Last Friday (10/11), U.S. President Trump and China’s Vice Premier Liu He announced a trade agreement that saw Washington suspend tariff increases while China agreed to purchase some $40-$50 billion of agricultural products, including pork.

Behind this development, the financial markets rallied; the Dow Jones rose some 320 points or 1.21 percent. Trump billed the agreement as “phase one” of a broader trade agreement, but behind the soaring rhetoric belies a key motivation for the deal:

The Chinese need pig imports.  Big time. Here’s why – and why Trump’s timing for making a deal is impeccable.

Erin Burnett-CNN. Anderson Cooper-CNN, Marc Lacey-NYTimes last night (10/15)

If there is one thing that Tuesday night's Democrat debate showed us—as if we didn't know it in the first place—it's just to what degree the media is in the tank for the Democrats.

They're not only in the tank—they built it, filled it with water up to the brim, and would turn up the temperature to boil Donald Trump alive if they could. And maybe they can.

You knew this from the outset when CNN's lead moderator Anderson Cooper, along with his compatriots, one from the New York Times, opened the festivities with a round of leading impeachment questions, giving each candidate in turn a chance to outdo each other in bashing Trump. Only Tulsi Gabbard equivocated slightly.

It went downhill from there.

For conservatives who watched the Democrat debate, it was like visiting Earth-2, as Drunkblogger Stephen Green so cleverly put it.  Conservatives probably could not endure these debates without Stephen Green's infusion of both facts and humor.

Each of those candidates on the stage seemed oblivious to the reality of the last three years — the fabulous economy, lowest unemployment in decades, international trade renegotiated to our benefit, millions no longer on food stamps.

Our military, eviscerated by Obama, is being repaired.  Manufacturing has been revitalized, and the border, despite the intransigence of the Democrats, is slowly being better controlled.  The wall is being built.

The Democrats are losing.  Trump and his supporters are winning.  As others have observed, the Left plays checkers while Trump plays 4-D chess.  He is way ahead of his opponents on every level, every issue.   And boy, was that apparent at that Dem debate last night.

Last week The Washington Post revealed the alarming news that House Democrats were considering having their anonymous “whistleblower” testify from a remote location, and in disguise.

Just as shocking as the details of this plan was the justification the Post ladled on this Democrat effort to hide impeachment information from the public.

It explained, high up in the story, that the cloak-and-dagger approach was merely Democrats expressing “distrust of their GOP colleagues, whom they see as fully invested in defending a president who has attacked the whistleblower’s credibility and demanded absolute loyalty from Republicans.”

This, from a newspaper with a tagline of “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Maybe the better journalistic epitaph is: “Democracy Dies in Bias.” How did journalism get here?

There is no logical Democrat explanation for impeaching Donald Trump. The various factions within the Democrat Party calling for impeachment are united only by their loathing of Donald Trump, the person, and his systematic repeal of the Obama progressive project.

After failing with the voting machine gambit, the Logan Act, the 25th Amendment, the emoluments clause, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux-coup, the Comey memos farce, the “resistance” efforts outlined by the New York Times anonymous op-ed writer, the campaign finance violations accusations, Stormy, tax returns, whistleblowers, leakers, the Mueller 22 months charade, and now impeachment 2.0, what exactly is the point of impeaching Trump just 13 months before the election?

Here are the various rationales behind Trump’s Democrat and leftwing opponents’ latest “whistleblower” hoax. None of these scenarios are mutually exclusive.

Turkish jets bomb Kurdish town of Ras al Ain in Syria this morning (10/11)

President Trump has defended his shameful abandonment of our Kurdish allies in Syria, declaring that "I was elected on getting out of these ridiculous endless wars" that have left America "bogged down, watching over a quagmire."

Listening to the president, Americans might think that we still have large numbers of U.S. troops fighting on fronts across the Middle East. We do not.  In fact, we now have three times more troops deployed in Spain (3,200) than we do in Syria (1,000).

Trump likes to say he "defeated" the Islamic State. Actually, the bulk of the fighting was done by our Kurdish allies, trained and supported by U.S. Special Operations forces.

We are depending on the Kurds to keep the Islamic State down. But if we allow Turkey to wipe out our Kurdish allies, who will be left on the ground in Syria to fight the Islamic State?  Answer: No one.

The important news of the day--far beyond the inevitable tedious impeachment jousting--is that John Durham's investigation of the provenance of the FBI's counterintelligence investigation of possible Trump-Russia collusion has expanded, according to several administration officials.

Fox News previously reported that Durham would be reviewing the days leading up to the 2016 election and through the inauguration.

However, based on what he has been finding, Durham has expanded his investigation adding agents and resources, the senior administration officials said. The timeline has grown from the beginning of the probe through the election and now has included a post-election timeline through the spring of 2017, up to when Robert Mueller was named special counsel.

[Note by JW: Word is that Rosenstein, Mueller, Brennan, Clapper, and former President Obama are all in Durham’s gunsights – and that he would not have requested additional staff and resources unless he had found wrongdoing and criminal activity.]

A blueprint for the deindustrialization of the U.S. is being revealed even now in (you guessed it) California.

Beginning early yesterday morning (10/09), a series of total power shutoffs by Pacific Gas & Electric began in every county of the Bay Area, along with a number of others to the north (the number of counties involved total 34).  The sole exception — as you might have guessed — is San Francisco.

The power cutoffs are complete, with no exceptions for hospitals, emergency services, phone networks, etc., the purpose being to eliminate all power flowing through overhead power lines in the affected areas in a clumsy, ill considered effort to prevent wildfires.

Vast areas of central California will be returned by fiat to the conditions of the 19th century.  Here’s why.