Posts Tagged ‘Supreme Court’

LinkSwarm for January 1, 2021

Friday, January 1st, 2021

Congratulations! If you’re reading this, 2020 didn’t manage to kill you! Happy New Year!

  • “Ukraine Press Conference Explicitly Ties Hunter & Joe Biden To Corruption“:

    A video from a press conference in Ukraine is going viral. It is the follow-up to a video press conference that Ukraine released over a year ago, in which Members of the Ukraine Parliament demanded that President Zelensky and President Trump investigate billions of dollars of corruption in Ukraine that is tied to the U.S. The newly released video is meant to provide documentary and eyewitness information about the corruption – and the Biden family figures prominently in the story.

    Snip.

    At one of the first press conferences about a year ago, we showed bank transactions for hundreds of thousands of dollars to the family of former US Vice President Joe Biden, namely to his son Robert Hunter Biden. The latter was a member of the board of directors of the infamous gas production company Burisma.

    Burisma belongs to the fugitive Yanukovych-era minister Mykola Zlochevsky.

    The inclusion of Biden in the Burisma leadership and payment for his services is nothing more than a political cover that protected Zlochevsky from the Ukrainian law, namely from the criminal code.

    Two foreign witnesses whose identities are protected – Witness 1 and Witness 2 – came forward to testify about the facts of the case. Konstantyn Kulyk, the Head of the Group of Prosecutors of the Prosecutor General’s Office of Ukraine, explained what the witnesses offered:

    One quote from a statement by a Witness:

    “All the described financial transactions were fictitious. And a lot of money was paid in Ukraine so that the state authorities turned a blind eye to it.”

    [snip]

    In the period from November 2014 to October 2015, the Witnesses noticed strange recurring payments that, at the direction of Oleh Nelin (Zlochevsky’s assistant in the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine), were sent from the account of BURISMA HOLDINGS LTD, which was opened for the personal needs of Mykola Zlochevsky, in the Latvian PrivatBank AS to the account of the American company ROSEMONT SENECA BONAI LLC.

    The witnesses drew attention to these payments since about 20 times the same uneven amount was recurring – $83,333.33 as payment for consulting services.

    [snip]

    In the period from November 2014 to October 2015, the money stolen from Ukrainians, located on account of BURISMA HOLDINGS LTD with the Latvian PrivatBank AS, was transferred to the account of ROSEMONT SENECA BONAI LLC in the American bank MORGAN STANLEY in payments in total amounting to $3.4 million for consulting services.

    And this handy chart:

    The broad outlines of this have already been covered here, but the conference filled in some details.

  • Why the Hunter Biden scandal isn’t going away. “That is the problem with a bunker press strategy of denial and isolation. Like water, truth has a way of coming out.”
  • Five great Trump victories in 2020. Including Amy Coney Barrett and peace in the Middle East. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Want some brutal truth? Well, sorry, but that’s what’s on the menu:

    So I guess there’s going to be a rally in Washington DC on Wednesday, organized by https://stopthesteal.us/. There’s also going to be rallies (protests?) in many state capitols on Sunday as well.

    My question is, why? What, exactly, is the point of these demonstrations?

    If the purpose is to just gather like-minded people together for one last good time rock and roll bash before the awful, awful Harris-Biden administration sets in, OK, I can see that. Just don’t delude yourself into thinking that something is going to change because of these rallies. No Democratic lawmaker is going to say “hey, look at all of those pro-Trump protestors out there. We’d better not certify the swing-state electors because maybe they’re right about election fraud.”

    They’re not afraid of us.

    Because we hold our rallies, listen to the scheduled speakers, clap politely, and march around carrying our protest signs in an orderly fashion, and then go home – after first cleaning up after ourselves.

    At these rallies, we don’t wear masks to hide our identity, we don’t slug it out with the police, we don’t assault random passers-by and shout at diners through bullhorns at outdoor restaurants, we don’t vandalize and loot small businesses, we don’t break windows and we don’t cover the place with graffiti. And we don’t walk away from 100 tons of trash, which is the amount the city of Seattle had to clean up when they finally got around to busting up the CHAZ sh*thole last summer.

    So why would they listen to us?

    I am by no means advocating we start doing any of those things. This is an advantage the other other side has over us that we have to live with: politicians and judges are afraid of their protests, but not ours. Because if a judge rules against them, they’ll show up at his house late at night and threaten him. Nobody wants to have to face that. And I wonder why many of Trump’s election lawsuits got dismissed without so much as looking at the evidence. Is it because of the fear of the consequences if they found in his favor?

    My point is, none of these rallies, and I don’t care if they get a million people, two million to show up on Jan. 6th, is going to move the needle in the slightest.

  • Kurt Schlichter has predictions for 2021:

    5. Woke Won’t Work

    Slowly but surely, I think people are getting tired of Woke. None of us signed up to be ruled by a bunch of lachrymose sophomores who burst into tears because we insist they use the right toilet. Even liberals are getting sick of constantly having to navigate a minefield of microaggressions – it’s tiresome to always be worried that someone is going to freak out by your perfectly reasonable behavior. Look for a major star of some sort who is too big to cancel to simply refuse to play along anymore, and that may open the door to others. The SJW emperor truly has no clothes, and the second someone points and laughs at his/her/their shriveled junk, the entire country will join in the well-deserved mockery.

    4. The Murder Turtle Will Be Even More Of A Hero Than Dick “The Savior of Saigon” Blumenthal

    He’s frustrating, sure, but Cocaine Mitch is the most skillful knife fighter/Senate Majority Leader in American history, and whether or not we win in Georgia next week (I think we will, but not enough to put money on it – just don’t be an idiot and refuse to vote if you dwell in the Peach State), he will be our bulwark against the Democrat onslaught. And by “bulwark,” I refer to a strong, implacable defensive fortification, and not that lame blog written by sexually inadequate sissies that is hoping that the end result of 2020’s election is that they can once again round up suckers to pay good money to take their insipid Conservative Inc. cruises.

    However, I doubt his number 1 prediction, that Biden won’t be president by next New Year’s Eve. As bad as Biden’s cognitive decline might be, I have a hunch that both Jill Biden and the DNC cabal that managed to install him will turn the reigns over to Kamala Harris anytime soon.
    

  • “Floodgates Opening? Student sues over Critical Race Training at Nevada public charter school”:

    A Nevada mother has followed through on her threat to file a civil rights lawsuit against her son’s charter school for refusing to let him opt out of a mandatory class that promotes hostility toward whites as a race.

    Democracy Prep at the Agassi Campus forced William Clark “to make professions about his racial, sexual, gender and religious identities in verbal class exercises and in graded, written homework assignments,” creating a hostile environment, the biracial high school student and Gabrielle Clark allege in their federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.

    The senior’s statements were “subject to the scrutiny, interrogation and derogatory labeling of students, teachers and school administrators,” who are “still are coercing him to accept and affirm politicized and discriminatory principles and statements that he cannot in conscience affirm.”

    The suit also names Democracy Prep Public Schools, the New York-based charter network, and several officials in the local school and network as defendants.

  • The top seven myths of 2020. Including “Lockdowns work” and “The Presidential election was fair and clean.”
  • Chicago murders up 55% this year. And it’s not like Chicago was an oasis of peace before this year, either…
  • “Chicago Teachers Union Big Shot Says Unsafe To Teach Live…From Her Pool Side In Puerto Rico.”
  • The Great Exodus:

    One of the earliest signals that 2020 would be a year of mass homeschooling appeared in an April survey of parents conducted by EdChoice. It asked a variety of questions about how families were coping with school shutdowns and revealed that more than half of the respondents had a more favorable view of homeschooling as a result of the school closures. I remember thinking at the time that if families thought homeschooling was tolerable during the springtime tumult and isolation, then they would find it far more fulfilling under ordinary circumstances when they could actually gather with others, visit libraries and museums, attend classes and so on.

    In May, a RealClear Opinion Research survey confirmed that many parents were more satisfied with at-home learning than expected, with 40 percent saying they were more likely to choose homeschooling or virtual learning even after lockdowns ended. Around the same time, a USA Today/Ipsos poll found that 60 percent of parents surveyed said they would likely choose at-home learning in the fall rather than send their children to school even if the schools reopened for in-person learning.

    As summer began, parent actions reflected pollster predictions. Many parents began pulling their children out of school and registering them as independent homeschoolers. During the first week of July, so many parents in North Carolina submitted their online intent to homeschool forms that it crashed the state’s nonpublic education website. Homeschool applications were up 21 percent in Nebraska in July, and 75 percent in Vermont, while grassroots homeschooling networks and local Facebook homeschooling groups reported record increases in new members.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Los Angeles County prosecutors sue Gascon for not enforcing the law.” George Gascon is, of course, another George Soros backed prosecutor. We need similar lawsuits against all the other Soros prosecutors. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “California Doctor Fired After Writing Letter Criticizing Lockdown Orders.”
  • Louisiana Republican congressman elect Luke Letlow dies from a heart attack during a Wuhan coronavirus procedure. Dang, he was only 41…
  • Donald Trump Ends Obama’s 12-Year Run As Gallup’s ‘Most Admired Man.'”
  • Israel hits Gaza and Syria after Hamas rocket attack.
  • “Trump Administration Approves $290 Million Bomb Sale To Saudi Arabia.” That should about cover Cats and Dolittle
  • Just when you think 2021 couldn’t possibly be worse than 2020, scientists invent Ice 9.
  • Hungary: Christmas 1, Commies 0.
  • “Former public radio reporter charged with torching cop cars during BLM protests.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Steven F. Hayward.)
  • Joe Rogan on Cabo Steve Adler:

  • Man charged with throwing large concrete blocks off Congress overpass above Ben White.
  • Who is the super genius at Walmart who decided it was a good idea to let their social media person snipe at a sitting U.S. senator and piss off half of America?
  • “But only Gatsby knew…”
  • “How author Farley Mowat smuggled a V2 rocket into Canada.”
  • A wine guy reviews Everclear.
  • Speaking of booze, a cool milestone (or why he won’t be having a nice Chianti):

  • Interesting map:

  • If you haven’t already done so, now would be a good time to uninstall Flash.
  • Heh:

  • Heh: Dog Division:

  • Election Fraud Update for December 21, 2020

    Monday, December 21st, 2020

    At this point, I believe there’s less than a 1% chance that the election fraud is overturned and Donald Trump sworn into a second term on January 20. Still, I’m going to go ahead and do another Election Fraud Update for (as Dwight likes to put it) the Historical Record.

    No, not that one

  • Trump campaign files independent lawsuit over Pennsylvania election fraud with the Supreme Court. Given previous results and the lateness of the filing, I’m not overly hopeful. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
    

  • Here’s a 30 page report alleging coordinated voting fraud in six states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin):

    From the findings of this report, it is possible to infer what may well have been a coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket. Indeed, the observed patterns of election irregularities are so consistent across the six battleground states that they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election outright, strategically game the election process in such a way as to “stuff the ballot box” and unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket.

    Snip.

    • The ballots in question because of the identified election irregularities are more than sufficient to swing the outcome in favor of President Trump should even a relatively small portion of these ballots be ruled illegal.
    • All six battleground states exhibit most,or all,six dimensions of election irregularities. However, each state has a unique mix of issues that might be considered “most important.”To put this another way, all battleground states are characterized by the same or similar election irregularities; but, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each battleground state is different in its own election irregularity way.
    • This was theft by a thousand cuts across six dimensions and six battleground states rather than any one single “silver bullet” election irregularity.
    • In refusing to investigate a growing number of legitimate grievances, the anti-Trump media and censoring social media are complicit in shielding the American public from the truth. This is a dangerous game that simultaneously undermines the credibility of the media and the stability of our political system and Republic.
    • Those journalists, pundits, and political leaders now participating in what has become a Biden Whitewash should acknowledge the six dimensions of election irregularities and conduct the appropriate investigations to determine the truth about the 2020 election. If this is not done before Inauguration Day, we risk putting into power an illegitimate and illegal president lacking the support of a large segment of the American people.
  • And here’s an interview with Peter Navarro on the report.
  • “Statistical Model Indicates Trump Actually Won Majorities in Five Disputed States and 49.68 Percent of the Vote in a Sixth.”

    We report a simple yet powerful statistical model of county-level voter behavior in the November 2020 presidential election using two main types of data:

    1. County-specific voting data from the five previous presidential elections.
    2. Selected demographic variables (race and education) plotting how different national voter groups voted differently in 2020 overall.

    These two types of predictors allow us to explain over 95% of the variation in county-level votes, and therefore allow us identify which counties (and consequently, states) look substantially anomalous in the 2020 election.

    The model provides substantial support for the allegation that the outcome of the election was affected by fraud in multiple states. Specifically, the model’s predictions match the reported results in all other states, i.e. states where no fraud has been alleged, but predicts Trump won majorities in five disputed states (AZ, GA, NV, PA and WI) and 49.68% of the vote in the sixth (MI).

    In other words, the reported Biden margin of victory in at least five of the six contested states cannot be explained by any patterns in voter preference consistent with national demographic trends.

    SUMMARY OF MAIN ARGUMENTS

    1. Our model explains 96% of county-level variance in Trump’s two-party vote share with four demographic variables (non-college white, college-educated white, black and hispanic) and one historical variable (the average of county-level GOP two-party presidential vote share, 2004-2016). All five variables are highly significant. This reinforces the conclusion that the model is generally a very strong predictor of vote shares, and so deviations from it should be considered surprising.

    2. Under conservative assumptions, regression analysis shows Trump ought to have won AZ, GA, NV, PA, WI.

    Remember that statistical models are indicative, but not conclusive.
    

  • “After Examining Antrim County Voting Machines, ASOG Concludes Dominion ‘Intentionally Designed’ to ‘Create Systemic Fraud.'”

    The cyber-security firm that conducted a forensic examination of 22 Dominion Voting tabulators in Michigan has determined that “Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed” to “create systemic fraud,” and that election results of Antrim County should not have been certified. Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG) said in a report published Monday morning that it observed an error rate of 68.05 percent in the fatally flawed machines.

    Earlier Monday morning, Michigan state judge Kevin Elensheimer ordered the release of the the Dominion voting machines audit in Antrim County, where thousands of votes for President Trump were flipped to Joe Biden.

    Last week, Judge Elensheimer issued a protective order allowing Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to temporarily block the results of the audit.

    During a hearing conducted by ZOOM and streamed live on YouTube, Elensheimer this morning removed that order, clearing the way for the results to go public with some redactions.

    Snip.

    We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election
    results.

    The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.

  • The full ASOG group report is here. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • An interview with the Antrim County auditor.
  • Speaking of Dominion, “Maricopa County Board Refuses to Allow Audit of Dominion Machines“:

    PHOENIX — The Maricopa Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 today defy the state lawmakers and resist complying with legislative subpoenas. Instead of allowing a transparent audit, the board voted to file a lawsuit against lawmakers in Arizona state court to block the enforcement of the subpoenas.

    The Chairman of the Board, Clint Hickman (R), described the subpoenas as unrealistic and unconstitutional.

    The subpoenas were issued earlier this week by Arizona lawmakers, who sought to force an audit of Dominion voting machines used by Maricopa County.

    If they have nothing to hide, why are they hiding?

  • Dominion thread:

    Full summary in PDF form.

  • The year of the big fraud:

    Many Americans — according to some surveys, a majority — believe that the presidential election was marred by massive fraud in five states without which the President would surely have been re-elected.

    Snip.

    This partisan fraud has been ongoing for at least two decades but is no longer escaping the attention of great deal of its erstwhile consumer base. For years we have been examining media disinformation and bias. This year it was particularly evident in the media’s discrediting the accurate reports of Hunter Biden’s corruption (and that of his father and uncle, who also benefited from it).

    Snip.

    Add to this the media’s refusal to accurately describe the months-long BLM/Antifa riots, looting, arson, and killing, calling it instead “mostly peaceful protests,” it’s no wonder people are tuning them out. The heavy hand of the left wing played its part. Internet giants like Twitter suspended the account of the oldest newspaper in the country, the NY Post, which broke the story of the Biden family corruption with China, Russia, and the Ukraine as well as the account of the White House press secretary, and you can understand why “fewer than 15 percent of Americans trust the media.”

    Treat your pen like a Democratic party weapon and be rewarded with pink slips to the unemployment line. “An estimated 28,637 job cuts were reported in the industry by late October, Variety, citing data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, reported, nearly as many as the record 28,803 reported in the media sector in 2008. By comparison, the sector saw just over 10,000 job losses in 2019 and 15,474 in 2018.” The Hill attributes it to the China Virus. I think the mendacity and patent bias also has a great deal to do with the shrinking media employment.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • An important part of the steal was the media’s complicity in covering it up:

    Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway said on Fox News Thursday that allegations of a rigged election include big tech and big media conspiring to elect Joe Biden in addition to charges of voter fraud.

    “We hear about the rigging of the election,” Hemingway said, “but partly what they mean is the meddling on the part of big media and big tech to affect the outcome of the election.”

    Hemingway continued, pointing out that when major revelations about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, began to surface implicating the former vice president in corrupt and potentially criminal overseas business activity, the stories were suppressed online by Silicon Valley tech giants and delegitimized by legacy media.

    “When the New York Post broke the story about these emails,” Hemingway said, referencing the paper’s reporting from an abandoned Delaware laptop expanding the web of Biden’s scandals, “even though they were verified and people who were recipients of these emails verified they were real, the media suppressed that story.”

    In October, the New York Post published a series of exposes revealing that Joe Biden stood to rake in millions from Chinese communist leaders, lied repeatedly when denying conversations about his son’s business, and leveraged his high-powered position to benefit the family. A Biden family business partner-turned whistleblower even came forward to corroborate details of the New York Post’s reporting.

    The Post’s journalism that made Democrats look bad got the nation’s oldest paper locked out of its Twitter account for two weeks after the platform blocked users from sharing its blockbuster reporting.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • A summary how how the steal was performed:

  • The left is trying to redefine opposition to election fraud as “sedition“:

    It was inevitable that the Democrats would overreact to legal challenges by President Trump and other Republicans to corrupt election practices in swing states, but some responses have been unhinged even by their standards. One recurring refrain is particularly disturbing — that lawyers, members of Congress, and state attorneys general who supported post-election litigation are guilty of sedition. At least one Democratic congressman insists that attorneys representing the president in such challenges should be disbarred and that House members who supported Texas v. Pennsylvania in the Supreme Court shouldn’t be seated in Congress. One of the defendants in that ill-fated lawsuit described it as a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”

    This dangerous view of dissent has a long, sordid history among progressives.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Is election fraud China’s assassin’s Mace?

    Election fraud is the secret “assassin’s mace” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that has long confounded security hawks, according to tech billionaire and entrepreneur Patrick Byrne, who back in August assembled a cyber intelligence team to analyze the U.S. voting system.

    “For 10 years or more, there have been references to a coming ‘assassin’s mace’ in the Chinese literature—where they take out the United States with one stroke,” Byrne told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program. “The national security community in the United States has been trying to figure this out: Is it their new aircraft carrier? Is that the hypersonic missile? Is it this, that, is it an EMP?”

    “I don’t think so, ” he told host Jan Jekielek. “The one stroke that takes the United States out is what we’re experiencing right now.”

    The 2020 vote involved “massive election fraud,” he says. “Not voter fraud, but election fraud.”

    I doubt the “China did it” theory of election fraud, mainly because we’ve already seen the Democratic Party use these methods of fraud on a smaller scale (see Philadelphia) in past elections.

  • Despite the layoff, it’s been a busy week, so I have no doubt missed several election fraud stories. Please feel free to link to them in the comments.

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    Texas Election Fraud Lawsuit Rejected

    Friday, December 11th, 2020

    Well, so much for that hope of overturning massive election fraud:

    The Supreme Court on Friday evening rejected a suit brought by the state of Texas seeking to challenge election results in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.

    The Court wrote in an order that the lawsuit was denied for “lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution.

    The lawsuit claimed that voting procedures in those four states were marred by irregularities that led to the election of Joe Biden as president. A group of 126 House Republicans, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, signed on to an amicus brief in support of the lawsuit.

    “Texas has not demonstrated a cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections,” the Court ruled. “All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”

    I doubt any other lawsuit has a chance to stop the steal at this point, so we’re looking at the overwhelming likelihood Joe Biden will be sworn in as 46th President of the United States on January 20.

    Election Fraud Update for December 7, 2020

    Monday, December 7th, 2020

    We are rapidly approaching the endgame on election fraud remedies. States must ratify their final electors by December 8 (the “safe harbor” date), and electors meet and vote on December 14. Either the Supreme Court will have stopped the steal by that date, or Joe Biden will officially receive enough electoral votes to be elected President.

  • President Donald Trump lays out the case for significant voter fraud having altered the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election:

  • Here is a complete transcript of the speech.
  • Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has agreed to hear arguments that Pennsylvania’s loose mail voting requirements violated both state and federal law. Moreover, hearing it within the “safe harbor period by Tuesday “may signal that the Supreme Court takes Kelly’s case, which was rejected by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court with prejudice last weekend.”
  • The mysterious case of four suitcases of ballots pulled out from under a table after counting had supposedly stopped:

    President Donald Trump’s legal team on Dec. 3 presented surveillance footage at a Georgia state legislature hearing that appears to show ballot-counting workers telling poll observers late at night on Election Day to leave before continuing to count and pulling out what appears to be boxes filled with ballots.

    In the hearing on Dec. 3, Jacki Pick, a lawyer who is volunteering with the campaign’s legal case, said the team received video footage from State Farm Arena’s vote-tabulation center in Fulton County, Georgia. The team said that GOP poll watchers weren’t allowed to watch the counting process in the poll center.

    According to Pick, an unusual occurrence took place later in the evening at around 10 p.m. local time: A woman—described as a blonde woman with braids—told workers to stop counting and notified everyone to go home.

    Describing the video footage, Pick said, “Everyone clears out, including the Republican observers and the press, but four people stay behind and continue counting and tabulating well into the night.” The four counted unobserved until about 1 a.m., according to the video.

    Pick said that video footage shows Fulton County election workers waiting at their scanning areas until GOP poll observers and reporters left the room before they started “scanning ballots,” ostensibly without any observation.

  • National Review‘s Rich Lowry says that there’s nothing nefarious going on. I’m not so sure.
  • Ruby Freeman and daughter/supervisor Wandrea “Shaye” Moss (involved in the suitcases full of ballots) are also involved in this video-captured thumb drive handoff:

    If that’s not suspicious activity, they’re certainly doing an amazing imitation of looking suspicious while doing something.

  • Freeman seems to have lawyered up.
  • “GA Rep Says Forensic Tests Run On Sequestered Dominion Equipment Found Votes Switched From Trump to Biden.”
  • “Whistleblowers Dispute Over 1 Million Ballots, Cite Dominion Tampering, Shipping Filled Ballots Across State Lines.”

    The Amistad Project has gathered whistleblowers and sworn declarations revealing over one million potentially fraudulent swing-state ballots, including completed ballots getting shipped across state lines, postal service workers being told to prioritize Biden mail, and officials tampering with Dominion systems to prevent an audit.

    In total, over 300,000 ballots are at issue in Arizona, 548,000 in Michigan, 204,000 in Georgia, and over 121,000 in Pennsylvania.

    The declarations state that unlawful actions by state and local election officials in swing states, and possibly U.S. Postal Service officials,” the Amistad Project noted.

    The evidence details “the failure of election officials in blue jurisdictions to maintain ballot chain of custody,” and include “photographs of individuals improperly accessing voting machines and a detailed eyewitness account of the breaking of sealed boxes of ballot jump drives and commingling of those jump drives with others.”

    In addition to voting machine tampering, the Amistad Project’s findings reveal efforts by Postal Service officials in at least three of six swing states. “Details include potentially hundreds of thousands of completed absentee ballots being transported across three state lines, and a trailer filled with ballots disappearing in Pennsylvania,” the group notes.

    The Amistad Project feels that one whistleblower, a USPS truck driver Jess Morgan, had “fraudulent ballots were mistakenly placed” in his Pennsylvania-bound truck.

    (Hat Tip: Cut Jib news at Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • “Up to 280,000 Ballots ‘Disappeared’ Overnight Along with Trailer, USPS Whistleblower Alleges.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Judge Orders Forensic Audit of Dominion Voting Machines in Michigan.” “‘Our team is going to be able to go in this morning at about 8:30 and will be there for about eight hours to conduct that forensic examination and we’ll have the results in about 48 hours, and that’ll tell us a lot about these machines,’ Trump election attorney Jenna Ellis told Fox News.” Maybe this will finally provide the Dominion smoking gun. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Did Dominion give Biden a 5% boost in Georgia?
  • “Biden Received ‘Mathematically Impossible’ Spike in Votes When Suspicious Ballots Counted in Georgia.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Trump campaign witness Melissa Carone’s testimony about Michigan fraud was evidently deemed worthy of Saturday Night Live parody.
  • “Arizona GOP finds 2% of duplicate ballots took votes away from Trump after judge allows sample to be examined.”
  • Wisconsin supreme court refuses to hear election fraud cases.
  • A breakdown in Georgia court orders relating to election fraud cases through November 30.
  • The Red Headed Libertarian summarizes the evidence:

  • A call for an audit in Maricopa County, Arizona:

  • More evidence of Georgia fraud:

  • Scott Adams makes the case for witnesses being denied their rights to observe elections by force:

    (Hat tip: Mark Tapscott at Instapundit.)

  • Twitter has evidently taken down this video:

  • Sydney Powell discusses election fraud with Mike Huckabee.
  • “Pair Charged With Voter Fraud Allegedly Submitted THOUSANDS of Fraudulent Applications on Behalf of Homeless People.”
  • George Soros Appoints Chair of Smartmatic Parent Company to Lead Open Society Foundations.” That would be Mark Malloch-Brown. (Hat tip: Cut Jib news at Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Mysterious Tower Of Missing Trump Votes Appears In Utah Desert.”
  • Let me know if I missed any important election fraud news in the comments.

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    LinkSwarm for November 6, 2020

    Friday, November 6th, 2020

    All that calm wore off and now I’m just pissed about a variety of things: The stolen election, Amazon being irrational (“No, we can’t split orders just because one item won’t be in stock until February 2021, we don’t have that power. No, there’s nobody you can escalate to.”), and BlueHost refuses to say anything but “You’re not optimized enough” when the blog craters during and Istalanche. And other things I can’t talk about

    So enjoy a (shorter than usual) Friday LinkSwarm dominated by news of Democratic election fraud.

  • Yes, Democrats are trying to steal the election. Mostly what I’ve covered here before.
  • Documented evidence of fraud: “Wagons, Suitcases, and Coolers Roll Into Detroit Voting Center at 4 AM.”
  • “23,277 Ballots ‘Found’ In Pennsylvania, All Mysteriously For Biden.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Brazen:

  • Another lawsuit:

    Pennsylvania’s Democratic election leaders violated state code on Monday when they authorized county election officials to provide information about rejected mail ballots to political party operatives, according to a Republican lawsuit filed in state court and obtained by National Review.

    The lawsuit cites an email sent to county election directors at 8:38 p.m. on Monday by Jonathan Marks, Pennsylvania’s deputy elections secretary.

    In the email, Marks wrote that “county boards of elections should provide information to party and candidate representatives during the pre-canvass that identifies the voters whose ballots have been rejected” so they could be offered a provisional ballot.

    Democrats have been winning mail-in voting handily in Pennsylvania and mail votes are key to Joe Biden’s chances of overtaking President Donald Trump’s dwindling lead in the state.

    Republicans argue the direction from Marks violates the state’s election code, which states “no person observing, attending or participating in a pre-canvass meeting may disclose the results of any portion of any pre-canvass meeting prior to the close of polls.”

  • Larry Correia has thoughts:

    I am more offended by how ham fisted, clumsy, and audacious the fraud to elect him is than the idea of Joe Biden being president. I think Joe Biden is a corrupt idiot, however, I think America would survive him like we’ve survived previous idiot administrations. However, what is potentially fatal for America is half the populace believing that their elections are hopelessly rigged and they’re eternally fucked. And now, however this shakes out in court, that’s exactly what half the country is going to think.

    People are pissed off, and rightfully so.

    Before I became a novelist I was an accountant. In auditing you look for red flags. That’s weird bits in the data that suggest something shifty is going on. You flag those weird things so you can delve into them further. One flag doesn’t necessarily mean there’s fraud. Weird things happen. A few flags mean stupidity or dishonesty. But a giant pile of red flags means that there’s bad shit going on and people should be in jail.

    Except for in politics, where apparently all you have to do to dismiss a bunch of red flag is be a democrat and mumble something about “fascist voter suppression” then you can do all sorts of blatant crime and get off.

    I’ve been trying to keep up with the firehose of information about what’s going on during this clusterfuck of an election. Last night I was on Facebook talking about the crazy high, 3rd world dictatorship level voter turnout levels in the deep blue areas of these swing states was very suspicious. Somebody gas lighted me about how “I’d have to do better than that”, so this was my quick reply, listing off the questionable bullshit I could think of off the top of my head:

    The massive turn out alone is a red flag.

    But as for doing better…

    The late night spikes that were enough to close all the Trump leads are a red flag.

    The statistically impossible breakdown of the ratios of these vote dumps is a red flag.

    The ratios of these dumps being far better than the percentages in the bluest of blue cities, even though the historical data does not match, red flag.

    The ratios of these vote dumps favoring Biden more in these few battlegrounds than the ratio for the rest of the country (even the bluest of the blue) red flag.

    Biden outperforming Obama among these few urban vote dumps, even though Trump picked up points in every demographic group in the rest of the country, red flag.

    The poll observers being removed. Red flag.

    The counters cheering as GOP observers are removed, red flag.

    The fact that the dem observers outnumber the GOP observers 3 to 1, red flag (and basis of the first lawsuit filed)

    The electioneering at the polls (on video), red flag.

    The willful violation of the court order requiring the separation of ballots by type, red flag.

    USPS whistleblower reporting to the Inspector General that today they were ordered to backdate ballots to yesterday, red flag.

    The video of 2 AM deliveries of what appear to be boxes of ballots with no chain of custody or other observers right before the late night miracle spikes, red flag.

    Any of those things would be enough to trigger an audit in the normal world. This many flags and I’d be giggling in anticipation of catching some thieves.

    (Hat tip: Crossover Queen’s Creative Chaos.)

  • “How Senate Republicans averted catastrophe. With a late cash infusion and misses in the polls, the GOP looks likely to hold its majority.” Unfortunately, this was written two days ago, before Democratic Party election fraud manufactured enough votes to steal John James victory in Michigan and force both Georgia senate races into runoffs that Democrats could again try to steal.
  • Pollsters learned nothing from 2016. Or didn’t want to learn anything:

    A CNN poll had Trump down 12 percentage points nationally entering the final week before the election. An ABC News/Washington Post poll in late October claimed Biden was leading in Wisconsin by 17 points. That state’s voting ended up nearly even. YouGov’s election model showed Biden prevailing with a landslide win in the Electoral College. Progressive statistics guru Nate Silver had for weeks issued pseudo-scientific analyses of a Trump wipeout.

    Pollsters were widely wrong in 2016. Yet they learned nothing about their flawed methodologies. So how do they remain credible after 2020, when most were wildly off again?

    A cynic might answer that polling no longer aims to offer scientific assessments of voter intentions.

    Pollsters, the vast majority of them progressives, have become political operatives. They see their task as ginning up political support for their candidates and demoralizing the opposition. Some are profiteering as internal pollsters for political campaigns and special interests.

    Never again will Americans believe these “mainstream” pollsters’ predictions because they have been exposed as rank propagandists.

    That bleak assessment won’t make much difference to pollsters. They privately understand what their real mission has become and why they are no longer scientific prognosticators.

    Big liberal donors sent cash infusions totaling some $500 million into Senate races across the country to destroy Republican incumbents and take back the Senate. In the end, they may have failed to change many of the outcomes.

    But did they really fail?

    Democrats dispelled the fossilized notion that “dark money” is dangerous to politics. They are now the party of the ultra-rich, at war with the middle classes, whom they write off as clingers, deplorables, dregs, and chumps.

    In that context, the staggering amounts of money were a valuable marker. The liberal mega-rich are warning politicians that from now on, they will try to bury populist conservatives with so much oppositional cash that they would be wise to keep a low profile.

    Winning is not the only aim of lavish liberal campaign funding. Deterring future opponents by warning them to be moderate or go bankrupt is another motivation.

    Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey seemed unapologetic that his company was systematically censoring and de-platforming conservative users. In a recent hearing he talked to members of the Senate as if he were a 19th-century railroad baron.

    Google has been accused of massaging its search results to favor progressive agendas. During the final weeks of the campaign, social-media platforms shut down accounts and censored ads and messages, providing an enormously valuable gift to Joe Biden.

    Silicon Valley, like the 19th-century oil, rail, and sugar trusts, sees no reason to hide its partisanship and clout.

    The media coverage of the election was unsavory. Journalists confirmed the findings of Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center, which in an assessment of news coverage of Trump’s first 100 days in office found that 80 percent of the coverage was negative.

    As in the fashion of the Russian collusion hoax, the media for weeks on end revved up their engines for a seemingly certain Biden landslide victory. They rarely cross-examined Biden on the issues. And they certainly stayed clear of the Biden family influence-peddling scandal.

    What do all these power players — big polling, big money, big tech, and big media — have in common other than their partisanship and their powerful reach?

    One, they stereotypically represent a virtue-signaling coastal elite that feels its own moral superiority allows it to destroy its own professional standards.

    Two, they worry little about popular pushback because they assume that their money, loaded surveys, and Internet and media cartels create, rather than reflect, public opinion.

    Three, while these elite cadres have enormous resources, they still are relatively unpopular. Despite being outspent 2 to 1, pronounced doomed by pollsters, often censored on social media, and demonized in print and on television, Trump was neck and neck with Biden — a fact that a few days ago was deemed impossible.

  • “Election night showed why Trump voters don’t trust the media“:

    The wall-to-wall promises of a blue wave were delivered with all the certainty of prophecy. Joe Biden and Democrats would sweep the White House and all of Congress from sea to shining sea. Even a large voter survey that Fox News did with the Associated Press suggested as much.

    Some 24 hours after the polls closed, President Trump still has a fighting chance to get 270 electoral votes, the GOP is holding on to a slim majority in the Senate and actually gained five House seats, narrowing the Dems’ majority to 12 seats.

    We all make mistakes, and most of us try to avoid them. The problem with the unholy news-polling-social media-industrial complex is that the mistakes are so numerous and predictable that they begin to feel intentional.

    He’s wrong on that: They’ve felt intentional for a long time now.

  • Facebook Shuts Down Massive ‘Stop the Steal’ Group. The pro-Trump group attracted 300,000 members in just two days.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.”
  • Kurt Schlichter on the other election winners and losers:

    LOSER: The Pollsters

    You know, in the world we normal people dwell in, when you consistently fail, you get fired. But, as in so many of our garbage establishment institutions, when you’re a pollster there is no accountability. You keep failing and failing and failing and your dumb clients and the dumb media keep citing your garbage surveys. It’s really remarkable. You would think they would have a little pride in themselves and not want to look like idiots, but no. Instead, it’s, “Our weighting gives us Biden +15 in Texas. Gee, that sounds right. Let’s go with that!” Except for a few outlets, always the ones that take conservatives seriously enough to reach out to them, it’s been a disaster. But next time, we’ll hear once again about how, “Ackshuuuuuallly, the polls were very accurate in 2020” as if we have the same memory issues as the guy they were trying to help. The nice thing is that even the least woke Republican is woke to the poll scam now.

    WINNER: The Republican Party’s Populist Wing

    The battle for the soul of the Republican Party is over and we won. This is now the party of people who work for a living, people who have little companies, people who want their kids to grow up in a world of regular pronouns and where going to church isn’t a hate crime. It is also a party that cares nothing about where your grandfather came from – we are winning black and Hispanic voters to our cause not by condescending “outreach” but by offering an agenda of good jobs and their kids not being sent off to fight idiotic wars. It is not the party of the Chamber of Commerce – hey geniuses, how’s that pivot to the Dems working out for ya? It is not the party of the bow tie dorks who snicker with their lib buddies over pumpkin-infused IPAs in Georgetown restaurant about those Walmart-shopping, Jesus-liking hicks who make up the base. It is not the party of Wall Street. We are a party that happily includes both the Amish and Lil’ Pump. And the Democrats are the party of hedge funders, college professors, Antifa bums, and people who think “The Handmaid’s Tale” is nonfiction.

  • Tucker Carlson blasts the media for its racist assumptions:

    Elections tell you what the parties actually look like, not what you imagine they look like … so the coalitions become really clear. And in Florida, the population center, of course, Miami-Dade County, the biggest county in the state, Hillary Clinton [got] 334,000 votes there. An hour ago, with 84 percent reporting, Donald Trump had already outstripped that by more than 100,000 votes,” Carlson said on Tuesday evening.

    Miami-Dade is 70 percent Hispanic,” he continued. “That’s not what you would have expected if you’ve been watching for the past six months this attempt to racialize everything to make Trump the greatest racist in the world’s history. Whether you buy that or not, you would expect that to depress the votes for Trump in Miami-Dade County but the opposite happened. He’s doing better there with non-White voters than he did four years ago.”

    Clearly, the media was completely wrong.

  • Why the left is enraged at Amy Coney Barret’s confirmation:

    The fundamental source of this agitation is that the Left was convinced the Court would always be on its side, becoming its personal tool for achieving desired outcomes outside the electoral process.

    A fuller understanding requires looking back at recent history. And it requires looking at it more honestly than do the recent laments that, for example, Republican presidents over the past several decades have disproportionately appointed more justices to the Supreme Court than they deserve. For conservatives of a few decades’ past — and still, even, to some extent now — this is not a sign of success but of a particularly cruel kind of failure, if not even their preferred appointees could be trusted once on the Court. The modern conservative legal movement, animated primarily by a renewed commitment to understanding the Constitution as it was understood by those who drafted it (known as originalism), didn’t just come out of nowhere with the 1982 birth of the Federalist Society or the 1985 originalist stirrings of Reagan attorney general Edwin Meese. These and other stirrings came in response to a recognition on the right that the Left had either welcomed or been actively complicit in the transformation of the Supreme Court into a super-legislature, a way for liberals to achieve judicially what they could not electorally.

    To conservatives, this fact alone comported ill with the Constitution, never mind that many of the decisions achieved by the Court — most notoriously Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide in 1973 — proceeded to do further violence to the constitutional order. Their response was not merely to capitulate to this state of affairs, but to work, slowly yet surely, to change it. The Federalist Society helped these efforts greatly, bringing originalist-inclined law students together, connecting them to like-minded professors, helping to seed law schools and courts nationwide with trustworthy exponents of its philosophy, broadly speaking, and more. And this was done despite significant resistance from the left, which treasured the Court and wished to keep it under its control. Liberals aghast at McConnell’s hardball today shouldn’t just look back at the 2018 treatment of Brett Kavanaugh, but also to the infamous Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas hearings, the treatment of lower-court nominee Miguel Estrada, and more.

    And yet, for all of the Right’s successes on the Court, it must still witness what it views as fairly spectacular failures. The first Court with majority Republican appointees essentially affirmed Roe; in 2012 a Republican-appointed chief justice rewrote the Affordable Care Act to uphold it as constitutional; in 2015 the Court found a right to same-sex marriage in the 14th Amendment; and just this past summer, Neil Gorsuch, an apparent textualist, divined protection from transgender discrimination in legislation penned within living memory that originally contained no such protections. To be sure, the Right has had its triumphs — often though not always corresponding to defeats for the Left, only inasmuch as the Left was defying or hoping to defy the Constitution — such that it remains interested in the game. And so it is likely to remain, while still wary of the Court’s ability to uphold the Constitution, even with an ostensible 6–3 majority.

    Yet this complicated history, full of the kind of back-and-forth one would expect from the political process, helps to explain the depth of the Left’s anger about the Court’s current status. They are mad that conservatives discovered their thinly veiled attempts at transforming the judiciary and decided to try to recapture it with the help of a philosophy that emphasized a renewed commitment to the Constitution. Now that, after decades of patience and persistence, conservatives have established a beachhead on a Court liberals thought would always be theirs, they are infuriated. Some, such as Sheldon Whitehouse, see evidence of a nefarious conspiracy in what has been accomplished openly yet at great difficulty. But the true root of this remains a frustration that, in at least one area, the Right has refused to go along with the Left’s capture of an institution, that it has not consented to the triumphalist narrative the Left imagines culminates with it forever in charge of everything, never dealing with anything more than token opposition.

  • More on that theme:

    There is also one particular aspect of conservative success in filling the federal courts that contributes to the tone of hysteria that creeps into these reactions. The federal appellate courts, and the Supreme Court in particular, are elite institutions — indeed, the most elite institutions in all of American government and the legal profession. They are populated by highly educated professionals. They work with ideas. They are one of the few institutions of government that actually consumes the work of academics and sometimes translates it into policy. Their output is expected to be scholarly in character and taught in law schools. To see such institutions in the hands of conservatives, particularly social and religious conservatives, is intolerable to people whose worldview depends so heavily on sneering at the inferior intellect of anyone who holds to socially conservative views. That sneering is especially apparent any time a conservative is described as intelligent; the gag reflex you see in response is visceral.

    Elite or wannabe-elite institutions in our culture these days tend to be dominated by social liberals and progressives, who in turn seek to drive out all dissenters. To be a conservative on a university faculty is to be, at a minimum, badly outnumbered. Often there are more-or-less open efforts to stamp out any remaining vestiges of disagreement. We see the same thing with big newspapers, magazines, and other journalistic institutions; with the arts and entertainment; increasingly in large corporations as well. The tribunes of the legal profession itself — the bar associations, the journals covering the legal industry, the people who hand out awards — are dominated by the same groups, and rarely even engage with the possibility that their values might not be the only good ones. But no amount of desire for social ostracism can change the fact that the Supreme Court and the federal appellate courts sit atop the legal food chain, where the bar’s disapproval must remain comparatively muted, if through clenched teeth. To a certain sort of progressive, this itself serves as a kind of standing rebuke, a nagging reminder that gets in the way of simply scorning the idea that conservatives could be capable of doing such a job.

  • “My kid has cancer and ObamaCare is making everything worse.”
  • Governor Abbott welcomes a new resident:

  • Under other circumstances this might be amusing:

  • “Miracle: Ballot Counter Turns 5 Biden Votes Into 5,000.”
  • “Florida Recount Finally Wraps Up, Al Gore Declared President.”
  • Mike the Musicologist sends an emergency puppy:

  • That’s “Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett” To You

    Monday, October 26th, 2020

    Amy Coney Barrett was just confirmed to the Supreme Court on a vote of 52-48.

    Just one tweet:

    LinkSwarm for October 16, 2020

    Friday, October 16th, 2020

    I couldn’t post to Twitter yesterday, and briefly thought they’d finally banned me for spreading Disapproved Hunter Biden News. Sadly, it was down for everyone, not just me.

    Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • “Twitter, Facebook Go Full Tilt Protecting Biden Just Weeks After Execs Join Transition Team.”

    Perhaps the selective enforcement of content which is politically harmful to Democrats can be explained by recent hires by the Biden transition team.

    According to Breitbart, Twitter Public Policy Director Carlos Monje left the social media giant to join Biden’s transition team in September. He will reportedly serve as co-chair of Biden’s infrastructure policy committee, and helped organize a fundraiser for the former VP this week, according to an invitation from Politico.

    Meanwhile in October, Biden’s transition team hired Facebook executive Jessica Hertz to its general counsel to deal with ‘ethics’ issues. Notably, Facebook was the first platform to ban the Post article – with former Democrat staffer and Facebook communications team member Andy Stone tweeting that the company would be ‘reducing its distribution.’

  • Kurt Schlichter says that Trump’s momentum is back:

    Trump is back and this is a real race. I think we will win it.

    Except all the polls are telling us Grandpa Badfinger is up +37, right? Weird how four years ago right now, we were hearing the exact same thing. Ignore the spinners who are solemnly informing you that your lying eyes are lying again and the 2016 polls were akshually very accurate. Baloney. A key component of effective gaslighting is plausibility, and I was there. You were there. All we heard in 2016 was how Trump was going down to a landslide defeat. Instead, everyone in the smart set got blindsided by the Trump Train.

    And it can happen again.

    Now, it doesn’t have to happen again. Nothing is written, and we have to fight for our victory. There are a lot of stupid people around – my district regularly re-e-elects Ted Lieu – and Oldfinger could build a Coalition of the Drooling to put him in the White House. But I think the Trump lightning will strike again.

    Remember, the polls are the only data point in Biden’s favor. The only one. And as we have seen they screwed up last time and their proponents have an interest in them being bad for Trump.

    But Kurt, the libs say, “You must hate science because the science of polling cannot be wrong! It’s science.” Yeah, but so is phrenology. The fact is that not only do the polls have a track record of failure with regard to populists like Trump – remember that they also missed a number of Senate seats that were supposed to spin down the drain with The Donald – but many of the pollsters are retained by media outlets with an anti-Trump agenda. If these very fine people in the media lie about everything, like the “very fine people” quote, why would you buy the notion that there’s some line they won’t cross when it comes to faking polls?

    Am I saying they will push bullSchiff poll results to try to demoralize patriots? Yes, yes I am. You don’t have to just make up numbers – though I would not put it past them. You just tweak the turnout model and fiddle with the cross-tabs and voila! – CNN has its narrative. After all, it’s not like in the editorial offices they are saying “Sure, we’ll lie about Trump/ Russia, Trump/COVID, and Trump/Nickelback, and hey, there’s no way we’ll fake a poll! We have scruples.” They would sacrifice their babies to Baal if A) they hadn’t hit Planned Parenthood, and B) they thought it would ensure Trump loses.

    Also: “Biden rallies look like the shopping mall in Dawn of the Dead, which is apt since the guy handling his media events is apparently George Romero. Only the flesh-eating zombies had more pep than the Delaware Dementite’s fans.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Democrats Were Awful Filth Questioning ACB.” Kamala Harris looked sad, but Mazie Hirono of Hawaii was probably the biggest loon.
  • Hmmmm: “Pelosi takes a big stake in CrowdStrike.”
  • Trump has broken their minds.
  • Democrats want to pack the courts:

    Why do Joe Biden and Kamala Harris refuse to give a straightforward yes or no answer when asked whether they intend to “pack the Court” and expand it to a number larger than the nine justices that have been on the Court for the past 150 years?

    Because a considerable portion of the Democratic Party wants to expand the Court beyond nine. In a recent YouGov survey, 47 percent of registered voters opposed expanding the size of the Supreme Court, 34 percent supported it, and 19 percent responded they didn’t know how they felt. But self-identified Democrats were much more supportive: 60 percent wanted to expand the Court, 18 percent opposed the idea, and 22 percent didn’t know.

  • “Democrat Proposing To His Girlfriend Says He Won’t Reveal Position On Adultery Until After The Wedding.”
  • Kansas Democratic senate candidate Barbara Bollier comes out in favor of Australian-style gun confiscation.
  • More examples of that voting fraud that Democrats swear doesn’t exist. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Twitter discovers the Streisand Effect:

    It quickly became clear that in their attempts to strangle the Hunter Biden story, two social media giants left themselves gasping for air.

    Twitter and Facebook took major steps to squelch the New York Post piece, but wound up giving it far more attention than if they had done nothing and let their millions of users share it freely.

    For Twitter in particular, if you had to come up with a plan to reinforce conservative complaints about its liberal bias, you could hardly do better than for the tech giant to lock the Trump campaign’s account. Not to mention that of press secretary Kayleigh McEnany as well.

    Hashtag: #Fail

    In fact, Twitter chief Jack Dorsey admitted in a tweet that the company’s conduct–censoring stories and locking accounts with little public explanation–was “unacceptable.” You got that right, Jack. But then he didn’t do anything to fix it, apparently viewing the self-inflicted wound as just a PR problem. Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans plan to subpoena Dorsey next week.

    (Hat tup: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “A Poor Farrier’s Journey to Political Sanity.”

    After a few years of shoeing horses, briefly interrupted by a temporary job mining silver, I ran a brush-clearing and landscaping company as a side hustle. During this scramble for meaningful independence, the leftist tendencies I’d absorbed at college dropped off bit by bit. Life as a capitalist entrepreneur brought out the best in me, even when I was flirting with homelessness. Moreover, being in the real working world pushed me into contact with people, ideas, and situations that challenged me in all sorts of ways. After a few near-fatal incidents with horses (one of which left my skull and jaw shattered), I began pursuing my own business full time in 2016.

    Now in my early 20s, I still had a soft spot for socialist ideas, including a lingering resentment toward the wealthy. And so, from a progressive politician’s perspective, I was hardly a lost cause. But I also was becoming aware that the Left didn’t really have much interest in the challenges I was facing, being far more concerned with issues of race and gender identity. As a straight white male, I was supposedly luxuriating in a life of privilege—a stereotype that had nothing to do with my experience as a blue-collar worker who’d faced debilitating family traumas.

    Plus Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson.

  • Seattle’s far-left city council is busy taxing the golden goose to death. (Hat tip: johnnyk20001.)
  • Speaking of crazy leftwing city councils, thanks to the SUPERgenius police defunding policies of Mayor Adler and the Austin City Council, some 911 calls have waits of between 2-6 hours.
  • Austin Police is searching four four different suspects in a string of 7-11 robberies.
  • More Austin restaurant closures.
  • Some Wuhan Coronavirus perspective:

  • If you newly sign up for Twitter, they only recommend leftwing politicians to you.
  • Would-be second debate moderator Steve Scully lied about his account being hacked.
  • U.S. Cybercommand clobbers botnet.
  • “China Conducts Test Of Massive Suicide Drone Swarm Launched From A Box On A Truck.” I hope we’re working on similar or more advanced technology.
  • How malls die. Slowly, then all at once.
  • Daryl Morey steps down as Houston Rockets GM. He had everything on his resume (including the NBA trade of the century so far) but a championship.
  • “Twitter Shuts Down Entire Network To Slow Spread Of Negative Biden News.”
  • “Donald The Orange Returns Triumphantly As Donald The White.”
  • BidenWatch for October 12, 2020

    Monday, October 12th, 2020

    Biden refuses to reveal his position on court-packing, but he still wants to take your guns and hike your taxes until your eyeballs bleed, plus more on the enthusiasm gap, fracking flip-flops, and we’re all going to be millionaires (the Weimer Republic kind). It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • “Hey Joe, are you gonna pack the courts?” “Not telling!

    As the Senate moves forward on the president’s Supreme Court pick, both former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, continue to deflect when asked if they would try to add more justices to the nation’s highest court, a practice known as court packing.

    Biden and his party face increasing pressure because of the frustration of many progressives at the Republican effort to rush through a replacement for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a longtime liberal icon, with Amy Coney Barrett just before the Nov. 3 election. Because the addition of Barrett is expected to create a conservative majority on the high court some have called for adding more justices.

    The question of adding seats to the Supreme Court also hinges on the battle for control of the U.S. Senate, where Republicans currently hold a slim 53 to 47 majority. If Democrats are able to wrest control of the GOP, maintain control of the U.S. House and Biden wins the presidency, the party would need to pass legislation expanding the court beyond its current limit of nine justices.

    Lord knows progressive frustration is a just a swell reason to overthrow centuries of tradition.

  • Biden actually says voters don’t deserve to know his stance on court packing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • President Donald Trump is outperforming his 2016 polls in swing states.

    “According to an analysis from Real Clear Politics, Biden holds a 4.4 percentage point lead over the president in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, North Carolina and Arizona,” she explains. “However, Democrat Hillary Clinton was ahead of Trump by 4.8 points in these swing states this time in 2016—a slightly greater advantage than the one Biden currently has.”

    Biden’s leads in Pennsylvania and Michigan, two states Trump won, are also smaller than Clinton’s leads at this time four years ago. “The Real Clear Politics average shows that Biden is ahead with a 6.3 lead in Pennsylvania and a 6.2 advantage in Michigan. Comparably, Clinton was leading in these two states by 9.2 points and 9.6 points, respectively, this time in 2016.”

    Similarly, polls for Wisconsin and North Carolina show Biden with a smaller lead than they did for Hillary Clinton back in 2016.

    The only outliers to this trend are Florida and Arizona. Biden’s lead in Florida is at 3.5, compared to Hillary’s 3.2 point lead in 2016. Biden also leads in Arizona by 3.4 points, compared to Trump’s 0.7 point advantage in 2016.

  • “Biden website vows ‘assault weapons’ ban, forced gun registration and banning online sales of guns, ammo and parts.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • More media shenanigans:

  • Biden still wants to tax you until you bleed:

    Asked about President Donald Trump’s tax cuts, which most economists agree are largely responsible for the resurrection of the U.S. economy following the slow-growth Obama-Biden years, Harris said: “On Day 1, Joe Biden will repeal that tax bill.”

    Never mind that a President Biden will have no such power to “repeal” anything. That’s Congress’ job, and if Biden isn’t blessed with having both branches of Congress firmly in far-left Democratic hands, “repealing” the tax cuts won’t happen.

    But then Harris went on to say Biden wouldn’t raise taxes on those earning less than $400,000. Say what? By “repealing” Trump’s tax cuts, he would be doing just that.

    The truth is, Biden has played games with his tax plans all along. But the actual tax plans he has revealed would be nothing short of disastrous for working men and women, and the economy as a whole. Those plans plainly show that 77-year-old Biden, a lifelong politician, understands nothing about the private economy. That is, apart from it being a great source of graft for him and his family.

    A report out just this week from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that taxes would rise about $4.3 trillion over the next decade under Biden’s plans, while taxes under Trump would actually decline by $1.7 trillion over that period.

    At least, you say, that $4.3 trillion in added taxes under Biden would cut the deficit more than Trump’s plans, right? Wrong.

    The CRFB notes that its projections show a 10-year rise in federal deficits of $8.3 trillion for Biden, versus $6.9 trillion for Trump.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Biden and Harris show up to campaign with each other for the first time in their campaign…too bad no one else did:

  • Trump, Biden and the enthusiasm gap:

    Enthusiasm for Trump among his voters “is historically high,” said Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll. “We saw that very early in the cycle, in his primary vote totals,” when the president drew unusually large voter turnout in uncontested races.

    “Meanwhile, Biden’s enthusiasm level is historically low — so low that the Democrats run the risk of replaying 2016,” Baris said.

    Just 46 percent of Biden voters in a recent Pew poll said that they strongly support him, compared to 66 percent of Trump’s base.

    Rank-and-file Dems are sounding the alarm.

    “I look out over my Biden sign in my front yard and I see a sea of Trump flags and yard signs,” Pennsylvania voter Susan Connors told Biden worriedly at a CNN-sponsored town hall Sept. 17.

    Experienced political hands have a saying: “Yard signs don’t vote.” And research appears to bear that out — a 2016 study found that political signage increases vote share by a mere 1.7 percentage points, on average.

    Biden holds a 10-point lead in the RealClearPolitics national polling average, a commanding position with Election Day less than four weeks away. But the exuberant signs and displays of Trump passion may actually point to a yawning enthusiasm gap that could make a big difference on Election Day — just as they did in 2016.

    Four years ago, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found a 13-point enthusiasm gap in Trump’s favor, a result echoed by other surveys, The Hill reported.

    Many people . . . said that the sheer volume of Trump signs they saw in 2016 — and the scarcity of Hillary Clinton signs — was their first clue that the polling was wrong and that Trump would have more success than the pundits had predicted,” Daniel Allott writes in “On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey into the Heart of a Divided Nation” (Republic Books), out Oct. 20.

    It’s deja vu all over again… (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “Biden Fans Upset That New York Times Accidentally Committed Journalism in One Headline.” How dare you ask for health plan details from the great and powerful Biden!
  • “Hunter Biden Longtime Biz Partner And Burisma Board-Buddy Going To Prison After Obama Judge Reversed.”

    A federal appeals court has reinstated a fraud conviction of Hunter Biden’s longtime business partner, Devon Archer, reversing a decision by an Obama-appointed judge (and wife of Mueller special counsel lawyer) to vacate Archer’s conviction and grant him a new trial.

    Archer and several of his business partners were indicted on March 26, 2018 in a $60 million bond scheme which defrauded Native Americans. Hunter was not implicated in the fraud, however Archer and the other partners repeatedly name-dropped the former Vice President’s son.

    Following a trial which lasted nearly one-month, Archer was found guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and securities fraud. After requesting that the district court set aside the jury’s verdict, Judge Ronnie Abrams – the wife of Mueller special counsel attorney Greg Andres (who himself was a Deputy Assistant AG in the Obama DOJ, according to RedState) – granted Archer’s wish. What’s more, Abrams was Hunter Biden’s classmate at Yale Law school.

    In a unanimous opinion, a three-judge panel said that Abrams made a mistake by prioritizing her own theory above that of the jury’s, and that her assessment undercut the significance of the proof in its totality.

  • Ann Althouse reads the Vice Presidential debate transcript. Boy, the Biden-Harris ticket is 100% invested in promulgating the “Fine People” hoax.
  • “Pence effectively went after Harris — and a very biased moderator.”
  • How you know Pence won the debate.

    Mike Pence dominated in that debate. He was calm and cool. Rock-solid. Kamala Harris’s body language and voice reflected her nervousness—a stark contrast to her previous debate performances during the Democratic primary when she was still in the race. But neither her body language, her failure to answer questions, nor her constant reliance on fake stories as lines of attack were the key tell that she lost.

    The liberal media conceded Pence’s victory by describing Pence’s debate performance. And their go-to explanation was to attack the vice president by accusing him of “mansplaining.”

    

  • “China Censors Mike Pence’s Debate Comments On China But Freely Broadcasts Kamala Harris’s.” “‘China censored Pence’s comments on China,’ Canada’s Globe and Mail Beijing Correspondent Nathan VanderKlippe reported. ‘Signal returned when Harris began talking again.'”
  • Ace notes that 56% of Gallup respondents think they’re better off than four years ago and has some thoughts:

    Of all the people they know — including RINOs and squishes and NeverTrumpers who voted against Trump in 2016 — many of the NeverTrumpers are now reluctant Trump voters, and many of 2016’s reluctant Trump voters are now enthusiastic Trump voters.

    On the other hand, they don’t know anyone who has moved from voting for Trump in 2016 to voting for Biden.

    One friend tells me that the suburban well-to-do Wine Moms and Squish Sisters he knows are now fully on the MAGA train.

    Everyone they know who’s moved on The Trump Question (and Trump seems to be the only issue in 2020) has moved in favor of Trump.

    They also note that the “Shy Trumper” effect — where Trump supporters won’t admit to pollsters they still support Trump — is still strong, based on their own experience.

    One relates that he did not tell his own children that he voted for Trump, due to social pressure and the idea that he didn’t want to “normalize” Trump’s bad behavior to his children.

    If you can’t tell your own kids you voted for Trump, you’re not going to tell a pollster.

    And this person works in conservative politics, too!

    If even people in the conservative movement can’t admit they’re Trump supporters — well good luck getting Wendy Wine Mom to admit that on the phone.

    A friend of mine was a hardcore NeverTrumper in 2016 but now is a crawl-over-broken-glass Trump Voter. No, he doesn’t really like Trump, but unlike Jonah Goldberg and Steve Schmidt, he recognizes the profound threat the left poses to what is left of America.

    He has kept in touch with his NeverTrump pals. Media types. The types who annoy you on Twitter.

    And while he won’t Name Names, he tells me that many of the NeverTrumpers I hate are now “red pilled” Trump voters.

    They just won’t admit it publicly.

    Snip.

    If there were a lot of Trump defectors, the media would be profiling them and lionizing them and promoting them 24-7.

    But I haven’t seen a single story about Trump 2016-Biden 2020 defectors.

    The media hasn’t found any — despite the fact that by announcing that you’re now a full-on Democrat Liberal, you gain employment opportunities and social prestige.

    So if the media can’t find any of these people… do they even exist?

  • YouTuber Liberal Hivemind says that Biden is losing voters every day:

    Plus a supercut of Biden’s fracking flip flops.

  • Speaking of which, Pennsylvania voters are not fond of the fracking flip flop. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
    

  • Racist Joe does it again:
    

  • Good news! We’re all going to be millionaires thanks to Biden’s $15 million minimum wage:

  • Joe is trying his breast. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Biden wants to send psychiatrists on 911 calls:


    

  • Rimshot:

  • Kamala and The Knight of Columbus:

    chronicled many times over the last three years when Democratic senators questioned judicial nominees about their faith, suggesting in various forms that a candidate’s Catholic or Christian beliefs might render them unfit to serve on the bench.

    Several of those questions were posed by Harris herself, focusing especially on Catholic candidates. In late 2018, for instance, Harris grilled Brian Buescher, nominated to be a federal district judge in Nebraska, about his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization with more than 2 million members worldwide who conduct charitable work. Here’s one of Harris’s written questions to Buescher:

    Since 1993, you have been a member of the Knights of Columbus, an all-male society comprised primarily of Catholic men. In 2016, Carl Anderson, leader of the Knights of Columbus, described abortion as “a legal regime that has resulted in more than 40 million deaths.” Mr. Anderson went on to say that “abortion is the killing of the innocent on a massive scale.” Were you aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed a woman’s right to choose when you joined the organization?

    She went on to ask whether Buescher was “aware that the Knights of Columbus opposed marriage equality when you joined the organization” and whether he had “ever, in any way, assisted with or contributed to advocacy against women’s reproductive rights.”

    Harris posed these and other similar questions to Paul Matey and Peter Phipps, Catholic nominees who, like Buescher, are members of the Knights. Among the questions she posed to Matey based on his involvement in the Knights were:

    * Do you agree with Mr. Anderson’s description of abortion as “the killing of the innocent on a massive scale”?

    * Do you agree with Mr. Anderson that legal abortion in the United States has “resulted in more than 40 million deaths”?

    * Do you believe that a fetus is entitled to any protection under the U.S. Constitution?

  • Race snapshot:

  • “Biden: ‘I Won’t Reveal Whether I Plan On Abolishing The Constitution And Establishing A Glorious Communist Utopia Until After I’m Elected.'”
  • “Kamala Harris’s Ratings Plummet As People Realize They’d Have To Listen To Her Voice For Next 4 Years.”
  • “Kamala Harris Sneaks Into White House To Plant Weed On Mike Pence.”
  • Like BidenWatch? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    LinkSwarm for October 9, 2020

    Friday, October 9th, 2020

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Today’s topics include Texas, voting fraud, and Texas voting fraud.

  • Potentially the biggest story of the week is President Donald Trump authorizing the release of all documents relating to the Russian Collusion Hoax and Hillary Clinton’s email scandal in unredacted form. We were already getting a steady trickle of those declassified. Let’s see if this turns it into a flood.
  • Borepatch thinks the election is over. “The only thing that the Democrats had going for them was the lockdown. The breathless hyping of the ‘rona was intended to fan the flames of fear which would justify further lockdown and economic devastation. They then blamed Trump for all this, while the media shamelessly covered for them. That’s all gone now.”
  • How dare Trump recover?

    A keening wail of lamentation rings out across the land at Mr. Trump’s possible, dastardly recovery. How dare he! — to paraphrase Saint Greta Thunberg. 209,000 other Americans died, and not him! What vile and unholy devices got him out of a sure death sentence? No doubt Democratic Party astrologasters and consulting augurers will be searching for clues among the orbiting planets and the spilled organs of sacrificed chickens in the days to come. Perhaps Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) can snare a few of the president’s attending physicians into his House Intel Committee and rev up another impeachment for going against doctors’ orders. Wouldn’t that be a delectable counter to the looming confirmation process for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s replacement next door in the Senate this month?

  • “Media Criticizes Trump For Downplaying Virus Threat By Not Dying.” “Every hour that he lives is another hour that the severity of this virus is undermined!”
  • “Party That Wants To Run Your Healthcare Roots For Political Opponent To Die.”
  • Anti-Trumpers and their festival of hatred:

    Some of the worst things about it is the element of transformation of the formerly mild-mannered and kindly into founts of seething malevolence.

    It’s deeply unsettling to see the rage come over a person, as I recently did when looking into the eyes of a previously genial acquaintance who was shrieking with rage at me, her eyes narrowed with what looked like hatred.

    People don’t like what threatens them, especially if they have no immediate factual answer to some of the evidence presented to them. What’s left to them is to explode—which this person did, ultimately getting into her car and peeling off with tires screeching. I would guess, although I don’t know, and I’m certainly not about to ask, that she and plenty of other people I know might be rejoicing, openly or secretly, in Trump’s diagnosis.

    Are they “possessed?” Is this “demonic?” I don’t know, but I don’t think so. I tend to think in psychological terms because these people are, for the most part, not inherently evil. They are filled with self-righteousness, and they have been whipped up into a fever pitch by an MSM and Democratic Party bent on doing so for political reasons. This is no accident.

  • This week’s #BlackLifeMatters riots come to you from Wauwatosa, Wisconsin. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Kurt Schlichter on dangerous talk from stupid people:

    Wishing that your opponent dies of a disease is pretty bad, but some go beyond the passive voice when hoping for our deaths. They seek to do it. Exhibit A is tech overlord Dick Costolo, a former Twitter CEO apparently, who tweeted on September 30th, “Me-first capitalists who think you can separate society from business are going to be the first people lined up against the wall and shot in the revolution. I’ll happily provide video commentary.” So Dick, which by coincidence also happens to also be your name, you want to play horsey, huh?

    I guess casually cheering the murder of political opponents gets you some guffaws from your pals in Palo Alto cafes. But those of us who have ventured outside of the carefully constructed (and costly, in terms of sweat and blood) safe space that is the United States, and who get that the natural state of man is not driving Teslas and sipping bespoke Napa Chardonnay in prosperous, secure enclaves with one’s liberal cronies, know better. People who cheerlead political murder tend to be people who will support political murder given the chance to make it happen.

    One challenge for the dilettantes of death is to find the people who would actually commit political murder for them, but money and institutional inertia make that possible. As we have seen, woke zillionaires can fund their own lil’ revolutionaries. They are the ones behind Antifa, and if Donald Trump is reelected, we will likely see the DoJ (once Trump rids himself of the worse than useless FBI Director Christopher Wray, who never met self-serving establishment narrative he didn’t eagerly hump like a horny dog rubbing on the nearest leg) forced by Bill Barr to concede that this is an Astroturfed RICO conspiracy paid for by rich leftists. Yet, Antifa is not a combat organization (unless you are one person surrounded by a dozen of these brownshirts) but an information operation asset.

    But the Dicks of the elite are spoiled and soft and while this all seems like fun and games to them, with somebody else doing the murdering, they don’t realize that history holds that the status quo doesn’t remain in effect for everyone else when one group decides to alter it to its advantage. That is the plan – the establishment, outraged at the people who held them accountable for their legacy of failure, incompetence, and corruption by electing Donald Trump and a Republican Senate, intend to alter the status quo to ensure that this outrage never happens again. They intend to add states to increase their leverage. They intend to change voting laws to allow cheating and impose “campaign finance laws” that will be enforced against your candidates but not against establishment candidates to ensure there are no more troublesome populist alternatives. They intend, using tech companies and big corporations, to impose thought control and punish dissenters by cutting them off from access to the routine modes of living in this society – social media, banking, transportation, education. They intend to pass laws to disarm you so the ultimate failsafe of freedom is negated. And they intend to pack the Supreme Court to ensure they can’t be stopped by that pesky Constitution.

    But they will expect you to remain static and to respect and obey as if nothing has changed. You must be loyal to the institutions that betrayed you because…well, that’s unclear. Perhaps they hope you’ll just keep going along as if nothing is different out of habit, or from fear of losing what little they have left to you.

    Yet, the notion that Americans will wake up one morning, see that they are no longer free, shrug, obediently line up to turn in their Remingtons and Mossbergs and reconcile themselves to serfdom is not in the cards.

    Read the whole thing.

  • “Medical experts: Lockdowns do more harm than good.” You don’t say.
  • More studies find face masks ineffective against the Wuhan coronavirus than found them effective. I suspect that N95 masks might well be effective, but not this ‘wear any damn thing” Virus Theater we’re stuck in.
  • Arizona’s Republican governor Doug Ducey puts the kibosh on last-minute Democratic attempts to force through online voting.
  • SCOTUS to DC District Court: No, you can’t rewrite South Carolina voting laws a month before the election just to give Democrats a better chance to win. Not yours.
  • Carrollton mayoral candidate arrested on 109 counts of mail ballot braud. For the Texas geography challenged, Carrollton is part of the Greater Dallas Metroplex.

    Authorities arrested a North Texas candidate on dozens of felony voter fraud charges after catching him red-handed with a box of mail-in ballots belonging to local voters.

    Carrollton mayoral candidate Zul Mirza Mohamed was charged Wednesday with 109 felonies for fraudulently requesting and obtaining mail-in ballots he alleged were for nursing home residents.

    According to a press release from Denton County Sheriff Tracy Murphree, his office was tipped off to the possible mail-ballot harvesting scheme on September 23 by the Denton County Elections Office.

    Multiple mail ballots had been requested on behalf of Carrollton residents to be sent to a post office box in Lewisville, which purportedly belonged to a nursing home facility. Investigators contacted the voters and found they had not made the ballot requests.

    Investigators also learned the post office box was obtained using a fake Texas driver’s license and fake student ID from the University of North Texas, and they began surveilling the post office.

    On October 7, investigators saw the suspect pick up a box of requested mail-in ballots and take them back to his residence in Carrollton. Officers obtained a search warrant for Mohamed’s home and inside found the fake driver’s license and box of ballots—several of which had been opened.

  • What it’s like to be a cop in the antifa/#BlackLivesMatter era:

    I’m a police officer in a major American city. Many of you reading this have seen a movie or TV show set in this city. Some of you have vacationed here. We have a big problem with poverty, unemployment, people scamming the welfare system, drugs, and violent crime.

    Honestly, though, who I am and where I work isn’t important—what I stand for is. I show up every day I’m scheduled to work, on time, and I work. I don’t hang out at the station, I handle calls for service and I constantly back up other officers. I quickly progressed to different specialized units and, over time, even began to help out at the academy and became a Field Training Officer.

    But after a couple of high-profile incidents where suspects wound up dead, we were essentially told to stop pursuing the bad guys: Too much liability for the city. So, if a violent felon who shot someone last week is spotted and you know it’s him? Depending on the ranking officer working, you’re most likely not going to be allowed to go get him.

    Snip.

    Call someone out on being a worthless lazy officer? Is that worthless lazy officer a lieutenant’s mistress?! You just earned yourself a transfer to night watch in some outpost no one wants to work.

    In every major city there’s a punishment assignment. Everyone who’s ever been a city cop knows this to be true.

    After a while, that same lazy officer who’s been sitting in that same lieutenant’s lap, or who’s never really done anything noteworthy, except maybe they went to the right school or are in the right clique, they now have time on the job and they take the sergeants test. They pass and, if your department doesn’t go straight down the list, they’re now a supervisor! Newer officers have no idea they’re working for someone who’s telling them someone else’s war stories or making themselves seem more important than they really were in the situation.

    Roll call training is all about administrative work and checking boxes off for monthly audits. We barely talk about that stolen silver SUV that is absolutely raping us nightly with auto burglaries. Oh, and since our policies are out there for anyone to read (including the bad guys) in the “interest of transparency,” they know we can’t pursue them for a property crime once they blow the red light at the intersection after we light them up and they flee. Never mind the fact that that stolen SUV is occupied by a wanted felon for armed robber in possession of a stolen AK-47. It’s just a property crime, right? No big deal. If they t-bone a family of four and kill someone, the fleeing felon isn’t at fault. I am.

    Snip.

    You have mayors bowing to the political pressure from a small, very vocal, minority that wants to defund (read: abolish, in many cases) the police.

    Some mayors have made it known to their department brass they’d rather endure the optics of Revolutionary Communists (read: ANTIFA/BLM) rioting, looting, and burning their cities down, than have their police officers be seen wading into the fray with riot batons in hand.

    You realize that if cities abolish police departments, gated communities are going to hire private police forces, made up of nearly all ex-police from the agency that just disbanded (see Minneapolis when that happens) and ex-military guys. The city won’t have oversight and their rules and regulations are going to be way more relaxed. Less area to patrol and a large pay raise? Less crime? Sign me up!

    Major media outlets constantly fan the flames of civil unrest nationwide. In a race to be first with many stories, they finish last in credibility. The initial tragedy de jour is front-page news, leading all newscasts in prime time. Meanwhile, the retraction or exoneration of the officer is buried. No apologies from the likes of Shaun King, MSNBC, CNN, or Al Sharpton. They’ve all already moved on to the next rage-bait.

    Who gives a f— if some honest hard-working cop had his or her life ruined and is in financial shambles because they got a no-win call dropped in their lap, right? All cops are bastards, anyway. Black Lives only seem to matter when cops are involved in the death, justified or not, of a black person.

    Every single week, in many major cities all across this country, murders within the black community occur — oftentimes with stolen firearms. I’ve lost count of the bodies (mostly black, never in my case shot by police) I’ve stood over. Sometimes at night when I’m trying to fall asleep I hear the blood-curdling screams of family members (mostly mothers) who rush to the scene and are held back at the police tape.

    So, in a knee-jerk reaction to a high-profile incident, in an effort to placate a mob, there is talk of not only defunding the police but abolishing them. Do you know what that leads to nationwide? Cops like me are not being proactive. At all. Because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze.

    Read he whole thing. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • New York Times editorial writer is shocked, shocked to find left wing anarchists burning down America. (Hat tip: Vikingpundit.)
  • Real antifa group or an amazing parody of same? The answer may shock you!
  • Hamas: Hell yes, we’re getting missiles from Iran.
  • Seven of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s own aides have accused him of “improper influence, abuse of office, bribery and other potential criminal offenses” in relation to Austin investor Nate Paul.
  • Former Paxton assistant and current United State congressman Chip Roy called on Paxton to resign, which is not a good sign.
  • Lockdowns are the new global warming.
  • Boeing moving all 787 production from Washington State to South Carolina. How’s that hard left Democratic governance working out for you?
  • Speaking of Democratic governance, Baltimore’s next mayor is complaining about Donald Trump when he should be complaining about his fellow Democrats:

    Baltimore is no more “unjust” now than it was before its murder rate soared half a decade ago. What has changed is that Baltimore is less policed than it was back then. And that’s thanks to the policies and pronouncement of its pathetic Democrat mayors and other leading pols.

    It seems clear that Brandon Scott will continue in their tradition. Thus, it seems equally clear that Baltimore will remain exhibit A when informed people talk about the breakdown in law and order under the watch (if you can call it that) of Democratic mayors.

  • Today’s Democratic politician receiving a felony indictment comes to you from Rochester, New York, where Democratic Mayor Lovey Warren was indicted on felony campaign finance fraud charges. “At issue are transfers made from Ms. Warren’s political action committee to her campaign committee that far exceeded the $8,557 limit that a campaign could receive from an individual donor.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • “Democrat Party official arrested for allegedly pulling knife on ‘Women for Trump.'” “The communications director for the Democrat Party of Washington County, Oregon [Clayton John Callahan], was arrested after allegedly pulling a knife on female Trump supporters at an outdoor event hosted by the Oregon Women for Trump.”
  • “Texas Partisan Index: Rating Senate Districts From Most Republican to Most Democratic.”
  • European Union slaps tariffs on Chinese, Indonesian and Taiwanese steel for price dumping.
  • ESPN got woke, and now it’s going broke, or at least laying off between 300 and 700 employees. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Fake investor con artist hauls in a cool $30 million.
  • All the media Trump-bashing just makes people like President Trump more.
  • Truth:

  • Interesting Twitter thread on how Google, Facebook and Amazon all straight-up lied to the Australian government about anticompetitive practices.

    Worth reading the whole thing.

  • The Red Headed Libertarian notes that the MSM seems to intentionally conflate anarchists with legal militias, and offers a brief history lesson:

  • OK, I laughed:

  • BidenWatch for October 5, 2020

    Monday, October 5th, 2020

    Like antifa, Joe Biden is just an idea, CNN skews its poll even more than usual, more “inappropriate” touching, and Biden refuses to take a position on, well, just about everything. It’s this week’s BidenWatch!

  • New poll shows Biden “lead” down to three points after debate.
  • Hold on! Zogby says it’s down to two.
  • Speaking of polls: How to lie with statistics, CNN division:

    Always check the crosstabs. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Joe Biden is just an idea:

    Lost in the blinding gaslighting over Donald Trump’s remarks about white supremacists during the first presidential debate was the fact that Joe Biden proved again that he’s little more than a stand-in propped up by a compliant political press.

    Biden was unable to answer even the most rudimentary queries about his beliefs, never mind specifics about policy. Apologies to the Twitter expert class, but opposing Donald Trump is neither a moral doctrine nor a policy agenda.

    There is plenty to dislike about the president, but you rarely have to guess where he stands. Biden, on the other hand, says “I am the Democratic Party,” and yet, after a half century in American politics, we have virtually no idea what his presidency would look like.

    Biden’s already put a lid on his past, and the press has obliged. The same reporters who will comb over 15 years of Trump’s tax returns have shown zero curiosity in nearly 40 years of Senate papers Biden has buried somewhere in a University of Delaware basement. Then again, there’s not a single significant piece of legislation Biden sponsored in his 36 years in Senate that he still supports, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

    Thanks to the media, though, I know more about some flaky QAnon candidate in Georgia than I do about the presidential frontrunner’s foreign-policy positions. Or much else. If Republicans were threatening to destroy the constitutional order by packing the courts and throwing out the legislative filibuster — one that Biden’s mentor Barack Obama once argued was an indispensable tool of a representative democracy — there would be massive pressure on the head of the party to stake out a public position.

  • Biden campaigns from the shadowrealm:

    Biden’s basement has proved more of a tomb than a front porch. And his vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, the avatar of the “Harris Admiration,” seemed almost as scarce as Biden. Until now, both thought it wiser to let Trump Agonistês flail at his existential enemies and to let the press do its now-accustomed work of churning out periodic hit jobs on Trump. When Biden gave a rare scripted interview, his obsequious interviewers grimaced as they sought to prop him up when he bizarrely claimed that he had served 180 years in the Senate or that 200 million Americans had died from the coronavirus.

    Technology has allowed Biden to hobble along now and then with Zoom and Skype. Hidden teleprompters and a conspiracy of toady journalists have passed off fake press conferences as spontaneous rather than scripted events.

    Biden was never up to 16- to 18-hour days, as we learned in the year-long primary fights. So staying home purportedly also gave him rest and the chance to run an occasional on-screen Wizard of Oz campaign — and again let the ram Trump beat his head against the media, the virus, and the chaos of the cities.

    So without current technology, a slavish media, the weirdest year in American history, and strong polling, Biden could not have gotten away by disappearing from a presidential campaign for months on end.

    Yet there were other reasons that the once loquacious motor-mouth Biden never really campaigned. He became a virtual candidate in quite another sense: He has acted as an emissary for a Bernie Sanders socialist agenda that otherwise would have stayed underground after expiring and being buried in the Democratic primary. A prisoner of ideology, Biden found it wiser not to rebel and comment on the issues — well aside from the pragmatic worries of his handlers that he might detour to yet another “You ain’t black” revelation.

    If Biden were to openly oppose any of the hard-left ideologies that his handlers and masters embrace — if he endorsed fracking, issued a list of liberal rather than hard-left judges, or objected to dismantling the Electoral College — he would lose his new base and with them a close election.

    And yet if Biden were to explicitly and publicly advocate the Sanders, AOC, or Warren neo-socialist agenda, he would also lose, turning off his supposed swing-voter and independent suburban constituents.

    So Biden in the vortex stays nearly mute — a quietude certainly well suited to his age, the prior news cycles of 2020, his cognitive limitations, and his hope that he can win with a rope-a-dope, run-out-the-clock strategy.

    And now? The polls tighten. This strange year is gradually normalizing. Biden should be rested, after his months-long hiatus. And so will he in the eleventh hour actually conduct a campaign? Yes and no.

    His strategists still seem to suffer from the Hillary disease. As in 2016, Trump is frenetic in the swing states, the Democratic candidate is virtually nonexistent.

    As in 2016, Biden and the Democrats talk of a 70 to 90 percent likelihood of victory and an Electoral College blowout. They speculate about who will be the nation’s next cabinet officers, oblivious that such arrogance only feeds their blindness.

    As in 2016, a few polls — Rasmussen, Trafalgar, Emerson, Zogby — show Trump nearly even or ahead in some states and are thus dismissed. Mainstream polls, as in 2016, likely “prove” their absence of bias by under-sampling working-class Democratic constituencies and over-sampling suburbanites, many of them Republicans — as if they cannot be accused of party asymmetries even as they do not reflect accurate ideological affinities.

    And the polling outfits that in 2016 assured a Clinton victory are now once against cited for their reassurance that the Democrat remains clearly ahead.

    As in 2016, when millions would not reveal their preferences and were written off as mythical voters, so too now we are told that the proverbial stealthy Trump voter remains an exaggeration and a likely no-show.

    As in 2016, when Hillary dismissed Trump’s road-runner-like feverish visits to swing states as an ossified strategy, at least compared with the tactics of her twentysomething technical wizards, so too Biden’s youngsters now laugh off Trump’s calcified ideas, such as knocking on millions of doors to talk to voters in person.

    And as in 2106, when Hillary’s social-media masters and tech experts proved incompetent, so too Biden’s scripted tele-campaigning is often plagued by glitches, inadvertent glimpses of teleprompter reflections, and prompts left on the script that Biden dutifully speaks out loud, giving the game away.

    Long ago, we knew that Biden was physically not up for a normal campaign. Yet the freakish year of 2020 gave him the chance to outsource his candidacy to the weird cycle of events that drove down Trump’s polls.

    (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Biden sends mixed signals on whether he supports the socialist “Green New Deal,” but his own proposals look like the Green New Deal’s Little Brother:

    For starters, the Biden Plan does include the following:

    • “Ensure the U.S. achieves a 100% clean energy economy and reaches net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
    • “On day one, Biden will make smart infrastructure investments to rebuild the nation and to ensure that our buildings, water, transportation, and energy infrastructure can withstand the impacts of climate change.”
    • “He will not only recommit the United States to the Paris Agreement on climate change – he will go much further than that.”
    • “The Biden plan will make a historic investment in our clean energy future and environmental justice, paid for by rolling back the Trump tax incentives that enrich corporations at the expense of American jobs and the environment.”
    • “Biden will set a target of reducing the carbon footprint of the U.S. building stock 50% by 2035, creating incentives for deep retrofits that combine appliance electrification, efficiency, and on-site clean power generation.”
    • “Make climate change a core national security priority.”

    These are just a few examples of the radical progressive elements in Biden’s plan.

    Plus Green New Deal Supporter Kamala Harris would be waiting in the wings.

  • Kyle Rittenhouse’s layer threatens to sue Biden for libel for falsely calling him a white supremacist. As well he should.
  • Black members of the Proud Boys react to Biden calling them white supremacists. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Speaking of actual white supremacists, “Will MSM Ask Biden To Renounce White Supremacist Richard Spencer’s Endorsement?” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Tech stocks are likely to take it on the chin under a Biden presidency.
  • American Jews should reject Joe Biden.

    The Obama administration oversaw the lowest point in the US-Israel relations since Israel’s establishment in 1948. Biden was party to regular leaks of Israeli intelligence and political attacks targeting Israel on the global stage. In 2010, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited the US to mend relations. The prime minister was taken in and out of the White House through a side door with no official media related to the visit.

    Biden also worked to pass the Iran nuclear deal, which Israel heavily opposed. There are reports that in a 2014 meeting, Obama threatened to shoot down Israeli fighter jets should they target facilities in Iran. Biden does not get to run on the Obama-Biden record and play coy to these events. It is no coincidence that a month before Netanyahu addressed the House of Representatives, the Obama administration decided to declassify a 386-page report on Israeli nuclear capabilities.

  • No Wuhan coronavirus for Biden.
  • Biden refuses to denounce court-packing because he’s afraid of losing the radical left.
  • “The wife of a Massachusetts transit police officer who was injured in the manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers accused Joe Biden of touching her inappropriately and making a suggestive comment in 2014.” Hey, remember when we were supposed to believe all women during #MeToo? It already seems a million years ago…
  • Not that our media will report any of them:

  • “Biden Transition Team Member Worked With CCP Officials For Over a Decade.” “Suzy George, a new addition to the transition team of Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, is a former principal of Albright Stonebridge Group, a consulting firm that has extensive links to the Chinese Communist Party.”
  • The ghost:

  • Context:

  • Beto O’Rourke shows the same keen political acumen that made him a U.S. Senator and Presidential nominee.
  • Heh:

  • The whiff of desperation:

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