Friday, January 31, 2020

Final Trump impeachment vote teed up for next week after GOP blocks Dem effort for new witnesses Alex Pappas By Alex Pappas | Fox News

TRUMP IMPEACHMENT

Published January 31, 2020

Last Update an hour ago

Final Trump impeachment vote teed up for next week after GOP blocks Dem effort for new witnesses

By Alex Pappas | Fox News

Republicans in the Senate secured enough votes Friday evening to reject Democratic efforts to extend the impeachment trial of President Trump and call new witnesses, paving the way for his widely expected acquittal next week on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over his dealings with Ukraine.

DEMS WORK TO DRAW OUT IMPEACHMENT FINALE, POTENTIALLY PUSHING FINAL VOTE INTO NEXT WEEK

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said late Friday he expects to "conclude the trial in the coming days" as the Senate approved the framework to continue the trial on Monday, with a final up-or-down vote on Wednesday.

After hours of debate during the day on Friday, the Senate voted 51-49 to block a Democratic motion to call new witnesses. The vote came after vehement demands from Democrats to call former national security adviser John Bolton to testify about the Trump-Ukraine saga. Two Republicans -- Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and Maine Sen. Susan Collins -- voted with Democrats.

"A majority of the U.S. Senate has determined that the numerous witnesses and 28,000-plus pages of documents already in evidence are sufficient to judge the House Managers’ accusations and end this impeachment trial," McConnell said after the vote.

Democrats decried the failure of the motion.

"America will remember this day, unfortunately, where the Senate did not live up to its responsibilities, where the Senate turned away from truth and went along with a sham trial," said Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.

Later on Friday evening, Senate Republicans voted down four amendments offered by Democrats to call Bolton and White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, among others. Chief Justice Roberts told Schumer before that vote series that he would not break ties in the Senate, after Democrats in recent days raised the possibility Roberts could possibly tip the scales for them during votes on amendments.

"I think it would be inappropriate for me, an unelected official from a different branch of government, to assert the power to change that result so that the motion would succeed," Roberts told Schumer.

The vote on witnesses came as Trump was flying to Florida. A senior administration official aboard Air Force One said that the reaction to the Senate vote was “calm, but pleased."

"Nothing like applause or cheering, but just a recognition that things are clearly going in the right direction,” the official said.

There will be no trial action over the weekend. The trial will resume Monday with closing arguments by the impeachment managers and defense counsel. Senators will have the opportunity to make speeches on Monday and Tuesday.

The final vote will come the same week as Iowa’s caucuses on Monday and the State of the Union address on Tuesday. A senior congressional source told Fox News that there has been no discussion about postponing the speech, as advance teams have been crawling all over the Capitol in preparation for Tuesday’s address.

Earlier Friday, it became apparent that Republicans had the votes to shut down any new witnesses from testifying in the trial, with Sens. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, announcing they wouldn’t defect.

After the vote on witnesses, Trump drew attention to the number of witnesses during the House's impeachment proceedings: "Democrats = 17 Witnesses. Republicans = 0 Witnesses."

On Friday, Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., rejected criticism that Democrats are trying to extend the trial until after the Iowa caucuses, which would keep four 2020 White House hopefuls away from the campaign trail and past Trump’s planned State of the Union address on Tuesday.

He said the timing of these events “are totally irrelevant."

"Pardon me for seeming somewhat cavalier about it, but we're talking about an impeachment trial. Nothing we do as senators will be more important," Blumenthal said.

Earlier in the day, several GOP senators grumbled at the prospect of the trial continuing past Friday. Many expressed frustration that Trump got impeached on what they believe is a flimsy case and they want the trial to end as soon as possible.

“Let’s go and get this over with for the sake of the American people,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said.

Sen. Mike Braun, R-Ind., said Trump will be able to give a State of the Union address on Tuesday successfully even if he hasn’t been acquitted just yet.

“He would be able to do almost anything most other individuals couldn't,” Braun said.

Fox News' Chad Pergram, Marisa Schultz and Jason Donner contributed to this report.

Alex Pappas is a senior politics editor at FoxNews.com.

Watch Students Bash Trump for Profiting from Presidency…Find Out it Was Obama

Campus Reform’s Addison Smith went to the University of Virginia to ask students about President Trump profiting from his office.

The only problem is that Smith gave information from Obama and not Trump.

“When you take the role as a President you’re not supposed to try to benefit or make business deals.”

He donates his paycheck every quarter to a worthy cause.

https://100percentfedup.com/watch-students-bash-trump-for-profiting-from-presidency-find-out-it-was-obama/

Ted Cruz Caught Celebrating Senate Vote With Hilarious Imitation Of Nancy Pelosi’s SOTU Clap [Video]

Poor Nancy Pelosi, when she’s not giving out souvenir impeachment pens, she’s publicly mocking President Trump, the man she claims she prays for on a regular basis. <Insert eyeball roll here.>

Earlier this afternoon, the U.S. Senate voted 51-49, against retrying the House impeachment case against President Trump in the Senate. Only two Republican (in name only) Senators, Susan Collins (ME) and Mitt Romney (UT) crossed over to the Democrat side to vote in favor of keeping the impeachment charade alive.

The Democrat Party’s lead hack, Speaker Pelosi got the embarrassment of her career, when once again, she underestimated the popularity of President Trump with the American people and with the Republican lawmakers who voted to end the Democrat Party’s shameless coup of a sitting president.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX), who hasn’t always been a fan of President Trump, stood by him throughout the process, demanding that the Democrats case against him was baseless and foolish. Today, after the Senate vote, Ted Cruz could be seen on the Senate floor talking to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), as he playfully mocked Speaker Pelosi, clapping like a seal, with arms extended following the results of the vote.

Watch the hilarious video here:
https://100percentfedup.com/ted-cruz-caught-celebrating-senate-vote-with-hilarious-imitation-of-nancy-pelosis-sotu-clap-video/

LORD: The Politics of Authoritarianism, Starring Elizabeth Warren And Sacha Baron Cohen

Call it the new authoritarianism.

You recall Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren? She of the disinformation campaign that featured herself in a starring role as a Cherokee Indian — for which, caught out by a DNA test, she had to apologize? The same Elizabeth Warren who falsely claimed she was fired as a school teacher for being pregnant?

And doubtless you recall the British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, he who has made a very good living conducting disinformation campaigns in which he pretends to some persona other than his own and conducts “interviews” with his unsuspecting targets. In fact, full disclosure, I myself was targeted by Cohen in his role as Billy Wayne Ruddick Jr., a blonde-wigged supposed hillbilly, who “interviewed” me by saying all sorts of bizarre and crazed things as I, the unsuspecting soul of politeness, answered his character’s craziness. In fact, I thought it was hysterically funny, decidedly no offense taken.

(L-R) Jon Voight and Sacha Baron Cohen attend the Netflix 2020 Golden Globes After Party on Jan. 5, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Arnold Turner/Getty Images for Netflix)

But now? Now, suddenly if unsurprisingly and quite separately, both Warren and Cohen have made it their deeply unfunny task in life to attack Mark Zuckerberg because — gasp! — Zuckerberg allows political ads with which the two or any other given left-winger may disagree with on Facebook. Zuckerberg had the gall to stand up for free speech by leaving it up to Facebook users to do their own research on the truthfulness of an ad and make their own decision.

Warren, who is, of course, a sitting United States senator, has put her anti-free speech authoritarianism into legislative form. She promises to “create civil and criminal penalties for knowingly disseminating false information about when and how to vote in U.S. elections.”

There is no word whether Warren would arrest the longtime PBS host Bill Moyers, now 85. Moyers, for those who came in late, was a senior aide to then-President Lyndon B. Johnson during the 1964 presidential campaign in which LBJ, the Democratic nominee, was running against the Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater.

It was Moyers, according to multiple books on the campaign, who turned to the advertising agency Doyle Dane Bernbach to launch a massive television ad campaign that depicted Goldwater as a “warmonger and extremist.”

Goldwater biographer Lee Edwards notes this in his extensive biography “Goldwater: The Man Who Made a Revolution.”

… the most controversial ad of 1964 — and perhaps of all political advertising — does not mention Barry Goldwater, or anything he ever said. It begins with a small girl standing in a sun-speckled field, plucking petals from a daisy as she childishly counts, ‘1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 6, 6, 8, 9, 9…’ When she reaches ‘9’ a deep bass voice overrides her voice and ominously begins a countdown, ’10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, zero.’ At zero, the camera, which has been closing in the child’s face, dissolves from the pupil of her eye to an atomic bomb that explodes and expands and fills the screen.
Like a doomsday project, President Johnson’s voice solemnly intones: ‘These are the stakes — to make a world in which all of God’s children can live, or go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die.’ On a black screen are the words, ‘Vote for President Johnson on November 3,’ which an announcer repeats and then adds, ‘The stakes are too high for you to stay home.’

Here is the actual commercial, as produced by the top media consultant of the day, the late Tony Schwartz.

This being 1964, CBS, the only network on which the commercial aired, was, as it were, the Facebook of its day. The commercial was shown but once, on CBS’s “Monday Night at the Movies,” which had a Facebook-sized audience of around 50 million Americans.

Edwards goes on to add this:

The response to the TV spot was electrifying. The switchboard of the White House lit up, and Johnson called Moyers excitedly, [saying] ‘Jesus Christ, what in the world happened?’ Moyers said, ‘You got your point across, that’s what.’ After a pause, the president said, ‘Well, I guess it did what we goddamned set out to do, didn’t it?’ Moyers: ‘I would think so.’

The Republican National Committee and Senate GOP Leader Everett Dirksen protested the ad so “vehemently” that all three television networks of the day picked up the ad as a news story and “showed the commercial on their evening newscasts, giving the spots millions of dollars of free airtime. Time followed with a cover story about ‘The Nuclear Issue,’ using the ‘daisy girl.’”

Elizabeth Warren released a plan to combat voter disinformation online.

Were Elizabeth Warren to get her authoritarian was, Bill Moyers would have been frog-marched in handcuffs out of the Johnson White House. Not to mention everybody else involved in the ad, from producer Schwartz to the advertising agency to the executives of CBS.

Then there’s Sacha Baron Cohen. One can only imagine what a Warren-style authoritarian campaign could lead to for Cohen. His entire career has been carefully constructed by falsely portraying himself as someone else in order to lure targets into unwitting conversations designed to portray them as fools. Whether then-private citizen Donald Trump or Vice President Dick Cheney or countless others, the Cohen “interviews” are universally based on false information that has him portraying someone other than his factual personage.

Now he says this of Facebook and its creator, Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook’s stand for free speech and opposition to authoritarian censorship means “history will judge you harshly — if we still have historians after you help destroy democracy!”

Without a trace of irony Cohen says of Zuckerberg:

Terrifying. 218,000 political ads on Facebook — many with lies and hate — seen by voters perhaps 1.3 BILLION times.

Got that? The guy who has built his entire career on what could easily, were one similarly authoritarian and censorship-minded, call “lies and hate,” is outraged at the very same free speech rights that protects, when he is visiting America, Sacha Baron Cohen himself.

It would be easy to laugh at Warren and Cohen.

But in fact there is nothing funny about authoritarianism — or censorship.

https://dailycaller.com/2020/01/31/lord-the-politics-of-authoritarianism-starring-elizabeth-warren-and-sacha-baron-cohen/

Father Of 7-Year-Old Texas Boy Whose Mother Wanted To ‘Transition’ Him To A Girl Wins In Court

Syringe and a vial. — Photo by Guido Mieth/GettyImages

Facebook

Twitter

Mail

On Thursday, a Texas court ruled in favor of Jeff Younger, the father of James Younger, the seven-year-old whose pediatrician mother was attempting to medically transition her son into a girl.

Dallas Judge Mary Brown upheld an October decision that gave both parents conservatorship over their child and denied the mother’s request that the case revert to the October 21 11-1 jury decision that gave her sole managing conservatorship. That decision was later overruled by Judge Kim Cooks, who ruled that conservatorship would be split evenly between both parents.

But then the mother, Dr. Anne Georgulas, and her attorneys argued that Cooks had acted improperly by posting an article about the case on her Facebook page, prompting Cooks to be summarily recused from the case.,

The Daily Mail noted, “In November it was revealed the youngster had decided to attend school this year as a boy. In a post from the Facebook page ‘Save James,’ pictures of James dressed in a button down shirt, slacks and tennis shoes were shared online. The caption read: ‘Going to school. This is what it looks like when JAMES gets to choose! *Affirm this! * Also, a photo taken yesterday, just before church. James and Jude proud to be men! Save James, save thousands of children!’”

Georgulas and Younger were in 2010 and underwent in vitro fertilization to have twins; they requested the babies to be male. Georgulas later brought James to see a gender therapist at the Children’s Hospital Center, where she claimed he had wanted a girls’ toy from McDonald’s and then started imitating the female characters from Disney’s Frozen and asking to wear dresses, as The Texan reported.

The Texan continued:

She said she contacted the GENecis clinic at Children’s Hospital Center, and they referred her to Rebekka Ouer for counseling. Ouer recommended a process of “affirmation” and thought that a “social transition” for James to begin going to school dressed as a girl named “Luna” would be in his best interest.

Jeff Younger said Georgulas had been pushing their son to transition after their divorce. He claimed that when his son was three years old, his mother locked him in his bedroom and told him, “monsters only eat boys.” He also said she had forced James to wear dresses.

Jeff Younger stated:

I want you to imagine having electronic communication with your son on FaceTime, and imagine that your ex-wife has dressed him as a drag queen to talk to you. He has false eyelashes and makeup. His hair has got glitter in it. He’s wearing a dress.

Now imagine how you would feel seeing what I believe is actual sexual abuse — I believe this is not just emotional abuse but is the very, most fundamental form of sexual abuse, tampering with the sexual identity of a vulnerable boy. Every. Single. Day. You have to see your son sexually abused, and you have to maintain your calm… because the courts are not going to be fair to you. And the only way you can survive this and get your son through this alive is to calmly allow your son to be tortured right before your eyes and outlast the opposition. That’s what it’s like.

In October, GOP Texas Governor Greg Abbott stated that the Texas Attorney General’s Office and the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services were looking into the case, which had drawn national attention. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) also weighed in, tweeting, “A 7-year-old child doesn’t have the maturity to make profound decisions like this. The state of Texas should protect this child’s right to choose—as an informed, mature person—and not be used as a pawn in a left-wing political agenda.”

https://www.dailywire.com/news/father-of-7-year-old-texas-boy-whose-mother-wanted-to-transition-him-to-a-girl-wins-in-court

Conservatively Speaking

Friday, January 31, 2020