Posts Tagged ‘Philadelphia’

Crime Is Rising In America Because George Soros Wants It To Rise

Monday, December 6th, 2021

We’ve covered George Soros’ baleful effect on American law and order many times before, and will no doubt again. But the Daily Mail has published this handy piece about how Soros-backed DAs have led to spiraling crime rates in deep blue cities:

Billionaire Democrat donor George Soros has bankrolled District Attorneys in America’s most crime ravaged cities, where criminals are being allowed to walk out of jail on low cash bonds or aren’t even being charged.

Soros, the most prolific Democratic donor, is most known for giving to Presidents Clinton and Obama but he has also been pumping money into a far-left effort to overhaul the criminal justice system by giving millions to a network of woke prosecutors in Democratic races.

Among them is Kim Foxx, the State’s Attorney for Cook County, Chicago, where murder is at its highest in nearly 30 years.

In 2020, Soros donated $2 million to a PAC that backed Foxx in her re-election campaign. She won the race and has since offered deferred prosecutions and softball deals to criminals.

In 2021, there were more murders in Chicago than in any other year since 1994.

There have been more than 1,000 murders in Cook County, Foxx’s district, this year.

Soros bolstered her re-election campaign by donating to the Illinois Justice and Public Safety PAC.

Attorney Buta Biberaj is refusing to recuse herself from the case to remove School Board Chair Brenda Sheridan, despite what district parents say is an apparent conflict of interest.

Fight for Schools, the parent organization that filed to remove Sheridan, has now also filed a petition to remove Biberaj – who received a $861,039 contribution from the George Soros-funded Justice and Public Safety PAC during her 2019 election – from the case.

Ian Prior, executive director of the group, claimed Biberaj was ‘very involved in two of the very serious incidents’ that were catalysts for the push for Sheridan’s recall.

He said Loudoun County residents need to know the case will be handled fairly and that Biberaj’s involvement makes that nearly impossible.

‘It is necessary to have faith that the prosecutor in this removal proceeding has no actual or perceived conflicts, that she will go where the evidence takes her, and litigate this case with appropriate prosecutorial zeal,’ Prior told Fox News.

‘In this case, Commonwealth Attorney Biberaj was very involved in two of the very serious incidents that gave rise to the recall. There is simply no way that the people of Loudoun County can be confident in a fair process for the removal of Brenda Sheridan unless Ms. Biberaj either recuses herself, or is disqualified based on her conflicts of interest, and an independent prosecutor is appointed by the Court.’

The PAC spent over $500,000 on materials to damage one of her challengers. It’s a pattern that can be seen in other parts of the country.

He has also donated to PACs that support Los Angeles District Attorney George Gascón, who is being widely condemned for not cracking down on shoplifters and violent criminals.

Soros has also donated to the campaign of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner.

He donated $1.7 million to Krasner’s campaign, according to The New York Post.

Soros also donated to Super PACS that prop up Democratic prosecutors and politicians across Republican states.

Republican pundits say he has blood on his hands now for the deaths of innocent people like those killed at the Waukesha Christmas Parade by Darrell Brooks, a career criminal who had been bonded out of jail days earlier for other crimes.

In 2016, Soros pumped $3million into seven local district-attorney campaigns including races in Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico and Texas.

That includes Austin’s Jose Garza.

Larry Krasner, a 60-year-old longtime civil rights and defense attorney who sued the Philadelphia Police Department 75 times, won election in 2017 against a crowded field by billing himself as the outsider candidate capable of making radical change.

Krasner’s campaign benefitted from the largesse of controversial Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros, who poured an eye-popping $1,7million into the race to support the Democratic candidate’s criminal justice reform agenda.

Under Krasner, the future years of incarceration have been cut by half, and the length of parole in probation supervision have been slashed by nearly two-thirds compared to the previous DA.

Krasner, who previously defended Black Lives Matter and Occupy Philadelphia protesters as a lawyer, has clashed with the city’s top cops over his reluctance to prosecute non-violent gun and drug possession crimes, despite a surge in gun violence and rising homicide rates in the City of Brotherly Love.

As of November 21, 2021, there have been 491 homicide victims, a 14 per cent increase from last year’s number of 436, and 283 in 2019.

The Philadelphia Police Department and Krasner have been at loggerheads over a steep drop in convictions related to gun offenses.

This year, police in Philadelphia have made a record number of arrests for illegal gun possession, but the suspects’ chances of getting convicted have dropped from 63 per cent in 2017 down to 49 per cent in 2021, according to an analysis by the Philadelphia Inquirer published in March.

Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw was previously quoted as saying that Philadelphia’s criminal justice system has become a ‘revolving door’ for repeat gun offenders since Krasner was sworn into office in January 2018.

Krasner has blamed the decrease on police submitting weaker evidence in cases, or on witnesses failing to show up in court to testify.

The progressive Democrat DA has contended that his main focus is on convicting people who use guns to kill or hurt others, not those who are caught being in possession of the weapons.

Krasner’s office has argued that there is little evidence that suspects accused of being in possession of guns are responsible for the uptick in gun violence.

Compared to the previous DA term, Krasner’s has imposed 24,000 fewer years of incarceration and 102,000 fewer years of supervised probation or parole since 2018.

We covered some of Krasner’s follies here.

Other Soros-backed DAs include:

  • Kim Ogg (Harris County)
  • Joe Gonzalez (Bexar County)
  • Chesa Boudin (San Francisco)
  • Kim Gardner (St. Louis County)
  • Mike Schmidt (Multnomah County (Portland))
  • Rachael Rollins (Suffolk County, MA)
  • There are probably several I’ve missed. (Feel free to add them in the comments below.)

    The question remains: How does Soros benefit from raising crime rates in Democratic Party-controlled cities? What is the endgame?

    I’ve seen various theories, but I want to throw it open to readers as well. Feel free to share your thoughts and theories in the comments below.

    LinkSwarm for May 28, 2021

    Friday, May 28th, 2021

    Like inflation and unemployment, crime rates are rising again. Biden is really the 1970s gift that keeps giving!

  • Democrats are weaker than they appear:

    Vulnerable red- and purple-state Democrats need some bipartisan cover if they’re going to vote for another massive spending bill. And Biden would prefer to have a unified Democratic Party blaming Republicans for the inability to come to a consensus than to have a divided Democratic Party with one side of the Senate caucus blaming the other side of the Senate caucus for the inability to come to a consensus.

    Chuck Schumer is largely bluffing when he says the Senate will pass an infrastructure bill in July, with or without Republicans. Democrats can go down this path, but it’s a risk that at least a handful of their senators don’t want to take, and when the Senate is split 50–50, the Democrats can’t afford to lose anyone. Those with long memories can remember when Democrats were convinced all the legislation they passed in 2009 and 2010 would protect them in the midterms.

  • Speaking of Democrats in trouble, rising violent crime rates are another thing that might doom them in midterm elections:

    A rise in violent crime is endangering slim Democratic congressional majorities more than a year out from the midterm elections and threatening to revive “law and order” as a major campaign issue for Republicans for the first time since the 1990s.

    Homicides in cities increased by up to 40% over the previous year, the biggest single-year increase since 1960, a trend that has not abated so far in 2021. Sixty-three of the 66 largest police jurisdictions saw a rise in at least one category of violent crime, ranging from homicide and rape to robbery and assault, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association. Homicides and shootings have gone up for three straight years in Washington, D.C., and at least a dozen mass shootings were reported nationwide over the weekend.

    Democrats’ flirtations with defunding the police — a handful of lawmakers on the Left nearly scuttled a $1.9 billion Capitol security bill in the House — may make them ill-equipped to handle the reemergence of crime as a top issue for voters.

  • Speaking of rising crime rates, having Soros-backed Democratic District Attorney Larry Krasner overseeing Philadelphia has helped create the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast:

    Mirrors are useful. A hooker walking down the street can easily fix their makeup. They can lean on them when they nod out too. In addition, when a heroin addict has no more veins left to inject in their arms, that mirror can help them find one in their neck.

    It’s kind of hard to inject a needle in your neck otherwise. Think about it.

    You’ll eventually get a sideview mirror ripped off your vehicle sooner or later. It generally happens as they nod out or “dip out” when the drugs kick in. When they slump towards the ground, they generally just take the mirror with them.

    You also become way to comfortable with people “dipping out”. It’s the local dance craze around here. As heroin takes effect, it’s almost like they fall asleep on their feet — slowly getting ever so close to the ground. Miraculously, they rarely hit the pavement. Many yoga masters couldn’t duplicate their prowess.

    Dippers are everywhere. It’s so common, YouTube has endless clips up and down Kensington Avenue; many have hundreds of thousands of views. A YouTuber named “HoodTime” has over 5 million views on a walk he captured through Kensington March of this year. Many others are following suit.

    Just walking through Kensington and filming gets you instant material. There’s always something to see here. It’s sometimes hard to tell if you’re in America or a third-world nation at points. But money hides in trash and addiction.

    As Mike Newall explains in his article for the Philadelphia Inquirer, some of the drug corners near where I work pull in over $20 million a year. He also quotes Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro as saying Kensington’s drug trade is close to a billion dollar a year enterprise.

    (Hat tip: Dwight.) There are ways to decriminalize drugs that don’t give a pass to widespread “quality of life” offenses. merely ceasing to prosecute people for open criminality doesn’t make the problems that open criminality engenders go away.

  • Even Ezra Klein says that rising crime rates are a threat to Democrats. Gee, I must have missed him expressing such concerns when antifa and #BlackLivesMatter were burning down large swathes of American cities last year…
  • In news of the Biden recession, both both inflation and unemployment picked up in April. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday that he opposes teaching critical race theory in the state’s public schools, calling the ideas pushed by its advocates as ‘based on false history’ and ‘teaching kids to hate their country and to hate each other.'” Good.
  • Kurt Schlichter: Bring on the ‘Asperger’s Republicans’:

    Far too many Republicans, for far too long, have found themselves distracted and/or enslaved by the elite consensus, restrained by norms and conventions that the liberal elite demands we observe, but that it itself flaunts when those rules limit its options. These Fredocons care what people who care nothing about them think, and they find themselves responding to the outside stimuli of the garbage mainstream media instead of focusing intently on conservative change while disregarding the slings and arrows of the haters. When it comes to fighting the establishment, political Asperger’s is indicative of awesomeness.

    And our next generation of Republicans needs to embrace their place on the Spectrum – the more inappropriate the liberal elite finds their reactions to its cues and signals, the better. No more tame, pliable sissies like Mitt (R-ish – Miracle Whip). No more of Nikki! Haley’s sucking up to the establishment while trying to grift the base by leveraging hack conserva-cliché’s from 2005 to present to us as hardcore instead of Jeb! in a dress. No more Kristi!s and Asa!s fronting as all tuff about men pretending to be girls to win races then folding the second the establishment disapproves. Instead, we need GOP politicians who are utterly immune to the siren song of a media and an establishment that seek to draw them in and crash them upon the rocks. Our pols need to ignore MSNBCNN and its hysterical horsehockey. They need to stop reading the NYT and WaPo and being scared that a bad write-up will get them uninvited to all the cool parties. They need to lock onto their target and take it out like an Israeli missile flattens a Hamas/AP frat house.

    Look at Ron DeSantis – he just doesn’t care what the bad guys say. Not at all. They scream that he won’t enforce face-diapering, that he’s too hard on election fraud, that’s he’s declared open season on those Antifa/BLM nimrods who trap normal citizens in their cars on public roads, and then DeSantis just goes ahead and does what he wants anyway. And it works – he’s super popular.

  • Also weighing in against Critical Race Theory: Austin Knudsen, Montana’s Attorney General.
  • How Democratic foreign policy “experts” are projecting their own failures on Jared Kushner:

    For the past four years, there was no greater laughingstock in the American foreign policy cognoscenti than Jared Kushner. A full-on consensus reigned that cast the previous administration’s Middle East policies as hopelessly ignorant and one-sided, a view that went unchallenged in the smart set’s Op-Ed pages. There was no easier laugh to be had, no quicker way to pull a nodding agreement, than to mock the intelligence and good will of the former president’s son-in-law, charged with crafting an American peace plan, and obviously in way over his head.

    But the Young Pretender in charge of the Mideast portfolio is gone, and the mommies and daddies are back in charge, their think tanks falling over each other producing glossy full-color booklets promoting policies that would bring to bear the priorities of people who actually understood a thing or two about Israelis, Palestinians, international law, justice, and most importantly, American strategic interests.

    And four months into the methodical implementation of all the bright ideas reflecting off those glossy booklets, the situation on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territories has taken a dramatic turn for the worst.

    Though Kushner is long gone, this latest conflagration has been laid at his feet. His name trended on Twitter for days as hostilities between Israel and Hamas escalated. “They really put Jared Kushner, the slumlord millionaire who couldn’t properly fill out security clearance forms, in charge of Peace in the Middle East. Failure was inevitable,” read one viral tweet. “Kushner’s Absurd Peace Plan Has Failed” blared the headline to Michelle Goldberg’s New York Times column.

    This is not just wrong; it’s complete projection. Kushner-era policies—on Jerusalem, UNRWA, and regional diplomacy—were promised again and again to lead to an “explosion,” but didn’t. The return of the experts was supposed to improve lives and prospects for Israelis and Palestinians alike, but hasn’t. In fact, it was the foreign policy intelligentsia’s values and vision that have led to disaster.

    Back in March, mere weeks into the new Biden administration, a leaked internal State Department memo outlined the contours of a new direction on American policy toward the Palestinian issue. The document called for renewed diplomatic ties with the Palestinian Authority, restoring aid that had been cut, renewing American contributions to UNRWA, putting pressure on Israel for moves in Jerusalem that would make a new Palestinian Authority election possible, and pursuing a two-state arrangement based roughly on the pre-1967 lines.

    These were all priorities of the smart set miffed by a previous administration that was too close to Israel for their tastes. But they were also terrible ideas. Take the renewal of UNRWA funding. UNRWA is the U.N. agency dedicated to perpetuating, rather than solving, the Palestinian refugee problem. By cultivating the myth of a non-existent “right of return” rather than rehabilitating displaced persons and their descendants, UNRWA ensures that a negotiated two-state deal cannot be reached.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Drew Holden takes us on a trip down memory lane of various MSM talking heads declaring that the Wuhan coronavirus lab leak hypothesis was a “conspiracy theory,” including all the usual suspects (New York Times, CNN, etc.).
  • “Washington, D.C., Attorney General Karl Racine (D) filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon Tuesday, alleging that the e-commerce giant has unfairly raised prices and hurt innovation.”
  • Glenn Greenwald: “A federal appellate court on Thursday invalidated the racial and gender preferences in President Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act as unconstitutional. The Cincinnati-based Sixth Circuit of Appeals ruled that provisions of that law, designed to grant preferences to minority-owned small-restaurant owners for COVID relief, violate the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.”
  • “Moms Demand Action [AKA another branch of the Brady Bunch Hydra] member-turned-congresswoman in hot water over bribe.” Allegedly newly-elected Illinois Rep. Marie Newman bribed opponent Lymen Chehade to drop out of the race, then reneged on the cushy congressional job.

  • “Support for Black Lives Matter Movement Collapses Among Whites and Hispanics, Drops For Blacks.” The only question is why it took so damn long, when it’s been obvious for a long time that it is radical marxist garbage.
  • Christian teacher suspended after opposing the district’s transgender doctrine. “The teacher, Byron “Tanner” Cross, made the defiant declaration at a Loudon County school board meeting on Tuesday, according to the nonprofit group, Parents Against Critical Race Theory.”
  • Ted Cruz gets Biden ATF director nominee David Chipman to admit under oath that he wants to ban the AR-15. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Speaking of Ted Cruz: Israel has a right to defend itself.
  • “Hunter Biden’s Ukraine salary was cut two months after Joe Biden left office.” What a curious coincidence!
  • China Warns Australia’s Military Is “Weak“, Will Be “First Hit” In Any War With Western Alliance.” Knowing Australia, this is far more likely to piss them off than make them cower. Maybe Australia should develop it’s own nuclear arsenal…
  • CNN hits new lows. I suppose I should clarify that’s new ratings lows… (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Screwed up even by the standards of Baltimore.
  • Politifact tries to fact check The Babylon Bee yet again. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • IDF stats:

  • Interesting: Higher reasoning functions wake up first from anesthesia. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Enjoy the original video for David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”.” A very different sound mix as well.
  • If you’d told me 10 years ago that one day Windows would run Linux apps, I’d give you a funny look. But that appears to be happening. “New Windows 10 test build adds first preview of Linux GUI apps on WSL.” That’s “Windows Subsystem for Linux.”
  • Now you’ll finally get a chance to read John Steinbeck’s werewolf novel.
  • “Public School Teachers Issue Students Their Summer Book-Burning Lists.”
  • “Newsom Announces Sweepstakes Where 5 Lucky Winners Get To Move Out Of California.”
  • A vicious pack pulls down its pray:

  • Election Fraud Update for November 23, 2020

    Monday, November 23rd, 2020

    It’s another election fraud update, full of twists and turns. Some of these reports are from sources I’m not familiar with, so use your own judgment.

  • Let’s start off with a transcript of the Rudy Giuliani/Sidney Powell conference laying out the case that election fraud occurred:

    [Rudy Giuliani:] When we began our representation of the president, we certainly were confronted with a very anomalous set of results. The president way ahead on election night, seven or 800,000 in Pennsylvania, somehow he lost Pennsylvania. We have statisticians willing to testify that that’s almost statistically impossible to have happened in the period of time that it happened. But, of course, that’s just speculation.

    As we started investigating, both our investigations and the very patriotic and brave American citizens that have come forward, are extraordinary, extraordinary number of people, extraordinary number of witnesses. And what emerged very quickly is it’s not a single voter fraud in one state. This pattern repeats itself in a number of states. Almost exactly the same pattern, which to any experienced investigator, prosecutor would suggest that there was a plan from a centralized place to execute these various acts of voter fraud, specifically focused on big cities and specifically focused on, as you would imagine, big cities controlled by Democrats, and particularly focused on big cities that have a long history of corruption. The number of voter fraud cases in Philadelphia could fill a library. Just a few weeks ago, there was a conviction for voter fraud and one two weeks before that. And I’ve often said, I guess, sarcastically, but it’s true, the only surprise I would have found in this is that Philadelphia hadn’t cheated in this election, because, for the last 60 years, they’ve cheated in just about every single election. You could say the same thing about Detroit.

    Each one of these cities are cities that are controlled by Democrats, which means they can get away with anything they want to do. It means they have a certain degree of control over… certainly control the election board completely. And they control law enforcement. And unfortunately, they have some friendly judges that will issue ridiculously irrational opinions just to come out in their favor.

    So, let’s start with the specifics, Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania, the margin of victory now for Biden, which is not a victory, it’s a fraud, is 69,140 votes. The reality is that we are now at a count of 682,770 ballots for which we have affidavits that there was no inspection of that ballot at the time that it was entered in the vote. It was a mail ballot.

    Mail ballots are particularly prone to fraud. We were warned about that by Jimmy Carter, president Jimmy Carter and Secretary Baker in a report about a dozen years ago, in which they said that mail balloting is particularly susceptible of fraud, that we should very carefully consider ever doing it, and that it can be taken advantage of. Justice Souter warned us at the same thing in a comment in an election law case. And even the New York Times wrote articles about how dangerous mail voting, mail-in voting was. And this is the first time we ever did it en masse. And I think we proved that all three are prophets. It’s not only susceptible to fraud, it is easily susceptible to fraud, particularly if you have a plan or scheme, which sounds eerily similar to what Joe Biden told us a few days before the election, that he had the best voter fraud team in the world. But they were good. I don’t know that they were that good because they made significant mistakes, like all crooks do. And we caught them. One of them was pushing out Republican inspectors. Every state… almost every civilized country, even Tanzania and places that you wouldn’t think of, have rules about inspectors, particularly for mail-in ballots. And why particularly for mail-in ballots? Because they can more easily be defrauded and you can’t check on them.

    People who have never done a mail-in ballot, I’m going to show you why it’s so easy. Well, you fill out an envelope like this. You put your… usually in New York, it would be your assembly district and the precinct in which you’re voting. You fill out your name and your address, and you sign it. You then use an inner envelope, and you put the ballot inside the inner envelope. You seal it all, and you send it in.

    When it’s being counted, almost invariably in the United States, up until the mass cheating that went on in this election, a Republican and a Democrat inspector, as well as others, if there are other parties, is allowed to watch the unsealing of this ballot. It used to go on all over America when we conducted honest elections. Because the only time you can ever find out if it’s a fraudulent ballot, is when it is looked at. The minute you approve this, it’s thrown away, gone for eternity. The only thing left is the vote. That could have been Mickey Mouse. That could have been a dead person. That could have been not filled out properly. That could have been the same person 30 times. And all these things have happened, by the way. That could have been nothing filled out. We never know.

    So, for example, the recount being done in Georgia will tell us nothing because these fraudulent ballots will just be counted again because they wouldn’t supply the signatures to match the ballots. So, it means nothing to have counted these ballots, because for example, in Pennsylvania, where we have probably our most precise evidence, 682,770 of these ballots were cast, put in, and they weren’t inspected, which renders them ballots that are null and void, cannot be counted, have to be removed from the vote. Why? For several reasons, not the least of which is, that was basically only one of two places in the state where it was done. So, in the other parts of the state, there was a legitimate inspection of the ballots. So, if you have two different standards in different parts of the state, one favoring one part of the state, the other disfavoring the other part of the state, that’s a classic violation of the equal protection clause of the United States constitution, Bush V Gore being the most recent case that teaches that.

    Bit on “ballot correcting” snipped.

    To give you another example, we have 17,000 provisional ballots cast in Pittsburgh. Do you know what a provisional ballot is? Provisional ballot usually happens this way, and about 15 of the 17,000 happened this way, you walk in and you say, I’m here to vote today. Oh, Mr. Giuliani, you already voted. I did? I don’t remember voting. Oh, yes. Yes. You cast an absentee ballot. No, I didn’t. Yes, you did. No, I didn’t. Yes, you did.

    So, why does that happen 17,000 times in Pittsburgh? People walked in thinking… actually 15,000, to be precise. Why did it happen 15,000 times that people in Pittsburgh walked in to vote and they had already voted, according to the Democrat election machine? Did they forget? That many people with bad memories in Pittsburgh? Or is the following correct, that, as witnesses will testify, they were instructed by the Democrat bosses when they had a ballot in which there was no one registered, just assign it to somebody, just assign it to Rudy Giuliani. So, maybe Rudy Giuliani won’t show up to vote. And, if he does show up to vote, we’ll give him a provisional ballot. That is what we call circumstantial evidence of the fraud.

    The direct evidence of the fraud are the people who will testify that, in fact, that’s what happened to them, as well as the 50 to 60 witnesses we have for the way they were treated and not allowed to inspect the ballots. They weren’t just not allowed to do it. They were pushed. A few cases, they were assaulted. In all cases, they were put in a corral so far away. Probably the closest they got is from here to the back of that room. We could do like a… Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny? You know the movie? It’s one of my favorite law movies because he comes from Brooklyn. And when, the nice lady who said she saw, and then he says to her, “How many fingers do I got up?” And she says a three. Well, she was too far away to see it was only two. These people were further away than My Cousin Vinny was from the witness. They couldn’t see a thing.

    Now, I don’t know. You’re going to tell me that 60 people are lying? They didn’t just tell me this. They swore under penalty of perjury, which is something no Democrat has ever done. You don’t even ask Biden about this. You don’t put them under penalty of perjury. He doesn’t even get asked questions about it. He doesn’t get asked questions about all the evidence of the crimes that he committed. These people are under penalty of perjury, the names that are on our affidavit. They swear that they weren’t allowed to carry out their function as inspectors.

    And it’s not just a technical thing. There’s a reason they did it. Why would you not allow people to carry out the function they’ve been allowed to do for 50 years, 60 years? Why wouldn’t you allow inspections of those ballots? Because you knew you were going to use those ballots to catch Biden up. And you had a big road ahead of you. You had to catch him up for 700,000 to 800,000 votes that he was behind. And the only way you were going to do it were with the mail-in ballots. You couldn’t have a Democrat and Republican inspector around. They don’t even have Democrats watching, because they’d be afraid that they’d be honest Democrats who would say, “You’re cheating.”

    So, that takes us to Michigan where there was an honest Democrat who said they were cheating. And we’ll show you her affidavit because I know you keep reporting falsely that we have no evidence, that we have no specific acts of fraud. That’s because the coverage of this has been almost as dishonest as the scheme itself. The American people are entitled to know this. You don’t have a right to keep it from them. You don’t have a right to lie about it. And you are. I mean, you don’t report to them that a citizen of this country, a very fine woman who was willing to allow me to give you her name. I can’t give you all these affidavits. Because, if I do, these people will be harassed. They’ll be threatened. They may lose their job. They will lose their friends. We’ve lost lawyers in this case because they’ve been threatened. We’ve had lawyers that need protection. What’s going on in this country is horrible. And the censorship that you’re imposing is making it worse.

    But Jesse Jacob is an adult citizen and a resident of the state of Michigan. She’s been an employee of the City of Detroit for decades. I know her age, but she can tell you her age. She was assigned to voting duties in September, and she was trained by the City of Detroit and the State of Michigan. She was basically trained to cheat. She said that I was instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than when they were actually sent in. The supervisor made that announcement for all workers to engage in that fraudulent practice. That’s not me saying that. That’s this American citizens saying that under oath.

    Snip.

    Then she was instructed, “By my supervisor not to ask for a driver’s license or any photo ID when a person was trying to vote. Don’t ask for identification. Why would you not ask for identification? Because you knew that a lot of people not entitled to vote were going to come in and early vote. Because you knew that illegal immigrants were going to be allowed to vote. You knew, if you lived in Philadelphia, unless you’re [Italian 00:17:56]. That’s an Italian expression for stupid. Unless you’re stupid, you knew that a lot of people were coming over from Camden to vote. They do every year. It happens all the time in Philly. It’s about as frequent as getting beaten up at a Philadelphia Eagle football game. Happens all the time, all the time.

    And as it allowed to happen because it is a Democrat corrupt city and has been for years, many, many years. And they carried it out in places they could get away with it. They didn’t carry it out in neutral places. They didn’t carry it out in Republican places. They didn’t carry it out where the law is respected. They carried it out in a corrupt city where the district attorney releases criminals on mass, which is why it has so much crime.

    She also said, “I observed a large number of people who came to the satellite location to vote in person, but they had already applied for and submitted an absentee ballot.” So, she observed a lot of people voting twice. Again, this is Jesse Jacob, not me. “I was instructed not to invalidate any ballots and not to look for any deficiency in the ballots. Why would you do that? Because you’re cheating, on purpose cheating, intentionally cheating. You’re cheating as a institution. This is an instruction from the election commissioner or the employer to the worker. “Don’t look for any deficiencies in the ballot.” “I was instructed not to look at any of the signatures on the absentee ballots. “If she was instructed not to look for any of the signatures on the absentee ballots, why the heck do you sign it in the first place? In order to identify it. She was instructed not to do that because many of the absentee ballots were fraudulent, and they knew that, and they didn’t want to have account of that.

    “On November four, 2020, I was in strict structured to improperly predate the absentee ballot when the receipt date was after November 3rd, 2020.” Now, this is really significant because Justice Alito of the Supreme Court instructed Pennsylvania that any ballot that comes in after eight o’clock on November 3rd, 2020 had to be put aside and not opened because there’s a question as to its legality and its constitutionality. What she’s telling you is that they blatantly disregarded that order, that they took ballots that were marked the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, and they marked it down for the third in blatant disregard of the order of the United States Supreme Court.

    Snip.

    There are many more affidavits here. I’d like to read them all to you, but I don’t have the time. You should have had the time and energy to go look for them. That’s your job, like it’s my job to defend the president and to represent the president. It’s your job to read these things and not falsely report that there’s no evidence. Do you know how many affidavits we have in the Michigan case? 220 affidavits. They’re not all public, but eight of them are. Four affiants here, those are people who give affidavits, report an incident that, under any other circumstances, would have been on the front page of all your newspapers if it didn’t involve the hatred that you have, irrational, pathological hatred that you have for the president. What they swear to is that, at 4:30 in the morning, a truck pulled up to the Detroit center where they were counting.

    A truck pulled up to the Detroit center where they were counting ballots. The people thought it was food, so they all ran to the truck. Wasn’t food. It was thousands and thousands of ballots and the ballots were in garbage cans, they were in paper bags, they were in cardboard boxes, and they were taken into the center. They were put on a number of tables. At that time, they thought all the Republican inspectors had left, all but two had and an employee of Dominion who we will address a little bit later.

    Here’s what they jointly swear to, that every ballot that they could see, everything they could hear, these were ballots for Biden. When they saw a ballot, these were ballots only for Biden, meaning there was no down-ticket. Just Biden. Many of them didn’t have anything on the outer envelope because these ballots were produced very quickly, very swiftly and there are estimated to be a minimum of 50,000, maximum of 100,000. Many of them were triple-counted, which means they were put into the counting machine this way. Once, twice, three times. I didn’t see that. I don’t know that but for the fact that three American citizens are willing to swear to it. We’re not going to let them go to court and do that? We’re going to let this election go by when there are in this case 60 witnesses that can prove what I’m saying to you and other acts of fraud in Michigan? I mean what’s happened to this country if we’re going to let that happen? What happened to this country if we’re going to cover that up? We let Al Gore carry on an election dispute longer than this one has been going on for one state and for chads. This happened in Pennsylvania, it happened in Michigan, Michigan probably right now, if I count up the B, just one case alone, Trump v. Benson, a case that we dismissed today because that case was attempting to get the Wayne County Board of Supervisors to de-certify. Well they did. They de-certified. That case has 100 affidavits and 100 affidavits show essentially what I’ve talked to you about. Counting ballots improperly, counting them three and four times, having people vote three and four times, changing and backdating ballots to the point of at least 300,000 illegitimate ballots that we can specifically identify. The margin in Michigan is 146,121 and these ballots were all cast basically in Detroit that Biden won 80-20. So you see it changes the result of the election in Michigan if you take out Wayne County. So it’s a very significant case. That is being raised in the case of Costantino v. The City of Detroit. Not by us, but by an individual plaintiff. We are helping and assisting in that case however and you can find all the affidavits that you want filed in that case. You can find out they’re not just allegations, they’re allegations supported by sworn testimony which is a lot better than Joe Biden has ever done on anything. He doesn’t answer questions, much less give you sworn affidavits.

    On to Wisconsin.

    Wisconsin. Wisconsin had a very small margin, 20,544 last time I looked. In Wisconsin, without going into great detail, very similar plan. Republicans shut out in the City of Milwaukee and also in Madison. Republicans almost uniformly shut out from the absentee process. Not allowed to inspect, not allowed to look at the ballots. We have in Milwaukee and in the state of Wisconsin a much stricter law. Wisconsin doesn’t allow mail-in ballots. They didn’t buy into the big mail-in ballot situation. Wisconsin, when you look at their constitution, almost seems to not like absentee ballots. They state it’s not a right, a privilege, and they have very, very strict procedures and the strict procedure says that you can’t be given an absentee ballot, you have to personally apply for it. It’s illegal basically to solicit a vote and they have actually many reasons for it that probably goes back to their progressive days, when I say progressive, I mean late 19th century early 20th century progressive, when that really meant progressive, not retrogressive.

    So there are 60,000 ballots in Milwaukee County and 40,000 ballots in Madison that as far as we can tell and this is why we are auditing because we have very good information that numbers are going to come out about here that don’t have applications. Under the law of the State of Wisconsin, already decided, if there’s no application for an absentee ballot, the absentee ballot is thrown away. This all happened in two places in Wisconsin. Didn’t happen in Northern Wisconsin. Didn’t happen in Republican Wisconsin. Didn’t happen in neutral Wisconsin, where there are equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats, it happened in a place where the vote was 75, 80% for the Democrat. You take away any number of those and that 20,000 lead disappears. In other words, if you count the lawful votes, Trump won Wisconsin by a good margin. Indeed, if you count the lawful votes in Pennsylvania, he won it by about 300,000 votes.

    Also in the lawsuit filed in Wisconsin which is really a petition because of their procedures, there were no inspectors provided for the count of the illegal ballots. There were numerous backdated ballots, we’re just counting them now. Run over into the thousands and there were many precincts in which there was an overvote. Now let me explain to you what an overvote is which is something you should have explained to the American people because it’s about the clearest circumstantial evidence of massive fraud that you can have. An overvote is if 200% of the people who are registered in a district vote. Think about that. 200% of the registered voters in a district vote. What does that mean? That means somebody voted twice, that means somebody who’s not entitled to vote voted, an illegal, a person from another city or state, a person who’s not registered, but what it means is that those are illegitimate votes. You don’t have an overvote of 200% or 300%. You don’t have an overvote of 100%. Most precincts don’t have 100% turnout. In fact, classically it’s considered to be an overvote if you go over 80%. Well in Michigan and Wisconsin, we have overvotes in numerous precincts, of 150%, 200%, and 300%.

    One of the reasons why the two Republicans did not certify in Wayne, Michigan, Wayne County, Michigan is because the overvote was so high. Monstrously high in about two-thirds of the precincts in the city of Detroit. Which means magically two and three times the number of registered voters turned out to vote. In fact we have precincts in which two times the number of people who live there, including children, voted. That’s absurd. The frustration of this is, what I’m describing to you is a massive fraud. It isn’t a little teeny one. It isn’t 100 votes switched here or there. Georgia. We’re about to file a major lawsuit in Georgia. That’ll be filed probably tomorrow. I don’t need to go through it. Virtually the same things I’ve told you before. In the City of Atlanta, Republicans were not allowed to watch the absentee mail-in ballot process. Inspections completely cast aside and we have numerous double voters, we have numerous out-of-state voters, and we have specific evidence of intimidation and changes of vote. That will all be in the lawsuit that comes out tomorrow.

    He’s also going to look at Arizona. Sidney Powell then makes some extraordinary claims:

    Thank you Rudy. What we are really dealing with here and uncovering more by the day is the massive influence of communist money through Venezuela, Cuba, and likely China in the interference with our elections here in the United States. The Dominion voting systems, the Smartmatic technology software and the software that goes in other computerized voting systems here in as well, not just Dominion, were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out. We have one very strong witness who has explained how it all works. His affidavit is attached to the pleadings of Lin Wood in the lawsuit he filed in Georgia. It is a stunning, detailed affidavit because he was with Hugo Chavez while … He was being briefed on how it worked, he was with Hugo Chavez when he saw it operate to make sure the election came out his way. That was the express purpose for creating this software. He has seen it operate and as soon as he saw the multiple states shut down the voting on the night of the election, he knew the same thing was happening here, that that was what had gone on.

    Now the software itself was created with so many variables and so many back doors that can be hooked up to the internet or a thumbdrive stuck in it or whatever, but one of its most characteristic features is its ability to flip votes. It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it broke the algorithm that had been plugged into the system and that’s what caused them to have to shut down in the states they shut down in. That’s when they came in the backdoor with all the mail-in ballots, many of which they had actually fabricated, some were on pristine paper with identically matching perfect circle dots for Mr. Biden. Others were shoved in in batches, they’re always put in in a certain number of batches and people would rerun the same batch. This corresponds to our statistical evidence that shows incredible spikes in the vote counts at particular times and that corresponds to eyewitness testimony of numerous people who have come forward and said they saw the ballots come in the backdoor at that time.

    Notably the Dominion executives are nowhere to be found now. They are moving their offices overnight to different places. Their office in Toronto was shared with one of the Soros entities, one of the leaders of the Dominion Project overall is Lord Malloch-Brown, Mr. Soros’ number two person in the U.K., and part of his organization. There are ties of the Dominion leadership to the Clinton Foundation and to other known politicians in this country. Just to give you a brief description of how this worked, I’m going to quote from a letter that was written and I will read that to make sure I get the quotes right. This person was objecting to the United States acquisition of Sequoia Voting Systems by Smartmatic, a foreign-owned company. I believe this transaction raises exactly the sort of foreign ownership issues that [Siphius 00:42:10] is best positioned to examine for national security purposes. It’s undisputed that Smartmatic is foreign-owned and it has acquired Sequoia, they keep changing the names as they go along. Different times when a problem comes up, they just create another corporation and call it a different name, but it was a voting machine company doing business in the United States.

    Some information about foreign ownership of Smartmatic snipped. All concerning, but probably not anything that will get a judge to prevent certification, throw out fraudulent votes or order a revote.

    We have evidence of different numbers of votes being injected into the system, the same identical unique six digit number multiple times in at least two States that we’ve analyzed so far. I’m talking about like 341,542 votes for Biden and 100,012 for Trump. There’s no explanation, no logical explanation for the same numbers being injected 20 minutes apart into the machine. The software manual itself, you can download it from the internet and I would encourage you all to read it, because it specifically advertises some of these things as features of the system. Why it was ever allowed into this country is beyond my comprehension and why nobody has dealt with it is absolutely appalling.

    The machines were easily accessible to hackers. There’s video on the net that will explain to you how a kid with a cell phone can hack one of these voting machines. There’s been no oversight of Dominion or its software. Workers in each county were trained by Dominion, but there’s no evidence of any monitoring otherwise. We have testimony of different workers admitting that they were trained how to dispose of Trump votes and add to Biden votes. The software has a feature pursuant to which you can drag and drop any number of batches of votes to the candidate of your choice, or simply throw them away. So we have mathematical evidence in a number of states of massive quantities of Trump votes being trashed, just simply put in the trash like you would on your computer with any file and Biden votes being injected. That’s addition to the flipping.

    I mean, it really happens in two ways. There’s an algorithm that runs that automatically flips all the votes, and then each operator has the ability to go in override settings. They can ignore a signature, they could ignore the top line of the ballot. They can go down ballot and select who they want to change the results for. The gentleman who founded Smartmatic, there’s video of him on the internet, explaining that, yes, in at least one occasion, he admits, they changed a million votes with no problem. Many of the jurisdictions that have had this problem might not have known of the issues, but many did. I think a full-scale criminal investigation needs to be undertaken immediately by the Department of Justice and by every state’s equivalent, Attorney General’s Office or State Investigatory Unit, because there’s evidence of different benefits being provided to the people who spent 100 million dollars of taxpayer money at the last minute for their state to get the Dominion voting systems put in, in time for this election in different ways.

    There’s one person that a lawyer told me got, “election insurance”, meaning that he would be able to make sure he was elected. I’m sure they explained that feature in detail to many people who expressed interest in putting this voting system in. Texas denied certification of the Dominion system in 2019, but there are no doubt issues with the software that Texas did use, unbeknownst to Texas, I would imagine, since they went to great trouble to examine the Dominion systems and reject them, but other software, the source code that does the alterations is embedded we have been told in the source code all across the country, in all the voting machines.

    (Hat tip: Regular reader Brandon Byers.)

    I think what Powell means here is the compiled code, which would be a very concerning and shocking thing, if true. Those identical numerical entries (and any other obvious statistical anomalies) need to be investigate and thrown out if found to be fraudulent. But the remote control flipping of votes charge is going to require some evidence to back it up, if true. (For starters, compile the supposed source code and see if the checksum matches the checksum on the compiled code on the machine.) Absent that sort of verification, it’s understandable why even those (like myself) who thinking election fraud occurred think some of the wilder Dominion theories are a distraction from the real issues. Which explains why…

  • Why the Trump campaign is now saying that Powell is no longer a member of their legal team.
  • Tucker Carlson telling Powell to put up or shut up might also have had something to do with it. Powell highlight some real issues, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and I don’t think she’s produced that.
  • But back to Rudy:

    The media has been claiming since the election ended that President Trump’s claims of voter fraud are ‘baseless’ and ‘without evidence’. That just is not true. The President’s lawyer gave examples of it during today’s press conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington DC. But everyone is too busy mocking him to pay attention.

    I tried to listen to what Giuliani actually said and not what he looked like or the characterization of him by the rest of the media. The cameras started feverishly clicking the first time he wiped the sweat from his face, all but guaranteeing that would be the focus of the presser.

    Giuliani did in fact present evidence of voter fraud today but many people simply didn’t want to hear it. He cited multiple Americans, one by name, who have signed sworn affidavits stating that they witness some type of fraud, whether it was pro-Trump ballots being thrown out without cause, ballots being backdated to before the election, poll workers being told not to ask voters for identification, and more.

    As Giuliani helpfully pointed out, affidavits are considered ‘evidence’ in a court case. Whether you agree or disagree with them is a different question. And it’s reasonable that not all of the people who signed their names would be willing to go public. If you want to hear more of the evidence that was presented, just watch the first hour or so of the press conference.

    The more difficult — and crucial — question is whether Trump’s legal team has enough witnesses or other evidence to actually overturn the election in court. That is what journalists should be addressing. But it is simply wrong for the media to assert there is NO evidence of fraud.

  • Things that make you go “Hmmmmm”: “Dominion Voting ‘Lawyers Up‘ Before Abruptly Backing Out Of Pennsylvania Fact-Finding Hearing.”

    Pennsylvania lawmakers had scheduled the hearing with the voting machine manufacturer “to help identify and correct any irregularities in the election process,” according to the House Republican Caucus.

    “It is vitally important voters have faith in the machines they use to cast their ballots. On the heels of Gov. Tom Wolf unilaterally decertifying every voting machine in the Commonwealth, we need to know whether these new machines met expectations, whether they are reliable and whether they are not subject to interference,” said Rep. Grove (R-York).

    Dominion had initially agreed to attend the hearing, before it “abruptly canceled,” Grove said.

    “I was impressed at what appeared to be the willingness that Dominion Voting Systems to address accusations and it would have put 1.3. million Pennsylvanians who used their machines at ease—including myself, thinking that Dominion was willing to publicly back up their product which PA taxpayers invested millions to purchase” he noted during the presser.

    “Unfortunately, last evening, Dominion Voting Systems lawyered up, and backed out of their commitment to the people of Pennsylvania to provide their input in a public format.”

    Grove blasted the company for “retreating into the darkness,” rather than appearing at the hearing with “honesty and integrity.”

    The committee chair said he wanted to know why a company with nothing to hide would back out.

  • Reminder: Texas rejected Dominion: “The examiner reports raise concerns about whether the Democracy Suite 5.5-A system is suitable for its intended purpose; operates efficiently and accurately; and is safe from fraudulent or unauthorized manipulation.”
  • Here’s a statistical analysis from Director Blue that suggests election fraud in Pennsylvania and Georgia.

    Notice the similarities in PA and GA? How the right sides of the graph show virtually no movement for Trump; and very predictable vote movements to Biden. How predictable?

    Below are excerpts of spreadsheets that show what was happening on the right side of each chart. Vote flips in the same-sized bundles (6,000 in PA and 4,800 in GA) were injected into the system to overcome Trump’s lead in both states. You can click either image above to see all of the data.

    The highlighted cells show where the vote counts — stunningly obvious in retrospect — were manipulated to benefit Biden.

    That does look might suspicious. Someone with more statistical analysis expertise than I have will have tell me how meaningful this is.

  • Here’s another data analysis suggesting that Dominion software in Philadelphia regularly transferred votes in exact ratios. The video’s 40 minutes long, I haven’t watched all of it, and, again, someone with more statistical analysis expertise will have to analyze this to tell me how meaningful it is. (Hat tip: Janie Johnson.)
  • Remember the Wayne County flip-flop? Well, it flipped again:

    The two Republicans on Michigan’s Wayne County Board of Canvassers claimed in signed affidavits Wednesday that they were bullied into siding with Democrats and have now rescinded their votes to certify.

    The two Republicans — Monica Palmer and William C. Hartmann — were involved in a brief deadlock in the county’s election certification process Tuesday before voting to certify.

    Wayne County, which includes Detroit, is Michigan’s most populous county, with more than 1.7 million residents.

    The Associated Press reported that a person familiar with the matter said Trump himself reached out to the canvassers on Tuesday evening after the revised vote to express gratitude for their support. Then, on Wednesday, Palmer and Hartmann signed affidavits saying they believe the county vote “should not be certified.”

    And on Thursday, the Trump campaign said it was withdrawing its lawsuit in the state, citing what happened in Wayne County.

    “This morning we are withdrawing our lawsuit in Michigan as a direct result of achieving the relief we sought: to stop the election in Wayne County from being prematurely certified before residents can be assured that every legal vote has been counted and every illegal vote has not been counted,” said Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani.

    Both Republicans say they were called racists and subjected to threats for raising concerns about ballots that Democrats said were from predominately Black communities, Jenna Ellis, a lawyer for the Trump 2020 Campaign, told Fox News on Tuesday.

    They also said people had threatened members of their family.

  • Speaking of which, watch a Detroit State Rep candidate dox Wayne County canvasser Monica Palmer…and her children:

    (Hat Tip: Brandon Bryers)

  • Alan Dershowitz outline’s Trump’s narrow legal path to victory:

    For example, in Pennsylvania, they have two very strong legal arguments. One, that the courts changed what the legislature did about counting ballots after the end of Election Day. That’s a winning issue in the Supreme Court. I don’t necessarily support it, but it’s a winning issue in the Supreme Court,” Dershowitz told Fox Business on Sunday. The team, meanwhile, has “a winning issue in the Supreme Court on equal protection, that some counties flawed ballots to be cured while others didn’t. Bush v. Gore suggests that an Equal Protection argument can prevail.”

    Dershowitz, who helped defend Trump during the Senate impeachment trial earlier this year, said that due to Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s lead over the president, Trump’s team may not be able to contest enough ballots in Pennsylvania.

    “The other legal theory they have, which is a potentially strong one, is that the computers, either fraudulently or by glitches, changed hundreds of thousands of votes. There, there are enough votes to make a difference, but I haven’t seen the evidence to support that,” he elaborated. “So, in one case, they don’t have the numbers. In another case, they don’t seem yet to have the evidence, maybe they do. I haven’t seen it. But the legal theory is there to support them if they have the numbers and they have the evidence.”

  • Trey Trainor, the Chairman of the federal Election Commission says Trump has a case. “The massive amounts of affidavits that we see in these cases show that there was in fact fraud that took place.”

    Trainor said his review of evidence, including numerous affidavits claiming voter fraud and a sworn statement by a prominent mathematician flagging up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots, met the first level of legal scrutiny under what’s known as motion to dismiss or “Rule 12(b)(6)” of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which would dismiss less credible claims.

    Noting the subsequent legal threshold beyond a “motion to dismiss” is the “summary judgment phase,” Trainor said that under this phase, the credibility of witnesses is presumed to be accurate, especially given the caliber of the testimonies Trainor has observed to date.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Another “Hmmmm”: “Floyd County [Georgia] terminates election director after state audit uncovers uncounted votes.” Over 2,600 votes not counted.
  • Related:

  • Given those revelations, the Trump campaign asks for another recount in Georgia.

    The news comes after Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R) certified the election results. Although Kemp certified the results, he called for an additional hand recount, citing major errors in Floyd, Douglas and Walton Counties.

    “I would just say I’m formalizing the certification,” Kemp said at the time. “Now that Secretary Raffensperger certified, it triggers the ability of the Trump campaign to ask for the recount. If something were to happen, I’m still part of that process. So my take on all this is: I’m following the law and the rules.”

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Another data point:

  • Another Dominion “Hmmmm”:

  • And another: “Dominion Engineer Told Antifa He’d ‘Made Sure’ Trump Wouldn’t Win, Report Says.”
  • NotSureIfSerious.jpg:

  • The Pennsylvania Supreme Court has rejected a Trump lawsuit complaint about counting observers. “It’s inexplicable that five justices on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court would conclude that watchers observing from distances up to 100 feet away is reasonable.”
  • Also: “US District Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania Matthew Brann, a Barack Obama appointee on Saturday dismissed a Trump campaign lawsuit seeking to block Pennsylvania from certifying its election results.” Both of those lawsuits may be headed for the Supreme Court.
  • “The moment when Michigan counted 149,772 votes in 5 seconds and less than 6,000 of them were for Trump.”
  • Screwjob in Wisconsin?

  • “The Greatest Electoral Heist in American History“:

    The pieces are finally coming together, and they reveal a masterpiece of electoral larceny involving Big Tech oligarchs, activists, and government officials who prioritize partisanship over patriotism.

    The 2020 election was stolen because leftists were able to exploit the coronavirus pandemic to weaken, alter, and eliminate laws that were put in place over the course of decades to preserve the integrity of the ballot box. But just as importantly, it was stolen because those same leftists had a thoroughly-crafted plan, and because they were rigorous in its implementation and ruthless in its execution.

    Let’s not forget that liberals have been consumed by a fixation with removing Donald Trump from office for longer than he’s actually been in office. The sordid story of the 2020 election heist begins all the way back in January 2017, when Barack Obama’s former campaign manager and senior advisor, David Plouffe, took a job leading the policy and advocacy efforts of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, a “charitable” organization established by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan.

    Earlier this year, just as it was becoming clear that Joe Biden would be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president, Plouffe published a book outlining his vision for the Democrats’ roadmap to victory in 2020, which involved a “block by block” effort to turn out voters in key Democratic strongholds in the swing states that would ultimately decide the election, such as Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Minneapolis.

    The book was titled, A Citizen’s Guide to Defeating Donald Trump, and it turned out that the citizen Plouffe had in mind was none other than his former boss, Mark Zuckerberg. Although Plouffe no longer officially managed Zuckerberg’s policy and advocacy efforts at that point, the political operative’s influence evidently remained a powerful force.

    Thanks to the extensive efforts of investigators and attorneys for the Amistad Project of the nonpartisan Thomas More Society, who have been following Zuckerberg’s money for the past 18 months, it is still possible to expose the inner workings of this heist in time to stop it.

    Snip.

    Under the pretext of assisting election officials conduct “safe and secure” elections in the age of COVID, Zuckerberg donated $400 million — as much money as Congress appropriated for the same general purpose — to nonprofit organizations founded and run by left-wing activists. The primary recipient was the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which received the staggering sum of $350 million. Prior to Zuckerberg’s donations, CTCL’s annual operating expenses averaged less than $1 million per year. How was Zuckerberg even aware of such a small-potatoes operation, and why did he entrust it with ⅞ of the money he was pouring into this election cycle, despite the fact that it had no prior experience handling such a massive amount of money?

    Predictably, given the partisan background of its leading officers, CTCL proceeded to distribute Zuckerberg’s funds to left-leaning counties in battleground states. The vast majority of the money handed out by CTCL — especially in the early days of its largesse — went to counties that voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Some of the biggest recipients, in fact, were the very locales Plouffe had identified as the linchpins of the Democrat strategy in 2020.

    Zuckerberg and CTCL left nothing to chance, however, writing detailed conditions into their grants that dictated exactly how elections were to be conducted, down to the number of ballot drop boxes and polling places. The Constitution gives state lawmakers sole authority for managing elections, but these grants put private interests firmly in control.

    Amistad Project lawyers tried to prevent this unlawful collusion by filing a flurry of lawsuits in eight states prior to Election Day. Unfortunately, judges were forced to put those lawsuits aside without consideration of their merits because the plaintiffs had not yet suffered “concrete harm” in the form of fraudulent election results. The law had no remedy to offer because the left’s lawless schemes had not yet reached fruition.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • “Vegas Oddsmaker Says, “The Fix Was In, Trump Was Robbed, This Election Was Stolen.”

    Trump entered the night a 2 to 1 underdog. As soon as the polls started to close and the picture became clear, Trump’s odds quickly moved to even money. Then Trump became the slight favorite. Then a moderate favorite. Then a 2-to-1 favorite.

    Then 3 to 1. 4 to 1. 5 to 1. 6 to 1. 7 to 1. Finally, Trump moved to 8 to 1 favorite.

    What does all this mean? Bettors putting their money on the line during Election Night have always proven to be deadly accurate. Smart bettors can clearly see what direction a race is taking. Bettors around the world clearly saw what I saw, when they stared at the electoral map- Trump was headed for an electoral landslide.

    But something wasn’t quite right. Fox News wouldn’t call Florida for Trump- even though he was ahead by a mile. They wouldn’t call Ohio- even though Trump was ahead by a mile, They wouldn’t call Texas- even though Trump was ahead by a mile. I sat there screaming at my television.

    More strange calls. Fox News had called Virginia for Biden at the start of the night- with Trump well ahead in Virginia. Trump would remain ahead in Virginia for three long hours after Fox awarded the electoral votes to Biden. Why would they do that? What was the rush? It made no sense.

    Biden was awarded Virginia with Trump ahead. But Trump was ahead by a mile in Florida, Ohio and Texas, yet Fox News refused to award him the electoral votes. I knew at that moment, something was wrong. Something smelled fishy. Something was rotten in the DC Swamp.

    Bettors witnessed Trump dominating. He clearly won not only those key states of Florida, Ohio and Texas, but Trump also enjoyed large leads in the entire Midwest- Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Iowa. It was all but over. Trump had an electoral landslide. Hence the massive 8 to 1 odds in favor of Trump.

    And then it happened. It was the most bizarre call in Election Night history. Fox News called Arizona for Biden. Why? It wasn’t even close to over. There was no reason on earth to make that call. Arizona is STILL not over 8 days later. CNN still hasn’t awarded Arizona. ABC pulled it back from Biden only 24 hours ago.

    Why would Fox News be in such a rush to call Arizona for Biden? At that moment, Trump’s odds crashed almost instantly from 8 to 1, back down to 2 to 1. That drop set off alarm bells. My friend who is one of the biggest bookmakers in the country called me to say, “Wayne, something is wrong. I’ve never seen a drop like that, let alone a drop that fast. How can Trump go from 8 to 1, to 2 to 1. Someone knows something. We’ve got a problem.”

    It was as if someone had decided in advance to give Arizona to Biden- whether he won it, or not. It was as if the secret code was known to only a few billionaire gamblers, “Fox News awards Arizona to Biden.” Six magic words. Someone was ready for that call. Someone waited until Trump was a prohibitive 8 to 1 favorite, then knew to bet millions of dollars on Biden at the longest odds of the night. Someone knew the fix was in. Someone made a fortune.

    There’s more to the story. First, by awarding both Virginia and Arizona to Biden way too early in the evening and also going super slow awarding states to Trump where he led by a mile, Fox News made sure Biden had the electoral lead all night. That’s another big part of the story.

    (Hat tip: The Samizdat Herald.)

  • The Democratic Media Complex reaps what it sows:

    A prominent liberal legal academic who spent the last four years pushing outrageous, discredited, and debunked conspiracy theories about Donald Trump stealing the 2016 election said on Fox News Sunday that refusal to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election threatens the country.

    Snip.

    No conspiracy theories of recent vintage have damaged the country as much as the ones [Laurence] Tribe (and many other anti-Trump media figures) trafficked in each and every day of the last four years from prominent perches in politics, media, and the academy. If taking claims to court undermines democracy, how to defend Tribe’s vociferous and repeated claims that Trump stole the election in 2016 with the help of Russia?

  • More on the same theme:

    There have been a number of frustrating things to deal with during the past couple of weeks. In victory or defeat, the Democrats and their flying monkeys in the media are insufferable. We’ve all known that for a very long time but — and we have said this a lot lately — they’re getting even worse.

    They are complaining about President Trump’s legal right to make sure that the election to decide the leader of the free world wasn’t compromised in any way. It seems a reasonable thing to do, but we are dealing with liberals here, so reasonable doesn’t factor into the equation much.

    The painstaking, necessary scrutiny of ballots in key states continues, much to the chagrin of the Democrats. If they are so certain of victory, this delay shouldn’t mean much to them. They’re acting as if they’re terrified of what may be found out.

    Snip.

    After what the Democrats put this president and the country through with the Russia collusion hoax, the impeachment charade, and four years of flat-out saying that the 2016 election wasn’t legitimate, I don’t care if the Left has to suffer frustration forever. Put simply: they’ve brought this on themselves.

    If they had, for even a moment at any time in the last four years, not been thoroughly awful then maybe we might all be able to search for some common ground.

    Now, as I recently said on Facebook, I’ve spent every day since the election looking all over my house and I can’t find the kumbaya anywhere.

    Karma has entered the building, and will be staying awhile.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Another data point in Pennsylvania:

  • And here are thousands of data points: “Two California men were indicted on 41 counts of voter fraud after allegedly submitting thousands of fraudulent voter registration applications on behalf of homeless people, according to NBC Los Angeles.”
  • Is a bombshell lawsuit coming in Georgia?
  • More on Georgia:

  • We need to end mail in vote fraud. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Philly Bans All Indoor Gatherings Unless You’re Still Counting Biden Votes.” And for the reader who complained I shouldn’t include Babylon Bee links in these roundups:

  • Like BattleSwarm? Consider hitting the tip jar:





    Election Fraud Update for November 16, 2020

    Monday, November 16th, 2020

    Evidence continues to pile up that Democrats stole four states through brazen election fraud in a small number of urban counties. Here’s my attempt to wrangle this fire hose of information into some coherent form:

  • Rudy Giuliani says that 650,000 Votes Were Counted Unlawfully In Philadelphia And Pittsburgh:

    A few days earlier, Giuliani said that the Trump campaign may have sufficient evidence to change the election results in the state of Pennsylvania.

    He told Fox News’ Maria Bartiromo on Sunday that lawsuits being filed by Trump’s reelection campaign might show that as many as 900,000 invalid ballots were cast in the battleground state.

    According to an unofficial vote count from the Pennsylvania Department of State, Biden has received 3.35 million votes to Trump’s 3.31 million votes. Percentage-wise, Biden has 49.7 percent, compared to Trump’s 49.1 percent.

    “I think we have enough to change Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania election was a disaster,” Giuliani said, responding to a question from the host about whether the evidence is enough to change the fate of the presidential election.

    “We have people that observed people being pushed out of the polling place. We have people who were suggested to vote the other way and shown how to do it. I’m giving you the big picture,” he said.

    While mail-in ballots were being counted, GOP Pittsburgh observers were “kept out of the room or kept away from the room” for a period of 24 hours, Giuliani alleged.

    “Even though we went to court and we were allowed to move six feet closer, the Democrat machine people moved the counting place six feet further away. This is documented on videotape. There are upwards of 50 witnesses,” he continued.

  • Analysis of Pennsylvania data shows clear evidence of election fraud:

    You’ll notice that after the 11/4/20 23:00Z cutoff time, only swings of Biden votes (in multiples of 6,000 at a time) seem to have been received.

    Statistically, these changes make no sense. They’re not just improbable, they appear to be impossible.

    It looks to me like bundles of around 6,000 votes were used to slowly overcome any Trump lead. The correlation is uncanny.

  • More on the same theme.
  • Chuck DeVore says that irregularities justify recounts:

    “If the local elections officials in the city of Philadelphia are so confident that they have enough valid votes to beat President Donald Trump, and assign the 20 electoral college votes of Pennsylvania to Vice President Joe Biden. If they were that confident, why are they resisting an authorized court order to allow for people to observe the ballot as they’re supposed to legally be able to do?” DeVore responded to a question from correspondent Jan Jekielek.

    Snip.

    “By the way, this is a common thing throughout the entire country, that you’re supposed to have people from both sides observing the physical process of counting the votes to make sure that it’s done honestly and legally,” DeVore added, “it really potentially puts into doubt the results that came out of Philadelphia.”

    DeVore pointed out that only a few months ago, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted a Philadelphia election official on charges of bribery and election tampering.

    “When you have a race or a state like Pennsylvania, where you have this unprecedentedly large number of mail-in ballots that have been requested, then the question becomes what sort of safeguards are we using to ensure that the votes are valid and have been legally cast?” DeVore spoke about the integrity of the mail-in ballots.

    DeVore went on to say that one of the safeguards—the requirement to have a matching signature on the outside of the envelope—was obliterated in Pennsylvania.

  • Judicial Watch in October: “Pennsylvania Counties Admit They Gave Incorrect Voter Roll Information to Federal Government – Disclose Conflicting Numbers of Inactive Voters to Court.”
  • The statistical anomalies of those fraudulent Biden ballots in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin.
  • Massive Voter Fraud In Wisconsin?”

    There were 3,684,726 registered voters in Wisconsin going into Election day. The total votes recorded in Wisconsin were 3,240,549. That would give Wisconsin a turnout of 88%. [UPDATE: The current vote total is 3,297,420, which would yield a turnout of over 89%. However, Wisconsin permits same-day registration, so the number of such registrations would bring that percentage down somewhat.] According to Ballotpedia, no American state in the period 2002-2018 has ever achieved a turnout rate of 80% or higher. [UPDATE: These are turnout numbers expressed as percentage of eligible voters, not registered voters, so the percentages are not directly comparable.] For purposes of comparison, in 2016 Wisconsin had a 67 percent turnout rate. [UPDATE: Wisconsin tabulates turnout as a percentage of the estimated voting-age population, so these numbers would be lower than the percentages of registered voters.] If you are credulous, you can believe that 21% more Wisconsinites voted this year, compared with the red-hot election of four years ago, and 248,000 more Wisconsinites turned out to vote for the charismatic Joe Biden this year than voted for Hillary Clinton four years ago. I think those numbers are almost certainly false, the result of ballot manipulation.

  • Michigan Election Fraud: Evidence of Wolverine State Chicanery During America’s 2020 Presidential Election.”

    On Election Night when America went to bed, President Trump had a commanding lead in virtually every swing state, as well as Virginia, which no one expected him to win.

    However, when America woke up the next day, we found that he’d lost these leads, largely on the basis of mail-in ballots found in the middle of the night and out from under the watchful eye of legal election monitors.

    What’s more, these massive caches of votes – almost all of which were for former Vice President Biden – came via large dumps primarily from the five aforementioned cities in states predominantly run by Democratic governors.

    When one looks at the statistical likelihood of the reported turnout, the numbers are so improbable they’re more at home in a one-party state like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq or North Korea.

    What’s more, Biden’s victory does not square with the results of the Republican Party nationally: Republicans won 28 of 29 competitive House seats and Democrats were unable to flip a single state legislature. Joe Biden secured a scant three of the so-called “Bellwether Districts” that almost always choose the winner, one of which was in Delaware. Judicial Watch found 353 counties in 29 different states who had higher than 100 percent turnout.

    Anecdotally, swing states tend to follow Florida in terms of swinging left or right. This is particularly true in Michigan, which has voted in lockstep with Florida since 1968. Nearly three dozen states had counting machines connected to the Internet during the election, which is inherently insecure. Joe Biden’s lead among mail-in ballots was massive in two states — Michigan and Pennsylvania — while it was in the single digits in most states.

    Snip.

    Michigan might take the dubious honor of having the most corrupt elections in America in 2020. As of November 9, the FBI has opened up two investigations into voter fraud in the state. Affidavits have been filed alleging a scheme to backdate mail-in ballots. It is the land of massive vote dumps that go 100 percent for Joe Biden (which the controlled media has attempted to retcon as a “glitch” or “clerical error”), of thousands of dead people voting, of United States Postal Service officials coercing postal employees into backdating the postmark on ballots. And, of course, remember that this is the state that was shut down by executive fiat by Gretchen Whitmer, who eventually had her executive overreach invalidated by the state Supreme Court.

    A single computer “glitch” awarded 6,000 votes to Biden and the Democrats that were supposed to go to President Trump and other Republican candidates. With 47 Michigan counties using this software, similar glitches might yield a discrepancy of hundreds of thousands of ballots — or even more. Perhaps this “glitch” was one of the more innocuous ones. Another glitch returned a Republican incumbent to office after he “lost” to his Democratic challenger.

    We use “glitch” in quotes because these types of things seem to be a running pattern in the state and appear to always benefit the Democrat candidate. One other, and far more important, example of this was the “glitch” that awarded 138,000-plus votes to Joe Biden. It was one of these monolithic vote dumps we keep talking about.

    Over 138,000 votes tabulated and not a single one of them went for the President (or, for that matter, Jo Jorgensen or Howie Hawkins or Kanye West), a statistical impossibility. It was later corrected when hordes of Internet denizens found the vote dump and wondered how it was possible, even under the basic laws of statistics.

    This is hardly the only example of “mistakes” benefitting Biden or suspicious reported totals in the State of Michigan. Take, for example, Antrim County, where President Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016 but had now swung back to Biden by 29 points. County officials vowed to investigate what they called “skewed” results.

    Even prior to the 2020 election back in October, city officials in Muskegon found that there were registration irregularities.

    A suit has been filed in the state of Michigan based on a sworn affidavit from a Michigan poll worker — not an observer. Among other things, this suit alleges that poll workers processed ballots with missing signatures, coached voters on who to vote for (Joe Biden), and were instructed to backdate ballots.

    How deep is the rabbit hole of “computer error” in Michigan? Sidney Powell, counsel for one General Michael Flynn, appeared on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business News program and explained that she believes that programs like HAMMER or SCORECARD were used to change as much as 3 percent of the result. While this is merely speculation at this point, it is worth noting that Steve Bannon also floated this possibility on his show, War Room.

  • “Administrative policies in Wisconsin election put tens of thousands of votes in question. From allowing clerks to fix spoiled ballots to permitting voters to escape ID rules, Wisconsin election officials have taken actions that were not authorized by legislature.”

    Records reviewed by Just the News show that an executive branch agency called the Wisconsin Elections Commission:

    1. permits local county election clerks to cure spoiled ballots by filling in missing addresses for witnesses even though state law invalidates any ballot without a witness address.
    2. exempted as many as 200,000 citizens from voter ID rules in 2020 by allowing them to claim the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to be “indefinitely confined.”
    3. failed this year to purge 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls as required by law.

    (Hat tip: John Solomon.)

  • “Great Lakes Justice Center Files Election Crimes Lawsuit.”

    The Great Lakes Justice Law Center is filing a new election crimes lawsuit in Wayne County Circuit Court. The Lansing area law firm is representing two Detroit area residents in the action. The suit charges Wayne County elections officials knowingly allowed and supported illegal activities surrounding the Tuesday general election. The suit in Wayne County Circuit Court is asking for an entirely new election to be staged for the county.

    Lead attorney David Kallman says numerous witnesses are filing swarm affidavits under oath supporting the claims in the lawsuit. The suit spells out a number of alleged election crimes. Many of them surround the use of absentee or mail-in ballots.
    They include:

    -Validating ballots the name showing on the ballot did not appear in the official voter database.
    -Election workers were ordered to not verify voters’ signatures on absentee ballots, to backdate absentee ballots, and to process invalid ballots.
    -The suit claims election workers processed ballots that appeared after the election deadline and falsely reported those ballots had been received prior to the election evening deadline.
    -And the suit claims many of the invalid ballots won’t be hard to pinpoint, saying election workers in Wayne County altered already illegal ballots by inserting a birthdate of 1/1/1900.

    Attorney Kallman says the lawsuit asks the Circuit court to immediately void the uncertified election results in Wayne County and order a new and fully monitored election at the earliest possible date. “This type of widespread fraud in the counting and processing of voter ballots cannot be allowed to stand. Michigan citizens are entitled to know that their elections are conducted in a fair and legal manner and that every legal vote is properly counted. Such rampant fraud cannot be undone. We ask the Court to enjoin the certification of this fraudulent election, void the election, and order a new vote in Wayne County.”

    

  • Sharyl Attkisson has more details on the lawsuit:

    Defendants systematically processed and counted ballots from voters whose name failed to appear in either the Qualified Voter File (QVF) or in the supplemental sheets. When a voter’s name could not be found, the election worker assigned the ballot to a random name already in the QVF to a person who had not voted. Defendants instructed election workers to not verify signatures on absentee ballots, to backdate absentee ballots, and to process such ballots regardless of their validity. After election officials announced the last absentee ballots had been received, another batch of unsecured and unsealed ballots, without envelopes, arrived in trays at the TCF Center. There were tens of thousands of these absentee ballots, and apparently every ballot was counted and attributed only to Democratic candidates. Defendants instructed election workers to process ballots that appeared after the election deadline and to falsely report that those ballots had been received prior to November 3, 2020 deadline.

    Defendants systematically used false information to process ballots, such as using incorrect or false birthdays. Many times, the election workers inserted new names into the QVF after the election and recorded these new voters as having a birthdate of 1/1/1900.

    On a daily basis leading up to the election, City of Detroit election workers and employees coached voters to vote for Joe Biden and the Democrat party. These workers and employees encouraged voters to do a straight Democrat ballot. These election workers and employees went over to the voting booths with voters in order to watch them vote and coach them for whom to vote.

    Unsecured ballots arrived at the TCF Center loading garage, not in sealed ballot boxes, without any chain of custody, and without envelopes.

    Defendant election officials and workers refused to record challenges to their processes and removed challengers from the site if they politely voiced a challenge. After poll challengers started discovering the fraud taking place at the TCF Center, Defendant election officials and workers locked credentialed challengers out of the counting room so they could not observe the process, during which time tens of thousands of ballots were processed.

    Defendant election officials and workers allowed ballots to be duplicated by hand without allowing poll challengers to check if the duplication was accurate. In fact, election officials and workers repeatedly obstructed poll challengers from observing. Defendants permitted thousands of ballots to be filled out by hand and duplicated on site without oversight from poll challengers.

  • Unfortunately, Wayne County circuit judge Timothy Kenny refused to issue an injunction. Great Lakes Justice Center is appealing.
  • President Trump’s plans to defeat the cheats:

    Democrats are stealing the election in Michigan and Pennsylvania. This bothered the heck out of many people because it seems as if nothing can be done to stop them. In Michigan, people born before the Civil War voted. In Philadelphia, Democrats ignored a court order to let Republicans observe the voting. Those are just two of the many irregularities.

    Republican Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, told NBC his state’s Supreme Court “went rogue and decided to violate the U.S. Constitution, ignore Pennsylvania law, and just rewrite the law themselves.

    “In Pennsylvania, unfortunately, it’s been a little bit complicated by a Pennsylvania Supreme Court that went rogue and decided to violate the U.S. constitution, ignore Pennsylvania law, and just rewrite the law themselves.

    “They have no authority to do that. And they extended the period of time over which ballots can arrive beyond the deadline. That’s outrageous, frankly.”

    Some people are banking on state legislatures overturning election. Perhaps they can.

    Forget recounts. The same people who counted the votes the first time will count them again.

    Biden declared victory on Saturday night.

    Big mistake.

    Democrats took the bait. Now President Trump can go to the Supreme Court and have the elections in Michigan and Pennsylvania declared invalid. Without those Electoral College votes, Biden fails to reach 270 and the election gets thrown into the House.

    Other states also may be invalidated. The Supreme Court will decide, and I believe President Trump has 5 votes and Chief Justice John McCain Roberts has only 4.

    Ignoring a federal judge’s order is never a good idea when you are stealing an election.

  • Georgia:

    

  • “Why Does Biden Have So Many More Votes Than Democrat Senators In Swing States?”

    In Michigan, for example, there was a difference of just 7,131 votes between Trump and GOP candidate John James, yet the difference between Joe Biden and Democratic candidate Gary Peters was a staggering 69,093.

    In Georgia, there was an 818 vote difference between Trump and the GOP Senator, vs. a 95,000 difference between Biden and the Democratic candidate for Senator.

  • Trump lawyer Sydney Powell says thy’re getting ready to overturn the results in several states. Whether that’s true or lawyerspeak framing I leave up to you to decide.
  • MIT’s Dr. Shiva Ayyadurai conducts an in-depth statistical analysis of election anomalies and

    I haven’t watched all of it yet. Dr. Ayyadurai says that the Secretary of State of Massachusetts got Twitter to kick him off the platform for 21 days until he was able to get a judge to issue an injunction over election fraud allegations.

  • A thread about Dominion and Smartmatic:

  • Haven’t analyzed this statement to see if it’s true, but it wouldn’t shock me:

  • “Woman Who Voted For Trump In Texas Shocked To Find She Also ‘Voted’ Via Mail-In-Ballot In California.”
  • “5 Historical Trends That Show It’s Utterly Shocking If Trump Lost In 2020.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • “Local Man Wouldn’t Have Believed There Was Election Fraud Except Media, Big Tech Keep Insisting That There Wasn’t“:

    Yeah, I think Trump lost fair and square,” he said last Wednesday. “He just got beat by the Biden campaign — that’s all there is to it.”

    But then something happened that changed his mind: Facebook, Twitter, Google, Fox News, CNN, and more giant corporations keep screaming at him via notifications, messages, and broadcasts that there was no election fraud. Now, he’s starting to think maybe there is something fishy going on.

    “You know what, screw it,” he said as another notification popped up on his Facebook feed telling him how safe and secure the elections are. “I’m all-in on the conspiracy theories. If the shadiest, slimiest people in the world really, really want me to believe the election wasn’t stolen, then I’m going full-on Alex Jones, baby. Woooo!!!”

  • Truth:

  • “Pennsylvania Invites World-Renowned Election Auditor Hilaaniti Clintraja To Count The Votes.”
  • I’m sure there’s lots of election fraud new I missed (there are only so many hours in the day), so feel free to share it in the comments.

    Election Fraud Update for November 9, 2020

    Monday, November 9th, 2020

    I trust you saw my Benford’s Law post from yesterday. Here’s a roundup of current election fraud news:

  • A state of play thread.

    Read the whole thread.

  • In Detroit, Republican poll watchers were prevented from carrying out their duties.
  • Evidence:

  • Undeniable mathematical evidence of voting fraud:

    In both Michigan and Wisconsin, several vote dumps occurred at approximately 4am on Wednesday morning, which showed that Joe Biden received almost 100 percent of the votes. President Trump was leading by hundreds of thousands of votes in both states as America went to sleep, and turnout in the state of Wisconsin seems to be particularly impossible.

    With absentee ballots, former vice-president Joe Biden was also up 60 points in Pennsylvania and almost 40 points in Michigan According to the New York Times. Comparably, Biden was only up single digits in absentee voting in most other battleground states. Wisconsin has not yet been reported.

    Elections officials in Michigan and Wisconsin could not explain Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s sudden and dramatic vote tally increase that occurred in both states Wednesday morning.

    When asked at a Wednesday press conference how this occurred, Michigan Department of State spokesperson Aneta Kiersnowski told reporters “We cannot speculate as to why the results lean one way or another.”

    This is particularly concerning considering republicans led in mail-in ballots requested and mail-in and in-person ballots returned leading up to and at the start of election day.

    According to NBC News on election day before the polls opened, In Michigan, Republicans led 41% to 39% in Mail-in Ballots requested. Republicans also led 42% to 39% with Mail-in and in-person ballots returned.

    In Wisconsin on election day before the polls opened, Republicans led Mail-in Ballots requested 43% to 35%, and Mail-in and early in-person ballots returned 43% to 35%. Almost ALL of the ballots found, while most in the country were sleeping, after they officials stated they would stop counting, were for Joe Biden.

    
    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Detroit Democrats evidently pulled out all the stops in the fraud machine:

  • Thread on the security deficiencies in the “Dominion” voting software used in so many states:

    Read the whole thread, as there are a lot of attack surfaces there….

  • Rudy Giuliani claims there’s enough evidence to change the outcome, and it will all come out in court. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • A list of the lawsuits the Trump team has filed over election fraud.
  • Even if Democrats make their presidential fraud stick, it came at a high price:

    But even if Trump does lose, it may be a blessing in disguise for Republicans.

    The result has crushed Democratic expectations of a clean sweep. It wasn’t a landslide win against an unpopular president, as we had been told so confidently for months.

    If Biden wins, it will be by the narrowest margin.

    And all the hundreds of millions spent on retaking the Senate came to nothing, with the Republicans looking to hold onto their lead. The top targets, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Lindsey ­Graham, survived easily.

    The fatal miscalculations of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in cynically refusing to negotiate on the latest stimulus bill have cost the Democrats dearly in the House, where they have gone backward by at least six seats. They did not manage to get rid of a single Republican. So much for the blue wave.

    The failure means that in 2022, the House is more likely to revert to Republican control, setting up a lame-duck presidency.

    The Democrats won’t be able to pack the Supreme Court, abolish the Electoral College or make DC and Puerto Rico states. They will struggle to impose the Green New Deal.

    Unfortunately, nothing can be done to stop a President Biden-Harris repeat of the geopolitical errors of the Obama presidency, such as appeasing China and Iran’s mullahs and signing onto the Paris climate accord.

    But a President Biden in cognitive decline will sooner or later be replaced by his unpopular, untested vice president, Kamala Harris.

    Saddled with a recession and policies that will only exacerbate economic decline, the next four years will hobble Democrats.

  • Sarah Hoyt says not to panic:

    They’re scared.

    Oh, not the sheep on the streets. They fell for it, just like they fell for “two million dead from covid.” But the higher-ups, they’re scared.

    Years ago, during the ’04 election, a friend told me the Democrats always get louder and more triumphalist when they’re losing. I’ve observed this is true, since then.

    So, step down from the ledge. Go take a shower. Have some real food. Eat a vegetable. Ease up on the coffee. Go for a walk.

    And don’t fall for the blue smokescreen

  • “In Apparent Glitch, Voting Machines Hunt Down And Murder Trump Supporters.” “This is just a small, routine error, and we are looking into it,” said one official. “There’s nothing to be concerned about. These kinds of small mistakes happen from time to time, and it will be corrected soon.”
  • LinkSwarm for May 22, 2020

    Friday, May 22nd, 2020

    The Wuhan coronavirus, and China, and deep state shenanigans, oh my! But first a PSA for Texas shoppers:

  • There’s an an “Energy Star” sales tax holiday in Texas Memorial Day weekend. Products you can buy tax free this weekend include:
    • Air conditioners (priced $6,000 or less)
    • Refrigerators (priced $2,000 or less)
    • Ceiling fans
    • Incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs
    • Washers
    • Dishwashers
    • Dehumidifiers

    Why water heaters, dryers and freezers aren’t eligible I couldn’t tell you, but if you needed to get any covered appliances, this weekend is a good time.

  • When was Michael Flynn unmasked? Wrong question. What if he was never masked in the first place?

    There is no such evidence in the unmasking list that acting national intelligence director Richard Grenell provided to Senators Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R., Wis.). I suspect that’s because General Flynn’s identity was not “masked” in the first place. Instead, his December 29 call with Kislyak was likely intercepted under an intelligence program not subject to the masking rules, probably by the CIA or a friendly foreign spy service acting in a nod-and-wink arrangement with our intelligence community.

    “Unmasking” is a term of art for revealing in classified reports the names of Americans who have been “incidentally” monitored by our intelligence agencies. Presumptively, the names of Americans should be concealed in these reports, which reflect the surveillance of foreign targets, primarily under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Broadly speaking, FISA governs two kinds of intelligence collection.

    The first is “traditional” FISA — the targeted monitoring of a suspected clandestine operative of a foreign power. If the FBI shows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) probable cause that a person inside the United States is acting as a foreign power’s agent, it may obtain a warrant to surveil that person. If the foreign power’s suspected agent communicates with Americans, the latter are incidentally intercepted even though they are not the targets of the surveillance.

    The second kind of FISA collection occurs under Section 702 of the statute. It brings under FISC jurisdiction various intelligence-collection programs that target categories of non-Americans outside the United States. These foreigners also communicate with Americans, so the latter are incidentally intercepted.

    Under federal law, both kinds of FISA collection are subject to so-called minimization procedures. These aim to safeguard the privacy of Americans who have been incidentally monitored. When raw intelligence is refined into intelligence reports (including transcripts of recorded conversations) that are disseminated to U.S. officials, the identities of these Americans do not appear. Rather, a designation such as “U.S. Person” is substituted — the “mask,” as it were.

    If, upon reviewing intel reports, an official with national-security or foreign-relations responsibilities believes that the reporting is critical, and that the identity of the U.S. person must be known in order for our government to reap the full benefit of the intelligence, then that official may request unmasking. Decisions on such requests are made by specialists assigned to the agency that reported the intelligence in question — usually the FBI or the NSA for intelligence collected, respectively, inside or outside the United States. Our intelligence agencies, led by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), keep records of these requests. This underscores that unmasking — because of its privacy implications, because foreign intelligence must never be a pretext for government spying on Americans — is a big deal that should be done only rarely and carefully.

    With that as background, let’s get back to Flynn.

    For three years, we’ve been led to believe that Flynn’s December 29 conversation with Kislyak was intercepted because the latter was “routinely” monitored. (Kislyak was replaced as ambassador in 2017.) That is, Kislyak was an overt agent of Russia, stationed at its embassy in Washington, so the FBI kept tabs on him. Indeed, the “routine”-surveillance story line was repeated by the New York Times just this week.

    The implication is that Kislyak was probably subjected to traditional FISA surveillance by the FBI; or, since he lived in Russia and traveled to other places when not in America, perhaps he was also a FISA Section 702 target. In either event (or both), Kislyak was interacting with Americans, who were thus incidentally intercepted.

    That, the story goes, is what must have happened to Flynn. Trump’s designated national security advisor was unmasked because, once intelligence agents intercepted the December 29 phone call, they decided it was essential to identify the person with whom the Russian ambassador was discussing sanctions that President Obama had just imposed against Moscow.

    I no longer buy this story. If it were true, there would be a record of Flynn’s unmasking. DNI Grenell has represented that the list he provided to Senators Grassley and Johnson includes all requested unmaskings of Flynn from November 8, 2016 (when Donald Trump was elected president) through the end of January 2017 (when the Trump administration had transitioned into power). Yet, it appears that not a single listed unmasking pertains to the December 29 Kislyak call.

    Timeline details and Strzok-Page comms snipped.

    Well, the possibility that first leaps to mind is: Maybe Flynn was a FISA surveillance target. That is, his interception was not incidental. Rather, the FBI was monitoring him under FISA because he was a suspected agent of a foreign power — the theory based on which the bureau opened their counterintelligence investigation of Flynn in August 2016. But that can’t be right. After an exhaustive investigation of the FBI’s abuse of FISA, Justice Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz concluded that there is no evidence the FBI “requested or seriously considered FISA surveillance of . . . Flynn.” (IG Report’s “Executive Summary,” p. vi.)

    It is more likely, then, that the Flynn–Kislyak call was captured by intelligence operations that are not governed by FISA.

    Snip.

    Readers of my book Ball of Collusion know I have argued that the Obama administration’s Trump–Russia probe/political-narrative long predated the FBI’s July 2016 opening of “Crossfire Hurricane.” I believe there were several strands of the Trump–Russia probe, and that they trace back to 2015, around the time of Donald Trump’s entry into the race for the Republican presidential nomination.

    The CIA played a central role. The agency collaborated — I’m tempted to say colluded! — with a variety of friendly foreign intelligence services, especially NATO countries that Trump made a habit of bashing on the campaign trail.

    Read the whole thing.

  • “How Russiagate Began With Obama’s Iran Deal Domestic Spying Campaign“:

    Barack Obama warned his successor against hiring Michael Flynn. It was Nov. 10, 2016, just two days after Donald Trump upset Hillary Clinton to become the 45th president of the United States. Trump told aide Hope Hicks that he was bewildered by the president’s warning. Of all the important things Obama could have discussed with him, the outgoing commander in chief wanted to talk about Michael Flynn.

    The question of why Obama was so focused on Flynn is especially revealing now. The Department of Justice recently filed to withdraw charges against the retired three-star general for making false statements to the FBI in a Jan. 24, 2017, interview regarding a phone call with a Russian diplomat. The circumstances surrounding the call and subsequent FBI interview have given rise to a vast conspiracy theory that was weaponized to imprison a decorated war hero and a strategic thinker whose battlefield innovations saved countless American lives. There is no evidence that Flynn “colluded” with Russia, and the evidence that Flynn did not make false statements to the FBI has been buried by the bureau, including current Director Christopher Wray.

    So if the Obama administration wasn’t alarmed by Flynn’s nonexistent ties to Russia, why was he Obama’s No. 1 target? Why were officials from the previous administration intercepting his phone calls with the Russian ambassador?

    The answer is that Obama saw Flynn as a signal threat to his legacy, which was rooted in his July 2015 nuclear agreement with Iran—the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Flynn had said long before he signed on with the Trump campaign that it was a catastrophe to realign American interests with those of a terror state. And now that the candidate he’d advised was the new president-elect, Flynn was in a position to help undo the deal. To stop Flynn, the outgoing White House ran the same offense it used to sell the Iran deal—they smeared Flynn through the press as an agent of a foreign power, spied on him, and leaked classified intercepts of his conversations to reliable echo chamber allies.

    Again, read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

  • Matt Taibbi: “Democrats Have Abandoned Civil Liberties.” I wonder if Taibbi could pinpoint the last time Democrats actually supported civil liberties…
  • “House Dem criticizes her own party for shoving ‘wish list’ stimulus package: ‘It’s not a good look.'”

    Rep. Katie Porter, D-Calif., criticized her own party’s coronavirus legislation this week as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., pressured the Republican-controlled Senate to adopt what Porter described as a Democratic “wish list.”

    “The HEROES Act is dead on arrival,” Porter said Tuesday, referring to the $3 trillion package the House passed last week as a follow-up to the CARES Act. Her comments during an online meeting hosted by the Tustin [Calif.] Democratic Club were first reported by the Washington Examiner.

    “There was no bipartisan negotiation here and no effort at bipartisan negotiation,

    Snip.

    But tucked into the legislation are provisions that rankled the Republicans, including expanding $1,200 checks to certain undocumented immigrants, restoring the full State and Local Tax Deduction (SALT) that helps individuals in high-taxed blue states, a $25 billion rescue for the U.S. Postal Service, allowing legal marijuana businesses to access banking services and early voting and vote-by-mail provisions.

    “I did find myself, Porter said, “on the House floor thinking [of] my Republican colleagues who said, ‘This bill is a Democratic wish list written by a handful of Democrats, and shoved down the throats of the rest of the Congress.’

    Restoring SALT is a giveaway to blue state billionaires. Sounds like the marijuana banking part should be passed, but there’s no reason to cram it into a coronavirus relief bill. And the early voting and vote-by-mail provisions are designed to help further voting fraud. Speaking of which:

  • A Philadelphia judge has pled guilty to helping Democrats commit voting fraud:

    A former Judge of Elections in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, has been charged and pleaded guilty to illegally adding votes for Democrat candidates in judicial races in 2014, 2015, and 2016.

    On Thursday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) announced charges against former Judge of Elections Domenick DeMuro, 73, for stuffing the ballot box for Democrats in exchange for payment by a paid political consultant.

    The charges, and guilty plea, include conspiracy to deprive Philadelphia voters of their civil rights by fraudulently stuffing the ballot boxes for specific Democrat candidates in the 2014, 2015, and 2016 primary elections and a violation of the Travel Act.

    “The Trump administration’s prosecution of election fraud stands in stark contrast to the total failure of the Obama Justice Department to enforce these laws,” Public Interest Legal Foundation President Christian Adams said in a statement. “Right now, other federal prosecutors are aware of cases of double voting in federal elections as well as noncitizen voting. Attorney General William Barr should prompt those other offices to do their duty and prosecute known election crimes.”

    As Judge of Elections, DeMuro was paid to oversee the election process in the 39th Ward, which encompasses Philadelphia.

    DeMuro’s guilty plea states that he was paid by a political consultant to illegally add votes for particular Democrat candidates in primary judicial races. The political consultant who allegedly paid DeMuro had been hired by those Democrat candidates.

    According to the indictment, the political consultant allegedly solicited payments from Democrat candidates who hired him, classifying them as “consulting fees.” The payments — which ranged from $300 to $5,000 — were then allegedly used to pay Election Board Officials, such as DeMuro, in exchange for those officials illegally adding votes for the consultants’ Democrat candidates.

    (Hat tip: The President of the United States of America.)

  • In addition to certifying fraudulent results to help Democrats, DeMuro also took a hands-on approach to voting fraud: “Demuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear.” (Hat tip: Chuck DeVore.)
  • Several posts here suggested that Sweden’s model of reaching herd immunity might be a better method than what we were doing. Now that the data is in: not so much. “Sweden becomes country with highest coronavirus death rate per capita.”
  • Speaking of data, the way media dashboards count the numbers are skewed high. “At the time of Colorado’s announcement on Friday, the CDC-definition tally, used in CNN’s “dashboard” and all the other media reports, stood at 1,150 statewide. But only 878 of those, more than 23 percent less, are identified as deaths due to COVID-19.”
  • Democrats thinks the Wuhan coronavirus crisis will get worse. Of course they do.
  • “CNN Is Willing To Lie About Wuhan Virus in Texas If That’s What It Takes to Crash the Economy.”

    CNN has staked out a position in its coverage of Wuhan virus that can only be explained in one way. They perceive a drawn-out lock down of America as something that will damage President Trump’s reelection chances and therefore it is something to be preserved. The move by a handful of governors to re-open their states to normal life despite the latest pronouncement from the latest M.D. or Ph.D. who fancies himself as Galactic Commander, threatens to reveal the Wuhan virus’s new clothing, so to speak. Therefore, anything that can be done to discredit the incontrovertible data that shows whatever threat Wuhan virus presented is now largely abated must be discredited.

    More tests are being given, and the positives rate is actually declining.

  • Oregon’s Democratic governor Kate Brown: “No shopping in open counties for those in closed counties!”
  • “Why California Is In Trouble – 340,000 Public Employees With $100,000+ Paychecks Cost Taxpayers $45 Billion.” I believe the word you’re looking for is looting
  • Speaking of California: More suicides than coronavirus deaths? I know that “data” is not the plural of “anecdote,” but maybe somebody should run the numbers…
  • Is Tesla planning a Gigafactory near Austin? There are still big tracks of land available out near 130…
  • Wargaming a war between the U.S. and China in 2030. Don’t be so sure they could knock out our carriers with hypersonic missiles, and our drones and submarines would wreck havoc with their trade.
  • Another day, another college professor arrested for spying for China:

    Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine professor and former Cleveland Clinic employee was arrested Wednesday over his alleged ties to China.

    The Justice Department announced that Qing Wang was arrested at his Shaker Heights, Ohio home as part of a joint operation conducted by the FBI and the Department of Health and Human Service Office of the Inspector-General. Wang was charged with wire fraud related to more than $3.6 million in grant funding that Wang and his research team at the Cleveland Clinic had received from the National Institutes of Health.

    According to the criminal complaint, Wang failed to disclose affiliations with Chinese universities. He also allegedly failed to disclose that he had received grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China for a nearly identical research project. He held the title Dean of the College of Life Sciences and Technology at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

    Cleveland Special Agent-in-Charge Eric Smith said this wasn’t “a simple case of omission, ” adding that “Wang deliberately failed to disclose his Chinese grants and foreign positions and even engaged in a pervasive pattern of fraud to avoid criminal culpability.”

  • The 40-year old girlfriend of 74-year old former Texas Lt. Governor David Dewhurst cracked two of his ribs. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Magazine publisher Conde Nast lays off about 100 employees. Maybe the entire Teen Vogue Anal Sex department got laid off. Hopefully there are some good Python courses available in their area…
  • Universally respected mystery expert Otto Penzler was let go as editor of the Best American Mystery Stories of the Year so the publisher could pick stories based on “affirmative action” criteria rather than excellence.
  • When the levee breaks there ain’t no place to—

  • “There’s a sale bankruptcy at Penny’s!”
  • Oopsie!


    

  • “Florida Ruled To Be In Violation Of Science For Not Having More People Die.”
  • “Democrat Governors Warn If Lockdowns Are Lifted They Won’t Get Nearly As Much Time In The Spotlight.”
  • “I Forced A Bot to Read 1,000 Jennifer Rubin Columns And Write A Jennifer Rubin Column of Its Own.” One step closer to the robot uprising…
  • “Not this time, cat!”

  • Should save this one for winter:

  • Antidepressant or Tolkien character?
  • Play Stupid Games, Win Stupid Prizes Roundup

    Tuesday, December 24th, 2019

    A few dramatic cases of defensive gun use crossed my feed this morning.

    First up: A Channelview resident killed three armed intruders who broke into his home:

    A Texas resident grabbed his shotgun and shot and killed three men when they allegedly broke into his home, authorities said.

    Early Monday morning, one of the two residents of a trailer home in Channelview — about 20 miles east of Houston — heard a “commotion” outside, according to Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez. He then saw several men in dark clothing — possibly one armed — force their way inside, the sheriff said at a news conference.

    That resident ran to hide, while his roommate, armed with a shotgun, exchanged gunfire with the suspects, Gonzalez said.

    The armed resident shot and killed three suspected home invaders, Gonzalez said.

    A FedEx driver in Philadelphia killed an armed robber:

    A FedEx driver suffered a gunshot wound to the stomach before he pulled out his own gun and killed the armed robber who attacked him, police said.

    The incident occurred in the 600-block of Unruh Avenue at approximately 7:10 p.m. on Tuesday night, WPVI reported.

    The 32-year-old FedEx driver had just finished making a delivery at a home when he was confronted by the 27-year-old armed suspect, according to WCAU.

    The robber stole multiple packages from the FedEx truck before he shot the driver in the abdomen, police said.

    That’s when the driver pulled out his own gun and retired fire, hitting his attacker multiple times.

    The suspect made off with several packages as he fled the scene, while the wounded FedEx driver jumped back into the delivery truck and drove to a nearby ACME store to get help, WPVI reported.

    Driver was stabilized at the hospital. The perp? Not so much:

    Meanwhile, officers located an unconscious man in an alley in the 1400-block of Creston Street suffering from gunshot wounds to his back and chest, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported.

    He was carrying packages that had been stolen from the FedEx driver, according to WCAU.

    The suspect was transported to Einstein Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

    Also in Pennsylvania: “A man was sent to an area hospital after being shot while trying to burglarize a home in Fayette County Friday night.”

    Next up: Would-be armed robber dirtnapped by bystander:

    Finally, not a current event, but Karl Rehn has a book review up of FBI Miami Firefight (Five Minutes that Changed the Bureau), written by one of the agents involved in the famous 1986 gun battle that changed law enforcement gun policy.

    LinkSwarm for July 26, 2019

    Friday, July 26th, 2019

    Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Democrats just keep making the same mistakes over and over again when it comes to President Donald Trump.

    This month, Netroots Nation met in Philadelphia. The choice was no accident. Pennsylvania will probably be the key swing state in 2020. Donald Trump won it by only 44,000 votes or seven-tenths of a percentage point. He lost the prosperous Philadelphia suburbs by more than Mitt Romney did in 2012 but more than made up for it with new support in “left behind” blue-collar areas such as Erie and Wilkes-Barre.

    You’d think that this history would inform activists at Netroots Nation about the best strategy to follow in 2020. Not really. Instead, Netroots events seemed to alternate between pandering presentations by presidential candidates and a bewildering array of “intersectionality” and identity-politics seminars.

    Senator Elizabeth Warren pledged that, if elected, she would immediately investigate crimes committed by border-control agents. Julian Castro, a former Obama-administration cabinet member, called for decriminalizing illegal border crossings. But everyone was topped by Washington governor Jay Inslee. “My first act will be to ask Megan Rapinoe to be my secretary of State,” he promised. Naming the woke, purple-haired star of the championship U.S. Women’s Soccer team, he said, would return “love rather than hate” to the center of America’s foreign policy.

    Snip.

    Many leftists acknowledge that Democrats are less interested than they used to be in trimming their sails to appeal to moderates. Such trimming is no longer necessary, as they see it, because the changing demographics of the country give them a built-in advantage. Almost everyone I encountered at Netroots Nation was convinced that President Trump would lose in 2020. Earlier today, Roland Martin, an African-American journalist, told ABC’s This Week, “America is changing. By 2043, we’ll be a nation [that’s] majority people of color, and that’s — that is the game here — that’s what folks don’t want to understand what’s happening in this country.”

    It’s a common mistake on both the right and the left to assume that minority voters will a) always vote in large numbers and b) will vote automatically for Democrats. Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 in part because black turnout fell below what Barack Obama was able to generate. There is no assurance that black turnout can be restored in 2020.

    As for other ethnic groups, a new poll by Politico/Morning Consult this month found that Trump’s approval among Hispanics is at 42 percent. An Economist/YouGov poll showed Trump at 32 percent among Hispanics; another poll from The Hill newspaper and HarrisX has it at 35 percent. In 2016, Trump won only 29 to 32 percent of the Hispanic vote.

    Netroots Nation convinced me that progressive activists are self-confident, optimistic about the chances for a progressive triumph, and assured that a Trump victory was a freakish “black swan” event. But they are also deaf to any suggestion that their PC excesses had anything to do with Trump’s being in the White House. That is apt to be the progressive blind spot going into the 2020 election.

  • Democrats’ strategy against President Trump has been a miserable failure. Even CNN agrees!
  • President Trump won the Mueller showdown and now is going on offense:

    Trump is just beginning to advance his arguments about what has blanketed the country since the summer of 2016. The president is going to argue that the real scandal was the attempt to keep him from winning election and, once having won, from governing. And his opponents did so by shocking means far outside the norms of law and U.S. politics. In this offensive against his tormentors of the past 36 months, the president may be aided by the Justice Department’s office of the inspector general and by John H. Durham, the U.S. attorney for the District of Connecticut, to whom Attorney General William P. Barr has entrusted the investigation into what may well become “CoIntelPro 2.0.”

    Even if not, Trump will make this argument simply by force of repetition of the facts we already know: The Steele Dossier was a con job from the start — opposition research passed off as intelligence and, at best, stupidly accepted as legitimate by a naive FBI. It could turn out much worse than this. Wise advice during the Mueller investigation was to wait for the endgame and not guess. The same holds for the inspector general and for Durham.

    That the attack on Trump has decisively failed is not open to debate — except by people unfamiliar with sunk costs. Many political figures and folks in the commentariat heavily invested in the idea that Mueller would bring forth impeachment, and possibly even conviction and removal of the president. He did not. Impeachment proceedings, much less a successful vote on articles of impeachment, seem unlikely.

    Trump has his economic boom, his deregulatory record, his military buildup and his remaking of the judiciary. He has criminal-justice reform to his credit and an overhaul of Veterans Affairs is underway. He now has a spending deal that would guarantee continuing fiscal stimulus via larger deficits, and he has four vacancies (to which he astonishingly has not nominated anyone) on the U.S. courts of appeals for the 2nd and 9th circuits, as well as scores of district court openings to remind his base of the stakes.

  • How long has Robert Mueller been like this?
  • In case anyone still isn’t clear on this point, Democrats still aren’t serious about impeachment:

    Look at the last impeachment, that of President Bill Clinton in 1998. Independent counsel Kenneth Starr delivered his report on the Lewinsky affair to Congress on Sept. 9. The House voted to start impeachment proceedings on Oct. 8. The formal impeachment vote was Dec. 19. The matter then went to the Senate, which voted to acquit Clinton on Feb. 12, 1999. The process took a few days more than five months.

    Imagine a similar timeline today. The House stays out on recess until the second week in September. Say they vote to begin proceedings in October. The impeachment vote comes in mid-to-late December, and the Senate verdict in February — probably somewhere between the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries.

    That is a crazy scenario, and that is what would happen if impeachment work got under way immediately after the House returns from recess. If it were delayed further, the whole thing would move weeks or months farther down the road. Why not a Senate trial during Super Tuesday, or the summer political conventions? The possibilities are mind-boggling.

    Speaker Nancy Pelosi fears impeachment will backfire on Democrats, in large part because the Republican-controlled Senate will never remove Donald Trump from office. Her strategy appears to be to delay and delay until at some point it becomes obvious to all that it is far too late to make impeachment happen. Pelosi will then look at her watch and say, “Oh, my goodness, look at the time!” And that will be that.

    The fact is, it is nearly too late for impeachment right now. Yet the possibility of impeachment is still being discussed seriously.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • While everyone was watching Robert Mueller ask when Matlock was on, the House, in coordination with the Trump Administration, passed a budget agreement that continues profligate spending as far as the eye can see (or at least two years), and which takes a government shutdown off the table until after the 2020 election. Not what I or any conservative activist would have done, but obviously President Trump feels he can continue to hold off the next cyclical recession long enough to get reelected. Kicking the can down the road has become a global pastime for almost all the nations of the world, and sooner or later there will come a reckoning. In America, this fight may have been lost when Bush41 let Gramm-Rudman-Hollings get whacked in 1990…
  • It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at this story of Washington, D.C. therapists whose patients’ Trump Derangement Syndromes are making their equally liberal TDS-suffering therapists depressed as well. (Hat tip: Kurt Schlichter.)
  • Another lovely side effect of living in a one-party state controlled by the far left: Los Angeles faces an imminent outbreak of Bubonic Plague

    Dr. Drew told Adams that he had predicted the recent typhus outbreak in Los Angeles, which was carried by rats, transferred by fleas to pets, and from pets to humans.

    Bubonic plague, Dr. Drew said, like typhus, is endemic to the region, and can spread to humans from rodents in a similar fashion.

    Though commonly recognized as the medieval disease responsible for the Black Death in the fourteenth century, which killed one-third of the population of Europe, the last outbreak of bubonic plague in the U.S. was nearly a century ago, from 1924 to 1925 — also in Los Angeles. Only a “heroic effort” by doctors stopped it, Dr. Drew recalled, warning that conditions were perfect for another outbreak of the plague in the near future.

    Los Angeles is one of the only cities in the country, Dr. Drew said, that has no rodent control plan. “And if you look at the pictures of Los Angeles, you will see that the homeless encampments are surrounded by dumps. People defecate there, they throw their trash there, and the rats just proliferate there.”

  • Incumbent Democrats gear up for the AOC-inspired blue-on-blue violence:

    Representative Jerrold Nadler has served in Congress for 27 years, rising to become the chairman of the powerful House Judiciary Committee. He has become a boldface name in the age of President Trump, the linchpin of many Democrats’ hopes of impeachment.

    Eliot Engel leads the Foreign Affairs Committee, after first being elected to the House in 1988. Carolyn Maloney was the first woman to represent her district when she was elected in 1992. Yvette Clarke, serving since 2007, has delivered some of the most consistently progressive votes in her party.

    All four New York House members are facing primary challenges from multiple insurgent candidates.

    Almost a year in advance of the June 2020 primary, more than a dozen Democrats in New York have declared their plans to run, forming one of the most contentious congressional fields in the country at this stage. They are targeting some of the country’s longest-serving or most powerful politicians — most as first-time or outsider candidates, and some in the same district.

    The phenomenon is not unique: Progressives across the country are plotting primary battles, spurred on by the victories last year of figures such as Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as well as growing disenchantment with the Democratic Party’s old-guard wing. Early challengers have emerged in blue states including New Jersey and California.

  • How Democrats plan to turn Texas blue:

    Texas Democrats have their eyes on taking over Texas, and a newly released plan lays out how they aim to finally turn Texas blue.

    In a presentation given to political donors and Austin lobbyists this week, Texas Democrats made their case for heavy political investment in the Lone Star State.

    First, they compare Texas to Ohio, a traditional swing state that often receives a heavy influx of cash from national Democrat donors. Both states, the presentation states, voted 43 percent Democrat in the 2016 presidential election. But while Ohio’s trajectory is “successively worse in the last two presidential elections,” Texas Democrats point out that they had their best showing in 20 years. They also highlight demographic differences between Ohio and Texas that they believe make the task easier, such as the Texas’ overall younger and larger minority population.

    Snip.

    Democrats need not worry, they say, about retaining [12 Texas House seats they flipped], as they claim there is “too much GOP defense to go on offense” in order to take those seats back. Recently released campaign finance reports, however, show that many of the newly elected “Democrat Dozen” have an astoundingly small amount in their campaign accounts, depicting what could be an uphill battle for many of them should Republicans wage serious campaigns to take those seats back.

    In addition to John Cornyn’s senate seat, Democrats are targeting six U.S. congressional seats.

  • On the same theme, this piece says those six districts are:
    • TX-10 — Mike McCaul
    • TX-21 — Chip Roy
    • TX-22 — Pete Olson
    • TX-23 — Will Hurd
    • TX-24 — Kenny Marchant
    • TX-31 — John Carter
  • Minnesota, the only state to vote against Ronald Reagan in 1984, is trending Republican.

    For example, last month, Trump moved to expand a major copper and nickel mining operation, one of the largest remaining reserves in the world, that Barack Obama had refused to renew in his final weeks in office. Obama’s backpedaling on approving new mining leases was widely unpopular. While liberal environmental groups are still vocally protesting Trump’s decision, polls show that Minnesotans, especially in the five counties surrounding the project, strongly approve.

    Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration has also found increasing favor. Minnesota is a major resettlement state for Muslim refugees, many of them from terror-prone Syria and Somalia. Some Somalis have also left Minnesota to join the Islamic State in east Africa. A November 2016 attack by a Somali American, who stabbed eight people in a shopping mall, has fueled support for Trump’s Muslim travel ban.

    Minnesota’s up for grabs for another reason: Massive fallout from the resignation of Sen. Al Franken, a prominent liberal Democrat, over sexual assault allegations that have damaged the party’s standing with voters across the board. Add to this the growing controversy over newly elected in-state Rep. Ilhan Omar, who is widely viewed as anti-Semitic and extremist, and the Democrats are confronting a major crisis of credibility with Minnesota’s electorate.

    Nevada and Colorado could also flip red. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • “Takeover of federal judiciary by ‘larval Scalias‘ is devastatingly close to completion.”
  • Jeffrey Epstein found injured in New York jail sale after suspected “suicide attempt.”
  • Related: “According to a report from the Centers for Disease Control released on Thursday, people with inside, compromising knowledge of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s financial and political dealings are 843% more likely to commit suicide.”
  • The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General David Berger, wants to desilo the Corps and reintegrate it into the Navy’s overall structure. CDR Salamander thinks this is a good idea. Maybe. I haven’t followed recent strategic seapower debates much as of late. But it’s a devil-in-the-details move that could badly backfire if improperly implemented. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Sen. Kyrsten Sinema pushes program to streamline removal of migrant families without valid asylum claims.” That’s Democrat Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
  • Interesting profile of Boris Johnson in Quilette:

    I first set eyes on Boris Johnson in the autumn of 1983 when we went up to Oxford at the same time. I knew who he was since my uncle Christopher was an ex-boyfriend of his mother’s and he had told me to keep an eye out for him, but I still wasn’t prepared for the sight (and sound) of him at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union. This was the world famous debating society where ambitious undergraduates honed their public-speaking skills before embarking on careers in politics or journalism, and Boris was proposing the motion.

    With his huge mop of blond hair, his tie askew and his shirt escaping from his trousers, he looked like an overgrown schoolboy. Yet with his imposing physical build, his thick neck and his broad, Germanic forehead, there was also something of Nietzsche’s Übermensch about him. You could imagine him in lederhosen, wandering through the Black Forest with an axe over his shoulder, looking for ogres to kill. This same combination—a state of advanced dishevelment and a sense of coiled strength, of an almost tangible will to power—was even more pronounced in his way of speaking.

    He began to advance an argument in what sounded like a parody of the high style in British politics—theatrical, dramatic, self-serious—when—a few seconds in—he appeared to completely forget what he was about to say. He looked up, startled—Where am I?—and asked the packed chamber which side he was supposed to be on. “What’s the motion, anyway?” Before anyone could answer, a light bulb appeared above his head and he was off, this time in an even more orotund, florid manner. Yet within a few seconds he’d wrong-footed himself again, this time because it had suddenly occurred to him that there was an equally compelling argument for the opposite point of view. This endless flipping and flopping, in which he seemed to constantly surprise himself, went on for the next 15 minutes. The impression he gave was of someone who’d been plucked from his bed in the middle of the night and then plonked down at the dispatch box of the Oxford Union without the faintest idea of what he was supposed to be talking about.

    I’d been to enough Union debates at this point to know just how mercilessly the crowd could punish those who came before them unprepared. That was particularly true of freshmen, who were expected to have mastered all the arcane procedural rules, some of them dating back to the Union’s founding in 1823. But Boris’s chaotic, scatter-brained approach had the opposite effect. The motion was deadly serious—“This House Would Reintroduce Capital Punishment”—yet almost everything that came out of his mouth provoked gales of laughter. This was no ordinary undergraduate proposing a motion, but a Music Hall veteran performing a well-rehearsed comic routine. His lack of preparedness seemed less like evidence of his own shortcomings as a debater and more a way of sending up all the other speakers, as well as the pomposity of the proceedings. You got the sense that he could easily have delivered a highly effective speech if he’d wanted to, but was too clever and sophisticated—and honest—to enter into such a silly charade. To do what the other debaters were doing, and pretend he believed what was coming out of his mouth, would have been patronising. Everyone else was taking the audience for fools, but not him. He was openly insincere and, in being so, somehow seemed more authentic than everyone else.

    A long list of Johnson scandals that didn’t even remotely come close to derailing his ascent skipped.

    Another quote that’s often dragged up by Boris’s enemies to discredit him is from a Conservative campaign speech in 2005: “Voting Tory will cause your wife to have bigger breasts and increase your chances of owning a BMW M3.” In their minds, this is appallingly sexist, as well as environmentally suspect. But if Orwell is right about the enduring appeal of the “overwhelming vulgarity,” the “smuttiness,” the “ever-present obscenity,” of Britain’s seaside postcards you can see why constantly reminding people of Boris’s politically incorrect remarks won’t necessarily hurt his electoral chances. It just serves to embed him in the public imagination as a stock British character whom many people still feel an instinctive affection for: the lovable rogue, the man with the holiday in his eye. He’s the guy that tries to persuade the barman to serve one more round of drinks after time has been called, the 14-year-old who borrows his father’s Mercedes at two o’clock in the morning and takes it up to a 100mph on the motorway with his friends shrieking in the back. He’s Falstaff in Henry IV, Sid James in the Carry On films. He’s a Donald McGill postcard.

    In case you’re unfamiliar with the reference, here’s an example:

  • Iran is losing its confrontation with the west and will eventually have to cut a nuclear deal. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • in fact, Iran has already lost:

    Israel has reportedly flown a modified version of the F-35 to Iran and back, circling major cities and military bases and taking surveillance photographs without being detected by Iranian radar or intercepted by Russian missiles.

    That is the story that has been circulating throughout the Middle East for the past year. No one is certain whether it is true, but it has begun to appear in Western sources, especially since Iran recently fired the head of its air force.

    The Israeli version of the F-35, known as the “Adir,” is reportedly the first version of the American-made Joint Strike Fighter that has ever been deployed in combat. But it may have already had a bigger impact in a non-combat role.

    That so many believe the story is a sign Iran is already regarded as the “weak horse” in the middle east. (Hat tip: Scott Adams on Twitter.)

  • Transgender Athletes Threaten Women’s Sports.”

    Social justice warriors defy any and all pushback, calling it “transphobia.” They argue that gender is a social construct. It’s a theory in feminist sociology that states society and culture, not genetics, define whether one is male, female, or “other”.

    While the argument about what constitutes “gender identity” and “gender expression” – other confusing facets of gender in contemporary society – remain up for debate, what isn’t up for debate is the fact that those born with male body parts and hormone levels have physical superiority over most biological females. It is settled science.

  • Ball-waxing tranny pervert keeps getting people banned from Twitter for pointing out he’s a tranny pervert.
  • Speaking of tranny madness, this piece is about a woke and naive Harvard professor who let himself be taken to the cleaners by a “lesbian” divorced from a tranny who had a one-night stand with him and then proceeded to rob him blind because he was too stupid/woke to resist her.
  • An eye-opening thread about health insurance fraud.
  • Not news: Man robbed at gunpoint in Baltimore. News: He’s the new deputy police commissioner. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Good Disney news: Avengers: Endgame passes Avatar as the highest grossing film of all time.
  • Bad Disney news: Former Disney vice president Michael Laney convicted of sexually abusing a 7 year old girl.
  • Here’s a horrifying story about how San Luis Obispo police chief Deanna Cantrell losing her gun in a toilet stall led police to conduct a warrantless search of an innocent man’s house and seized his children for “neglect” because the house was dirty.
  • Florida town levies hundred of thousands of dollars in fines for things like unmown grass.
  • “Snopes Publishes Helpful Fact Check On 1996 Basketball Documentary ‘Space Jam.'”
  • LinkSwarm for April 26, 2019

    Friday, April 26th, 2019

    Democratic mayors behaving badly, violence, mayhem, and an Easter Bunny smackdown. Welcome to your Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Long, detailed post on FISA abuse under the Obama Administration. Fully 85% of all Obama Administration requests were not compliant with federal law.
  • AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka slams Obama and praises President Trump. Unions are also not wild about the “Green New Deal.”
  • Kurt Schlichter revels in the misery of #NeverTrumpers after the Mueller Report:

    Now, it’s not really fair to imply that the Never Trumpers hate Trump solely because he’s vulgar and crude – or, as normal people see it, unwilling to meekly take the guff the Never Trumpers’ country club class pals dish out like a proper gentleman should. They do find him aesthetically displeasing, but it also gnaws at them because every time he stands up to the garbage Democrats, the garbage press, or the garbage jerks and pervs of Hollywood, his refusal to knuckle-under reminds Team Fail that they don’t have the stones to do the same. He shames their cowardly weakness.

    It’s clear, in retrospect, that George W. Bush’s supine acceptance of the abuse the elite heaped upon him was not because he was too classy and too decent to respond in kind. Since Obama left office and he rediscovered his vocal cords, Bush has had zero problem trashing Trump and Trump supporters who, like many of us, stood by Bush in the ’00s while Bush was treading water in a sea of mediocrity. No, it’s clear that W was afraid to fight back against fellow members of the ruling class. He cared about being part of the club. Not The Donald. Trump, by fighting, demonstrates that the establishment GOPers are weak. And it eats at them.

    But besides providing a manly contrast to their own gimp-like submission to the leftist establishment, Trump infuriates the Never Trumpers for another reason. He’s kicked them out of their comfy sinecures. One of Trump’s magical powers is to make his enemies reveal their own grift complicity, and boy, have they ever. As a result, while once the mandarins of Conservative, Inc., traded on their insider influence and privilege, under Trump they are outsiders. Copies of the Weekly Standard used to be all over the Bush White House. Now, if its inept crew had not slammed it into an iceberg, you would be lucky to find a few pages at the bottom of Barron’s pet iguana’s cage.

    Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and all the rest are nobodies, relegated to occasionally joining CNN panels and fighting with Ana Navarro over the doughnuts in the green room. Where’s Bob Corker now? Jeff Flake hasn’t even got an MSNBC gig; I think last week he was the dude who offered to supersize my order.

  • The Twilight of Liberalism:

    it is not the abstract logic of liberalism that is flawed, but rather the attempt to apply it to fallible humans. Like communism, liberalism conflicts with immutable human characteristics. However, unlike communism, certain kinds of liberalism (the industrial liberalism of the 1900s, for example) work because they are moderated by the material conditions of society. But as those moderating conditions are obliterated by technology, the problems of post-industrial liberalism have become clearer. The ultimate problem is this: Humans desire unfettered freedom, but need the discipline that constraint provides. Without such discipline, they risk slumping into an empty and unsatisfying hedonism that is ruinous to communities and to society more broadly.

    Those who are intelligent and self-controlled often create their own constraints and can therefore thrive in post-industrial societies that are radically unlike the societies in which humans evolved. Those who are less intelligent or self-controlled, however, often fail to create successful constraints and therefore suffer when once powerful cultural guardrails (such as religion, strict norms, civic groups, and so on) are destroyed by accelerating innovation and secularism. The result is a growing cultural and economic gap between segments of the population which, when coupled with the declining outcomes for a once thriving middle class, fuels growing bitterness and discontent. Combine this with a trend toward cosmopolitanism that increases ethnic and religious diversity and therefore potential sources of faction and conflict, and liberalism’s immediate prospects look bleak.

    The authors also posit technological change as one of the biggest drivers of challenge to the old liberal order.

  • Followup: Remember how Baltimore’s Democratic Mayor Catherine Pugh took over $100,000 in bribes disguised as book sales? Well, now the feds have raided her house and office:

    Hauling out boxes of “Healthy Holly” books and documents, dozens of federal law enforcement agents Thursday struck homes, businesses and government buildings across Baltimore as an investigation into Mayor Catherine Pugh’s business dealings widened.

    FBI agents and IRS officials executed search warrants at her City Hall office, Pugh’s two houses, and offices of the mayor’s allies, as the growing scandal consumed the city’s attention, generated national headlines and provoked fresh calls for the embattled Democratic mayor’s resignation.

    Snip.

    Dave Fitz, an FBI spokesman, confirmed that agents from the Baltimore FBI office and the Washington IRS office searched at least six addresses. The U.S. attorney’s office confirmed the location of a seventh search. The actions were the first confirmation that federal authorities, as well as state officials, were investigating the mayor’s activities.

    Snip.

    Shortly after the raids began, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan called on Pugh, who has taken a paid leave of absence as mayor, to resign. The Republican governor had asked the Maryland Office of the State Prosecutor on April 1 to investigate Pugh’s sales of her self-published “Healthy Holly” children’s book series to the University of Maryland Medical System while she was on its unpaid board of directors.

    “Today, agents for the FBI and the IRS executed search warrants at the mayor’s homes and offices,” Hogan said. “Now, more than ever, Baltimore city needs strong and responsible leadership. Mayor Pugh has lost the public trust. She is clearly not fit to lead. For the good of the city, Mayor Pugh must resign.”

    When a raid involves both the FBI and the IRS, usually that’s a bad sign.

  • And speaking of Democratic mayors committing fraud, Edinburg, Texas Mayor Richard Molina was arrested on voting fraud charges:

    At times appearing unfazed by the severity of his circumstances, Edinburg Mayor Richard Molina was guided into a Pharr courtroom Thursday morning after he and his wife surrendered themselves to law enforcement to face multiple election fraud charges. The scene was notably different from when Molina entered a state of the city address just one year ago, shadowboxing and wielding a championship belt.

    Now, allegations from a Texas Attorney General’s office investigation into the city’s 2017 municipal election have cast Molina as allegedly cheating his way into the mayoral seat by having people who live outside of the city vote for him.

    An hour after he turned himself in at the Texas Department of Public Safety’s Edinburg office, Molina stood before Precinct 2 Justice of the Peace Jaime “Jerry” Muñoz, who presides out of Pharr, and was charged with two counts of illegal voting and one count of engaging in organized election fraud — second- and first-degree felonies, respectively.

    Molina, 40, was then escorted to Hidalgo County jail where he was quickly booked in and out on a combined $20,000 cash surety bond, and promptly headed to a city workshop to discuss the future of a city golf course.

    It was business as usual for a mayor who has faced scrutiny since he unseated Edinburg’s longtime mayor, Richard Garcia, in November 2017 by 1,240 votes. Such scrutiny has only increased over the past year as the AG’s office arrested more than a dozen people on illegal voting charges tied to the election.

    And the voting fraud, sadly, seems business as usual in both the Rio Grande Valley in general and Hidalgo County specifically… (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • The Press Will Learn Nothing From the Russiagate Fiasco.”

    You know what was fake news? Most of the Russiagate story. There was no Trump-Russia conspiracy, that thing we just spent three years chasing. The Mueller Report is crystal clear on this.

    He didn’t just “fail to establish” evidence of crime. His report is full of incredibly damning passages, like one about Russian officialdom’s efforts to reach the Trump campaign after the election: “They appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect.”

    Not only was there no “collusion,” the two camps didn’t even have each others’ phone numbers!

    In March of 2017, in one of the first of what would become a mountain of mafia-hierarchy-style “Trump-Russia contacts” graphics in major newspapers, the Washington Post described an email Trump lawyer Michael Cohen sent to Kremlin press secretary Dmitry Peskov. They called it “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government.”

    The report shows the whole episode was a joke. In order to further the Trump Tower project-that-never-was, Cohen literally cold-emailed the Kremlin. More than that, he entered the email incorrectly, so the letter initially didn’t even arrive. When he finally fixed the mistake, Peskov didn’t answer back.

    That was “the most direct interaction yet of a top Trump aide and a senior member of Putin’s government”!

    As outlined in his initial mandate, Mueller explored “any links” between the Russian government and the campaign of Donald Trump. His conclusion spoke directly to the question of whether there was any kind of quid pro quo between the two sides:

    “The investigation examined whether these contacts involved or resulted in coordination or a conspiracy with the Trump Campaign and Russia, including with respect to Russia providing assistance to the Campaign in exchange for any sort of favorable treatment in the future.”

    In other words, all those fancy org charts were meaningless. Because there was no conspiracy, all those “walls are closing in” reports — and there were a ton of them — were wrong. We were told we’d hit “turning point” after “turning point” leading to the “the beginning of the end,” with Trump certain, soon, to either resign in shame, Nixon-style, or be impeached.

    The “RNC platform” change story was a canard, according to Mueller. The exchanges Trump figures had with ambassador Sergei Kislyak were “brief, public, and non-substantive.” The conversations Jeff Sessions had with Kislyak at the convention didn’t “include any more than a passing mention of the presidential campaign.” Mueller added “investigators did not establish that [Carter] Page conspired with the Russian government.”

    There was no blackmail, no secret bribe from Rosneft, no five-year cultivation plan, no evidence of any kind of any relationship that ever existed between the Trump campaign and Russian officials. Michael Cohen “never traveled to Prague.”

    The whole Steele dossier appears to have been bunk, with even Bob Woodward now saying the “highly questionable” document “needs to be investigated.” The Times similarly is reporting, two-plus years late, that “people familiar” with Steele’s work began to have “misgivings about [the report’s] reliability arose not long after the document became public.”

    Reporters are going to insist all they did was accurately report the developments of a real investigation. They didn’t imply vast criminality that wasn’t there, or hoodwink audiences into thinking a Watergate-style ending was just around the corner, or routinely blow meaningless episodes like the Sessions-Kislyak meeting out of proportion, or regularly smear people who not only weren’t part of a conspiracy but had no connection to anything (see here for an example).

    They’ll also claim they didn’t spend years openly rooting for indictment and impeachment via wish-casted predictions disguised as reporting and commentary, or denouncing people who doubted the conspiracy as spies and Putin apologists, or clearing their broadcast panels and op-ed pages of skeptics while giving big stages to craven conspiracy-spinners like Malcolm Nance and Luke Harding.

    (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)

  • Mark Steyn notes that between the Notre Dame fire and the bombing of Christian churches in Sri Lanka, our journalists have reached new levels in truth avoidance:

    It used to be said that ninety per cent of news is announcing Lord Jones is dead to people who were entirely unaware that Lord Jones was ever alive. Now the trick is to announce Lord Jones is dead and ensure that people remain entirely unaware of why he is no longer alive. One senses that a line was crossed in yesterday’s coverage. As one of our Oz Steyn Club members, Kate Smyth, put it, the media have advanced from dhimmitude to full-blown taqiyya.

    The lights are going out on the most basic of journalistic instincts: Who, what, when, where, why. All are subordinate to the Narrative – or Official Lie. All day yesterday and into today, if you had glanced at the telly, switched on the radio or surfed the big news sites of the Internet, you would have thought the Tamil Tigers were back “with a vengeance”, as The Economist put it – even though with one exception (the 1990 police massacre) the death toll was higher than any individual attack the Tigers had ever pulled off.

  • This seems like big news: “The National Security Agency has recommended that the White House abandon a U.S. surveillance program that collects information about Americans’ phone calls and text messages.”
  • Interesting thread on Gregory Craig, Obama’s White House Counsel who was recently indicted for crimes in his Ukraine work with Paul Manafort, and also Ted kennedy’s top foreign policy guy back when he was secretly asking for the Soviets to help him against Reagan.
  • “The partisan warfare over the Mueller report will rage, but one thing cannot be denied: Former President Barack Obama looks just plain bad. On his watch, the Russians meddled in our democracy while his administration did nothing about it.”
  • Russia launches world’s largest submarine. “The six hundred foot long submarine displaces more water than a World War I battleship and can dive to a depth of 1,700 feet.” More: “The nuclear-powered Belgorod is neither an attack submarine nor a ballistic missile sub. A special mission submarine, Belgorod will be a mothership to other undersea vessels. The sub can carry a payload on its back, behind the sail, or a Losharik class mini-submarine that attaches and detaches to the bottom of the hull.”
  • The Philippines threaten war over the canuck garbage menace.
  • M. J. Hegar, the Democrat who unsuccessfully challenged Rep. John Carter for the Texas 31st congressional district last year, announced that she’s running against John Cornyn. If she couldn’t take Carter in the Betomania midterm of 2018, she stands approximately no chance against Cornyn in the Presidential year of 2020.
  • “Sarah Wickline Hull was 20 weeks pregnant when she was diagnosed with an aggressive cancer.”
  • Former State Department employee Candace Marie Claiborne pleads guilty to concealing contacts from communist China. From the 2017 indictment:

    According to the affidavit in support of the complaint and arrest warrant, which was unsealed today, Claiborne began working as an Office Management Specialist for the Department of State in 1999. She has served overseas at a number of posts, including embassies and consulates in Baghdad, Iraq, Khartoum, Sudan, and Beijing and Shanghai, China. As a condition of her employment, Claiborne maintains a Top Secret security clearance. Claiborne also is required to report any contacts with persons suspected of affiliation with a foreign intelligence agency.

    Despite such a requirement, the affidavit alleges, Claiborne failed to report repeated contacts with two intelligence agents of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), even though these agents provided tens of thousands of dollars in gifts and benefits to Claiborne and her family over five years. According to the affidavit, the gifts and benefits included cash wired to Claiborne’s USAA account, an Apple iPhone and laptop computer, Chinese New Year’s gifts, meals, international travel and vacations, tuition at a Chinese fashion school, a fully furnished apartment, and a monthly stipend. Some of these gifts and benefits were provided directly to Claiborne, the affidavit alleges, while others were provided through a co-conspirator.

    Notable is how cheaply her allegiance was bought: “Claiborne noted in her journal that she could “Generate 20k in 1 year” working with one of the PRC agents, who, shortly after wiring $2,480 to Claiborne.”

  • Senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps commander reportedly defects. “Brigadier General Ali Nasiri, head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps Protection Bureau, is said to have fled to the West after a fallout with the representative of the Supreme Leader in the IRGC….General Nasiri was said to have fled with hundreds of classified documents, which could be of great value to the United States.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Katy human trafficking sting results in 44 arrests. (Hat tip: Governor Greg Abbott on Twitter.)
  • “The Bail Project is an unprecedented effort to combat mass incarceration at the front end of the system…We pay bail for people in need, reuniting families and restoring the presumption of innocence.” Like Samuel Scott. “Just hours after a nonprofit group posted bail for a man accused of assaulting his wife, the suspect went to the woman’s home and brutally murdered her.”
  • Kansas schools rebel against Mark Zuckerberg.
  • Ouch! 28-vehicle, multiple-fatality crash in Colorado.
  • Man who shot four people in self-defense, killing one, turns down plea deal, gets acquitted by jury in Philadelphia. (Hat tip: Karl Rehn.)
  • No matter how badly you’ve ever failed a class, you’ve never failed one “police cadet accidentally shoots two fellow cadets” bad. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • More on the Boeing 737 Max stall issue. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Australian feminist coffee shop that charged men a surcharge goes out of business. That will teach the patriarchy!
  • Shocking truth from the Washington Post: “If you’re in debt, you don’t deserve a vacation.” (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Savage:

  • Florida Man gets ass kicked by the Easter bunny.
  • Speaking of oversized ears, here’s a chart of everything Disney owns. Including Vice.
  • “New Poll Reveals Americans Strongly In Favor Of Legalizing Comedy.”
  • This just seems like a really bad idea. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Heh:

  • “Epic Troll: Jesus To Return Moments Before Avengers: Endgame Premieres.”
  • Happy Friday!

  • LinkSwarm for October 26, 2018

    Friday, October 26th, 2018

    Greetings from Austin in October! The skies have finally cleared to deliver some beautiful autumn weather, but we’re still required to boil our water due contamination from the massive rains.

  • The Fort Worth Democratic Party fraud ring we covered Wednesday has widened:

    A former Democratic Party official is accused of funding an organized voter fraud ring busted earlier this month that targeted elderly and incapacitated voters in north Fort Worth.

    In court documents filed Tuesday, state prosecutors allege former Tarrant County Democratic Party executive director Stuart Clegg funneled money to Leticia Sanchez, one of four paid campaign workers arrested and charged with submitting false and forged mail-ballot requests in an organized criminal voter fraud scheme.

    The documents say Sanchez, her co-defendants, Clegg, and others collaborated to cast mail-in votes for down-ballot candidates in the 2016 Democratic primary “without the voter’s knowledge or consent.” The state claims Sanchez used funds from Clegg, now a campaign consultant, to pay her three co-defendants and others for their part in the illegal mail-ballot harvesting scheme.

    Sanchez, her daughter, and two other women are charged with a total of 29 felony voter fraud counts. Sanchez’s charges include one count of illegal voting and 16 counts of providing false information on a ballot application. The court notice filed Tuesday implicates Sanchez in hundreds more crimes for which she hasn’t yet been charged.

  • Cahnman notes how well Republicans are making inroads into Hispanic South Texas:
    • Strong Border Security positions help in November — While Hurd is a sometimes squish, Flores isn’t. That this is happening at the same time as Trump is doing what he’s doing (and the legislature is, however reluctantly, doing what they’re doing) tells you everything you need to know. If the GOP’s immigration position were “toxic,’ they wouldn’t be winning in Southwest Texas.
    • The Democrats are simply too liberal (esp. on Guns and Babies) — We’ve made this observation before, but it remains true.
    • The Failure to address Carlos Uresti has cost Democrats DEARLY — Another observation we’ve made previously. But all they had to do was do the right thing when either the financial or the sexual stuff came out. But they didn’t….
    • Southwest Texas REALLY isn’t into Bobby Francis — These are the same counties that he lost in his primary disaster.
  • Blue wave? Not so much.

    Think about it. You’ve got Hollywood, the media, the Tech giants and big education behind you. You’ve got tends of millions of dollars being spent in races all over the country and you and yours. you’ve got every possible advantage going your way. Add to that you and your allies are completely energized and engaged, literally counting the days until the election so you can defeat Donald Trump…

    …and you STILL lose.

    How will they deal with the realization that their anger, rage and panic over Donald Trump is not shared by the voting public?

  • Voting to confirm Kavanaugh may not be enough for Senator Joe Manchin, who is now two points down to Republican Patrick Morrisey in the state the voted for President Trump by a bigger margin than any other. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Chik-Fil-A more popular than Starbucks among teenagers.
  • “Americans’ support for a ban on semi-automatic guns in the U.S. has dropped eight percentage points from a year ago,” now opposed 57% against to 40% in favor. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • I’m sure you’ll be shocked, shocked to know that Google’s male feminist executive ranks are filled with creepers. Some interesting details:

    Google could have fired Mr. Rubin and paid him little to nothing on the way out. Instead, the company handed him a $90 million exit package, paid in installments of about $2 million a month for four years, said two people with knowledge of the terms. The last payment is scheduled for next month.

    Also this bit of enlightened thinking:

    In a civil suit filed this month by Mr. Rubin’s ex-wife, Rie Rubin, she claimed he had multiple “ownership relationships” with other women during their marriage, paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to them. The couple were divorced in August.

    The suit included a screenshot of an August 2015 email Mr. Rubin sent to one woman. “You will be happy being taken care of,” he wrote. “Being owned is kinda like you are my property, and I can loan you to other people.”

    Our “moral superiors” sure seem to have a fetish for slavery…

  • Want to read something super, mega depressing? Here’s the New York times on the Walmart of heroin in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Kensington.

    n the summer of 2017, when I first toured the area with Patrick Trainor, a special agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, he called Kensington the largest open-air narcotics market for heroin on the East Coast. It’s known for having both the cheapest and purest heroin in the region and is a major supplier for dealers in Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland. For years, the heroin being sold in Kensington was pure enough to snort, but that summer, it was mixed with unpredictable amounts of fentanyl. In Philadelphia, deaths related to fentanyl had increased by 95 percent in the past year.

    Philadelphia County has the highest overdose rate of any of the 10 most populous counties in America. The city’s Department of Health estimates that 75,000 residents are addicted to heroin and other opioids, and each day, many of them commute to Kensington to buy drugs. The neighborhood is part of the largest cluster of overdose deaths in the city. In 2017, 236 people fatally overdosed there.

    Snip.

    In the early 2000s, Dominican gangs started bringing in Colombian heroin that was not only purer but much cheaper than heroin imported from Asia, which historically predominated. Kensington’s decentralized market kept competition high and prices low. Most corners were run by small, unaffiliated groups of dealers, making the area difficult to police; if a dealer was arrested, there was always someone there to replace him. The Philadelphia prison system has become the largest provider of drug treatment in the city. The police have realized that they can’t arrest the problem away, and they spend many of their calls reviving drug addicts with Narcan, an overdose-reversal spray. The D.E.A. focused on the high-level drug traffickers, not the guys working the streets, but the arrests did little to curb the growing demand.

    “They call this the Badlands,” Elvis Campos, 47, said about Kensington. “Good people are held hostage in their homes.” Campos, who moved to the neighborhood 22 years ago, lives on a small, crumbling block next to a demolished crack house. “I didn’t know about the drugs when I came,” he said. “I found the house, and it was cheap.” No one on his block used or sold drugs, he said, and his neighbors worked hard to keep it clean. But dealers were always around their homes trying to sell. “I tell them to leave,” Campos said. “I served in Iraq, and I think that’s why I’m good at telling drug dealers to get off the block.”

    Like Campos, many residents had come to Kensington simply because they couldn’t afford housing anywhere else, and though many expressed empathy for the users, they also wanted them to leave. People cleared needles off their lawns, their front steps and the sidewalks where their children played. Some wouldn’t go anywhere unless they were in a car, but a lot of families were too poor to afford a car. They organized cleanups, lobbied City Council members and state representatives and asked for help from church groups, but the problem seemed insurmountable. The drug market, institutional racism, joblessness and the ravages of the war on drugs in the ’80s left the community struggling. “You see everything here,” one female resident told me. “Overdoses, shootings, killings. We are exposed to trauma every day just living here. It’s constant.”

  • Were the “explosive devices” sent to several Democrats fakes? They may or may not have been hoaxes or false flags, but they are at the least very suspicious. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Chuck Todd’s theory? Russians!
  • “‘Segway Jeremy’ — a central character in the 2011 Wisconsin protests — has been arrested for trying to buy a lethal dose of radioactive material.” He’s a far left anti-police loon who ran against Paul Ryan in the 2014 Republican primary on a legalize weed platform. Via Badger Pundit, this is what he looked like back in 2011:

    And here’s his booking mugshot:

    If you’re trying to make the case that marijuana is a safe recreational drug, you’re not helping…

  • Effective weapons for your planned high school murder spree: Guns, bombs. Ineffective weapons: pizza cutters. Do I even need to name the state? Bonus: Preteen girls who claim to be Satan worshipers. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig on Twitter.)