Posts Tagged ‘Brad Raffensperger’

LinkSwarm For March 15, 2024

Friday, March 15th, 2024

Happy Ides of March! You might want to avoid knife-wielding Romans today. Trump trial news, lots of Russo-Ukrainian War news, transexual madness starts to recede, and more Disney missteps. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Biden’s proposed budget is going to lower the deficit by $3 trillion. By which he means it will grow by $16 trillion.

    Following yesterday’s release of Biden’s $7.3 trillion budget, the Biden administration bragged about lowering the deficit by $3 trillion over the next decade – an average of 0.8% of GDP over that period.

    This would consist of roughly $2.6 trillion over 10 years in additional spending programs, offset by around $4.8 trillion in tax increases over the same period. Most of the tax and spending proposals have been included in prior budget proposals from the White House, according to Goldman’s Alec Phillips, however there are several new items.

    The budget would increase the corporate alternative minimum tax on book income from 15% to 21%, raising $137 billion over the next decade. It also limits a corporation’s ability to deduct employee pay exceeding $1mm/year, raising $272 billion over 10 years. The largest proposed tax increases include; raising the corporate minimum tax from 21% to 28%, as well as a series of tax increases on high-income earners, including new Medicare taxes, and a new 25% minimum tax on incomes over $100 million, raising $500 billion over the next decade.

    Of course, it has zero chance of passing under the current Congress – but that’s not the point.

    As one DC strategist wrote in a morning email noted by CNBC’s Brian Sullivan, the budget deficit will still grow by another $16 trillion over the next decade – and that’s with aforementioned tax hikes.

    Without them, the deficit grows to $19 trillion.

    In short, talk of ‘$3 trillion saved’ is total bullshit in the grand scheme of things, given how much the national debt will grow in the best case scenario.

  • “Georgia Judge Strikes Down Six Counts in Trump Election-Interference Indictment.”

    The judge overseeing the Georgia election-fraud case struck down six counts in the indictment on Wednesday finding that the language in the counts didn’t provide “sufficient detail” for former president Donald Trump and more than a dozen other co-defendants “to prepare their defenses intelligently.”

    The counts that Fulton County Superior Court judge Scott McAfee struck down all involved allegations that some of the defendants in the case solicited various Georgia elected officials to violate their oaths of office and to unlawfully appoint pro-Trump presidential electors.

    The six counts struck down by McAfee on Wednesday involved Trump, his former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Ray Smith and Bob Cheeley. The defendants were accused in the various counts of soliciting elected members of the Georgia house and senate and Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to violate their oaths “to unlawfully appoint presidential electors.” Trump and Meadows also requested that Raffensperger “unlawfully decertify” the 2020 presidential election, according to two of the counts that McAfee struck down on Wednesday.

  • Fani Willis ruling: She can stay on the case despite her numerous ethical lapses and bias, but her boytoy Nathan Wade has to go, so he’s stepping down.
  • “Judge Sets Trial Date for Hunter Biden’s Federal Gun Case.” “U.S. district judge Maryellen Noreika ruled the trial will start on June 3 at a status conference with Hunter Biden’s attorneys and special counsel David Weiss’s team of prosecutors.”
  • Kursk and Belgorod Invaded by Freedom for Russia Legion with Tanks.” It looks like several more villages have been invested this time, with some artillery backing (and unconfirmed reports of Bradleys). (Previously.)
  • Ryazan Oil Refinery Hit By Multiple Ukrainian Drones.”
  • And another one. “Kaluga Oil Facility Hit By Drones.” I know a lot of previous Ukraine drone strikes on oil facilities hit storage tanks. It can be hard to tell with the quality of videos, but in both of these videos, it appears that these recent strikes are hitting either the cracking or fractional distillation towers, which are much higher value targets and more difficult to replace.
  • Russia bags one (possibly two) Patriot batteries.
  • Have I already talked about how stupid Biden’s idea to build a floating pier for Hamas is?

    The Biden admin knows that US military personnel will not be safe in Gaza, but millions of dollars will be spent to build a pier to send aid that the Gazans don’t even want and that someone in the admin hopes will become a “commercial facility.”

    That’s what they think “American leadership” looks like.

    Apart from wasting taxpayer money, this is building infrastructure that, unless Israel finishes off Hamas, will fall into the hands of terrorists.

    Also, it will take 60 days to build (at least), by which time Israel should have finished pounding Hamas into a thin paste. It’s stupid piled on top of stupid.

  • Biden Department Of Justice Declares War On Voter ID And Other Election Security Laws.” Of course they have. There’s no way to drag Biden’s ambulatory corpse over the finish line without cheating.
  • Progress: “U.K. National Health Service to Stop Prescribing Puberty Blockers to Kids.”
  • Bling bishop’ Lamor Whitehead convicted of fraud, attempted extortion and lying to the FBI.” Not noted in the piece is that under his full name, Lamor Whitehead-Miller, he ran for Borough President of Brooklyn as a Democrat…and came in dead last. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • New Canadian law wants to hand down life sentences for #WrongThink.
  • The F-35 is now certified for nuclear weapons. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • UT brings back the SAT. It was stupid to dump it.
  • Female Swimmers Sue NCAA over Male Competition.” Discovery of who’s pushing transexism on American institutions should be enlightening…
  • I haven’t paid much attention to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s independent presidential run because I doubt it’s going to be on enough state ballots to even play a spoiler role. But the idea that he’s thinking of picking NFL quarterback Aaron Rodgers as his running mate seems extra stupid. Yes, he’s won a Super Bowl and is a four-time MVP, is 40 years old (and thus constitutionally eligible to serve, but what the hell does an NFL quarterback know about running the country? Also, since Rodgers is under contract to the Jets, won’t having to play NFL football preclude him from actively running as VP pick?
  • Crazy white boy Shuan King is now a Muslim.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Weird crime news of the week: “2 men charged with blowing up woman’s home, planning to use large python to eat her daughter.”
  • Captain Marvel 3, Ant Man 4, Eternals 2 All Cancelled.” Second time to break this out this week:

  • Related: Just about all of the $71 billion Disney spent to acquire Fox was essentially wasted. They got into a bidding war, and then “they don’t use the catalog that Fox has that they were given.”
  • The Texas town of Palestine is suing Union Pacific over a contract dispute. The catch: The contract was signed in 1872.
  • Charges are dropped in “Hotel California” lyrics case.

    In the middle of trial, New York prosecutors abruptly dropped their case Wednesday against three collectibles experts who had been accused of scheming to hang onto and peddle the pages, which Eagles co-founder Don Henley maintained were stolen, private artifacts of the band’s creative process.

    In explaining the stunning turnabout, prosecutors agreed that defense lawyers had essentially been blindsided by 6,000 pages of communications involving Henley and his attorneys and associates. Prosecutors and the defense got the material only in the past few days, after Henley and his lawyers apparently made a late-in-the-game decision to waive their attorney-client privilege shielding legal discussions.

    In waving attorney-client privilege, it looks like Henley made himself a prisoner of his own device…

  • An end to drywall?
  • How the famous tracking shot in Wings was done.
  • I’ve seen this one before, but it’s still funny:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Election Fraud Update For December 1, 2020

    Tuesday, December 1st, 2020

    As promised, here’s this week’s election fraud update. Lots of hearings, lots of lawsuits, lots of evidence of fraud, and no indication yet that anything is getting overturned.

  • Sydney Powell’s election fraud presentation. Caveat: PowerPoint, and the links appear to be broken.
  • Here’s the presentation on Michigan, with the same caveats.
  • “Giuliani, Trump Pull Off ‘One Hell Of A Hearing‘ On Pennsylvania Election Fraud”:

  • Some state of play updates in tweet form:

  • “5 More Ways Joe Biden Magically Outperformed Election Norms.”

    1. 80 Million Votes

    Holy moly! A lot of Americans turned out for a Washington politician who’s been in office for nearly 50 years. Consider this: no incumbent president in nearly a century and a half has gained votes in a re-election campaign and still lost.

    President Trump gained more than ten million votes since his 2016 victory, but Biden’s appeal was so substantial that it overcame President Trump’s record support among minority voters. Biden also shattered Barack Obama’s own popular vote totals, really calling into question whether it was not perhaps Biden who pulled Obama across the finish lines in 2008 and 2012.

    Proving how sharp his political instincts are, the former VP managed to gather a record number of votes while consistently trailing President Trump in measures of voter enthusiasm. Biden was so savvy that he motivated voters unenthusiastic about his campaign to vote for him in record numbers.

    2. Winning Despite Losing Most Bellwether Counties

    Biden is set to become the first president in 60 years to lose the states of Ohio and Florida on his way to election. For a century, these states have consistently predicted the national outcome, and they have been considered roughly representative of the American melting pot as a whole. Despite national polling giving Biden a lead in both states, he lost Ohio by eight points and Florida by more than three.

    For Biden to lose these key bellwethers by notable margins and still win the national election is newsworthy. Not since the Mafia allegedly aided John F. Kennedy in winning Illinois over Richard Nixon in 1960 has an American president pulled off this neat trick.

    Even more unbelievably, Biden is on his way to winning the White House after having lost almost every historic bellwether county across the country. The Wall Street Journal and The Epoch Times independently analyzed the results of 19 counties around the United States that have nearly perfect presidential voting records over the last 40 years. President Trump won every single bellwether county, except Clallam County in Washington.

    Whereas the former VP picked up Clallam by about three points, President Trump’s margin of victory in the other 18 counties averaged over 16 points. In a larger list of 58 bellwether counties that have correctly picked the president since 2000, Trump won 51 of them by an average of 15 points, while the other seven went to Biden by around four points. Bellwether counties overwhelmingly chose President Trump, but Biden found a path to victory anyway.

    Read the whole thing.

  • “Reasons why the 2020 presidential election is deeply puzzling“:

    To say out-loud that you find the results of the 2020 presidential election odd is to invite derision. You must be a crank or a conspiracy theorist. Mark me down as a crank, then. I am a pollster and I find this election to be deeply puzzling. I also think that the Trump campaign is still well within its rights to contest the tabulations. Something very strange happened in America’s democracy in the early hours of Wednesday November 4 and the days that followed. It’s reasonable for a lot of Americans to want to find out exactly what.

    First, consider some facts. President Trump received more votes than any previous incumbent seeking reelection. He got 11 million more votes than in 2016, the third largest rise in support ever for an incumbent. By way of comparison, President Obama was comfortably reelected in 2012 with 3.5 million fewer votes than he received in 2008.

    Trump’s vote increased so much because, according to exit polls, he performed far better with many key demographic groups. Ninety-five percent of Republicans voted for him. He did extraordinarily well with rural male working-class whites.

    He earned the highest share of all minority votes for a Republican since 1960. Trump grew his support among black voters by 50 percent over 2016. Nationally, Joe Biden’s black support fell well below 90 percent, the level below which Democratic presidential candidates usually lose.

    Trump increased his share of the national Hispanic vote to 35 percent. With 60 percent or less of the national Hispanic vote, it is arithmetically impossible for a Democratic presidential candidate to win Florida, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico. Bellwether states swung further in Trump’s direction than in 2016. Florida, Ohio and Iowa each defied America’s media polls with huge wins for Trump. Since 1852, only Richard Nixon has lost the Electoral College after winning this trio, and that 1960 defeat to John F. Kennedy is still the subject of great suspicion.

    Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.

    We are told that Biden won more votes nationally than any presidential candidate in history. But he won a record low of 17 percent of counties; he only won 524 counties, as opposed to the 873 counties Obama won in 2008. Yet, Biden somehow outdid Obama in total votes.

    Victorious presidential candidates, especially challengers, usually have down-ballot coattails; Biden did not. The Republicans held the Senate and enjoyed a ‘red wave’ in the House, where they gained a large number of seats while winning all 27 toss-up contests. Trump’s party did not lose a single state legislature and actually made gains at the state level.

  • Now in Tweet form:

  • “Pennsylvania Bombshell: Biden 99.4% v. Trump 0.6%

    What surfaced during hearings in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 25, 2020, may set the standard for electoral outrageousness. An expert testifying to the Pennsylvania Senate flagged a batch of ballots that recorded some 570,000 votes for Joe Biden and only 3,200 for Donald Trump.

    Yes, you read that correctly. That would equate to Joe Biden bagging 99.4 percent of that enormous chunk of votes. That one batch alone would have flipped the state to Biden.

    This bombshell was dropped last Wednesday at the Wyndham Hotel in Gettysburg. The November 25 hearings, which began at 12:30 p.m. and ran for nearly four hours, were convened at the request of Sen. Doug Mastriano (R-Adams, Cumberland, Franklin, and York counties). It was sponsored by the Senate Majority Policy Committee, chaired by Sen. David Argall (R-Berks/Schuylkill). Mastriano has called what happened “unacceptable,” and has called for the resignation of Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar.

    This particular gem was provided by Ret. Col. Phil Waldren, a former combat officer with a background in Army information and electronic warfare. Waldren, who testified along with Rudy Giuliani’s team, brought to the hearing his considerable expertise in analysis of election-data fraud. After Waldren presented his material, the chair opened the floor for questions. Rudy Giuliani went first, asking Waldren to clarify what his analytics team means when they talk about “spike anomalies” in voting patterns. These, as Waldren defines them, are “events where a numerical amount of votes are processed in a time period that is not feasible or mechanically possible under normal circumstances.” Waldren showed a chart with a shocking example of an apparent massive dump of votes for Joe Biden.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • More on Pennsylvania:

  • A Quantitative Analysis of Decisive Vote Updates in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia on and after Election Night”:

    In the early hours of November 4th, 2020, Democratic candidate Joe Biden received several major “vote spikes” that substantially — and decisively — improved his electoral position in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia. Much skepticism and uncertainty surrounds these “vote spikes.” Critics point to suspicious vote counting practices, extreme differences between the two major candidates’ vote counts, and the timing of the vote updates, among other factors, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of some of these spikes. While data analysis cannot on its own demonstrate fraud or systemic issues, it can point us to statistically anomalous cases that invite further scrutiny.

    This is one such case: Our analysis finds that a few key vote updates in competitive states were unusually large in size and had an unusually high Biden-to-Trump ratio. We demonstrate the results differ enough from expected results to be cause for concern.

    Snip.

    This report studies 8,954 individual updates to the vote totals in all 50 states and finds that four individual updates — two of which were widely noticed on the internet, including by the President — are profoundly anomalous; they deviate from a pattern which is otherwise found in the vast majority of the remaining 8,950 vote updates. The findings presented by this report [28]suggest that four vote count updates — which collectively were decisive in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, and thus decisive of a critical forty-two electoral votes — are especially anomalous and merit further investigation.

    In particular, the finding that the broader data follows general patterns and our ability to measure just how much any individual vote update does — or doesn’t — follow this pattern allows us to make concrete claims about both how extreme any given vote update is and about what any particular vote update might have looked like, had it been less extreme one one axis or another.

    We further find that if these updates were only more extreme than 99% of all updates nationally in terms of their deviation from this generally-observed pattern, that, holding all else equal, Joe Biden may very well have lost the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, and that he would have 42 fewer Electoral votes — putting Biden below the number required to win the Presidency. Either way, it is indisputable that his margin of victory in these three states relies on four most anomalous vote updates identified by the metric developed in this report.

  • “Nevada: Total Ballots Cast: 1,327,394, Total Presidential Election Votes: 1,405,376.”
  • More on why Nevada is ground zero for in the battle against voting fraud:

    For the last several weeks, I have been screaming from the rooftops that mail ballots are the place to be looking for fraud. I have felt that the Hunt for Hacked Dominion has been a waste of time, unlikely to merit any immediate result that would provide enough of a boost to put Trump over the top. In watching the returns and the data, I saw mail ballot dumps that went almost 9 to 1 for Biden, and mail ballot turnouts that were much higher than surrounding counties, which led me to believe that there was more potential for issues here than anywhere else.

    Yesterday, news broke that a judge in Nevada has allowed a trial to continue, which could potentially lead to a recount and the exposure of significant fraud in that state. My colleague at RedState and a fantastic legal analyst, Shipwreckedcrew, wrote about the legal consequences in-depth here. As he explained, the Trump campaign is not a part of this particular suit, as a result of Nevada State Law that requires the standing of an elector for suits.

    In 2016, the ballot rejection rate in Nevada was 1.6% while this year it was around 0.75%. The idea that of the 654,389 mail ballots accepted by the state, it is likely the plaintiffs will find 34,000 ballots (or 5%) to overturn on signature alone, is nuts. There needs to be a much higher level of scrutiny that will give the result.

  • There was an Arizona election fraud hearing yesterday.
  • More details on the Arizona hearing.
  • Michigan is holding hearings on voting irregularities today, though evidently there’s some shenanigans with witnesses going on. (Hat tip: John Solomon.)
  • What is Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger thinking?

    ne has to wonder if Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is thinking at all. Under his leadership, the state rammed through an election technology system change violating every known rule of system implementation project management. It deployed this completely new system for one of the most contested national elections in our nation’s history. Then the state became an international embarrassment when the whole process fell apart on election night.

    Now, the eyes of the world are on Georgia because two runoffs will determine the majority in the Senate. So, what do Raffensperger and the rest of the Georgia State Election Board do? You guessed it. Outside of the legislative process, they are changing the rules again, according to Fox News:

    The five-member Georgia State Election Board, chaired by Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, voted on Monday to extend the use of the 24/7 monitored drop boxes for use through the runoffs. Use of the boxes was originally set to expire in late December.

    The move comes amid a surge in absentee ballot requests in the runoff elections. Officials said that as of Monday morning 762,000 requests for absentee ballots had been submitted.

    A second rule adopted allows counties to continue to begin processing absentee ballots two weeks before Election Day – but now also mandates them to start processing them no later than a week and one day ahead of the election. But as per Georgia law, none of the ballots would be tabulated and counted until the polls close on Jan. 5.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Pennsylvania’s supreme court tosses another election certification lawsuit.
  • “The ‘smartest man in the room‘ has joined Sidney Powell’s team.”

    In her Georgia complaint, Sidney Powell included the declaration of Navid Keshavarz-Nia, an expert witness who stated under oath that there was massive computer fraud in the 2020 election, all of it intended to secure a victory for Joe Biden. Dr. Kershavarz-Nia’s name may not mean a lot to you, but it’s one of the weightiest names in the world when it comes to sniffing out cyber-security problems.

    We know how important Dr. Kershavarz-Nia is because, just two and a half months ago, the New York Times ran one of its Sunday long-form articles about a massive, multi-million-dollar fraud that a talented grifter ran against the American intelligence and military communities. Dr. Kershavarz-Nia is one of the few people who comes off looking good:

    Navid Keshavarz-Nia, those who worked with him said, “was always the smartest person in the room.” In doing cybersecurity and technical counterintelligence work for the C.I.A., N.S.A. and F.B.I., he had spent decades connecting top-secret dots. After several months of working with Mr. Courtney, he began connecting those dots too. He did not like where they led.

    Not only does Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have an innate intelligence, but he’s also got extraordinary academic and practical skills in cyber-fraud detection and analysis. The reason we know about his qualifications is that it takes seven paragraphs for him to list them in the declaration he signed to support the Georgia complaint.

    His qualifications include a B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in various areas of electrical and computer engineering. In addition, “I have advanced trained from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), National Security Agency (NSA), DHS office of Intelligence & Analysis (I&A) and Massachusetts Institution of Technology (MIT).”

    Professionally, Dr. Kershavarz-Nia has spent his career as a cyber-security engineer. “My experience,” he attests,” spans 35 years performing technical assessment, mathematical modeling, cyber-attack pattern analysis, and security intelligence[.]” I will not belabor the point. Take it as given that Dr. Kershavarz-Nia may know more about cyber-security than anyone else in America.

    So what does the brilliant Dr. Kershavarz-Nia have to say? This:

    1. Hammer and Scorecard is real, not a hoax (as Democrats allege), and both are used to manipulate election outcomes.
    2. Dominion, ES&S, Scytl, and Smartmatic are all vulnerable to fraud and vote manipulation — and the mainstream media reported on these vulnerabilities in the past.
    3. Dominion has been used in other countries to “forge election results.”
    4. Dominion’s corporate structure is deliberately confusing to hide relationships with Venezuela, China, and Cuba.
    5. Dominion machines are easily hackable.
    6. Dominion memory cards with cryptographic key access to the systems were stolen in 2019.

    Although he had no access to the machines, Dr. Kershavarz has looked at available data about the election and the vote results. Based on that information, he concluded

    1. The counts in the disputed states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia) show electronic manipulation.
    2. The simultaneous decision in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, Nevada, and Georgia to pretend to halt counting votes was unprecedented and demonstrated a coordinated effort to collude toward desired results.
    3. One to two percent of votes were forged in Biden’s favor.
    4. Optical scanners were set to accept unverified, un-validated ballots.
    5. The scanners failed to keep records for audits, an outcome that must have been deliberately programmed.
    6. The stolen cryptographic key, which applied to all voting systems, was used to alter vote counts.
    7. The favorable votes pouring in after hours for Biden could not be accounted for by a Democrat preference for mailed in ballots. They demonstrated manipulation. For example, in Pennsylvania, it was physically impossible to feed 400,000 ballots into the machines within 2–3 hours.
    8. Dominion used Chinese parts, and there’s reason to believe that China, Venezuela, Cuba interfered in the election.
    9. There was a Hammer and Scorecard cyber-attack that altered votes in the battleground states, and then forwarded the results to Scytl servers in Frankfurt, Germany, to avoid detection.
    10. The systems failed to produce any auditable results.

  • “Judge freezes voting machines in 3 Georgia counties.” “A judge assigned to a Republican-led lawsuit alleging widespread fraud in the presidential election in Georgia issued an order late Sunday night blocking plans to wipe or reset voting machines used in three counties in the state.”
  • “Powell: Dominion Server Removed From Fulton County While Lawyers Sought Restraining Order.”
  • Patrick Byrne, former CEO of Overstock.com, is paying “a team of hackers and cybersleuths” to prove Trump won.
  • Even 30% of Democrats think election fraud occurred.
  • A list of election certification dates.
  • There’s enough voting fraud that that margin was easily enough to flip the election:

  • Real or Photoshopped?

  • Let me know if I missed any important election fraud news in the comments.