Category: Congress

Congress Subpoenas Ali

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The Sammy Davis Jr. lookalike is now world-famous:

The House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol on Thursday subpoenaed additional organizations connected to the “Stop the Steal” rally that occurred prior to the attack on Congress.
The committee sent the subpoenas to Ali Alexander, an organizer of the Stop the Steal rally and conservative provocateur, and Nathan Martin, both of whose names are linked to permit applications for the rally.
The move follows the committee late last month issuing 11 subpoenas to allies of former President Donald Trump who were also involved with organizing the Stop the Steal event that preceded thousands of Trump supporters storming the Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States.
Five people died in the siege and more than 140 Capitol Police officers were injured.
The select committee has been investigating the causes that led to the insurrection attempt with focus on those who organized the Stop the Steal rally on the Capitol grounds Jan. 6.
“The rally on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6th, like the rally near the White House that day, immediately preceded the violent attack on the seat of our democracy,” committee chair Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement. “Over the course of that day, demonstrations escalated to violence and protesters became rioters.”
The committee said its investigation found that an organization named One Nation Under God submitted a permit application to hold an event Jan. 6 on the Capitol grounds on “the election fraud in the swing states.”
The permit named Martin as a contact for the organization and the listed address was the same provided on Alexander’s website soliciting donations, the committee said, adding that a vendor also listed on the permit told Capitol Police that he was reporting to both Martin and Alexander and identified them as with the Stop the Steal event.
“However, the permit application did not disclose any connection between STS and the Capitol rally event,” the letter sent to Alexander reads. “Further, when a USCP official spoke by telephone with Mr. Martin on or about Dec. 28, 2020, Mr. Martin claimed not to have any information about the rally and directed the official to speak with the vendor.”
Capitol Police had granted the permit for the One Nation Under God rally, which had estimated there would be only 50 attendees, it said.
In its letter to Alexander, the committee said he repeated during Stop the Steal events in the weeks before the attack of the potential for violence to achieve their goals while stating he was in communication with the White House and members of Congress to organize an effort to coincide with the certification of the 2020 Electrical College results.
The committee on Thursday also subpoenaed records from Stop the Steal, LLC.
“The Select Committee needs to understand all the details about the events that came before the attack, including who was involved in planning and funding them,” Thompson said. “We expect these witnesses to cooperate fully with our probe.”
The announcement came as Trump has instructed former aides subpoenaed to testify before the committee to not comply, claiming the information sought is protected by executive privilege, and that the former president will defend them.

The usual suspects on left-wing Twitter were doing the happy dance about this Thursday because, in their minds, Ali is the key to linking congressional Republicans to the “insurrection.” But in fact — and this is what the Left refuses to acknowledge — the rally organized by Ali was entirely peaceful, while a separate group (some Proud Boys and Oath Keepers) were the ones who breached the Capitol building. The committee has subpoenaed Ali to testify in three weeks, and I don’t think the Left is going to be smiling after Ali — who has been banned from Twitter since January — gets his moment in the spotlight.

What this “investigation” is really about is a political strategy by Democrats to keep producing headlines about “insurrection” all the way to November 2022, with the idea of more or less permanently campaigning against Trump. Alas for the Democrats, this strategy is too clever by half. It was one thing, back in May, when Biden’s approval numbers were high, to make a big deal about the alleged threat to “our democracy” of right-wingers trying to “overturn” the election. Since the disaster in Afghanistan, however, Biden’s poll numbers have cratered, and “buyer’s remorse” has set in — like, maybe this guy really shouldn’t be president — and many voters now view the “Stop the Steal” movement more favorably than they did just four or five months ago.




 

Seattle: Mecca of White Guilt Syndrome

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Why is Primila Jayapal a member of Congress?

Radical Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) broke “into tears” Wednesday while pleading with President Biden to include amnesty into the $3.5 trillion reconciliation package.
During Biden’s attempt to resolve the Democrat infighting over the his tax and spend measures, Jayapal cried in front of the President of the United States to sway his emotions towards allowing millions of illegal immigrants amnesty. Jayapal used her story as a “selling point,” Jayapal’s spokesperson Chris Evans confirmed to Politico.
“She said, ‘I’m the first South Asian woman ever elected to the House … and one of only two dozen immigrants in Congress … as an immigrant woman of color, I just want to share my perspective,” Evans explained. “She has a unique story as an immigrant — but also coming at 16, and to be sitting at the White House delivering what would be a transformational investment in social programs, it will be a moment she will remember forever.”
Unfortunately for Jayapal’s sob story, the Senate parliamentarian ruled Senate precedent would not allow amnesty measures to be included in the reconciliation package. The parliamentarian stated a number of non-fiscal impacts would result from including amnesty into the giant package, which opposes the budgetary purpose of using the tactic of reconciliation in the first place.
“Senate rules never contemplated a majority circumventing the filibuster by pretending that sweeping and transformational new policies were mere budgetary changes,” Sen. Mitch McConnell wrote in a statement after the ruling.

You see that Jayapal’s agenda is about destroying all American institutions and traditions, and what does she care about the filibuster?

When I first saw the headline about Jayapal’s tearful plea for amnesty, the question occurred: What district does she represent? She was elected in 2016 to replace retiring Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott in the 7th District of Washington state, which includes Seattle. According to Wikipedia, the 7th District “is the most Democratic district in the Pacific Northwest and the most Democratic district on the West Coast outside the San Francisco Bay Area or Los Angeles. It is also the most Democratic majority-white district in the United States” (emphasis added).

Three-quarters of the residents of the 7th District are white, but such is their liberal guilt about their whiteness that they felt only an immigrant woman could be qualified to represent them in Congress.

The politics of White Guilt Syndrome have always fascinated me, simply because I have no such guilt plaguing my conscience. All this progressive chatter about “white privilege” does nothing except inspire me to sarcastic laughter, knowing that I’m but one generation removed from the ubiquitous poverty of Depression-era rural Alabama. And certainly it’s not as if I’m living in the lap of luxury today. One must be higher up the socioeconomic ladder (or perhaps, further down the long slope of degeneracy) to be the kind of guilt-stricken white liberal who thinks congressional seats should be filled on the basis of affirmative action.

White Guilt Syndrome is a luxury, a status display marker, by which wealthy white people exhibit their presumed moral superiority. The median household income in Seattle is $92,263, so I reckon they can afford this 21st-century noblesse oblige, but it’s out of my price range.




 

Get Up And Fight

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— compiled by Wombat-socho


Silicon Valley delenda est.


I’m not quite to Ace levels of rage yet, but I’m becoming increasingly pissed off at the defeatist moaners who think the Democrats have pulled off their October Revolution and it’s all over. “The Uniparty has won,” they whine. “There’s nothing we can do.” Yes, we should all sit quietly in our houses, waiting for the blue-caps to come along and haul us off to the Alaskan death camps for being associated with friends of the supporters of the badthinking White Supremacist RAAAAACIST homophobic Bad Orange Man.

FUCK. THAT. SHIT.

All the horrible things the Democrats want to do are definitely going to happen if you sit at home and moan about what a useless bunch of sellouts the Republicans are, or if you go off trying to make the Libertarians or the Populists a thing. The LP is not going to happen. They’ve been around all my life and all they’ve managed to accomplish is…nothing. The best-known, most successful libertarians have been Republicans like Ron Paul and his son Rand. As Colonel Schlichter points out, the infrastructure of the GOP is sitting right there waiting for Trump’s supporters to take over and use it to support America First candidates. There are a ton of local party organizations dying for lack of volunteers – and I don’t mean the worthless fucks who show up for the party caucuses and then vanish for the next four years. Get involved. Find your local GOP party organization, become a precinct officer and/or delegate, and get to work. Get your friends involved too. The more of you that are involved, the more impact you’re going to have and the more you can get done. It’s not that damn hard. If some autistic kid from 4chan can do it, you can too.
If there is no active local GOP party organization? Find your county or state party org and start building one. Uncle Bob produced a how-to guide for building your own political machine back when he was a Democrat, and while some of it is dated, the basics are still sound.

Too old/sick/overworked to help rebuild the GOP to be an America First party? Stop contributing to the national party organizations. Do your homework and find local candidates who support the MAGA agenda, or who at least are opposed to the left-wing Democrat Party crazy. Not One Red Cent was a good idea in the Tea Party days, and it’s an even better one now. Speaking of the Tea Party, don’t send money to PACs claiming to support the MAGA agenda. This is one of the things that killed the Tea Party movement – a bunch of grifters latching onto it and draining off vital cash & volunteers to support themselves. Support state and county party orgs and candidates instead. Talk to people. Get them active.

One of the big reasons for concentrating on the state and local GOP organizations, especially if you live in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, & Wisconsin, is to make sure the legislatures and state offices are firmly in the grasp of the GOP so that the kind of crap that was pulled last fall doesn’t happen again. Push your local state reps and senators on voting security, and if they show indications of being squishy on the issue, follow Don Surber’s advice – primary them and purge them. We have to root out the RINOs from the party at all levels, or we’re going to continue getting screwed by the likes of Liz Cheney, Ben Sasse, Nikki Haley, whose loyalties are to the traitors at the Chamber of Commerce first and us somewhere in 10,000th place. Hang their donations from corporate PACs around their necks and beat them on the ground – because as we all should know by now, money alone doesn’t win elections, and all of these people need to relearn that lesson. Especially the Murder Turtle.

Now get up and fight.


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AOC’s Fake Victimhood Narrative

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Why would anyone believe anything she says?

“Alexandria Ocasio Smollett” and “AOC Lied” trended on Twitter amidst backlash over Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s tale of her experiences during the Capitol Riot.
The New York Democrat has repeatedly described fearing for her life during the Jan. 6 riot. In a Monday evening Instagram Live video, she said she hid in her office bathroom after hearing loud banging and shouting.
She described her fears at length before revealing that it was not rioters but a Capitol Police officer who entered her office. . . .
“I thought I was going to die,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “I have never been quieter in my entire life.”

Journalists who actually bothered to check the facts — there are precious few of those in D.C. nowadays — pointed out that Ocasio-Cortez’s office is not in the Capitol building, which was stormed by a mob of Trump supporters Jan. 6. Instead, her office is in the Cannon House Office Building, on the south side of Independence Avenue, across from the Capitol. None of the rioters ever entered the building where AOC was in her office, cowering in her bathroom and allegedly fearing for her life.

Democrats generally have lied about the Capitol riot, in which a relatively small number of angry nutjobs breached the police barricades, allowing a somewhat larger number of pro-Trump protesters to enter the Capitol, where they mostly wandered around taking selfies, like tourists. Democrats expect us to believe that this incident was a “terrorist attack” comparable to Sept. 11, 2001, and AOC’s “I thought I was going to die” sob story was clearly intended to dramatize that narrative.

My advice to conservatives since before Election Day has been to remain calm. If the news is depressing you or making you angry, stop watching the news. Find something pleasant to divert your attention from these daily provocations. Maintaining sanity in these crazy times can be difficult, but if you don’t work at it, you might end up jabbering about “lizard people” and doing something crazy and/or illegal.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)




 

Democrats and the Media (But I Repeat Myself) Are Trying to Destroy America

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Yesterday, Ace of Spades linked to an essay that included this:

Starting in the second decade of the 1900s, certain Communists began seeing in modernism a potential advertisement for the values of a mass society of industrial workers laboring under the direction of a small group of engineers. In other words, this aesthetic — which whole swaths of the Western world were already in the process of quickly adopting — could also be the perfect delivery mechanism for their political ideology. One hundred years later, we find ourselves in the middle of a similar cultural and political struggle.

You can read the rest of that by Alana Newhouse, who examines how an ideal of “flatness” — conformity, homogeneity, the destruction of individualism and the end of actual diversity — has been advanced by Internet technology. We must now endorse whatever beliefs the Party requires, or be destroyed. Dissent against the Party is treason. We are all Winston Smith in Room 101, expected to agree that 2+2=5, if that’s what the Party decides. This is about power, and those who wield power on behalf of the Party — the 20-something SJWs in charge of “fact checks” for the media, and “safety” for social-media platforms — will target you as an enemy if you question their authority to decide what is true.

This is why the phrase “white supremacy” is being slung around so promiscuously by Democrats and their media allies, as if anyone who didn’t vote for Joe Biden is a violent neo-Nazi skinhead:

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) said Friday on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show” that she could not stay in the secure location with Republican members of Congress during the Capitol Hill riots because they sympathize with white supremacist cause.
Maddow said, “Let’s talk about that in terms of members of Congress and congressional staff as well. You are saying that you didn’t feel safe going to that extraction point because you believe, knowing them, that there were members of Congress you didn’t trust not to betray your location and put you in danger in that way. Can you talk a bit more about that, why you believed that, if what you believed about that, what you know about that is something that should be part of the investigation? Or is it part of the investigation that’s been announced into whether members of Congress are complicit here?”

(Note well that Maddow and Ocasio-Cortez are tag-teaming here. Without any actual evidence, Maddow asks Ocasio-Cortez about “whether members of Congress are complicit” in the Jan. 6 riot.)

Ocasio-Cortez said, “I can’t speak as to what is currently under investigation specifically or not, but there are members of Congress that have made public comments. Comments like that Muslim Americans should not hold public office. They’ve made public comments that are quite closely aligned with the beliefs of white supremacists and white supremacist sympathizer organizations. These are all public record. And, you know, people of color are not safe around any individual who, frankly, sympathizes with a white supremacist cause. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been elected to Congress or not. It is a complete abdication of any responsibility that we all have to protect and defend and be there for each other as human beings and certainly as Americans. So it wasn’t safe. And the implications of that are quite dire. To not be in a secure location because being in the insecure location seems like a safer bet than being in a secure location. I mean, it’s pretty scary. I can also say I was not the only member of Congress that felt that way. You know, not every member was in that secure room.”

AOC said “white supremacist” three times in about 10 seconds. If you are one of the 74 million Americans who voted to reelect President Trump, AOC is calling you a “white supremacist.” By this, she means, you are a potential terrorist. Every Republican voter should be fired from their job and sent to prison — that is what AOC and Democrats have in mind.

There will be no liberty — no First Amendment protection of free speech, no right to dissent — in the one-party regime that Democrats are preparing to implement. Joe Biden and the Democrats have in mind nothing less than the destruction of America as we know it.




 

To Say the Least . . .

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House impeaches Trump a second time,
but conviction and removal are unlikely

As a symbolic gesture, what does this symbolize? The absolute contempt that Democrats have for the 74 million Americans who voted for Trump.

Having discovered that, with the help of mail-in vote fraud and Big Tech censorship, they can steal any election anywhere, Democrats have no fear that the “deplorables” could ever regain power. Thus the totalitarian regime, able to cruse its enemies with impunity, simply does not care about the potential of a backlash — dissent is now treason, and resistance is illegal. No matter how “unlikely” Trump could be removed from office between now and next Wednesday (it’s so unlikely as to be almost impossible, but we cannot rule anything out, in this climate of hysteria), this vote with 10 “Republicans” voting yes, is important for its symbolic value. Glenn Reynolds observes: “They were talking about impeaching him before he was even sworn in, which tells you a lot about the seriousness of this stuff.” Democrats never accepted the results of the 2016 election as legitimate, yet anyone who today questions the outcome of the 2020 election is condemned as an Enemy of Democracy.




 

Democrats Debut New 2020 Campaign Slogan: ‘Reclaiming My Time!’

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Yesterday, while I was working on an American Spectator column, my office TV was tuned to the House Judiciary Committee hearing where Attorney General William Barr was testifying and the performance by the committee’s Democrats of a loathsome kabuki theatre. Every Democrat unloaded a sort of sermon accusing Barr of various malfeasances — treason, conspiracy, murder, etc. — and then, when Barr would begin to answer, his interrogator would interrupt: “Reclaiming my time!”

Barr remained calm during this abusive treatment. At one point, interrupted by California Democrat Lou Correa, Barr responded: “This is a hearing. I thought I was the one who was supposed to be heard?”

The Democrats’ complaints about having limited time to ask their questions was, of course, the fault of the committee chairman, Jerry Nadler, who had made the rule allotting five minutes to each member. This rule seemed to be intended to make sure each Democrat got a chance to stage a “gotcha” moment that might become a viral video clip on social media. Different members focused on different themes. Many wanted to talk about the Roger Stone sentencing recommendation, although the Attorney General’s intervention in that case became moot once President Trump exercised his authority to commute the sentence. Several members wanted to talk about the June 1 decision to clear protesters out of Lafayette Park. That incident happened after Antifa rioters set fire to historic St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin asked Barr: “Are you aware that the director of the church that the Episcopal archbishop of Washington and the bishop of the Episcopal Church nationally along with the Catholic bishop of the Archdiocese of Washington, all denounced this police assault on the civil rights and civil liberties of the people?”

Barr answered: “Did they do that before or after the fire was put out?”

The Democrats on the committee seemed to have coordinated their strategy to use the hearing to attack Barr and “reclaiming my time” to interrupt his answers was probably a tactic planned in advance.

 

Ohio Republican Jim Jordan twice complained to Chairman Nadler about the Democrats’ abusive treatment of Barr:

“I don’t think we’ve ever had a hearing where the witness wasn’t allowed to respond to points made, questions asked, and attacks — attacks made. Not just in this hearing, not just in this committee, but in every committee I’ve been on,” Jordan said. “Particularly when you think about the fact that we have the attorney general of the United States here.”
He added, “I want the attorney general to be able to have enough time to respond to accusations and questions asked him, and you guys not cut him off.”
New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, the Democrat who is chairman of the committee, told Jordan that what he wanted was “irrelevant.”
A second clash between Nadler and Jordan happened later in the hearing.
“For months, you have tried to get the attorney general to come. He’s here. Why don’t you let him speak? Why don’t you let him answer the questions? Time after time. If you want the attorney general to come, at least let him answer the questions and the accusations made against him,” Jordan said.
Nadler said he would not allow Jordan to continue to speak, citing his “rudeness.”
“Rudeness is on the other side,” Jordan said. “Time after time, you refused to let the attorney general of the United States answer the questions posed to him.”

 

If you expected the hearing to be conducted in a civil manner — question asked, question answered — you don’t understand what the Democrats were actually doing. This was a campaign event for them, a chance to air their grievances against the Trump administration and depict Barr, a longtime public servant, as a corrupt tool of Orange Man Bad.

Ace of Spades calls it a “Stalinesque show trial,” but to be fair, it didn’t end with Barr being executed in the basement of the Lubyanka. The execution of dissenters won’t begin until after Biden is elected.




 

Devin Nunes Sues CNN and Daily Beast Over ‘Demonstrably False’ Stories

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Breitbart News reports:

House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence ranking member Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) intends to file lawsuits against both CNN and the Daily Beast over fake hit pieces the outlets have published about him in recent days, Breitbart News has learned exclusively.
Two pieces recently published in both outlets — one from Daily Beast earlier this week, and one from CNN published late Friday — alleged that the Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas, who is now indicted on unrelated charges, helped Nunes with a variety of matters when digging into Ukrainian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of Democrats.
The Daily Beast story, from Betsy Swan (formerly Woodruff), alleges that Parnas helped Nunes set up a variety of meetings on Ukraine matters. The CNN story, from Vicky Ward, goes even further, alleging that Nunes arranged a secret trip to Vienna and met there with Victor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor that former Vice President Joe Biden pushed to have fired when Shokin was investigating Burisma Holdings, the natural gas company paying Biden’s son Hunter Biden $83,000 per month. It is unclear at this time how much of these reports are blatantly false, but most of each of them appear to be inaccurate, according to sources familiar with the matter.
As such, Nunes is planning to sue both the Daily Beast and CNN over each story.
“These demonstrably false and scandalous stories published by the Daily Beast and CNN are the perfect example of defamation and reckless disregard for the truth,” Nunes told Breitbart News late Friday night. “Some political operative offered these fake stories to at least five different media outlets before finding someone irresponsible enough to publish them. I look forward to prosecuting these cases, including the media outlets, as well as the sources of their fake stories, to the fullest extent of the law. I intend to hold the Daily Beast and CNN accountable for their actions. They will find themselves in court soon after Thanksgiving.”

If you report a fact — e.g., person X met person Y in location Z on a certain date — based on what an unnamed source told you, and this “fact” turns out to be false, you’re going to have a difficult time explaining to a judge that this is not libel per se. This is just basic Journalism 101 stuff, and if the “secret trip to Vienna” did not actually happen, heads should roll at CNN and the Daily Beast. Here’s something else that young journalists ought to be taught: When a source offers you a story on the basis of anonymity, ask yourself what their motive is, and if this motive renders the offered information suspect. Even if a story is basically true — i.e., Parnas was trying to help expose the corrupt connections between Ukrainians and Democrats, so that Parnas and Nunes had reasons to cooperate — the specific facts alleged in your reporting must be provably true, or else you could be at risk of a libel case.