Here are my observations and opinions from my selected news of the day.

HAND IT TO JUDICIAL WATCH – I am proud to be a member of this conservative watchdog organization in Washington that refuses to take “no” for an answer in its search for who, where, when and why as it investigates the Deep State.

Judicial Watch has filed two lawsuits after the CIA and DOJ failed to respond to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for the communications of Eric Ciaramella, a CIA employee who reportedly worked on Ukraine issues with both the Obama and Trump White Houses, according to Tyler O’Neil in PJ Media.

Kramerontheright named Ciaramella as the “whistleblower” on October 31, 2019, when most of the media refused to do so.  I also made mention of Ciaramella’s NSC colleague, Steve Misko, who was hired by the now infamous Rep. Adam Schiff.  Was Misko Ciaramella’s go-between with Schiff?

“Our lawsuits are designed to break through the unprecedented cover-up of his activities,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.  He hopes to get to the bottom of Ciaramella’s communications with a number of Obama operatives, including former Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, who had extensive involvement with the Clinton-funded Steele dossier.

A FACT NOT EXTENSIVELY COVERED by the media – naturally – just might calm down those, including some moderate Republicans, who are put off by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s statement that he would “coordinate” the impeachment trial with the White House, if they knew it had been done before.

Jazz Shaw of PJ Media must have heard me scream during a recent news program on Fox News Channel.  Yes, Fox fails to tell the full story, too.

“Senator Schumer is apparently suffering from sort of ‘senior moment’ and losing his memory,” writes Shaw, who recalls that it was “back in the nineties, when Bill Clinton was being impeached, that Schumer said:

“Any fair process would be consulting the White House, because it’s the president who’s the defendant, and due process would guarantee him fairness.”

Yet it was Schumer, who now chastises McConnell for saying that he would coordinate the Trump impeachment trial with the White House, and it was the likes of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who was “disturbed” by McConnell’s decision.

“Imagine that – the leader of her party in the Senate defending the President from  her party from a political coup involving one sham investigation after another with no real crime, not even a poll-tested crime.”– Daniel J. Sobieski, American Thinker

It’s not the first time Murkowski has fulfilled her role as a RINO.  She refused to sign on to the Senate resolution opposing the House Democrats’ Trump impeachment inquiry, and you may recall how she used a technical maneuver to become the only Republican to oppose the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh, voting “present.”

Citing her unwillingness to be a team player, the editorial board of Issues & Insights recalled the days of Lyndon B. Johnson’s stint as majority leader, when he once reflected, “I do understand power, whatever else may be said about me, I know where to look for it, and how to use it.”

McConnell is no LBJ, but he seems to be on the right track on the impeachment trial.

ONLY NEWS WONKS LIKE ME will recognize the name Bret Stephens.  After seeing him seemingly single-handedly attack candidate and later President Trump as the deputy editorial page editor at the Wall Street Journal, it was a memorable day for me when he left the Journal to join the leftist New York Times on April 12, 2017.

He hasn’t changed.  He continues to promote a hate for the president in a recent op-ed, “What Will It Take to Beat Donald Trump?”  And it began in his lead, in which he reminds his readers that while both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama campaigned and won on the watchword “hope.”  He asks, “what watchword will it take for a Democrat to win this time?” His suggestion – “soap.”

“Nearly three years into Donald Trump’s presidency, America needs a hard scrub and a deep cleanse,” he writes. “It needs to wash out the grime and grease of an administration that every day does something to make the country feel soiled.”

Upon his move to The Times, I remind you that its editorial page editor James Bennet said of Stephens, “He’s a beautiful writer … he will bring a new perspective to bear on the news.”

Still peddling his East Coast elite arrogance, Stephens didn’t hesitate to take a shot at “middle-of-the-road America,“ where the president’s supporters know “he may be bad, but he’s nowhere near as bad as his critics (like Stephens) say.”

Stephens suggests what would work to defeat Trump – smart infrastructure  spending, new carbon offset taxes on income and savings, and modest increases in taxes on the wealthy matched to the promise of a balanced budget.  Whoa. Impressive.

He does concede that the Trump economy shows no signs of needing an overhaul, but cannot help himself from hurling insults at Trump.  “In a contest between the unapologetic jerk in the White House and the self-styed saints seeking to unseat him, the jerk just might win.

“The winning Democrat will need to make Trump’s presidency seem insignificant rather than monumental – an unsightly pimple on our long republican experiment, not a fatal cancer within it,” he writes.

Though he has no apparent candidate in mind, Stephens says, “the key to beating Trump is to treat him as the nonentity he fundamentally is.”

The New York Times is just the home for Stephens, the home of Paul Krugman, who predicted economic collapse hours after Trump’s 2016 victory.

MEANWHILE, another anti-Trumper, filmmaker Michel Moore, believes President Trump “could be on his way to another electoral victory,” claiming his support hasn’t dropped “one inch” in the Midwestern battlegrounds.

Claiming that women, people of color, and young adults are “on our side … (all) we have to do is, we have to make sure we don’t give them another Hillary Clinton.”

TWO STORIES ON WAGES surfaced after Christmas.  In the first story, a Seattle restaurant worker wrote in the Wall Street Journal that the minimum wage hike in the city led her losing her job just before Christmas.  When the minimum wage rose to $16.39 an hour, the restaurant where she had worked for six years closed.

ATTENTION DEMOCRAT CANDIDATES: An admitted progressive (liberal), she suggests that progressives “should reconsider minimum wage laws that hurt the very workers they’re trying to protect.”

In the second story, the headline, “Low-earning Americans are seeing the biggest wage gains in a decade,” highlights the piece by Megan Henney of Fox Business. She writes that “pay for the bottom 25 percent of wage earners, who account for 82 percent of the population, rose 4.5 percent in November from the year-ago period.  The Labor Department put the average worker salary at $23.83.

May God continue to bless the United States of America.