Paying people not to work makes them worse off, Democrats sleepwalk toward disaster, another would-be assassin of a Republican congressman walks away without bail, more Democratic judicial officials who refuse to obey the law, and a disturbing number of pedophiles in our school systems. Welcome to a special Saturday LinkSwarm!
The “experts” didn’t expect it to turn out this way. An experiment conducted by Harvard University and University of Exeter social scientists found no-strings-attached handouts harmed low-income recipients rather than help them.
Funded by an anonymous nonprofit, the study centered on an experiment in which 2,073 low-income people were randomly selected to receive a single, unconditional cash transfer of either $500 or $2,000. Another 3,170 low-income study subjects received no money from the study.
The experiment was conducted from July 2020 to May 2021. On average, the subjects were earning roughly $950 a month while receiving another $530 in food stamps and other government benefits. A little over half were unemployed and 80% had children.
Over a 15-week period, participants were periodically surveyed about their financial, physical and mental health. Across a wide range of financial and non-financial attributes, researchers found no positive effects on those who received free money — but plenty of negative ones.
For a few weeks, people who received the extra money spent more than the control group — $182 a week for the people who received $500, and $574 a week for the ones given $2,000.
The additional spending didn’t bolster their financial health. The handout recipients reported the same rate of overdraft fees, late-payment charges and cash advances as did those who didn’t receive the extra money. And it was all downhill from there. The handout recipients reported:
Less earned income
Less job satisfaction
Lower work performance
More financial stress
Less liquidity
Worse sleep
Worse physical health
More anxiety
More loneliness
The Wall Street Journal’s Allysia Finley writes:
“It’s no surprise that people who received a large percentage of their monthly income for doing nothing were less motivated to work and less satisfied with their work.
Earning a paycheck can give workers a sense of personal agency that encourages them to make better financial and health decisions. Receiving a handout may do the opposite.”
The editors of The Economist beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to “wake up” to the fact that they’re about to get demolished in the upcoming midterms. Politico reports that, “The gubernatorial race in Pennsylvania has begun to look more competitive than either party expected.” The Economist blames the loud voices of the hard-left fringe, and warns that Democrats must “moderate, or die.” But this is just about the least likely moment for centrist Democrats to launch a new fight against the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez types, and Democrats won’t have that fight until a midterm thrashing forces them to — and even then, Democrats may well choose to learn the wrong, but more comforting lessons, from a sweeping defeat.
The editors of The Economist, sensing an impending midterm blowout and the ensuing empowerment of a Trump-friendly GOP, beg the Democratic Party’s leaders to distance themselves from their fringe elements:
Fringe and sometimes dotty ideas have crept into Democratic rhetoric, peaking in the feverish summer of 2020 with a movement to “defund the police”, abolish immigration enforcement, shun capitalism, relabel women as birthing people and inject “anti-racism” into the classroom.
Snip.
First, out of all the possible times for the leaders of the party and its centrist members to embrace a fight with their hard-left grassroots, four months before Election Day is perhaps the worst time. Right now, Democrats desperately need progressives — the Bernie Bros, the Squad fans, and your crazy Aunt Edna with the Ruth Bader Ginsburg prayer candles — to turn out in November; they’re disappointed enough with Joe Biden already. The future of Senators Raphael Warnock of Georgia, Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire, and Mark Kelly of Arizona depends upon frustrated and impatient progressives in those states.
Second, rebuking the fringe Left is going to be difficult, and few people embrace difficult change until they hit bottom. Nobody likes admitting that they got something wrong, and nobody in politics wants to admit that their approach didn’t work — until after they’ve paid a high price at the ballot box.
The disappointing results of 2020 were clearly not enough. Shortly after the election, Representative Abigail Spanberger of Virginia seethed about her party’s left wing: “Tuesday was a failure, it was not a success. . . . If we don’t mean defund the police, we shouldn’t say that. . . . And we need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. Because while people think it doesn’t matter, it does matter, and we lost good members because of that. If we are classifying Tuesday as a success from a congressional standpoint, we will get f***ing torn apart in 2022.”
Do the Democrats seem more centrist and results-focused now than they did in 2020?
Democrats can’t rebuke their social justice warrior radicals because the shock-troops of that “fringe” has taken control of vast swathes of the party machinery. The SJW faction is willing to endure electoral disaster as along as it lets them sieze full control of the party machinery and thus all the spigots party patronage.
How bad is it? Ruy Teixeira, whose “emerging Democratic majority” thesis is is so central to Democratic administrations refusing to enforce border controls, is leaving the Center for American Progress because it’s gotten too radical.
Ruy Teixeira, a prominent scholar at the left-leaning think tank Center for American Progress (CAP), is leaving his job for a conservative organization because of liberals’ obsession with race, gender and other identity issues, according to Politico.
The obsession with identity politics at CAP made it difficult for him to do work involving class and economics, he told the outlet, so he’s leaving for the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. Left-leaning think tanks have given in to demands of junior staffers and made it difficult for scholars to discuss crime, immigration and other issues beyond a narrow set of default assumptions, according to Teixeira.
The culture within left-leaning organizations “sends me running screaming from the left,” Teixeira told Politico. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land … the fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”
Attack a Republican congressman? Enjoy your Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card. “A 43-year-old man [David G. Jakubonis] accused of attacking Representative Lee Zeldin (R., N.Y.) with a sharp object at a campaign stop in upstate New York on Thursday evening was charged with a felony and released from custody just hours after his arrest, police said…Jakubonis was charged with attempted assault in the second degree and was released on his own recognizance.”
The groomer plague is not your imagination. “At least 181 K-12 teachers, principals, and staff have been arrested for child sex crimes in the United States so far this year.”
“Self-Proclaimed Socialist Judge in Harris County Facing Removal by Judicial Conduct Commission. Judge Franklin Bynum allegedly ordered the sheriff not to collect DNA samples required by law and repeatedly dismissed domestic and family violence cases for no probable cause.”
Cost of living index for cities worldwide. Weirdly, Austin is still pretty affordable in relation to purchasing power compared to most of the world. Also weirdly, New York City is the index city…
Gascón’s prosecutors sued him so they could “charge repeat offenders to the fullest extent of the law.” The DA wants to appeal in front of the California Supreme Court:
In June, the Second Appellate District Court upheld portions of a lower court’s injunction that said Gascón cannot refuse to charge three-strike cases, which can dramatically increase prison sentences for some of the most serious repeat offenders.
Gascón is hoping to have the court’s order overturned, arguing that it is “draconian,” creates “a dangerous precedent” and amounts to “taking the charging decision out of a prosecutor’s hands.”
“The district attorney overstates his authority,” the Second Appellate District ruling reads. “He is an elected official who must comply with the law, not a sovereign with absolute, unreviewable discretion.”
Don’t the peasants know that laws are for the little people?
Good. “San Francisco’s New DA Goes On Firing Spree After Voters Recall Soros-Backed Predecessor…”The new district attorney in San Francisco fired at least 15 employees from the prosecutor’s office after her left-wing predecessor Chesa Boudin was recalled last month.
“Charlene Carter, a flight attendant who had worked at Southwest Airlines for 20 years but was fired in 2017 because she had publicly opposed the use of her union dues to fund pro-abortion protests, has now won a $5.1 million lawsuit against both Southwest and her union.” Good. Coerced speech violates the First Amendment. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
Beto O’Rourke gets a $1 million donation from George Soros. Well, at least that’s $1 million that won’t go toward burning down small businesses and defunding the police. Also, remember how Democrats are always saying they want to get money out of politics? They never mean it.
The Biden administration is imposing new limits on states’ ability to access to Covid-19 antibody treatments amid rising demand from GOP governors who have relied on the drug as a primary weapon against the virus.
Federal health officials plan to allocate specific amounts to each state under the new approach, in an effort to more evenly distribute the 150,000 doses that the government makes available each week.
The approach is likely to cut into shipments to GOP-led states in the Southeast that have made the pricey antibody drug a central part of their pandemic strategy, while simultaneously spurning mask mandates and other restrictions. That threatens to heighten tensions between the Biden administration and governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who have emerged as vocal opponents of the federal Covid-19 response.
“How dare they pay for treatments that work while ignoring the one true path of vaccine righteousness?”
Which states are the feds rationing?
Demand from a handful of southern states has exploded since then, state and federal officials said, raising concerns they were consuming a disproportionate amount of the national supply. Seven states — Texas, Florida, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, Louisiana and Alabama — accounted for 70 percent of all orders in early September.
Huh, I wonder what those states might all have in common? Maybe…Republican governors? Well, we can’t have those upstarts showing up vaccine-pushing blue states, can we?
“President Joe Biden has sharply criticized DeSantis and others for resisting efforts to encourage mask wearing and ramp up vaccinations, vowing in a speech last week that if ‘governors won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get them out of the way.'”
Evidently this is code for “Stop fighting the holy narrative or I’ll make sure your citizens die!”
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden’s Afghan debacle continues to top the news:
At least 90 people, including 13 American soldiers, were killed in in a bombing at an entrance to the Kabul airport.
Un-Fucking believable: “U.S. officials provided Taliban with names of Americans, Afghan allies to evacuate.”
U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.
The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.
But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.
“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”
“French officials gave the Nazi occupiers a list of Parisian Jews they wanted to remain safe…”
It is becoming increasingly difficult to draw any conclusion other than that President Biden knowingly and willfully surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban.
To be clear, this is different from concluding that Biden committed to a recklessly premature date for withdrawing all U.S. forces (which, practically speaking, would necessitate NATO’s departure, too) while being aware that the Taliban were capturing territory and that the Afghan security forces might be unable to hold them off over the ensuing months.
That would be bad, but not as damning as what I am deducing.
I now believe Biden long ago reasoned that the Taliban were going to take over the country inevitably and decided to treat them as the de facto government. Consistent with this — and with the progressive Democratic orientation that American military power is needlessly provocative, and that concessions are the preferred way to inspire rogues into good behavior — Biden determined back in the spring that he would set a firm deadline to pull our forces out, and then demonstrate to the Taliban that the deadline was real.
Snip.
Biden saw the Taliban as the regime in waiting, with whom his administration was energetically negotiating. If he proved to the Taliban that the U.S. really was leaving no matter what, then he figured the Taliban would allow — even facilitate — the evacuation of thousands of American civilian workers, contractors, and diplomatic personnel. Biden would pull out American troops and trust the Taliban, thus appeased, with the fate of the remaining Americans.
This is mind-boggling, but not the half of it. Biden was also effectively administering the coup de grace to the Afghan government, and not only by elevating the Taliban to the sole Afghan party with which his administration would negotiate the terms of the U.S. departure. Biden would also pull out in a manner that undermined the Afghan security forces’ capacity to fight the Taliban. After all, if U.S. troops and contractors continued providing technical and logistical support to the Afghan ground and air forces, the Taliban might interpret that as an American commitment to continue the war. Biden would make sure the jihadists had no cause for doubt.
In this, Biden had to know he would be leaving to the Taliban the fate of tens of thousands of Afghans who supported American combat, intelligence, training, and nation-building efforts over the last 20 years. Though many government officials, members of Congress, and influential commentators pleaded with the Biden administration to fast-track the visa process and evacuate the Afghans while American forces were still in control, Biden plainly rationalized that this could provoke the Taliban into retaliatory measures — potentially against Americans — that would put public pressure on him to maintain U.S. forces in the country. Biden’s priority was to withdraw them. Ergo, the Taliban — yes, that Taliban — would be trusted to deal benignly with America’s Afghan allies.
Read the piece for Andrew McCarthy’s reasoning behind this conclusion, including the Bowe Bergdahl swap, and evacuating Bagram in the dead of night. My only quibble with his analysis is that his working assumption that Biden is making the decisions of the Biden Administration. I rather doubt it…
“My phone is melting, and my inbox is jammed, from grown Afghan men pleading, crying to get out with their wives and children,” my reader begins:
All of them used to work for our company. They are engineers, electricians, lab technicians, urban planners, CAD drafters, surveyors, concrete masons, welders — all skilled technical and professional people who enjoyed what we would consider a solid middle-class life. Some went on to become lecturers at university. These aren’t herders and farmers — they are civilized, educated, middle class tradesman and professionals who trusted their government to maintain the safety and security of the nation. Their average age of the parents is late thirties. Their average family size is seven. The youngest child among them is 10 days old. Inside of a month, their lives are uprooted by bloodthirsty barbarians. They are hunted because they helped the Americans.
One of our families has been waiting in the Entry Control Point for four days straight – living in trash and filth, with no shelter, jammed among thousands of others. The parents know full well what awaits if they are fortunate to get out. They are willing to live the life of a refugee in a camp near a military installation. Essentially a one room United Nations Refugee Center shack, or group expeditionary tents, no indoor plumbing, no kitchen. They share public toilets and showers and live in a fenced compound in a sea of other shacks or tents surrounded by gravel — for at least 12-18 months while they wait for the State Department to process their visas. They are willing to walk away from their middle-class comforts and live in refugee camps for well over a year, possibly two, for the freedom and liberty of the United States. Amanullah asked me yesterday if I could get him to Mexico so he could walk to Texas so he wouldn’t have to live in a refugee camp. They know.
Don’t let anyone claim that Afghans who worked for America or international organizations will be fine.
“Here’s a kick in the gut,” my reader continues. “Fawad — not his real name — called me crying last night after midnight. His brother-in-law was killed by the Taliban earlier that day. He had worked for an American contractor in Zabul [a southern province considered part of the Taliban’s heartland]. He was beaten in the street and then shot in the head so the villagers could see.”
More of that California ballot fraud that doesn’t exist. “300 recall ballots, drugs, multiple driver’s licenses found in vehicle of passed out felon: Torrance police.” I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that Random X. Felon wasn’t working for Larry Elder…
“It would be one thing if Congress had specifically authorized the action that the CDC has taken. But that has not happened,” the Court majority wrote in an unsigned opinion.
“Instead, the CDC has imposed a nationwide moratorium on evictions in reliance on a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination,” the opinion continued. “It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts.”
David Gilbert is the father of San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin. He had Chesa with his then-partner Kathy Boudin.
David Gilbert was also a member of the Weather Underground, the domestic terrorist group responsible for the 1981 Brink’s armored car robbery in New York.
Gilbert and Boudin dropped off infant Chesa with a babysitter before driving to the robbery.
The terrorists, with members of the Revolutionary Armed Task Force and Black Liberation Army, robbed the truck and wounded guard Joe Trombino and killed his co-worker Peter Paige. Police officers Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady died in the shootout.
A jury convicted Gilbert of three counts of second-degree murder and four counts of first-degree robbery.
Oh: They also took his Emmy away. The one they gave to him after we all knew he was a Granny-murderer…
My modest proposal was that the 3% of Republicans who never approved of President Trump should stop pretending that they were spokesmen for the 97% of Republicans who did. In the corporate media, where 97% of that 3% were keeping a high profile on cable news, the distortions became preposterous. This seemed to me elementary logic. But for the tiny group of delusional Never Trumpers, my modest proposal fell on them like a ton of bricks.
In the end, my essay ignited a kind of public war among conservative intellectuals that helped to bring down the neocons and the Never Trumpers in the media. Not only did the Weekly Standard shut down, but the National Review kicked out Jonah Goldberg, and the neocon’s peewee prince Bill Kristol went to work for Democrats – all in six months. How did that happen? They had no base of support outside of the Beltway, and they were in willful denial about their own unpopularity. This dynamic was obvious at all levels of media, but let’s take a high visibility example: the old panel at Fox New’s Special Report with Bret Baier. Now, Bret Baier is obviously a very quiet Never Trumper but if you stacked your daily panel with Stephen Hayes, A. B. Stoddard, and Jonah Goldberg and these were the “conservative” pundits you picked to defend President Trump’s policies then it’s obvious what Bret was doing.
A week or so after my essay appeared, I got a very short and shrill phone call from one of Bret’s staffers – who was a rabid Hillary Clinton supporter, no less. When I picked up the call, she was angry and breathless and did not want to do small talk. She said: “You don’t know what you’ve done, you don’t understand the damage you’ve caused to this show.” I asked her to calm down, and be specific. She hung up instead.
This bizarre exchange piqued my interest enough to watch Bret Baier’s show that night, which was an emotion I rarely felt for Special Report. Sure enough, Bret Baier ended the episode with an odd little “farewell” segment to Stephen Hayes. The gist of it was that Hayes was suddenly taking “a one year vacation to Spain” with the family. My first thought was: who does a video farewell when they take a vacation? The whole thing was pure baloney. It was now perfectly clear why Bret’s hysterical staffer had called. Apparently my essay had been a crucial factor in getting Stephen Hayes kicked off TV. Someone over at corporate had finally looked at the piss poor ratings Bret was getting and the light bulb went off: no one wants to listen to Hayes anymore. That was certainly true. (A few months later, the sour puss A. B. Stoddard also disappeared from the Special Report show – this time without a video farewell.)
Hayes getting axed left me surprised. How was I to know that Fox executives could read? How was I to know that Baier and Hayes were roommates in college? Did Hayes sail to Spain on one of those idiotic cruises that he was always pushing on his subscribers? Jonah Goldberg had been taunting me from the pages of the National Review that the Never Trumpers were all doing fine – and then suddenly none of them were doing fine. In his video farewell, Hayes wanted everyone to know that he’d be back in a year, and that he was still the chief editor of the Weekly Standard magazine. Both of these statements actually turned out to be false.
Five months later, I got a call from an insider that all the employees at the Weekly Standard were being asked to prepare for the worst. Had anyone run with this story yet? No they hadn’t. Had it somehow fallen to me to be the first to announce the end of the celebrated neocon magazine where Bill Kristol and Stephen Hayes had regularly taunted the American working class? Yes it had. The Lord had delivered them into my hands
Honestly, it was less of a murder than documenting a suicide…
Like the Soviet Union under Stalin, Current Affairs is the private kingdom of one man, in this case the dandy communist Nathan Robinson. For five years, Robinson has been all over Current Affairs like a cheap suit, while a small team of deluded volunteers has labored in his salt mine, generating content for the greater glory of the revolution, and their leader, the Potemkin page-turner. But even five-year plans go awry.
Lyta Gold, who was hired to generate ‘Amusements’, is not amused. Gold claims that when the staff attempted to form a workers’ co-operative, Robinson fired them all.
In an administration that sucks, Jen Psaki stands out for really sucking hard.
Speaking of sucking, here’s Spanish-language media omitting embarrassing information in their translation:
The most vivid example to date of how U.S. Latino media shields Biden from any accountability or scrutiny regarding the disastrous pullout from Afghanistan: NO ONE watching the Biden presser heard "INSTRUCTED". pic.twitter.com/cW1pZuFmMZ
“Texas Wins Preliminary Victory Against Biden Administration in Medicaid Lawsuit. The district court’s order temporarily suspends the Biden administration’s revocation of Texas Section 1115 Medicaid waiver.” The Biden Administration retroactively denied a waiver issued by the Trump Administration in an attempt to force ObamaCare down the state’s throat.
Texas election integrity law finally passes the Texas House, meaning Democrat’s quorum-busting stunts got them Jack and Squat.
Who should you back with your Go Fund Me money, Brett Butler or Spinal Tap’s Viv Savage? (I did toss a little money Brett’s way, as I knew her a little back in my standup comedy days…)
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Biden not just dropping, but deflating and throwing away the ball on border security, Andrew Cuomo finally behaves badly enough for the MSM to notice, and some tidbits about hacking attacks.
Biden’s proposed budget wants to cutting funding for border security…by 96%:
His administration has presented Congress with a Department of Homeland Security budget proposal that calls for slashing spending on what it calls “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” by 96%.
In fiscal year 2021, Congress approved $1,513,000,000 in funding for border security assets and infrastructure. Biden is now asking that Congress approve just $54,315,000 for fiscal year 2022. That is a reduction of $1,458,685,000—or 96.4%.
What exactly is Biden cutting?
Biden’s DHS has presented Congress with a 562-page “overview” of its fiscal year 2022 budget proposal for Customs and Border Protection. The explanation for its “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” plan is presented on pages 326 through 350 of this document.
The presentation divides “Border Security Assets and Infrastructure” into six categories: Integrated Fixed Towers; Remote Video Surveillance Systems; Mobile Video Surveillance System; MVSS-M2S2 Modular Mobile Surveillance System; Border Security Assets and Infrastructure End Items; and Border Wall System Program.
In the past two fiscal years—as reported in Biden’s proposal—the Border Wall System Program has been the most significant of these. “This investment,” it says, “includes real estate and environmental planning, land acquisition, wall system design, construction, and construction and oversight of a physical barrier system.”
In fiscal year 2020, it received $1,375,000,000. In fiscal year 2021, it received the same amount.
Now, if Biden gets his way, the federal government will not spend one penny in fiscal year 2022 on planning or constructing a “physical barrier system” at the border.
Obviously, Democrats want a massive influx of illegal aliens so they can amnesty them and have them vote for Democrats. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
As illegal aliens are still being allowed to cross Texas’ open border, U.S. Border Patrol has reportedly reassigned all hands from “apprehending” to “processing.” A former federal agent says these massive waves of illegal aliens are one of the “biggest sources” of rising cases of the Chinese coronavirus and advises Texans to contact all their state officials to stop illegal crossings at the border.
Victor Avila, a former U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, has previously told Texas Scorecard that federal and state officials aren’t making serious efforts to stop illegal aliens from crossing the border. He said the number of illegal border crossings has recently skyrocketed.
On Tuesday, Kinney County Attorney Brent Smith (R) told Texas Scorecard that U.S. Border Patrol informed him they had been given new orders. “They’ve all been reassigned to processing,” Smith said. “None of them are actually going to be enforcing the border.” Avila commented, “That is what I’m hearing exactly.”
Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe described processing as “paperwork, documentation, etc.”
“We’re in a bad spot now,” Smith said. “Texas is on its own.”
Speaking of border security: “Texas landowner fears for kids’ safety amid worsening border crisis, says they can’t play outside anymore.”
“More Illegal Immigrants, Border Agents Testing Positive for COVID-19.” The way Democrats love expanding governemnt in the name of fighting Flu Manchu, you wonder if this is a bug or a feature… (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
“House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans released their report on COVID-19’s origins, pointing to evidence of a lab leak, genetic modification, and a cover-up, making the case the virus accidentally emerged from the Wuhan lab in August or September 2019.” Or pretty much what every conservative blogger has been saying for almost a year and a half…
This week’s Democratic political scandal de jour is an official state probe of New York Governor Andrew “Granny Killer” Cuomo committed multiple instances of sexual harassment. “These interviews and pieces of evidence revealed a deeply disturbing yet clear picture: Gov. Cuomo sexually harassed current and former state employees in violation of federal and state laws,” said State Attorney General Letitia James. It would be ironic if it was this rather than killing some 15,000 elderly New Yorkers by putting Flu Manchu cases in nursing homes that brought Cuomo down.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, once widely celebrated for leading New York out of the coronavirus pandemic’s darkest days, is now embroiled in crisis over how many of the state’s nursing home residents died because of the virus and an apparent effort to hide the true toll.
Beginning last spring, Mr. Cuomo was criticized over a state requirement that forced nursing homes to take back residents who had been hospitalized with Covid-19 once they recovered. Critics said the policy had increased the number of virus-related deaths among nursing home residents.
At the time, Mr. Cuomo and his aides dismissed the outcry as politically motivated, and in July, the State Health Department released a report that found the policy was not responsible for an increase. The report did, however, raise questions in some quarters about how the state was reporting deaths.
In January, New York’s attorney general said the administration had undercounted nursing home deaths by several thousand. Mr. Cuomo later acknowledged as much, blaming the lower figure on fears that the Trump administration would use the data as a political weapon.
“Don’t you see? We had to lie to you, because Orange Man Bad!”
The suggestion that the actual death count had been covered up intensified criticism of Mr. Cuomo, including from his allies in state government. The scandal deepened after reports that the governor’s aides had altered the July report to hide the true figure.
In April, The New York Times reported that Mr. Cuomo’s aides had gone to far greater lengths than previously known to obscure the death toll, repeatedly overruling state health officials over a span of at least five months.
First, there was the nursing-home scandal, in which Governor Cuomo deliberately undercounted the number of seniors who died due to his directive placing COVID-positive residents back into understaffed, underequipped nursing homes — and then misled New Yorkers and federal officials about it. Estimates suggest that as many as 15,000 New York seniors due to his actions. Worse yet, while covering up these deaths, he took a cool $5.1 million to write a book touting his COVID leadership and then allegedly used state staff and resources to produce this propaganda piece. One needn’t be a skeptic to link the timing of the deal to the cover-up of the scandal.
And that’s just one of the many fires engulfing the Cuomo administration. At this point, it’s hard to keep up with the litany of abuses perpetrated by Governor Cuomo and his staff. Despite anointing himself as a champion of women, Cuomo has been hit with more than ten accusations of sexual harassment since December. First, he said he’d investigate these allegations himself. When public pressure forced him to establish independent investigations of the charges, he stalled for time and declined to comment while the investigations played out. Now, with a Democratic state attorney general investigating the claims, the governor and his top aides have stonewalled, threatened, and gaslit witnesses and state officials, accusing them of playing political games.
There have also been reports that Cuomo’s friends, family, and donors received preferential access to COVID-19 tests and health information. There’s the matter of a $62 million COVID-related state contract being given to a medical network that donated $230,000 to the Cuomo campaign. There’s the claim by gaming interests that the governor’s team threatened them until they coughed up campaign money. And another investigation is centered around allegations that a top Cuomo aide linked vaccine access to political support of the governor.
In an attempt to silence these stories, the governor has responded with brute force. New York City mayor Bill de Blasio is on the record as saying Governor Cuomo hurls invective at officials and the media to make them feel “belittled.” Democratic assemblyman Ron Kim — who lost a close family member to COVID in a New York nursing home — called for Cuomo to provide answers about the nursing-home tragedy. Cuomo personally phoned Kim and threatened to “destroy” him, before holding a press conference in which Kim was referred to as a “habitual liar.” Democratic state senator Alessandra Biaggi has released text messages showing threats she’s received from the Cuomo administration.
The behavior displayed by Governor Cuomo is appalling, but it’s nothing new. This is who he is, and who he has always been.
More ethical lapses snipped.
The obvious lies, the ham-fisted cover-ups, the corruption — we’ve seen it all time and time again from this governor. When there’s even a hint of an investigation into wrongdoing that implicates him or his cabal, Cuomo cuts his losses and scorches the earth. This is who he is: a mean-spirited bully with a flagrant disregard for the rule of law, ruthless in defense of his own venal interests and public image.
The Cuomo administration has run the gamut of travesties and tragedies. Personal viciousness is the governor’s calling card, and criminal behavior his M.O. Even as they’re barraged with one scandal and outrageous revelation after another, he and his inner circle continue to operate as though it’s all business as usual. So why is Cuomo still the governor of New York? Democratic lawmakers — the very same ones who called on him to resign when the sexual-harassment claims first emerged — continue to stand with him and normalize his behavior more than seven months later, partially out of fear and partially out of a complete lack of interest in governing.
Meanwhile, Cuomo seems locked into the Ralph Northam strategy: Assume that the (D) after his name absolves him of all sins against Social Justice and just wait out the storm confident no one will dare hold him accountable for his actions. And don’t forget the media’s nonstop fluffing of Cuomo back in 2020:
The Rolling Stone cover; Politico declaring him a “social media superstar”; Harry Enten of CNN declaring that, “The rise of Cuomo shows that times of tragedy can make very unlikely political heroes”; Carl Bernstein declaring that, “[It’s] real leadership of the kind the president of the United States should have provided to the American people throughout this crisis, but hasn’t”; Jesse McKinley and Shane Goldmacher of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo’s handling of the crisis has fostered a nationwide following; Mr. Biden called Mr. Cuomo’s briefings a ‘lesson in leadership,’ and others have described them as communal therapy sessions”; Ben Smith of the New York Times declaring that, “Cuomo has emerged as the executive best suited for the coronavirus crisis”; the New York Post (!) declaring that New York women were developing crushes on him; and Jen Rubin gushing: “Watching Andrew Cuomo is inspiring, uplifting, fascinating. He weaves details and humor and math and common sense all together. He is magnificent.” Even the Columbia Journalism Review started to worry that the adoring tone of the coverage was overlooking real problems with Cuomo’s decision-making.
And this is all separate from his appearances on his brother’s CNN program. I suspect you remember or can find examples I didn’t list above. Oh, another classic example, from Rebecca Fishbein of Jezebel: “I swooned when he told a reporter he had his own workout routine. I have watched a clip of him and brother Chris Cuomo bickering about their mother at least 20 times. I think I have a crush?”
Democrats in Washington want Andrew Cuomo to resign to allow the Democrat lieutenant governor to run New York state. If a Republican were next in line for the job, Democrats would be falling on grenades for Cuomo. That is, after all, what happened in Virginia when Governor Black Face unleashed his oppo research on the Democrats in the line of succession.
There are no criminal charges against Cuomo.
Cuomo’s problem is not sexual harassment. His problem is Democrats see him as a threat if he chooses to run for president.
Democrats in Washington want no part of playing second fiddle to an outsider. They had their fill of outsiders as presidents with Bill Clinton. Democrat senators want the White House all to themselves. In the 6 presidential elections since Clinton, Democrats have nominated a senator or former senator for president and vice president each time.
National Review wants you to know that Huey Long was a bad role model. Or you could just, you know, watch All the King’s Men, which remains a timeless classic. It won the Oscar in back-to-back years with All About Eve, another timeless classic, both of which showed you what the old studio system could achieve when they were working at the top of their game.
Inside the fight against a ransomware attack against the Texas town of Borger (which is way the hell up north of Amarillo):
In Borger, a city of fewer than 13,000, early indications were worrisome as the city raced to shut down its computers.
Gibberish ransom demands spat out of printers and displayed on some computer screens. Government files were encrypted, with titles like “Budget Document” replaced by nonsensical combinations of letters and symbols, said current city manager Garrett Spradling.
Vital records, like birth and death certificates, were offline. Payments couldn’t be processed, checks couldn’t be issued — though, blessedly for Borger, it was an off-week for payroll. Signs posted on a drive-up window outside City Hall told residents the city couldn’t process water bill payments but cutoffs would be delayed.
One update shared with city officials soon after the attack described how every server was infected, as were about 60% of the 85 computers inspected by that point. A city government email told council members that agendas for a meeting would be in paper format, “since your tablets won’t be able to connect.” An official told a judge it was unclear if computer systems would be operational in time for trials two days away.
Because the city had paid for offsite remote backup, Borger had the capability to reformat servers, reinstall the operating system and bring data back over. A newly purchased server that had yet to be installed came in handy. The police department, however, retained its data locally and the attack hampered officers’ access to previous incident reports, Spradling said.
Expensive Ivy League college film degrees are a scam. “Recent graduates from the Columbia University film program have an average loan debt of six figures against a low-to-mid five-figure income. And given that the master’s program takes four years, Columbia alumni enter the competitive field at around age 30, a detrimentally late start. Graduates soon face the shocking realization that they not only crippled their future but also wasted their money and youth.”
Automotive News published a report on Thursday of this week noting that EVs were 2.3 times more expensive to service than ICE vehicles after three months of ownership. Analytics firm We Predict compiled the data by looking at roughly 19 million vehicles between the 2016 and 2021 model years.
That figure drops to just 1.6 times more expensive after one year, the report noted, as a result of a 77% drop in maintenance costs and a decline in repair costs. The data showed that service techs spend about twice as much time diagnosing problems with EVs as they do with regular gas vehicles. They spend about 1.5 times longer fixing them and the labor rate for repairs was about 1.3 times higher.
Presumably some of this gap will drop as technicians become more familiar with them.
Classical music is under racial attack. Orchestras and opera companies are said to discriminate against black musicians and composers. The canonical repertoire—the product of a centuries-long tradition of musical expression—is allegedly a function of white supremacy.
Not one leader in the field has defended Western art music against these charges. Their silence is emblematic. Other supposed guardians of Western civilization, whether museum directors, humanities professors, or scientists, have gone AWOL in the face of similar claims, lest they themselves be denounced as racist.
Also this: “Orchestras should hire diversity consultants to develop ‘extra-musical evaluation’ criteria for orchestral positions, such as serving as an institutional spokesman.” Diversity consultants always demand hiring more diversity consultants. What are the odds?
The Offspring fire longtime drummer Pete Parada for refusing to get a Flu Manchu vaccine. “Given my personal medical history and the side-effect profile of these jabs, my doctor has advised me not to get a shot at this time.” If the other members are vaccinated, why the hell should they care? Stupider still: Parada already caught the virus last year, so he probably has more immunity than the vaccine provides…
Col. Dave Severance, who helped take Iwo Jima (and commanded the second flag-raising on Mt. Suribachi, the one in the famous photograph), dead at 102.
Where does this rank among disturbing YouTube videos? I give it a three.
A group seeking to ensure that elections are run fairly said this week that an in-depth analysis of mail-in ballot images it obtained through a court order shows that the hand-count audit in Fulton County, Georgia, last year “was riddled with massive errors and provable fraud.”
The analysis turned up at least 36 batches of mail-in ballots, containing 4,255 votes, that were added redundantly to the audit results, Voters Organized for Trusted Election Results in Georgia (VoterGA), charged. Nearly 3,400 were for Democrat Joe Biden.
The team examining the ballots also found seven audit tally sheets (pdf) they believe were falsified to contain fabricated vote totals. In one example, the group said, a batch containing 59 ballot images for Biden and 42 for former President Donald Trump was reported as 100 for Biden and 0 for Trump.
The analysis revealed that 923 (60 percent) of the 1,539 mail-in ballot batch files contained votes that were incorrectly reported in the county’s official 2020 election result compared to the audit totals, according to VoterGA.
“We believe that there is massive audit errors,” Garland Favorito, founder of the group, told a press conference in Georgia on July 13.
The group received the images as part of a court case after it petitioned in late 2020 to get clearance to inspect all mail-in ballots cast in the county in the 2020 election, alleging that fraud took place. The petition cited witnesses to the alleged fraud, including Favorito and other poll watchers and workers.
CBS’s “60 Minutes” deceptively edited an exchange that reporter Sharyn Alfonsi had with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) two weeks ago about the way the Sunshine State has rolled out its vaccination program.
In the clip, Alfonsi suggested that Publix, the largest grocery store chain in Florida, had engaged in a pay-to-play scheme with DeSantis where they donated money to his campaign in exchange for him awarding a contract to the grocery store chain to host vaccinations.
CBS edited the interaction between DeSantis and Alfonsi when she showed up to a press conference a few weeks ago and repeatedly confronted the governor. The network cut out a lengthy portion of DeSantis’ response in which he explains what happened and how decisions were made.
The Arkansas General Assembly voted Tuesday to enact a ban on gender transition surgery for minors, overriding a veto by Governor Asa Hutchinson.
Arkansas is the first state to ban transition surgery for minors, although similar legislation is under consideration in other states. The bill also prohibits doctors in Arkansas from administering hormones or puberty blockers to residents under age 18.
Here’s a word to every single Republican office holder in America: this is not an optional fight. You fight on this hill or we’ll replace you with someone who will.
Remember how President Trump “detaining kids in cages” was the Worst Thing In The World? Well, Joe Biden is detaining 18,000 illegal alien minors, almost seven times as many. And Democrats aren’t uttering a peep of protest because they never really cared about those kids anyway, they just wanted to: A.) Bash Trump, and B.) Open up the border so they can amnesty a new wave of illegals as Democratic Party voters.
Speaking of illegal aliens: “New York is reportedly going to spend $2.1 Billion on a fund to give illegal aliens COVID relief payments up to $15,600 per person.” Did any of these Democrats actively campaign on giving taxpayer money to illegal aliens? It’s like they want to live down to the most outlandish Republican parodies of Democrats.
Liberal writer Thomas Frank says that fellow liberals are deluding themselves if they think “misinformation” is the source of all their problems and censorship is the answer:
In liberal circles these days there is a palpable horror of the uncurated world, of thought spaces flourishing outside the consensus, of unauthorized voices blabbing freely in some arena where there is no moderator to whom someone might be turned in. The remedy for bad speech, we now believe, is not more speech, as per Justice Brandeis’s famous formula, but an “extremism expert” shushing the world.
What an enormous task that shushing will be! American political culture is and always has been a matter of myth and idealism and selective memory. Selling, not studying, is our peculiar national talent. Hollywood, not historians, is who writes our sacred national epics. There were liars-for-hire in this country long before Roger Stone came along. Our politics has been a bath in bullshit since forever. People pitching the dumbest of ideas prosper fantastically in this country if their ideas happen to be what the ruling class would prefer to believe.
Authorities have charged Adalberto Fructuoso Comparan-Rodriguez, whose nickname is “Fruto,” the former mayor of Aguililla, Mexico, and the reported leader of the United Cartels in Michoacán, Mexico, with drug trafficking crimes, according to the indictment.
Alfonso Rustrian, of Mexico, has also been charged as a co-conspirator. Another four defendants were charged for their roles in the alleged methamphetamine scheme.
According to court filings, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian met in Cali, Colombia, with whom they believed were members of Hezbollah but were actually undercover DEA agents. Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian agreed to send 1,100 pounds of methamphetamine from Mexico through Texas to the Miami area, according to the charges.
Once the meth arrived in Miami, Comparan-Rodriguez and Rustrian allegedly cracked open the concrete tiles and dissolved the meth inside 5-gallon buckets of house paint. The men are alleged to have extracted the pure crystal meth from the paint.
The mysterious case of “Dr. Jialun,” an anti-Trump Twitter troll who got his account verified despite having a fake profile and all of 100 followers.
Legal Insurrection is suing SUNY Upstate Medical University for refusing to comply with a New York Freedom of Information Law request on information related to Critical Race Theory training.
Man tells his estranged girlfriend he’s driving to Florida to kill her, is shocked when he gets there and gets arrested.
Sgt. Charles H. Coolidge, previously America’s oldest living Congressional Medal of Honor winner, went to his final muster. I previously mentioned him here. That makes Hershel Woody Williams America’s last living Congressional Medal of Honor winner from World War II.
Golden Retriever has had enough of your fake news:
Weather report from Moscow streets was suddenly interrupted by a four-legged heckler. A dog stole the microphone from the reporter of a Russian broadcaster. A golden retriever jumped at Nadezhda Serezhkina, grabbed the microphone and ran away – during LIVE broadcast. pic.twitter.com/po16bUGazB
Greetings, and welcome to a Good Friday LinkSwarm! I had the day off, so I slept ridiculously late, which is why you’re getting this in the late afternoon evening.
1. $10 Billion to Create a ‘Civilian Climate Corp’
The Biden administration proposes spending $10 billion to create a “Civilian Climate Corp.” The White House claims that “This $10 billion investment will put a new, diverse generation of Americans to work conserving our public lands and waters, bolstering community resilience, and advancing environmental justice through a new Civilian Climate Corps.”
2. $20 Billion to ‘Advance Racial Equity and Environmental Justice’
The proposal sets aside a whopping $20 billion—more than the latest COVID package spent on vaccines—for “a new program that will reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments and ensure new projects increase opportunity, advance racial equity and environmental justice, and promote affordable access.”
3. $175 Billion in Subsidies for Electric Vehicles
Electric vehicles: A technological novelty so good it won’t catch on without hundreds of billions in subsidies. At least, that’s apparently what the Biden administration thinks, as its infrastructure proposal earmarks a “$174 billion investment to win the electric vehicle market.”
The spending will take the form of manufacturing subsidies and consumer tax credits, which historically have benefitted wealthy families most. For comparison, the proposal carves out more for green energy goodies than it does on the total $115 billion to “modernize the bridges, highways, roads, and main streets that are in most critical need of repair.”
After Joe Biden’s performance last Thursday, every American should be demanding to talk to the manager. That’s because while President Joe Biden’s pathetic display during his “matinee” presser showed clearly that he is not in charge of our country, it also begged the obvious follow-up question not being asked by the 25 reporters in the room: If Joe Biden isn’t in charge of running our government, who is?
If you didn’t actually watch the press conference—and every American should-especially those who voted against Trump by voting for Biden because they’d thought he was an improvement—by now, you have doubtless read the accounts of the President’s cliff notes that included scripted talking points and photos of the journalists upon whom he was directed to call. His staff treated him in much the same way as does the family of someone in the early stages of dementia, where they put pictures on doors and cabinets as a reminder of what goes where.
If Joe Biden were my next-door neighbor, his condition could be described as sad, and he would be afforded every consideration and allowance possible for someone entering the final stage of the aging process. He is not, however, my next-door neighbor. He is supposed to be the President of the United States. His performance was mortifying. This is one of the most powerful men in the world. He controls our budget. He controls our military. He controls our nuclear weapons. What he clearly does not control is himself.
And if he isn’t in control of himself, then who is? Who is in charge?
Matt Taibbi: “Master List Of Official Russia Claims That Proved To Be Bogus”:
Update 3/21/21 “All 17 intelligence agencies,” October 19, 2016. Before the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton and others publicly stated that all 17 U.S. intelligence agencies backed an assessment that cyberattacks in 2016 came from the “highest levels of the Kremlin.” That was later corrected in congressional testimony to four agencies. It was actually a hand-picked team from three agencies, and the chief conclusion from that group came mainly from CIA chief John Brennan, who in his own book, “Undaunted,” published in 2020, revealed that he had overlooked dissenting analysis from two members of the working group. Brennan said he believed “the quality of the sources justified the high confidence,” but the Times and other outlets reported that Brennan was basing much of his confidence on a single human source in Russia whose information was allowed to bypass the normal vetting process….
So a story that began as an assessment on Russian interference agreed upon by “all seventeen agencies,” became four agencies, then it was a hand-picked group from three agencies dominated by the CIA director, who overrode dissenting analysts within the group, likely because of confidence in one human source.
There are twenty five entries on the list, and Taibbi admits he could have gone “on and on.”
The goal was to destroy dissidents and potential dissidents socially and emotionally without resorting to arrest and imprisonment. The Stasi collected information about the victim's private life, and proceeded to "disintegrate" their careers and their family and private life.
The goal was to destroy the reputation of the target and make him so preoccupied with his personal difficulties and emotional turmoil that he had no will to question the government of the DDR. It was done covertly, and often victims weren't believed even if they discovered it.
The results are in—and they overwhelmingly vindicate the free states over the authoritarian experiments. First, we saw that states with the harshest restrictions didn’t necessarily achieve the best COVID-19 death outcomes. Florida has fared far better than New York and New Jersey, for example, and multiple studies have found no correlation between lockdown stringency and death rates.
Yet lockdowns have come at an enormous economic and human cost. We’ve seen mental health problems and child suicide spikes, an increase in domestic violence, an uptick in drug overdoses, and much, much more. And, of course, the economic toll of shutting down businesses and criminalizing “non-essential” livelihoods has been devastating.
The national unemployment rate was a poor if not disastrous 6.2 percent in February. Yet the just-released state-level unemployment rates for last month show that the devastation hasn’t been equal across the board. New Labor Department data reveal that many free states have returned to nearly their pre-pandemic unemployment rates—while lockdown states dominate the wrong end of the list.
Why isn’t everyone in Texas dying? “The lockdowns have had no statistically observable effect on the virus trajectory and resulting severe outcomes. The open states have generally performed better, perhaps not because they are open but simply for reasons of demographics and seasonality. The closed states seem not to have achieved anything in terms of mitigation.”
Try to contain your shock, but Cruz Noguez, the mano owned the SUV involved in the carash that killed 13 illegal aliens, was a coyote.
Related: “Austin Resident Faces Life in Prison for Alleged Smuggling That Killed 8 Illegal Aliens.”
Prosecutors have also charged Austin resident Sebastian Tovar, age 24, with transporting illegal aliens resulting in death for an incident that killed eight people on March 15.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a press release that a Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officer tried to stop Tovar, who led police on a 50-mile car chase.
“Traveling north into the southbound lane on Highway 277, Tovar collided with another vehicle head-on, resulting in the death of eight illegal aliens that had been in Tovar’s pickup truck,” the DOJ said. “The driver and passenger of the vehicle into which Tovar collided are hospitalized and in stable condition.”
The DOJ said that, after the incident, border patrol agents apprehended 12 illegal aliens, two of whom confessed to being connected to Tovar’s alleged smuggling activities.
The defendants in the March 4 incident are 28-year-old Isidro Rodriguez Jr. and 18-year-old Bianca Michelle Trujillo-Lopez. They face the possibility of life in federal prison if convicted.
The indictment charges Rodriguez and Trujillo-Lopez with illegal alien transportation resulting in death, illegal alien transportation resulting in serious bodily injury and placing lives in jeopardy, and two counts of conspiracy.
“Court records allege that on March 4, 2021, the defendants were traveling on FM 2523 near Del Rio when a Texas Department of Public Safety trooper attempted to stop them for speeding,” the DOJ said in a press release.
“The driver, Trujillo-Lopez, tried to outrun the trooper, at times reaching speeds over 120 miles per hour. She ultimately lost control of her vehicle and rolled it multiple times after missing a curve on the road.”
“Conservative Humorist Chad Prather Launches Campaign for Texas Governor.” He’s running against incumbent Governor Greg Abbott in the Republican primary. I can’t say that I’ve actually heard of Prather before (which would tend to bode ill for his chances), but he starts out with 196,000, which is more than a goodly number of Democratic Presidential candidates started out with. Of course, all of them lost too…
Dwight covers stopping the bleed, with a side order of Julia Child’s liver and a nice Chianti.
Review of Kong: Skull Island in advance of seeing Godzilla vs. Kong this weekend.
Greetings, and welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Slow Joe slows the economy and holds a press conference, global trade founders on a single choke-point, and Democrats behave badly (a LinkSwarm evergreen). Plus a load of Archer memes.
“Slow” evidently applies not only to Slow Joe Biden’s mental speed, but also to the effect he’s having on the economy. “Americans’ Income Collapsed By Most On Record In February,” falling 7.1%.
Slow Joe finally held a press conference. It didn’t go well. “President Joe Biden struggled through his first official press conference on Thursday, pausing frequently to check his notes on the podium and occasionally losing his train of thought as if distracted by the voices echoing madly in his geriatric brain.”
Tucker Carlson also reviewed Biden’s “slow and painful” performance:
Now that the 2020 figures have been properly tallied, there’s still no convincing evidence that strict lockdowns reduced the death toll from Covid-19. But one effect is clear: more deaths from other causes, especially among the young and middle-aged, minorities, and the less affluent.
The best gauge of the pandemic’s impact is what statisticians call “excess mortality,” which compares the overall number of deaths with the total in previous years. That measure rose among older Americans because of Covid-19, but it rose at an even sharper rate among people aged 15 to 54, and most of those excess deaths were not attributed to the virus.
Some of those deaths could be undetected Covid-19 cases, and some could be unrelated to the pandemic or the lockdowns. But preliminary reports point to some obvious lockdown-related factors. There was a sharp decline in visits to emergency rooms and an increase in fatal heart attacks due to failure to receive prompt treatment. Many fewer people were screened for cancer. Social isolation contributed to excess deaths from dementia and Alzheimer’s.
Researchers predicted that the social and economic upheaval would lead to tens of thousands of “deaths of despair” from drug overdoses, alcoholism, and suicide. As unemployment surged and mental-health and substance-abuse treatment programs were interrupted, the reported levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts increased dramatically, as did alcohol sales and fatal drug overdoses. The number of people killed last year in motor-vehicle accidents in the United States rose to the highest level in more than a decade, even though Americans did significantly less driving than in 2019. It was the steepest annual increase in the fatality rate per mile traveled in nearly a century, apparently due to more substance abuse and more high-speed driving on empty roads.
The number of excess deaths not involving Covid-19 has been especially high in U.S. counties with more low-income households and minority residents, who were disproportionately affected by lockdowns. Nearly 40 percent of workers in low-income households lost their jobs during the spring, triple the rate in high-income households. Minority-owned small businesses suffered more, too. During the spring, when it was estimated that 22 percent of all small businesses closed, 32 percent of Hispanic owners and 41 percent of black owners shut down. Martin Kulldorff, a professor at Harvard Medical School, summarized the impact: “Lockdowns have protected the laptop class of young low-risk journalists, scientists, teachers, politicians and lawyers, while throwing children, the working class and high-risk older people under the bus.”
The deadly impact of lockdowns will grow in future years, due to the lasting economic and educational consequences. The United States will experience more than 1 million excess deaths in the United States during the next two decades as a result of the massive “unemployment shock” last year, according to a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins and Duke, who analyzed the effects of past recessions on mortality. Other researchers, noting how educational levels affect income and life expectancy, have projected that the “learning loss” from school closures will ultimately cost this generation of students more years of life than have been lost by all the victims of the coronavirus.
After the pandemic began in March, the number of excess deaths in the United States rose for all American adults. During the summer, as the pandemic eased, the rate of excess mortality declined among older Americans but remained unusually high among young adults. When statisticians at the Centers for Disease Control totaled the excess deaths for age groups through the end of September, they reported that the sharpest change—an increase of 26.5 percent—occurred among Americans aged 25 to 44.
That trend persisted through fall, and most of the excess deaths among younger people were not linked to the coronavirus, as researchers from the University of Illinois found by analyzing excess deaths from March through the end of November. Among Americans aged 15 to 54, there were roughly 56,000 excess deaths, of which about 22,000 involved Covid-19, leaving 34,000 from other causes. The Canadian government also reported especially high mortality among Canadians under 45: nearly 1,700 excess deaths from May through November, with only 50 of those deaths attributed to Covid-19.
Noem has – perhaps had – a future as a conservative conservative, and her utterly insane unforced error last week has hugely damaged her prospects. There are lessons here, people.
What did she do? She vetoed a bill defending women athletes from the insanity of letting men dominate them, a “style and form” veto, and then offered the most weaksauce weasel word explanation imaginable. Here tweet thread trying to explain it was lame; her appearance on Tucker was condescending gibberish. Watching it, woke cons started out disappointed with her and ended up infuriated at her. Here’s the irony – Kristi Noem stepped on her Ted Lieu in the context for a transexual policy issue.
It was really quite remarkable how amateurish and totally unnecessary it all was, but we’ve been seeing a lot of this lately. Recently, Greg Abbot decided to label all of Gab’s users “anti-Semites” because…well, who knows? It’s one of those things that you do that ticks off the base while the liberals continue to hate you. Good plan.
On the plus side, it lets us disqualify the weakhearts now.
It’s unclear who told Noem this was a great idea, but that person ought to be exiled to one of those other Dakotas. It’s 2021 and there are Republican consultants who still think the base is dumb. SMDH. The base is not dumb. The base is based. And we’re not going to be fooled with painful tweet threads and interviews about how 2 + 2 = 5 and how we need to not fight because it might make our enemies angry with us or – horrors! – cost us something to make a stand. Noem decided that instead of holding strong on an issue that conservatives care about, she would not merely rollover to the tech/Chamber of Commerce lib axis but also attempt to talk us into thinking this was just a routine administrative decision and that she is totally behind us 100 percent.
Except she isn’t.
We’re not stupid. Is she? Because if she thinks that conservatives, the cheated-on spouses of American politics, are not hyper-vigilant to any sign of betrayal then she’s too dumb to be our prezzy. We’ve been shafted too many times, and she is hallucinating if she thinks anyone will get a pass – including her. One of the most basic things we expect GOP politicians to do is protect our girls from getting clobbered by boys pretending to be girls. This is not one of those fringe issues where we’re, “Yeah, okay, sometimes you gotta compromise.” This is foundational.
Some of the rioters in Bristol last night were dressed in black bloc as they set dumpsters on fire to block streets and used barricades as battering rams to attack police. They also came armed with explosive mortar fireworks, a favorite projectile weapon among antifa to disorientate, deafen, blind and injure cops.
Though the protest-turned-riot was ostensibly organized to oppose the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, which would allow police to impose more conditions on protests and increase penalties for those convicted of vandalizing statues, among other things, the demonstration had all the hallmarks of a far-left gathering.
The ‘Kill the Bill’ protest was promoted by the Bristol chapters of a Black Lives Matter-style group, Extinction Rebellion and Momentum, the hard-left wing within the Labour party. Unsurprisingly, British antifa groups also encouraged their comrades to support the violence.
‘Be careful about sharing footage with people’s faces who aren’t wearing masks,’ warned one antifa group. ‘Solidarity with all the comrades out there in Bristol fighting the bill and facing hard repression,’ tweeted Brighton Antifascists. ‘Spread the fire,’ they urged. And the fire spread.
Hundreds of protesters had gathered earlier in the city center carrying hammer and sickle flags, symbols of anarchist-communism, and signs against racism and fascism. The most frequent message spray-painted on vehicles and buildings at the riot? Antifa’s adopted slogan of ‘ACAB’ — all cops are bastards.
I recently visited Bristol. I noticed immediately that the leftist student politics of the University of Bristol and other colleges seemed to define the city’s wider political culture. That is, Bristol is a left-wing political monoculture, much like Portland.
Around the turn of the century, Portland was the new belle on the block, not despoiled like San Francisco or in bed with high tech like Seattle. Oregon was not known nationally for much more than Nike and pinot noir and former Republican Sen. Bob Packwood, but maybe (with the exception of Packwood) that was OK. Maybe the city could debut as a fresh canvas, eco-friendly and affordable, a place to achieve your achievable dreams.
A lot of people were willing to take the chance, including my family. We moved from Los Angeles to Portland in 2004, and for a while, everything seemed on the up. The city in 2009 was, according to The Wall Street Journal, attracting “college-educated, single people between the ages of 25 and 39 at a higher rate than most other cities in the country.” New residents built the city they wanted to live in: farm-to-table restaurants and 40 million brewpubs and too many bike paths and aggressively progressive politics. When then–Illinois Sen. Barack Obama swung through on the campaign trail in 2008, more than 75,000 people lined Portland’s waterfront to see him.
Portland had entered the national stage. Was it a little bit goofy, a little bit twee? Sure, but also energetic in the way a young city can be, with people cutting what seemed to be genuinely new paths. Would the dudes slinging Korean barbecue out of an old R.V. take it brick-and-mortar? Who knew? Who cared? The dynamism of what-could-be hung in the very air.
Snip.
Portland’s leadership seemed likewise unserious. Democratic Mayor Sam Adams had to fly home from Obama’s first inauguration to face charges of having had a sexual liaison with an underage legislative intern with the readymade name of Beau Breedlove, and in 2019 he was accused by his former executive assistant of sexual harassment. In 2015, Democratic Gov. John Kitzhaber resigned amid allegations of influence peddling by his fiancé.
“It’s not a well-governed city. It’s not a well-governed state. Portland has basically had three failed mayors in a row,” says T.B., who previously held a high-ranking position in state government and who asked not to be identified by name. “Tom Potter was a former police chief who became mayor. He was totally hapless. Sam Adams was hyperkinetic, one thing after another and scandalous and so totally ineffective. And then Charlie Hales—I don’t know exactly what happened to him, but he also served one term; they all did. And now you have Ted [Wheeler], who I think has had three police chiefs since taking office. There’s certainly political instability at the municipal level, to say the least.”
Out of instability, good things nevertheless grew—including Portlandia. The comedy series debuted in 2010 and served up the city at its most parodic, with real-life Mayor Sam Adams playing a bumbling mayoral assistant and restaurant diners demanding the life story of the chicken they were about to eat.
The show riffed on slacktivism and five-hour yoga classes and men whose only “safe space” was Reddit. It was often genuinely funny. Who didn’t like to laugh at themselves?
Snip.
Young people had come here to achieve those achievable dreams. What was taking so long? Why did they have to live three, four people to a house, when just a few years ago rent was affordable? When my husband told baristas at the cafés he owned that, no, he couldn’t raise the starting wage to $12 an hour—this was in 2014—seeing as they also received tips and health insurance, the response was a general chilling, an “us against them” ethos that seemed to seep into the city. Activists became more vocal, denouncing businesses they saw as anti-LGBTQ. The city’s most active queer center was called out in 2015 for being too “white-centric.” And in 2016, students at Reed College formed RAR (Reedies Against Racism) and staged a protest against the 1978 Saturday Night Live skit “King Tut,” claiming Steve Martin’s portrayal of the Egyptian pharaoh was racist. “The gold face of the saxophone dancer leaving its tomb is an exhibition of blackface,” a student told the student newspaper.
The anger seemed free-floating; it was gathering momentum, was becoming an identity in itself.
When Donald Trump won the presidency, Portlanders’ anger catalyzed into a manic animus that took the form of compulsive marching and letter writing and CNN watching and the schadenfreude-tinged hope that Mike Flynn/Stormy Daniels/the Russia scandal would sweep the president out of office any day now. In this way, Portland was not different from other heavily Democratic U.S. cities.
Snip.
But there was a problem: Trump was both far away and a master of eliding responsibility. Without the satisfaction of seeing their enemy downed, people grew antsy. Someone needed to take the blame for stagnant wages, and rising rents, and what some saw as the misallocation of social and emotional resources. And so, in a preview of the protests that would come to roil Portland following the death of George Floyd, those who considered themselves more finely calibrated toward injustice than the rest of us took matters into their own hands.
“You probably remember there was massive rioting in the Pearl District the day after Donald Trump was elected. Millions of dollars of damage were inflicted,” says journalist Michael Totten. “How many people in the Pearl District voted for Donald Trump? It’s probably not even 1 percent. Who on earth are these people who declare war on a place where nobody voted for Donald Trump? That’s not how people in a democratic society are supposed to behave. You don’t go trash neighborhoods with the opposing political party in a healthy democracy, but they didn’t even do that. They declared war on the city as a whole.”
If there was zeal in using one’s power thus, crude as it was, there was also a mandate: If good citizens needed to fight racism, why not start at home? The food world, which arguably more than any industry had put Portland on the cultural map, was the first target. Andy Ricker, whose restaurant Pok Pok was the only place the late Pulitzer Prize–winning food writer Jonathan Gold wanted me to take him when he visited Portland in the early 2010s, was called out for making Thai food while not being Thai. Two young women closed their burrito cart within days of opening it after they received multiple death threats for making homemade tortillas despite not being Latinas. The local press, which had once lauded such people and places, now published lists of business owners “wantonly cooking the food of other countries, arguably at the expense of people from those very cultures.”
So much for ALL being welcome. People instead seemed to be asking: Are you with us or against us?
Then details of the riots and assaults. If anything, author Nancy Rommelmann is far too even-handed with antifa’s crimes, and fails to note that their antics preceded Donald Trump’s election by quite a while.
Displacement. “Blue checkmarks are mourning bad careers in a broken industry”:
Displacement is a psychological defense mechanism in which a person redirects a negative emotion from its original source to a less threatening recipient. A classic example of the defense is displaced aggression. If a person is angry but cannot direct their anger toward the source without consequences, they might “take out” their anger on a person or thing that poses less of a risk.
Media Twitter does not hate Substack because it’s pretending to be a platform when it’s a publisher; they don’t hate it because it’s filled with anti-woke white guys; they don’t hate it because of harassment or any such thing. I don’t think they really hate it at all. Substack is a small and ultimately not-very-relevant outpost in a vastly larger industry; they may not like it but it’s not important enough for them to hate it. What do they hate? They hate where their industry is and they hate where they are within their industry. But that’s a big problem that they don’t feel like they can solve. If you feel you can’t get mad at the industry that’s impoverishing you, it’s much easier to get mad at the people who you feel are unjustly succeeding in that industry. Trying to cancel Glenn Greenwald (again) because he criticizes the media harshly? Trying to tarnish Substack’s reputation so that cool, paid-up writer types leave it and the bad types like me get kicked off? That they can maybe do. Confronting their industry’s future with open eyes? Too scary, especially for people who were raised to see success as their birthright and have suddenly found that their degrees and their witheringly dry one-liners do not help them when the rent comes due.
The U.S. Secret Service reportedly got involved in a bizarre incident back in 2018 involving Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden, and Hallie Biden, who was married to the late Beau Biden.
According to the report, on October 23, 2018, Hallie Biden, who became romantically involved with Hunter sometime after Beau’s death, found Hunter’s .38 revolver in his pickup truck, which was parked at her house, then took the gun to a nearby grocery store and threw it away in a trash can behind the building. Upon returning to retrieve the gun from the trash, the Bidens discovered it was no longer there, reports Politico.
Delaware police investigated, concerned that the grocery store’s proximity to the local high school might mean the missing gun could be used in a crime. But then, Politico notes, a “curious thing happened.”
Two sources, one with direct knowledge of the incident, say Secret Service agents allegedly approached Ron Palmieri, the owner of the gun store where Hunter bought the firearm, in order to retrieve the paperwork involving the sale.
The owner of the store refused, suspecting the Secret Service officers intended to get rid of any evidence of Hunter’s ownership of the gun in the event the gun would be involved in a crime.
Honestly, it’s probably not even the tenth weirdest and/or most corrupt thing Hunter Biden has been involved in… (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
Meet Eric Feigl-Ding, Democratic Party operative and coronavirus expert impersonator.
Someone is trying to torpedo the historic Abraham Peace Accords between Israel and various Arab states. Namely the Biden Administration:
Media reports on March 18 revealed that the United Arab Emirates has suspended its plans for an Abraham Accords summit in Abu Dhabi with Israel, the United States, and other Arab signatories to the historic peace agreements brokered by the Donald Trump administration. Supposedly, the Emiratis are angry with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for using the UAE’s de facto leader Mohammed bin Zayed as a “prop in his election campaign.”
In fact, as the theme of “election interference” should make clear (the UAE doesn’t have elections), and as has been substantiated by Israeli reporting, the source of the upset isn’t in Abu Dhabi but in Washington. In other words, the Biden administration is interfering in Israel’s upcoming election by strong-arming the Emiratis into publicly distancing themselves from Bibi.
Next week Israel will hold its fourth election in a little more than two years, so in effect Netanyahu has been campaigning for more than 24 months—including in August when he and MBZ signed the agreement. Should the Emiratis have shunned the deal since Netanyahu, like any Israeli prime minister, would invariably present his accomplishment to voters? What about sending an ambassador to Israel, as it did at the beginning of March? What about investing $10 billion, as MBZ told Netanyahu he would? So how does a photo op with the prime minister glad-handing the crown prince of Abu Dhabi on his home turf cross the line?
Plainly, the Obama-Biden team doesn’t care about interfering in Israeli elections or else Barack Obama’s State Department wouldn’t have funneled money to an NGO that campaigned against Netanyahu in 2015. Nor do Arab royals sitting atop petro-kingdoms have much theoretical or practical reason to worry about appearing to back one candidate against another. Smaller powers like the UAE make alliances not with factions but with states—and all parties in Israel support the Abraham Accords. Israel’s strategic class, its political, military, and intelligence echelons, as well as Israeli voters consider relations with Gulf Cooperation Council members a strategic boon. It is difficult to imagine any circumstances short of war under which an Israeli prime minister would think it politically wise to abandon a normalization agreement with any Arab state, never mind a major oil producer.
No, “election interference” is a staple of American political discourse. More particularly it is the rhetoric through which the Democratic Party now pushes information operations, like the Russiagate conspiracy theory holding that Russia interfered with the 2016 vote to put Trump in the White House. News of the canceled visit by the Israeli prime minister was eagerly pushed in the press and on social media by Obama’s Israel point man Dan Shapiro through his proprietary Israel wing of the echo chamber.
But there’s a bigger play here than interfering in Israeli politics by denying Bibi a preelection photo op with Israel’s peace partners in the Gulf. Their larger goal is to weaken or dismantle the Abraham Accords, which by assembling a treaty structure that binds Israel together with the Gulf states structurally interferes with the administration’s stated goal of realigning the United States with Iran—and therefore against Israel and the Gulf—by reentering Obama’s nuclear deal.
But isn’t peace in the Middle East the collective dream of the Beltway policy establishment, left and right? Trump, love or hate him, got Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan as well as the UAE to normalize relations with Israel, the first peace agreements with the Jewish state since Jordan signed in 1994—and Biden said he wanted to build on the Abraham Accords. But as it turns out, “peace” has a very particular meaning for American policymakers. For the Middle East hands in the Biden administration, what matters most is completing the project many of these Obama alumni helped initiate while serving under Biden’s former boss—realignment with Iran.
Trump didn’t just withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal, which undergirded Obama’s realignment strategy, he also designed a strategic architecture to counter Iranian influence—the Abraham Accords. To bind Israel and the Arab Gulf states, the Trump White House had to bracket the issue that previously kept these traditional American allies apart—the Palestinians. That alone earned Trump the wrath of Washington’s wise men.
“Yale Psychiatrist Who Declared Trump Mentally Unfit Has Been Fired, and She’s Suing.” Funny how that happened when Bandy Lee broke the Goldwater Rule. I would break out an appropriately tiny violin, but I’m afraid my atomic force microscope is being recalibrated…
South Carolina State Rep. Cezar McKnight (D) has represented his district for six years. It’s heavily Democratic, and two-thirds African American — two demographics that people don’t typically associate with social conservative causes. But the threat of transgenderism to our kids isn’t just a conservative concern, McKnight insists. “Black Democrats tend to be more conservative than white progressives,” McKnight told an AP reporter. They’re very much on board with the idea that children should not be pressed to permanently mutilate their bodies over gender confusion that is almost always temporary.
That’s why McKnight felt comfortable introducing a bill that would ban minors from pursuing transgender treatments or transitioning until they’re old enough to vote. “I would not have ever put this bill forward if I didn’t think the people in my district wouldn’t be receptive, and they are. Pastors, young parents, older parents, they all tell me the same thing: if you want to do this, wait until you’re 18.” A member of the Legislative Black Caucus, he says he’s received “an outpouring of support from his constituents, “who have told him that, while they don’t necessarily oppose this type of procedure on its face, they think that it’s one that should only be made when a person has reached adulthood.”
Andrew “Granny Killer” Cuomo’s book on how he bravely spread the Wuhan coronavirus in New York nursing homes has reportedly garnered a seven figure advance from the Crown Publishing Group. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
At this point, I believe there’s less than a 1% chance that the election fraud is overturned and Donald Trump sworn into a second term on January 20. Still, I’m going to go ahead and do another Election Fraud Update for (as Dwight likes to put it) the Historical Record.
Here’s a 30 page report alleging coordinated voting fraud in six states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin):
From the findings of this report, it is possible to infer what may well have been a coordinated strategy to effectively stack the election deck against the Trump-Pence ticket. Indeed, the observed patterns of election irregularities are so consistent across the six battleground states that they suggest a coordinated strategy to, if not steal the election outright, strategically game the election process in such a way as to “stuff the ballot box” and unfairly tilt the playing field in favor of the Biden-Harris ticket.
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The ballots in question because of the identified election irregularities are more than sufficient to swing the outcome in favor of President Trump should even a relatively small portion of these ballots be ruled illegal.
All six battleground states exhibit most,or all,six dimensions of election irregularities. However, each state has a unique mix of issues that might be considered “most important.”To put this another way, all battleground states are characterized by the same or similar election irregularities; but, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, each battleground state is different in its own election irregularity way.
This was theft by a thousand cuts across six dimensions and six battleground states rather than any one single “silver bullet” election irregularity.
In refusing to investigate a growing number of legitimate grievances, the anti-Trump media and censoring social media are complicit in shielding the American public from the truth. This is a dangerous game that simultaneously undermines the credibility of the media and the stability of our political system and Republic.
Those journalists, pundits, and political leaders now participating in what has become a Biden Whitewash should acknowledge the six dimensions of election irregularities and conduct the appropriate investigations to determine the truth about the 2020 election. If this is not done before Inauguration Day, we risk putting into power an illegitimate and illegal president lacking the support of a large segment of the American people.
We report a simple yet powerful statistical model of county-level voter behavior in the November 2020 presidential election using two main types of data:
1. County-specific voting data from the five previous presidential elections.
2. Selected demographic variables (race and education) plotting how different national voter groups voted differently in 2020 overall.
These two types of predictors allow us to explain over 95% of the variation in county-level votes, and therefore allow us identify which counties (and consequently, states) look substantially anomalous in the 2020 election.
The model provides substantial support for the allegation that the outcome of the election was affected by fraud in multiple states. Specifically, the model’s predictions match the reported results in all other states, i.e. states where no fraud has been alleged, but predicts Trump won majorities in five disputed states (AZ, GA, NV, PA and WI) and 49.68% of the vote in the sixth (MI).
In other words, the reported Biden margin of victory in at least five of the six contested states cannot be explained by any patterns in voter preference consistent with national demographic trends.
SUMMARY OF MAIN ARGUMENTS
1. Our model explains 96% of county-level variance in Trump’s two-party vote share with four demographic variables (non-college white, college-educated white, black and hispanic) and one historical variable (the average of county-level GOP two-party presidential vote share, 2004-2016). All five variables are highly significant. This reinforces the conclusion that the model is generally a very strong predictor of vote shares, and so deviations from it should be considered surprising.
2. Under conservative assumptions, regression analysis shows Trump ought to have won AZ, GA, NV, PA, WI.
Remember that statistical models are indicative, but not conclusive.
“After Examining Antrim County Voting Machines, ASOG Concludes Dominion ‘Intentionally Designed’ to ‘Create Systemic Fraud.'”
The cyber-security firm that conducted a forensic examination of 22 Dominion Voting tabulators in Michigan has determined that “Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed” to “create systemic fraud,” and that election results of Antrim County should not have been certified. Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG) said in a report published Monday morning that it observed an error rate of 68.05 percent in the fatally flawed machines.
Earlier Monday morning, Michigan state judge Kevin Elensheimer ordered the release of the the Dominion voting machines audit in Antrim County, where thousands of votes for President Trump were flipped to Joe Biden.
Last week, Judge Elensheimer issued a protective order allowing Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel and Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to temporarily block the results of the audit.
During a hearing conducted by ZOOM and streamed live on YouTube, Elensheimer this morning removed that order, clearing the way for the results to go public with some redactions.
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We conclude that the Dominion Voting System is intentionally and purposefully designed with inherent errors to create systemic fraud and influence election
results.
The system intentionally generates an enormously high number of ballot errors. The electronic ballots are then transferred for adjudication. The intentional errors lead to bulk adjudication of ballots with no oversight, no transparency, and no audit trail. This leads to voter or election fraud. Based on our study, we conclude that The Dominion Voting System should not be used in Michigan. We further conclude that the results of Antrim County should not have been certified.
PHOENIX — The Maricopa Board of Supervisors voted 4-1 today defy the state lawmakers and resist complying with legislative subpoenas. Instead of allowing a transparent audit, the board voted to file a lawsuit against lawmakers in Arizona state court to block the enforcement of the subpoenas.
The Chairman of the Board, Clint Hickman (R), described the subpoenas as unrealistic and unconstitutional.
The subpoenas were issued earlier this week by Arizona lawmakers, who sought to force an audit of Dominion voting machines used by Maricopa County.
If they have nothing to hide, why are they hiding?
Dominion thread:
2/ This Dominion advantage was observed regardless of the county's majority political party affiliation nor urban, suburban, or rural-area demographics. Biden over-performed our estimates in “democratic strongholds” – by the same amount he over-performed in “Trump” counties.
4/ In the first graph, we see Biden’s actual 2020 election results. The blue line is our center “prediction” line. Half the counties should be above the blue line & half below. This is confirmed true with Biden over-performing in 45% of counties & underperforming in 55%. pic.twitter.com/UEGrQ5Tn6s
6/ The county data filtered by voting machines shows us that candidate Biden over performed by approximately 5% on Dominion machines AND also by approximately 6% on Hart machines. pic.twitter.com/vQpK8rx1fG
8/ In this graph, we see green dots represent votes from counties using Dominion/Hart machines. The green dots should overlay the blue dots in a similar, mixed up/random fashion. We do not see this. Instead, we see the green dots centered higher than the center of the blue dots. pic.twitter.com/rsjoPq7hcA
10/ The increases in votes occurred in hundreds of Dominion/Hart counties across the U.S. Again, it is important to understand, Biden "over-performed" in "democratic strongholds" – by the same amount he over-performed in “Trump” counties as long as these machines were used.
Many Americans — according to some surveys, a majority — believe that the presidential election was marred by massive fraud in five states without which the President would surely have been re-elected.
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This partisan fraud has been ongoing for at least two decades but is no longer escaping the attention of great deal of its erstwhile consumer base. For years we have been examining media disinformation and bias. This year it was particularly evident in the media’s discrediting the accurate reports of Hunter Biden’s corruption (and that of his father and uncle, who also benefited from it).
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Add to this the media’s refusal to accurately describe the months-long BLM/Antifa riots, looting, arson, and killing, calling it instead “mostly peaceful protests,” it’s no wonder people are tuning them out. The heavy hand of the left wing played its part. Internet giants like Twitter suspended the account of the oldest newspaper in the country, the NY Post, which broke the story of the Biden family corruption with China, Russia, and the Ukraine as well as the account of the White House press secretary, and you can understand why “fewer than 15 percent of Americans trust the media.”
Treat your pen like a Democratic party weapon and be rewarded with pink slips to the unemployment line. “An estimated 28,637 job cuts were reported in the industry by late October, Variety, citing data from Challenger, Gray & Christmas, reported, nearly as many as the record 28,803 reported in the media sector in 2008. By comparison, the sector saw just over 10,000 job losses in 2019 and 15,474 in 2018.” The Hill attributes it to the China Virus. I think the mendacity and patent bias also has a great deal to do with the shrinking media employment.
Federalist Senior Editor Mollie Hemingway said on Fox News Thursday that allegations of a rigged election include big tech and big media conspiring to elect Joe Biden in addition to charges of voter fraud.
“We hear about the rigging of the election,” Hemingway said, “but partly what they mean is the meddling on the part of big media and big tech to affect the outcome of the election.”
Hemingway continued, pointing out that when major revelations about Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, began to surface implicating the former vice president in corrupt and potentially criminal overseas business activity, the stories were suppressed online by Silicon Valley tech giants and delegitimized by legacy media.
“When the New York Post broke the story about these emails,” Hemingway said, referencing the paper’s reporting from an abandoned Delaware laptop expanding the web of Biden’s scandals, “even though they were verified and people who were recipients of these emails verified they were real, the media suppressed that story.”
In October, the New York Post published a series of exposes revealing that Joe Biden stood to rake in millions from Chinese communist leaders, lied repeatedly when denying conversations about his son’s business, and leveraged his high-powered position to benefit the family. A Biden family business partner-turned whistleblower even came forward to corroborate details of the New York Post’s reporting.
The Post’s journalism that made Democrats look bad got the nation’s oldest paper locked out of its Twitter account for two weeks after the platform blocked users from sharing its blockbuster reporting.
How it happened: 1. Pick six Democrat-machine controlled cities. 2. On election night stop the count & figure out the spreads. 3. Add enough non-verified ballots to cheat big. 4. Resume the counts. 5. Flip the states. 6. Declare historic “victory…”#PickSixCheatBigJoeDid
The left is trying to redefine opposition to election fraud as “sedition“:
It was inevitable that the Democrats would overreact to legal challenges by President Trump and other Republicans to corrupt election practices in swing states, but some responses have been unhinged even by their standards. One recurring refrain is particularly disturbing — that lawyers, members of Congress, and state attorneys general who supported post-election litigation are guilty of sedition. At least one Democratic congressman insists that attorneys representing the president in such challenges should be disbarred and that House members who supported Texas v. Pennsylvania in the Supreme Court shouldn’t be seated in Congress. One of the defendants in that ill-fated lawsuit described it as a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”
This dangerous view of dissent has a long, sordid history among progressives.
Election fraud is the secret “assassin’s mace” of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that has long confounded security hawks, according to tech billionaire and entrepreneur Patrick Byrne, who back in August assembled a cyber intelligence team to analyze the U.S. voting system.
“For 10 years or more, there have been references to a coming ‘assassin’s mace’ in the Chinese literature—where they take out the United States with one stroke,” Byrne told The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program. “The national security community in the United States has been trying to figure this out: Is it their new aircraft carrier? Is that the hypersonic missile? Is it this, that, is it an EMP?”
“I don’t think so, ” he told host Jan Jekielek. “The one stroke that takes the United States out is what we’re experiencing right now.”
The 2020 vote involved “massive election fraud,” he says. “Not voter fraud, but election fraud.”
I doubt the “China did it” theory of election fraud, mainly because we’ve already seen the Democratic Party use these methods of fraud on a smaller scale (see Philadelphia) in past elections.
Despite the layoff, it’s been a busy week, so I have no doubt missed several election fraud stories. Please feel free to link to them in the comments.
#funny #animals pic.twitter.com/BVWjjt2Zml
ᗛ𓂃𓂂༻￮ (@KlatuBaradaNiko) July 16, 2022
(@TinuoluwaK) 
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