Looks like the Democrats have finally stopped talking and started acting. Although there still has not been a formal impeachment vote on the House floor, things are ramping up. Of course this could be just more talk, but really folks, if you're going to impeach the guy it's about time you got going. A good start was made by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who changed the House rules to allow depositions of witnesses to be taken without minority members present. This is a good step if you want to impeach a guy you hate: just don't allow his supporters in the room! Then, when the articles of impeachment are drawn up, the other side will have no clue when the Senate holds their trial. That's what I call fair treatment. After all, the president is a prick so he deserves it, right?

Source: "Pelosi’s House Rule Changes are Key Part of “Articles of Impeachment”, Being Drafted Over Next Two Weeks…"

The source is a conservative publication called the Conservative Treehouse, so the information in it is immediately suspect of course. After all, if Adolf Hitler, a known fascist, said that 2 + 2 = 4, we couldn't trust the information. (This logical fallacy is used all the time. However, the source of a fact is (or should be) irrelevant. But facts have long been discarded in this absurd, contentious screaming match between left and right where the truth is the first casualty).

In a tweet several days ago, Trump tweeted about “Liddle Adam Schiff” in reference to the whistleblower complaint filed with the ICIG, The Intelligence Community Inspector General.

My take on this is that Trump is saying that the complaint was written by lawyers on Schiff’s  staff. We know now that Schiff's committee had the whistleblower complaint document before it was released. The complaint reads like a legal brief. Go read it yourself, it's all over the internet.

The former NSA chief of staff suggests that the complaint was written by Congress people. See “Former NSA Chief of Staff Suggests Whistleblower May Have Had Congress Members’ Help on Drafting Complaint ” at https://www.theepochtimes.com/former-nsa-chief-of-staff-suggests-whistleblower-may-have-had-congress-members-help-on-drafting-complaint_3098870.html

One other important fact: The whistleblower complaint form, called the “Disclosure of Urgent Concern Form”, was changed in August 2019, just a month before the complaint came out, to allow hearsay evidence.

According to The Federalist,

Between May 2018 and August 2019, the intelligence community secretly eliminated a requirement that whistleblowers provide direct, first-hand knowledge of alleged wrongdoings. This raises questions about the intelligence community’s behavior regarding the August submission of a whistleblower complaint against President Donald Trump. The new complaint document no longer requires potential whistleblowers who wish to have their concerns expedited to Congress to have direct, first-hand knowledge of the alleged wrongdoing that they are reporting.

“The brand new version of the whistleblower complaint form, which was not made public until after the transcript of Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and the complaint addressed to Congress were made public, eliminates the first-hand knowledge requirement and allows employees to file whistleblower complaints even if they have zero direct knowledge of underlying evidence and only “heard about [wrongdoing] from others.”

Source: “Intel Community Secretly Gutted Requirement of Firsthand Whistleblower Knowledge,” https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/27/intel-community-secretly-gutted-requirement-of-first-hand-whistleblower-knowledge/

The current Disclosure of Urgent Concern form (second image) can be found at https://www.dni.gov/files/ICIG/Documents/Hotline/Urgent%20Concern%20Disclosure%20Form.pdf

Apparently “I heard about it from others” is good enough these days to file a whistleblower complaint. This is called hearsay. I found the definition of “hearsay evidence” by going to startpage.com and picking the first non-ad entry, from findlaw.com:

Created by FindLaw's team of legal writers and editors.

“The rule against hearsay is deceptively simple, but it is full of exceptions. At its core, the rule against using hearsay evidence is to prevent out-of-court, second hand statements from being used as evidence at trial given their potential unreliability.

Hearsay Defined

Hearsay is defined as an out-of-court statement, made in court, to prove the truth of the matter asserted. These out-of-court statements do not have to be spoken words, but they can also constitute documents or even body language. The rule against hearsay was designed to prevent gossip from being offered to convict someone.”

https://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-procedure/hearsay-evidence.html

I’m no lawyer, but I do know that prosecutors don’t like cases based on  second and third hand accounts -- they prefer eyewitness accounts or docs. Much easier to get a conviction that way. The complainant admitted that he was not on the call between Trump and Zelensky, nor did he have access to the actual transcript before he filed the complaint.

The person who filed the complaint is a CIA officer who was assigned to the White House. That’s great. The CIA is, of course, known for its integrity. These are the same guys who organize coups to overthrow democratically elected leaders in other countries, give bad intelligence to U.S. policy makers that lead to foreign wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and who generally lie whenever it suits them. We should always trust the CIA.

If Congressional staffers did indeed write the complaint, this is the sequence of events:

1) Congressional staffers help a CIA officer who used to be assigned to the White House (and whose lawyers used to work for Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D, NY)) to write a complaint against Trump. The complaint, nicely legal and looking good, and based on hearsay, is then submitted to the ICIG.

2) The ICIG sends it to staff lawyers in the department who claim that the complaint (the validity of which can easily be determined by actually reading the 5 page transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky) doesn’t meet the requirements of a valid whistleblower complaint. The complaint is eventually released based on the new definition that hearsay evidence is acceptable.

3) Nancy Pelosi then starts an “impeachment inquiry” (a precursor to a formal vote in the House directing House committees to begin writing the Articles of Impeachment) based on the complaint.

4) Mainstream news outlets then begin a campaign to impeach the president.

5) Adam Schiff, in committee, then reads a fabricated version of Trump’s conversation with Zelinsky. This is shown on news programs all over the country.

6) When minority members of Schiff’s Intelligence committee compare what he said to the actual transcript, they realize that the chairman has altered the text of what was actually said, and they call him on it.

7) Schiff then says that the minority member is right, but that his statements were “a sort of parody,” and that what he said wasn’t what the president said, but ‘it’s what the president meant, in so many words.’

9) The impeachment inquiry proceeds, trumpeted by the always objective mainstream media.

So we have a recently altered whistleblower form that has been changed to accept hearsay evidence just before a CIA officer submits a whistleblower complaint against Trump. The complaint itself may have been written by Congressional staffers, and the complainant’s lawyers worked for the opposition party. This complaint is then used as the basis of an impeachment investigation.

As the great David Crosby (of the Byrds) said in one of his songs, "There's something going on around here, that surely won't stand the light of day."

New York Senator Charles Schumer warned President Trump three years ago what would happen to him if he took on the intelligence community: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community -- they have six ways from Sunday to get back at you."

Senator Schumer was oh so right! Impeachment proceedings have begun, based on a complaint by a whistleblower assigned to the White House. The whistleblower was a former CIA agent who has returned to the CIA!

To give both sides we'll post an article by Paul Craig Roberts, who was in the Reagan administration.

Don't listen to the talking heads in the media. Read the conversation between Ukrainian President Zelensky and Trump. Read the whistleblower's complaint. Think. Make up your own mind.

The New York Times this week removed all doubt about the corporate controlled media being in the hands of the military-industrial-complex / Deep State.

As you recall, President Trump fired his warmongering national security adviser, John Bolton. This war hawk, when he was in the Bush administration, favored the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the War in Iraq in 2003. Trump remarked in a tweet announcing Bolton's firing that he “strongly disagreed” with his nat sec advisor on a range of issues. In another tweet back in June, Trump famously said to Chuck Todd: “I have some hawks. John Bolton is absolutely a hawk.  If it was up to him he'd take on the whole world at one time.”

So, you’d think that peace-loving people would be grateful that this warmonger is out of the cabinet.

Not, apparently, the New York Times.

Here is how the Strategic Culture Foundation put it:

The Washington establishment, the deep state and the bipartisan War Party, with its entrenched Cold War ideology, seems to have an endemic sway over policy which may thwart Trump’s efforts to direct a less belligerent US.

To illustrate the twisted nature of the US establishment, one only had to read the way sections of the American corporate-controlled media lamented the departure of Bolton. The New York Times, which is a dutiful conduit for deep state intelligence and the foreign policy establishment, actually bemoaned the ouster of Bolton, calling him a “voice of restraint”.

The NY Times commented, with approval, on how Bolton “objected to attempts to pursue diplomatic avenues with players considered American enemies. And he angered Trump with a last-minute battle against a peace agreement with the Taliban… whether it was inviting the Taliban to Camp David or cooperating with Russia, he [Bolton] was the national security adviser who said no.”

In another piece this week, the NY Times commented, again approvingly of Bolton: “Mr Bolton strongly opposed detente with Iran, and his unceremonious ouster has reignited concerns among some Republicans [and Democrats] in Congress about the White House’s declining projection of American military power around the world.”

Can you believe it? The so-called US “newspaper of record” is somehow valorizing an out-and-out warmonger in the form of Bolton, and appears to be advocating “projection of American military power around the world”. The latter phrase being but an Orwellian euphemism for imperialism and war.”

"Bolton Gone: Improved Peace Prospects?" Strategic Culture Foundation, https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/09/13/bolton-gone-improved-peace-prospects/

Couldn’t have said it better. Wasn’t it John Bolton who wanted regime change in Iran? Even though Trump has stated his desire NOT to seek regime change in Tehran, despite Trump’s intense dislike of the mullahs in Iran. Bolton also opposed Trump in his detente with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. It is also thought that Bolton used his influence to impede Trump’s recent attempt to host Taliban leaders at Camp David earlier this month. This was a genuine effort at building trust for a proposed peace deal to withdraw US troops from the disastrous war in Afghanistan.  We’ve been there for almost 18 years! What have we accomplished? Nothing! Except to protect a lot of poppy fields that are the source of heroin that enters our cities.

Trump isn’t exactly a dove, he’s a pragmatic deal-maker who puts U.S. interests first. Personally, I encourage the president’s efforts to get out of Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. I would have hoped that the Times, a newspaper I used to read cover-to-cover, would also do so.

Apparently not. The Times’ hatred of Donald Trump puts this once-great newspaper on the side of the warmongers. It’s too bad.

The 1619 Project

The introductory essay of the Times' 1619 Project opens with this sentence: "Our democracy’s ideals were false when they were written.” This is an attempt to frame the ideals enshrined in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in terms of a Marxist, dystopian vision of this country. It says that the idea of freedom and equality under the law are invalid because the old white guys who wrote the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were inveterate racists.

Here is what Andrew Sullivan, in his brilliant essay in The Intelligencer, says:

Don’t get me wrong. I think that view deserves to be heard. The idea that the core truth of human society is that it is composed of invisible systems of oppression based on race (sex, gender, etc.), and that liberal democracy is merely a mask to conceal this core truth, and that a liberal society must therefore be dismantled in order to secure racial/social justice is a legitimate worldview. (That view that “systems” determine human history and that the individual is a mere cog in those systems is what makes it neo-Marxist and anti-liberal.) But I sure don’t think it deserves to be incarnated as the only way to understand our collective history, let alone be presented as the authoritative truth, in a newspaper people rely on for some gesture toward objectivity."

Andrew Sullivan, " The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism," http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/09/andrew-sullivan-ny-times-abandons-liberalism-for-activism.html

The Times' view is materialist, anti-spiritual, and atheist, a view that deprecates human spirituality and regards a human being as just the body without a spiritual component. This point of view identifies a person merely by the body's sex and race. Unfortunately, the Times is going the route of neo-Marxist materialism -- the same route that in the Soviet Union and in China led to the establishment of dictatorships that resulted in the deaths of 60 million people. In other words, the route to a dark, dystopian society.

Don't believe it.

No one who is sane can figure out the current political landscape. No one can understand why the president is so divisive in his tweets, calling the press the “enemy of the people,” and tweeting out criticisms of everyone he doesn’t agree with. It all goes back, I think, to May 17, 2017, when he made the famous “despite the negative press covfefe” tweet, which began a firestorm of commentary.

Here’s what the New York Times said about this crazy tweet in the article titled, “What’s a ‘Covfefe’? Trump Tweet Unites a Bewildered Nation”:

And on the 132nd day, just after midnight, President Trump had at last delivered the nation to something approaching unity — in bewilderment, if nothing else. The state of our union was … covfefe. The trouble began, as it so often does, on Twitter, in the early minutes of Wednesday morning. Mr. Trump had something to say. Kind of.

“Despite the constant negative press covfefe,” the Twitter post began, at 12:06 a.m., from @realDonaldTrump, the irrepressible internal monologue of his presidency.

And that was that. A minute passed. Then another. Then five. Surely he would delete the message. Ten. Twenty. It was nearly 12:30 a.m. Forty minutes. An hour. The questions mounted.

Had the president’s lawyers, so eager to curb his stream-of-consciousness missives, tackled the commander in chief under the cover of night? Perhaps, some worried aloud, Mr. Trump had experienced a medical episode a quarter of the way through his 140 characters.

But by 1 a.m., the debate had effectively consumed Twitter — or at least a certain segment of insomniac Beltway types, often journalists and political operatives — ascending the list of trending topics. “Of course #covfefe is real word,” wrote @Diane_7A, recalling an invented tragedy once invoked by the Trump White House. “It was coined during the Bowling Green Massacre.”

“What if this is it,” asked Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker television critic, after just five minutes. “That is his final tweet & the rest of history stops.”

...“Covfefe,” said Tasneem Raja, a journalist, perhaps chafing at the growing communal giddiness. “There, I participated.”

Eventually, the jokes lurched into delirium. Twitter users held forth on the former F.B.I. director James Covfefe. They pledged to order a grande covfefe during their next Starbucks runs. They announced they had at last discovered what Bill Murray whispered to Scarlett Johansson at the end of “Lost in Translation.”

Just after 6 a.m., the president resurfaced, finally deleting the Twitter post and tapping out another.

“Who can figure out the true meaning of ‘covfefe’ ???” he wrote. “Enjoy!”

Consensus proved elusive — to say nothing of pronunciation guidelines — and the White House appeared disinclined to help. “The president and a small group of people know exactly what he meant,” Sean Spicer, the press secretary, said flatly. He did not elaborate.

But someone else had a theory — the American perhaps most attuned to the power of the president’s Twittering hand. “I thought it was a hidden message,” Hillary Clinton told a crowd in California, “to the Russians.”

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/us/politics/covfefe-trump-twitter.html

And there you have it. That tweet was the first that got people thinking, “this president might be mentally unbalanced.” After that, this narrative was taken up by the press. Acting AG Rod Rosenstein joked a year later that the president might be crazy enough to invoke the 25th amendment and that he could be removed from power. Nancy Pelosi seriously considered it as an item in a potential impeachment investigation of Trump.

What is the real meaning of covfefe? Well, I’m going to offer my own explanation.

We all know that Donald Trump is a big WWE wrestling fan. So big that the WWE website has devoted a bio page to Trump:

https://www.wwe.com/superstars/donald-trump

In WWE wrestling, there is a term called “kayfabe.”

Here’s what Wikipedia says about the word kayfabe:

In professional wrestling, kayfabe /ˈkeɪfeɪb/ (also called work or worked) is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true", specifically the portrayal of competition, rivalries, and relationships between participants as being genuine and not of a staged or predetermined nature of any kind. The term kayfabe has evolved to also become a code word of sorts for maintaining this "reality" within the direct or indirect presence of the general public.

Kayfabe is often seen as the suspension of disbelief that is used to create the non-wrestling aspects of promotions, such as feuds, angles, and gimmicks in a manner similar to other forms of fictional entertainment. In relative terms, a wrestler breaking kayfabe during a show would be likened to an actor breaking character on-camera. Also, since wrestling is performed in front of a live audience, whose interaction with the show is crucial to its success, kayfabe can be compared to the fourth wall in acting, since hardly any conventional fourth wall exists to begin with. In general, everything in a professional wrestling show is to some extent scripted, or "kayfabe", even though at times it is portrayed as real-life.”

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kayfabe

For example, kayfabe has also been practiced in Hollywood and in entertainment. The famous (fake) feud between Matt Damon and Jimmy Kimmel is now a running joke. The feuds between comedians Jack Benny and Fred Allen, and comedian/actor Bob Hope and singer/actor Bing Crosby, were totally fake. Benny and Allen were best friends in real life, while Hope and Crosby were also close friends.

So OK, what does WWE have to do with covfefe and Trump? Later on in this article, it says,

It has long been claimed that kayfabe has been used in American politics, especially in election campaigns, Congress, and the White House, but no evidence of actual usage of kayfabe in Washington has ever been uncovered. In interviews as Governor of Minnesota, former wrestler Jesse Ventura often likened Washington to wrestling when he said that politicians "pretend to hate each other in public, then go out to dinner together."

Ibid.

It’s a stretch, but linking covfefe with kayfabe isn’t too ridiculous. No more ridiculous than the other explanations for covfefe.

In this interpretation, Trump’s “covfefe” tweet was the ultimate troll. It was a message, for those who could understand, that what was about to happen in the next 3 years of his presidency was, basically, going to be staged. Kayfabe baby! As the Wikipedia definition says, “Kayfabe is the portrayal of staged events within the industry as "real" or "true".”

This only makes sense if what we’re seeing is really staged or scripted. Some claim that the president is working with the military, and military intelligence, on a multi-decade plan that began after JFK was assassinated. This plan is about what Trump called “draining the swamp” (getting rid of the criminal elements in Washington DC).  

Crazy? Yup. But no crazier than the events we read about every day in the news. Seriously, folks, you couldn’t make this shit up. I check the news every day, and I do sometimes feel that I’m watching a movie. It’s unreal.

Hey, the tweet might simply have been referring to a cup of coffee, as in, “despite the negative press I’m going to sit back and drink a cup of coffee.” But the Times piece (and others), and the heated reaction to it, tells me that tweet was way more important. It tells me that certain folks in the media had a good idea what it was really about.

We probably won’t know the truth until November of 2020. By then, hopefully, we’ll have more clarity in this crazy movie we are living in. Or is it a Matrix?

The old order is crumbling. We are seeing very strange things, murderers shooting up people in public, the president trolling the media (and anyone who he doesn’t like), and a political frenzy being generated among the population.

Is there a method to Trump’s madness?

He thinks so. We’ll just have to wait and see whether he is really crazy, or whether he’s a “stable genius.” It’s all about the 2020 election.