applying the Constitution as the supreme law of the land.</blockquote>
Dershowitz noted, “No one should criticize President Trump for raising the possibility of Supreme Court review, especially following Bush v. Gore,  the case that ended the 2000 election. Many of the same academics ridiculed the notion that the justices would enter the political thicket of vote-counting. But they did and, in the process, weakened the “political question” doctrine.”
&nbsp;

The President And First Lady Attend Hanukkah Reception At The White House

Dershowitz Meets Trump At Christmas Dinner, Fueling Speculation Of Joining Trump’s Legal Team

Alan Dershowitz

On Little Bay Islands, a town in Newfoundland and Labrador,  after the Canadian government issued a December 31 deadline after which all services, including electricity, would be shut down, all the residents left.
Except one couple.
Mike and Georgina Parsons stayed behind after the other 69 residents of the ghost town evacuated. The only fish plant in the town closed in 2011; the only school shut down in 2015. <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7824975/Canadian-island-turns-ghost-town-two-residents-leave.html">The Daily Mail</a> noted, &#8220;According to official data, the government will save roughly $20 million over the next two decades from the relocation. The savings will mostly come from cutting the ferry service to the island.&#8221;
The Parsons have spent $50,000, including getting a solar power system and a fresh water well,  stored medication, dry and canned goods, as well as six freezers with protein, enough to last them for two years, they told <a href="https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/much-quieter-n-l-couple-prepares-for-life-alone-as-town-resettles-1.4721839">CTV News.</a>
The Parsons own half-a-dozen boats, though the winter arctic ice could keep them isolated for six weeks in the winter. In October, Georgina Parsons said, &#8220;We&#8217;re not nervous at all. It still feels a bit unreal.&#8221; Mike Parsons acknowledged, &#8220;The town has gotten much quieter &#8230; Every day now people are packing up and leaving.&#8221;
The government, trying to effect a resettlement program to relocate residents, has been accused by some residents of not remunerating them. They claimed that although they paid taxes, they weren&#8217;t compensated because they didn&#8217;t live there all year. The government claimed in 2017 that 55 of the 76 residents then living in the town were permanent residents. The government paid those 55 residents a total of $8.7 million.
Juanita and Gord Hull, who left the town after Gord had a stroke in 2003, told <a href="https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfoundland-labrador/little-bay-islands-left-out-payment-resettlement-relocation-1.5400920">CBC </a>that they were not compensated although they had lived in the town for roughly 70 years. Juanita Hull stated, &#8220;I was hurt and I thought we was discriminated (against). There&#8217;s bad feelings. And the ones like myself, got turned down, they feels exactly the same way that I do.&#8221;
Doris Tucker echoed said: &#8220;I felt insulted. And I felt, you know, of anyone — I was born there in 1939, I went to school there, and I worked there.&#8217;
A spokesperson for the Department of Municipal Affairs stated, &#8220;A person&#8217;s place of birth, or where they spent most of their life, does not constitute a person being a resident of a community. A person may be born in a community and live there for 50 years, but if they, at some point prior the community&#8217;s relocation request, move to, and reside in another community, they cease to be a permanent resident.&#8221; The department added, &#8220;The funding provided to eligible permanent residents is not intended to compensate for the value of their property. As such, persons with permanent residences outside the community do not require financial assistance to relocate.&#8221;
CBC noted, &#8220;A permanent resident is defined as an individual who &#8216;lives and sleeps year-round, 365 days per year,&#8217; on Little Bay Islands — subject to some conditions. Those conditions allow for temporary absences for vacations, work or caregiving, and more extended absences for those in prison or accessing ongoing health care treatment if &#8216;substantiated by a doctor&#8217;s note.'&#8221;

The Dungeon Provincial Park, Newfoundland, Canada.

All Residents Leave Canadian Island After Government Cuts Off Power. One Couple Remains.

On Thursday’s episode of “The Michael Knowles Show,” Knowles talks about the notorious abortion joke included in Michelle Wolf’s Netflix special, and how it speaks to the problem that afflicts radical egalitarian democracies. Video and partial transcript below: 
Another tough feature about radical democracy, another really unfortunate feature, is that it breaks all constraints on society. It’s obviously broken our Constitutional constraints — this happens time and time again. It’s broken our legal constraints, when people feel like they can just impose their will regardless of what the framework of our country says, but it also breaks the constraints of the moral order. 
Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the recent special of the alleged comedian Michelle Wolf. You’ll remember her, she was at the White House Correspondents Dinner a few years ago and she made fun of Sarah Sanders, and this was something of a controversy. 
So Michelle Wolf&#8217;s got a new special on Netflix, and she decided to do a whole bit, a whole joke, about how killing her child made her feel like God. Here she is:
<blockquote>WOLF: You feel like you should have this sense of shame after you get an abortion. Well you can feel any way you want after you get an abortion. Get one! See how ya feel! 
You know how my abortion made me feel? Very powerful. You know how people say you can&#8217;t play God? I walked out of there being like, “Move over, Morgan Freeman, I am God.”</blockquote>
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That&#8217;s pretty ghastly. I think it&#8217;s pretty repugnant. Most people are so shocked by that joke because it&#8217;s so real, it&#8217;s so true. 
It&#8217;s actually why it&#8217;s a pretty good joke, if not for all the suffering, if not for all the dead babies, if not for the reality of it — cause she actually killed her child — it would be a very funny joke if not for the victims. 
Why would it be a funny joke? Because it&#8217;s so true. She&#8217;s right, I&#8217;m sure she did feel very powerful. The ability to snuff out innocent life makes one feel powerful, it makes one take on the — presumed to have the authority of God. Yeah, that she&#8217;s right. That&#8217;s not a good thing. That&#8217;s a very bad thing.
The impulse of radical egalitarian democracy is to make each man a god. That&#8217;s the trouble. 
What is the result of that? Is the result of that a good, thriving, wonderful society where we all love each other and we&#8217;re all very nice to each other? No, the result of that is a society that is coarse, and capricious, and miserable, and murderous. 
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Michelle Wolf

KNOWLES: The Truth Inside Michelle Wolf’s Ghastly, Repugnant Abortion Joke

Michael Knowles

On Thursday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about the impeachment debate and aftermath. Video and partial transcript below: 
Merry Impeachment, as those at The Washington Post say each and every day. Merry Impeachment to you. Merry Impeachmas — I guess is how they&#8217;re putting it.
It is very exciting news, The New York Times splashing across its front page, “Trump Impeached” and then The Washington Post, “Trump impeached” — everybody, very excited about the impeachment. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-is-impeached-by-the-house-creating-an-indelible-mark-on-his-presidency/2019/12/18/501bcab2-2105-11ea-a153-dce4b94e4249_story.html">The Washington Post</a> reveled in this — Philip Rucker, Felicia Sonmez, and Kobe Itkowitz: 
<blockquote>The House of Representatives voted late Wednesday to impeach President Trump on charges that he abused his office and obstructed Congress, with Democrats declaring him a threat to the nation and branding an indelible mark on the most turbulent presidency of modern times.</blockquote>
An indelible mark, is it? So indelible, because when people think of Bill Clinton&#8217;s presidency, the only thing they think about is impeachment. Not the economy, not welfare reform, not the fact that his wife would go on to become a Democratic nominee herself — no, they only think about the impeachment. It&#8217;s an indelible mark. 
<blockquote>After 11 hours of fierce arguments on the House floor between Democrats and Republicans over Trump&#8217;s conduct with Ukraine, lawmakers voted almost entirely along party lines to impeach him.</blockquote>
By the way, the only people who did not vote along party lines were the two, three Democrats who voted not to impeach and Tulsi Gabbard, who abstained from the voting [and] voted “present.”
<blockquote>Trump becomes the third president in U.S. history to face trial in the Senate — a proceeding that will determine whether he is removed from office less than one year before he stands for re-election.</blockquote>
Spoiler alert: Nope, not gonna happen. According to The Washington Post:
<blockquote>On Trump&#8217;s 1062nd day in office, Congress brought a momentous reckoning to an unorthodox president who has tested America&#8217;s institutions with an array of unrestrained actions, including some that a collection of his own appointees and other government witnesses testified were reckless and endangered national security.</blockquote>
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It&#8217;s a reckoning — momentous, momentous reckoning. You saw Democrats cheering yesterday very, very excited about all of this. Then there was that awkward moment where they realized he&#8217;s not exiting office &#8230; as they realized that the impeachment doesn&#8217;t mean anything because it&#8217;s an entirely political act, and they do not run the Senate. The Democratic-controlled House passed two articles of impeachment against Trump — abuse of power and obstruction of Congress — neither of which is a crime, of course.
<blockquote>The House voted 230 to 197 to approve the article charging abuse of power, with the gavel falling about 8:30 P.M.</blockquote>
Right in the middle of “The Masked Singer.” So you had this bizarre split-screen on Fox, they cut into “The Masked Singer” to show the commentators on Fox News, and everybody was like, “Wait a second, I wanted to know who the fox was, why doesn&#8217;t someone just tell me who the fox was?” No one cares about the impeachment, let&#8217;s be real about this. 
<blockquote>On the &#8220;obstruction of Congress&#8221; vote, which followed soon after, the tally was 229 to 198. All Republicans voted against both articles. Among Democrats, two voted no on the first article and three on the second, with one — Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — voting “present” both times.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi framed the day&#8217;s proceedings &#8230;</blockquote>
So here was Nancy Pelosi&#8217;s opening statement: It was very solemn, very somber, and this was the supposed mood that was being created. Solemness, somberness, solemnity, sadness, and any other “s” words you can think of that makes you feel very sober. 
Here&#8217;s Nancy Pelosi, wearing her Emperor Palpatine costume, and then reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, which again, the last time I checked, Democrats wanted to ban from public school classrooms. But here&#8217;s Nancy Pelosi: 
<blockquote>PELOSI: Very sadly now, our Founders’ vision of a republic is under threat from actions from the White House. That is why today, as speaker of the House, I solemnly and sadly open the debate on the impeachment of the president of the United States. If we do not act now, we would be derelict in our duty. It is tragic that the president&#8217;s reckless actions make impeachment necessary. He gave us no choice.</blockquote>
No, you had a choice, and you just didn&#8217;t do it. Now the best part again, of all of this, was the theatrical stupidity of all this. The Democrats pretending that they’re very solemn and upset about having to do this, despite the fact that, again, they&#8217;ve spent three years openly screaming for lightning to hit Trump, openly praying that the alligator moat opens up beneath Trump, that Jabba the Hutt’s gate opens up and Trump falls down into the &#8230; pit. 
That what they&#8217;ve been praying for for three long years, and finally, they did it yesterday, and [they’re like] “No, we&#8217;re not excited about this. We&#8217;re not excited about this.”
Yeah, you&#8217;re not excited about this. You’re about as not excited about this as a new husband on his wedding night. Sure. Here&#8217;s a montage of all the Democrats proclaiming how sad and solemn, and solemn and sad, and solemn and sad and sober they are. 
<blockquote>PELOSI: We are here today under the dome of this temple of democracy to exercise one of the most solemn powers that this body can take. 
CHU: It&#8217;s with solemn purpose today that I vote to impeach. 
BARRAGAN: Madam Speaker, it is with the solemn sense of duty that I rise —
HUFFMAN: Madam Speaker, as we take this solemn, necessary step of impeaching President Trump — 
BUTTERFIELD: I rise on this solemn occasion —
GARAMENDI: Impeaching the president is one of the most solemn and consequential — 
KELLY: I cast a solemn vote for the many individuals in my district. 
KAPTUR: Members of Congress swear a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and today we fulfill our oath — 
LEWIS: Madam Speaker, I rise with a heavy heart to support this resolution. 
MATSUI: I rise today with a heavy heart. 
PRESSLEY: It is with a heavy heart, but a resolved one — 
SEWELL: Madam Speaker, it is with a heavy heart and a profound sense of the gravity of this moment that I rise today in support of the impeachment — 
COSTA: Madam Speaker, I rise with a heavy heart. The two most difficult votes any member of Congress ever asked to cast his vote to go to war or to impeach. 
PELOSI: Today, as speaker of the House, I solemnly and sadly open the debate.
CORREA: This is a very sad day and I do not take impeachment lightly. 
LEE: I am saddened, but I&#8217;m not shocked. 
SCANLON: It&#8217;s with profound sadness that I stand here today — 
BASS: It is a sad day in America.
LANGEVIN: Today, sadly, we are voting to impeach President Donald John Trump. 
LEE: Yes, I am saddened, but I&#8217;m not shocked.</blockquote>
Everybody’s sad, so sad! Now, if you believe this, it&#8217;s because you&#8217;re unbelievably stupid and gullible. So sad. Oh, you can see them weeping! The tears, they’re so upset! And they’re so sober. It&#8217;s like a funeral out there. I mean, it&#8217;s so sober. What a sober moment in America&#8217;s history when we have to impeach this guy that we absolutely wish would just effing die. It’s just so sober, and so sad, and so sober-sad. 
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ben-shapiro-show/id1047335260">Listen to full episodes of “The Ben Shapiro Show” on iTunes. </a>
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U.S. House Of Representatives Votes On Impeachment Of President Donald Trump

SHAPIRO: Merry Impeachmas From The Very Solemn Democrats

Last night, Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aPkR8lrtLU">joined</a> &#8220;Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler&#8221; on One America News Network to discuss the <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-pelosi-considers-withholding-articles-of-impeachment-from-senate-heres-the-insane-reason-why">news</a> that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) intends to withhold the formal physical delivery of the House&#8217;s <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/breaking-multiple-democrats-vote-against-impeachment-only-democrats-vote-for-it">passed articles of impeachment</a> to the Senate unless and until she and House Democrats can be assured a &#8220;fair process.&#8221; The delay raises a myriad of complex legal issues, and there is also the distinct topic of the political fallout from such a stunt.
Hammer also has an <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/hammer-at-the-new-york-post-pelosis-newest-dirty-trick-putting-trumps-senate-trial-on-hold">op-ed</a> in today&#8217;s <a href="https://nypost.com/2019/12/19/pelosis-newest-dirty-trick-putting-trumps-senate-trial-on-hold/">New York Post</a> that breaks down the topic:
<blockquote>
Some prominent lawyers on the right, such as former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Tom Dupree, have ­argued that it is outright unconstitutional for Pelosi to delay transmission. He has suggested that Trump has a constitutional right to see his impeachment proceed to a possible acquittal in the Senate.
I disagree. As a matter of constitutional construction, it is generally inappropriate to read duties and rights that aren’t there in the text. When the Constitutional text is silent, we have to turn to hierarchically lower bodies of law. Here, that means the internal rules governing the House and the Senate. &#8230;
The president may not have an explicit constitutional right to a Senate trial. But if Democrats really cared about rule of law and good order, they would have allowed the Framers’ process to unfold as it was supposed to do. Their delay tactics merely expose the frivolity of their Trump-induced mass hysteria.
</blockquote>
Hammer and Wheeler probed the legal and political issues at length on the &#8220;Tipping Point&#8221; television segment, with Hammer first discussing the legal intricacies and Wheeler then breaking down the politics.
Wheeler began by asking whether the Senate has to wait for the House&#8217;s physical delivery of impeachment articles to begin a trial. Hammer responded that, under the Senate&#8217;s own rules, it currently does have to wait:
<blockquote>&#8230; [W]hen we&#8217;re interpreting the Constitution, I think it&#8217;s inappropriate to read in implied rights and duties that are not there. So, the Constitution is pretty silent on this.
What that means [is] we then look to House and Senate internal rules. There is nothing in the House&#8217;s internal rules that mandates that the speaker of the House pass any kind of resolution or legislation and physically deliver that to the Senate. It&#8217;s totally up to the discretion of the speaker of the House. As far as the Senate is concerned, there&#8217;s a Tulane law professor — who&#8217;s apparently one of the country&#8217;s only &#8220;impeachment law&#8221; experts — who has digged up this Senate Rules provision that, according to the Senate&#8217;s own internal rules, they say that the trial does not start until the articles of impeachment have been physically delivered to the Senate.
So the Senate can always amend its own rules, but unless and until they do so, [Majority Leader Mitch] McConnell has his hands tied right now.</blockquote>
Later in the conversation, Wheeler expressed her opinion that Pelosi&#8217;s stunt will backfire, politically speaking: &#8220;I don&#8217;t know how this is going to help her. It shows that this is partisan, which we all know, but this shows that even to the people who were maybe on the fence. The Democrats who are on the fence, it shows that this is partisan. She&#8217;s essentially &#8230; trying to coerce Mitch McConnell into allowing [Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer and the Democrats to call witnesses that they want.&#8221;
WATCH:
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Hammer OANN screen grab 12.19.19

WATCH: Hammer On ‘Tipping Point With Liz Wheeler’: Can Pelosi Delay The Senate Impeachment Trial?

New York Post

On Wednesday’s episode of “The Ben Shapiro Show,” the Daily Wire editor-in-chief talks about the way the Left and Right view President Trump and the collapse of the political consensus. Video and partial transcript below: 
Everybody&#8217;s very up for this impeachment thing — very exciting, it&#8217;s a historic day! So much history making! Let me just explain something: History will care, I don&#8217;t. 
The reason I don’t is because it&#8217;s like going to a movie where you already know the ending. It&#8217;s the most predictable movie in the world. The Democrats are going to impeach, the Republicans are going to acquit in the Senate. It&#8217;s not going to have any massive impact on the election, everything in the world is baked into this cake — old shoes, human feces — everything is in the cake, and when it comes to 2020, the only factor that is not baked into the cake is who the Democrats will nominate. …
I realized [Wednesday] morning, I was thinking about this with regard to how people view President Trump, because really how you view the impeachment is a referendum on how you view President Trump — and, even more than President Trump, how you feel about the broader political situation in the United States. I don&#8217;t think that many people are actually looking at the charges in this case and reading the Democrats’ 659-page report, and then reading the Republicans&#8217; 200-page response and being like, “Well, after considering all of the transcripts and all of the facts, here&#8217;s where I come down on the legal merits of this case, on the evidentiary burden — has it been met or has it not been met?” I don&#8217;t think that most Americans are thinking that way. 
I think most Americans are thinking to themselves, “Is this impeachment appropriate or is this impeachment not? Are the people trying to impeach Trump politically motivated or are they motivated by just concern for the Constitution and preventing foreign countries from interfering in America&#8217;s elections?” I feel like we&#8217;ve been speaking past each other for quite a while here. 
There are a couple issues on which this is a referendum on Trump, and then there are a couple issues where this is a referendum on American politics as a whole, and it&#8217;s all wrapped up together in a ball, and that&#8217;s what people&#8217;s opinions on impeachment are, but it comes down to this, I think: Do you think that President Trump is a murderer or is he a coroner? Is he a political murderer or is he a political coroner?
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If you are on the Left, you look at President Trump and you say, look at this &#8230; look at this person. He lies frequently, he says things that are dishonest, he breaks every rule of the presidency, he says things out loud that should never be said, he gets on phone calls and he just jabbers to the president of Ukraine about his political opponents, he&#8217;s the kind of guy who will say or do anything, he&#8217;ll insult people on Twitter, he rips the media and then he degrades the view of people of the media because he sees them as his enemy, he calls them the enemy of the people. This is somebody who cannot be normalized! 
This is why you&#8217;ve heard Democrats say and people in the media say since literally the day he was elected and really since the day he was nominated, “We cannot accept this as the new normal.” In other words, Trump murdered all of these conventions. There were all of these conventions, that the media were trustworthy and Trump murdered it — he took it out back with a pickaxe and buried it in the eye like Leon Trotsky. 
That Trump has murdered civility — before this we were a republic of comedy — and you see this in the rewriting of Barack Obama&#8217;s history by the media. It has now been an accepted part of the media&#8217;s history that Barack Obama was actually a politician of comedy and unity, and spent his days trying to cut bipartisan deals, which for any of us who have a memory longer than that of the fish Dory in &#8220;Finding Nemo,&#8221; we recognize that&#8217;s a bunch of crap. But for folks on the Left, it&#8217;s like, “Well, Barack Obama, that was a man of honor and civility.” I don’t remember a lot of civility from Barack Obama, but they do.
Don&#8217;t you remember those days when there was a consensus that politics stopped at water&#8217;s edge, that you never militarize foreign policy on behalf of your own political viewpoint? And now Donald Trump has wrecked that — he&#8217;s the murderer of that political consensus. The idea that we were all in it together — and it&#8217;s true domestically, too — Trump has polarized us along domestic political lines, whereas once we were unified. It is Trump who has wrecked everything! 
There&#8217;s the view of the Left, [and] the view of the media when it comes to impeachment, they say, “Well, if we don&#8217;t impeach now, then we&#8217;ve broken impeachment forever. If we don&#8217;t impeach now, then the very conventions of impeachment will have been destroyed for all time. Trump will have murdered them. It will just be another casualty of his evil.” The view of the Left is that Donald Trump is the political murderer — that he is Michael Meyers and that he is stalking Jamie Lee Curtis, and that Jamie Lee Curtis is all that is good and right with the American Republic.
Then there is the view of the people who are, I would say, probably on the middle or on the Right, and that view is that Trump is not actually a political murderer. Yes, he exacerbates a lot of the problems that the country has already been experiencing; no, he&#8217;s not militating against any of those. But Trump is much more a coroner than he is a murder, [and] his election represents the recognition by the American people that all these things were already dead. 
Trump came upon the the still-warm corpse of American politics, and then he declared it dead. So Democrats, seeing a man standing over the body, are going, “Oh, that guy probably killed him, that guy&#8217;s the murderer” — and Republicans, conservatives, independents, they&#8217;re looking at Trump, they&#8217;re going, “No, that body was dead, and Trump didn&#8217;t exactly like get down on his hands and knees and perform CPR on the guy. But he ain&#8217;t a murderer, He&#8217;s the coroner, he&#8217;s the person who came along and declared all of these things dead to the media.”
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ben-shapiro-show/id1047335260">Listen to full episodes of “The Ben Shapiro Show” on iTunes. 
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President Donald Trump Holds Campaign Rally In Shreveport, Louisiana

SHAPIRO: President Trump: The Political Murderer, Or The Political Coroner?

On Tuesday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan talks about how Adam Schiff has played into the hands of Putin by falling for the Russian collusion conspiracy theory. Video and partial transcript below: 
The Republicans are basically threatening to turn the tables on this entire investigation. Bill McGurn has a terrific column in [The Wall Street] <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-job-for-adam-schiff-11576540574">Journal</a> [Tuesday,] saying:
<blockquote>Now that his impeachment work is over, here&#8217;s a new assignment for Adam Schiff: to investigate whether the bad intel in the Christopher Steele dossier was there because the former British spy was a sloppy partisan — or because he was the patsy in a Russian disinformation campaign.
As chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Mr. Schiff is plainly the man for the job. Such an investigation fits comfortably with his oft-stated complaint that Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 presidential election and will do so again in 2020 if we don&#8217;t stop it. Meanwhile, the allegation that the Steele “dossier” was a product of Russian disinformation comes from one of Mr. Schiff&#8217;s own star witnesses, Fiona Hill.</blockquote>
&#8230; The myth that the Democrats spread around and that [former Special Counsel Robert] Mueller helped spread was that Vladimir Putin was trying to get Trump to win and Hillary to lose — I said from the very beginning, that is absolutely absurd. Everyone knew, including me, everyone knew Hillary Clinton was going to win. There was no way Vladimir Putin had any idea that Donald Trump could win because nobody had any idea Donald Trump could win. So I speculated, “Well, what was he doing?” He&#8217;s obviously just screwing around with our election and their own witness, Fiona Hill, said the same thing. Here she is:
<blockquote>HILL: The Russians interests, frankly, to delegitimize our entire presidency. So one issue that I do want to raise and I think that this would resonate with our colleagues, some on the committee from the Republican Party, is that the goal of the Russians was really to put whoever became the president by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale under a cloud. 
So if secretary, former first lady, former Senator Clinton had been elected as president, as indeed many expected in the run up to the election in 2016, she too would have had major questions about her legitimacy. And I think that, you know, what we&#8217;re seeing here as a result of all of these narratives, is this is exactly what the Russian government was hoping for. If they seed misinformation, they seed doubt, they have everybody questioning the legitimacy of a presidential candidate being President Trump or potentially President Clinton, that they would pit one side of our electorate against the other, that they would pit one party against the other. </blockquote>
See, this is the thing, and I said this from the very beginning, because it has to be true as the only way the story makes sense. Vladimir Putin has been messing with our elections forever. They do all this kind of — they take out ads and they do whatever they can to disrupt things. He doesn&#8217;t care whether Donald Trump is president. This whole mythology that Donald Trump was a Russian asset, [which] Brennan and Clapper were selling on TV to cover up their own bad behavior in the Obama administration, it just doesn&#8217;t make sense. 
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There was simply no way for Vladimir Putin to know there was any chance of Donald Trump winning. He went after Clinton because it was obvious she was going to win — that&#8217;s why he&#8217;s mostly targeting Clinton, not Trump. But if it had been clear that Trump was going to win, he would have targeted Trump. It&#8217;s America that he&#8217;s after — it&#8217;s us — he wants us at each other&#8217;s throats. 
So who are the Russians&#8217; assets? Because this is Putin&#8217;s success that he couldn&#8217;t even have dreamed of, Adam Schiff going on TV and convicting Trump for two years of Russian collusion, falsely, of lying about it. Adam Schiff lying about his relationship with the whistleblower in the Ukraine affair, Adam Schiff lying now about whether he could have known that the FBI FISA warrant process was out of control when Devin Nunes knew two years ago. Why didn&#8217;t he know? Because he was lying. 
Adam Schiff is a Russian asset. I don&#8217;t think on purpose, I just think he&#8217;s a patsy who [has] played into the Russian plan to make us to turn us against each other. James Comey, another guy who went after Trump with a vengeance, who made it sound as if it were possible that Donald Trump was some kind of colluding with the Russians — I think it was Lindsey Graham [who] recently said Donald Trump doesn&#8217;t collude with anybody. He doesn’t collude with his own government, why would he collude with the Russians? It&#8217;s nonsense. 
Of course, Jerry Nadler, who just does whatever that [he’s] told, I&#8217;m sure, who&#8217;s bumbling around trying to make this impeachment thing sound like it&#8217;s a constitutional emergency. These are the three Russian stooges, these are the guys who either the Moe, Larry, and Curly of Russia&#8217;s attempt to fiddle with our country, and they have just been patsies for this guy, who is very good at this information and who sent that disinformation through Christopher Steele and through this — now we know, bogus, dossier. Who fell for it? I didn&#8217;t, they did. 
<a href="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-andrew-klavan-show/id1045171376?mt=2">Listen to full episodes of “The Andrew Klavan Show” on iTunes. </a> 
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House Intelligence Committee Holds Hearing On Impeachment Inquiry Of President Trump

KLAVAN: Adam Schiff: The Unwitting Russian Asset

Adam Schiff

Russia

Vladimir Putin

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