Living in Italy, expat Americans were shocked to learn that they couldn’t drive their cars into Verona on certain days if their licenses ended in odd numbers and on other days if their licenses ended in even numbers. Caught driving on the wrong day, the penalty was stiff. It was the bureaucrats’ way of dealing with pollution that affected air quality, soot deposits on marble statues, and buildings in town.
In Modesto, California, the city deals with water shortages, whether real or imagined, by giving citations and fines to odd-numbered addresses that water lawns on Tuesdays when only even-numbered addresses can use sprinkler systems.
In the impeachment hoax, Democrats are illegally using taxpayer funds to manipulate the 2020 election. We are watching a Democrat Party campaign event set in the U.S. Capitol. This is the best version of a Trump rally Democrats can manage.
Yet it requires a scramble to handle the latest surprises. I hate last-minute “bombshells” because the timing deprives the accused of the time and ability to properly respond. Springing last-minute surprises is fundamentally unfair.
On January 16, 2020, just as the U.S. Senate and the Chief Justice were kicking off an impeachment trial, GAO, an agency of the U.S. Congress, suddenly issued a false and erroneous report:
BELLEVUE, WA – Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam should apologize to the thousands of gun owners who turned out Monday for their annual, and peaceful, Second Amendment rally, and to the thousands more his hysteria kept away, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.
“Following a peaceful gathering of law-abiding gun owners protesting the gun control extremism of Northam and his Democrat colleagues in the General Assembly,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb,” Gov. Northam should beg forgiveness from every Virginia resident his Chicken Little drama both offended and demonized over the past several days.
Politicians hide behind enquiries – their magic answer to all problems, especially bushfires.
Announcing enquiries give the impression of decisive action, they generate fees for armies of barristers, lawyers and bureaucrats, and provide momentary excitement for the media.
The proposed 2020 Australian Bushfires corrobboree will provide a grandstand for the Climate Rebellion Mob who will get starring roles on ABC/Fairfax. Big business willprobably propose a carbon tax to fight bushfires while foresters and land owners will hardly be heard.
Former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton claimed there was no way she could have known about Harvey Weinstein’s history of allegedsexual assault, despite multiple women saying they warned her campaign.
"How could we have known?" Clinton said when asked by the Hollywood Reporter about her longstanding relationship with Weinstein. "He raised money for me, for the Obamas, for Democrats in general. And that at the time was something that everybody thought made sense. And of course, if all of us had known what we know now, it would have affected our behavior."
Several Hollywood insiders have said that the Clinton camp was well aware of his predatory behavior. In a 2017 profile of the "complicity machine" that allowed Weinstein to evade punishment, the New York Timesreported that two high-profile women, journalist Tina Brown and actress Lena Dunham, warned people close to Clinton about the Hollywood mogul, who is now standing trial for sexual assault.
Brown, the former editor in chief of the Daily Beast, claimed in an interview that she told a member of Clinton’s inner circle about Weinstein during the 2008 campaign. "I was hearing that Harvey’s sleaziness with women had escalated since I left Talk in 2002 and she was unwise to be so closely associated with him," Brown said. Dunham was even more direct.
"I just want to let you know that Harvey’s a rapist and this is going to come out at some point. I think it’s a really bad idea for him to host fundraisers and be involved because it’s an open secret in Hollywood that he has a problem with sexual assault," Dunham recalled telling 2016 campaign deputy communications director Kristina Schake.
Dunham, a Clinton surrogate, said the staffer responded by saying she would pass the message to campaign manager Robby Mook. Dunham also said that she gave a similar warning to campaign spokeswoman Adrienne Elrod. Both women denied to the Times that Dunham had mentioned rape, while Mook said he never received any warning.
Clinton’s professed ignorance also comes despite journalist Ronan Farrow’s claim that the failed candidate’s staff attempted to pressure him when he first began investigating Weinstein at NBC in 2017.
"Hillary Clinton had scheduled an interview while I was at the height of the Weinstein reporting, and her folks got in touch and said, ‘We hear you’re working on a big story,’ sounded very concerned, and tried to cancel that interview," Farrow told ABC News in 2018. "Over the Weinstein stuff."
Farrow’s report led alleged Weinstein victim and Clinton supporter, Rose McGowan, to publicly attack the former secretary of state. "I knew that Hillary Clinton’s people were protecting the Monster," the actress tweeted. "I guess predators are her style."
MSNBC on Tuesday kicked off impeachment with a movie trailer-style hype video and a Chris Matthews rant about dumb voters. Matthews attempted to compliment the legal strategy of Alan Dershowitz, who is arguing that no crime should equal no conviction. The Hardball host bashed the dummies he fears will find the strategy effective. Matthews spewed, “To the non-attentive voter — I think Trump always loves the low information guy, the Dancing with the Stars who cares more about Harry and Meghan or about Brad and Jennifer."
Democrat presidential candidate Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) son-in-law, with whom she is close, has troubling ties to the Iranian regime, according to a new book by Peter Schweizer.
The book, Profiles in Corruption, reveals progressive leaders’ little-known ties to corrupt businesses and governments and discusses the Massachusetts senator in a chapter.
The chapter details the business deals of Warren’s son-in-law, Sushil Tyagi, who is married to her daughter, Amelia. Tyagi was born in India but moved to the United States, where he met Amelia while they were both pursuing MBAs at Wharton Business School.
Warren and Tyagi are close. She attended his brother’s wedding in India, recounting it in her memoir. She and her husband Bruce Mann in December 2009 served as witnesses for a power of attorney corporate document he filed in India.
Since his marriage into the Warren family, Tyagi “has been involved in a series of curious—even troubling—business ventures around the world,” Schweizer writes.
Tyagi runs Tricolor Films, and in 2008, produced a film called The Song of Sparrows, directed by Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi.
The film was described as Majidi’s “most religious” and is about a man who is fired from his job on an ostrich farm, moves to the big city and becomes a motorcycle taxi driver, and soon becomes consumed with his passengers’ lives and is swept up in a world of greed. It is his family that help him restore his “caring and generous nature,” according to a film synopsis.
Tyagi was listed as the film’s sole producer on a New York Times page, in credits which have now been deleted. A look back at the page’s archive revealed that the film was funded by the Iranian government agency that is overseen by Iranian propagandists.
Schweizer writes:
The full credits of the film, for some reason, seem to also have been scrubbed from the internet. We obtained a copy by using the Wayback machine and made a startling discovery: the movie’s chief investors included none other than the social deputy of the State Welfare Organization (SWO) of Iran (SWO-“معاونت اجتماعی سازمان بهزیستی کشور”) as well as the Cultural and Artistic Organization of Tehran. (“سازمان فرهنگی و هنری شهرداری تهران”)
These two investors in the film might appear at first glance to be innocuous cultural organizations—but they are not. Both are funded and controlled by the Islamist Iranian government.
The Cultural and Artistic Organization of Tehran states: “This organization was founded in 1996 and [does] its activities under the supervision of a board of trustees composed of various cultural institutions such as IRIB and Islamic propaganda organization.”
The Cultural and Artistic Organization of Tehran’s page promotes cultural events such as one for school children entitled “The Seal of Hostages,” attended by several top Iranian officials, according to the book.
Another event is the inherently antisemitic Quds Day on the last day of Ramadan. The organization also arranges marches, as well as organizes posters and other materials, for Quds Day. Its site says, “A new plan for the destruction of Israel will be launched, and the Quds Cultural Radio station will be located at the Radio Station. Also, the ‘I love the fight against Israel’ is distributed among the people.”
Schweizer notes, “Quds Day typically features massive crowds organized by the Iranian government chanting ‘death to America’ and burning effigies, with full media coverage.”
He writes Tyagi’s The Song of Sparrows has film credits that read like “who’s who of prominent Iranian government institutions.” For example, there is a thank-you to the “Iranian Revolutionary Guards Air Force.”
This was during a time of heightened U.S.-Iran tensions, when Washington had accused Iran of assisting in the killing of five American soldiers based in Iraq, and the then-Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had repeatedly threatened that the United States, which he declared a “satanic power,” and warned that Israel would disappear from the face of the earth.
Tyagi also produced another film by Majid Majidi, but even less information is available about this film, Schweizer writes.
According to the book, a now deleted Web page describes Tyagi’s production company this way:
Leveraging their relationships with studio executives, access to top creative talent, and the high-level support that they enjoy from numerous foreign governments, this Los Angeles–based production company is developing a number of major international-themed projects for feature films, television, and interactive media.
“It is not known what foreign governments those might involve beyond Iran. Why the website was shut down is also unknown,” the book says.
Jay Sekulow, one of the lawyers leading President Donald Trump’s defense in the Senate impeachment trial, attacked the arguments Tuesday by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) against executive privilege — by quoting his own words at him.
Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee and is the lead manager for the House Democrats’ case against the president, argued that the president had attempted to obstruct his and fellow Democrats’ impeachment inquiry by instructing senior aides in the executive branch not to comply with congressional subpoenas to appear and testify.
But Sekulow reminded Schiff that he had taken an entirely different approach when the Republican-led Congress held then-Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt for refusing to provide key documents relating to Operation Fast and Furious, President Barack Obama’s attempt to use gunrunning to Mexico to trace the weapons’ path and — critics said — to justify new restrictions on firearms. (Border Patrol Brian Terry was murdered with guns from Fast and Furious.)
Sekulow quoted Schiff, who wrote in Politico in 2012: “The White House assertion of privilege is backed by decades of precedent that has recognized the need for the president and his senior advisers to receive candid advice and information from their top aides.”
He could have added that Obama’s exertion of executive privilege, which Schiff and other Democrats had defended so vigorously, was later ruled invalid by a federal judge in 2016. The documents were eventually released.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
Living in Italy, expat Americans were shocked to learn that they couldn’t drive their cars into Verona on certain days if their licenses ended in odd numbers and on other days if their licenses ended in even numbers. Caught driving on the wrong day, the penalty was stiff. It was the bureaucrats’ way of dealing with pollution that affected air quality, soot deposits on marble statues, and buildings in town. 
In the impeachment hoax, Democrats are illegally using taxpayer funds to manipulate the 2020 election. We are watching a Democrat Party campaign event set in the U.S. Capitol. This is the best version of a Trump rally Democrats can manage.
Politicians hide behind enquiries – their magic answer to all problems, especially bushfires.
