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Forced labor is bad

December 3, 2020

If there’s one thing you’d think Democrats and Republicans could agree on, it’s that using forced labor to make your products (you know: slavery) is bad. Republicans had to fight Democrats over that point in the 1860s, but they seem to have come around. Indeed, in September, the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, a bill to ban products made by forced labor in China, passed the House 406-3 and is expected to soon pass in the Senate.

But now, there are reports that some major corporations have hired lobbyists to try to water down some of the provisions of the bill.

These companies include Coca-Cola, Apple and – what ho! – that ultra-woke critic of American injustice, Nike. The companies deny that they’re trying to weaken the bill or that they use forced labor. Nike replied that its lobbying efforts were merely “constructive discussions with staff of the Congressional Commission aimed at eliminating forced labor and protecting human rights.”

Meanwhile, China has denied alleged mistreatment of Uyghurs and claims that what have been described as concentration camps are actually “training centers.”

So everything’s all right then!

Oh, wait, to quote Columbo, just one more thing: Rick Moran of PJ Media reports that prominent leftist attorney and MSNBC contributor Neal Katyal, who became a darling of the left when he fought Trump’s travel ban (NOT a “Muslim ban”), was just at the Supreme Court representing corporate food giants Nestle and Cargill in a lawsuit filed by several actual former child slaves. They were kidnapped in Mali and brought to work on cocoa plantations in Ivory Coast.

Katyal made several compassionate legal arguments for why the former child slave laborers didn’t have the right to sue in the US, which didn’t seem to impress the Justices very much. Moran has more details at the link, along with the astute observation that fighting on behalf of big corporations against former child slaves will probably not make a dent in his cred among leftists. He’s already virtue signaled so hard that having no actual virtue is irrelevant.

President Trump himself has filed a lawsuit against the Wisconsin Elections Commission, in his personal capacity as a candidate for re-election as President of the United States. The suit alleges “unlawful and unconstitutional acts.” Details are at the link, along with general information and updates on Trump’s legal fight and a place to donate to his Election Defense Fund.

Interestingly, the list of alleged unlawful acts includes activities involving a group we’ve reported on recently, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which came in from out of state to implement a new form of balloting in Wisconsin: unmanned, absentee ballot dropboxes “without adequate or uniform chain of custody standards and security protocols contrary to the Wisconsin Election code.”

According to this lawsuit, the CTCL funded (yes, FUNDED) a plan by the mayors of Wisconsin’s five largest cities --- Milwaukee, Madison, Kenosha, Green Bay and Racine --- to use these dropboxes. The mayors are also included in the suit. The dropbox plan was adopted by the Wisconsin Elections Commission for use throughout the state.

Remember the CTCL? We reported that they used to operate on a yearly budget of about $1 million but then got a whopping infusion of $350 million from Mark Zuckerberg. That should buy a whole lot of dropboxes. This release from the Amistad Project is really a must-read if you want to know what’s going on with all that money.

Donors to the CTCL include Facebook, Google, and progressive organizations such as Rock The Vote, Democracy Fund, and the Voter Information Project, which after a few clicks tells us it is a member of “the Election Infrastructure Subsector Coordinating Council,” which after a few more clicks we find is part of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). You know, the same public-private agency within the Department of Homeland Security that Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic are members of.

And, hoo boy. The header on the home page of the CTCL will have you rolling on the floor: “We harness the promise of technology to modernize the American voting experience. What you get: High-performing election offices. Increased public confidence and trust. A more resilient and adaptive election system. Better informed voters.” They say their job is to “ensure that our elections are more professional, inclusive and secure.”

What we got in this election –- though the mainstream media won’t report it –- was a freaking mess, an unmitigated disaster. If this is the “modernized” American voting experience, give me old-fashioned in-person voting with paper ballots and poll watchers from both parties standing calmly and politely by, as in the days of the dinosaurs. (Stone tablets would be fine with me as long as signatures are verified. One bonus is that they’re too heavy for mail-in.)

The CTCL website goes on to say they offer courses such as “Cybersecurity for Election Officials.” (Again, I’ll pause while you roll on the floor, laughing helplessly.) And on their page called “20 Ways Election Officials Increased Accessibility During the November Election,” they brag that “in California, Vermont and D.C., every registered voter received a mail-in ballot for the first time.” What could possibly go wrong?

They also work to register “voters serving out felony sentences” as “an issue of social and racial justice.” Thanks to their efforts, Cook County Jail in Illinois, the nation’s second largest prison, served as a polling location this year, marking “the first time in U.S. history that a prison hosted in-person early voting for a general election. It saw a 40 percent voter turnout rate, with over 2,000 incarcerated individuals casting ballots.”

They say they are also “educating Native Americans to reverse historic suppression.” I'm not sure, but I do have to wonder if they were involved in Nevada’s get-out-the-vote effort for Native Americans.

It appears that the CTCL goes into heavily-Democrat cities and pays election officials, but with strings attached. In Philadelphia, they reportedly required the city to open 800 new polling places. Should a non-government entity be coming in and changing how an election is managed?

Now that Election Day has passed, the CTCL is crowing about what a great job everybody did. I am not kidding. “Election officials are still hard at work canvassing ballots,” they say on their website, “conducting post-election audits, and certifying results, but the November 2020 election is largely over and, overall, IT WENT EXCEPTIONALLY WELL [emphasis mine].”

National Public Radio agreed. Don’t miss reading the transcript of this roundtable, as officials are patting each other on the back for how good a job they all did. It’s quite a hoot, funny and sad at the same time. These people are in a world of their own.

Anyway, as for the Wisconsin lawsuit that sent us down this rabbit hole. Jenna Ellis, Trump attorney and senior legal advisor for his campaign, said it “reveals an apparently coordinated effort to push a new form of balloting upon Wisconsin voters that was not protected by uniform chain of custody and security standards and protocols. Regrettably, this is the same sort of conduct we have seen across many battleground states that Democrats knew they had to win to defeat the President where the rules of the election were changed at the last minute and guardrails against fraud were simultaneously lifted.”

This is what Perkins Coie attorney Marc Elias was so busy setting up during the months leading to the election.

The dropbox plan is just one of the directives of the Wisconsin Elections Commission cited in the lawsuit. Trump accuses them of ordering election officials to “tamper with witness certifications on absentee ballot envelopes,” making it easier to count unlawful ballots. He also accuses them of issuing orders with the purpose of “undercutting” the state’s photo ID law.

It looks as though Big Tech, through lots of money and “directives” issued by the CTCL to heavily-blue cities, played a major role in creating the chaos we now have. Trump’s legal challenges are bringing this to light –- one more reason why he’s performing a public service by doing this.

New Project Veritas Expose

December 3, 2020

In their latest expose, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas revealed that they’ve been recording CNN’s conference calls for the past two months, including directives to reporters by CNN president Jeff Zucker. I’m not sure if this actually qualifies as news, though, because I can’t imagine anyone would be surprised to learn that it sounded more like a bunch of unhinged leftists having a dorm room Trump-hate bull session than a phone meeting of professional journalists discussing the news.

We did learn that CNN didn't want to cover the Hunter Biden laptop story (Jake Tapper called it “too disgusting” - at least he didn't call it "icky"), that Zucker thought CNN’s anti-Trump banner headlines were actually too polite, that he compared Trump not conceding to the situation preceding 9/11, and that he urged his staff to “go after Lindsay Graham.” There was also some smearing of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson for “naked racism” and promoting white supremacy by CNN’s general counsel. CNN tried to accuse Carlson of racism for misidentifying the speaker as a black executive, but Carlson pointed out that CNN, perhaps desperate to change the subject, once again got the story wrong. Project Veritas misidentified the speaker, but Carlson didn’t identify him at all. Well, research and accuracy are not CNN’s strong points.

Rather than claim the tapes were fake or doctored or deny what they revealed, CNN expressed outrage at O'Keefe for recording them and threatened legal action for releasing them. I’m strangely reminded of the DNC’s response to the release of all those emails in 2016.

Zucker and CNN should just take a chill pill. I hardly consider it a major revelation to find out that CNN is not a news network but a biased propaganda mouthpiece for the Democratic Party. I would’ve been far more shocked if those tapes had revealed them engaging in actual, objective journalism.

With Christmas approaching and COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus cases rising, Americans are bracing for more lockdown orders that seem to be aimed more at shutting down businesses, churches and Christmas celebrations than actually stopping the spread of the virus. So before we get too far past the recent Thanksgiving hypocrisies of the “Do as I say, not as I do” leaders, here are a few things worth remembering when they start in with the war on Christmas in the name of stopping the pandemic (using the same failed tactics that were supposed to be imposed for only two weeks, eight months ago.)

First of all, PJ Media made a handy list of prominent Democrats who imposed crackdowns on their constituents, then flouted their own rules. It ranges from big names like Nancy Pelosi, Andrew Cuomo, Bill DeBlasio and Gavin Newsom to Denver Mayor Michael Hancock, who told everyone to avoid travel 30 minutes before he got on a plane to go visit his own family for Thanksgiving.

The media have also been pushing draconian measures that they seem to think don’t apply to them. CNN’s Chris Cuomo made the previous list of hypocrites, but let’s not overlook ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who has become notorious for shaming others who don’t wear masks while being caught not wearing one when he thinks the cameras aren’t on.

The latest is the L.A. County Supervisor who voted to ban outdoor dining restaurants, then was spotted eating at one a few days later. (If she looks familiar, yes: she did used to play Zelda on the ‘50s sitcom “Dobie Gillis.” I think Maynard G. Krebs might now be in charge of coming up with the state's plans to stop the coronavirus.)

And let’s not forget the California state lawmakers who, after doing such a bang-up job dealing with riots, crime, blackouts and wildfires, shut down businesses and told Californians to stay home and not travel for the holidays. Then they set off on a plane for a taxpayer-paid “conference” at a luxury resort in Hawaii.

Americans have just about reached the end of their patience with the hypocrisy of politicians and their endless job- and business-killing lockdowns and restrictions that defy common sense and often have little to do with any scientific evidence about stopping the spread of the virus. Some are staging full protest rallies

Others are becoming quite creative in their ways of protesting the dictates, or getting around them entirely.

I’m proud to say that I inspired Pastor Rob McCoy, who took off his tie to striptease music before his sermon so his church could be declared a “strip club” and therefore, an essential business that’s allowed to stay open in California. Here’s a video of that, but watch it beyond the funny opening to hear a very important message in his sermon.

There was also the Buffalo, New York, restaurant owner who put a sign on his business that read “WalMart,” so that he could be deemed worthy of remaining open.

The owner of a New York pub declared it a Seattle-style “autonomous zone,” where, as we all learned, COVID restrictions simply don’t apply.

And the owner of “Eat At Joe’s” restaurant in Redondo Beach, California, protested Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “sheer insanity” of restrictions by putting a banner over his place for the tony “French Laundry” restaurant, where Newsom attended a birthday party after telling everyone else not to gather in indoor groups. I guess the French restaurant is special, and as with anti-cop protests and Biden election celebrations, the virus doesn’t spread there.

I’m very glad to see that people are finally saying enough is enough, and before they give up their rights and lose their jobs and businesses, they're starting to demand to know what the scientific basis is for these restrictions, why they’re expected to work now when they haven’t before, why they’re going on indefinitely, and why the people creating them think they don’t apply to themselves.

Since my strip tease idea was so inspiring, I hope that my latest suggestion will be picked up nationwide: The reason it’s so easy for these politicians to shut down other people’s businesses is that, no matter what, their government paychecks never stop coming. I think we should all demand that they not receive any pay as long as they have their states’ or cities’ economies shut down and their constituents aren’t getting paid. I’ll be they would come up with some much better ways to deal with the virus pronto if their endless lockdowns also locked down their own paychecks.

The “cancel culture” is coming for guitar hero Eric Clapton, for daring to record a song written by Van Morrison that protests the endless lockdowns that are killing live music and destroying musicians’ livelihoods. He couldn’t be allowed to go around expressing a non-approved opinion, so the Twitter keyboard warriors dug up an old racist comment he made in the 1970s and are using it as a pretext to try to “disappear” him.

The comment was indeed shocking, but he’s apologized for it repeatedly for years, explaining that when he said it, he was out of his head and suicidally addicted to booze and drugs. The left seemed to forgive him, until it suddenly became useful to take it back.

I’d also point out that the song the self-righteous social justice warriors are so outraged over is to raise money to help struggling musicians whose livelihood is being destroyed by their policies. Just by recording it, he’s already done more to help others than they ever will. And I seriously doubt that anyone who already knows Eric Clapton is going to stop listening to his music because some twits on Twitter said to.

From Patti:

Gov. Huckabee, if President Trump is not able to get this into court or investigated by the FBI or DOJ, we are doomed. The rest of us are nobodies with no power or influence or recourse to "make" anyone hear us or take action.

I listened to the interview [between President Trump and Maria Bartiromo] and was so frustrated, I turned it off. Who in the world can get action on this if the President of the US cannot? Who hires and fires at the FBI and DOJ? I thought the President did! Why aren't heads rolling over there because no action is being taken to protect the citizens of the US? I am so angry at the FBI and DOJ and the courts! Regardless of who appointed them, is there no one left to defend the Constitution and We the People?!

Thank you for letting me comment. I want to know what We the People can do to get this fixed. I pray. I write my legislators and those in other states. I re-post the truth about election fraud to every social media account (including those that censor and those that don't). I do not know what else I can do.

Thank you for keeping us informed with the truth. I have pulled the plug on MSM and refuse to watch it anywhere. You and a few other independent news sources are all I have. Please tell us what We the People can do other than watch it go down the drain. God bless you.

From the Gov:

Thank you so much for writing, Patti. I think your letter expresses very well what so many are feeling right now. If it seems to us that even the President of the United States can only stand and watch while the Republic circles the toilet bowl, we’re bound to feel truly powerless.

Democrats and the media (same thing) are trying 24/7 to make us think we’re crazy even to consider that there’s anything strange about the election results, let alone to believe we can do anything about it. Do you know where the term “gaslighting” comes from? It’s from an old Ingrid Bergman movie called GASLIGHT, in which the main character’s husband manipulates the environment around his wife to make her think she’s insane and powerless to maintain her grip on reality. It almost works.

The reason these tactics are so effective against this character, at least for a time, is that the victim is ALONE. She essentially has only one source of information, her husband –- no other way to tell what is real and what is not. This is why social media is trying so hard to cut off access to “outside” information about this election and the hearings going on now.

The idea is to isolate conservatives and expose them only to information that furthers the one permissible narrative. The covid lockdown helps perpetuate that sense of isolation, too.

Another part of the plan is to make you feel powerless and ready to just give up and go along. To "move on." They want you to think the current is too strong for you to swim against it. If you keep trying to resist, they’ll label you as a crazy conspiracy theorist. But millions of people, and even some brave news outlets, continue to swim strongly against that current.

So how does our main character come to realize she’s not crazy? SOMEONE ELSE enters the picture, figures out what is going on, and SHOWS the victim how she is being intentionally misled and that she is perfectly sane. This is what we can do for others who are slowly being worn down by the media and "cancel culture." What you are doing --- writing legislators, posting everywhere you can, ditching the MSM and finding alternatives, and even writing letters like this one --- is important, because this is how we remind each other that we are not crazy and we have eyes.

Surveys show that a large majority of those who voted for Trump believe the vote count is way off and that Trump really did win the election. (Even a surprising number of Democrats can see this.) Statisticians are saying the anomalies they've seen virtually guarantee that these results would not just happen. And now Bill O'Reilly, who strikes me as a hardened realist, agrees.

As more evidence comes to light, I think the chorus of doubters will grow, perhaps to encompass virtually everyone who supported the President. That’s 73 million people, just including the ones whose votes made the count.

Social media can’t isolate and indoctrinate 73 million people, not in America, though they might try. In fact, one study has shown that "fact-checking" can backfire, causing people to be more likely, not less, to believe something if social media plays nanny and tries to "correct" it.

That doesn’t mean Trump will prevail in the courts, though he might. It’s impossible to predict whether he will or not. There is a balance of power and the Constitution prescribes remedies for this situation that will give us an outcome, but not necessarily a good one. Trump might tweet angrily about what has happened, and complain to Maria Bartiromo about it, but he’s not about to overstep his authority the way Democrats love to tell us he will. That's just another lie from the left. Without a doubt, the real megalomaniacs dwell on the other side of the aisle.

So right now, we must leave it to the attorneys and let this situation play out.

As I’ve said before, Trump is providing a public service to the country he loves by forcing us to take a closer look at the institution of “The Vote.” Yes, it’s in his own interest, but it’s in our interest, too, and he's well aware of that. There have long been instances of “manipulation” in elections, but if the 2020 election really turns out to be what it looks like, we can’t have this level of anarchy and continue as a democratic republic. That’s how important this is.

And whether or not Trump gets another four years, we 73 million people will have had perhaps the biggest wake-up call of our lives.

Crime is sky-rocketing

December 2, 2020

In cities across America where leftwing leaders sided with rioters and slashed police budgets, crime is skyrocketing. As Gomer Pyle used to say, “Sur-prise! Sur-prise!”

How devastating was that insane abdication of public responsibility? We can now put some figures to it. The Major Cities Chiefs Association (an organization of police chiefs representing 69 of America’s largest cities) reports that from May 25 to July 31, about 8,700 protests took place in US cities. Of those, 574 were riots that included mass looting and destruction. During them, more than 2,000 police officers were injured in the line of duty.

One police agency reported 115 commercial burglaries in just one day. Another reported a single looting event at a shopping mall that resulted in over $70 million in damage. One agency alone reported 300 police cars damaged, including 19 that were engulfed in flames.

But maybe this, more than any statistics, will drive home just how bad it was: It was SO bad that in Minneapolis, ground zero of the Defund The Police movement and current site of a surging crime wave, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey stood up Monday at a city council meeting and shot down the council’s plan to slash the police budget.

The plan, hilariously named “Safety For All,” calls for reducing the police department from 888 to 750 officers. Frey, actually sounding like a voice of reason, said, “It’s irresponsible and untenable, especially given what we are presently experiencing now in this city. If the goal is simply to dramatically reduce the number of police officers we have and hamstring our chief, no, I cannot sign onto that.”

Frey also noted that any plan was supposed to wait until after a year-long “community engagement process” to find out what the people want. They could find out right now, if they’d listen: the people want more cops on the street. It sounds as if the only way to make that happen would be to throw their useless city council out onto the street.

Oh, and if you need any further verification of just how bad, dangerous, counterproductive and idiotic the council’s police plan is, try this: Rep. Ilhan Omar tweeted her support for it.

President Trump’s team is continuing to challenge the vote, and I believe in giving him time to make his case, but it does appear that the odds are getting longer, with officials certifying votes and courts throwing out cases. Still, I believe in not reporting news until it’s actually news, so I have held off on commenting on all the speculation over who Joe Biden will name to his Cabinet. But now that Biden is actually giving us some names, it’s worth pointing out that, aside from the media, the reaction is not universal adoration.

So far, what we’ve seen is exactly what many expected: a lot of warmed-over Obama-era failures and entrenched Deep Staters with egos far in excess of their abilities, the very people Trump was referring to when he said that if the Obama Administration hadn’t been so bad, he never wouldn’t gotten near the White House. I already mentioned John “Iran Deal/Logan Act” Kerry being picked as "climate czar" (I think "Secretary of Hot Air" would be more accurate), but here are a few more blasts from the past that could be returning to prominence if Biden becomes President.

Biden is rumored to be considering Michigan Rep. Elissa Slotkin as CIA Director. At least it’s not John Brennan, but here’s what Michigan GOP chair Laura Cox had to say about that pick.

“From her support of the failed Iran Nuclear Deal to her inability to articulate any plans to fight America’s adversaries, Congresswoman Slotkin has proven time and again how grossly unqualified she is to handle foreign policy matters. It comes as no surprise that Joe Biden would consider someone this incompetent for his CIA Director, but I hope for the sake of the American people he has the wherewithal to pass on what would be a disastrous appointment.”

Okay, safe to say that might not be a universally acclaimed choice. But how about his reported pick for head of the Office of Management and Budget, Neera Tanden?

Turns out she has a long history of spreading discredited Russia collusion hoaxes (ironically, she suggested that Russia switched votes to Trump in the 2016 election), and more to the point, a string of Twitter tweets rudely and viciously smearing the very Republican Senators who would have to vote for her to confirm her to the job. A spokesman for Sen. John Cornyn put Tanden’s chances of confirmation at “zero,” while other former top GOP staffers described her nomination as “a funeral” and “a sacrifice to the confirmation gods.”

Biden’s reported choices to lead his national security team, including the Secretaries of State and Defense, went straight from the Obama Administration into a DC consulting firm that doesn’t disclose its clients. The lack of transparency and ethics even drew criticism from leftwing blogs and the New York Times.

Even one of the people he chose to lead his transition team is under fire for being in charge of Los Angeles Metro while it’s under two federal criminal investigations.

I could go on, but you get the picture. He's being slammed for considering failures, liars and crooks, but what else does he have to choose from? Biden isn’t even officially the President-elect, and already the long knives are coming out from both directions. Even if he does become President, it might not be long before he starts feeling the wisdom of the old proverb: “Be careful what you wish for. You might get it.”

Not the first

December 2, 2020

Joe Biden named his (potential) White House communications team, and the media are falling all over themselves to praise him for having the first all-female senior White House team. One problem, as White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany (who replaced my daughter, Sarah) points out: President Trump already has an all-female senior White House press team. So does the First Lady. And so does the Second Lady. The press has been barking at them for four years; you’d think they’d have noticed by now that they’re women.

But this is par for the course for our media, who have gone from madly attacking Trump to polishing Biden’s shoes with their tongues in record time. They’re so desperate to come up with positive things to praise him for that they might have set a hilarious new record for fawning. The liberal site The Daily Beast actually ran a story with this headline:

“Joe Biden’s Dogs Have Told This Pet Psychic a Lot About Their Beloved Master, and His Future.”

To triple the hilarity, Instapundit caught a screen grab of that puffiest of puffballs with a pop-up ad over it for subscriptions, urging people to “Support our fearless journalism.” My dogs told me psychically that even they think that’s idiotic.

In a related story, Biden slipped and twisted his ankle Saturday while playing with his dog, Major. My hopes and prayers for a swift recovery. But as Instapundit noted, why didn’t the dog psychic warn him?

Johns Hopkins University published and then retracted a study that found that there has been no major increase in the expected number of deaths among all age groups in the US this year due to COVID-19.

The researcher found that while there was a sharp increase in COVID-19 deaths, there was a drop in deaths attributed to other causes, such as pneumonia or heart disease. In fact, “the total decrease in deaths by other causes almost exactly equals the increase in deaths by COVID-19.” He theorizes that deaths from other causes are being categorized as COVID-19 deaths. Also, the very elderly victims might have been expected to die of old age, seasonal flu or other causes if the pandemic hadn’t occurred.

Interestingly, Johns Hopkins University didn’t retract the study because they could cite anything inaccurate, but because it “was being used to spread misinformation about the pandemic,” and discount the danger of the virus or the need to take precautions. But if the numbers are correct, then why should the study be retracted? Is it the job of the university to only publish scientific facts that support a particular narrative, or to suppress facts just because someone might misinterpret or misuse them?

The researcher said he was even accused online of being a “COVID denier” (of course, he was.) He called those false accusations “devastating,” but said, “I stand my ground. The goal is never to undermine the effects of COVID-19 but to suggest a possible over-exaggeration in death numbers due to the pandemic.”

I thought we were supposed to listen to the scientists. I must be getting old because I remember when liberals thought that refusing to accept “inconvenient truths” was a bad thing.

A Very Subjective Term

December 2, 2020

Remember when Hollywood liberals and feminists were all riled up about “Me Too” and started the “Time’s Up” movement to fight sexual abuse of women in the workplace? That all went out the window when Joe Biden was nominated, but until that point, they were so worked up that some top name Hollywood celebrities started a charity composed of two groups, the Time’s Up Foundation and Time’s Up Now Inc. They had such luminaries as Reese Witherspoon, Amy Schumer and Brie Larson on their boards, and they quickly went to work raising money to fight sexual predators.

The New York Post reports that in their founding year of 2018, the nonprofit organization raised over $3.6 million. It spent $157,155 on conferences on “gender equity,” which included “a retreat at the Ojai Valley Inn, a luxury resort and spa north of Los Angeles. The retreat was dominated by agents from the Creative Artists Agency, who apparently had difficulty deciding on what the core mission should be.” They also spent $288,000 on advertising, $112,000 on a public relations firm, over $58,000 on travel, and $1.4 million on salaries. That included $342,308 to former WNBA head Lisa Borders, who ran the group for four months before resigning after her adult son was accused of sexual misconduct.

I’ll let you click the link to find out how much they spent on supporting women who made legal claims of sexual harassment. They say their legal defense fund has spent over $1.7 million to help women, but the share of it that the two groups kicked in themselves is less than what Borders was paid for four months’ work.

Apparently, “non-profit” is a very subjective term.

Considering that Trump's election challenges have “no evidence” (right), there sure is an explosion of such activity going on around the country. It’s so much, in fact, that we can’t possibly condense and comment on it all. Believe me, you wouldn't want that, and my little staff and I would be in the loony bin if we tried. (They risk ending up there anyway; it's a risk that comes with the job.) Fortunately, THE EPOCH TIMES' homepage has links to most of the updated information, state by state.

https://www.theepochtimes.com

Their news site has done an amazing job of staying on top of all this. The story out of Nevada is one we find of particular interest at the moment.

Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak is pushing forward with certifying the election for Biden just as District Judge James Russell in Carson City has set an evidentiary hearing for this Thursday, December 3, in a contest-of-election case filed by Trump’s campaign attorneys. Trump attorney Jesse Binnall says he intends to prove that so many fraudulent votes were cast across the state of Nevada that Trump actually won there, not Biden.

Kayleigh McEnany, appearing on Sean Hannity’s TV show Monday evening, talked briefly about this. Part of this lawsuit, she says, is that Trump’s side has been granted discovery, which means they get to depose witnesses. “Democrats have been fighting tooth and nail,” she said, for us not to be able to depose witnesses, not to be able to investigate and ask questions.” One question: if Democrats didn't steal the election in Nevada, what possible objection could they have to this?

It’s not in the EPOCH TIMES story, but what we find especially interesting about this is that the moment Trump's team was granted discovery, ten attorneys from the law firm Perkins Coie magically appeared. These are the same Hillary cronies who hired Fusion GPS and paid for the phony anti-Trump “dossier.”

Most interesting of all, the lead attorney for the group is Hillary's guy Marc Elias, the very lawyer who spent this year going around the country filing lawsuits in key states to make them loosen their election laws! I am not kidding. Democrats are bringing out the big guns in Nevada, and one has to wonder what they're hiding there. Stay tuned.

President Trump, on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES with Maria Bartiromo, had no problem whatsoever calling Biden’s still-unofficial “win” a big fat case of voter fraud. “Biden didn’t get 80 million votes,” Trump said.

Afterwards, in online “news” stories that sounded like they came straight from the opinion page (the only appropriate place for them), the mainstream media slammed the President for “whining” about “unsubstantiated claims.” Actually, Trump brought up statistical anomalies for which we have no satisfactory explanation. To say that Biden really got the most ACTUAL VOTES in this election –- when he had to outperform Barack Obama to do it and when Republicans swept the down-ballot races –- is, itself, quite unsubstantiated, bordering on impossible.

Bartiromo asked very specific questions that Trump tended to answer much more generally --- to her frustration --- but he’s not in a position to say, for example, when his cases might reach the Supreme Court. In fact, he has no guarantee that any of his cases will even be heard by SCOTUS, though he thinks it will happen. “We should be heard by the Supreme Court,” Trump said. “Something has to be able to get up there; otherwise, what is the Supreme Court?”

"It will take a brave judge or a brave legislature,” he said. He spoke very highly of Rudy Giuliani: “Let me tell you, that guy has guts, ‘cause we had lawyers that were afraid to go forward ‘cause they were threatened, viciously threatened…both psychologically and otherwise.”

"What’s going on --- nobody’s ever seen anything like this.”

And later: “If Republicans allow it [nationwide mail-in voting] to happen, you ‘ll never have another Republican elected in the history of this country, at a Senate level or at a presidential level.”

Ken Starr, who followed President Trump on the show, said the challenge was "translating those allegations and intuitions and the reports into actual admissible evidence in court." He does think the President has a couple of "platforms, so to speak" that he can get heard. But "we're in the fourth quarter," he said.

The compelling statistical evidence gathered by data analyst Matt Braynard has apparently gained the attention of the FBI.

Braynard, former data and strategy director for Trump’s 2016 campaign and head of the Voter Integrity Project, amassed “data that has been used to identify hundreds of thousands of potentially fraudulent ballots in the states where we filed litigation,” according to former Kansas attorney general Phillip Kline, now of the Amistad Project.

Attorney Sidney Powell is already using Braynard’s findings in two lawsuits, one in Georgia and one in Michigan, to help her make the case that their election results are invalid.

In case you didn’t see our first report, here are some of the serious problems Braynard turned up. He says they could “easily” switch at least three states from Biden to Trump.

The FBI never confirms or denies an ongoing investigation. It was Braynard who tweeted about it on Sunday, saying, “The FBI has proactively and directly requested from me the VIP findings that indicates illegal ballots. By Tuesday, we will have delivered to the agency all of our data, including names, addresses, phone numbers, etc.” Presumably they didn’t tell him to keep it quiet.

Specifically, he’s put together the names of all the people who voted in this election who also filed change-of-address cards in Georgia that moved them to another state. (People who are thinking of “moving” to Georgia to vote in January might want to take heed. It wouldn’t be hard for authorities to find out and prove that they broke federal law.) He can then show that these individuals registered to vote in that other state but still voted early or absentee in Georgia. He’s got names of people who are on record as having voted in multiple states. Oops.

The states make this information available in the form of raw data; Braynard just put it all together. It seems as though he might have just made the FBI’s job a whole lot easier. Thank goodness for that, or for anything that kick-starts the FBI.

Anyway, there might actually be something to the report that a Department of Justice plane went to Toronto, which is headquarters for Dominion Voting Systems, for a three-day trip and after that, made a quick jaunt down to Atlanta, staying on the tarmac for just over an hour before flying back to Washington, DC. Perhaps they were in Atlanta just long enough to pick up evidence such as hard drives and other records.

The federal judge in one of Sidney Powell’s election lawsuits, this one concerning Dominion Voting Systems in Georgia, issued an order Sunday requiring the state to cease and desist wiping or resetting machines.

Shortly afterwards, U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten, Sr., reversed himself.

Oh, but he had a good reason. “The state” was not in possession of the machines. “Plaintiffs’ request fails because the voting equipment that they seek to impound is in the possession of county election officials.”

Got that? The STATE doesn’t have the machines. The COUNTIES have them, and “...plaintiffs have not demonstrated that county election officials are within Defendants’ [the state’s] control.”

Good grief.

Lin Wood, an attorney associated with the Trump campaign, couldn’t believe it. “What???” was his response. He noted that the machines are owned by THE STATE and that Georgia elections are overseen by the Georgia secretary of STATE. This judge used a ridiculous technicality to reverse a completely reasonable order to prevent officials in the state of Georgia from wiping forensic evidence.

The plaintiffs had filed their emergency motion after an election official told a poll worker that ballot-counting machines would be “reset to zero” on Sunday, November 30, prior to the recount. This information was put into an affidavit by the poll worker, a Republican, who had expressed concerns to the official about wiping the machines.

When the poll worker asked the official if the reset would wipe forensic evidence off the machines, he was told, “Atlanta already did it.”

I'll pause while that sinks in.

Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer is fed up. He tweeted, “Our Republican recount monitors at the World Congress Center waited today for four hours while Fulton County election officials ‘updated the software.’”

“Updated the software"?? At the risk of sounding like Lin Wood, WHAT??

In an update late Sunday night, the judge –- I assume because the story got out –- finally did grant a temporary restraining order on election officials in Cobb, Gwinnett and Cherokee counties to prohibit them from “any alteration, destruction or erasure of any software or data on any Dominion voting machines” used in the 2020 elections. He graciously allowed Wood to amend the previous complaint to include COUNTIES in possession of voting machines. But what about Fulton County? Is it true that "Atlanta already did it?"

Here’s the full story at THE EPOCH TIMES.

The NOQ REPORT has this story, too, with an interesting add-on about a Department of Justice plane logging two trips to Toronto, where Dominion Voting Systems is headquartered. After spending three days there, the same plane flew to Atlanta, where it remained on the tarmac for just over an hour. The speculation: the DOJ was picking up hard drives or other equipment to take back to DC for analysis. Hard to believe they’re on the case, but maybe they are, very quietly.

Here’s the original story on those Justice Department flights, which was reported by NOQ on Saturday.

This Georgia story is just one of many unacceptable facts --- repeat, FACTS --- coming to light in the aftermath of Election Day. If you still hesitate to tell friends and acquaintances that you question the results of the election, fearing they’ll think you’re a crank or conspiracy theorist, just have them read the best article we’ve seen that lays out the many reasons for doubt. It’s from the SPECTATOR, by Patrick Basham, “Reasons Why the 2020 Presidential Election is Deeply Troubling.”

Basham is a director of The Democracy Institute and a pollster himself who, after looking at the many anomalies, believes that Trump campaign “is well within its rights to contest the tabulations.” He knows that with the given media narrative and the current political climate, “to say out-loud that you find the results of the presidential 2020 election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or conspiracy theorist.”

“Mark me down as a crank, then,” he says.

Perhaps his largest concern is the staggering amount of vote-flation there was. Trump got more votes than any incumbent President ever seeking re-election. He got 11 million more votes than he got in 2016, and somehow still lost. According to exit polls, he grew his support among black voters by 50 percent. He increased his share among Hispanic voters to 35 percent, making it “arithmetically impossible for a Democrat presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada or New Mexico.”

Basham is wondering exactly the same thing we have: where did those thousands of Biden votes that put him over the top COME FROM?? I would stress that if these were fraudulent, every one of them canceled out someone’s legitimate vote for Trump.

Even more to the point, Biden got them in exactly the places he needed to, to win the Rust Belt states that usually go the way of Ohio, which went red big-time this year. Biden got them in the cities of Philadelphia, Detroit, Milwaukee and Atlanta. “He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states,” Basham said, “which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.”

Basham goes on to list in bullet points many of the problems we’ve discussed here, such as the suspicious halt to the counting just in those cities (he doesn’t even mention the phony “burst water main” story in Georgia), the statistically abnormal results that coincidentally started when counting resumed, the ejection of Republican poll watchers, destruction of mail-in ballot evidence (which contain signatures that should have been matched), missing USB cards containing thousands of votes, non-resident voters (he mentions the discovery by Matt Braynard that thousands of of Georgia “voters” no longer met residency requirements or were using commercial addresses or boxes as “residence” addresses), and much more.

And when you take a look at the amazing down-ballot sweep for Republicans all across the country, it just doesn’t make sense.

Basham brings up a particularly incredible coincidence: “For...53 batches of votes counted, Biden led Trump by the same exact 50.05 to 49.95 percent margin in every single batch.” What are the odds?

"Whether the cause was simple human error or nefarious activity,” he says, “or a combination, clearly something peculiar happened. If you think that only weirdos have legitimate concerns about these findings and claims, maybe the weirdness lies in you.”

In interviews over the past couple of weeks, Basham has asked the question that if there's really no evidence of fraud and it's crazy to think Biden didn’t really win, what's the harm of taking a closer look and letting the lawsuits play out? Wouldn’t this simply end up confirming that Biden is the real President? Our side would then have to say that we lost fair and square. Isn’t that what Democrats would want? Then the only people still questioning Biden’s win would BE the cranks and conspiracy theorists.

The very fact that courts are trying to squelch efforts to examine what happened on Election Night tells us something that no judge or election official can cover up, no matter how hard he tries.

Here’s a story about the many limousine leftist Hollywood celebrities who are pouring money into Georgia to try to help the Democrats take the two Senate seats and control the entire government.

And on that subject, Derek Hunter at Townhall.com has a list of some entertainment options for Republicans in blue states who are stuck at home under unconstitutional Thanksgiving bans. My suggestion for Republicans in blue states would be to go to the Internet and check out the U-Haul moving truck rates.

But these articles give me a good opportunity to promote something we’ve been working on for a while. I don’t like promoting political boycotts, because they hurt workers who had nothing to do with the leftist rants of the executives and stars of the projects they work on. But there is a positive way that you can enjoy entertainment without enriching leftists who call conservatives Nazis while, without seeing the irony, wanting to put them into concentration camps. That’s by supporting entertainers and movies that don’t threaten or insult you.

Be on the lookout for our Huckabee Newsletter Holiday Entertainment Guide, coming soon with recommendations and links for CDs, DVDs and streaming video that you can buy for yourself or as gifts with a clear conscience. They include music and clean comedy from performers who aren’t liberal political activists, many of whom have been on my show, as well as quality movies and documentaries with a conservative and/or Christian viewpoint.

In breaking news Wednesday, Pennsylvania Commonwealth Judge Patricia McCullough has ordered state officials not to certify the results of the 2020 election, pending an evidentiary hearing on Friday.

She's not only ordered them to not certify, but also not to take any further steps toward that end. In other words, STOP NOW.

According to the story in THE EPOCH TIMES, this ruling regards a lawsuit brought by “Republican lawmakers and candidates” –- Pennsylvania Rep. Mike Kelly, Republican congressional candidate Sean Parnell, and Pennsylvania House of Representatives candidate Wanda Logan –- against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, and the Pennsylvania General Assembly. The lawsuit concerns “Act 77,” a bipartisan bill that in October of 2019 became law and expanded mail-in voting but that plaintiffs say would have required an amendment to Pennsylvania’s state constitution.

Pennsylvania has its votes counted (perhaps I should use quotation marks around “votes” and “counted”), but a number of steps still need to be carried out before the formal certification can be completed. The plaintiffs maintain there's no need to rush through these to certify the results, as Pennsylvania didn’t certify until December 12 in 2016.

Marc Elias, the Perkins Coie attorney who went from state to state in the months before this election, filing lawsuits and persuading officials to (unconstitutionally) loosen up the rules, called this lawsuit “frivolous” and “absolutely shameful.” I’d say that means it’s on the right track.

"It appears that respondents’ actions may have been accelerated in response to the application for emergency relief...in an effort to preclude any remedial action by this court faster than this court was able to evaluate this application for emergency relief and the answers to it,” the plaintiffs wrote.

In other words, it looked as though state officials were pushing ahead even faster so the judge wouldn’t have enough time to figure out what was going on and do anything about it.

Come on, man! That would NEVER happen…

Over 30,000

November 26, 2020

Tuesday, the Dow closed over 30,000 for the first time in history. Again, to clarify for the media: Joe Biden had nothing to do with it, and the stock market isn’t booming because investors think Biden is going to become President. That’s the kind of data you get from liberal economists like Paul Krugman, who announced on the night Trump was elected that markets would “never” recover, and who assured us just last March that we were headed into a “permanent recession.”

FYI: One of my writers told me he opened a little day-trading account shortly after Krugman's warning last spring, and bought only stocks that had taken a big dive in industries that Democrats claimed would never recover. As of Wednesday, he says his stocks are up anywhere from 32% to 70.5% in six months or so. It proves you’ll never go wrong betting that leftists don’t know what they’re talking about. Even ones with a Nobel Prize.

Election Updates

November 26, 2020

The Trump team said legislatures in three swing states would hold hearings into campaign irregularities, but some legislators say that came as news to them. Here’s the latest schedule on what’s set to happen when:

The Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project has filed an emergency petition with the Wisconsin Supreme Court, claiming they have identified more than 150,000 potentially fraudulent ballots, more than enough to call into question the validity of the state's election results, in which Biden was declared the winner by only about 20,000 votes.

Walkaway founder Brandon Straka wrote a list of six things that Joe Biden should do if he wants to prove that he’s really serious about unifying America. Interestingly, #5 is “Call for a transparent audit of 2020 election.” What a great idea! Why hasn’t someone suggested that before?...

Operation Warp Speed, Indeed

November 26, 2020

Providing the FDA approves, 6.4 million doses of Pfizer’s COVID-19 (Chinese) coronavirus vaccine will be shipped to the states by mid-December. Forty million doses are expected to be ready by the end of the year. Moderna is also expected to file for an emergency use authorization for its own vaccine within a few weeks.

And just to clarify for the media: this record-smashing accomplishment was completed under Donald Trump, the President they accused of botching the virus response. It was not developed under Joe Biden. He’s the one who wanted to let people keep flying into the US from Wuhan in the middle of a pandemic to prove we aren’t racist. Science!

The Atlantic magazine, last seen trying to convince us that President Trump called our World War I heroes “suckers and losers” based on anonymous sources, is now trying to convince us to cancel Thanksgiving. They must think that we’re suckers because the writer gives away his real motivations by describing Thanksgiving dismissively as “a nebulous day of atoning for the sins of colonialism by eating food and saying thank you.”

He tosses us a turkey bone by writing, “Next year will be an opportunity to be thankful for the elements of the holiday that we tend to take for granted. It will be like a Super Thanksgiving.” But then he gives away his and the Atlantic’s real feelings about cherished American traditions and we suckers and losers who revere them: “Or maybe this new way of doing it will work so well, you’ll never want to go back.”

Right, we’ll love being separated from our loved ones by fear and paranoia on one of our most important holidays that we’ll want to continue eating frozen turkey dinners alone while watching MSNBC on every Thanksgiving from now on, as I assume the staff at the Atlantic will.

Lisa Carr at the Victory Girls blog has more on the Atlantic article and the general war on Thanksgiving here:

Personally, I doubt that the Atlantic’s stance on canceling Thanksgiving will carry much weight, since every thinking person I know long ago canceled their subscriptions to the Atlantic.

At this writing, attorney Sidney Powell reportedly intends to file a lawsuit in Georgia on Wednesday. We’re not sure what it’ll cover, but some reports out of Georgia strongly suggest that we still just don’t know the real vote count there. And if this isn’t cleared up, not only is the presidential vote in doubt, but there’s no telling how it will affect the upcoming senatorial run-offs.

As Peter Svab reports in THE EPOCH TIMES, and Dan Bongino discussed in his Tuesday podcast, something very suspicious is going on with thousands of ballots in Georgia.

Bongino knows something about such allegations because in his early days as a Secret Service agent, he had to investigate cases of fraud that led him to discover Post Office boxes being used as residences. Criminals were using them as drop boxes; the Secret Service would stake them out and catch the bad guys.

This same type of falsification appears to have been done on thousands of ballot applications in Georgia, which require a RESIDENTIAL address. Keep in mind that the margin between Biden and Trump, with their “official” count, is less than 13,000 votes.

Matt Braynard, former data and strategy director for Trump’s 2016 campaign, noticed that many addresses on the voter rolls included information that didn’t make sense for the actual locations. So he and his team analyzed just a partial sample of the voter data and saw that thousands of registered voters in Georgia --- who are shown to have actually voted --- might have used addresses of commercial businesses or postal facilities and disguised this by making them look like residential addresses.

Some of these immediately look suspicious: An address that says “Apt. 4928” doesn’t really make sense, as an apartment complex typically doesn’t contain nearly that many units. Others with lower numbers would, of course, blend right in.

On November 22, Braynard tweeted: “Georgia: We have identified over a thousand early/abs votes cast by individuals whose registered addresses are in fact at post offices, UPS, and FedEx locations, willfully disguising the box numbers as ‘Apt,’ ‘Unit,’ etc.”

Whoever did this has broken the law. Georgia election law states that “the residence of any person shall be held to be in that place in which such person’s habitation is fixed, without any intention of removing therefrom.”

WITHOUT ANY INTENTION OF REMOVING THEREFROM. That’s the part that people in other parts of the country intending to “move” to Georgia just to vote Democrat in the run-offs need to consider. Unless they plan to continue living in Georgia for the foreseeable future, they are committing a felony by doing this. And the state of Georgia had better get tough on this or enforce that law, or their election in January will be steamrolled.

According to Georgia state law, anyone who “knowingly gives false information when registering as an elector” can be charged with a felony and imprisoned for up to 10 years or fined up to $100,000.

Braynard found anomalies in Pennsylvania as well. His team was able to contact by phone 1,137 Republican voters in Pennsylvania who requested a ballot but were not shown in state records to have had their ballots received or counted. Nearly 42 percent of those said they had returned their ballots, or thought they had. So, what happened to those ballots?

In Pennsylvania, over 160,000 uncounted mail-in ballots were requested by or in the name of registered Republicans. If we extrapolate from the sample Braynard was able to contact, with nearly 42 precent saying they returned them, that’s many thousands of votes not to have counted. Dr. Steven Miller, mathematics professor at Williams College, has filed a sworn affidavit of his findings, which says:

"I estimate that within a reasonable degree of mathematical certainty (based on the data I received being accurate and a representative sample of the population), the number of the 165,412 mail-in ballots requested by someone other than the registered Republican is at least 37,000, and the number of the 165,412 mail-in ballots requested by registered Republicans and returned but NOT COUNTED [emphasis mine] is at least 38, 910.”

Here are Dr. Miller’s findings from Pennsylvania with his detailed analysis, as presented in the affidavit.

But back to Georgia. Braynard’s survey concluded that in Georgia, a similar percentage of Republicans they contacted who'd requested mail-in ballots said they returned them: 44 percent.

As we reported, Georgia attorney Lin Wood got a major smack-down from Judge Steven Grimberg when he attempted to stop the certification of the state vote count. He was suing as an individual voter and campaign donor (not sure why), not acting as an attorney for the Trump campaign, and Judge Grimberg ruled that he lacked standing. So Wood has filed an appeal with the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals seeking an emergency review of that decision.

In a lawsuit against the Georgia secretary of state and other state officials, Wood is making an argument that Alan Dershowitz says has merit: the fact that state officials do not have the authority to change the rules for counting absentee ballots, because under the U.S. Constitution, state legislatures must do that.

State officials did this regarding the process for verifying signatures, without authorization from the Georgia Legislature. I believe Wood still has the same judge on this one, though, so don’t hold your breath.

Wood also had State Farm Arena, where votes were being counted, served with a subpoena seeking video footage of the counting process during and after the election. Recall that officials claimed the vote count there had to be halted for several hours because of a burst water pipe, which turned out to be a mere dribble. So, what were they doing in there for all that time the count was stopped?

Here’s more of an overview of what’s going on in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and, especially, Georgia.

Trump’s campaign has requested a machine recount in Georgia, which he’s entitled to do in such a close race. They’re also looking at a Petition to Challenge the election based, we surmise, on the suspicious registration applications detailed above, the ones that appear to be from non-residential addresses. There were approximately 1 million new voter registrations between November 2018 and 2020. Absentee votes cast totaled 1,322,529.

Even though the Georgia secretary of state has certified the results, Trump still has five days from that point to file such a petition.

According to RedState.com, there is anecdotal evidence --- not yet verified but certainly being checked out --- that numerous commercial mail-drop businesses had exhausted their supply of mailboxes as of this September and October. So the campaign is likely cross-referencing the street addresses of these commercial businesses with the addresses on voter registration applications to see if this was part of a scheme to inflate the Democrat vote.

Of course, just because leftists are openly encouraging people to “move” to Georgia to vote in the senatorial run-offs doesn’t mean Democrats would EVER have falsified their addresses there to vote against Trump. Certainly not! Win or lose, if Trump’s election challenge uncovers this kind of rot, it should be considered a public service to America.

Divided Government

November 25, 2020

A new Harvard CAPS-Harris poll of registered voters found that a sizable majority of Americans want divided government. Fifty-six percent said they want Republicans to maintain control of the Senate, while only 44 percent want Democrats to control the White House and both Houses of Congress.

That’s hardly surprising, given the radical agenda that the Dems have promised to ram down our throats with the tiniest of margins if they win the two upcoming Georgia Senate runoff elections. That would tie the Senate 50-50 and allow a Vice President Kamala Harris (who fell to the left of socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders in one ranking) to cast tie-breaking votes.

Incidentally, I keep hearing that the polls in Georgia are about neck-and-neck, yet overall, Americans want the Republicans to win those seats by a margin of 12 points. Are Georgians really that out of step with the rest of America, or are the polls wrong again, or is this just another one of those 2020 election statistical mysteries for which there is simply no explanation?

Having already helped shepherd historic peace agreements between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain and Sudan with the Abraham Accords, and promised that more nations will join soon, President Trump is reportedly trying to craft a landmark agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia. Fox News reported that on Sunday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu flew to Saudi Arabia for a clandestine meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Saudi officials and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

An Israeli official seemed to unofficially confirm the meeting, but Saudi officials denied it, saying that Saudi Arabia has “supported normalization with Israel for a long time, but one very important thing must happen first: a permanent and full peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians.”

That’s what I would expect the Saudis to say publicly. Seeing the other Arab nations make peace and recognize Israel’s right to exist, and just hearing a report that Saudi Arabia is leaning toward it, should put pressure on the Palestinians to give up their rabid opposition to making peace with Israel. This is sending them a message that other Arab nations are getting tired of defending them. The message Trump is sending the Palestinians with these deals is that the peace train is leaving the station, and they can either make a deal and get on board or stubbornly refuse and hope that a President Biden will re-enrich Iran enough that the Mullahs will take care of them.

I know that Biden and his whole coterie of former Obama officials can’t wait to undo everything that Trump has done to replace their endless wars with peace in the Middle East. But Trump seems determined to make that hard for them by creating so much peace in the Middle East that even they, with all their diplomatic experience and expertise, will have a hard time screwing it up.

Say, remember the name “Hunter Biden”? Those who get their news from mainstream sources or social media probably never heard of him. But he’s Joe Biden’s son whose alleged shady international business dealings, particularly with China, were dismissed by the Democrats and their media stenographers as “Russian disinformation” (to use their favorite phrase) “without evidence.”

Well, while hardly anyone was paying attention, the Senate Finance Committee and the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs looked into some of the latest claims about Hunter from whistleblower Tony Bobulinski. They’ve just issued a supplemental report, and it shows that what Bobulinski gave them was consistent with other evidence they’d gathered showing millions of dollars being transferred from a company linked to China’s communist party to a company associated with Hunter Biden. There are more details here:

If Joe Biden gets into the White House and controls the Department of Justice, there’s no way this will be investigated other than by the Senate, which is reason #10,312 why it’s vitally important for the Republicans to win the two Georgia runoffs and maintain control of the Senate. If not, we might be conducting an experiment to find out whether manure still stinks if you sweep it under the rug.

President Trump gave the go-ahead to the General Services Administration to make funds available to the Biden transition team. But he insists that this does not mean that he is giving up his efforts to contest the ballot count in key battleground states.

That write-up also includes other developments, including Michigan certifying its vote, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejecting the Trump campaign’s lawsuit to throw out more than 8,000 absentee ballots that were missing key information, and the latest comments on the Trump campaign’s efforts by Rudy Giuliani and law Professor Alan Dershowitz.

And in updates on the updates (whew!), the Third Circuit Court of Appeals granted the Trump Team an expedited review of the Pennsylvania case. And the Michigan House agreed to hold a hearing into the Trump team’s allegations of election irregularities at 9 a.m. Wednesday.

From Saturday into Sunday morning, there were four killings in Los Angeles, including a 17-year-old boy riding a bicycle. That pushed the total killings this year to 300, and it’s only November. The last time there were that many was in 2009.

City officials are blaming it on the coronavirus, and its attendant economic lockdowns, unemployment and restrictions on city services and interventions.

And I’m sure that is a major factor. However, I notice that the virus is everywhere while the worst spikes in violent crime have come in cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Portland, Seattle, Minneapolis and Austin that have been run entirely by Democrats for a long time, and whose current leaders are the most far-left in history. It makes me wonder if maybe policies like slashing police budgets, letting all the criminals out of jail, doing away with bail, not prosecuting a wide range of crimes while targeting citizens who defend themselves against criminals, tolerating widespread homelessness, providing sanctuary for criminal illegal immigrants and allowing rioters and looters to run amuck might have a little something to do with it, too.

Happy Thanksgiving Week

November 24, 2020

Happy Thanksgiving week, and I hope you don’t live in a state where the government wants to arrest you for buying a turkey that feeds more than six people.

With all the other things in the news, a very important anniversary is not getting the attention it deserves. This year marks the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Pilgrims in the New World aboard the Mayflower in 1620. A lot of people are poisoning our children’s minds with lies about their nation’s history and trying to convince them that America was founded on nothing but racism, slavery and genocide. They are an even better argument for home-schooling than COVID-19.

Arkansas Tom Cotton has a terrific article at the link about the importance of this date and the Pilgrims, and the truly great and real American traditions that first appeared in that small colony of people seeking the freedom to express their religious beliefs without fear of government oppression.

John Adams called the Pilgrims’ arrival and their organizing document, the Mayflower Compact, the “birth-day of your nation.” Sen. Cotton writes, “In this covenant, the ship’s passengers agreed to form a ‘civil body politic’ of ‘just and equal laws’ based on the consent of the governed and dedicated to the ‘Glory of God’ and the ‘general good of the colony.’ Immediately after signing the compact, the signatories conducted a democratic election to choose their first governor.”

No wonder schools don't want kids to be taught that anymore! Read the whole thing. It will remind you of a whole lot of things that all Americans have to be thankful for, and that a lot of people would like us to forget about.

Speaking of 1620, National Review has a great article about an important new book, “1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project.” It’s a well-deserved deconstruction of the New York Times’ awful “1619 Project” that falsely recasts America’s founding as being about nothing but enforcing and preserving slavery and that some schools are now teaching as part of their curriculum (see my recommendation of home-schooling, above.)

57 Years Later

November 24, 2020

Sunday marked the 57th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. For those of us who are old enough to have lived through seeing the assassination of a President unfolding on live television, it will forever be seared into our memories. Not until 9/11 was there such a traumatic moment that affected the entire nation.

That’s one of many reasons why some of us find it so shocking and appalling that loose talk of assassinating a President you don’t like has become commonplace. It’s just one of many examples of how woeful the younger generations’ history education has become.

There have been many distorted conspiracy theories about JFK’s death that have supplanted the real history, and in recent years, they’ve taken a new twist as political partisans have tried to rewrite the truth about that dark day to throw shade on their contemporary political rivals. For instance, on the 50th anniversary, liberal media outlets like the Washington Post tried to link the Tea Party with the “right-wing extremism” of the ‘60s to imply they would have killed JFK if they’d been around back then. I wouldn’t be surprised to find similar attacks on Trump supporters, if I felt like digging through the muck to look for them. So let me just give you a quick history lesson:

For years, Dallas was unfairly painted by the left as a “city of hate” because JFK was killed there. Yes, there were some nasty anti-JFK ads in the local media (imagine that during a campaign year!) But in fact, the streets of Dallas were jammed with hundreds of cheering well-wishers who turned out just to see the President drive past. That’s why the FBI had so many photos to analyze: because there were so many people who came out to get a picture.

Lee Harvey Oswald was not a Dallasite, or even a Texan, and certainly not a right-winger. He was born in New Orleans and had only recently moved to Dallas. He was also a genuine, card-carrying communist who admired Castro and Cuba and had actually defected and lived in the Soviet Union for three years. He hated JFK for his anti-communist policies.

He was also known to be a rude, arrogant, communist loser who couldn’t hold a job and was always arguing with people and getting into fights. I could make an argument that he sounds more like an Antifa member than a Tea Partier or Trump supporter. But I won’t.

The anniversary of the JFK assassination should be a time for reflection on a tragic event that affected the world and all Americans. It should also be a time for reflection on what horrors can take place when people let their political passions overrun their sense of basic human decency.

Thank God for our freedom

November 24, 2020

The elections were almost 3 weeks ago and votes are still being counted and ballots are turning up that are just being “found.” American Idol can tabulate 100 million ballots in an hour on a live show, but we can’t get the votes straight in all 50 states in 3 weeks? You know what no one is talking about? Florida. Remember back in 2000 when the national joke was the hanging chads? Let’s give some credit where credit is due. Florida’s governor at the time was Jeb Bush, and to his credit, he realized what a national embarrassment that election was for Florida and he worked with the legislature and county election officials across Florida and created one of the most efficient, safe, and trusted election systems in the nation. On election night this year, Florida quickly and efficiently counted millions of votes across 2 time zones without a bit of controversy and was able to announce undisputed results early in the evening. So the reforms that Florida enacted in the wake of the disastrous 2000 election are a model. If the next President, whether Donald Trump retains the office or Joe Biden is sworn in ought to appoint Jeb Bush to lead a national ballot integrity initiative that will propose ways to regain the trust of the American public that their votes are being counted properly and only the votes of legal and properly registered voters are counted.

If we can’t do that, then we have 2 choices: Either contract the producers of American Idol to do it, or just officially announce that we are no longer a free nation where we elect our leaders, but a dictatorship with make-believe elections to humor the masses, but to ignore their will.

In the meantime, we will observe Thanksgiving this week and there are plenty of turkeys this year! I’m not even talking about the bird, but the elected officials around the country who are telling us not to have Thanksgiving with our families for fear of Covid. I’m very careful about the virus—probably more than you would believe. I wear my mask, wash, sanitize, socially distance, and don’t shake hands, but elbow bump instead. But fear will not be my driving force when it comes to my family at Thanksgiving. It’s especially offensive when the politicians impose on us rules they don’t follow themselves. CA Governor Gavin Newsom issued orders for CA citizens not to eat out, but he did because he thinks he’s better than the little people he orders around. It’s not unlike Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot who prohibited the people of her city from getting haircuts, but she got one because she said she had to make public appearances. Nancy Pelosi also visited a salon without a mask—a salon that was closed to the public was opened up just for her. And just this week, Senator Diane Feinstein was seen going into a hearing room not wearing the magic mask that everyone else in the Capitol is required to wear.

Bottom line—the elections are frustrating enough, but we need to worry about the kind of people who are getting elected and who think it’s their job to tell us how to live, but who ignore the rules imposed on the rest of us.

Maybe the reason some of the elections are so messed up is because the officials running them also think that it’s their job to force us to live in a way they have no intention of living. So, sure, be careful this Thanksgiving, but the purpose of Thanksgiving is to thank God for our freedom. And there’s a reason it’s not celebrated in North Korea or China. And I don’t want to be like them.

Friday, HUD Secretary Dr. Ben Carson issued a statement thanking President Trump for saving his life. Carson contracted COVID-19 and was treated with Oleander 4X. At first, he improved, but he has several co-morbidities and soon worsened and became “desperately ill.” He said Trump was following his condition and cleared him to get the monoclonal antibody therapy he’d received, and it worked.

I’m sure we’re all thankful that Dr. Carson is on the mend, but there’s another part of his statement that applies to us all and that deserves to quoted far and wide:

“I am hopeful that we can stop playing politics with medicine and instead combine our efforts and goodwill for the good of all people. While I am blessed to have the best medical care in the world (and I am convinced it saved my life), we must prioritize getting comparable treatments and care to everyone as soon as possible.

There are a number of promising treatments that need to be tested, approved, and distributed (sooner rather than later) so that the economy can be reopened and we can all return to a semblance of normalcy. Also, people should recognize that there are a number of defined steps that legally have to be taken before vaccines are released to the public and trying to cause alarm by saying dangerous shortcuts were taken only serves to stoke fear. Together we will be victorious. God is still in charge.”

Those who keep pushing draconian measures that destroy the economy and people’s lives until a vaccine is developed while spreading politically-motivated suspicion of any vaccine developed under President Trump also keep telling us we must listen to the doctors. Ben Carson is one of the most preeminent doctors in the world. How about listening to him?

Election Updates

November 24, 2020

Attorney Sidney Powell made a statement to the Wall Street Journal about the report that she was not part of Trump’s campaign legal team, but it still doesn’t clarify exactly what happened. It reads, "I agree with the statement today. I will represent #WeThePeople and seek the Truth. I intend to expose all the fraud and let the chips fall where they may. We will not allow the foundations of this great Republic to be destroyed by abject fraud."

After Georgia certified its vote results, the Trump campaign announced Saturday that it wants a recount that includes signature matching, to insure that the ballots that were counted and recounted are legitimate. Since Biden’s current lead is only 12,670 votes out of more than 5 million cast, or less than 0.5%, Trump has a legal right to request a recount after certification.

Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has become one of the few prominent GOP political figures to call on President Trump to begin the transition to a Biden Administration.

Fact To Bear In Mind: I’m starting to see op-eds pop up in liberal outlets, praising Al Gore for selflessly putting the good of America first by conceding to George W. Bush in 2000. What they’re not mentioning is that he only did that after exhausting all possible legal options, and the date that he conceded was December 13th. If Trump hasn’t either prevailed or conceded by December 13th (nearly three weeks from now), then you can compare him to Al Gore.

It didn’t require a multinational voting machine conspiracy to swing votes away from Trump and towards Biden and the Democrats, though it might turn out there was one. There are other ways in which we KNOW some strings were pulled. Some of these were legal; some were not.

Monday on Tucker Carlson’s FOX NEWS show, research psychologist and author Dr. Robert Epstein showed that, after gathering voluminous data on the 2020 election, he can conclude “Google’s search results were strongly biased in favor of liberals and Democrats.” (They did not find this to be the case for Yahoo or Bing.) The bias was shown with almost every demographic group; interestingly, conservatives saw more liberal bias in response to their searches than liberals did.

They also found what Dr. Epstein called a “smoking gun”: over a period of days, the vote reminder on Google’s home page was sent ONLY to liberals. “Not one of our conservative field agents received a vote reminder during those days,” he said.

On the fourth day, they went public with these findings, and Google “backed off,” he said. “They literally shut off that manipulation that night, and so for four days before the election they were showing vote reminders to everyone, finally.”

Apparently it pays to notice such things and bring them to light. Otherwise, social media will go right on doing whatever they want --- and getting away with it.

Dr. Epstein said the manipulations they’ve quantified from this election had the potential to shift at least 6 million votes, easily, “in just one direction,” and you know which direction he means. “That’s the bare minimum of at this point,” he said. It’s also greater than the margin between Biden and Trump. Dr. Epstein said that because they have so much data, they haven’t even begun to estimate the possible maximum effect. Thanks, Google!

Oh, and I should mention that Dr. Epstein is NOT a Trump supporter; he deserves points for objectivity. He’s heard from whistleblowers for over a year that this has gone on at Google for some time, and he's seen leaked videos and documents attesting to it as well. “There’s no question that they set about after the 2016 election to make sure that President Trump...is not re-elected." The data they’ve collected, he said, is consistent with what the whistleblowers and leaks have said for a long time.

How is this done? Dr. Epstein alleged that “Google literally buys candidates and politicians, and my colleagues, my fellow academics, are often bought by Google with large grants...The fact is, if you’re a Democrat or you’re a liberal, you LIKE what Google and, to some extent, these other tech companies are doing. It’s to your advantage.”

The problem, he said, is that we don’t know who Google is going to be supporting tomorrow. On this one point, I beg to differ; the fact that they currently support someone like Biden and the leftist machine behind him and Harris is very much the problem NOW. I hope one day soon he sees that.

He also pointed out that Google works with the Chinese government “to help surveil and control the Chinese population.” When Google first came into existence, its motto was “Don’t be evil.” What happened, Google?

Dr. Epstein is currently seeking funding to continue this research as his group moves to Georgia and monitors the senatorial run-offs. There could hardly be anything more important than that.

Guest Sharyl Attkisson also spoke about Big Tech, how it “moved into the internet in a way we haven’t seen before, in a very overt way in those weeks before the election,” to try to control the “information landscape,” as she described it.

As one example, she said Google announced after the coronavirus hit that they would direct searches to the World Health Organization, which in reality was giving out false information. She also related how, as we got closer to the election, they started “overtly censoring and taking down accounts,” de-platforming people and even media organizations, as they did with the NEW YORK POST Hunter Biden story. And they knew there would be no repercussions.

She didn’t see how to stop this before the Georgia runoffs in January, but said we have “a lot of strong, technical minds" looking for ways in which "information can be disseminated without being curated by these self-appointed parties who have their own conflicts of interest.”

So she's optimistic. “I do think something new will be born of all this,” she said. We shall see; I think we’ve got a big fight ahead, one we MUST fight if we want to take back the control being exerted over us.

And now to Facebook. Ken Blackwell for CNS NEWS has a commentary on how the election was hijacked in what he calls “a masterpiece of electoral larceny involving Big Tech oligarchs, activists, and government officials who prioritize partisanship over patriotism.”

Blackwell says they planned this well in advance and executed it ruthlessly, by exploiting the pandemic and also by going state-by-state and getting laws changed (unconstitutionally) to make it easier to weaken the integrity of the vote.

His piece details the activities of former Obama campaign manager and senior adviser David Plouffe, starting in 2017 when he went to work leading the policy and advocacy initiative of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, an organization established by Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

Plouffe published a book called –- I am not kidding –- A CITIZEN’S GUIDE FOR DEFEATING DONALD TRUMP. This offered a “roadmap” for a Biden win, turning out voters “block by block” in key Democrat strongholds in swing states.

Guess where these are. The examples Blackwell gives are Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Detroit and Milwaukee.

Investigators and attorneys for the nonpartisan Thomas More Society have been “following the money” for 18 months. “Under the pretext of assisting election officials conduct ‘safe and secure’ elections in the age of COVID-19, Blackwell wrote, “Zuckerberg donated $400 million...to non-profit organizations founded and run by left-wing activists.” The Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), whose prior yearly budgets averaged less than $1 million per year, got most of it, $350 million. The CTCL distributed these funds to left-leaning counties in battleground states, in large part to those areas identified by Plouffe. Blackwell estimates this level of spending could have translated into hundreds of thousands of votes in Philadelphia alone.

Take a look at the CTCL website. I can't wait to read "Cybersecurity for Election Officials."

Here’s the kicker: Zuckerberg and the CTCL wrote detailed conditions into their grants, including rules for exactly how elections were to be conducted, “down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places.”

The lawyers who tried to stop this before Election Day had their lawsuits dismissed because they’d not yet been able to show harm. Of course they hadn't --- the election hadn’t happened yet!

Blackwell’s piece is a must-read, but one caution: You are going to get very, very angry, particularly with Zuckerberg and the other Big Tech billionaires pulling the strings in this world of 2020. And it’s going to make you doubt the election results even more than you already do.

When attorney Sidney Powell said last week that she was getting ready to “release the Kracken,” there was no clue that President Trump’s legal team would distance itself from her just days later, as it seemingly has done. So, what does this mean? It depends on who’s talking. One could speculate that Powell’s claims, whether eventually provable or not, might not mesh with the team’s immediate strategy, mostly because of time constraints.

BREITBART quoted a White House source (for what that's worth) as saying “the scope of Powell’s public claims had gone beyond the scope of the evidence they had seen and believed they could prove in court.”

As THE EPOCH TIMES reported, Trump’s personal attorney and head of his re-election effort Rudy Giuliani issued a statement that “Sidney Powell is practicing law on her own. She is not a member of the Trump Legal Team. She is also not a lawyer for the President in his personal capacity.” It’s not clear from this statement if she ever was a part of Trump’s official team.

Trump himself has sort-of referred to her in that way, listing her among their “lawyers and other representatives.” Even THE EPOCH TIMES’ headline was unclear, describing her as part of “their election legal effort.”

Powell appeared with the team during their big press conference of November 19. Whether or not she was officially a member at that time, it certainly appeared so.

But this “distancing” might be about something else entirely. Michael Flynn, Jr., son of Powell’s looooongtime client Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, aimed to clear it up with a message on Parler, saying, “Cannot confirm yet but I’m confident this has to do w money coming in for legal defense fund [support]. Sidney Powell has her own separate entity 4 legal donations that isn’t in conjunction with the Trump legal team. Frees SP to do her own thing...which will STILL b biblical. Give this the 24 hour rule.”

That’s what we always do. Here’s Flynn later: “Can confirm this parlay...Sidney Powell is free to focus and not be tied to having to vett everything through the campaign.”

Here's how Andrea Widburg in an opinion piece for AMERICAN THINKER dissects the story. (She does believe "epic fraud" took place, but the allegations are so huge that I'm waiting to see what Powell has.)

Powell told NEWSMAX that “we’ve got tons of evidence; it’s so much it’s hard to pull it all together.” Of course, they do have to pull it all together for it to be worth anything. As we’ve cautioned, showing that votes COULD have been changed is not the same as showing they WERE changed.

On Sunday, Michael Steel, spokesperson for Dominion, was interviewed on FOX NEWS, and he told Eric Shawn it was “physically impossible” for the machine to switch votes.

But reportedly, Steel is also a former strategist for John Boehner, Paul Ryan and Jeb Bush, so what’s going on here? This strong opinion piece –- repeat, opinion –- from NOQ REPORT is highly skeptical of his defense of Dominion. I pass it along to you so you’ll have more to go on as we all try to unravel this story.

Incidentally, here’s a story from NBC NEWS about the problems with Dominion voting machines. I know, hard to believe they'd cover that, right? But it’s from 2019, when it was okay for the MSM to report such things.

Moving to another question, since this is civil litigation, what kind of evidence is needed? Mark Levin, on Sunday’s LIFE LIBERTY & LEVIN (which was recorded before the latest on Powell and has little to do with her claims), said filing a civil complaint requires “a reasonable basis in fact and law. Allegations can be made on information and belief.” A motion to dismiss assumes everything in the complaint is true --- interesting --- and then asks if relief can be granted for that complaint.

I would add that, of course, this has to do with what form the “relief” takes. If it means canceling out millions of votes, the complaint would have to be serious indeed.

Levin finds it troubling that some cases brought by Trump’s team have been dismissed when they shouldn’t have been. (Of course, when this happens, the media don’t question it; they just say Trump lost another case.) The threshold should be fairly easy to reach that allows the case to go forward and lets the plaintiffs seek “expedited discovery.” Since time is of the essence, he said, “discovery can be ordered immediately.”

In civil litigation, he said, “unexplained significant deviations from expected results --- mathematical inconsistencies supported by experts --- should be more than sufficient to establish a reasonable basis to file a complaint and justify fast discovery.”

Aha –- we definitely have mathematical inconsistencies, very big ones, supported by experts. This should be enough to advance a civil case. Those who say “there is no evidence” are wrong.

It seems to me that judges, in dismissing these cases, are cutting Trump’s team off at the knees before they can go forward with discovery to gather the evidence they'd need to take to trial. Such rulings prevent the lawyers from fact-finding, and that might be their purpose.

Levin reminds us that the Trump team has collected “hundreds and hundreds” of affidavits, sworn under penalty of perjury (meaning jail, unless you’re on Team Hillary), from “election workers, state officials and civilians."

We also have the question of who makes election laws. The Constitution says state legislatures do this, not governors or state supreme court justices. This distinction will come into play in Pennsylvania, and that’s why Justice Sam Alito ordered Pennsylvania to keep late-arriving ballots separate, pending future rulings.

Dershowitz has maintained this is a strong Supreme Court argument for the Trump team, as well as equal protection, as he said on FOX NEWS. Still, he believes that the strongest case, “if they have the evidence,” is the one about voting machines turning hundreds of thousands of votes.

Recall that in the months before the election, Democrat lawyers such as Marc Elias (of Hillary law firm Perkins Coie) brought over 300 lawsuits to change voting rules in various states, all with the result of making fraud easier if not downright institutionalized. JUDGES made these decisions, when the Constitution says state legislatures are supposed to do it. Some of these changes call into serious question the accuracy of the vote count.

Levin says the legislatures in these states should have issued resolutions early on, stating that THEY had a duty to ensure Article II of the Constitution is upheld, that THEY make the election laws and that THEY declare these judges’ rulings null and void. If they had, they would've headed off all kinds of chaos. But they didn’t.

Powell may have gone “a bridge too far” in her claims, but we shall see. She has a sterling reputation, and her determined, measured handling of the Flynn case makes it hard to believe she’s saying things she can’t back up or isn’t confident she’ll be able to. As I've said, this seems startlingly out of character for her, so much so that we suspected there was something about it we just didn’t know. But now we have an idea what that might be.

The Party of Science

November 21, 2020

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was recently caught attending a birthday party at a restaurant while ordering Californians to cancel their Thanksgiving dinners, ordered a new policy to slow the coronavirus that may be the dumbest one yet. People in counties in the purple infection tier are being put under a stay-at-home curfew from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m.

Think about that. Does the virus really spread more during overnight hours? Isn’t that when you would be least likely to catch it, since hardly anyone is out at that hour anyway? (Comic Flip Wilson once said midnight is the best time to be sneakin’ around, because if you meet anyone, they’re sneakin’, too.) Some say he’s trying to keep from harming businesses by shutting them down during daylight hours, but if the point is to stop the virus, isn’t it more likely to spread when people are out and conducting business than when 98% of them are home in bed anyway? Or is he just trying to keep vampires from catching it?

I think we can add this to “The virus doesn’t spread at BLM protests or Biden celebrations,” Andrew Cuomo’s shutting down only bars that don’t serve what he considers substantial lunch foods, and New York forcing nursing homes to take in COVID-19 patients when we eventually construct our Idiotic Coronavirus Responses Hall of Fame.

Dumber than rocks

November 21, 2020

If your kids attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you might be interested to hear what they plan to blow a big chunk of your tuition money on.

School officials want to remove a large black boulder from Observatory Hill after a black campus activist group and a campus newspaper declared it a racist rock (and no, “Racist Rock” is not an old ABC afterschool series.)

Its name since 1926 has been Chamberlin Rock, after geologist and then-campus president Thomas Crowder Chamberlin. But showing that at least someone there is studying history, the activists discovered that in the first half of the last century, such rock formations were sometimes called by the racist name, “'N-word'-heads.” And this rock was once referred to by that term, albeit in quotation marks, in a newspaper article…in 1925.

So of course, it has to be removed because black students might feel oppressed by it. The estimated cost is between $30,000 and $75,000, which would pay for a nice scholarship for a promising black student. But removing the rock that was referred to by a racist name one time 95 years ago is far more urgent.

The removal will require the okay of the Wisconsin Historical Society, which notes that the boulder is a “Pre-Cambrian era glacial erratic that is an iconic representation of Wisconsin glaciation period.” FYI: the Pre-Cambrian period stretched from 4.6 billion years ago to about 541 million years ago. That’s how long the rock had been sitting there minding its own business before anyone decided it was racist and had to go.

The most shocking part of this story isn’t that the school’s administrators are actually planning to blow $75,000 of desperately-needed school funds on removing a rock that’s been there since the dawn of time because someone called it by a racist term 95 years ago. The shocking part is that we pay these people to teach our kids when they are apparently dumber than a box of Pre-Cambrian rocks.

While the presidential race is spinning into surreal territory, the down ballot races are getting less attention, but they carry serious national implications as well. For instance, there was the “blue wave” that didn’t appear (Republicans were supposed to lose House seats, not retain and flip so many that they came close to retaking the majority, which AOC apparently thought they did.)

Another monumental story that’s been largely overlooked was the election results for state legislatures, where redistricting lines will be drawn that will shape the House for the next decade. Democrats were salivating over grabbing that power, but Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com points out that not only did Democrats not flip a single state legislative chamber, Republicans shocked them by flipping both the House and Senate in New Hampshire. Now Republicans have a huge advantage over redistricting. He wrote:

“Republicans are set to control the redistricting of 188 congressional seats — or 43 percent of the entire House of Representatives. By contrast, Democrats will control the redistricting of, at most, 73 seats, or 17 percent.”

Of course, legislators aren’t supposed to draw districts to their parties’ advantage, but it happens. That’s how we get Congressional districts that look like a chalk outline drawn around a dead centipede. When Republicans do it, it’s called “gerrymandering,” and when Democrats do it, it’s called “fairness.”

Can we pay AOC to stay home?

November 21, 2020

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declared that to stop the coronavirus, we need to pay people to stay home until the coronavirus goes away. Except that if everyone stays home and hides from it, then it will never play itself out, as all viruses eventually do (all we’ve done with these draconian lockdowns is delay the spread, not stop it), and we’ll be paying people to stay home and do nothing until there's either an effective vaccine that everyone will take or the economy collapses and the government is $100 trillion in debt.

Still, even though it’s a flawed plan, I will personally agree to pay AOC $25 a week to stay home instead of going to Congress. I’ll bet we could get that even higher with a GoFundMe page.

Texas still seeing red

November 21, 2020

Another big election story that didn’t pan out was “Texas turning blue.” At the link, “Beto” O’Rourke writes about what Democrats learned from this race and why Texans didn’t fall for what they were selling (my terminology.

As usual with liberals, he misses the point again and again. Whenever the left loses, it’s always because their “messaging” wasn’t effective enough. Having billions of dollars in both paid advertising and free friendly media to promote their economic and social policies just wasn’t enough to overcome the lies of the Republicans playing upon the fears of the poor, uneducated voters (quite a ringing endorsement for public schools, by the way.)

He cites as examples “lies” like “Biden will kill your oil and gas jobs” and “Biden will close down the economy” (two things Biden specifically said he would do, before looking at the polls and backtracking furiously.) He forgot, “Hell, yes,” the Democrats will take away your guns, which is what he famously said. I’m sure that played well in Texas.

He almost came close to getting it right when he said the national party had ignored Texas border districts and were shocked when Trump got such a high percentage of the vote there. But he misreads the reason. It’s not because the Democrats didn’t put in enough ads or outreach or canvassing. It’s because, as always, they assumed racial groups think monolithically, not as individuals. Latinos living along the border are on the front lines of suffering the negative effects of illegal immigration, including drugs and gang violence. Why would they vote for the “open borders/defund the police” party?

You’ve heard the saying, “When you ‘assume,’ you make an ‘ass’ of ‘u’ and ‘me’”? That was part of the Democrats’ problem in Texas. They assumed that all Latinos think alike and their votes belong to the Democrats by divine right. But in Texas, most Latinos are hard-working, God-fearing, law-abiding, church-going, patriotic, pro-family and pro-life. It’s not that they didn’t hear the Democrats’ message, they heard it loud and clear, found it terrifyingly radical, and rejected it. No amount of slick ads could put enough lipstick on the pig the Dems were trying to sell them.

And if you insist on putting people into categories, at least get the category right. Texas Latinos have their own proud heritage dating back to before Texas was a republic. It’s called Tejano, not Latino, and certainly not the annoying PC invention, “Latinx.” The Democrats’ leftist policies went over with them about as well as they did with Cubans in Florida.

One of my writers who lives in suburban Dallas provided a perfect example. He said the person he knows who is most adamantly opposed to illegal immigration is a lady who moved here with her husband from Mexico City. It infuriates her when illegal aliens come to them for jobs in their construction company, assuming she’ll hire them because she’s Mexican. She said she and her husband followed the laws, waited their turn, studied, took tests, paid fees and swore an oath to become Americans. She considers it an affront to her beloved adopted homeland for people to break its laws and demand the same rights they worked so hard to earn. What would the “one-size-fits-all” identity politics left make of her?

While it’s sadly true that the Democrats are making inroads in Texas, many Texans are seeing what allowing them to take over the big cities has led to and are recoiling in horror. Leftists have taken over Austin, and between the homelessness, trash, defunding the police and huge spike in violent crime, they’re turning the city’s motto from “Keep Austin Weird” to “Make Austin Unlivable.” The biggest problem Democrats have in selling their policies is not that their messaging isn’t effective enough; it’s that their policies are disastrous and anything they gain full control over, they destroy. Their biggest opponent isn't Republicans, it's reality.

“Beto” is right about one thing. He said: “People are smart. They smell a focus group-tested message, talking points derived from polls, a campaign driven by consultants, from a mile away.”

But their real problem is that there are also a lot of things about leftwing governance that people can smell from a mile away.

On Friday, we reported that Dominion Voting Systems had backed out of a scheduled meeting with Pennsylvania officials regarding the use of their equipment in the 2020 election and that they appeared to have lawyered-up. As this was a developing story, the plan was to provide a more detailed account on Saturday.

The story is developing more slowly than that.

New details are hard to come by right now. Here’s a local news blurb from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

It seems intended to offer a brief defense of Dominion for not showing up. “Dominion addresses [the software issue] and other questions on its website," it says, "disputing what it says are fraudulent claims. It says it is a nonpartisan, American company, its results are 100 percent auditable, and there were no glitches in its software.”

Well, that’s good enough for me! It’s right there on their website. So why should they bother to attend any hearings and answer any questions, even if they had agreed to do so?

Here’s what they post on their website as of November 17 –- “setting the record straight,” as they put it –- that it seems they’re reluctant to say face-to-face in a Zoom call with state officials questioning their claims.

Anyway, the Harrisburg story continues: “Multiple fact-checkers say there’s no evidence that Dominion Systems switched any votes from Trump to Biden.” Actually, some have gone farther than that, to say definitively that Dominion systems DID NOT switch any votes. But the conclusion that there was no vote-switching is still open to legitimate question. It would be more accurate to say something like, "If there is evidence, it has not been made public."

It is true, at least at this point, that we have NOT seen conclusive evidence that this happened, only statistical anomalies suggestive of it. (Also, note that the specific wording in the Harrisburg story still allows that someone else besides Dominion might have done it.) Let me make it very clear, I am making no accusations about the voting machines or the software or what anyone did; I’m just saying that it’s something that should be looked into, like just about everything else surrounding this chaotic election. The lack of curiosity in the media about these issues and the desire to shut down all questions is amazing.

"The federal agency that oversees election security says the election was secure,” the story also says. Ah, well, I guess that’s that. But this statement conveniently glosses over the problems with that agency’s conclusion.

The agency is CISA, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which was headed by Christopher Krebs until President Trump unceremoniously (as in, by tweet) fired him, after CISA issued a statement saying this election was “the most secure in American history.” As you saw if you visited the Dominion website, the outrageous assertion that got Krebs in hot water is the very one quoted there.

The FEDERAL NEWS NETWORK says “CISA works with the state and local officials who run U.S. elections as well as private companies who supply voting equipment to address cybersecurity and other threats while monitoring balloting and tabulation from a control room at its headquarters near Washington.” What it doesn’t say is that two of those private companies happen to BE Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic. And at the time CISA issued their statement, this information was not disclosed.

Again, we haven’t seen evidence that Dominion machines and/or the election software were used to commit voter fraud. It’s also true that we’re not legally entitled to see such evidence before it’s presented in court, so we can’t conclude it doesn’t exist. That applies to the fact-checkers as well; just because they haven’t seen it doesn’t mean there isn’t any. And we sure can’t count on the media to uncover it and show it to us. So right now, we can’t do much more than wait while the attorneys assemble their case.

A sharp political divide

November 21, 2020

There’s seldom been a sharper divide in America over the views of an election. Trump’s people claim he really won in a landslide and was cheated by massive vote fraud. The Democrats and the media brush that off as crazy, unfounded conspiracy talk and irresponsible, un-American rhetoric that undermines faith in a free and fair election.

I’m deliberately not taking a side on issues that I don’t know the truth about. I made my view clear early on, and caught flak for it, in calling on Joe Biden and the Democrats to simply agree to work in a bipartisan fashion to audit the vote to reassure voters that they could trust the results. If there was nothing amiss, then they should be eager to prove it, dispel the suspicions and move on.

Instead, the accusations have devolved lower every day (“You’re crazy!”/”You’re a thief!”), and a new poll shows how corrosive this has already been. A recent Rasmussen survey found that 59% of Americans think mail-in ballots will lead to more voter fraud (that’s 86% of Republicans and even 36% of Democrats.) Now, a new Rasmussen survey of likely voters finds that 61% think Trump should concede to Biden. That includes 84% of Democrats, 59% of Independents and 37% of Republicans.

But here’s the weird part: even though 61% think Trump should concede, 47% think it’s likely Democrats stole votes or destroyed Trump ballots to win, while 50% disagree. That means that not only do nearly half of voters not trust the election results, but as many as 14% apparently believe or suspect the election was stolen, but Trump should concede anyway.

Democrats are rushing to blame this apparent loss of faith in elections on Trump refusing to concede and making wild accusations of fraud and conspiracy. But they’re conveniently overlooking their own part in preparing the ground by spending four years making wild, unsubstantiated claims that the 2016 election was rigged by Russia and that Trump is an “illegitimate” President. They even made a party leader and celebrity out of Stacy Abrams, who has yet to concede her loss in Georgia in 2018. She’s currently leading their drive to win Georgia’s two Senate seats, even as prominent Democrats openly call for liberals to move temporarily to Georgia and commit voter fraud by voting in the runoff.

It’s not healthy for this nation to have so many people start to believe – whether that belief is accurate or not – that they can’t trust our election process. It’s like ignoring a crack in your home’s foundation. Restoring their trust is going to take both parties working to pass bipartisan reform to make our elections more secure. One top priority should be an end to the push to simply mail ballots to every name on unvetted, out-of-date voter lists, which even 39% of Democrats see as an open door to vote fraud. That’s how we treat junk mail, and ballots are not junk.

Unfortunately, as Arizona Rep. Debbie Lesko points out, the House is already poised to do the exact opposite if the Democrats win the Senate. They will ram through HR 1, a bill that federalizes election laws to remove most safeguards, including banning voter ID laws and legalizing ballot harvesting. This is why it’s so vital that the Republicans win those Georgia seats so the Senate can put the brakes on incredibly irresponsible bills like these.

Now is the time to tighten election security and reassure Americans that the system works, not undermine their trust even more. Anyone who would fight even the most basic, common sense laws to insure that every vote is secure and legal is signaling a lack of concern for the disenfranchisement of legal voters and prioritizing the pursuit of their own power over the good of the nation.

The most striking thing about Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani’s press conference on Thursday is the immediate dismissal it got from most of the media.

Look at what they were alleging: wholesale election fraud, stealing a presidential election right under our noses in the world’s great democratic superpower, reducing the “shining beacon on a hill” to a mere penlight. There has been nothing like this in the history of our country. The media can’t risk looking at it; they instinctively know that, like looking straight at the sun, it would cause them permanent injury.

But if this is true, it explains a lot of very strange anomalies we’ve seen in the vote.

https://nationalfile.com/election-fraud-expert-michigans-election-results-are-physical-impossibility/

Russell Ramsland, co-owner of Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG), which specializes in election fraud detection, has looked at the Michigan vote and claims it’s a “physical impossibility.” According to a story in NationalFile.com, Ramsland served in the Reagan administration and has worked for both MIT and NASA. His must be one of the thousands of sworn affidavits Giuliani was referring to on Thursday. Ramsland swore he had determined --- no question --- that vote tampering took place in Michigan and that given "significant anomalies and red flags," the results could not possibly have happened otherwise.

He addressed the vulnerabilities of Dominion Voting Systems, saying that experts had already known about these and written about them extensively. He called the system logs essentially “unprotected,” meaning that any alterations to the tabulations would be undetectable. He said anyone with an elementary knowledge of computer systems could “arbitrarily add, modify or remove log entries, causing a log event to take place."

His colleague, Dr. Andrew Appel, described how a hack could easily be accomplished: creating a memory stick and then “7 minutes alone with [the machine] and a screwdriver.”

Here's one red flag: “There are a stunning 3,276 precincts where the presidential votes cast compared to the estimated voters...ranges from 84 percent to 350 percent...[revealing] 431,954 excess ballots.” This is one of the problems Giuliani was talking about. At least 19 townships/precincts have more votes than registered voters, some WAY more.

The biggest red flag is those “spikes” that Giuliani also mentioned. The spikes are “strongly indicative of a manual adjustment, either by the operator of the system...or by outside actors.” This is what convinced Ramsland that a crime did occur. “In the data are 4 spikes totaling 384,733 ballots allegedly processed in a combined interval of only 2 hours and 38 minutes. This is physically impossible given the available equipment at the 4 reference locations.”

However, other computer security experts have disputed Ramsland’s qualifications as an election systems expert and say he’s promoted vote fraud claims before without producing evidence. He has also claimed that vote tallies were uploaded to a database outside the US controlled by a company called Scytl. Both Scytl and Dominion denied that, with Dominion saying it would be illegal under US election law for Scytl to control votes cast and tabulated in the US.

Ramsland also allegedly made an error in an affidavit filed by Lin Wood in his Georgia case, confusing some districts in Minnesota for Michigan districts.

https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2020/11/do-trumps-lawyers-know-what-they-are-doing.php

These kinds of mistakes, disputes and conflicts can’t be in a legal filing when you’re asking a court or legislature to throw out thousands of votes. Just because something COULD have happened, or seemed to happen doesn’t, in itself, prove that it DID change the outcome of the election. Anecdotal or statistical anomalies aren’t enough; you need solid evidence.  Besides, how do you prove alterations were made by the thousands, perhaps millions, if the experts say they’re “undetectable”? The thought of making such a case, especially to people whose natural reactions range from dismissive to hostile to murderous, is daunting. Powell and her team have just a few days to build their case and have it heard, and it will have to be ironclad to get anyone to hear it.

Alan Dershowitz thinks the effort might be worth it in Pennsylvania.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/alan-dershowitz-says-trump-has-chance-prevail-constitutional-legal

That’s why Tucker Carlson’s remarks about Powell not coming on his show Thursday evening might have been misplaced.

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/tucker-carlson-rudy-giuliani-sidney-powell-election-fraud

He understandably wants to see the proof, we ALL NEED to see the proof, but the clock is ticking and she’s got work to do. Tucker said he would’ve given her the whole hour, even the whole week, but I’m thinking maybe she doesn’t have that kind of time. Just because she doesn’t show her hand doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a good one and is saving it for court. Keeping it close to the vest is likely her strategy.

Giuliani did go on HANNITY Thursday night for one segment, talking about coordination among ten Democrat-controlled cities. If that’s the case they’re planning to make in the next week or two, they’ve got their work cut out for them. That does sound like conspiracy theory if you don't have hard evidence. But John Solomon claims to have some, from prominent mathematician Steven Miller.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/mathematics-prof-says-sworn-statement-many-56000-gop-ballots-pa-may-be

Those in media who reflexively say there’s “no evidence” need to look at some of that. (Force yourselves.) But for now, what we have is bits and pieces in multiple states, so we might feel like the blind men trying to describe an elephant.

The point is, we need to give Powell and her team a few precious days. Lack of time is the main challenge that legal expert Jonathan Turley says they have. What’s really critical is not what Powell says tonight on TV but the case she presents in a courtroom, before a judge --- or, it's hoped, a panel of justices.

If it turns out she was just blowing smoke –- which would be highly out of character for her –- THEN she deserves criticism from all sides. Goodness, her career and reputation will be ruined if she’s doing that, and she knows it.

Powell, Giuliani and their team are already enduring vicious criticism and threats of violence from Trump’s wacko adversaries. It got so bad for one Trump attorney in Philadelphia that she was placed under protection and allowed by the judge to withdraw from the case.

https://www.theepochtimes.com/lawyer-representing-trump-in-pennsylvania-placed-under-protection-after-threats-of-harm_3585988.html

Linda Kerns wrote on November 16 that she'd “been subjected to continuous harassment in the form of abusive emails, phone calls, physical and economic threats, and even accusations of treason --- all for representing the President of the United States’ campaign in this litigation.”

As we've reported, the anti-Trump group The Lincoln Project, which has hundreds of thousands of social media followers, has suggested that people target Trump attorneys, and to my knowledge neither Joe “the unifier” Biden nor any other Democrat leaders have denounced them. They bullied the law firm Porter, Wright, Morris & Arthur into withdrawing from the Philly case. Kerns is the attorney who took over the case, and now SHE has withdrawn as well. This is an attempt to deprive Trump of legal representation.  It's also mob rule.

So let’s give Trump’s legal team some space while they put their case together, as is their right. They’ve got enough to deal with and an almost superhuman deadline. But when it's completed, it will have to be built as solid as a tank if they expect it to go anywhere.

Not going away

November 19, 2020

Our elite classes in government and media seem to believe that if they can only vanquish Trump, they will reign triumphant once again and cement themselves into power forevermore. First of all, even if he loses, Trump's not going away. Second, they have never seemed to grasp that Trump wasn’t the cause of their rejection by the public, he was a symptom of it. He even told Biden in the debates that if he and Obama hadn’t done such a terrible job, there’s no way he ever would have been elected President, and that’s probably true.

In this Twitter thread, Richard Fernandez tries once again to tell them that the people’s loss of faith in their leaders’ competence dated back well before the 2016 election. This isn’t news to me, since I wrote an entire book about how out of touch with America our coastal and DC elites were before Trump even entered politics:

Fernandez warns that more woke virtual signaling at the “deplorables” is not going to convince anyone that our self-proclaimed elites are competent again (based on Biden’s vow to reverse every Trump policy that led to a booming economy, record job creation, energy independence, cheap gas and peace in the Middle East, I think competence is the last thing a Biden Administration would be known for.)

Mark Judge at The Stream has a great suggestion for journalists: get a menial job. Take a few months to go work in a restaurant, hardware store, coal mine, factory, construction site, nursing home or anyplace where working class Americans put in a hard day, sweating for their paychecks.

Maybe if journalists actually meet some of the “flyover” people they constantly talk down to, they’ll learn a few things about them. Like that they’re not racists, they’re not obsessed with politics, and they love America and think it’s working just fine. They want to keep the money they earn instead of giving it to politicians in taxes to redistribute to their pet projects and people who won’t work. They hate bullies who try to tell them what they’re allowed to say and think, and they don’t want to be lectured about ridiculous things that defy common sense, like that a man can become a woman or that illegal immigration is not a problem. I would add that they’d also learn that working class people are not stupid or “low-information voters;” in fact, they are in many ways smarter and far more accomplished than most of the desk jockeys with useless college degrees who mock them.

Also, they might learn the most devastating realization of all: that many Americans view the elite journalist class as a bunch of over-privileged narcissists and “whiny, entitled, half-educated mediocrities.”

Some New York Sheriffs announced that they will not enforce Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on family Thanksgiving dinners. They say it’s unconstitutional and wouldn’t stand up in court anyway. One said he doesn’t see how it’s in the public good to devote police resources to counting cars in people’s driveways and investigating how much turkey and dressing they bought. Personally, if I were ordered to be on the lookout for big turkeys, I’d head straight to the Governor’s Mansion.

And in a somewhat related story, the Washington Free Beacon reports that 644 New Yorkers have died of COVID-19 since the day Gov. Cuomo released his self-congratulatory book about how brilliantly he'd handled the crisis.

Overall, New York's latest COVID-19 death toll stands at 33,540, over twice as many as second-place Texas, which has nearly 10 million more people. Incidentally, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also wrote a book, "Broken But Unbowed," but it's about both his battle to overcome an accident that left him paralyzed and restoring American greatness by bringing the government back to obeying the Constitution.

I think I'm starting to see why so many people are moving out of New York to go to Texas.

Snopes.com does it again

November 19, 2020

This week, I discovered that the “fact-checking” site Snopes.com had done a piece on my Open Letter to Joe Biden. As usual with these pieces, it was filled with arguable leftwing talking points presented as indisputable facts, while it misrepresented what I wrote. But on the whole, it didn’t really attack my piece too much, because frankly, I don’t think there was anything to attack in it on a factual basis, and I stand by it. Their purported reason for running it was to verify that I actually did write it, since people were posting it on social media without links to the original site in my newsletter.

Here’s a piece of their introduction, with my corrections in parentheses, to show you how “objective” these so-called “fact-checkers” are:

“In the aftermath of the Nov. 3, 2020 U.S. election and Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s projected victory (only by the media, which has no authority to declare a winner), defeated incumbent U.S. President Donald Trump (the election has not been settled so calling Trump a “defeated incumbent” is inaccurate), along with some of his allies and his supporters, promoted unfounded and often easily-debunked allegations and conspiracy theories about electoral fraud playing a telling role in the outcome of the election (while some stories have proved incorrect, there are many such claims which have yet to be “debunked” or proven as “conspiracy theories,” and the jury is still out on whether there was sufficient fraud to have affected the election outcome), which they disputed more than a week after Biden was declared the winner (Biden has not been declared the winner, the stories began appearing as soon as the next day after the election, and Trump declared that he had actually won – also a disputed claim – on Thursday after the election, which is two days, not more than a week.)

Would you like me to drop by Snopes HQ and explain to your “fact-checkers” what a fact is?

Snopes also claimed that my letter included several “dubious,” later debunked claims of suspicious vote activity that I haven't changed. I made it clear there and in subsequent writings that I only report that these claims are being made, I don’t endorse their veracity. I’m not a leftist, so I’m not going to go back and rewrite old news stories. Besides, those claims have already been supplanted by countless others. But whether they eventually prove true or not, the salient “fact” to my article was that they did exist and need to be addressed because they affect the public's attitude toward their government.

The point of the letter was obviously not to endorse every claim of vote chicanery but to appeal to Biden (and by extension, his fellow Democrats) to join in calling for a full and transparent investigation to assure Americans that the vote was honest. Did they not just put us through a two-year, $40 million investigation of their claims of Russian collusion with the 2016 Trump campaign in the last election? And now we know for sure: there wasn’t any. I warned Biden in good faith that even if he prevailed, he would suffer the taint of suspicion by millions of Americans, just as Trump did, if the Democrats refuse to cooperate and keep putting up stonewalls and telling suspicious voters that they’re crazy and to shut up. That’s not good for him, and it’s not good for America as a whole.

There are certain things you learn from a decades-long career in politics that maybe a twentysomething Internet “fact-checker” doesn’t know. One is that once a politician loses the public trust, it’s very hard to win it back. Unlike Google, political leaders don’t have a monopoly. They can’t violate the public trust and sail blithely on, assuming there’s nobody else people can turn to.

And even if you have Google, most of the news media and all of social media on your side to censor any criticism or suspicion of you, you still can’t stop people from thinking it. Not even the most repressive communist regimes, where the government and military terrified people into voicing fake love for Dear Leader, could manage that.

Conservative humorist P.J. O’Rourke used to visit countries behind the Iron Curtain, and he wrote that the first thing oppressed people did when they discovered he was an American was to take him aside privately and tell him the latest jokes about what a corrupt, incompetent bunch of clowns their government masters were. If that’s what you want, then keep telling people they’re not allowed to question their leaders or voice their suspicions of wrongdoing by them

I’ll leave you with one more quote from Snopes that’s actually accurate:

“The main point of the letter appeared to be to ask Biden to ‘put partisanship and political ambition aside and join President Trump in demanding an impartial investigation into the very disturbing allegations of voter irregularities and fraud in Tuesday’s election.’”

Well, they got me there! I actually did call on a politician to put partisanship aside and work across the aisle to reassure voters that the election was honest. The HORROR!!!

Last week, Georgia attorney Lin Wood, who represented Richard Jewell and Nicholas Sandmann, was “100 percent” confident that Joe Biden would not become President. This week, to express how certain he is relative to last week, he says he’s “105 percent.”

Wood spent all day Sunday with Trump attorney Sidney Powell, assisting in an unofficial capacity, and said Monday in a NEWSMAX interview with Howie Carr that Powell and Rudy Giuliani really do have the “smoking guns” (plural) that show Trump won re-election. As we’ve reported, Powell has said her team will release evidence that overturns the results in multiple states because of software used by Dominion Voting Systems that switched “millions of votes.” Wood is convinced.

He said that “when you boil it down, it simply amounts to the fact that the United States of America was relying on voting machines that were subject to manipulation.”

This is a separate issue from the lawsuit Wood filed against the secretary of state in Georgia; that one has to do with the counting of mail-in ballots.

"I’ve seen sworn affidavits, I’ve seen sworn video statements,” he said. “I think that Rudy and Sidney have done a magnificent job in a short period of time of piecing together a solid legal case on what was intended to be a complicated scheme of fraud as it relates to the voting machines.”

Of course, this needs to happen very quickly, but Wood is confident that it will. “Things are going to be rapidly developing over the course of the next few days,” he said, because the evidence of the computer voting fraud is mounting daily.”

Like me, he sounds very old-school about what we need to do in future elections: “We might want to go back to the days where we fill in a hand ballot, sign it, and let people count it, ‘cause when you open the door to these types of computers, you’re opening the door for people to manipulate, hack, and to defraud people, and that’s exactly what was done here.”

"There’s no doubt in my mind about it,” he said, describing a process that spans several countries and tracks “ultimately to the software company SGO Smartmatic, whose software went into a number of voting machines, almost exclusively used in the Dominion machine. The information was then processed through Scytl –-that’s where the manipulations occurred in the software that [were] reported out to a company called Clarity. Clarity was reporting out real-time numbers for people watching it on TV.” He explained this is why viewers might have seen the Republican side go down 560 votes and the Democrat up 560. “It was pure and simple computer manipulation of the voting totals,” he said.

Wood's own lawsuit in Georgia claims the vote there is “null and void” because the secretary of state “changed the substantive rules of the election.” (I would add that this is what the Pennsylvania governor and state supreme court also did.) That would mean the Georgia legislature needs to meet and select its electors as required under the 12th Amendment and direct them on how to cast their votes. Wood believes the President will be elected through the Electoral College, “but it’ll be based on state legislators determining the will of the state.”

"The rest of the Georgia election has got to be thrown out,” he said, calling for a re-vote on all the down-ballot races. “Everything was infected by the computer and the absentee ballot fraud."

They need to “get busy” to make that happen in January, he said. They can do it then instead of having a run-off, he suggested, because the run-off is now illegitimate, the product of an illegitimate general election.

Wood can speak only for Georgia, but he thought there would have to be “some determination by the state legislatures” as to how much confidence they have in their election results. They might choose to certify, or else they’ll have to do a re-vote like Georgia.

"It’s gonna take some time,” he said, “but the time will be well spent. Because I don’t believe any objective, fair-minded citizen wants to be represented by individuals who are elected based on fraud by buying an election. They want people to be elected by their legitimate, valid votes. If it takes a little time, it takes a little time.”

We can go ahead and deal with the presidency in the Electoral College on December 14, he said; that’s what the Constitution mandates and gives us the mechanism for in the 12th Amendment. When Carr mentioned the potential problem of Republican state legislators not wanting to interfere with the election returns (perhaps even if there is fraud), Wood said he hadn't heard their specific concerns and couldn’t really comment, but he added that they "have a duty under their oath of office to uphold the laws of the state, and I’m sure the laws of the United States. And if they’re aware of a fraudulent election, they have a legal, and moral, and ethical obligation to act on it. You cannot ignore fraud.”

Wood thinks most of the down-ballot vote was legitimate; “they were concentrating on key senate races,” he said, “and...on the presidency. That’s where they put in the computer algorithms, and that’s certainly where they went in late at night, created any number of hundreds of thousands of paper ballots --- many of which, in some key jurisdictions, were only votes for Biden.”

He mentioned another unusual thing about “an extremely large number” of the paper ballots –- all the circles made to mark votes were perfect.

"This election is so fraught with fraud that anybody, no matter whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, you ought to stand up and say we’re not gonna tolerate it.” In America, he said, “we have the right to vote, we have the right to have our vote count, and we do not have to tolerate people manipulating and putting in a fraudulent election simply because of their agenda. And that’s what happened here.”

He went on to point fingers and noted that it’s not the first time this has happened. The video of the full interview is here.

Incidentally, we found something quite interesting about Smartmatic; it appears there might be a connection between that company and Kamala Harris's spouse. We'll explore this further. In the meantime, have a look.

Now is the time for the President's lawyers to produce this evidence for the American people, otherwise they sound no better than Congressman Schiff and Congressman Nadler when they promised a Russian - Trump campaign conspiracy around every corner.

A FELONY

A reminder to all the Californians and other out-of-staters who are talking about moving to Georgia temporarily, just so they can vote in the runoff and steal the two crucial Senate seats for the Democrats: it’s illegal. Claiming you’re becoming a resident of Georgia just to vote in an election when you’re only there temporarily is a felony punishable by a $100,000 fine and up to 10 years in state prison. So either way, you’d better be planning to stay a while in Georgia.

DEPLATFORMED

The web hosting site WordPress/Automaticc seems to be looking with envy at Facebook and Twitter. It just deplatformed the popular blog The Conservative Treehouse, ordering them to find another host.

When pressed for a reason, WordPress/Automaticc issued a vague statement saying that TCT had consistently violated their terms of service on prohibited ads and calls to violence. The site’s creators reply that in 10 years, they have never been told they were violating any terms of service and have never advocated violence. They say they will move to a new platform.

I would say that if I had a lot of money, this would be a great time to launch a new webhosting platform, social media site or women’s magazine that didn’t think of itself as a leftist propaganda organ first and a for-profit business second.

WAGE GROWTH

Along with cheap gas, standing up to China and peace in the Middle East, here’s something else you’ll never see again if Biden gets into the White House: wage growth.

A study by the Foundation for Economic Education found that despite the left’s claims of stagnant wages and the economy leaving the working class behind, wages soared under Trump. From 2002 to 2015, there was no growth in wages, adjusted for inflation. But between 2016 and 2019, real median income grew by nearly $6,000 to $68,703 a year. In 2018 alone, the median household income rose by $4400, more than in the previous 20 years combined. By comparison, “in 2016, real median household income was $62,898, just $257 above its level in 1999.”

The two major factors fueling this explosive wage growth were Trump’s deregulation push and the corporate tax cut, two things Biden has vowed to reverse immediately.

But I’m sure he won’t send any mean tweets, so it’ll be worth it, right?...

WAPO: ABOLISH THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE

The editors of the Washington Post think it’s time to get rid of the Electoral College because too many people in non-urbanized states still have a say over who their leaders are going to be, and that should only be decided by people like the editors of WaPo and the swells they attend cocktail parties with. I paraphrase, but that’s the gist.

THE MEDIA WILL IGNORE THIS

News That Absolutely Nobody in Government or the Media Will Pay Attention To: Even as some officials are ordering new lockdowns and canceling Thanksgiving and Christmas, the New England Journal of Medicine published a joint study of the spread of COVID-19 by Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Naval Medical Research Center. It involved 1,843 young, healthy Marine volunteers and took place on a Marine campus tightly controlled by the military.

The recruits were tested and put through a 14-day quarantine to insure they were not infected at the start. They were then put through rigorously-enforced prevention measures, including wearing double-cloth masks at all times except when sleeping and eating, washing their hands, maintaining 6 feet of distance, using bathrooms and dining facilities regularly sanitized with bleach, avoiding personal electronics and other items prone to surface virus transmission, taking classes and exercise outdoors, undergoing daily temperature checks and more. Their instructors were also restricted to campus and put under similar precautions.

Result: Despite all those precautions, after two weeks, there were 51 infections among the 1,843 recruits, a 2.8% infection rate. Interestingly, there were fewer infections among a control group that didn’t follow all the strict measures (26 out of 1554, or a 1.7% infection rate.) It’s speculated that overuse of masks in the first group increased infections because of recruits touching them more and viruses growing in masks that are worn too long.

The full report can be accessed via this link, but because it’s pretty dry science reading, I’m linking to a summary of it by historian and science blogger Robert Zimmerman.

Aside from providing scientific evidence that the virus, like all viruses, is going to spread no matter what we do, the study also notes that almost all the infected recruits were asymptomatic and wouldn’t have known they had it if they hadn’t been tested constantly. Again showing that the disease is not a death sentence for younger, healthy people, who are still being forced to follow all the economy-, job- and freedom-destroying mandates that this study suggests are pointless and might even make matters worse.

A PERFECT RESPONSE

The Rev. Franklin Graham had a perfect response to Jake Tapper’s claim that “Christmas is not gonna be possible this year” because of the coronavirus.

I don’t really expect a lot of people in the media these days to understand Christians or Christianity, but did they not at least learn as kids from the Grinch TV special that Christmas is not something that comes from a store, Christmas means a (whole lot) more?

CNN FOR SALE?

I mentioned recently the rumors about CNN possibly coming up for sale if they don’t have Donald Trump to badmouth 24/7. Here’s some more background on that possibility, including that their parent company has $150 billion in debt and needs to cut costs and unload losing businesses. My suggestion is that Trump buy it in a clearance sale and rename it “Trump TV.”

PROPHETIC

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to be under the impression that the Democrats lost their majority in the House.

Unlike some conservatives, I’m not going to make fun of her. I’ll just congratulate her on her ability to see two years into the future.

A NEW "SQUAD"

We have far too many people in America today, and even in government, who have been miseducated into believing in socialism. Fortunately, we’ll have some new Republican House members in January forming their own “Squad” of immigrants and children of immigrants from socialist nations who know only too well how toxic it is.

One of them is Victoria Spartz, who grew up in Soviet-dominated Ukraine and who was just elected in Indiana’s 5th District. Here’s a great interview she gave Monday to Fox & Friends, expressing her concerns about the rising embrace of socialism in America by people who don’t understand what it really is and what it leads to. As she ominously put it, “I was born in a country that doesn’t exist anymore, for good reason.”

HUCK'S HERO

We could all use a non-political Huck’s Hero story right now, to give us some inspiration. So how about a big salute to Chris Nikic?

Born with Down syndrome, he had to undergo painful operations, and was once too weak to swim a single lap. But with determination and his dad helping train him to pursue his dreams, Chris just entered the Guinness Book of World Records. He’s the first person with Down syndrome ever to finish the Ironman Triathlon. He swam 2.4 miles, cycled 112 miles and ran just over 26 miles in 16 hours, 46 minutes and 9 seconds. Learn more about this extraordinary young man at the link.

To everyone who has been suspicious of Pfizer’s delay in announcing their new vaccine –- waiting until six days after the election although they reportedly knew in October –- and even telling Biden’s people about it first, here’s some information about a Biden-Pfizer connection that might go a long way towards explaining that.

It’s in a report about a “charity” –- I’m very sorry to have to use the quotes around that word, but I think I do –- called the Biden Cancer Initiative, which, incidentally, gave out ZERO grants and spent ZERO money on cancer research.

(By the way, the DAILY CALLER story I linked to above falsely refers to Biden as “President-elect,” while the NEWSMAX story correctly does not. Just giving credit where credit is due, and that would be to NEWSMAX.)

In the NEW YORK POST’s report on this same story, there’s a lovely two-shot at the top of the page, showing Joe Biden on the right and a man named Greg Simon on the left. It’s from 2016, and at that time, Simon was the executive in charge of Obama’s “Cancer Moonshot Task Force.” That was shortly before this healthcare lobbyist went to work for the Biden organization, where he did very well for himself. Simon was paid $429,850 in fiscal 2018, and that was almost twice what he made the first year of their operation for fiscal 2017. The Biden Cancer Initiative spent most of its donations on salaries and, let me stress, gave out NO research grants.

When asked about this, Simon defended it, saying the main point of the charity was not to give out grants (!) --- that its goal was to find ways to accelerate treatment for all, regardless of their economic or cultural backgrounds. Oh, I see, he’s saying its goal centered around identity politics and “access” to treatment, not fighting cancer per se.

Simon might want to look at the stated goals of the organization, which are to “develop and drive implementation of solutions to implement progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care, and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes.” That last thing, “reduce disparities in cancer outcomes,” refers to the more identity-politics aspect, but what about the “research” and all those other goals? Are they just there to implement the implementation? I’ll bet people who donated to the Biden Cancer Initiative thought their money was going to fund research grants.

Anyway, here’s how this possibly ties into Pfizer choosing to delay its announcement until after the election: Greg Simon is a former top executive for...drum roll, please...Pfizer Inc.

Pfizer took federal money to be part of President Trump’s “Operation Warp Speed” and create a vaccine as soon as humanly possible, and then when it said it had one, initially even denied it was part of that project. Later, this had to be corrected.

Incidentally, NEWSMAX pointed out that Joe Biden’s tweet congratulating “the brilliant women and men who produced this breakthrough” and “the frontline workers who are still confronting the virus around the clock” failed to give any credit whatsoever to President Trump. The goal is no doubt to have President Trump written out of the narrative entirely. I apologize if it turns out that Biden has thanked the President elsewhere, but if he has, I haven’t seen it.

But back to the main point. Now, I hesitate to criticize something called the “Biden Cancer Initiative,” especially since it reportedly was inspired by the death of Joe Biden’s son Beau from brain cancer and because it has also been reported that Simon himself is a cancer survivor.

But one doesn't have to look very far to see how political Biden’s “charity” was. Millions taken in, millions paid out in salaries and travel expenses, with absolutely no money given out in grants. The man in charge, a “longtime healthcare lobbyist” as described in the NEW YORK POST, making close to half a million dollars in one fiscal year.

Greg Simon goes way back with the Democrat Party. He was chief domestic policy adviser to Al Gore from 1993 to 1997. A blurb from Wikipedia describes him as “an American political aide who supported Joe Biden and Al Gore. His private sector work is concentrated in the pharmaceutical, biotechnology and telecommunications sectors.” He was on the Obama-Biden transition team and then joined Pfizer as a senior vice president in charge of policy and patient advocacy.

When we looked him up on Wikipedia, we saw to our great interest that his page had last been edited on November 15, 2020 (just the night before). That in itself doesn’t tell us anything, but it does make us wonder what might have been changed.

According to Techonomy.com, Simon was also the lead staffer for the Clinton-Gore administration for the development and passage of the Telecommunications Reform Act of 1996 as well as development of the National and Global Information Infrastructure. (Hey, maybe he helped Al Gore invent the internet!) Before joining Pfizer, he represented Gore on the National Economic Council, helped negotiate the U.S.-Russia agreement on the International Space Station, and oversaw a number of key programs etc. etc.

Would it surprise ANYONE that in the weeks leading up to the Trump-Biden election, a company that had just developed a vaccine effective against COVID -19 –- with money from President Trump’s initiative –- might have delayed announcing it until six days after the election? Especially if someone very tightly connected with this company was a highly political supporter of the Democrat Party and, specifically, Biden for President?

Anyone at all?

As we reported yesterday, the CEO of competing pharmaceutical company Moderna, which has just announced a vaccine of its own that's proven in stage-3 trials to be 94.5 percent effective (Pfizer’s was 90 percent), specifically thanked Operation Warp Speed.

I can’t help but wonder if the announcement of a vaccine BEFORE the election might have garnered Trump some thankful votes, for the fulfillment of a major promise. (That’s Trump: “Promises made...promises kept!”) I certainly get the impression that some associated with Pfizer assumed it might.

We’ll never know, but recall the recent survey that said 36 percent of Biden voters didn’t know about his and Hunter’s business dealings with China before the election, and if they had, 13 percent of them (4.6 percent of Biden’s total) said they wouldn’t have voted for him. That's enough to change the outcome.

This is why the media try so hard to control the narrative, and why we have to do everything possible to stop them.

Question: Since when is Biden the President?

Trump has not conceded, and with the serious legal challenges to the highly suspicious vote in Philadelphia and Detroit –- to name just two cities –- and the questions surrounding the voting software used in those cities, plus the odd counting shutdown on election night, we don’t even know that Biden will be President-ELECT, regardless of what the media (and Biden) assume.

It may take weeks, perhaps even a decision by the Supreme Court about late ballots in Pennsylvania, if they’ll hear it.

Electors don’t meet until December 14. After listening to Democrats call Trump “illegitimate” for four years, with no evidence ever found of Russian “collusion,” he’s right to take steps to ensure the 2020 vote was on the up-and-up.

Also, recall that Biden pledged not to claim victory until the vote was certified.

Still, Sean Davis of THE FEDERALIST tweeted Sunday: “A source familiar with Durham’s ongoing investigation of the bogus Russian collusion operation tells [THE FEDERALIST]: Durham isn’t doing anything. Dropping his investigations. He’s worried about blowback from Biden. What an absolute disgrace.”

And it is indeed a disgrace, if it’s true. We all assumed that if Biden became President, the various investigations into how the FBI and others in the Obama administration lied and violated people’s rights to tie Trump with Russia would be shut down. Because, of course they would be.

But as of now, the vote count isn’t even certified and Biden has not been officially declared the winner –- let alone inaugurated. Durham is already “worried about blowback”? No matter what happens, Trump is still the President (sorry, Facebook!) until January 20.

If Davis’ source is correct, Durham might also want to think about the “blowback” if it turns out that Trump wins a second term. It could still happen.

As Victoria Taft reports for PJ MEDIA, even the NEW YORK TIMES a month ago reported that “Spygate” had fizzled. Her attitude about this development very much mirrors mine.

I just don’t know what’s going to happen on the right if this turns out to be true and no one is held accountable. For a long time, we assumed Durham would be the one to get to the bottom of Crossfire Hurricane. We’ve been reporting on the "Russia" travesty for Trump’s entire time in office. With so much evidence, how could it turn out otherwise?

But then time passed...and passed. We finally realized that nothing would be released before the election. (Gosh, we wouldn’t want to “politicize” the investigation by giving voters the truth, would we?) Still, we thought Durham was close to wrapping things up and would issue indictments, or at least a report, soon. Comey, McCabe, Brennan and others might actually pay a price for weaponizing the FBI and CIA against Trump.

Importantly, Davis said Durham has enough evidence to file charges but has apparently just been sitting on it. He also tweeted this: “A separate source who has seen the evidence compiled during the course of Durham’s investigation told [THE FEDERALIST] this afternoon that ‘there’s more than enough evidence to indict multiple’ involved in the Russian collusion hoax operation to take down Trump.”

Right now, it appears the swamp has won. “A possible Joe Biden administration is just a green light to return to the way things always were,” writes Bonchie at RedState.com. “It’s one of the worst aspects of Trump losing this election, if he does indeed lose it after the electors vote in December.”

To make it even more perplexing, we’re seeing this at the same time Trump attorney Sidney Powell is insisting that they’re “getting ready to overturn election results in multiple states.” She said this quite confidently on SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES, to host Maria Bartiromo.

Most of what Powell said involved Dominion Voting Systems, makers of the voting machines used in Philadelphia, Detroit, and other at-issue cities, and the software from Smartmatic. If she’s correct –- and she has a reputation for saying things she can prove –- it’s simple to change the tally. “We’ve identified mathematically the exact algorithm they’ve used,” she said, “and planned to use from the beginning.”

"They can stick a thumb drive in the machine, they can upload software into it even from the internet...from Germany or Venezuela even,” she said. Operators, “can watch votes in real time” and “can shift votes in real time,” or alleged bad actors can “remote-access anything.”

We’ve previously reported on Dominion Voting Systems, their fishy background, and problems with security that are built right in. Texas found numerous problems with them and turned them down for elections in their state --- three times.

The voting pattern for the country is extremely strange. How would the House flip 11 seats from Democrat to Republican and be positioned to keep the Senate when Trump seemingly lagged? Also, did Biden REALLY receive more votes than any other presidential candidate in American history, including Barack Obama in 2008? REALLY?

Dominion denies its machines were compromised, dismissing those allegations as –- here’s that word –- “misinformation.” But Powell says you can LOOK IN THE OPERATING MANUAL and see how this set-up can be made to do anything you want.

No matter how suspicious this looks, the problem is proving it. But Powell says she can. When asked for the specific proof, she said she has it but that it would be foolish to come out and say on national TV what it is.

Finally, we love this from legal expert Jonathan Turley: his comment on the lightning speed with which President Trump is being told to set aside his legal challenges. And this insistence is coming from...other lawyers.

"The media and legal analysts have declared no evidence of voter fraud to change the outcome,” he says. “The problem was that we had not even seen the evidence from the Trump campaign.”

He cites WASHINGTON POST columnist Randall Eliason, who came up with strategies for impeaching Trump that were so outlandish, they weren’t even used by the House Judiciary Committee. Eliason wrote that going after other attorneys who were defending Trump is “fair game.” Anti-Trump groups such as the Lincoln Project targeted those firms and tried to force lawyers to abandon Trump as their client. It got so bad, Twitter even blocked one of their tweets, not for targeting Trump (they’re fine with that) but for targeting other attorneys.

When Turley tried to talk to colleagues about just the POSSIBILITY that voting software or systems might be vulnerable to human error --- even allowing he’d seen no evidence of systemic problems --- he was rejected outright. Heretic! Turley hadn’t even alleged fraud, he says, but law professor Paul Campos likened him to a Holocaust denier (!) and called for him to be fired.

"The courts are supposed to be where reason transcends the rage outside,” Turley says. Trump’s case will likely wind up in the courts, with lawyers and judges, and it needs to be decided by reason, not rage. It’s the same with investigations. If Durham has the goods, he needs to present them, with no concern about “blowback.”

If he won't, Trump should declassify EVERYTHING that doesn't damage national security. Win or lose, let the blowback begin.

Good election news

November 16, 2020

To those looking for good news in the election returns: In California’s House District 39, Republican Young Kim has defeated incumbent Democrat Gil Cisneros, marking the 11th seat flipped from Democrat to Republican.

On Thursday night, New York Rep. Max Rose conceded to Republican challenger Nicole Malliotakis. And there might be more flips and GOP holds still to come as the long count continues.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted a blue wave would increase the Democrats’ majority. Of course, all those losses haven’t stopped her from claiming they have a “mandate” to remake America into Venezuela. "Mandate" being a meaningless word that politicians invoke to justify doing whatever they want, no matter how closely they squeaked their way into office.

Ms Malliotakis is one of two new GOP members who are children of Cuban immigrants, while two others actually lived under socialism in Cuba and Ukraine. Two seats flipped to the GOP in Miami, and one of the winners explained that was thanks to Trump and to the Democrats’ romance with socialism, which is driving Florida increasingly Republican.

These four new Congress members all know only too well the false promises and tragic, oppressive reality of socialism. Mallitotakis tweeted, “An anti-socialist ‘Squad’ is forming.” Unlike the socialist “Squad,” this one will know what socialism really is. However, I don’t expect them to be fawned over by the media or end up on the cover of Vanity Fair, the way AOC is this month.

The idea of a magazine devoted to conspicuous capitalist luxury putting a socialist on its cover would be striking if it weren’t sadly all too common. Clueless rich liberals have been celebrating charismatic leftist radicals for decades, from the Hollywood fundraisers for Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega to all the T-shirts, posters and other art/merchandise romanticizing Che Guevara as if he were Jim Morrison in olive drab fatigues. If these people ever met the real Che, he would’ve put them in front of a firing squad, because that’s what he did…a lot.

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Good article by Derek Hunter that touches on several questions we’ve discussed here about the suspicions and accusations swirling around this election.

For instance, if there really is no evidence of voter fraud, why are the Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself) trying so hard to block investigations and refusing to do any investigative reporting? Don’t they want to prove that the election was on the up-and-up so Joe Biden won’t have a cloud of suspicion hanging over him for the rest of his life? This reminds me of Sherlock Holmes’ observation that the curious fact about this case is that the watch dog didn’t bark.

Why have so many people signed sworn affidavits that they witnessed voter fraud on penalty of perjury if there wasn’t any? Like these

Why did black voters in only three key cities vote for Trump in lower numbers than the rest of the country?

Why are there no accusations of vote fraud to help Trump in cities where everything is run by Republicans?

And why have we gone so long treating vote fraud as a joke instead of rooting it out? To answer that one, I don’t think anyone is laughing anymore.

Comparing Trump to the Nazis

November 16, 2020

This week, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour was rightly excoriated for using the 82nd anniversary of Kristallnacht, the November 1938 assault on Jews by the Nazis, as an excuse to attack Trump. She compared the term of Trump – the best friend Israel’s ever had in the White House and a man whose daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren are Orthodox Jews – to Kristallnacht.

It was more than disgusting political rhetoric, it was a reprehensible diminution of the horrors of the Holocaust. For four years, we’ve been hearing that Trump is an authoritarian dictator – one of those leaders who shoot reporters who criticize them and take over opposition media outlets – from reporters who had no fear of attacking him to his face on national media outlets that spewed opposition to him 24/7. I don’t think they know what the words “authoritarian” or “dictator” mean. And I know for darn sure that Christiane Amanpour doesn’t know what the word “Kristallnacht” means.

Another computer “glitch” has been discovered that reversed the results of an election, this time in Connecticut. Republican state Rep. Craig Fishbein was actually the winner, not his Democrat challenger Jim Jinks.

This is just a local race with a small amount of votes, and it was corrected, but it carries great significance. It shows that unreliable voting software is not isolated to just one state, and we don’t know if there are others that just haven’t been caught. It shows that it can result in races being awarded to the person who didn’t really get the most votes. And the factor that hardly anyone is talking about other than statisticians: what are the odds that a “random computer glitch” would always result in votes being taken away from the Republican and given to the Democrat?

If I ever hear of one of these corrections that results in a Republican mistakenly being named the winner, I’ll be sure to make it the lead-off story since it will be a perfect example of the “Man bites dog” theory of what makes something newsworthy.

A couple of days ago, I wrote –- this was fairly tongue-in-cheek –- about Joe Biden deserving prosecution under the Logan Act, as he is a private citizen speaking under no authorization with world leaders to affect foreign policy. It seemed particularly fitting; after all, Biden is reportedly the one who brought up the Logan Act in the Oval Office as a way to target Michael Flynn. (Ironically, unlike Biden today, Flynn was justified in talking with foreign leaders, as he was incoming national security adviser during an OFFICIAL TRANSITION.)

Since raising the issue of the Logan Act, I’ve seen that others are wondering about this, too

Biden is “playing President.” The media are playing along. He addresses them in front of an official-looking cardboard backdrop that says he’s the President-elect, and the media take him seriously because they choose to. JOE BIDEN IS NOT THE PRESIDENT-ELECT.

He might, God forbid, actually become President-elect if he survives the careful examination of the vote that absolutely must occur. But with the myriad allegations of massive, deliberate fraud that might be confirmed and reverse the count enormously in key states, he might not get through that process. Democrats were the ones who pressed for massive mail-in balloting, which --- intentionally, I believe --- weakened the process and left it vulnerable to outside manipulation (especially by the dead, ha). So they’re just going to have to wait while we make sense of the crazy result, which statisticians say is mathematically impossible.

The vote has NOT been certified. I’m reminded of Lucy informing Charlie Brown, “Peculiar thing about this document. It was never notarized.” For once, it’s time for the Republicans to pull away the football and let the Democrats land helplessly on their backs.

As reported in the WASHINGTON EXAMINER, Biden is already play-acting the role of President-elect, accepting “congratulatory” calls from world leaders from France, Germany, Ireland and the U.K. and discussing issues such as climate change and COVID-19.

In her report, Haley Victory Smith refers to him as the “apparent President-elect.” Apparent to WHOM? Haley Victory Smith?

Smith says that despite Trump’s refusal to concede, “many world leaders have recognized Biden as the victor.” Well, that’s probably because they listen to our media, and also because Biden's already assuming the mantle of power, quite inappropriately, speaking with them about foreign policy when he’s not supposed to be doing it.

I would add that one leader who HASN'T yet congratulated Biden is the president of Mexico, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador; he says he himself has been “robbed” of office before by a corrupt process and will wait until our count is certified. Of course, AMLO is catching a lot of grief in the press for doing the right thing.

Reports say he "refuses," but that's too harsh; he's just prudently waiting until our legal issues are resolved, as our own media should.

Anyway, Biden’s team has been quite open about these talks, as they add to the perception that he really is Prez-in-waiting. They say Biden spoke to French President Emmanuel Macron about Iran’s nuclear program (!). He spoke to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson about Ukraine (!) and the Western Balkans.

"I’m letting them know that America is back,” Biden told reporters. “We’re going to be back in the game. It’s not America alone.”

Now wait just a doggone minute. I realize the media are playing along with this “game” –- an unwittingly apt choice of words from Biden –- but the “game” has gone too far.

During the presidential debate hosted by Chris Wallace on September 29, Biden was asked, as the final question, “Will you urge your supporters to stay calm while the vote is counted, and will you pledge not to declare victory until the election is independently certified?”

Biden did not waver: “YES. And here’s the deal: We count the ballots, as you pointed out. Some of these ballots in some states can’t even be opened until Election Day, and if there’s thousands and thousands of ballots, [it’s] gonna take time to do it.”

And so it will. But Biden has PLEDGED not to declare victory until the election results are certified. The results have not been certified, so...does this mean he hasn't declared victory? And if he hasn’t, what in blazes is he doing “playing President” and talking with foreign leaders about Iran and Ukraine? Trump's the President; Biden's a private citizen. Say, isn’t that a violation of the LOGAN ACT??

I would really like to have an answer to this. And I want it from his own lips, not in some CYA statement put out by his legal team.

Last Saturday night, Megyn Kelly said on NEWSMAX that the legal fight over the election is not over, even if the margins make it a longshot. (I would add that since Saturday, hard evidence has been produced that makes it seem like less of a longshot.) She said the Trump campaign deserves its days in court and the election deserves to have “its tires kicked,” particularly in Pennsylvania, where judges had no business jumping into what the legislature constitutionally determines.

Kelly called Trump’s fight “an uphill battle.” But almost a week later, we’ve got sworn evidence of large-scale lawbreaking, and we don’t yet know the extent of the targeted election fraud that appears to have taken place. Kelly accused Biden of being worse than disingenuous with his calls for unity and healing. She called him hypocritical for alienating everyone who voted for Trump at the same time he’s claiming he can unite all Americans.

"[Biden’s speech] was written by a man in his basement for the past year,” she said. (I would add that it’s unlikely Biden himself wrote the speech.) “Because the nation’s extremely divided right now...And you need to look no further than Joe Biden’s own party.”

"Biden’s been saying this all along,” she said. “He’s the unifier, he’s the one who’s going to bring us together. It sounds delightful...and I want that...But let’s get real. It’s not connected to reality on the ground in this country right now. And the only reason you’re hearing Biden and all these Democrats calling for it is because they won.”

Megyn, just one tiny point of clarification: it’s because they want you to THINK they won. Again, they haven’t.

But, but...THE NEW YORK TIMES splashed a big headline on Wednesday’s paper: ELECTION OFFICIALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD. This is just more "gaslighting" to make us believe voter fraud is a bogus conspiracy theory --- you know, like the one they've helped perpetrate against Trump for going-on five years. Ignore them.

Joe, stop “playing President,” or you might have to be indicted for violating the Logan Act. Wouldn’t that be something if you had the distinction of being the first American to be successfully prosecuted under it? I just love the idea.

Yesterday, we brought you the story of how Biden’s team is already pressuring the General Services Administration to anoint him as the “President-elect” –- well, heck, the media have –- and to immediately start the “transition” process for a Biden administration.

We said wait just a doggone minute. Nothing about this is official yet. The head of the General Services Administration, in charge of setting up the “transition,” agreed that the Biden team’s push for this was premature. And, as of Monday, something else IS official: Attorney General Bill Barr has sent a memo authorizing the Department of Justice (including all U.S. attorneys and FBI Director Christopher Wray) to investigate voting irregularities in the 2020 election.

Barr apparently reads his mail. On Friday, 39 Republican members of the House had written Barr, appealing to him to allow DOJ resources to look into the allegations and make sure the election and vote counting process are fully consistent with state and federal law. People who’ve been asking, “Where is Bill Barr?” should be glad to know he’s on the job.

The letter to Barr, authored by Rep. Michael Cloud of Texas, said, “While each state runs its own election process, the United States Department of Justice is ultimately responsible for the integrity of federal elections. The American people must have the utmost confidence that the outcome of the presidential election is legitimate.”

Here’s the memo from Barr authorizing the investigation. It makes great reading.

Barr says that to wait until after the vote is certified would not be advised, as “Such a passive and delayed enforcement approach can result in situations in which election misconduct cannot realistically be rectified.” No kidding.

Barr is minimally concerned that these actions will impact the vote, in that voting has already taken place. “...I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions, as I have already done in specific instances.” Also, he warns: “While it is imperative that credible allegations be addressed in a timely and effective manner, it is equally imperative that Department personnel exercise appropriate caution and maintain the Department’s absolute commitment to fairness, neutrality and non-partisanship.” Barr stresses that he isn’t saying voting irregularities have impacted the outcome of any election, just that he’s giving the authority to address those allegations.

This phrase jumps out: "...as I have already done in specific instances." No elaboration. Apparently, some investigation of specific allegations has already been going on.

Barr didn’t predict where this would eventually lead: “...it would likely be prudent [for U.S. attorneys] to commence any election-related matters as a preliminary inquiry, so as to assess whether available evidence warrants further investigative steps.”

Attorney Harmeet Dhillon, in a piece she wrote for FOX News, lays out the various GOP lawsuits examining a variety of irregularities at the polls in Michigan, Georgia, Arizona and Pennsylvania, explaining how they likely could have impacted the vote in those states.

As reported in the EPOCH TIMES, a 78-page lawsuit has been filed by David A. Kallman, senior counsel with the Great Lakes Justice Center, in Detroit (Wayne County) alleging “clear fraud” and numerous issues of misconduct.

In Pennsylvania, House Speaker Bryan Cutler has called for a “full audit” of the presidential election returns before the vote is certified. He cites “very serious equal protection rights issues” due to votes from different counties being treated differently.

Also, 10 attorneys general have filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Pennsylvania Republicans who are asking that the ruling extending the deadline for mail-in ballots be overturned. As we’ve discussed, it’s the state legislature’s job to set the deadline, not the governor and the state supreme court.

Here’s the brief.

We reported yesterday on another serious allegation, this one about voting machine software deliberately flipping votes. There’s much more to be examined before we can be confident we've counted every legal vote but not the illegal ones.

My point: this is far from over. Biden may be deluded into thinking he’s officially the President-elect –- and I can understand this if he’s watching almost any news outlet --- but HE IS NOT THE PRESIDENT-ELECT. It’s almost as if he, like the rest of America, were being “gaslighted” about this. So, it occurs to me that another question, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, needs to be asked: Since Biden is essentially a private citizen right now, with the race up in the air, is he already talking with foreign leaders as if he were President?

When he was Vice President, attending a January 5, 2017, Oval Office meeting with outgoing President Obama and a handful of top-level bureaucrats, he reportedly (according to Sally Yates) brought up the Logan Act, an obscure law that said it was a crime for a private citizen to conduct foreign policy. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t care about this centuries-old law that has never been used to successfully prosecute anyone, but since Biden himself apparently thought it was a good law to use to go after then-incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, it might be fun to look at applying it here.

Is Joe Biden already talking with foreign leaders and trying to set foreign policy as a private citizen of the United States? If so, he’s certainly as subject to the Logan Act as Mike Flynn was --- arguably more so, since Flynn actually was serving the duly-elected President during an official transition period.

(Related: Biden’s team is rumored to have been working behind the scenes with Trump’s Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, even though election results have not been certified, votes are still being counted and alleged irregularities are being investigated. You will note that President Trump has just terminated Esper. Trump's being savaged by the media –- so what else is new? –- for firing Esper during the “transition” --- which is NOT officially underway --- but the two reportedly had a strained relationship, and if the rumors are true about Esper coordinating with the Biden team, one has to wonder what else has gone on behind Trump's back.)

Now, here's where the Logan Act comes in: We know Biden plans to take a far different approach to foreign policy, particularly with Iran and China, than Trump did (unfortunately), so I wonder if he's already been in touch with, say, Tehran or Beijing, undermining Trump's policy. Biden is not a member of the current administration, nor is he even officially cleared to be in the “transition.” Since calls between Americans and foreign leaders are surely picked up by our surveillance, if Biden is "playing President" on any of those calls, I assume his name will be unmasked, he will be investigated and interrogated by the FBI –- with the goal of catching him in a perjury trap and ensnaring him in litigation for years –- and he will possibly be prosecuted under the Logan Act for trying to affect U.S. foreign policy as a private citizen.

It wasn’t too harsh a punishment for Mike Flynn.

And now, here's a similar take, just found at RedState.com. I swear we thought of this completely independently.

Important Reminder

November 9, 2020

Let’s not get caught up in the left’s false narratives that there’s “no evidence” of vote fraud (people have already been arrested for it) or that Biden’s popular vote lead is beyond the “margin of fraud.” That’s due to states like California that aren’t in dispute; we’re talking about very slim margins in a handful of battleground states.

This isn’t an either/or situation. It’s entirely possible that there was widespread vote fraud but not enough to determine the winner. If it is proven that Biden won legitimately, then I will accept him as President, just as I did Obama, despite our policy differences. I won’t do what the other side did and spend however long Biden is President screaming that he's “illegitimate” or “not MY President!” I will show the respect due the office that many Democrats never showed to Trump.

But I also want all allegations of voting irregularities investigated; any incidences of fraud prosecuted to the full extent of the law, whether they determined the election or not; and laws changed and tightened to prevent it ever happening again. Democrats dispense a lot of balloon juice about all Americans having their voices heard in elections. They even declared Stacy Abrams a hero and a party leader for challenging her loss in Georgia. They've whined for four years about the legitimacy of the 2016 election ("without evidence," to use their favorite phrase.) So since every fraudulent vote negates the legal vote of a citizen, I assume they’ll join me in my demand for transparency, law changes, and investigations of claims like this, from a Nevada whistleblower who put it in a sworn affidavit to the Department of Justice.

I also assume that someday, pigs will fly.

Where to start on the situation we as a nation are now facing? First, let’s get one thing clear: Does anyone think for ONE SECOND that –- given all the anomalies of this election and the strange turnaround that completely changed the outcome –- if the situation were reversed and Trump were ahead, the Biden campaign would say, “Yes! The people have spoken! Donald Trump has won re-election! We’re leaving now.”? Anyone?

Of course they wouldn’t. They’d recount close states and find every bit of evidence of voter fraud that might have influenced the outcome –- which this year, I must point out, is all coming from the Democrat side. They’d NEVER go quietly. (Recall Gore in 2000 –- that took well over a month.) So anyone –- including the media –- saying it’s over and Trump should concede need to put a cork in it until we determine the actual vote count.

The left NEVER accepted Trump as the duly-elected President, even though he was. They concocted a story about Russians and STILL push it, though exhaustive investigation found no evidence. They undermined him –- and demeaned us –- at every turn. They tried to remove him with a sham impeachment. Now, they expect us to slump away defeated after a few days while they coronate his opponent? NO.

Biden is already pretending to be the President-elect, giving speeches saying “the people have spoken.” Actually, the media have spoken, but they don’t decide this. They DON’T certify the vote. Still, they just can’t wait, so this is the kind of headline we’re seeing everywhere.

When Democrats say “the people have spoken,” that’s not what they mean. They refer to the ballot count, which may or may not reflect the people’s will. They want to freeze it before it can be shown that “the people” might want something very different from what THEY want to give them.

My staff and I have been looking through almost countless reports about this to see what is partisan spin (from both sides) and what might actually reflect reality. Here’s some good sense from AMERICAN THINKER.

The author, Jay Valentine, is clear that he supported Trump and has tried hard to contain his confirmation bias, but he has a degree in statistics and sees plenty of reason to examine the result. Not only is this NOT OVER, he says, but it’s “scary for Biden.” That’s why the Biden campaign and the media (but I repeat myself) are in such a hurry to declare him the winner and get everybody used to the idea.

Valentine first looks at Philadelphia and the order from Justice Alito to keep late ballots separate. Remove those, and Trump wins Pennsylvania. (Of course, there are scores of eyewitness accounts that suggest outright fraud in Philadelphia, also in Pittsburgh.) Valentine thinks Trump will win the state.

Here’s a story we found about Pennsylvania accepting mail-in ballots for this election at almost 30 times the rate predicted by historical rejection numbers. Hmm...

Valentine also finds numerous anomalies in Nevada and Wisconsin. For example, Wisconsin election clerks were told to fill in ballots themselves where critical information had been left off. This information is supposed to be resolved before Election Day. Such ballots don’t count, at least according to retired Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Michael Gableman, who said on local radio that the statute is “very, very clear. If an absentee ballot does not have a witness address on it, it’s not valid.” The Wisconsin GOP “estimates that thousands of witness addresses may have been changed.” Here are more details concerning Wisconsin.

Michigan is a mess, too, especially Detroit, where many accounts have emerged about GOP observers being ejected or otherwise barred from seeing the process. Here’s just one.

By the way, don’t look for such reporting through a Google search. They’ve “fact-checked” it and found it all to be “false.” Not so.

Problems have also arisen on a smaller scale; example, Michigan.

"Voter fraud is kind of like larceny,” Valentine says. “A little is okay. It is even kind of entertaining...” (like all those jokes we’ve told about dead “Democrats” voting) “...But voter fraud on this scale is just not sustainable. It does not pass the common sense test...The overwhelming number now goes beyond humor and rubs our faces in it.”

Trump has, as he puts it, “gone to the mattresses.” We’ll just see what the “will of the people” is.

Also, Mark Levin had a MUST-SEE program this Sunday on LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN. Here’s a great clip of him with guest Ken Starr; if you missed it Sunday night, the show in its entirety should be online soon.

As they discussed, it was a deliberate choice to have legislators direct the process for choosing electors for their states, to keep it as close to the people as possible. This “got lost in the Pennsylvania shuffle,” Starr said, calling what the governor did through the state supreme court to change the rules “a constitutional travesty.” Justice Alito has stepped in to say, in effect, that “the legislature is the boss.” That’s why he’s having late ballots counted and kept separately, pending a decision by the full Court about the power of the state legislature.

"To ‘count every vote’ may be a crime” under state law, Starr said, perhaps even under federal law. You don’t count every ILLEGAL vote. “It’s shameful,” he said, “that Vice President Biden’s people and the Vice President himself are saying ‘Count every vote’ and selling a lot of t-shirts.”

Levin observed, “The Democrats...want to vote earlier and earlier and count later and later.” Yes, to create unreliability and chaos. (I would add that it keeps early voters from being able to change their minds.) Starr cited two cities, Detroit and Philadelphia, for having “a sordid history of voter fraud,” involving “criminal convictions” that in Pennsylvania involved the sitting state senate majority leader, who went to jail.

Imagine someone actually going to jail over this!

As Levin said, there have been over 300 lawsuits this year in key states, to “stack the deck” with the methodology by which votes are cast and counted, setting us up for the current mess. (I should mention that we previously reported Clinton attorney Marc Elias of the firm Perkins Coie being particularly active in this process.)

Levin also hosted constitutional scholar and election law expert Hans von Spakovsky, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former commissioner for the Federal Election Commission. He was also counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the DOJ, in charge of enforcing voting rights law. He spoke about those 300+ lawsuits, which had “a common theme.”

"They all tried to get the security protocols that are in place for absentee or mail-in ballots eliminated,” he said. Signature requirements, signature comparisons, limits on ‘vote harvesting,’ voter ID –- they wanted it all out the window. Is that to ensure we “count every vote,” or that we “count every ballot, real or not”?

Be sure and watch the entire interview, as well as Levin’s closing statement --- you’ll see why the media and the Biden campaign (same thing) do NOT get to call this election; why it might very well turn out differently; and why it’s so important, whatever the outcome, that this be done right.

If you saw Maria Bartiromo’s SUNDAY MORNING FUTURES yesterday, you know that legal powerhouse Sidney Powell --- known for her determination in defending Michael Flynn --- has taken a leading role in Trump’s election challenge in a number of states. Lawsuits are expected to be filed Monday, including at least one in Pennsylvania.

Powell claimed that “there has been a massive and coordinated effort to steal this election from ‘we the people of the United States of America,’ to delegitimize and destroy votes for Donald Trump, [and] to manufacture votes for Joe Biden. They have done it in every way imaginable, from having dead people vote in massive numbers, to absolutely, fraudulently creating ballots that exist, only voting for Biden.”

As the WASHINGTON EXAMINER reports, Powell said on the show that at least 450,000 ballots –- this includes 98,000 in Pennsylvania, 80-90,000 in Georgia, 42,000 in Arizona, 69-115,000 in Michigan and 62,000 in Wisconsin –- have already been identified in key states that “miraculously” have just a mark for Biden in the presidential race but no other mark down the ballot, not even for big races such as for U.S. Senate. (That in itself is not proof of ballot box-stuffing, but it’s very unusual and highly suggestive of it.) She said that if you look at the ballots in Florida, “where things were done right,” you can see how the rest of the balloting should have gone.

She also said an “algorithm” was used to calculate the number of votes they’d need to flip and they used computers to do this. She suspects the same method was used to cause Doug Collins and John James to lose their races. “There were many people affected by this. We have got to fight tooth-and-nail in federal court to oppose this abject fraud and the conspiracy behind it.”

But the news that made headlines was her claim that the software used in voting machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems, a company in which top Democrats hold significant interest, flipped votes from Republican to Democrat or added votes that didn’t really exist. She said the “glitches” that happened never should have. (Maria also mentioned the “stop-downs” as returns came in as something she’d never seen.) For more details, the WASHINGTON EXAMINER has a report.

If Powell does have evidence of this, she didn’t present it on the show. She did say that some Democrats should be angry about this, too, naming Bernie Sanders as someone who may have lost primary elections through this same tactic.

This is something that absolutely must be checked out. Dominion machines are in use in 28 states and Puerto Rico, including ALL the battleground states where Trump’s team is contesting the vote count.

In answer to Maria’s question about investigation by the Department of Justice, Powell said she didn’t know where they were on it, but that they need to be investigating. (I realize they don’t announce when they are investigating, but in this case they need to be on it, fast.) Powell also noted that they now have an affidavit from a postal worker who swears he was told to back-date ballots. She also said there are “at least three major federal issues” for the Supreme Court to resolve.

She says that when the real votes are counted, “Trump will win. He is the President, and he is in charge of this country.”