Posts Tagged ‘Sidney Powell’

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:





    LinkSwarm for May 8, 2020

    Friday, May 8th, 2020

    The lockdowns are finally ending for Americans (at least in states without Democratic governors), and the lockdown also ended for Michael Flynn, who was finally freed from his Kafkaesque prosecution:

  • Finally! Justice prevails for Michael Flynn:

    The Justice Department has moved to withdraw its case against former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn, citing “newly discovered and disclosed information,” according to a new court filing.

    The move, first reported by The Associated Press, comes less than an hour after the top prosecutor on the case, Brandon Van Grack, submitted his withdrawal from the case. The decision said that the White House interview Flynn gave to the FBI, which ultimately led to his guilty plea, was “conducted without any legitimate investigative basis.”

    “The Government is not persuaded that the January 24, 2017 interview was conducted with a legitimate investigative basis and therefore does not believe that Mr. Flynn’s statements were material even if untrue,” the decision states, citing Flynn’s 2017 guilty plea of lying to federal investigators. “Moreover, we do not believe that the Government can prove either the relevant false statements or their materiality beyond a reasonable doubt.”

    Jeff Jensen, the U.S. attorney tasked by Attorney General Bill Barr in February to reviewing the case, recommended that it be dropped. Flynn moved to withdraw his guilty plea in January, saying he “never lied” to FBI agents over his contacts with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

    “Through the course of my review of General Flynn’s case, I concluded the proper and just course was to dismiss the case,” Jensen said in a statement. “I briefed Attorney General Barr on my findings, advised him on these conclusions, and he agreed.” The DOJ’s filing states that Flynn’s contacts with Kislyak “were entirely appropriate on their face.”

    In recent weeks, additional information released in the case has shed scrutiny on the way the case was conducted. Flynn’s lawyer Sidney Powell claimed last month in a court filing that Van Grack had made a “side deal” with Flynn’s former defense team that was withheld from the retired Army general, citing heavily-redacted emails that show Flynn’s former lawyers discussing why the deal needed to be “kept secret,” implying that Flynn would be used to testify in further criminal cases.

    Further documents released last week showed handwritten notes from an FBI official questioning the goal of Flynn’s White House interview with FBI agents Peter Strzok and Joe Pientka, suggesting the intent was “to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired.”

    Another release revealed that Flynn had been the subject of a spinoff surveillance operation under the FBI’s “Crossfire Hurricane” probe of the 2016 Trump campaign.

    Given all the dirt that has come out about Crossfire Hurricane, AKA the Russian Collusion Hoax, AKA The Plot Against the President, this is not the last we’re going to hear about that conspiracy…

  • The Wuhan coronavirus is the disaster that bankrupt blue cities and states have been waiting for:

    The people running states like New Jersey and cities like Chicago know they’re broke. Ridiculously generous public employee pensions – concocted by elected officials and union leaders who had to have understood that they were writing checks their taxpayers couldn’t cover – are bleeding them dry, with no political solution in sight.

    They also know that they have only two possible outs: bankruptcy, or some form of federal bailout. Since the former means a disgraceful end to local political careers while the latter requires some kind of massive crisis to push Washington into a place where a multi-trillion dollar state/city bailout is the least bad option, it’s safe to assume that mayors and governors – along with public sector union leaders – have been hoping for such a crisis to save their bacon.

    And this year they got their wish. The country is on lockdown, unemployment is skyrocketing and mayors and governors now have a plausible way to rebrand their criminal mismanagement as a “natural disaster” deserving of outside help.

  • Hate the continuing lockdowns? Blame Democrats:

    Early estimates of the COVID-19 death rate, cited to justify the lockdowns, have proven far too pessimistic. In March, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimated a 3.4 percent fatality rate and Dr. Anthony Fauci estimated that the fatality rate of the coronavirus was about 2 percent. As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis reported, at least five studies have placed the death rate below 1 percent, confirming President Donald Trump’s hunch.

    Recent studies have found that far more people than expected have COVID-19 antibodies — meaning the virus has spread faster than previously thought, but also proving that it is far less deadly than previously thought.

    Furthermore, a recent study showed that Democratic governors were three times more likely than Republican governors to impose a lockdown. This would make sense, given the Democratic control over many population centers experiencing large outbreaks: New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., for example. However, the study found that “counterintuitively, the percentage of the state’s population infected with COVID-19 had the weakest effect on the governors’ decisions of all the four variables.”

    The study found that the three most significant variables were political affiliation (a heavy slant toward Democrats), “social learning” (governors of states afflicted by COVID-19 later acted much faster than governors of states who were afflicted early on), and “mini-cascades” (the actions of some governors sparked multiple other governors to order lockdowns in the next three days).

    Both social learning and mini-cascades shine a light on how news of the coronavirus’ danger spread. As states with coronavirus hot spots reacted, other states followed suit, preparing for outbreaks of their own.

    Yet the political slant is also extremely significant, especially considering the different ways state and local officials have carried out their lockdowns. Greenville, Miss. Mayor Errick Simmons notoriously defended his ban on drive-in church services that led to parishioners facing $500 fines. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio threatened to “permanently” close churches and synagogues unless they comply with his orders — and he issued a disgusting threat to the Jewish community in particular. Andy Berke, mayor of Chattanooga, Tenn., banned drive-in church services even though Tennessee’s governor permitted them. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear dispatched the State Police against a church hosting a drive-in service. Police in Virginia threatened a pastor with a year in jail for hosting a socially-distanced church service, enacting Gov. Ralph Northam’s order.

    All these political leaders belong to the same party: the Democratic Party. Not all of the onerous coronavirus restrictions that violate religious freedom have been issued by Democrats, but there is a disturbing correlation between the left-wing party and crisis orders that single out churches, synagogues, and mosques. It seems one party is more likely than the other to think of religion as less than “essential,” and much of that animus traces back to the mistaken idea that religion (Christianity in particular) and science are in conflict.

  • We’re finally getting better Kung-Flu data and weekly peak deaths are falling.
  • Michigan’s Democratic Obergrupenfuhrer Gretchen Whitmer extended the state of emergency (and the lockdown) through May 28, despite lacking authority from the legislature to do so.
  • Maine Yanks Licenses From Restaurateur Who Defied Lockdown, Went On Tucker To Castigate Governor.”

    The outrageous tyranny of Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer and her heavy-handed, illogical, and irresponsible Wuhan coronavirus edicts have finally been outdone by another Democrat governor, this time on the east coast.

    Maine governor Janet Mills jumped on the one-size-fits all Wuhan coronavirus bandwagon, and forced a state-wide shutdown order, including in counties that have tiny numbers of infections and zero deaths.

  • “[Of] the five Upper Midwestern states…Minnesota has both the highest unemployment rate and the worst COVID-19 death rate in the region. Heckuva job, Timmy!” That would be Minnesota’s Democratic governor Tim Walz.
  • Science 1, Social Justice 0:

    As I write this, I am surrounded by silence: not only the silence of a small university town on lockdown but, also, the silence of the feminists and postmodernists as the COVID-19 pandemic has taken over.

    Where are the usual attacks on white male-dominated science? Where’s the “standpoint epistemology” to tell us how different is the knowledge intersectionally-appropriate feminist scientists would bring to this crucial problem? How many of those labs fiercely trying to find a treatment, a vaccine, a path forward, have a demographically appropriate number of women researchers? Not to mention racially and sexually “diverse” ones? What can possibly explain the lack of attention to this terrible problem of marginalization of the already oppressed?

    On a women’s studies listserve I subscribe to, activity has been almost at a standstill for weeks. You’d think with the endless attention paid to the virus there would be vigorous debate about the need to bring feminist, queer, trans, and other such perspectives to bear, and heated discussions of how to convey this to students via distance learning. Or, at the very least, that criticisms would be voiced of the data showing that men are more vulnerable to the virus than women. If one is “assigned” the category of male or female at birth—by now a routine formulation aped even by medical organizations– how could an uncaring virus ever make such a distinction?

    Can anything positive come out of the current crisis? Or, is it strictly a negative to be reminded that reality – the actual physical world, in all its threatening materiality – is not a social construction, and that solutions to a virus must engage with that material world, and not merely attack the rhetoric of disease and the identity of those researching it.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Hydroxychloroquine helps some but not all:

    Part of the frustration in dealing with a really bad situation is a ravenous hunger for magic bullet solutions. One reader wrote in, contending that hydroxychloroquine is effective 100 percent of the time if it’s administered early enough, so why not reopen society and give everyone a prescription for hydroxychloroquine at the first sign of the virus?

    Chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine actually slow down parts of a patient’s immune system by “interfere with lysosomal activity and autophagy, interact with membrane stability and alter signalling pathways and transcriptional activity, which can result in inhibition of cytokine production and modulation of certain co-stimulatory molecules” — which is a jargon-heavy way of saying it makes your immune system’s cells not work as well together.

    People might wonder why anyone would want to take a drug that weakens their immune system. Hydroxychloroquine can be an effective drug for lupus, because with lupus, the body’s immune system becomes overactive and starts attacking healthy, normal cells. It is also used to treat arthritis, because in patients with rheumatoid arthritis, their immune system attacks the lining of their joints. With patients suffering from malaria, the parasite actually can send out “messages” that distract the body’s immune system, causing it to attack healthy red blood cells and ignore the real threat: “While the immune system is busy defending the organism against fake danger, the real infection proceeds inside red blood cells, allowing the parasite to multiply unhindered at dizzying speed. By the time the immune system discovers its mistake, precious time has been lost, and the infection is much more difficult to contain.” Hydroxychloroquine effectively calms down the immune system and along the way binds to the malaria parasite, breaking it apart.

    The coronavirus identified as SARS-CoV-2 can generate a “cytokine storm” — when the body’s immune system kicks into overdrive and starts attacking healthy cells in important organs. Dr. Randy Cron, an expert on cytokine storms at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, told the New York Times last month that in about 15 percent of coronavirus patients, the body’s defense mechanism of cytokines fight off the invading virus, but then attack multiple organs including the lungs and liver, and may eventually lead to death. As the patient’s body fights its own lungs, fluid gets into the lungs, and the patient dies of acute respiratory distress syndrome.

    From this, you can get a sense of how and why hydroxychloroquine might be effective in some circumstances and not others. If the patient’s immune system is strong enough to fight off the coronavirus, but is at risk of going into overdrive and setting off a cytotkine storm, administering the right amount of hydroxychloroquine might put their immune system back in the Goldilocks zone — strong enough to fight off and defeat the virus, but not so strong that it starts attacking vital organs by mistake. It’s also easy to see why we would only want people taking this drug under a doctor’s recommendation and possibly supervision — take the drug too early, and you suppress the body’s immune system just when it needs that system functioning well to fight off the invading virus. Take the drug too late, and the damage to the vital organs can’t be overcome.

  • “FDA Pulls Approval for Dozens of Mask Makers in China.” They’re garbage that doesn’t meet spec. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Hey media: Do you think you could stop publishing the same #NeverTrump piece over and over again?

    Media outlets treat conservative Americans as second-class citizens whose arguments don’t need to be listened to or engaged with. Instead, they take the vanishingly small number of column inches or pundit panel seats they have and give the “conservative” slots to people who repeatedly disparage conservative elected officials, their voters, and their policies.

    In some cases, the supposed “conservatives” have long ago renounced their conservatism. The Washington Post’s Max Boot, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin, and Twitter’s Bill Kristol receive a great deal of mockery for their boring obsession with Orange Man Bad, an obsession that has led them to renounce every one of the policy positions they once held.

    Even as their positions change in response to whatever Trump has said, NeverTrump is known for writing the same column over and over again. It’s usually headlined something like “Why Trump And His Voters Are So Awful That They Forced Me To Leave the GOP But Also Remember To Please Continue Calling Me A Republican To Preserve The TV/Column Gigs That Depend On Me Claiming I’m On The Right Even Though I Am Now Aligned With Democrats, Write Columns About How I Vote For Them, And Generally Work To Help Them Gain More Political Power.”

  • “Democrat On Committee To Oversee Coronavirus Stimulus Payouts Broke Federal Law By Failing To Report Stock Sales.” That would be Florida Representative (and former Clinton Administration official) Donna Shalala.
  • “Illinois governor says churches may not fully reopen for a year or more because of coronavirus.” I don’t think the constitution is going to agree with you there, sport… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Good Samaritan health care workers: I will go to New York to help out with the crush of Wuhan coronavirus cases! Andrew Cuomo: Fark you, have some more taxes.
  • Twitter decides to Big Brother harder.
  • The Supreme Court unanimously bitch-slapped the Ninth Circuit for ruling that a federal statue that makes it illegal to encourage illegal aliens to come to the U.S. was unconstitutional. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg delivered the opinion.
  • “I’m going to eat at these places even harder now. Thanks a lot, #Karen.”
  • Friend-of-the-blog Karl Rehn offers up Ammo 101.
  • As if we didn’t have enough deadly Asian intruders this year, say hello to Murder Hornets.

  • Tengujo, the thinnest paper in the world. (Hat tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • Florida South Carolina woman grabs gator. It turns out exactly how you would expect. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Surprise!

  • I’m going to try to get to the Shelly Luther and Project Veritas stories this weekend.