THE TWELVE DAYS OF CONGRESS: Tis the season for impeachment? Courtesy of “Obviously Shot on an iPhone by Think Tank Amateurs” Media, a temporary division of the R Street Institute.

AH, LET ME COUNT THE WAYS THE SENATE TRIAL WILL BE DIFFERENT: Trump may be impeached within a week or so, but whenever it happens, everything changes when the scene shifts to the Senate.

ARE YOU REMINDED OF JOHN GALT BY THE 2020 DEMS? The R Street Institute’s James Wallner reminds us of the regime’s last plan in “Atlas Shrugged” and points to the similarities with today’s Washington Establishment:

The regime promised the John Galt Plan “will reconcile all conflicts. It will protect the property of the rich and give a greater share to the poor. It will cut down the burden of your taxes and provide you with more government benefits. It will lower prices and raise wages. It will give more freedom to the individual and strengthen the bonds of collective obligations. It will combine the efficiency of free enterprise with the generosity of a planned economy.”

Definitely worth reading, as an indictment of both parties and a reminder to Trump that going along on suicidal budgets is not what he was elected to do.

PREDICTION – THIS IS A HUGE BOOST FOR TRUMP: Washington politicians and generals have lied to the American people for years about the war in Afghanistan, according to the Washington Post. Trump will say it proves him right about getting out of Afghanistan, and, more importantly, about why the Washington Establishment cannot be trusted. That this gift comes to Trump from the Post is the icing on the political cake.

ONE AMERICA NEWS (OAN) GOES WHERE MSM WON’T: Former Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko tells OAN all about former U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovich’s “untouchables” list. If OAN can go to Ukraine and interview principals in the impeachment scandal, why can’t ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, the Washington Post, New York Times, etc. etc.?

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Answer: Because they’re not interested in knowing what actually happened.

ANOTHER UPDATE (FROM GLENN): I’m bumping this up because it’s very important, undercutting the thesis of the whole impeachment endeavor. And this is the evidence that the House prosecutors will be confronted with if there’s a trial in the Senate.

IS INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY EVEN POSSIBLE IF WE’RE ALL JUST A BUNCH OF DOMINOES? Dominoes have no choice about how or when they fall, they just react. Without free will, we’re kidding ourselves about preserving individual freedom because we’re merely matter in motion, acting and reacting according to material forces.

This is the fundamental dividing line separating Right and Left. As with its Marxism root, identity politics makes us all slaves of our group, based on ethnicity, gender, income level, etc. Conservatives and libertarians know individuals have free will, and make choices for which they are responsible. But making choices requires reasoning, which is an attribute of agency. See where this is going?

NADLER SAYS HOUSE CAN READ TRUMP’S MIND, THEN IMPEACH HIM: It’s an extraordinary claim in the House Judiciary Committee’s just released report on the constitutional grounds for impeachment.

You will find it on page six in the graph beginning “Fourth” where it is stated that: “The question is not whether the President’s conduct could have resulted from permissible motives. It is whether the President’s real reasons, the ones in his mind at the time, were legitimate. Where the House discovers persuasive evidence of corrupt wrongdoing, it is entitled to rely upon that evidence to impeach.”

UPDATE: Question for Nadler — If “the House discovers persuasive evidence of corrupt wrong-doing,” why is it necessary to determine “whether the President’s real reasons, the ones in his mind at the time, were legitimate”?

SPARE US, LORD, OF THIS HOOTENANNY OF INSUFFERABLE ELITISTS: That’s the plea of today’s Issues & Insights (I&I) analysis of the 25th annual United Nations Conference of the Parties on the environment.

Notes I&I: “How long have we been hearing this? Prince Charles has been predicting imminent doomsday for more than a decade, as has Al Gore. Before the conference began, Vice was trying to convince the world that “The Collapse of Civilization May Have Already Begun,” while Extinction Rebellion has been barking madly that “billions will die” and “life on Earth is dying” because of man’s use of fossil fuels.”

And that’s just a taste of the inanity, arrogance and lunacy in I&I’s well-aimed sights.

IMPEACHMENT IS ABOUT GETTING TRUMP, NOT JUSTICE: Just in case anybody had any remaining doubts, former Obama Solicitor-General makes it clear. 

ANOTHER VICTIM OF AMERICAN ISLAMOPHOBIA: Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is clearly suffering from Islamophobia. Why else would he charge state Rep. Movita Johnson-Harrell (D), who is Muslim, with multiple counts of theft, perjury and tampering in connection with a charity she founded?

OK, WHEN DID THE GUYS IN THE WHITE HOODS DRAW NADLER’S DISTRICT? It’s 70 percent white in a metropolis in which one of every four residents is Black.  Just asking, OK?

WHY DO THE CLINTONS ATTRACT ALLEGED SEX OFFENDERS, ILLEGAL DONORS? The Daily Caller’s Chuck Ross reports on the indictment of a key Mueller witness on pedophilia charges and how he funneled millions to the 2016 Hillary campaign. Investigating the Clintons is like what digging in an old graveyard must be – everywhere you shovel, you turn up something rotten.

NO, GETTING DEVIN NUNES’ PHONE LOGS IS NOT A SMOKING GUN FOR DEMS: Margot Cleveland at The Federalist lays out why it might be for the California congressman, though.

AN ELOQUENT, CONCISE DESCRIPTION OF TODAY’S IMPEACHMENT HEARING: It’s not merely a fraud, according to Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.).

HARVARD LAW PROF TELLS A BIG FAT ONE: House Judiciary Committee Democrats led their hearing this morning with Harvard’s Noah Feldman. Later in the day under intense questioning by Rep. Matthew Gaetz (R-Flor.), Feldman claimed he “was an impeachment skeptic before July 25.”

That’s a flat-out misrepresentation by Feldman of his views because he was among the early advocates of impeachment, beginning March 7, 2017, barely six weeks after President Donald Trump’s inauguration. See three more examples in 2017 and 2018 of Feldman clearly pushing impeachment of Trump: here, here and here.

MAYBE DEMOCRATS LIKE BUDGET DEADLOCKS: Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) took to the Senate floor to lay out the many ways Democrats’ broken promises and their impeachment mania are pushing Congress toward a virtually complete inability to get anything done. But what if Democrats consider that a feature, not a bug?

WHY AREN’T REPORTERS HARASSING JOHN DURHAM ON HIS CRIMINAL INVESTIGATION? Great question posed by Sundance earlier today: “You know what it looks like, you’ve seen it a thousand times on television … The U.S. attorney is walking into the office from his car and a half dozen cameras and reporters are rushing alongside and asking questions. Have you seen that customary media effort even once since U.S. Attorney Durham was announced as investigating the origins of the Trump campaign surveillance? No, why not?”

Perhaps the answer to that question is that journalists who detest Trump don’t want to know the answers that Durham is uncovering about why the FBI launched its original investigation of allegations of collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and Russia. The legitimacy of the investigation rests on this narrative, courtesy of the Washington Post’s Phillip Bump:

“The FBI had been informed by the Australian government that a Trump campaign aide, George Papadopoulos, had months earlier informed one of their diplomats, Alexander Downer, that he had heard Russia possessed emails incriminating Hillary Clinton, Trump’s 2016 opponent. Papadopoulos came by that knowledge in April, having been informed by a professor named Joseph Mifsud about the emails.”

Odds are Durham is confirming facts related to what I reported in 2018 concerning Downer’s long-standing connections to U.S., British and Chinese intelligence. Downer’s “tip” to the FBI was NOT the origin of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation.

UH OH, KANYE WEST HAS DONE IT NOW: His latest video — “Closed On Sunday” — makes the case for traditional families and faith, as well as for raising boys to be men and girls to be protected. But then he has the audacity to say this: “No more livin’ for the culture, we nobody’s slave.” The PC Nazis and SJWers will not take this one lying down.

DEMOCRAT STRATEGIST SEES THREAT IN POLLS SHOWING BLACK SUPPORT FOR TRUMP: There’s one anyway.

LOSING THEIR FAITH? NOT REALLY: So says President Ronald Reagan’s  *“terrible, swift sword” over the federal bureaucracy, former Office of Personnel Management Director Donald Devine, writing in today’s edition of The American Conservative. (Full Disclosure: I spent 2.5 great years working for Devine as a Reagan political appointee).

Devine, a political scientist and data wonk by profession, took a look at the recent Pew and other polls reported by the Mainstream Media as heralding the accelerating decline of Christianity in the U.S. Not quite what the data show, according to Devine, who summarized it all thusly:

“Pew calculates worldwide that—mainly due to higher death rates and lower number of children—people with no religion will decline relative to those who are religious by the year 2060 and that Christianity will remain the world’s largest religion.

“So sorry to rain on the media parade, but while there has been a recent decrease in formal religious affiliation and participation in the U.S., mostly among the youngest, it has pretty much been within a narrow band that’s fluctuated over the last half century but maintained a participation and membership total surpassing any other type of social organization. That even includes watching the Super Bowl!”

* The inside story of Reagan and Devine made monumental reforms in the civil service.

YOU KNOW SOMETHING BIG IS STIRRING WHEN CHINA CAN’T STOP LEAKS: It’s been a bad couple of weeks for Beijing, thanks to leaks of classified documents detailing how to impose mass incarceration on the Uyghur Muslim minority, speeches by high-ranking government officials and the claims of an apparently defecting Chinese spy. Helen Raleigh of The Federalist adds up the damages and offers a warning to the U.S.

IS CASTRO ABOUT TO CALL IT QUITS? Former Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Julian Castro laments of the Republicans that “there’s a certain element within that base that seems to love it when people are cruel to one another. And I don’t know why that is.” Where does that come from?

Most likely from the fact Castro is doubtful to qualify for the December 19 Democratic presidential debate in Los Angeles after missing the previous one. He’s nowhere in the polls and he’s failed to make any real difference in the flow of the campaign. So …

Remember Beto’s parting shots before he withdrew? Six weeks from his withdrawal, he said “Hell yes, we’re going to take away your AR-15.” Then a couple of weeks before the end, he threatened to jerk tax exemptions from churches that don’t support same-sex marriage. Saying something really radical in a last-ditch attempt to gain some saving traction didn’t work for Beto and isn’t likely to for Castro, either.

THIS IS BAD NEWS FOR THOSE SEEKING TO REWRITE THE FIRST AMENDMENT: A new annual Index of Religious Freedom from the Beckett Fund for Religious Liberty finds massive, bipartisan support for an America in which the right to believe or not believe is protected in public and private.

Three-fourths, or 74 percent, of the respondents support religious freedom “when that practice takes place at work.” In fact, 63 percent of the respondents “supported the freedom to practice religion in daily life and at work, even when it creates an imposition or inconvenience for others.”

In other words, evangelical bakers and florists who wish only to support traditional marriage are entirely within their constitutional rights to suggest to homosexual couples planning weddings to seek cakes and floral arrangements at other establishments.

The index results demonstrate just how out of touch with most Americans are those like the Freedom From Religion Foundation who are trying to redefine the First Amendment’s guarantee of religious freedom as applying only to the private realm.

LIBERAL ESTABLISHMENT’S $600 MILLION SECRET FUNDING NETWORK: How many times have we heard from liberals about the evils of “dark money” — anonymous contributions — poured into conservative campaigns and advocacy by the likes of the Koch Brothers, Sheldon Adelson and Phil Anschutz? But guess what, the liberals are even better at it, according to the Washington Free Beacon’s indispensable Joe Schoffstall, who exposes yet another massive secret funding network on the Left:

“The massive cash flow came from Arabella Advisors, a D.C.-based organization that says it provides ‘strategic guidance for effective philanthropy.’ In reality, the group does far more, funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in anonymous donations to some of the most influential advocacy groups on the left,” Schoffstall reports today. If you are familiar with the Tides Foundation and the Democracy Alliance, you know Arabella isn’t entirely original.

But one unique way Arabella — established by former Obama appointee and Clinton Global Initiative operative Eric Kessler — is stepping beyond conventional dark money maneuvering , however, is how it provides rich liberals a way to conceal their identities as they fund left-wing activism: Arabella is behind a couple of groups that lend their tax-exempt status to newly organized lefty outfits that have not yet been recognized by the IRS, a neat trick that somehow sounds like a too-clever-by-half way to evade tax compliance that somebody among the Right’s many activist lawyers ought to challenge.

HOW TO DEAL WITH FAMILY LIBERALS ON THANKSGIVING: You’ve likely heard retreating described as “advancing to the rear.” Understand that your relatives and friends from the other side have entered into just such a movement, even if they don’t realize that is what is happening.