Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Joe Biden’

Biden’s Campaign Manager Calls Republicans ‘A Bunch Of F**kers,’ Then Calls For Unity

Reported by VIRGINIA KRUTA, ASSOCIATE EDITOR | December 15, 2020

US President-elect Joe Biden delivers remarks at The Queen in Wilmington, Delaware, on November 10, 2020. – A week after losing the US election, President Donald Trump remained shut up in the White House on November 10, 2020, pushing an alternate reality that he is about to win and blocking Democrat Joe Biden’s ability to prepare the transition. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP) (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images)

Jen O’Malley Dillon referred to Republicans as “a bunch of fkers” during a Glamour magazine interview that was published Tuesday. O’Malley Dillon, who managed former Democratic Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign before taking on the same role for President-Elect Joe Biden, spoke with author Glennon Doyle about running two back-to-back campaigns with small children and what she expected as she took on her new role in the Biden administration: deputy chief of staff. (RELATED: REPORT: Biden Expected To Name 3 More Top White House Aides)**

O’Malley Dillon told Doyle that one of the ways Biden had been able to connect with American voters was his focus on unity as the ultimate goal.

“The president-elect was able to connect with people over this sense of unity. In the primary, people would mock him, like, ‘You think you can work with Republicans?’ I’m not saying they’re not a bunch of f**kers. Mitch McConnell is terrible,” she explained. “But this sense that you couldn’t wish for that, you couldn’t wish for this bipartisan ideal? He rejected that. From start to finish, he set out with this idea that unity was possible, that together we are stronger, that we, as a country, need healing, and our politics needs that too.”

O’Malley Dillon also argued for more compromise in politics, saying that she knew how difficult that was in a nation so polarized.

“I get that you’re not supposed to talk politics at the holiday dinner. Well, f**k that. It’s because we don’t do that that we are in this situation now,” she said, adding, “I also think, as in love, compromise is a good thing. The atmosphere in the world now is like, ‘Oh, if you compromise, you don’t believe in something.’ No, it’s: I believe in it so much that I’m going to work to find a path we can both go down together.”

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Right On Time

A.F. BRANCO | on December 16, 2020 at 8:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-right-on-time/

Hidden Biden made Time Magazine’s person of the for simply just being a liberal Democrat.

Donations/Tips accepted and appreciated – $1.00 – $5.00 – $25.00 – $50.00 – $100 – it all helps to fund this website and keep the cartoons coming. Also Venmo @AFBranco – THANK YOU!

A.F. Branco has taken his two greatest passions, (art and politics) and translated them into the cartoons that have been popular all over the country, in various news outlets including “Fox News”, MSNBC, CBS, ABC, and “The Washington Post.” He has been recognized by such personalities as Dinesh D’Souza, James Woods, Sarah Palin, Larry Elder, Lars Larson, Rush Limbaugh, and shared by President Donald Trump.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Image

Sent By A Friend

Written

on December 15, 2020

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – D.C. Curmudgeon

A.F. BRANCO | on December 15, 2020 at 8:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-d-c-curmudgeon/

After a Fraudulent Election, MS Media, and High Tech converging against Trump Biden returns to the swamp.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A,F, Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Bare Necessities

A.F. BRANCO | on December 13, 2020 at 10:38 pm | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-bare-necessities/

Minneapolis Police Department is being targeted for defunding under the current left-wing leadership.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – There’s Hunter!

A.F. BRANCO | on December 14, 2020 at 8:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-theres-hunter/

Where’s Hunter? Oh, there he is, now that Joe Biden won the election the media is all over the scandal.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Daily Beast: Isn’t It Odd That The Hunter Biden Money-Laundering Probe Went “Largely Unnoticed” Until Now?

Reported by ED MORRISSEY | Posted at 11:15 am on December 10, 2020

“Largely unnoticed,” purposely ignored, or actively suppressed? The Daily Beast’s reporting team on Hunter Biden’s legal woes sound somewhat surprised that the FBI’s money-laundering probe didn’t get noticed before the election:

The Justice Department’s announcement on Wednesday that it was investigating Hunter Biden, for what he deemed to be “tax affairs,” took root several years ago with a much broader inquiry that included possible money laundering, according to a report by CNN.

That inquiry reportedly fizzled, leading instead to a probe on tax matters that is now being led by the U.S. attorney’s office in Delaware. But evidence of the larger probe was apparent in the markings on a series of documents that were made public—but went largely unnoticed—in the days leading up to the November election, according to two individuals familiar with the matter.

The word “unnoticed” is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting in this sentence. Not only did it get noticed, it got reported by Sinclair TV’s James Rosen a few days before the election. A large number of online outlets — mostly conservative — picked up on Rosen’s report about the FBI’s criminal probe of Hunter Biden, including us. Rosen reported that Tony Bobulinski had cooperated in the probe, and that its focus was money laundering:

A U.S. Justice Department official has confirmed to Sinclair Broadcast Group that a 2019 FBI investigation into Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, is still active.

The 2019 criminal investigation looks into Hunter and his associates on allegations of money-laundering.

Sinclair investigative reporter James Rosen spoke with a central witness in these allegations, who suggested that former vice president Joe Biden knew more than he has acknowledged about his son’s overseas dealings.

That witness was Bobulinski, who went public about Hunter’s business dealings after the Biden campaign tried sloughing him off as a malcontent business partner. Rosen himself addressed this last night:

This didn’t go “largely unnoticed.” It was widely noticed, everywhere except in the mainstream media. Why? It started with the New York Post exposé of Hunter’s laptop, which Biden’s team claimed was Russian disinformation and social media platforms actively suppressed:

MacIsaac also said he copied the contents of one of the laptops for Giuliani. And, sure enough, those contents quickly made their way to conservative media personalities and outlets. Giuliani and others, including Steve Bannon, appeared on network television, stirring conspiracy theories and pushing unsubstantiated claims about Hunter’s overseas business dealings.

One of the main outlets pushing emails and pictures from the hard drive was the New York Post. And for one of its stories, the paper published what appeared to be federal law enforcement documents given to MacIsaac in return for his handing over the Biden laptops.

One of those documents—from the FBI— included a case number that had the code associated with an ongoing federal money laundering investigation in Delaware, according to several law enforcement officials who reviewed the document. Another document—one with a grand jury subpoena number—appeared to show the initials of two assistant U.S. attorneys linked to the Wilmington, Delaware, office.

Gee — you mean if media outlets had actually checked the details, they might have found a real story about corruption around Joe Biden? As in, acting like real journalistic organizations and speaking truth to power? The deuce you say. The excuse in this article for failing to report on this — even with Rosen’s report already made public — was that law enforcement wouldn’t comment and the Biden team stonewalled the Daily Beast. But the documents themselves apparently left that very big clue two months ago that they’re reporting …. now.

[Update: That’s too harsh in regard to the Daily Beast, actually. They did try to follow up. That puts them head and shoulders above other media outlets … like, for instance …]

As Glenn Greenwald says — memories …

It’s not just media outlets that should get the heat, either. Twitter and Facebook actively suppressed the New York Post article — and the New York Post itself — for days. Democrats called it Russian disinformation, and both Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey nearly twisted their ankles in a rush to suppress it. Now, and only after Hunter Biden issued a press release acknowledging the accuracy of Rosen’s reporting, have all of these “institutions” suddenly cured their myopia.

The clear conclusion is that the national media didn’t want to report anything detrimental to Joe Biden, no matter how accurate it might have been. Now that the election is over, they’ll tell their readers and viewers that the story went “largely unnoticed” [see update above as to TDB, which did at least notice it] as a passive-voice dodge to avoid responsibility for their active decision to ignore and in some cases suppress it. It’s an utter disgrace.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Operation Warped Deeds

A.F. BRANCO | on December 10, 2020 at 8:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-faker/

Biden Would like to be the one accredited for the fast-tracked COVID vaccine but this was all Trump’s policies.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin Voted Against Biden’s Surgeon General Pick When Obama Was President

Reported HENRY RODGERS, SENIOR CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT | December 07, 20205:28 PM ET

Photographer: Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Democratic West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin previously opposed President-elect Joe Biden’s choice for surgeon general under former President Barack Obama. Biden has selected Dr. Vivek Murthy to serve as surgeon general under his administration, but Murthy will first have to get through a Senate confirmation vote, where Republicans currently hold a majority. Fox News first reported that Manchin was against Murthy’s confirmation in 2014, saying his politics could interfere with his job.

“After meeting with Dr. Murthy, I don’t question his medical qualifications; I just question whether the public will believe that he can separate his political beliefs from his public health views,” Manchin wrote in a December 2014 letter. “I am wary that his past comments and political involvement will have an impact on his leadership capabilities and effectiveness.”

Manchin’s office referred the Daily Caller to a Nov. 24 statement on Biden’s cabinet picks after being asked whether he would vote against Murthy again. The statement did not rule out voting against Murthy, or any other cabinet picks.

Surgeon General of the United States Dr. Vivek Murthy speaks on the epidemic of prescription drug addition before the arrival of President Barack Obama at the National Rx Drug Abuse and Heroin Summit on March 29, 2016 in Atlanta, Georgia. (Photo by Jessica McGowan/Getty Images)

Murthy was confirmed 51 to 43 and served as surgeon general from 2014 through 2017. Former Democratic North Dakota Sen. Heidi Heitkamp and former Democratic Indiana Sen. Joe Donnelly also voted against Murthy. (RELATED: ‘I Never Met Her’: Joe Manchin Slams Ocasio-Cortez After She Took A Jab At Him On Twitter)

The two Senate runoffs in Georgia could make the confirmation process for many of Biden’s nominees much easier, as Democrats have a chance of being in control of all three branches of government.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

A Short History Of Democrats’ Vicious Tactics For Controlling The Judiciary

As the courts have become hyper-politicized over the past few decades, the judicial nomination process has deteriorated. With this presidential term drawing to a close, we should note the new depths of obstruction that have become a part of the Senate Democrats’ playbook these past four years.

Origins of Obstruction

Matters were already bad when a Democratic Senate rejected Robert Bork for the Supreme Court in 1987 with such notorious vilification that “bork” was added to the dictionary as a verb denoting such unfair and harsh tactics. Four years later came personal vilification for Clarence Thomas before he squeaked by the Senate on a 52–48 vote.

Thomas nonetheless made it through a Democratic Senate that had not entirely shaken a long tradition of bipartisanship on judicial nominations. In fact, from the government’s establishment in 1789 through 2000, 97 percent of Senate-approved judges faced no recorded opposition, and 96 percent were confirmed by voice vote or unanimous consent as opposed to roll-call votes.

Recorded votes tended to be lopsided. When President Bill Clinton nominated Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer to the Supreme Court, instead of Republicans retaliating for past treatment, the nominees were confirmed respectively by margins of 96–3 and 87–9. This was despite a number of known controversial positions Ginsburg had taken during her career that Republicans chose not to highlight.

During George W. Bush’s administration, Democrats engaged in wholesale filibusters of circuit court nominees, a tactic that resulted in the defeat of several. Previously, only one judicial nomination fell apart after coming up short on a vote on cloture — the procedure by which senators, with a supermajority vote, could end debate and force a confirmation vote. That was the fate of Justice Abe Fortas, whom Lyndon B. Johnson tried to elevate to chief justice in 1968.

Whether Fortas could garner the simple majority of senators required for confirmation was unclear. His unusual case included bipartisan opposition and ethical questions — he actually resigned from the Supreme Court the following year — and did not leave even the most strident opponents of Bork and Thomas with a sense that they had the filibuster in their procedural toolbox.

In 2005, early in Bush’s second term, Republican Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist proposed to change the supermajority requirement for cloture on nominations (then at 60 votes) to a simple majority, an idea known as the “nuclear option,” which would have effectively ended judicial filibusters. Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid threatened to retaliate with an unprecedented level of obstructionism that would freeze most Senate business. This scenario did not play out after a compromise, engineered by the “Gang of 14,” derailed any change to cloture.

Eight years later, however, Reid was majority leader, and with the shoe on the other foot, he orchestrated by parliamentary maneuver the very rule change that had once evoked his threats of senatorial Armageddon, essentially ending the filibuster for all nominations other than for the Supreme Court in 2013.

Unprecedented Partisanship During the Trump Era

Gorsuch Filibuster

That exception for filibusters on Supreme Court nominations was quickly put to the test after Donald Trump became president in 2017 and Democrats launched a filibuster of the new president’s first judicial nominee to reach the floor, Neil Gorsuch. Thanks to Reid’s handiwork in 2013, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell garnered support for adding Supreme Court nominations to the others that were subject to simple majorities to invoke cloture.

Abuse of Cloture Motions

Although Democrats were in the minority in the Senate throughout Trump’s term, they used the tools in their arsenal more than any Senate minority before them. While the simple majority threshold made it easier than before to invoke cloture, even when a cloture motion succeeded, a confirmation vote was not immediate but subject to a limit of 30 hours of further consideration.

That time notoriously went by with little-to-no actual debate on the nomination at issue, but of course, actual deliberation was not the goal. By forcing votes on cloture, Democrats could take up more of the Senate’s time and make it that much more difficult to process nominations, not to mention other business.

This the Democratic minority did indiscriminately. All three of Trump’s Supreme Court nominees — Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — were subjected to cloture votes. Adding Samuel Alito (a George W. Bush appointee) to those three, four of the six sitting Republican-appointed justices have faced cloture votes, in contrast to all four of the justices nominated by Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

Senate Democrats have also regularly forced cloture votes for even noncontroversial nominees to circuit courts, district courts, and even the non-life-tenured courts of federal claims. Eight district court nominees who had previously been nominated by Obama before Trump renominated them were subjected to cloture votes despite a lack of meaningful opposition; five of them received between 95 and 100 votes for confirmation and zero against, and another was confirmed by a voice vote.

It was only after the cloture rule was broadened in 1949, during Harry Truman’s presidency, to cover any pending matter that nominations could be subject to a cloture motion. Since then, there were a total of 136 cloture votes on judicial nominees through the end of the Obama administration. Trump’s nominees have considerably more than that entire total, at 192 and counting.

The Disintegration of Bipartisanship

The bipartisanship that used to attend most judicial nominations is also falling apart. According to the Heritage Foundation, more confirmed judges received more than 30 percent opposition votes during the Trump administration than during all previous administrations combined, from George Washington to Obama. Moreover, the majority of negative votes cast against judicial nominees in American history were against Trump nominees.

The three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices were confirmed with almost total Democratic opposition. Only three Democrats voted to confirm Gorsuch, one to confirm Kavanaugh, and none to confirm Barrett, making her the first Supreme Court nominee to be confirmed without any votes from a major minority party since 1869.

In Kavanaugh’s case, Democrats employed kitchen-sink tactics of obstruction that included repeated interruptions during his hearings and deluging him with more written questions for the record than the combined number of such questions to prior Supreme Court nominees in American history. All other tactics were eclipsed by the disgraceful last-minute attempt to destroy Kavanaugh, when Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual-assault allegation, after being buried for six weeks by ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein, was sprung on the committee after the initial hearings, a desperate tactic that flouted the process for handling sensitive matters.

Weaponization of the Blue Slip

On top of everything else, Democrats tried, in the words of long-serving Senate Judiciary Committee member (and former chairman) Orrin Hatch, to “weaponize the blue slip” tradition for circuit and district courts. That was the courtesy established in approximately 1917 in which a nominee’s home-state senators receive blue pieces of paper on which they could express their views about the nomination to the committee. It was a tradition (as opposed to a rule) intended to encourage pre-nomination consultation, but Democrats during this administration routinely withheld positive blue slips, especially for circuit nominees, as a workaround in the absence of a true filibuster.

“Today, Democrats are trying to turn the blue-slip process into a de facto filibuster,” Hatch charged in 2017. “They want a single senator to be able to do in the Judiciary Committee what it once took 41 senators to do on the Senate floor.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chaired the committee during the first two years of the Trump administration, noted that only two of 19 Judiciary Committee chairmen who served over the span of a century treated the blue slip as a strict veto that would preclude a hearing in the absence of two positive blue slips, and he was not going to allow Democratic obstructionism to prevent him from proceeding with hearings for circuit nominees. Still, the blue slip has impeded the advancement of district court nominations through committee, and many trial court judgeships in states with Democratic senators remain vacant due to the withholding of blue slips or the threat of doing so.

It is thanks to current Republican leadership in the Senate and specifically the Judiciary Committee that so many nominees have been processed and made their way to confirmation. As the repeated operation of the 30-hour rule took its toll on nominations, McConnell garnered a majority to reduce the post-cloture clock to two hours for district court nominations.

To date, the Senate has confirmed 229 Article III (life-tenured) judges nominated by Trump. That total includes 53 circuit court judges, which ranks second among all four-year presidential terms to that of Jimmy Carter, who, boosted by the creation of 35 new seats on the courts of appeals in 1978, holds the record at 56. For several months this year, there was no room for Trump to increase his appointments to the courts of appeals because every vacancy had been filled.

Historical Support for Lame-Duck Confirmations

There are now two more appellate nominees, Thomas L. Kirsch II for Barrett’s former seat on the Seventh Circuit and Raúl M. Arias-Marxuach to fill the First Circuit vacancy created by the death of Juan Torruella on Oct. 26. There is no reason they cannot be confirmed before Inauguration Day. Kirsch already had his hearing before the Judiciary Committee, as have 11 pending nominees to district or federal claims courts.

While any nomination that is not processed by Jan. 3, the end of the current congressional term and beginning of the next, is automatically returned to the president, it can be resubmitted and processed without the need for a new hearing. There is ample precedent for lame-duck judicial confirmations, from John Adams’ appointment of John Marshall as chief justice after his re-election defeat, to Carter’s appointment of Breyer to the First Circuit after his loss to Ronald Reagan.

There is an unmistakable dissonance between Joe Biden’s calls for national unity and his party’s judicial obstructionism over the past four years. As a Judiciary Committee chairman, Biden helped to lay much of the groundwork for this sorry state of affairs. For his Democratic successors in the Senate, obstructionism is an ongoing project that seems to find no limit.

Consider the exception that proved the rule: When leftist interest groups criticized Feinstein after she praised Graham’s handling of Barrett’s Supreme Court nomination hearings and gave the chairman a hug — never mind that every Democrat voted against the nominee — Feinstein’s party compelled her to step down as the Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat. Is there any level of malevolence toward judicial nominations that would satisfy today’s Democratic leadership?

Frank Scaturro served as counsel for the Constitution on the staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee between 2005 and 2009, in which capacity he worked on the nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the Supreme Court and Neil Gorsuch to the Tenth Circuit. He is the author of, among other titles, “The Supreme Court’s Retreat from Reconstruction” (Greenwood Press, 2000). Follow him on Twitter at @FrankScaturro.

Photo PBS Newshour/YouTube

Category:

Law, Political

Tagged with:

Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Runaway Truck

A.F. BRANCO | on December 3, 2020 at 8:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-runaway-truck/

Joe Biden appears to be Obama’s 3rd term by the looks of his cabinet choices.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Widespread Censorship

A.F. BRANCO | on December 4, 2020 at 8:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-widespread-censorship/

Every day more evidence of election fraud and malfeasance is coming out while the media ignores it.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Biden’s Handpicked Admin May Have A Host Of Potential Ethics Issues

Reported By Tim Pearce | Nov 30, 2020 | DailyWire.com

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s picks for some of the top spots in his potential administration are bringing with them a slew of potential ethics issues.

A number of his nominations and appointees are former government officials who have left government to work in the private sector. Two firms specifically are personnel pipelines that Biden has used to staff up: the consulting firm WestExec Advisors and the investment fund Pine Island Capital Partners, according to The New York Times.

As the Times reports:

WestExec’s founders include Antony J. Blinken, Mr. Biden’s choice to be his secretary of state, and Michèle A. Flournoy, one of the leading candidates to be his defense secretary. Among others to come out of WestExec are Avril Haines, Mr. Biden’s pick to be director of national intelligence; Christina Killingsworth, who is helping the president-elect organize his White House budget office; Ely Ratner, who is helping organize the Biden transition at the Pentagon; and Jennifer Psaki, an adviser on Mr. Biden’s transition team.

…

At the same time, Mr. Blinken and Ms. Flournoy have served as advisers to Pine Island Capital, which this month raised $218 million for a new fund to finance investments in military and aerospace companies, among other targets.

Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said that all members of Biden’s administration with ties to WestExec and Pine Island would sell any ownership stake and file client disclosure forms. Such clients may be protected by non-disclosure agreements with the firms, and it is unclear whether Biden’s nominees and appointees will be required to disclose all former clients.

“Joe Biden has pledged the most ethically rigorous administration in American history, and every cabinet member will abide by strict ethics rules and abide by all disclosure requirements,” Bates said.

A number of firms around Washington and with ties to the incumbent administration or lawmakers in Congress take part in revolving-door politics, hiring on government veterans and releasing them back to the public sector under friendly administrations to build relationships for their private sector clients. Such relationships can also help a firm get the inside track on government contracts.

WestExec advertises itself with a phrase promoted on its website that suggests some level of revolving-door access at play. “Bringing the situation room to the board room,” WestExec says on its website’s homepage. Similarly, the people brought on to Pine Island were picked because of their “access, network and expertise” to secure the company opportunities in sectors including “government services industries,” according to a September filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The web of potential ethics issues with Biden nominees has already begun to trigger blowback in the Senate, which has the power to confirm or reject Biden’s nominees to his administration. Sen. John Cornyn tweeted on Sunday that in the case that a nominee fails to disclose all of their potential conflicts of interest, “the Senate is not obligated to confirm anyone who hides this information.”

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – On the Lookout

A.F. BRANCO | on November 29, 2020 at 9:39 pm | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-on-the-lookout/

Gov Walz cares more about enforcing lockdowns for business than he does mobs burning them down.

A. F. Branco Cartoon – The New Abnormal

A.F. BRANCO | on November 30, 2020 at 8:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-the-new-abnormal/

Some folks are more concerned about mean Trump tweets than handing the country over to Biden’s tyrants.

Political cartoon by A.F. Branco.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s Three Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Political Football

A.F. BRANCO | on November 25, 2020 at 8:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-political-goalpost/

Many folks are accusing Dr. Fauci of continuously moving the science goalpost.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Fatal Attraction

A.F. BRANCO | on November 26, 2020 at 9:30 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-fatal-attraction/

Many feel Biden, Harris and the Democrats have a lot to do with the failure with 2020 election security.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Trust But Don’t Verify

A.F. BRANCO | on November 27, 2020 at 12:17 pm | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-trust-but-dont-verify/

Democrats fighting against only legal votes being counted in the 2020 election.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – The Other Red Wave

A.F. BRANCO | on November 24, 2020 at 7:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-the-other-red-wave/

If Joe Biden takes over there will be a huge red wave of the communist kind coming.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

5 More Ways Joe Biden Magically Outperformed Election Norms

In all the excitement among objective journalists for Joe Biden’s declared victory, reporters are missing how extraordinary the Democrat’s performance was in the 2020 election. It’s not just that the former vice president is on track to become the oldest president in American history, it’s what he managed to accomplish at the polls this year.

Candidate Joe Biden was so effective at animating voters in 2020 that he received a record number of votes, more than 15 million more than Barack Obama received in his re-election of 2012. Amazingly, he managed to secure victory while also losing in almost every bellwether county across the country. No presidential candidate has been capable of such electoral jujitsu until now.

While Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 totals in every urban county in the United States, he outperformed her in the metropolitan areas of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Even more surprising, the former VP put up a record haul of votes, despite Democrats’ general failures in local House and state legislative seats across the nation.

He accomplished all this after receiving a record low share of the primary vote compared to his Republican opponent heading into the general election. Clearly, these are tremendous and unexpected achievements that would normally receive sophisticated analysis from the journalist class but have somehow gone mostly unmentioned during the celebrations at news studios in New York City and Washington, D.C.

The massive national political realignment now taking place may be one source of these surprising upsets. Yet still, to have pulled so many rabbits out of his hat like this, nobody can deny that Biden is a first-rate campaigner and politician, the likes of which America has never before seen. Let’s break down just how unique his political voodoo has been in 2020.

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.

3. Biden Trailed Clinton Except in a Select Few Cities

Patrick Basham, a pollster with an accurate track record and the director of the Democracy Institute in D.C., highlighted two observations made by fellow colleagues, polling guru Richard Baris of Big Data Poll and Washington Post election analyst Robert Barnes. Baris noted a statistical oddity from 2020’s election returns: “Biden underperformed Hillary Clinton in every major metro area around the country, save for Milwaukee, Detroit, Atlanta and Philadelphia.”

Barnes added that in those “big cities in swing states run by Democrats…the vote even exceeded the number of registered voters.” In the states that mattered most, so many mail-in ballots poured in for Biden from the cities that he put up record-breaking numbers and overturned state totals that looked like comfortable leads for President Trump.

If Democrats succeed in eliminating the Electoral College, Biden’s magic formula for churning out overwhelming vote totals in a handful of cities should make the Democrats unbeatable.

4. Biden Won Despite Democrat Losses Everywhere Else

Randy DeSoto noted in The Western Journal that “Donald Trump was pretty much the only incumbent president in U.S. history to lose his re-election while his own party gained seats in the House of Representatives.” Now that’s a Biden miracle!

In 2020, The Cook Political Report and The New York Times rated 27 House seats as toss-ups going into Election Day. Right now, Republicans appear to have won all 27. Democrats failed to flip a single state house chamber, while Republicans flipped both the House and Senate in New Hampshire and expanded their dominance of state legislatures across the country.

Christina Polizzi, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, went so far as to state: “It’s clear that Trump isn’t an anchor for the Republican legislative candidates. He’s a buoy.” Amazingly, Biden beat the guy who lifted all other Republicans to victory. Now that’s historic!

5. Biden Overcame Trump’s Commanding Primary Vote

In the past, primary vote totals have been remarkably accurate in predicting general election winners. Political analyst David Chapman highlighted three historical facts before the election.

First, no incumbent who has received 75 percent of the total primary vote has lost re-election. Second, President Trump received 94 percent of the primary vote, which is the fourth highest of all time (higher than Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon, Clinton, or Obama). In fact, Trump is only one of five incumbents since 1912 to receive more than 90 percent of the primary vote.

Third, Trump set a record for most primary votes received by an incumbent when more than 18 million people turned out for him in 2020 (the previous record, held by Bill Clinton, was half that number). For Biden to prevail in the general election, despite Trump’s historic support in the primaries, turns a century’s worth of prior election data on its head.

Joe Biden achieved the impossible. It’s interesting that many more journalists aren’t pointing that out.

J.B. Shurk is a proud American from Daniel Boone country.

Photo Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Biden’s Reported Pick As Secretary Of State Mocked Trump’s Foreign Policy: ‘Everyone Is Running In The Other Direction’

Reported By Hank Berrien | Nov 23, 2020 DailyWire.com

Former Vice President Joe Biden has apparently decided that he would pick Obama Administration Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken as Secretary of State in a prospective Biden administration. Blinken supports reentering the dangerous Iran nuclear deal which the Obama administration ardently supported, and has claimed that Iran was complying with the deal; he also has slammed President Trump for making decisions he felt were best for America’s interests without caring whether other nations were offended, saying, “Everyone’s running in the other direction.”

In an interview with France 24’s Marc Perelman in 2019, Blinken stated:

I think it’s very unfortunate that the United States pulled out of the agreement that Iran for all of the things that we don’t like that it does; was complying with that agreement, with the nuclear agreement. From Iran’s perspective, I imagine that at a certain point, they were no longer getting the economic benefit they bargained for in making the agreement, that they might decide to resume their nuclear program. That seems to be the point that they reached.

Perelman asked, “So Iran has withdrawn from some parts of the agreement; they say we’re still complying with the agreement, are you concerned that this could be the last step before Iran effectively gets out of the agreement?”

Blinken answered:

Well, at some point you’re in the agreement or you’re not in the agreement. They’ve said they’re staying in yet they’re starting to do certain things that are proscribed by the agreement. And so at some point, the other parties, the European parties, Russia, China, will have to decide if Iran is, in fact, still complying with the agreement. But what’s so troubling about this, Mark, is it basically puts us back in the situation we were in, potentially, before the agreement was reached; that is, Iran on the threshold of having the capacity very quickly, to develop a nuclear weapon, and the United States and other countries faced with that, having to decide what to do about it: let them do it or take action to stop them. That was a bad choice and the nuclear agreement created a third choice, which was actually putting real constraints for a long period of time on Iran’s nuclear program. But now that’s falling apart; we’re back to where we started.

He posited, “President Trump decided to tear up an agreement that Iran was actually complying with. And I say this cognizant of all the other things that Iran does, the destabilizing activities throughout the region, support for terrorism, its horrific record on human rights; all of those things that we don’t like and it continues to do, but the one thing it actually was doing in good faith was complying with the nuclear agreement and that’s the one thing we’ve now torn apart.”

Yet The Wall Street Journal reported in August 2015:

Iran so far has refused to allow United Nations inspectors to interview key scientists and military officers to investigate allegations that Tehran maintained a covert nuclear-weapons program, the head of the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog said in an interview Wednesday. … The IAEA and its director-general, Yukiya Amano, have been trying for more than five years to debrief Mohsen Fakhrizadeh-Mahabadi, an Iranian military officer the U.S., Israel and IAEA suspect oversaw weaponization work in Tehran until at least 2003. Mr. Amano said Tehran still hasn’t agreed to let Mr. Fakhrizadeh or other Iranian military officers and nuclear scientists help the IAEA complete its investigation.

In October 2017, famed attorney Alan Dershowiz noted:

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) recently stated that it could not verify that Iran was “fully implementing the agreement” by not engaging in activities that would allow it to make a nuclear explosive device. Yukiya Amano of the IAEA told Reuters that when it comes to inspections, which are stipulated in Section T of the agreement, “our tools are limited.” Amano continued to say: “In other sections, for example, Iran has committed to submit declarations, place their activities under safeguards or ensure access by us. But in Section T, I don’t see any (such commitment).”

It is well established that Tehran has consistently denied IAEA inspectors access to military sites and other research locations. This is in direct contravention to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and bipartisan legislation set out by Congress, which compels the president to verify that “Iran is transparently, verifiably, and fully implementing the agreement.”

In November 2019, after the U.S. had pulled out of the nuclear deal, AP reported:

Uranium particles of man-made origin have been discovered at a site in Iran not declared to the United Nations, the U.N. atomic watchdog agency said Monday as it confirmed a litany of violations by Tehran of the 2015 nuclear deal. The International Atomic Energy Agency said Iran has begun enriching uranium at a heavily fortified installation inside a mountain, is increasing its stockpile of processed uranium, and is exceeding the allowable enrichment levels. All such steps are prohibited under the agreement Iran reached with world powers to prevent it from building a bomb.

Blinken criticized President Trump’s penchant for making decisions that he considered best for America without the support of other countries, saying, “It’s really not leadership if no one is following and if everyone is running in the other direction.”

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Joe Biden: Why Are Reporters Asking Me Questions?

NOVEMBER 21, 2020 By Tristan Justice

Former Vice President Joe Biden isn’t used to getting real questions. On Friday, Biden appeared dumbfounded as to why a reporter was asking the projected Democratic presidential-elect a question as the press pool was being scurried away by staff.

“Mr. Biden, the COVID task force said it’s safe for students to be in class. Are you going to encourage unions to cooperate more to bring kids back to classrooms, sir?” asked CBS reporter Bo Erickson.

“Why are you the only guy that always shouts out questions?” Biden said.

It was a bizarre episode for the 78-year-old Democrat, who enjoyed the least amount of media scrutiny on the campaign trail of any modern candidate running for president. While serious revelations were emerging, revealing Biden’s role in his son’s potentially criminal overseas business dealings, reporters asked hard-hitting questions such as what kind of ice cream Biden purchased at a pit stop.

Erickson was also one of the few reporters to ask Biden about the scandals plaguing his campaign, bombshells suppressed by Big Tech and either ignored or dubiously delegitimized by other mainstream outlets. When pressed on the issue, Biden lashed out at the media. Erickson’s treatment of the former vice president Friday was the same treatment the media offered to President Donald Trump and his staff throughout the entire last four years, which was on full display again in the White House briefing room on the same day.

Meanwhile, one would be hard-pressed to find California Sen. Kamala Harris, Biden’s running mate, at any point throughout the entire general election campaign taking a single question from a reporter during a press conference.

The media gave a preview of how it would treat a Biden administration on Monday, when Biden began speaking with reporters, who lobbed him softball questions. Joe Concha, a media reporter for The Hill, dubbed the incoming presidential press corps “The new marshmallow media in the Biden era,” in a column published Thursday.

“Any press conference Biden has held since capturing the Democratic nomination has consisted mostly of questions about President Trump and very few questions about Biden’s own worldview, record, policy stances or perspective on important issues such as trade, foreign affairs, gun control, immigration, education, or taxation as it relates to repealing the Trump tax cuts,” Concha wrote. “Of the 12 questions Biden received Monday, there were zero follow-ups. Zero interruptions during answers. Zero questions about any of the issues above, which rank as among the top concerns on voters’ minds, along with the coronavirus.”

Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

Photo Bloomberg Quicktake Now / YouTube

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Without President Trump, On Whom Will The Left Blame Their Failures?

There is honor among thieves. There has to be, if they are to be successful. Even lawbreakers require some sort of law, both in reality, where organized crime requires organization, and in fiction, where it is a standard trope that the Guild of Assassins (or whatever) has rules. The wicked still need some virtue to be effective, although it must be severed from the whole of virtue.

This explains a lot about politics. The rules and organization necessary for societal or group survival and success are not the same as justice; indeed, they may be nothing more than a predatory morality that enables cooperation in oppression.

Governments often begin as the biggest band of brigands around, and many never rise much beyond that. As Augustine put it in “The City of God,” “Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies?” He illustrated this point with the tale of a captured pirate who told Alexander the Great that the difference between piracy and Alexander’s empire was only of scale.

Adherence to the norms and manners of the ruling class does not assure personal virtue or political justice. This is obvious to those on the outside, but members (and aspiring members and hangers-on) of the ruling class have an interest in not seeing it. This willful blindness also explains a lot about the recent election.

The Biden campaign told us that the election was about the soul of the nation. A multitude of Democrats, media figures, and Never-Trump leftovers told us that it was about restoring decency to the White House. Even now, in apparent victory, they remain appalled that anyone voted for President Trump, let alone more than 70 million Americans—don’t we know how indecent he is? But it is not that we think Trump is decent, it is that we doubt that his opponents are.

We suspect that by decency they mean nothing more than the professional civility of the educated class, and we know that true decency is more than civility. It is certainly more than not being Donald Trump.

This is not to say that civility does not matter. Conservatives know that manners matter. Manners can force us to be restrained, to at least make a show of treating political opponents with respect, and by inculcating these habits, they can make us better.

But manners can also be weaponized. They can become tools of exclusion that keep those with different beliefs and backgrounds out. They can conceal great wickedness behind a pleasing mask.

There is a persistent temptation to focus on the superficial form of decency (as manifest in politeness) over the substance of virtue. So we are treated to lectures on decency from men who have cheated on a succession of wives or traded in the wife of their youth for a young research assistant—and from a presumptive vice president who slept her way into politics.

Nor is such wickedness confined to personal sins; it extends throughout political positions. Consider the Democratic Party’s fanatical support for abortion. There is nothing decent about tearing a baby limb from limb and displaying her still-beating heart on a tray—if decency encompasses support for unrestricted, taxpayer-funded late-term abortion, then to hell with decency and the decent.

Likewise, the bipartisan establishment embrace of China is indecent, unless decency merely means civility in the service of ruling-class interests. There is nothing decent about closer bonds with the Chinese Communist Party and the genocidal totalitarian slave state that it runs. All the civility and cheap consumer goods in the world cannot wash away that guilt.

The pretense of decency also asks us to ignore that our ruling class is neither civil nor trustworthy. The same people who spent years suggesting that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election are now outraged that he has not conceded this one. And remember when Senate Democrats accused Brett Kavanaugh of being a high-school gang-rape mastermind?

Remember when the media tried to destroy a high school student for smiling awkwardly while wearing a Trump hat? Remember when they told you the most expensive riots in American history were mostly peaceful? Remember all the times they’ve called you and your friends and family ignorant, racist bigots—as epitomized by Hillary Clinton’s consigning you to an irredeemable basket of deplorables?

The response to this litany of leftist indecency is predictable—what about this and that and the other thing Trump did and said? Well, what about them? People who have concluded that our leaders are corrupt and indecent will not support them just because Trump is also indecent.

Furthermore, Trump will soon be out of office, while our elites will remain in their positions in media, academia, entertainment, business and government. Without President Trump, what excuse will they then have for their failures of virtue and justice?

Trump leaving office will not make America more decent if it just returns power to those whose garb of civility covers corrupt hearts. What is needed is not further recriminations over Trump, but a commitment to seek justice and the common good. This renewal must be led by those who have the power to shape institutions and culture.

I don’t say this to deny the need for all of us to repent of our sins. I merely state the obvious, which is that those with the power to shape the culture bear the most responsibility for it. If we are as indecent a nation as they say, then perhaps the likes of New York Times writers, Ivy League professors and pop stars should spend less time lecturing Trump voters and more time in sackcloth and ashes.

Nathanael Blake is a Senior Contributor at The Federalist. He has a PhD in political theory. He lives in Missouri.

Photo Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian

Category:

Opinion, Political

Tagged with:

In Nevada, A Corrupt Cash-For-Votes Scheme Is Hiding In Plain Sight

Reported by John Daniel Davidson | NOVEMBER 18, 2020

It should surprise no one that Nevada has problems with election security and voter fraud, especially after the state mailed an absentee ballot to every registered voter this year whether he requested one or not, then received back more than eight times as many mail-in ballots as they did in 2016. That’s part of the reason Republicans in Nevada filed another lawsuit on Tuesday alleging widespread voter fraud and irregularities.

The mass mailing of unsolicited ballots is of course a recipe for fraud, even more so in a state where the voter rolls contain tens of thousands of people who haven’t voted or updated their records in more than a decade. This is how you get dead people voting, as we reported here at The Federalist and as Tucker Carlson noted last week.

But there’s another, less sensational but perhaps more consequential election scandal in Nevada that hasn’t yet made headlines, even though it’s been hiding in plain sight for weeks now. Under the guise of supposedly nonprofit, nonpartisan get-out-the-vote campaigns, Native American voter advocacy groups in Nevada handed out gift cards, electronics, clothing, and other items to voters in tribal areas, in many cases documenting the exchange of ballots for “prizes” on their own Facebook pages, sometimes even while wearing official Joe Biden campaign gear.

Simply put, this is illegal. Offering voters anything of value in exchange for their vote is a violation of federal election law, and in some cases punishable by up to two years in prison and as much as $10,000 in fines. That includes raffles, free food, free T-shirts, and so on.

The GOTV Effort In Nevada Was Blatantly Criminal

Yet the Nevada Native Vote Project’s Facebook page contains post after post of voters receiving something of value in exchange for proof they cast a vote or handed over an absentee ballot. In one post, two men display $25 Visa gift cards they received after dropping off absentee ballots, presumably to someone who works for the Nevada Native Vote Project.

Sam appears in another video wearing a Biden-Harris campaign mask with the Biden campaign bus behind her, talking about how important Native votes are to “swing” Washoe County (Biden won the county, which includes Reno, by less than 12,000 votes). In another video, she tells viewers about “Biden swag” available at a GOTV event, along with free Biden cookies. All these videos appear on the official Facebook page of the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony. (I called Sam to ask about this, and about the illegal raffles, but she never called me back.)

Raffling off gift cards—the equivalent of a cash giveaway—appears to have been widespread among Native American communities in Nevada. The Nevada Native Vote Project’s Facebook page lists dozens of gift card winners by name, all of them rewarded simply for their vote, as well as advertisements for the raffles and information on how to enter.

Others, like the Las Vegas Tribal Community, simply gave away “free stuff” to voters.

Following The (Taxpayer) Money

All of this raises some fairly obvious questions. Where did all these gift cards and prizes come from? Who paid for them? How much “free stuff” was given away? Who’s really behind this so-called GOTV effort?

The Nevada Native Vote Project is a nonprofit group, and its voter advocacy is supposed to be nonpartisan and politically unbiased. Yet the group’s Facebook page includes a post from a group called Native Organizers Alliance about the importance of voting, “because we live in places of political upheaval where the rightwing operates quite openly.” The post includes a political map of Nevada and Wisconsin, with arrows pointing to blue, Democrat-voting areas that say, “Natives live here.”

Funding for the Nevada Native Vote Projects appears to come from an umbrella group called Native Vote that’s an initiative of the National Congress of American Indians, or NCAI. The connections between such groups are not always obvious, but the logos on the T-shirts the Nevada Native Vote Project was handing out at polling places is the same logo on the Native Vote website (see screenshots below).

So where does NCAI get its funding? From a lot of places, including Native tribal groups, charitable foundations, and major corporations. It also gets millions in funding from the federal government. More than a half-dozen government “partners” are listed on NCAI’s supporters page, including the Department of the Interior, Department of Agriculture, the Small Business Administration, and the Environmental Protection Agency, among others. In 2018, these federal agencies provided a total of more than $3 million to NCAI, according to the group’s own disclosures.

It’s unclear whether taxpayer dollars went directly into Native Vote’s GOTV efforts or to purchase gift cards and other “prizes” for Native American voters, but the NCAI logo does appear on Facebook posts advertising illegal Election Day cash raffles in Nevada.

What’s clear, however, is that the GOTV efforts of Native Vote aren’t nonpartisan. Native Vote and NCAI have partnered in the past with a Native advocacy group called Four Directions, jointly producing a voter guide in 2012 and last year partnering with Four Directions to co-host a presidential forum focused on Native American issues.

This year, back in January, Four Directions co-hosted a presidential forum in Las Vegas with Nevada Tribal Nations. The “donate” page for that forum, and indeed for Four Directions’ own website, goes through ActBlue, an online giving platform that funneled nearly $1.6 billion to Democratic candidates in the 2018 midterms and has since become a powerful fundraising tool for Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations like Black Lives Matter.

This Is Widespread, And Corporate Media Won’t Report It

There are about 60,000 eligible Native American voters in Nevada who make up about 3 percent of the state’s total voting population. That’s almost twice the current margin of Biden’s current lead over President Trump in Nevada. So the Native American vote really does matter, it could even be decisive. It therefore matters how many Native American votes were influenced by an illegal cash-for-votes scheme, especially if funding for it came from American taxpayers via the NCAI.

It also matters because this didn’t just happen in Nevada. Organizers there might have been more obvious about what they were doing, but there’s evidence that similar efforts, including gift card and electronics giveaways, were undertaken in Native communities in South Dakota, Arizona, Wisconsin, Washington, Michigan, Idaho, Minnesota, and Texas.

All of this coordinated illegal activity, clearly designed to churn out votes for Biden and Democrats in tribal areas all across the country, is completely out in the open. You don’t need special access or some secret source to find out about it. You just have be curious, look around, and report it.

Unfortunately, mainstream media outlets are not curious and refuse to report on any of this stuff. What’s described above is an egregious and totally transparent vote-buying scheme in Nevada that was likely undertaken on a similar scale across nearly a dozen other states, but you won’t read about it in The New York Times, or hear about it on CNN.

That’s not because the story is unimportant, but because, for the media establishment, it’s inconvenient. No wonder these groups didn’t try to hide what they were doing.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

Photo Facebook

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

5 Historical Trends That Show It’s Utterly Shocking If Trump Lost In 2020

If I told you an incumbent president had 52 percent approval on Election Day and ended up winning 10 million more votes than during his first election, would you predict victory? What if 56 percent of voters felt they were better off since the president had entered office? What if you knew that the incumbent had a nearly 30 percent enthusiasm edge over his opponent, or that when asked for whom they thought their neighbors were voting, nearly 10 percent more Americans expected the president to be re-elected than to lose?

With those numbers in mind, wouldn’t you feel pretty confident that the sitting president had, indeed, been re-elected? Alternatively, wouldn’t you consider it an amazing feat if, instead, the president’s challenger was victorious? The improbability of that result should be newsworthy all on its own.

Donald Trump has majority approval. Nearly six in 10 Americans feel better off today than when Barack Obama was in office, and 15 percent more voters pulled the lever for his re-election than in his 2016 victory. These are not the numbers of a losing candidate, yet we’re told Joe Biden managed to prevail.

The media and pollsters, of course, predicted a Biden landslide, not a very narrow squeaker in which Democrats lost in almost every other avenue of government. Considering the following five facts about the election, it’s no wonder Biden failed to achieve a landslide victory.

1. 10 Million More Votes

Not since President Grover Cleveland’s re-election campaign in 1888 has a sitting president won more votes the second time around and still lost, which is one reason he successfully ran again four years later. To put this in perspective, Obama lost 5 million votes between his 2008 and 2012 elections. He is the only president to have lost voters and still won re-election.

By comparison, Trump not only added about 10 million votes to his 2016 haul but also shattered the record for most votes received by a sitting president. Trump won a greater share of minority votes than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960 and brought more Democrats over to his side than in 2016. More than nine in 10 evangelical Christians voted to re-elect the president. For Trump to expand his coalition of voters so substantially and still lose is historic.

2. 56 Percent of Americans Better Off Than in 2016

This is a huge number. According to Gallup, only 32 percent of Americans say they aren’t better off since Trump was inaugurated. No sitting president has lost re-election when more than half of the country is doing better than before the incumbent entered office.

In fact, Obama, George W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan all won re-election, even though only about 45 percent of the country felt better off than when their presidencies had begun. For Biden to have won the election, despite nearly six in 10 Americans doing well under the current president, is noteworthy. It simply has never happened before.

Part of the reason for Americans’ strong sense of being better off under Trump surely stems from the unprecedented prosperity Americans were experiencing until this past spring when the Chinese coronavirus stopped the world’s economies. Under the president, minority unemployment had reached record lows, and minority wealth savings had reached record highs. At the same time, the stock market had risen to all-time record highs. In other words, the Trump economy was benefiting Americans at all economic levels.

After the pandemic caused an election-year recession, the economy has steadily rebounded since summer. Unemployment has already dropped back below 7 percent, much faster than many economists thought possible, and the stock market is back to its pre-pandemic highs.

In the past, the performance of the S&P 500 in the three months before Americans head to the polls has predicted 87 percent of elections since 1928 and 100 percent since 1984. If the S&P is in positive territory by the end of those three months, the incumbent party almost always wins. On the last trading day in July, the S&P 500 closed at 3,271, was up nearly 7 percent by mid-October, and closed at 3,310 on the Monday before the 2020 election. The market predicted a Trump victory.

3. Nearly 30 Percent Enthusiasm Gap Favoring Trump

In June, during the middle of the pandemic, pollster Scott Rasmussen was blown away by the enthusiasm gap between Trump and Biden voters. He wrote in amazement: “Wow! 76 percent of Trump voters are enthusiastic about their candidate compared to just 49 percent of Biden voters.”

This enthusiasm gap, measured consistently as somewhere between 15 and 30 percent, was picked up by many pollsters. Richard Baris, the director of Big Data Poll, told the New York Post in mid-October that enthusiasm for Trump “is historically high,” while “Biden’s enthusiasm level is historically low.”

Anyone who saw a Trump rally would not be surprised. At one of his last campaign stops before Election Day, about 60,000 Trump supporters showed up to see the president in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump tractor parades, boat parades, and 30-mile-long highway caravans have been a common feature of the 2020 campaign.

Republican support for the president has been higher than for any president of either party since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Until Biden’s presumed victory, no incumbent president winning so handily in voter enthusiasm had lost re-election.

4. More People Thought Neighbors Were Voting for Trump

Just as in 2016, polling this election cycle proved decisively wrong. Republicans in the House, Senate, and state legislatures across the country all out-performed polling estimates. Pollsters consistently predicted a Biden blowout, but instead, the race is one of the closest in American history.

Pollsters have partially excused their efforts by pointing to a “shy Trump voter” error in the polls that failed to capture the president’s true support. To get around this problem, some pollsters asked respondents to name the candidate for whom they believed their neighbors would likely vote, hoping to elicit more candid voting intentions.

By a 7 percentage-point margin, Harvard/Harris polling found in late September that more Americans believed their neighbors would vote for Trump’s re-election than for Biden. In the week before the election, USC Dornsife published a poll asking a similar question: “Do you think your friends and neighbors are voting for Trump?” USC concluded that “it’s looking like an Electoral College loss for Biden.”

5. Trump Still Has 53 Percent Approval

Just 12 days before the election, Trump’s approval rating popped over 50 percent and has held steady since that time. As Gallup noted, “[A]ll incumbents with an approval rating of 50 percent or higher have won re-election, and presidents with approval ratings much lower than 50 percent have lost.” Rasmussen and Zogby both had Trump hitting that “holy grail” approval number tied to certain re-election.

On the day before the election, Rasmussen had Trump at 52 percent approval. At the same point in his presidency, and before his own re-election, Obama had 50 percent. As of Nov. 11, Rasmussen shows 53 percent of the country approves of Trump, compared to 46 percent who disapprove. No incumbent president has ever lost re-election with numbers such as these.

All of these numbers have historically contributed to a victory for an incumbent president. Considering them, it’s no surprise Biden didn’t win in a landslide, but that they did not produce a win for Trump in 2020 is almost unbelievable.

J.B. Shurk is a proud American from Daniel Boone country.

Photo The White House/Flickr

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Partisans Cheating By Ignoring Election Law Is A Problem As Big As Vote Fraud

Fraud represents only one aspect of concern over the results from last week’s election. Of equal import when judging the legitimacy of the next president of the United States is whether states complied with the election rules established by their legislatures. These are not questions of mere “technical errors,” but raise significant constitutional concerns.

On Wednesday, Jim Geraghty of National Review tweeted his “Morning Jolt” summary of post-election lawsuits. “The Trump campaign,” Geraghty stressed, “conceded in oral arguments they were not contending fraud or improper influence, merely technical errors,” he wrote of a recent election case. Geraghty’s article, linked in his tweet, continued: “It is one thing to fume on Twitter that there is a sinister effort to steal an election; it is another thing to assert that sweeping claim in a court of law, before a judge, under penalty of perjury and/or disbarment.”

Not to pick on Geraghty, whom I respect immensely, but he is conflating two separate issues: fraud and violations of the election code. Those are two distinct problems, yet there has been little analysis of the latter, which over the next several weeks might prove more significant.

There are multiple allegations of fraud, such as the middle-of-the-night arrival of unsecured ballots in Detroit or the dead man voting in Nevada. Then there’s the even more devastating suggestion that votes for Donald Trump were swapped to Joe Biden via vulnerable computer systems. Frankly, this idea strikes me as unbelievable, but then again, so did the idea that the FBI would obtain illegal secret court warrants to spy on the Trump campaign, and we know how that turned out.

Election Code Violations Might as Well Be ‘Fraud’

Violations of the election code, however, are a different matter, and unfortunately, sometimes the public views election officials’ bending of the rules as a harmless ignoring of technicalities. As the attorney in the Montgomery County Board of Elections case noted after “conceding” he was not alleging fraud: “The election code is technical.”

That makes technical violations constitutionally significant because Article II, Section 1, Clause 2 grants state legislatures the ultimate authority to appoint the electors who choose the president: “Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.”

In Bush v. Gore, former Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist stressed the significance of this constitutional provision in a concurrence joined by Justice Clarence Thomas and former Justice Antonin Scalia. As Rehnquist wrote, that clause “convey[s] the broadest power of determination” and “leaves it to the legislature exclusively to define the method” of appointment of electors. Furthermore, “a significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.”

The three concurring justices in Bush v. Gore concluded that the Florida Supreme Court’s order directing election officials to count improperly marked ballots was a “significant departure from the legislative scheme,” and “in a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.” Accordingly, those justices would have declared the Florida recount unconstitutional under Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2.

While the concurrence in Bush v. Gore failed to garner support by a majority of the justices, the Supreme Court’s composition has changed dramatically since then, and the reasoning of this concurrence provides a strong basis to view deviations from the technicalities of the election code as unconstitutional. As Rehnquist stressed, “[I]n a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail.”

So, if the legislative branch mandates voter signatures, or verification of signatures, or internal secrecy sleeves, or counting only in the presences of poll-watchers from each party, it is no answer to say it is a technicality and not fraud at issue. The state legislatures, through the election code, define the validity of votes, and allowing state officials or courts to read those provisions out of the law raises serious questions under Article 2 of the Constitution.

Ignoring the Election Code Denies Equal Protection

Allowing state officials to fudge on the mandates of the election code raises a second significant constitutional issue, this one under the Equal Protection Clause, which served as the basis for the majority opinion in Bush v. Gore. The majority in Bush v. Gore held that the varying standards violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, reasoning: “The right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person’s vote over that of another.”

When state officials ignore the technicalities of the election code, however, it virtually guarantees voters will be denied equal treatment. The proof is in Pennsylvania. There, for instance, even though the election code prohibited inspecting ballots before Election Day, some county officials — those in larger counties with access to mail-sorting machines that could weigh ballots — weighed the ballots to determine if the voter failed to include the required inner secrecy sleeve.

Then those officials, again contrary to the election code, provided information to representatives of the Democratic Party so they could identify the voters whose ballots would be canceled. Voters whose election officials abided by the technicalities of the election code, however, did not receive that notice nor the opportunity to “cure” their ballot.

Now thanks to the unprecedented push toward mail-in voting over the last year, we are seeing this same pattern repeat itself throughout the country. Some election officials bent (or broke) the rules the legislative branch had set, while others followed the letter of the law. As a result, voters in different counties in the same state were treated disparately and on an arbitrary basis. Unlike the situation in Bush v. Gore, however, it is not the state courts altering the plain language of the election code, but secretaries of state or local election officials.

The majority in Bush v. Gore recognized the rightful place of election officials to interpret and apply the rules established by the legislative branch. This difference provides some leeway to states, which through interpretative guidance tweak the technicalities of the election code. But as in other areas of the law, such interpretations must be reasonable and must not violate the clearly expressed intent of the legislature.

The Supreme Court will likely decide where that line will be drawn in the coming days.

Margot Cleveland is a senior contributor to The Federalist. Cleveland served nearly 25 years as a permanent law clerk to a federal appellate judge and is a former full-time faculty member and adjunct instructor at the college of business at the University of Notre Dame. The views expressed here are those of Cleveland in her private capacity.

Photo Chris Phan/Wikimedia Commons

Category:

Law, Political

Tagged with:

Why President Trump Has A Strong Supreme Court Case To Contest Pennsylvania

As arguments about voter fraud have escalated across the country, it’s time to recognize that despite what an unmitigated disaster widespread expansion of absentee balloting has been, concerns about its abuse aren’t the most important argument in the ongoing fight over the legitimacy of this election. Sure, the media and Big Tech’s widespread white-washing and censoring of very real voter fraud concerns are damaging to the social fabric in existential ways, just as ignoring norms (and in some cases laws) requiring transparency destroys public trust and confidence in the outcome.

The Pennsylvania lawsuit isn’t yet proof that election-altering fraud occurred, although it does present compelling evidence that if proved shatters the media narrative on election security. A closer look at the allegations of direct fraud weighed against the likelihood of proving that enough occurred to alter the outcome — on a shortened timeline — reveals a daunting task for the president’s legal team.

President Trump’s lawyers, however, aren’t making the same argument as your uncle on Facebook; they’re playing for keeps. Some Republicans have been content to publicly call for the “process to play out” while privately predicting losses or maybe a few favorable rulings on some esoteric technicalities. But the president is not tired of winning yet.

Shortly after the filing, Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to the Trump campaign, put it succinctly: “Pennsylvania is irredeemably compromised.”

The thrust of their legal argument doesn’t hinge on the numbers of fraudulent ballots cast, but on the inconsistent and illegal application of Pennsylvania election law, which dilutes legally cast votes — so-called disparate treatment, from which the U.S. Constitution is supposed to protect us.

The other key legal argument is that those changes in the election law, which were implemented by an unelected appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch, namely Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar, were an impermissible usurpation of the legislature’s prerogative even if Pennsylvania’s judicial branch approved them.

Bush v. Gore Already Wrestled with These Concerns

Underlying the president’s legal argument is the recognition that the Pennsylvania legislature implemented an imperfect regime that rationally valued security of the election as more important than avoiding disenfranchising any voters. Even amid a pandemic, the Pennsylvania legislature understood that their expansion of ballot-by-mail increased risks to election security, and thus sought to mitigate that as best they could. It was partisan state courts that unilaterally overrode those determinations in the middle of a presidential campaign in an unconstitutional way.

The discussion about what types of fraud, and how much, is important because it goes to the very heart of election integrity, and our system cannot stand without trust in the outcome. That argument, however, won’t decide the Pennsylvania case from a legal standpoint. It will come down to whether a ministerial appointee of Pennsylvania’s executive branch can work with Pennsylvania’s judicial branch to subvert the expressed will of the legislature, and hastily put in place an election process wherein citizens who chose to vote differently had their votes disparately treated.

Recall that in 2000, the legal argument that eventually carried the day was equal-protection grounds; by implementing different methods for recounts and different scrutiny for different counties, voters were receiving unequal treatment. The Supreme Court held 7-2 that “Upon due consideration of the difficulties identified to this point, it is obvious that the recount cannot be conducted in compliance with the requirements of equal protection and due process without substantial additional work.”

In most cases, comity and respect for federalism compel us to defer to the decisions of state courts on issues of state law. That practice reflects our understanding that the decisions of state courts are definitive pronouncements of the will of the States as sovereigns. Of course, in ordinary cases, the distribution of powers among the branches of a State’s government raises no questions of federal constitutional law, subject to the requirement that the government be republican in character. But there are a few exceptional cases in which the Constitution imposes a duty or confers a power on a particular branch of a State’s government. This is one of them. … Thus, the text of the election law itself, and not just its interpretation by the courts of the States, takes on independent significance.

A significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.

If we are to respect the legislature’s Article II powers, therefore, we must ensure that postelection state-court actions do not frustrate the legislative desire to attain the ‘safe harbor’ provided by §5. (Rehnquist concurring, but writing separately; Citations and dicta omitted)

Admittedly, this “Article II view” was a more expansive view on why the ongoing Florida recount was suspect than the Supreme Court ultimately held, but clearly, at least three justices believed that the courts — even state courts, which usually receive great deference to interpreting state law — don’t have a right to tweak the express will of the state legislature about presidential electors.

To be sure, the equal-protection claims also present differently, so they aren’t a slam-dunk here, and the Rehnquist concurrence isn’t controlling precedent (two of the three justices who signed on to the opinion are no longer on the court), so it might not carry the day.

Three of the young lawyers on the Bush team advocating this view of the law in 2000 have received pretty notable promotions since that time, however, and three other guys likely to have a say have signaled their belief in exactly this interpretation, stating recently, “The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election.”

It’s anyone’s guess how the Supreme Court would rule if it gets to that point, but when three current justices (Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch) have signaled they’re sympathetic to the basic legal argument, and three other justices (John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett) were part of the team that advanced very similar legal arguments in Bush v. Gore, the president and his team must like their chances.

The Changes Disproportionately Helped Biden

Pundits and some Trump supporters have engaged in navel-gazing and resigned themselves to the line of reasoning that “maybe Trump shouldn’t have down-talked absentee voting.” We know in addition to increased risk of fraud, however, voters who cast absentee ballots have historically had a significantly greater likelihood of being disenfranchised than in-person voters.

For Trump to push his supporters to vote in ways that were more likely to count isn’t irrational. It instead raises the question of why former Vice President Joe Biden wasn’t concerned with his voters being disenfranchised if they voted absentee, given the historical risks.

Both the potential for fraud and increased probability of disenfranchising voters sound intuitively like things we should fix, but the Pennsylvania legislature didn’t. They saw fit to keep the bar high to offset the risk of fraud and associated effects to public confidence in the election that unrestricted mail balloting would cause.

There’s a rational basis for that, and the entire saga has played out nationally. With the non-legislative changes, absentee voters were significantly less likely to be disenfranchised than before — indeed, Boockvar’s unilateral changes in Pennsylvania removed nearly every barrier the duly elected state legislature had put in place.

This created an environment where the constitutional guarantee of one person, one vote was tilted significantly in the direction of a voting modality (mail balloting versus in-person balloting). Not only was this ripe for greater abuse, but that tilting of the playing field disproportionately benefited the voters of one presidential candidate. Making this even more obvious are new revelations that show how the larger Democratic strongholds were equipped to quickly pre-sort potentially invalid ballots, and Democratic operatives were gearing up to capitalize on the eventual changes to the statutory pre-canvass period before Boockvar’s office even announced them.

What if the Supreme Court Invalidates a State’s Election

For conservatives, an intellectual challenge now presents itself: If you were OK with the Supreme Court stopping the Florida recount in 2000, you need to prepare yourself to be comfortable with the same court invalidating the Pennsylvania electors. Indeed, you should want them to, whether or not there was underlying direct fraud sufficient enough to affect the outcome. Alternatively, you should start working on your tortuous rationale for why, on constitutional grounds, what was legitimate in 2000 is not legitimate in 2020.

Whether you’re persuaded by the equal protection reasoning in the Bush v. Gore holding or in the minority’s separate concurrence emphasizing the plenary powers of the Pennsylvania legislature under Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, if the case makes it to the Supreme Court it won’t hinge on some threshold level of fraud that tipped the scales against Trump, nor will it be about the raw power of a conservative court to hand the election to Trump (which will certainly be the media narrative if it gets to that point). It will be, and always has been, about the rule of law.

Where the actual fraud becomes important — an actual measure of it, and whether it delivered an illegitimate win to Biden — is in how the Pennsylvania legislature, and potentially Congress, should react to the Court prohibiting the certification of the November election with respect to presidential electors. There is nothing wrong or abhorrent to our constitutional system if the elected representatives of the citizens of Pennsylvania are required to weigh in and clean this up on behalf of their voters. They need to be prepared to make their case to their voters if the predominant media narrative remains that the fraud wasn’t significant enough to affect the election outcome in Pennsylvania.

Regardless of how the Pennsylvania case gets resolved, it won’t change the overall outcome on its own. The 20 electoral votes wouldn’t be enough to swing the election to Trump if existing media projections for Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Michigan stay in Biden’s column. If any of those changes, whether through ongoing canvassing efforts or other simultaneous legal challenges — such as the president’s filing Wednesday in Michigan making similar constitutional claims — well, Katy, bar the door.

Our way of government is strong enough to endure this. The only way through is through.

For nearly twenty years, Matt Beebe served as a countermeasures engineer in the Air Force and a contractor in the intelligence community before launching an IT and computer security firm in San Antonio, Texas. He is active in Texas politics and can be found on Twitter @theMattBeebe.

Photo Mark Thomas/Pixabay

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Biden Covid advisor says U.S. lockdown of 4 to 6 weeks could control pandemic and revive economy

Reported by Will Feuer | CNBC | November 13, 2020

Shutting down businesses and paying people for lost wages for four to six weeks could help keep the coronavirus pandemic in check and get the economy on track until a vaccine is approved and distributed, said Dr. Michael Osterholm, a coronavirus advisor to President-elect Joe Biden.

Osterholm, who serves as director of the Center of Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, said earlier this week that the country is headed toward “Covid hell.” Cases are rising as more people grow tired of wearing masks and social distancing, suffering from so-called “pandemic fatigue,” he said Wednesday. Colder weather is also driving people indoors, where the virus can spread more easily. A nationwide lockdown would drive the number of new cases and hospitalizations down to manageable levels while the world awaits a vaccine, he told Yahoo Finance on Wednesday.

“We could pay for a package right now to cover all of the wages, lost wages for individual workers, for losses to small companies, to medium-sized companies or city, state, county governments. We could do all of that,” he said. “If we did that, then we could lock down for four to six weeks.”

In an interview with NBC News on Thursday, Osterholm clarified his comments, saying “it was not a recommendation. I have never made this recommendation to Biden’s group. We’ve never talked about it.”

“My only point was if we are going to keep making restrictions state-by-state, there is no compensation for the businesses that are being impacted,” he added. “What we’re doing right now is not working.”

A Biden transition official told NBC News that a shutdown “is not in line with the president-elect’s thinking.”

Osterholm was appointed to Biden’s 12-member Covid “advisory board” on Monday. The panel of advisors is co-chaired by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University. Other task force members include Dr. Atul Gawande, a professor of surgery and health policy at Harvard, and Dr. Rick Bright, the vaccine expert and whistleblower who resigned his post with the Trump administration last month.

A representative for Biden did not respond to CNBC’s request for comment.

Osterholm on Wednesday referenced an August op-ed he wrote with Minneapolis Federal Reserve President Neel Kashkari in which the two argued for more restrictive and uniform lockdowns across the nation.

“The problem with the March-to-May lockdown was that it was not uniformly stringent across the country. For example, Minnesota deemed 78 percent of its workers essential,” they wrote in The New York Times. “To be effective, the lockdown has to be as comprehensive and strict as possible.”

On Wednesday, Osterholm said such a lockdown would help the country bring the virus under control, “like they did in New Zealand and Australia.” Epidemiologists have repeatedly pointed to New Zealand, Australia and parts of Asia that have brought the number of daily new cases to under 10 as an example of how to contain the virus.

“We could really watch ourselves cruising into the vaccine availability in the first and second quarter of next year while bringing back the economy long before that,” he said Wednesday.

On the current trajectory, Osterholm said the U.S. is headed for dark days before a vaccine becomes available. He said health-care systems across the country are already overwhelmed in places such as El Paso, Texas, where local officials have already closed businesses and the federal government is sending resources to handle a surge in deaths caused by Covid-19.

Osterholm said the country needs leadership. The president-elect is up to the task of providing that leadership, Osterholm said, adding that it could also come from local and state officials or those in the medical community. He referenced the fireside chats broadcast over radio during former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s terms, through which Roosevelt addressed the country on issues ranging from the Great Depression to World War II.

“People don’t want to hear that El Paso isn’t an isolated event. El Paso, in many instances, will become the norm,” he said. “I think that the message is: How do we get through this? We need FDR moments right now. We need fireside chats. We need somebody to tell America, ‘This is what in the hell is going to happen.’”

Read the full article: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/11/biden-covid-advisor-says-us-lockdown-of-4-to-6-weeks-could-control-pandemic-and-revive-economy.html

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Under A Biden Administration, Expect An Explosion In Illegal Immigration

One of the big changes we should expect under a Joe Biden administration is an explosion of illegal immigration and a renewed crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border. The reason for this is simple: the immigration and border policies the Trump administration has put into place over the past four years have succeeded in driving down illegal immigration, and Biden has promised to reverse nearly all of them.

Throughout the campaign, Biden was forthright about his plans to dismantle Trump’s immigration and border security agenda. His team is now planning to carry out those plans, including a 100-day moratorium on deportations, directives to curtail arrests of illegal immigrants, and a full restoration of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

These actions will almost certainly trigger a wave of illegal immigration up and down the southwest border. Why? Because Trump’s policies helped bring illegal immigration under control. Undoing them will be interpreted, rightly, as an invitation to would-be migrants in Mexico and Central America, who will respond accordingly, especially as those countries continue to suffer from worsening conditions under the pandemic.

Although pandemic restrictions and border security policies in the United States and Mexico helped decrease the number of apprehensions at the southwest border over the summer and fall, illegal immigration was steadily declining long before the outbreak, largely because of programs and policies implemented by the Trump administration in response to a dramatic rise in illegal border crossings and apprehensions in 2019.

The Migrant Protection Protocols, or the “remain in Mexico” program, which requires most asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their cases to be heard by a U.S. immigration judge, has been one of the most prominent—and controversial—Trump administration policies aimed at curbing illegal immigration. In cooperation with the Mexican government, it has also been successful at deterring illegal immigration and reducing specious asylum claims.

Since the program’s inception in late 2018, some 67,000 people have been returned to Mexico after having been caught crossing the border illegally. Many of these migrants have opted to return to their countries of origin, citing dangerous conditions in Mexico and the likelihood they will lose their asylum cases in court. Biden has said he will end the program.

Another major action taken by the Trump administration was the termination of the Flores Decree, a 1997 court decision that prevented U.S. officials from detaining migrant families and unaccompanied minors for more than 20 days. Because Flores all but guaranteed that an adult who crossed the border with a child would, upon claiming asylum, be quickly released into the United States, it created a powerful incentive for families to cross the border illegally and make questionable asylum claims.

It also fueled a lucrative and exploitative human smuggling industry stretching from Central America to the Rio Grande. Flores meant children were used as “passports” into the United States—not just by families but also by unscrupulous smugglers and cartels that profit handsomely from illegal immigration. U.S. officials discovered thousands of “fake families” at the border in recent years, with adults posing as parents of unrelated children, and even cases where children were “recycled,” crossing the border multiple times with unrelated adults.

By ending Flores, the Trump administration was able to more or less end this practice, since it removed the promise of a quick release if you had a child with you and claimed asylum. Biden has said he will effectively reinstate Flores, releasing asylum-seekers who arrive with children before their court dates and funding various case-management programs in hopes that they don’t simply disappear into the immigration underground once they are released.

Biden has also said he will restore DACA, the Obama-era program that allowed illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as minors a reprieve from deportation and renewable, two-year work permits. The promise of minors being allowed to stay in the United States helped fuel a surge of unaccompanied children and teenagers to the border beginning in 2014, with smugglers promising parents that they and their children would be granted “permits” to remain in the United States.

It didn’t matter that DACA didn’t actually apply to these minors. Unscrupulous smugglers, known as “coyotes,” sold families on the line to pocket their passage fees, with cartels taking their cut at the Rio Grande.

The Trump administration announced it was ending DACA in 2017, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that the administration hadn’t followed the proper procedures for ending the program, leaving it for the time being in administrative limbo. Even so, as the case has been wending its way through the courts the past few years, the message has gotten back to sending communities in Mexico and Central America that unaccompanied minors don’t have a guaranteed way to stay in the United States through DACA. Once Biden restores it, they will.

Another Border Crisis Is Already Brewing

All of these changes promised by the Biden administration will not go unnoticed by would-be migrants seeking entrance to the United States, or by the smugglers and cartels who profit off getting them here. Messaging and sometimes even minor U.S. policy changes have a ripple effect on the migration pipeline that runs from South Texas all the way to Guatemala City and Tegucigalpa.

What’s more, Biden need not have the cooperation of Congress to do these things. Indeed, Trump didn’t have congressional support for most of his immigration and border policies, and neither did President Obama. Most Americans don’t realize it, but U.S. immigration law gives wide latitude to executive branch agencies like the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection to create and implement policies at the border, from the detention and processing of migrants caught crossing illegally to the procedures and requirements for asylum adjudication.

That’s partly by design: Congress has long abdicated its responsibility for immigration, instead delegating authority and policy-making to an ever-growing executive bureaucracy.

That means every time the White House changes hands, U.S. immigration and border policy goes through a massive upheaval. All along, Biden has been candid about his plans for the border, and if he follows through on them—like Trump, mostly via executive order—it will trigger a wave of migration from Central America and Mexico that U.S. border officials will be largely powerless to stop.

To suppose otherwise is not only to ignore recent history, but to assume that the people of Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador have no agency. Already in late September, at least one large caravan was reportedly forming in Honduras, headed for Mexico and the U.S. border.

Others will follow under a Biden administration, their ranks filled with people drawn by the resurrection of Obama-era policies that will grant them, by various mechanisms, entry to the United States. They will be making a rational and reasonably informed choice. And on understanding just how drastically U.S. immigration policy can shift with a presidential election, and how much easier it will be to get in under Biden, they won’t be wrong.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

Photo John Davidson

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Lawsuit Claims 40,000-Plus Fraudulent Ballots Pumped Through Detroit For Joe Biden

A lawsuit filed Nov. 8 in Michigan alleges that Detroit, Mich. elections officials oversaw and openly encouraged election fraud totaling many “tens of thousands” of fraudulent ballots, plus other illegal election-tampering.

The complaint filed by an in-state conservative nonprofit legal group alleges numerous instances of illegal and suspicious activity in the Democrat stronghold encompassing Detroit, Wayne County. President Trump’s legal team has filed a separate lawsuit alleging additional voting crimes and irregularities in the county.

The current results of the presidential race in Michigan suggest an approximately 146,000-vote gap between President Trump and Joe Biden, and an 84,000-vote gap between U.S. Senate candidates Gary Peters (D) and John James (R). The Associated Press and the state’s Democrat officials say Biden has won the state’s electoral votes and that Trump’s claims of fraud are insulting and inaccurate.

Wayne County is estimated to have been the site of some 850,000 votes this year. If this lawsuit is accurate, however, a massive portion of these votes is fraudulent.

The Great Lakes Justice Center complaint provides “eyewitness accounts and direct evidence” that “approximately 40,000” unsecured, irregular ballots arrived in vehicles with out-of-state license plates at Detroit’s only vote-counting location, TCF Center, in the wee hours of the Nov. 4 morning during a shift change in election workers. Eyewitnesses signed affidavits saying that every one of this group of 40,000 ballots they saw “was counted orally and attributed only to Democratic candidates,” specifically Joe Biden.

Other eyewitnesses signed affidavits under penalty of perjury stating they saw multiple other piles of ballots, together additionally numbering in the tens of thousands, that were counted despite violating election law, sometimes at the direction of local election officials. This allegedly happened both before the election, during early voting, and during the election and subsequent vote count.

“After poll challengers started discovering the fraud taking place at the TCF Center, Defendant election officials and workers locked credentialed challengers out of the counting room so they could not observe the process, during which time tens of thousands of ballots were processed,” the complaint says. It also alleges:

“Defendant election officials and workers allowed ballots to be duplicated by hand without allowing poll challengers to check if the duplication was accurate. In fact, election officials and workers repeatedly obstructed poll challengers from observing. Defendants permitted thousands of ballots to be filled out by hand and duplicated on site without oversight from poll challengers.”
Poll challenger Daniel Gustafson signed an affidavit stating he “witnessed tens of thousands of ballots being delivered to the TCF Center that were not in any approved, sealed, or tamper-proof container…Large quantities of ballots were delivered to the TCF Center in what appeared to be mail bins with open tops. Contrary to law, these ballot bins and containers did not have lids, were not sealed, and did not have the capability of having a metal seal.”

The Federalist reported earlier this week on one affidavit filed in this complaint, from former Michigan Assistant Attorney General Zachary Larsen, but there are many, many more, and the details are scandalous.

The First Big Batch of 40,000 Suspicious Votes

An affidavit signed by poll challenger Andrew Sitto tells more about the 40,000 ballots he says he saw brought in: “At approximately 4:00 a.m. on November 4, 2020, tens of thousands of ballots were suddenly brought into the counting room through the back door…by vehicles with out-of-state license plates (Exhibit C). It was observed that all of these new ballots were cast for Joe Biden,” summarizes the complaint.

Sitto’s affidavit expands on what he saw while observing the vote-counting process from election night, Nov. 3, overnight into the early morning of Nov. 4. He says by 4:30 a.m. on Nov. 4, right before a 5 a.m. shift change between poll watchers, one of two men in charge of the vote counting “got on the microphone and stated that another shipment of absentee ballots would be arriving and would have to be counted.”

“At approximately 4:30 a.m., tens of thousands of ballots were brought in and placed on eight long tables. Unlike the other ballots, these boxes were brought in from the rear of the room. The same procedure was performed on the ballots that arrived at approximately 4:30 a.m., but I specifically noticed that every ballot I observed was cast for Joe Biden,” his affidavit states. “While counting these new ballots, I heard counters say at least five or six times that all five or six ballots were for Joe Biden. All ballots sampled that I heard and observed were for Joe Biden.”

There Was a Second Big Dump of Suspicious Ballots

The lawsuit alleges the 40,000 vote dump is not the only suspicious one observed on Nov. 4 in Detroit. Poll challenger Robert Cushman attested that on Nov. 4, 2020 at approximately 9 p.m., he “was surprised to see numerous new boxes of ballots arrive at the TCF Center in the evening… I estimate these boxes contained several thousand new ballots when they appeared.” He noticed that none of the names on these new ballots were of registered voters, which poll workers were supposed to verify.

“I saw the computer operators at several counting boards manually adding the names and addresses of these thousands of ballots to the QVF system,” his affidavit states. “When I asked what the possible justification was to counting ballots from unknown, unverified ‘persons,’ I was told by election supervisors that the Wayne County Clerk’s Office had ‘checked them out.’” Subsequently, Cushman challenged the entire process encompassing these “thousands of ballots.”

Election workers are supposed to match the name on each ballot with a registered voter on the state’s official lists. Instead, Cushman says, the Wayne County Clerk’s officers told poll workers to add all the names on the ballots from these boxes to the state’s list, giving them all a false birth date of January 1, 1900.

Election rules also say absentee voters are supposed to be added to the state’s registered voter lists before 9 p.m. on Nov. 3, election day. All of the voters for these ballots were added after this deadline, at the direction of local election officials, Cushman says.

“None of the names of these new ballots corresponded with any registered voter,” the complaint says.

Whistleblower: Election Officials Broke the Law Big-Time

One of the affidavits is signed by a Detroit Elections Department worker whose identity is concealed in the court documents under whistleblower protections. A Great Lakes Justice Center attorney told The Federalist she snuck out yellow sticky notes during ballot processing to be able to stay and observe some of the illegal activities alleged in her affidavit. The affidavit alleges numerous illegal activities conducted by Wayne County election officials, affecting thousands if not tens of thousands of votes atop all those outlined above.

The whistleblower says that during her work processing early votes, “I was instructed by my supervisor to adjust the mailing date of these absentee ballot packages to be dated earlier than they were actually sent. The supervisor was making announcements for all workers to engage in this practice.” If true, this is fraud and election tampering.

The same sort of fraud, she alleges, happened on Nov. 4. That day, she says, “I was instructed to improperly pre-date the absentee ballots receive date that were not in the QVF [the state’s registered voter list] as if they had been received on or before November 3, 2020. I was told to alter teh [sic] information in the QVF to falsely show that the absentee ballots had been received in time to be valid. I estimate that this was done to thousands of ballots.”

Throughout her daily elections work in September through November 2020, the whistleblower says, “I directly observed, on a daily basis, City of Detroit election workers and employees coaching and trying to coach voters to vote for Joe Biden and the Democrat party.” This is also illegal. “I witnessed these workers and employees encouraging voters to do a straight Democrat ballot. I witnessed these election workers and employees going over to the voting booths with voters in order to watch them vote and coach them for whom to vote.”

The whistleblower also says Detroit election officials actively avoided verifying voters’ identities: “During the last two weeks while working at this satellite location, I was specifically instructed by my supervisor not to ask for a driver’s license or any photo I.D. when a person was trying to vote.”

The whistleblower also alleges encouraged voter fraud through the possibility of double voting: “I observed a large number of people who came to the satellite location to vote in-person, but they had already applied for an absentee ballot. These people were allowed to vote in-person and were not required to return the mailed absentee ballot or sign an affidavit that the voter lost the mailed absentee ballot.”

The suit names the City of Detroit, the Detroit Election Commission, Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey, Wayne County Clerk Cathy Garrett, and the Wayne County Board of Canvassers as defendants. The Democratic Party has made a motion to join the lawsuit as defendants, meaning it is volunteering to be also sued for these alleged crimes.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist, a happy wife, and the mother of six children. Her newest ebooks are“Classic Books for Young Children” and “32 Classic Games You Can Play Anywhere.” @JoyPullmann is also the author of “The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids,” from Encounter Books.

Photo Photo By: Spc. Brian Pearson

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Warren: Biden should bypass Congress to implement the ‘most progressive economic and racial justice platform … ever’

Reported by LEON WOLF | November 12, 2020

Media outlets have called the presidency for Joe Biden, but by all accounts his win was much narrower than many Democrats expected, and Democrats down ticket performed much worse than expected, meaning that Democrats did not get the clean sweep on Election Day they hoped.

The “split decision” thus rendered by the American people on Election Day has led to an already spectacular amount of infighting among Democrats who are eager to point fingers for the party’s failure. In particular, the party’s liberal and more moderate wings have been particularly eager to point fingers at the other camp, with moderates aggressively blaming progressive policies like “defund the police” for their losses.

Massachusetts Sen. and former presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren (D), meanwhile, is confident that Biden’s expected win is a victory for “the most progressive economic and racial justice platform of any general election nominee ever,” as she wrote in an op-ed for the Washington Post.

As for the fact that the American people likely elected a Republican Senate and a larger number of Republican congressmen and therefore perhaps were not quite as keen on the most progressive platform ever? Warren argues that Biden should ignore that fact, saying, “We need to deliver [on progressive promises], even as Republican leaders can’t acknowledge the election outcome and plan to grind Congress to a halt.”

The fact that Republicans won enough elections in 2020 to grind Biden’s agenda to a halt is, apparently, an “election outcome” that Warren isn’t interested in acknowledging.

Instead, she argues that “there are lots of big changes that a Biden-Harris administration can achieve through executive orders and agency action on day one.” Among other things Warren thinks Biden should do without Congress, Warren argues that Biden should:

Cancel “billions of dollars” in student loan debt
Bypass patents for companies that have expended millions of dollars in research funds to develop life-saving drugs
Raise the minimum wage for all federal contractors to $15 an hour
Establish a “Racial and Ethnic Disparities Task Force” to “review racial disparities in pandemic funding.”
Declare the the climate crisis a national emergency

Warren concludes, “Even so, we know that Washington insiders and their establishment allies are ready to declare that unity and consensus mean turning over the governing keys to giant corporations and their lobbyists — the exact opposite of what voters want.”

Warren does not state who these people are who are arguing this, because they do not exist. Nevertheless, having demolished this straw man, Warren concludes, “Instead of allowing insiders to hijack the message sent by voters in both parties, we should listen to those voters and deliver real solutions to the problems we face.”

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

To Democrats, ‘Unity’ Means Doing Everything They Want And Shutting Up About It

The only thing worse than listening to a screaming toddler is seeing his smug, tear-stained but smiling face after his parent gives in to his irreverent outburst and rewards him for his tantrum. That’s all I could think about as I walked the streets of Madison, Wisconsin, Saturday night after several news outlets called the presidential race for Joe Biden.

A hopeful energy pulsed through State Street, the bustling pedestrian mall of restaurants and storefronts bookended by the university and the Capitol. I walked past business after business boarded up tight in anticipation of a fiery post-election purge, but instead, front doors were propped open on the uncharacteristically warm November night as groups of friends chattered and shopped and drank in merriment. No sirens or chanting interrupted my pleasant patio dinner date.

I breathed easier than I would have under different circumstances, I’ll admit. Had the media called the race differently, I likely wouldn’t have left the apartment and I certainly wouldn’t have neared downtown. Underneath that peaceful veneer, however, remains the gross reality that things are calm only because the snotty toddler got his way.

Unity Is a Joke

These are the infantile adults that were told “no” in 2016 by the half of the country they most despised and spent the next four years screaming that everything was unfair and that those who disagreed with them were racists, sexists, bigots, and homophobes. Instead of biting and hitting, they looted and vandalized, and the equally childish media covered for them.

They promised to “impeach the motherf-cker,” canceled dissenters, and maligned anyone who wanted to “Make America Great Again.” They smeared mask rebels and churchgoers as grandma-killers and squawked in our faces that boys are girls, silence is violence, and all women are inherently trustworthy, straight white men be damned. Only now that they think they’ve won do they have any interest in faux “unity.”

In a recent editorial, the Washington Examiner posited, “Biden has a historic opportunity to heal the country’s wounds, and if he wants an admired legacy, he will start now to fulfill the promise of his Delaware speech and bring uniters, not dividers, into his administration.” Conservatives who fall for this “unity” schtick are hopelessly naive.

While things might be quiet now, all hell is sure to break loose again the moment things don’t go in the way of the tantrum-throwers. This is because the wrong side won — or at least the fact that they believe they did proves the point. The toddlers got what they wanted. Their abhorrent behavior was reinforced with their most prized reward: the end of the Trump presidency.

Now rather than watching the thugs tear down and set ablaze our livelihoods, we’re stuck looking at their smug faces instead. It was always going to be one or the other: Elect us and we’ll destroy the country, or elect Trump and we’ll destroy your property.

For this reason, the relative peace in our cities now is a bad omen. This cultural calm is a reminder that, like the short-sighted parent capitulating to her toddler, the electorate traded long-term stability for short-term quiet. We didn’t bring an end to the fearmongering and the incivility; we put the uncivil fearmongers in power, and they have sinister plans for their political opponents.

Political Religion Makes All of Life a Holy War

This all goes back to the infantilization of the left, and it’s not surprising. There’s a reason shop-owners were afraid of spurned Biden supporters but relaxed when they remembered the frustrated Trumpsters had no intention of acting out.

When Trump supporters heard the unwelcome news that Biden would ostensibly be the president-elect, they were bummed. Some were mad, others were suspicious, and others felt defeated and discouraged — but they dutifully returned to their daily grinds, clocking in for work, caring for their families, and carrying on their commitments to their churches.

That’s because, for so many on the right, politics is an add-on. Family and faith, however imperfectly, inform civic values, but politics is no replacement for those superior institutions.

For many on the left, that isn’t the case. For those who have chosen to worship at the feet of progressivism as religion, this election was life or death because it was central to everything else.

For a population who has pushed off marriage, disposed of its children, abandoned church, and relinquished its independence to the nanny state and its individualism to identity politics, to lose an election is to lose it all. All battles therefore become moral, meaning victory by any means necessary — including stealing and destroying and sometimes even killing — is justified.

Don’t Let the Leftist Toddlers Get Their Way

That leaves us quite a divided America. How can we ever hope for unity when one side holds the other hostage? Give us what we want, or else. That’s no way to start a mutually beneficial negotiation.

So conservatives are left with a choice. Will we continue caving in to the boisterous toddler until it becomes an unruly and insufferable adult? Or will stand our ground and endure the tantrums until the left tuckers itself out on its own fickle rhetoric and runs its own cities into the soil? Don’t relish the present quiet; realize what it stands for.

Presidents come and go, and if Trump does finally lose re-election after all the legal battles run their course, so be it. The worst thing for our country isn’t a Biden presidency. It’s giving the leftist toddlers what they want.

Kylee Zempel is an assistant editor at The Federalist. Follow her on Twitter @kyleezempel.

Photo Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Calls For ‘Unity’ From Those Who Demonize Opponents As White Supremacists Are Deeply Unserious

Former Vice President Joe Biden delivered a victory speech Saturday night calling for national unity, insisting the country to move past partisan divides to new heights.

“With the campaign over, it’s time to put the anger and the harsh rhetoric behind us and come together as a nation,” Biden said celebrating his media-declared victory. “It’s time for Americans to unite. And to heal.”

“You can’t heal or reform the GOP who are now an extremist party,” wrote New York Times writer Wajahat Ali, the same columnist who mocked Trump supporters as ignorant rubes on CNN earlier this year. “They have to be broken, burned down and rebuilt. When Biden is in power, treat them like the active threats to democracy they are. If those who committed crimes aren’t punished, then they will be more emboldened.”

The usual culprits concurred, offering their own remedies to rooting out Trumpism, which was supported by more than 71 million Americans at the ballot box this year. New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was one of the first to promote the idea of creating Soviet-style dissident lists to harass heretic Trump supporters.

“Is anyone archiving these Trump sycophants for when they try to downplay or deny their complicity in the future?” Ocasio-Cortez pondered on Twitter.

The socialist congresswoman proceeded to mock the response from those she wished to punish.

“Lol a the ‘party of personal responsibility’ being upset at the idea of being responsible for their behavior over last four years,” she wrote.

Sevugan has since threatened potential future publishers and employers of ex-administration officials who dare make contracts with those who supported the president.

CNN’s Jake Tapper and the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin joined the chorus, demanding retribution against those demanding Trump have his day in court and every vote be counted before certifying the results of the election.

Labor Secretary Robert Reich had already recommended creating a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to put Trump backers on trial in October.

The calls for punishment of Trump supporters comprise just the latest episode in the nation’s downward spiral after the left and their allies in the corporate media spent years liberalizing definitions of white supremacy, racism, sexism, and homophobia to cast their opponents as contemptuous villains in the way of their utopian empire featuring actual racism. Biden has been no exception by calling Trump America’s first racist president, and neither has his running mate California Sen. Kamala Harris, who ushered donations to the Minnesota Freedom Fund bailing out Minneapolis rioters who burned down the city in the name of social justice.

The former vice president is not serious about national unity. If he were, he would have forcefully condemned calls within his own party to prosecute supporters of his November opponent. Biden cannot unify a country while still ignoring the loudest voices in it calling to punish political opponents for differences of political opinion.

Meanwhile, nothing about this president suggests he’s a white supremacist operating as a covert Klansmen in the Oval Office for the sole purpose of oppressing minorities. By the end of his first and potentially only term in the White House, Trump has probably condemned white supremacy more than any other president in front of a hostile media repeating this same question over and over. Whenever the media ask Trump to denounce white supremacy, it’s never a question, and it’s never presented in good faith. It’s always an accusation, an exhausting one at that.

A look at the exit polls, on the other hand, shows the media’s purported white supremacist president made considerable gains among Asian, black, and Hispanic voters while losing major ground among whites. That means there’s only one party that got more white this election, and it wasn’t the Republican Party.

In a concrete bid to “unify,” Biden’s transition team has floated the possibility of appointing Republicans to cabinet-level posts. Among the names touted, however, include Republicans who publicly engaged in the same attacks by the radical left on Trump and his supporters.

Elevating this kind of Republican is just as divisive, such as John Kasich who, while on a crusade for partisan unity has underhandedly fomented the very divisions the former governor claims to despise by endorsing impeachment and warning that Trump was rotting America’s “soul.” If Biden were serious about forming a bipartisan cabinet, then the media-declared president-elect would opt to include actual Republicans who espouse conservative ideas rather than token GOPers to claim unity.

Tristan Justice is a staff writer at The Federalist focusing on the 2020 presidential campaigns. Follow him on Twitter at @JusticeTristan or contact him at Tristan@thefederalist.com.

Photo Guardian News / YouTube

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Black Lives Matter leader to Biden and Harris: ‘We want something for our vote’

Reported by BRECK DUMAS | November 11, 2020

Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors has sent a letter to Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden and running mate Kamala Harris, after several media outlets declared them the winners in the election against President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, telling the Democrats, “We want something for our vote.”

The letter was signed by Cullors “on behalf of the Black Lives Matter Global Network,” and began by congratulating Biden and Harris on their reported victory before setting out demands for the group’s agenda.

“We are requesting a meeting with you both to discuss the expectations that we have for your administration and the commitments that must be made to Black people,” Cullors wrote, declaring, “We want something for our vote.”

Cullors asserted:

Without the resounding support of Black people, we would be saddled with a very different electoral outcome. In short, Black people won this election. Alongside Black-led organizations around the nation, Black Lives Matter invested heavily in this election. ‘Vote and Organize’ became our motto, and our electoral justice efforts reached more than 60 million voters. We want something for our vote.The BLM leader went on to remind Biden and Harris, “both of you discussed addressing systemic racism as central to your election campaigns. Both of you also expressed regrets regarding your record on issues impacting Black people.”

She closed the letter by writing, “We look forward to meeting with you at your convenience to begin the immediate work of Black liberation. We would like to be actively engaged in your Transition Team’s planning and policy work. Again, congratulations on your win. Let’s get to work!”

The Daily Wire noted that Cullors is not only the co-founder but executive director of the Black Lives Matter, and pointed to an Associated Press story that reported:

Since the wave of protests sparked by George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police in May, BLM has undergone a somewhat quiet transformation. As the words “Black lives matter” began appearing in city-sanctioned street murals coast to coast, the BLM network banked millions of dollars from a surge of donations — so much that Cullors established a grant fund of more than $12 million.

Cullors’ letter was dated Nov. 7, the same day several mainstream media outlets called the 2020 presidential race for Biden. Meanwhile, President Trump has not conceded the race, and his campaign has filed several lawsuits in key battleground states alleging instances of voter fraud.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Pennsylvania Postal Worker Denies Recanting Claims Of Mail-In Voter Fraud

Reported by CHUCK ROSS, INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER | November 11, 202010:07 AM ET

Coronavirus Pandemic Causes Climate Of Anxiety And Changing Routines In America

A postal service worker in Pennsylvania is disputing House Democrats’ claims that he recanted allegations that his supervisors ordered employees to back-date mail-in voting ballots after Election Day.

Democrats on the House Oversight Committee said in a statement on Tuesday that Richard Hopkins, a postal worker in Erie, Pa., retracted his story during interviews with investigators from the U.S. Postal Service’s office of the inspector general. Hopkins claimed in an interview with the conservative group Project Veritas last week that he overheard supervisors discussing backdating mail-in ballots received after the election on Nov. 3 so that they would still be counted in the state’s vote tally.

Videos of interviews with Hopkins have received millions of views and attracted congressional attention. Hopkins also set up an online fundraiser that had generated $130,000 in donations until it was taken offline on Tuesday.

Hopkins’ supervisor, Rob Weisenbach, has vehemently denied allegations that he directed employees to back-date mail-in ballots.

“The Erie Post Office did not back date any ballots,” Weisenbach, the postmaster in Erie, wrote on Facebook over the weekend, according to the Erie Times-News.

He said Hopkins’ story was “100% false” and that Hopkins had recently been disciplined multiple times.

Hopkins’ allegations gained traction among Republicans who have questioned the vote tally in Pennsylvania and other swing states. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham cited Hopkins’ allegations in a press release saying he would investigate all credible allegations of voter fraud. If Hopkins’ story is accurate, the voter fraud he claims to have witnessed is likely not extensive enough to swing Pennsylvania in President Trump’s favor. Joe Biden currently leads President Donald Trump by 48,000 votes in the state.

The Associated Press projected on Saturday that Biden won Pennsylvania, giving him enough electoral college votes to win the general election.

The Trump campaign has filed lawsuits in several swing states but has not provided evidence of voter fraud on the scale that would change the outcome in any of the swing states.

House Democrats asserted that Hopkins had “completely” recanted his allegations on Monday following an interview with postal service investigators. The IG’s office briefed Congress on its investigation of Hopkins’ claims, Democrats said.

Hopkins was adamant in an interview with Project Veritas published on Tuesday that he did not recant his initial story.

“I did not recant,” he said in a video posted by Project Veritas president James O’Keefe.

O’Keefe published an edited audio file of Hopkins’ interview with postal service investigators. Hopkins told O’Keefe that he thought investigators were trying to coerce him into changing his initial story.

A spokesperson for the inspector general’s office declined to comment.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – America’s Pravda

A.F. BRANCO | on November 11, 2020 at 7:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-americas-pravda/

The Media resisted Trump for 4 years now they want unity with the projected President-elect Biden.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Christians Aren’t In Existential Despair If Biden Won, Because Government Isn’t Our God

On Election Night, I was crowded around the television with a dozen college friends in a tiny apartment above our government professor’s house. The Virginia night air seeping through the window was rescuing the feeble air conditioning unit and someone had propped up the three-legged TV with a handful of textbooks. Everyone watched the colorful maps on TV flip colors and we good-naturedly heckled CNN hosts who had been talking nonstop for the better part of two hours.

When Trump started gaining votes in Pennsylvania, everyone glanced at the three Pennsylvanians in the room. “All the Republicans just got off work,” said one, a pastor’s son from Pittsburgh. We all laughed.

But his joke stuck with me. I imagined that amorphous group of Pennsylvania Republicans going about their days, serving customers, trading smiles, clattering dinner plates in the kitchen. They would vote proudly and then they would move on with their daily responsibilities to the people around them.

I can’t say for sure if those Norman Rockwell-esque voters in rural Pennsylvania exist the way I imagined, but I have been inspired and convicted by their imaginary example following the election. They cheerfully did their civic duty, and they went about their day. They didn’t drop the responsibilities and joys around them to hang all hope of salvation on a presidential candidate.

As Christians, that’s how we should approach the electoral process — both before and after the results are announced. We should be educated and enthusiastically involved in our governing authority. We should surely fight to protect our families, our right to worship, and the rights of those who cannot defend themselves. But at the end of the day, we do all we can and then leave the results in eternal hands.

We preach that Christ alone is the hope of our salvation. But how graciously we handle the results of this election will show those around us whether we mean it.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be rightly concerned about protecting the electoral process where there is evidence of voter fraud. It also doesn’t mean we should give up being politically involved or holding our elected officials accountable for their words and actions. Advocating for liberty and justice in the civic process is a legitimate and necessary calling.

But it does mean we have an excellent opportunity to live out our faith by remembering that we trust in something greater than elections. “Put not your trust in princes, in a son of man, in whom there is no salvation,” the psalmist says. “Blessed is he whose hope in is the Lord his God.”

Because our hope is not in this world, we have no reason to be fearful. We may be disappointed and should be aware of policies that threaten our ability to live as we have been called. Yet we have no need to feel afraid, distraught, or betrayed. Any earthly idol would betray our trust.

It is because we hope in an eternal savior that we joyfully continue our daily lives. We don’t need a week off of classes or work to mourn an election. Our daily joys have suffered no loss of meaning. We continue to enjoy fellowship with other members of the body of Christ. We keep going to work and serving those around us. We go on cooking dinner and enjoying it around the family dinner table. And we remain completely fulfilled by the daily grace of God. Because of our faith, we know that politics isn’t everything (and thank God it isn’t). Our lives shouldn’t revolve around who sits in the Oval Office.

After all, the whole concept of government is merely a means to enable people to live well in community with each other. We cannot let the means become the end. Instead, we should continue to live full and fruitful lives with the people placed around us. Furthermore, watching other reactions to election results reminds us how dangerous and disappointing it is to place our trust in fallen human beings.

A video of a woman screaming uncontrollably at Trump’s inauguration in 2016 became a meme because it captured the disconsolate reaction to Trump’s victory by some of his opponents. “I’m so sorry to my world,” the woman sobbed. “There’s so much potential for beauty and for devastation in this one moment, it’s just almost incomprehensible that they can exist right now.”

Other Clinton supporters reminisced a full year after Trump’s election about how devastated they were by his victory. “It kind of just hit you,” said Trent Vanegas, explaining how he broke down in tears when the 2016 election results were announced. “One moment, there’s hope and the next moment it’s complete despair.” Another Clinton voter expressed fear that he and his wife would have to raise their newborn child under a Trump presidency.

Even the positive reactions to Biden’s apparent victory show an obsessive and unhealthy faith in political power. Members of the media literally wept on television when they called the race for Biden. “I don’t know why I’m crying so much,” MSNBC contributor and former Democratic senator Claire McCaskill said. “I keep crying, I’m going to cry now.”

“I’m very emotional,” CNN’s Don Lemon said. “So when you ask me how I’m feeling right now, I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.” CNN’s Van Jones repeatedly wiped his eyes with a tissue on camera.

And then there was Stephen Colbert on Thursday night, in what was supposed to be a comedy routine. Because of Trump, “I’m not sitting down yet, I just don’t feel like it yet,” Colbert said. “I’m also dressed for a funeral, because Donald Trump tried really hard to kill something tonight.”

Two minutes into the show and without having told a single joke, Colbert hung his head and just stood awkwardly in silence. “What I didn’t know is that it would hurt so much,” he finally added. “I didn’t expect this to break my heart, for him to cast a dark shadow on our most sacred right.”

Comedian Marc Maron led off his podcast on Monday — after about 30 seconds straight of profanity — by proclaiming “the weight has been lifted…I don’t know that people really fully understand the power, the symbolic power of the head of state that determines on some level how grounded people feel in the country.”

“We just barely f—ing avoided real fascism, people,” he added, before calling Trump supporters “brainf—ed, brainwashed people or just people who believe that fascism is the way to go.”

Watching these reactions, we should not make a mockery of their joy or sorrow. We should, however, be inspired to share the promise that we have. After all, we are blessed with the confidence that politics is not our final hope. And we are called to live accordingly.

Elle Reynolds is an intern at the Federalist, and a senior at Patrick Henry College studying government and journalism. You can follow her work on Twitter at @_etreynolds.

Photo StockSnap / NeedPix.com

Category:

Spiritual

Tagged with:

PA House GOP Members to Call For a Legislative-Led Audit of Election and Demand Results Not Be Certified, Nor Electors be Seated, Until the Audit is Complete

Reported By Cristina Laila | Published November 9, 2020 at 7:17pm

What a difference a day makes.

Joe Biden and the corrupt Marxist machine is trying to steal Pennsylvania with illegal ballot harvesting and massive midnight mail-in ballot dumps. But their plans are crumbling.

The Pennsylvania House GOP members tomorrow (Tuesday) will call for a legislative-led audit of the 2020 election and demand election results not be certified, nor electors be seated, until the audit is complete,” according to a press release.

Via the Philly Inquirer:

It’s just not Joe Biden’s night.

First Trump’s campaign on Monday evening filed a lawsuit in Pennsylvania alleging “creation and implementation of illegal ‘two-tiered’ voting system for the election.”

“Voters in Pennsylvania were held to different standards simply based on how they chose to cast their ballot, and we believe this two-tiered election system resulted in potentially fraudulent votes being counted without proper verification or oversight,” Matt Morgan, Trump’s general counsel said.

Real Clear Politics on Monday night pulled their call for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania which means Biden isn’t even pretend president-elect anymore.

Joe Biden came from a 700,000 vote deficit on Election night and with the help of OVER ONE MILLION NEW VOTES overtook President Donald Trump by Friday!

US Attorney General Bill Barr authorized federal prosecutors to pursue “substantial allegations” of voting irregularities before the 2020 presidential election is certified, per the Associated Press.

“In a memo to U.S. attorneys … Barr wrote that investigations ‘may be conducted if there are clear and apparently-credible allegations of irregularities that, if true, could potentially impact the outcome of a federal election in an individual State.’”

Cristina Laila

Cristina began writing for The Gateway Pundit in 2016 and she is currently the Associate Editor.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Biden plans to enact no fewer than 4 executive orders on Inauguration Day undoing President Trump’s efforts

Reported by SARAH TAYLOR | November 10, 2020

Former Vice President Joe Biden plans to roll out at least four executive orders should he ultimately be sworn in as president on Jan. 20, undoing the work of President Donald Trump, his campaign said this week.

A spokesperson for the Biden campaign on Monday told Fox News that the former vice president plans to rejoin both the Paris climate agreement and the World Health Organization and also plans to reinstate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — or DACA — and repeal the president’s so-called travel ban on certain Muslim countries.

Biden has also previously vowed to repeal Trump’s tax cuts and reverse the Mexico City Policy, which bans foreign aid from going to nongovernmental organizations that promote or pay for abortions.

“Other abortion-related policies and those weakening the Affordable Care Act will likely be on the chopping block in a Biden-Harris administration as well,” the outlet noted.

Following the 2020 presidential election, Biden also said he has plans to tackle the coronavirus pandemic both at home and abroad and announced the formation of a coronavirus advisory board composed of scientists and physicians.

“The challenge before us right now is still immense and growing, and so is the need for bold action to fight this pandemic,” Biden said after announcing the advisory board. “We are still facing a dark winter.”

CBS News reported that the advisory board will include members such as former FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler, former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, Yale professor Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, former head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority Dr. Rick Bright, and more.

“Dealing with the coronavirus pandemic is one of the most important battles our administration will face, and I will be informed by science and by experts,” Biden added. “The advisory board will help shape my approach to managing the surge in reported infections; ensuring vaccines are safe, effective, and distributed efficiently, equitably, and free; and protecting at-risk populations.”

CBS noted that Biden is also expected to start announcing White House staff appointments as early as this week.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Let the Party Begin

A.F. BRANCO | on November 10, 2020 at 7:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-let-the-party-begin/

China, Antifa, BLM, Russia, and Iran are all celebrating Biden the projected winner of the 2020 Presidential election.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Dead voters. Biden van full of ballots. Trump legal team details shock Nevada claims

Reported by Emily Larsen | Washington Examiner | November 9, 2020

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nevada — President Trump’s Nevada legal team beefed up its legal challenge to mail-in ballot signature verification in the state with startling claims of voter and ballot fraud. Among the allegations: dead voters, votes from thousands who no longer live in Nevada, and a van marked “Biden-Harris” full of opened mail-in ballots.

Former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt, who is helping Trump’s legal effort in the state, detailed grievances that the campaign has with mail-in ballot signature verification in Clark County, Nevada, which accounts for the vast majority of voters in the state.

“We were told that signature verification will save all chances of fraud,” Laxalt said in front of a crowd of around 50 pro-Trump protesters on Sunday.

Laxalt identified several complaints about the more than 600,000 mail-in votes cast in Nevada. Laxalt said about 200,000 of those were verified through a machine, and never by a human. He also charged that Clark County registrar of voters Joe Gloria set the factory setting on the machine to accept signatures with an only 40% match.

A federal judge on Friday blocked a Trump campaign attempt to stop the use of the machine that validated voter signatures on mail-in ballots.

Another 400,000 of those mail ballot signatures were verified by hand, but Laxalt said that the campaign is not able to view those.

“I am positive, if you all got to see those,” Laxalt said, “you’re going to see countless mismatches.”

At the Sunday news conference, American Conservative Union Chairman Matt Schlapp joked that a small pug dog that someone had brought to the protest may have voted before he detailed the kind of eye-popping allegations that quickly spread on social media. He noted two reports the Republican Party received of deceased people who “miraculously” cast ballots in the general election: Rosemarie Hartle and Fred Sokes Jr., both of whom died in 2017.

A woman who said she was a family friend of Hartle, Marianne Rombola, spoke out about the fraudulent vote.

“It is heartbreaking what is happening in America, and for this family to be exploited, or anybody who has faced a tragedy in losing somebody and their vote has been counted as a person — this is just not America,” Rombola said. “These things need to be heard and taken care of.”

Schlapp mentioned one whistleblower who worked in a ballot counting center and signed an affidavit alleging that a supervisor instructed the person to process mail-in ballots despite concerns about whether the signature matched the name on the envelope. Schlapp said that another whistleblower from a ballot counting center, while taking a walk around the counting center on his lunch hour, “noticed a van pulled up at the center marked Biden-Harris.”

“The doors of the van were open, ballots were clearly visible, ballots were open with letter openers, and ballots were filled in and resealed in envelopes,” Schlapp said. “These people who were involved in this activity then decided to create a human shield around what they were doing in the van.”

Schlapp said that at least 9,000 people who moved out of state voted in Nevada’s election. Trump’s campaign previously sent to the Justice Department a list of more than 3,000 Nevada voters who, according to a national change of address database, no longer live in the state. Only an estimated third of people update their address in the database, so triple the number of voters on that list comes to about 9,000.

Laxalt dodged a question from the Washington Examiner about whether the Trump campaign’s legal challenges, if successful, could tip Nevada to Trump’s corner in the Electoral College. Apparent presidential election winner Joe Biden currently leads in the state by about 34,300 votes.

He expressed disappointment with what he said was the question he is “seeing out of the media now, which is, ‘Have we produced enough illegal voters to overturn the election?’” He asserted: “That, of course, is an absurd question. Let’s first start covering the fraud and now acknowledge that there are illegal voters.”

“The way we resolve division, even when you don’t get your way in an election, is to count every legal ballot,” Schlapp said. “Make sure that we count every legal ballot, and make sure that illegal ballots do not reduce the civil rights and the votes of those who voted legally.”

Read the full article: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/dead-voters-biden-van-full-of-ballots-trump-legal-team-details-shock-nevada-claims

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – In the Dark of the Night

A.F. BRANCO | on November 9, 2020 at 7:40 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-in-the-dark-of-the-night/

Although Biden is the projected presidential winner by the Media, many feel the left has stolen the election from President Trump.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Reports Of Election Fraud Keep Piling Up In Michigan. What’s Going On?

It appears that Democrats in Detroit, a city with a long history of election fraud, are tampering with absentee ballots and breaking state law. As absentee ballot counting continues in a handful of key states across the country, reports of voter fraud, ballot tampering, and the illegal removal of Republican election observers are cropping up in Michigan, especially in Detroit, a Democratic stronghold which has a long history of voter fraud.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it was filing a lawsuit in Michigan over what it claims are systematic efforts to prevent Republican election observers from monitoring the ballot counting process as allowed under state law. The lawsuit comes as video clips continue to surface on social media showing election officials denying access to authorized GOP poll watchers.

Aric Nesbitt, a Michigan state senator, posted a video on Twitter Wednesday afternoon of election workers at the convention center in Detroit, where absentee ballots are being counted. The video shows workers cheering every time an official election observer with the Michigan GOP is ejected from the counting room. Apparently this has been happening frequently, in violation of state law. Democratic observers, says Nesbitt, now outnumber Republicans observers at the convention center 3 to 1.

Here’s why that’s a problem. When an absentee ballot is unreadable for whatever reason, a ballot counter takes out a blank ballot, lays it on the table next to the unreadable ballot, and transposes the vote so it can be filed and tallied. Republican and Democratic “poll challengers,” as they’re called, are supposed to observe this process as it happens and make sure that the vote is transposed accurately. In addition, Michigan state law requires that a Republican and a Democratic official sign off on every voting precinct where absentee ballots are cast in this manner.

Phill Kline is a former Kansas attorney general and now an attorney for the nonprofit Amistad Project, which filed a lawsuit Wednesday alleging that tens of thousands of ballots in Detroit have been illegally filled out by election officials and Democratic election observers. “We have confirmed evidence that Democratic election officials have violated state law,” he told The Federalist, “and have opened the door for fraud involving tens of thousands of ballots.”

Kline confirmed Republican officials have been barred from observing the counting of absentee ballots, and that transposed absentee ballots are being certified without a GOP official signing off on them. The law, Kline says, states that an official from both parties must sign off “if possible,” and that Democratic election officials are claiming they can’t find a Republican to sign off—even though they are also kicking Republican officials out of the counting rooms.

I also spoke by phone to one GOP poll challenger who asked to remain anonymous and told me the election officials at the convention center are not letting Republican poll challengers remain in the room where absentee ballots are being counted, saying there’s “too many” of them. Asked how many people were in these rooms, the officials in charge could not say, according to this person, who added that the rooms in question are enormous, the size of a football field (remember this is at the convention center, where the Detroit auto show is held).

After kicking out Republican poll challengers, election officials began covering up the windows of the counting rooms with cardboard to block the view of Republican observers. “It was pretty chaotic,” the poll challenger said.

News reports are starting to reflect the chaos at the convention center. The Detroit Free Press reported Thursday morning that a lawyer, Jessica Connarn, who was working as a Republic poll challenger, filed an affidavit saying she was told by someone counting absentee ballots that workers in Detroit were “changing the dates the ballots were received” so they would be considered valid.

“When I approached the poll worker, she stated to me that she was being told to change the date on ballots to reflect that the ballots were received on an earlier date,” Connarn says in the affidavit. The Free Press goes on to report:

Connarn states when she tried to get additional information later from this poll worker, she was “yelled at by the other poll workers working at her table, who told me that I needed to go away and that I was not allowed to talk to the poll worker.”

In that interaction, the poll worker slipped Connarn a note, she states.

The note says “entered received date as 11/2/20 on 11/4/20.”

In Michigan, only ballots received by 8 p.m. on Election Day, this year Nov. 3, are valid.

No One Should Trust The Election Process In Detroit

None of this is new for Detroit, which has been plagued by corrupt election officials for years. In 2005, federal officials launched an investigation after the November election and state officials took over the handling of absentee ballots in Detroit after the Detroit News reported that “legally incapacitated nursing home residents were being coaxed to vote and Detroit’s voting rolls were inflated with more than 300,000 names of people who had died or moved out of the city.” A post-election audit found that nearly 30 percent of precincts showed discrepancies in vote totals.

Despite reform efforts over the years, these problems have persisted. Back in December, a public interest group sued the city in federal court, claiming its voter rolls are “replete with typos, dead people, duplicate registrations and mistakes about gender and birth: One Detroit voter is listed as being born in 1823—14 years before Michigan was annexed into the Union,” according to the Detroit Free Press.

In the 2016 presidential election, voting machines in more than a third of all voting precincts in Detroit registered more votes than the number of voters tallied by poll workers. The irregularities meant that more than half the city would be ineligible for a statewide presidential recount that was eventually called off by the Michigan Supreme Court. Here’s what Detroit News reported at the time:

Overall, state records show 10.6 percent of the precincts in the 22 counties that began the re-tabulation process couldn’t be recounted because of state law that bars recounts for unbalanced precincts or ones with broken seals.

The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.

But these problems persisted. In the August primary, ballot counts in 72 percent of Detroit’s absentee voting precincts didn’t match the number of ballots cast, and in 46 percent of the city’s precincts the combined vote counts for Election Day and absentee voting were out of balance. Even Democratic election officials admitted that something had gone wrong in tracking ballots by precinct.

According to Michigan state law, precincts whose poll books don’t match up with the number of ballots cast can’t be recounted. That might present problems for any eventual presidential recount in the state, as it did in 2016.

For now, it seems clear that credible evidence of election fraud has surfaced in Detroit, which is not surprising given Detroit’s troubled history of election fraud. But it’s also deeply disturbing. The Trump campaign’s lawsuit to halt what appears to be a corrupt process is, in this case, entirely appropriate. We need to get to the bottom of what’s going on in Detroit.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Yes, Democrats Are Trying To Steal The Election In Michigan, Wisconsin, And Pennsylvania

Reported By John Daniel Davidson | NOVEMBER 4, 2020

In the three Midwest battleground states, vote counting irregularities persist in an election that will be decided on razor-thin margins. As of this writing, it appears that Democratic Party machines in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania are trying to steal the election.

As reporters and commentators went to bed early Tuesday morning, all three states were too close to call, but President Trump led former Vice President Joe Biden by comfortable margins—far beyond what had been predicted in the polls. None of the networks called these states because enough mail-in ballots remained uncounted that it could swing either way, but Trump’s position looked good.

Then, something strange happened in the dead of the night. In both Michigan and Wisconsin, vote dumps early Wednesday morning showed 100 percent of the votes going for Biden and zero percent—that’s zero, so not even one vote—for Trump.

In Michigan, Biden somehow got 138,339 votes and Trump got none, zero, in an overnight vote-dump.

When my Federalist colleague Sean Davis noted this, Twitter was quick to censor his tweet, even though all he had done was compare two sets of vote totals on the New York Times website. And he wasn’t the only one who noticed—although on Wednesday it appeared that anyone who noted the Biden vote dump in Michigan was getting censored by Twitter.

Others were quick to note the partisan censorship from Twitter and raise concerns over how 100 percent of a vote dump could possibly go to Biden. But the social media giant has maintained its crackdown on sharing this information. Twitter users could not like or share a tweet from the Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh noting the 138,339-vote dump.

Buzzfeed later reported that according to a spokesperson at Decision Desk HQ, the votes for Biden were the result of a “data error” from a “file created by the state that we ingested.” When the state noticed the “error” it updated its count, which somehow gave 138,339 votes to Biden and zero to Trump.

It turns out, the vote dump was the result of an alleged typo, an extra zero that had been tacked onto Biden’s vote total in Shiawassee County, Michigan. It seems the error was discovered only because Davis and other Twitter users noted how insane and suspicious the vote totals looked, and demanded an investigation that uncovered what was either a typo or an incredibly clumsy attempt to boost Biden’s vote count.

There was also something suspicious about the vote reporting in Antrim County, Michigan, where Trump beat Hillary Clinton by 30 points in 2016. Initial vote totals there showed Biden ahead of Trump by 29 points, a result that can’t possibly be accurate, as plenty of journalists noted.

After the strange results caught national attention, election officials in Antrim County said they were investigating what they called “skewed” results, working with the company that provides their election software to see what went wrong. The county clerk said they plan to have an answer by Wednesday afternoon.

Then another mysterious all-Biden vote dump happened in Wisconsin. Biden miraculously overcame a 4.1-point Trump lead in the middle of the night thanks to vote dumps in which he got—you guessed it—100 percent of the votes and Trump got zero.

Note the vertical lines in both graphs below:

On Wednesday, the Trump campaign demanded a full recount in Wisconsin, citing “reports of irregularities in several Wisconsin counties which raise serious doubts about the validity of the results.”

In Pennsylvania, the Democratic scheme to steal the election is a bit different. Rather than vote dumps that impossibly go 100 percent to Biden, Pennsylvania is relying on the Democratic Secretary of State’s plan to count indisputably late mail-in ballots as though they were received on Election Day—even if they have no postmark.

This plan was of course rubber-stamped by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which cited the need for “equitable relief” to address mail delays amid the pandemic.

Note that this isn’t just about ballots that come in after Election Day, but about ballots that come in after Election Day that don’t even have a postmark—that is, there is no way to tell when the ballots were mailed, or from where.

Although it’s true that the long delays we’ve seen for absentee ballot counts are due in part to state laws in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that prohibit the counting of absentee ballots before Election Day, which is not the case in most other states. But the cumulative circumstances under which these absentees ballots are now being tallied is highly suspicious.

Unless election officials in Michigan and Wisconsin can explain the overnight vote-dumps and, in Michigan, the “typo” that appeared to benefit Biden, and Pennsylvania officials can explain their rationale for counting ballots with no postmark, the only possible conclusion one can come to right now is that Democrats are trying to steal the election in the Midwest.

John is the Political Editor at The Federalist. Follow him on Twitter.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Nolte: Dead Caught Voting in Democrat-Run New York City

Reported by JOHN NOLTE | 3 Nov 2020

NEW YORK, NY – MAY 10: The Empire State Building is seen behind the tombstones at Calvary Cemetery on May 10, 2020 in the Queens borough of New York City. The Catholic Archdiocese of New York is opening COVID-related cemetery-visitation restrictions for Mothers Day. (Photo by Jeenah Moon/Getty Images)

“Ballots have been mailed in to the New York City Board of Elections in the name of dead voters,” reports the New York Post.

Frances Reckhow, who was born in 1915, would be 105 today, and died in 2012, requested a mail-in ballot, filled it out, and returned it.

Gertrude Nizzere, who was born in 1919, would be 101 today, and died in 2016, requested an absentee ballot, filled it out, and returned it.

These are just the ones that have been found.

What’s so troubling about this is that there is no way this is an oopsie, no way it happened by accident,. You don’t “accidentally” request a mail-in ballot that belongs to a dead person, fill it out, and return it.

This feels like an organized effort on behalf of some person or organization that is going to a lot of trouble to find out who’s dead but still on the voter rolls, and vote on their behalf.

And you can bet this isn’t a Republican effort. If it were, it would be the biggest story in the world right now. But because it is almost only Democrats who cheat, we’re gas-lighted with the media lies about how voter fraud isn’t a real problem.

This, despite the fact, Jack Kennedy almost certainly beat Richard Nixon in 1960 thanks to all those dead voters in Chicago.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

‘The Steal Is On’ in Pennsylvania: Poll Watchers Denied Access, Illegal Campaigning at Polling Locations

Reported by HANNAH BLEAU | 3 Nov 2020

PHILADELPHIA, PA – OCTOBER 27: Voters wait in line outside Philadelphia City Hall on the final day to cast their early voting ballots at the satellite polling station on October 27, 2020 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. With the election only a week away, this new form of in-person voting by using … Mark Makela/Getty

Election Day kicked off with a bout of chaos in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, with poll watchers reportedly denied access and witnesses alleging “illegal campaigning” at various polling locations.

According to Trump 2020 EDO director Mike Roman, Democrat election officials are banning Trump poll watchers all across the city, as one video shows. Another photo on social media shows a physical barrier, which Roman says Democrat officials are using to keep poll watchers far from the counting tables:

There also appear to be instances of illegal campaigning at various polling locations. Roman provided an image of a man in blue purportedly distributing Democrat literature to voters as they stand in line to cast their ballots. Other polling locations appear to have the literature posted outside the facility:

This is our polling place in NE Philadelphia. Already a violation in sight. @PhillyROCTeam @mikeroman @phillyvotes @Richzeoli @ChrisStigall @EddieCaiazzo @DomShow1210 pic.twitter.com/WPZ60T0L19

— A. Benjamin Mannes (@PublicSafetySME) November 3, 2020

Additionally, there are mounting reports of polling locations opening late, forcing some voters to step out of line to return to work before casting their ballots:

According to the Philadelphia Republican Party, in the first two hours of voting alone, they have received reports of “several reporting locations closed,” hundreds of voters stuck in line, ballot harvesting, and officials denying poll watchers access.

There are also reports of voting machines down in Westmoreland and Philadelphia Counties, according to the Philly GOP:

All eyes remain on Pennsylvania, the state many believe could determine the outcome of the election. Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) made waves over the weekend after declaring — three days before the election — that “if all the votes are added up in PA, Trump is going to lose.”

Pennsylvania polls close at 8 p.m., with 20 electoral votes up for grabs.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

CBS Admits Trump Can Win With Expected Election Day Surge

Reported By Amanda Prestigiacomo | Nov 2, 2020 | DailyWire.com

President Donald J. Trump dances at the end of the rally just before he leaves. — Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images

CBS News reported Sunday evening that, despite the onslaught of mainstream polls outlining otherwise, President Donald Trump could win re-election on Tuesday night if he gets the turnout that is expected come Election Day.

The news network noted of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s suspected lead with early voting in key states while emphasizing that Trump supporters are far more likely to turn out on Election Day, which they likened to a “Republican-surge scenario.”

“Joe Biden heads into Election Day preferred by voters who have already cast their ballots early. President Trump has a lead among those who plan to show up on November 3,” CBS said.

“We estimate from our polling that Mr. Trump is doing, on average, over 30 percentage points better among likely Election-Day voters than early voters. We know the approximate size of the early vote so far, and we vary the potential size of the Election-Day vote to explore two scenarios,” the network explained. “In our Republican-surge scenario, the size of the Election-Day vote is relatively large, so given that these voters break for Mr. Trump, it mitigates Biden’s early-vote edge, and Mr. Trump inches out close wins in enough states to go over 270. (We increased the size of the Election-Day vote by an average of seven points in this scenario, while keeping vote preference among early voters and Election-Day voters fixed.)”

Here’s what the map would look like in the Republican Election Day “surge” scenario, per CBS:

Screenshot via CBS News

And here’s the breakdown of important battleground states — Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin — if Trump gets his “surge,” or if Biden hangs on to his early voting lead:

Screenshot via CBS News

CBS cautions that “it doesn’t take much” for Trump to lose the election.

“If some of the people planning to vote on Tuesday decide not to show up, and the size of the Election-Day vote decreases by an average of three points from our initial estimates, the net result is pretty dramatic,” the report said. “Given Biden’s overall preference leads, nearly all the competitive states either flip to Biden or stay in his column, giving him a comfortable win.”

Trump is hoping for a repeat of the major upset this election. And CBS News, it seems, is covering their bases for just that.

Read the full CBS News report, here.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Nolte: NBC Creates Decoy Disinformation Story to Protect Hunter and Joe Biden

Reported by JOHN NOLTE | 30 Oct 2020

Vice President-elect, Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., left, stands with his son Hunter during a re-enactment of the Senate oath ceremony, Tuesday, Jan. 6, 2009, in the Old Senate Chamber on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)

Less than a week before Election Day, far-left NBC News created a decoy story to make it seem as though the increasingly credible scandal involving Joe and Hunter Biden has been debunked as a fake document.

As everyone now knows, the national political media are engaged in an active cover-up to protect Joe Biden from the exploding scandal surrounding his involvement in the shady business dealings of his son, Hunter Biden. The allegations against Biden are beyond credible and involve confirmed documents; two first-hand, on-the-record whistleblowers, and no denials from Joe or Hunter Biden.

What’s more, there is an active FBI investigation into Hunter’s business dealings, including money laundering.

Nevertheless, the media are so partisan and dishonest, they are not only ignoring a scandal that will certainly swamp a potential Biden administration; they are outright lying with the claim the scandal is all a hoax based on “Russian disinformation.”

And now, NBC News is deliberately looking to muddy the waters with a decoy story, a story based on something entirely different and meaningless, a story no one has even heard of, and it has been dressed up to look like a debunking of the scandal involving Hunter Biden’s laptop and the open FBI investigation of him.

The headline (sorry, I don’t link fake news) is…

How a fake persona laid the groundwork for a Hunter Biden conspiracy deluge

The sub-hed is…

A 64-page document that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm.”

And this story has absolutely nothing to do with the credible allegations currently swirling around Joe and Hunter Biden. But as you can see, it has been positioned, angled, and headlined as a decoy to fool NBC News consumers into believing the allegations are all fake and have now been debunked.

What’s more, no one I know has ever even heard of this “64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump [and] appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.”

I sure as hell have never heard of it.

Breitbart News didn’t cover it, and way down deep in the story, NBC is forced to admit that a few obscure blog posts about the document were only shared 5,000 times across Facebook and Twitter, which is nothing.

So you can see what NBC News is doing here… “Debunking” a story that has nothing to do with the credible corruption allegations against Joe and Hunter Biden and dressing it up to look like it’s Game Over with that laptop full of incriminating emails and whistleblower Tony Bobulinski.

The story even opens in a way meant to conflate the two:

One month before a purported leak of files from Hunter Biden’s laptop, a fake “intelligence” document about him went viral on the right-wing internet, asserting an elaborate conspiracy theory involving former Vice President Joe Biden’s son and business in China.

The document, a 64-page composition that was later disseminated by close associates of President Donald Trump, appears to be the work of a fake “intelligence firm” called Typhoon Investigations, according to researchers and public documents.

Later, the story again deliberately conflates the two…

“The document and its spread have become part of a wider effort to smear Hunter Biden and weaken Joe Biden’s presidential campaign,” NBC writes. “An unverified leak of documents — including salacious pictures from what President Donald Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and a Delaware Apple repair store owner claimed to be Hunter Biden’s hard drive — were published in the New York Post[.]”

If that isn’t outrageously desperate and dishonest enough for you, the NBC News story does not even debunk the story it is claiming to debunk. It throws around a lot of chaff, but the only real claim here is that Typhoon Investigations, the firm that put the document together, is a fake “intelligence firm” and — LOL — uses “anonymous sourcing.”

One of the document’s authors stands by his work and is challenging anyone, including NBC, to present him with any facts he got wrong.

“To hear journalists [w]ho use anonymous sources all the time [act] morally superior is disgusting,” he tweeted Thursday. “Second, no one has written about the contents of the paper or found factual fault with anything in the report.”

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Final poll: Trump takes major lead in battleground state after being tied with Biden just weeks ago

Reported by CHRIS ENLOE | November 2, 2020

President Donald Trump has taken a significant lead over Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden in Iowa, signaling that Trump’s support in “fly-over” country is stronger than most polling has indicated. The final Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll of the 2020 election season found that Trump leads Biden by a whopping seven points ahead of Election Day, 48% to 41%.

Among the remaining respondents, 3% said they were voting for someone other than Trump or Biden, 2% said they were undetermined, and 5% did not want to reveal which candidate they support. The poll is conducted by the highly-respected Selzer & Co. of Des Moines, and is known as the “gold standard” of political polls.

What is most significant about the poll is that, just several weeks ago, the same survey found that Trump and Biden were tied in Iowa at 47% each. According to J. Ann Selzer, president of Selzer & Co., Trump is once again winning over independents, which explains the significant bump in his support in Iowa.

“The president is holding demographic groups that he won in Iowa four years ago, and that would give someone a certain level of comfort with their standing,” Selzer explained, the Des Moines Register reported. “There’s a consistent story in 2020 to what happened in 2016.”

“I think that the key to what’s happening with President Trump is that he is leading with independents,” she added. “That is a group that in Iowa in our September poll looked like it was swinging to Joe Biden, and it’s come back to be a Trump asset.”

Selzer said the gender gap — in which men are more likely to support Trump and women more likely to support Biden — has also narrowed in Trump’s favor.

“We saw a huge gender gap that benefited Biden in September,” Selzer said. “And while there is still a big gap among men — they’re going for Trump by a 24-point margin — it’s just a 9-point margin for Biden with women. And so there’s just an imbalance there. Before, we saw mirror images of each other.”

The Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa Poll also spelled good news for Sen. Joni Ernst (R), who is locked in a tight battle for control over the Senate seat she currently holds. The latest poll found that Ernst leads Democratic challenger Theresa Greenfield by four points, 46% to 42%. The showing is also a turnabout from September’s poll, which found Ernst trailing Greenfield by three points.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s TWO Politically INCORRECT Cartoons by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – King Putz

A.F. BRANCO | on November 1, 2020 at 11:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-king-putz/

Governor Walz played politics buy allowing only 250 people into a Trump rally in Minnesota.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – The Color of Doom

A.F. BRANCO | on November 2, 2020 at 7:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-the-color-of-doom/

Biden says if he’s elected there will be no Red or Blue states, but we know what color they will be.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Never Forget the Time Joe Biden Said ‘Don’t Assume I’m Not Corrupt’

Commentary By Kipp Jones | Published October 27, 2020 at 4:59pm

An old clip of Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden discussing whether he could be corrupted by power has taken on new significance with less than a week before the Nov. 3 election.

The Democrats’ lone shot at seizing power from the American people next week is currently embroiled in controversy surrounding reports that he used his son to peddle his influence while he served as the country’s vice president.

Contents discovered on a laptop that reportedly belonged to his son Hunter Biden continue to bring up questions about Biden’s alleged involvement in the younger Biden’s international business dealings.

Numerous and credible reports that Biden himself was involved in making money from Hunter Biden’s business in China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Ukraine have also not been challenged on substance.

But they portray a political family rooted in corruption, and they make a case that Biden himself allegedly guided American foreign policy while serving as VP with his own financial interests in mind.

Due to these and other reports, a decades-old unearthed clip of Biden speaking about political corruption are more important now than ever.

This past week, an old Biden interview shows Biden discussing corruption as a side-burned and fast-talking young senator from Delaware.

In 1974, during his second year in the Senate, Biden appeared on the weekly PBS program “The Advocates.”

He was asked, “As the youngest member of the Senate, the one therefore who may expect the longest career there, I wonder if you’d say to us since it’s clear that you’re not corrupt and you got elected, why should people think that the system produces corrupt results when there you are?”

READ THE REST OF THIS REPORT AT https://www.westernjournal.com/never-forget-time-joe-biden-said-dont-assume-not-corrupt/

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Today’s Politically INCORRECT Cartoon by A.F. Branco

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Swamp Thing

A.F. BRANCO | on October 30, 2020 at 7:45 am | https://comicallyincorrect.com/a-f-branco-cartoon-swamp-thing/

The Mainstream Media and Big Tech continue to blackout the Biden corruption story out of fear it’ll hurt Joe in the election.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Ann Coulter Op-ed: ‘Ask Not What Your Country Is’: The Biden Inaugural Address

Commentary by Ann Coulter | Posted: Oct 28, 2020 6:20 PM

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Townhall.com.

'Ask Not What Your Country Is': The Biden Inaugural Address

Source: AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

Trending

I’m not at liberty to reveal my sources, but I have obtained a draft of President Joe Biden’s inaugural address. (Trump, unfortunately, won’t be there to hear it. He will be holding a competing rally at RFK Stadium, also starting at 12 noon on Jan. 20.)

EXCLUSIVE CONTENT! MUST CREDIT COULTER!

Ladies and gentlemen, members of the fairer sex, the unfair sex, the transgenders, queers, what have you.

Women and gentlemen!

I’ve known women — my wife, my sister — no, that’s my wife! I mean my wife over here. The fat one.

I mean: The fact is, they switched on me!

Anyway, standing here today on the steps of the capitol of Wilmington — I should say, standing here today on the steps of the Capitol in the state of Washington, as we do every year, we have this peaceful transfer of power — I should say, every four years.

Which is a Big F—ing Deal! I used to say that to Barack all the time.

I see him out there! He’s the articulate, bright and clean one.

As I was coming over here on this brisk June day, I started thinking, why is it that Joe Biden is the first in his family ever to go to a university? My ancestors, Welsh coal miners, would come up after 12 hours underground and play cricket for hours. Were they not smart? Were they not strong, mate?

And so, as I look out at this wonderful crowd — what’s that from the fella in the back? You say I’m not Welsh and my father was a Chevrolet dealer in Wilmington?

Listen, you lying dog-faced pony soldier — I have a much higher I.Q. than you do! I went to law school on a full academic scholarship and ended up in the top half of my class. I got three degrees in college and was voted the “outstanding student” in the political science department.

What I mean to say is that it was a financial scholarship, I wasn’t voted the “outstanding student,” and I was only in the top half of the bottom 10 students.

No, I haven’t taken an I.Q. test. Why the hell would I take a test? Come on, man. That is like saying you — did you take a test whether you’re taking cocaine or not? What do you think? Are you a junkie?

Look, folks, kids today have advantages I didn’t have. Their parents play the radio, make sure they have the record player on at night. My parents couldn’t play the record player. They were in the mines.

And I remember my pop, a Chevrolet dealer in Wilmington, telling me in 1962, as I was going off to work at an African American swimming pool — we called them “African Americans” back then — and we saw two guys kissing each other. He said to me: “Joey, they love each other.”

I shouldn’t say it. I’m going to say something I probably shouldn’t say …

Anyway, today, I stand before you to announce my candidacy for president of the United States!

Wait — I won! That’s a Big F—ing Deal, as I used to say to Barack.

Oh look! Here’s the guy from Burisma! Good to see you, man! Look, the Biden administration will be monitoring Kiev prosecutors like you’ve never seen before. Clean government in Ukraine will be the No. 1 priority of my administration. When I’m president, this country won’t be cozying up to the totalitarian regimes of Poland and Hungary. It’s gonna stop with us.

I shouldn’t say it. I’m going to say something I probably shouldn’t say …

Anyway, on this crisp September day, I vow to you we’ll not only have a Green New Deal, but a Purple New Deal, a Yellow New Deal, a LBGTQXYZ New Deal — a whole rainbow of New Deals!

You have my word as a Biden, folks.

Anyway, as I stand here in the rotunda — I mean the steps of the Capitol — just as the great Democratic president Franklin Delano … uh, I should say, as FDR did — well, he wasn’t standing because he couldn’t stand.

And to all of you in wheelchairs, you don’t need to stand either! Oh, God love you! What am I talking about? I’ll tell you what, we’re making everybody else stand up, though. Let’s give the wheelchair-bound a big round of applause!

Look folks, as FDR said, we hold these truths to be self-evident … You bet and corn pop. Pop goes the weasel! And I’m your pop, as I always say to Hunter. I’m your pop, but I’m not a weasel, pal.

As we celebrate this peaceful transition — oh, I see Adam Schiff out in the crowd! As I always say, he reminds me of my son, Hunter.

Whoa — I almost forgot, let’s give a big hand to my vice president … Anita Hill!

What am I talking about? Anita ain’t black!

Everybody give a big hand to my vice president … Cardi B!

Oh sorry, buddy — my vice president, Al Sharpton!

But I promise you, Cardi and Anita and Al and Stacey and Jesse will all have positions in my Cabinet.

That’s cabinet, not cabin, folks. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” and, as she always said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” I know this because I got three degrees in college and was voted the “outstanding student” in the political science department.

I should say, I wasn’t actually voted the “outstanding student,” but it was an honor just to be nominated.

Anyway, I never served with John F. Kennedy — but he was no Dan Quayle! He said, “Ask your country to do things for you. Ask or not! The choice is yours.”

I’m pro-choice, although I’m personally opposed. But the important thing is, it’s your choice!

And so as I stand here today, asking for your vote — hold on! — you gave me your vote! That’s why I’m here, man!

This is a Big F—ing Deal, as I used to always say to Barack. Good night and God bless. Wear a mask!

Category:

Opinion, Political

Tagged with:

‘The Biden Five’: The Definitive Breakdown of One of America’s Most Corrupt Families

Reported by ROBERT KRAYCHIK | 28 Oct 2020

Peter Schweizer, president of the Government Accountability Institute and senior contributor at Breitbart News, explained how Joe Biden’s family members — dubbed the Biden Five — monetized political connections and influence in an interview aired on Tuesday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

The Biden Five is composed of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden; his younger brothers Frank Biden and James Biden, his sister Valerie Biden, and his daughter Ashley Biden.

Marlow highlighted Schweizer’s latest book, Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, as “the gateway into understanding not just Joe Biden and the Biden family, but also the entire institutional Democratic Party at this moment and their corruption.”

Marlow described Schweizer’s investigation of the Biden family as yielding “indisputable evidence that Joe Biden is running a crime-like syndicate where he is, if nothing else, enabling his family members to get rich, without really any noticeable skill, using the American people’s good name.”

Schweizer noted the internationalization of the Biden family’s business dealings following Joe Biden becoming vice president.

“There’s no question about it. Joe Biden is the planet around which the moons of his family travel,” Schweizer said, “and the gravitational pull is Joe Biden’s power and his position, and the family has enriched themselves based on the positions he has.”

Schweizer continued, “Before Joe Biden is vice president of the United States, they’re really not doing many international deals, but once Joe Biden becomes vice president of the United States, suddenly, they’ve got foreign governments and foreign entities falling over themselves to cut them in on deals that they have no background or no expertise in. There’s a direct link between the corrupt acts of the family and the policy positions and power that Joe Biden has.”

1 – Hunter Biden

Hunter Biden joined his father aboard Air Force Two in December of 2013 on a flight to China. Ten days later, he secured over $1 billion in financing from the state-run Bank of China for a newly launched private equity firm he co-founded.

Schweizer explained, “Before Joe Biden becomes vice president of the United States, Hunter is a lobbyist for online gambling companies in Europe. That’s what he’s doing. That’s his professional background. Once his dad becomes vice president of the United States, he suddenly starts doing a whole host of global deals beginning with China. He flies with his dad on Air Force Two to Beijing China in December 2013.”

“Within 10 days of that trip, Hunter Biden joins the board of directors and gets an equity stake in a Chinese government-financed investment firm called BHR Partners, Bohai Harvest RST,” Schweizer added. “He has no backgroundin private equity. He has no background in China. They put him on the board precisely because his father is vice president and precisely because his father is taking pro-China positions on the global stage.”

Schweizer focused on Hunter Biden’s lack of expertise related to either private equity or China as indicative of the Chinese government’s rationale for funding BHR.

In 2015, the Obama administration approved the sale of a strategically sensitive American company, Henniges Automotive, in a joint-purchase shared by a Chinese military contractor and BHR. The foreign acquisition required special approval from the Committee of Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) due to the company’s manufacturing of technology with military applications.

Schweizer remarked, “Hunter Biden’s business partners were quite explicit that he doesn’t bring anything to the table. He’s not bringing any money. He’s not bringing any expertise. He was the, quote, ‘pipeline to the administration,’ meaning the Obama-Biden administration.”

The Chinese Communist Party viewed Hunter Biden as a conduit through which political influence with the Obama administration could be procured, Schweizer held.

“There’s a very clear reason why the Chinese government wants the son of the vice president sitting on their board involved in these deals,” Schweizer said, “because they need the approval of the Obama-Biden administration, which is, of course, what they get when they start acquiring these companies.”

Joe Biden repeatedly denied having discussions with Hunter Biden about his son’s foreign financial dealings. “I’ve never discussed my business or their business, my sons’ or daughter’s,” said Joe Biden in 2019. “And I’ve never discussed them because they know where I have to do my job and that’s it and they have to make their own judgments.”

Joe Biden previously declared the existence of an “absolute wall” between himself and his family members’ business. He said, “I have never discussed, with my son or my brother or with anyone else, anything having to do with their businesses. Period.”

Laws prohibiting political bribery include transference of money to elected officials’ family members, Schweizer noted.

Schweizer pointed to a photograph of Joe Biden posing with oligarch Kenes Rakishev of Kazakhstan, who once reportedly explored business with Hunter Biden as further evidence of the former vice president’s deception in denying knowledge of his family’s financial dealings.

A recent report from the Daily Mail suggests the procurement of political favors from Joe Biden via Hunter Biden by Yelena Baturina, a Russian oligarch who wired $3.5 million to Rosemont Seneca, a private investment firm co-owned by Hunter Biden. Baturina’s brother said the consultancy fee was “a payment to enter the American market.”

Schweizer identified Hunter Biden’s previous position on the board of directors for Burisma, a Ukrainian energy company, as further evidence of Joe Biden’s monetization of political influence through his son.

“[Hunter Biden] was getting a million dollars a year from a corrupt Ukrainian energy company,” Schweizer stated. “He had no background energy. He had no background in Ukraine. We now know with emails that have been released that he was working at Burisma’s direction to try to deflect investigations into Burisma, which is a very corrupt company run by corrupt oligarchs.”

Schweizer highlighted Joe Biden’s admission in 2018 that he pressured Ukraine to terminate Viktor Shokin during his vice presidential tenure. At the time, Shokin was a Ukrainian prosecutor investigating corruptio? on the part of Burisma.

The Biden family’s lack of expertise in fields within which they have been paid millions of dollars from foreign governments and interests reveals their sale of political influence through Joe Biden, Schweizer assessed.

“What are the Bidens selling?” asked Schweizer. “What product or what service are they providing these Chinese companies [or] a Ukrainian energy company? They don’t know anything about the energy business. They don’t know anything about private finance [or] equity companies. They don’t know anything about that, so the point is these foreign entities are paying the Bidens money — millions of dollars. The question is, what are they getting in return?”

Schweizer concluded, “These are not charities. These are not philanthropies. They are expecting and they are getting something in return, or they would stop paying.”

2 – Frank Biden

Companies owned by Frank Biden, Joe Biden’s youngest brother, received millions of dollars in taxpayer loans related to real estate development in the Caribbean during Joe Biden’s vice presidency.

Schweizer said, “[Frank Biden was] basically was a real estate agent — not very successful — in Florida. Suddenly decides he’s going to go into the renewable energy business. [He had] no background in any of that. He set up companies in Costa Rica [and] sets up another company in Jamaica, and lo and behold, gets involved in deals that get taxpayer-backed loans from the U.S. government — or more specifically, from the Obama-Biden administration, to do renewable energy projects in Costa Rica and Jamaica.”

Frank Biden’s business interests also received millions of dollars in grants from the Department of Education towards the construction of charter schools. Joe Biden’s youngest brother described his family name as a “tremendous asset” that delivered “automatic acceptance” for government approvals of school projects and securing public funding.

“These are our grants that are discretionary, which means the Department of Education can decide who they want to give them to,” Schweizer explained. “[Frank Biden] took in millions of dollars from the Education Department while his brother was vice president of the United States.”

Schweizer added, “[Frank Biden] actually had a meeting involving his companies in the Oval Office with Barack Obama and just a couple of other individuals. If his name had been Frank Jones instead of Frank Biden, I doubt any of that would have happened.”

3 – James Biden

James Biden, the younger brother of Joe Biden, worked as executive vice president of HillStone International, a firm that received $1.5 billion in government contracts during the Obama administrations, including a contract to build 100,000 homes in Iraq as part of an international development project.

Schweizer detailed the conflicts of interest related to James Biden’s position with HillStone International given Joe Biden’s oversight of ostensibly humanitarian government-funded development projects in Iraq during his vice presidency.

Kevin Justice, founder and president of Hillstone International, visited the White House in 2010 and met with Michele Smith, a top aide to then-Vice President Joe Biden who worked as a liaison to “global government officials and business executives.”

James Biden had no background in construction or international development when he joined the company. Hillstone International’s company profile of James Biden touted his familial connection to Joe Biden as a professional attribute.

“Within six months [of HillStone’s founding], they land these billion-dollar contracts to build homes in Iraq,” recalled Schweizer. “This is part of the Iraqi reconstruction after the war, and who is in charge of the Iraqi reconstruction at the time? Joe Biden, his brother. Now we have a third member of the family, who because of Joe’s position, is cashing in. In this case, taxpayer money is flowing to a member of the Biden family.”

4 – Valerie Biden

Joe Biden’s sister Valerie Biden, who previously managed Joe Biden’s senatorial campaigns in Delaware, financially benefited from donations to her brother’s later presidential campaigns. In 2008, she sent $2.5 million to her political communications firm from Citizens for Biden and Biden for President Inc.

Schweizer described Valerie Biden’s enrichment via Joe Biden’s campaign funding as “legal graft.” He recalled, “When Joe Biden ran for the senate in Delaware — obviously a very safe for him, there hasn’t been a Republican in there for 40 years — what does Joe do? Joe hires his sister to run his campaigns [and] hires her firm as a consultant. As a result, millions of dollars flow to Valerie Biden.”

“It speaks to the pattern [of] the Bidens looking at opportunities to take money, whether it’s taxpayer money, political money, or business money, and steer it to their family members for their benefit,” Schweizer explained.

5 – Ashley Biden

Joe Biden assisted his daughter Ashley Biden by helping her husband, Howard Krein, launch healthcare company StartUp Health in 2011. He arranged a meeting with former President Barack Obama in the Oval Office weeks after the company’s founding.

StartUp Health’s meeting with Barack Obama was a “huge hookup,” Schweizer explained, noting StartUp Health’s securing of an invitation to Health Data-Palooza, a joint conference run by federal government and health industry.

“Health Data-Palooza is very prestigious and very hard to get into,” Schweizer stated. “They get hooked up and they are put front and center in this very important conference, and that’s the beginning of the favors that happen.” Joe Biden gave several private speeches and briefings to the partners and investors of Howard Krein’s business.

Joe Biden’s inside knowledge regarding the Obama administration’s planned healthcare policies afforded Howard Krein a competitive advantage relative to competing healthcare companies, Schweizer held.

Krein is now advising Joe Biden’s campaign on coronavirus matters while StartUp Health plans to invest $1 million in companies developing goods and services pertaining to the novel virus. Politico reported, “Krein simultaneously advising the campaign and venturing into Covid investing could pose conflict-of-interest concerns for a Biden administration or simply create the awkward appearance of Krein profiting off his father-in-law’s policies.”

Schweizer credited the Biden family with expanding the frontiers of American political corruption.

“The Bidens, to me, are unprecedented in the extent and scope of the corruption, because I’ve been doing this for a long time,” Schweizer determined. “I’ve exposed Republicans and Democrats. The most that I’ve ever seen up to this point was a Republican senator from Missouri that had three family members engaged in this kind of behavior. The Bidens now have five, making the Biden Five, in my mind, the the reigning champs when it comes to corrupt behavior in Washington, D.C.”

Breitbart News Daily broadcasts live on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Biden stays silent on Bobulinski claims about family’s business ventures

By Brooke Singman | Fox News

Kimberley Strassel and Gregg Jarrett join ‘Hannity’ to react to claims about the Democratic nominee on ‘Hannity’

Joe Biden and his presidential campaign are staying mum after Hunter Biden’s former business associate went public to say he met twice in the past with the former vice president — despite past statements from Biden on the campaign trail that he had no involvement with or discussions about his family’s overseas business ventures.

That associate, Tony Bobulinski, gave an interview on Fox News’ “Tucker Carlson Tonight” on Tuesday and detailed his alleged meetings with the former vice president—one of which took place on May 2, 2017, according to text messages first reported by Fox News last week.

Those messages indicated that the meeting did, in fact, take place. Bobulinski claimed Tuesday that it was Hunter Biden and Jim Biden, the brother of the former vice president, who had pushed the meeting.

“They were sort of wining and dining me and presenting the strength of the Biden family to get me engaged,” he said.

The Biden campaign declined to comment on the meeting Biden allegedly had with Bobulinski. Biden himself has not yet directly addressed Bobulinski’s claims on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.”

In 2019, Biden told reporters: “I have never discussed with my son or my brother or anyone else anything having to do with their businesses. Period.”

But Bobulinski — in his interview Tuesday — described at length how Joe Biden arrived for a Milken conference, partly held at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, and how he was introduced by Jim and Hunter Biden to the former vice president.

Speaking with Carlson, Bobulinski also claimed Biden’s denials of knowledge in his son’s foreign dealings during the presidential debate was “a blatant lie.”

“I didn’t request to meet with Joe” Biden, he said. “They requested that I meet with Joe [Biden]. They were putting their entire family legacy on the line. They knew exactly what they were doing.”

He asked why the former vice president would want to meet him.

Tony Bobulinski reveals details of conversation with Joe Biden

Video

“Why on 10:38 on the night of May 2 would Joe Biden take time out of his schedule to take time with me, behind a column so people could not see us, to have a discussion with his family and my family and business at a very high level?” he said.

The meeting on May 2, 2017, would have taken place 11 days before a May 13, 2017, email obtained by Fox News, which included a discussion of “remuneration packages” for six people in a business deal with a Chinese energy firm. The email appeared to identify Hunter Biden as “Chair / Vice Chair depending on agreement with CEFC,” in an apparent reference to now-bankrupt CEFC China Energy Co.

The email includes a note that “Hunter [Biden] has some office expectations he will elaborate.” A proposed equity split references “20” for “H” and “10 held by H for the big guy?” with no further details. Bobulinski has repeatedly said “the big guy” was Joe.

Biden has repeatedly denied being involved with his son’s business dealings. placeholder

Bobulinksi, meanwhile, said he was told by CEFC that it was a $10 million deal that would see a $5 million loan to the Biden family and $5 million was their contribution to capitalize SinoHawk Holdings.

The allegations have been denied by Joe Biden and his campaign.

“I have not taken a penny from any foreign source ever in my life,” Joe Biden said at a presidential debate last week. “We learned this president … has a secret bank account with China, does business in China, and in fact is talking about me taking money? I have not taken a single penny from any country whatsoever, ever, ever.”

Separately the Biden campaign has said that it released the former vice president’s tax documents and returns, which do not reflect any involvement with Chinese investments.

“Joe Biden has never even considered being involved in business with his family, nor in any overseas business whatsoever,” Biden campaign spokesman Andrew Bates told Fox News. “He has never held stock in any such business arrangements nor has any family member or any other person ever held stock for him.”

Meanwhile, during the interview, Bobulinski said that the Biden family, in 2017, had shrugged off concerns that Joe Biden’s alleged ties to Hunter Biden’s business deals could put his future presidential campaign at risk. Bobulinski said he raised concerns in 2017 to Jim Biden, about Joe Biden’s alleged ties to the possible joint venture—SinoHawk Holdings, which was a partnership between the CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming and Jim and Hunter Biden.

“I remember saying, ‘How are you guys getting away with this?’ ‘Aren’t you concerned?’” he told Carlson.

He claims that Jim Biden chuckled.

“‘Plausible Deniability,’ he said it directly to me in a cabana at the Peninsula Hotel,” he said.

As for what those deals could mean in a potential Biden administration, Bobulinski said that he believes Joe Biden and his family are “compromised.”

“I just don’t see given the history here and the facts how Joe can’t be influenced in some manner based on the history they have here with CEFC,” he said.

“I think the American people should be demanding that this is investigated,” he said.

Fox News’ Adam Shaw contributed to this report.

Brooke Singman is a Politics Reporter for Fox News. Follow her on Twitter at @BrookeSingman.

Category:

Political

Tagged with:

Perspectives; Thoughts; Comments; Opinions; Discussions

Posts tagged ‘Joe Biden’

Share this:

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Right On Time

Hidden Biden made Time Magazine’s person of the for simply just being a liberal Democrat.

Share this:

Share this:

A.F. Branco Cartoon – D.C. Curmudgeon

After a Fraudulent Election, MS Media, and High Tech converging against Trump Biden returns to the swamp.

Share this:

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Bare Necessities

Minneapolis Police Department is being targeted for defunding under the current left-wing leadership.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – There’s Hunter!

Where’s Hunter? Oh, there he is, now that Joe Biden won the election the media is all over the scandal.

Share this:

Reported by ED MORRISSEY | Posted at 11:15 am on December 10, 2020

The Justice Department’s announcement on Wednesday that it was investigating Hunter Biden, for what he deemed to be “tax affairs,” took root several years ago with a much broader inquiry that included possible money laundering, according to a report by CNN.

A U.S. Justice Department official has confirmed to Sinclair Broadcast Group that a 2019 FBI investigation into Hunter Biden, son of Democratic nominee Joe Biden, is still active.

The 2019 criminal investigation looks into Hunter and his associates on allegations of money-laundering.

Sinclair investigative reporter James Rosen spoke with a central witness in these allegations, who suggested that former vice president Joe Biden knew more than he has acknowledged about his son’s overseas dealings.

One of the main outlets pushing emails and pictures from the hard drive was the New York Post. And for one of its stories, the paper published what appeared to be federal law enforcement documents given to MacIsaac in return for his handing over the Biden laptops.

Share this:

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Operation Warped Deeds

Biden Would like to be the one accredited for the fast-tracked COVID vaccine but this was all Trump’s policies.

Share this:

Share this:

Origins of Obstruction

Unprecedented Partisanship During the Trump Era

Historical Support for Lame-Duck Confirmations

Share this:

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Runaway Truck

Joe Biden appears to be Obama’s 3rd term by the looks of his cabinet choices.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Widespread Censorship

Every day more evidence of election fraud and malfeasance is coming out while the media ignores it.

Share this:

Share this:

A.F. Branco Cartoon – On the Lookout

Gov Walz cares more about enforcing lockdowns for business than he does mobs burning them down.

A. F. Branco Cartoon – The New Abnormal

Some folks are more concerned about mean Trump tweets than handing the country over to Biden’s tyrants.

Share this:

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Political Football

Many folks are accusing Dr. Fauci of continuously moving the science goalpost.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Fatal Attraction

Many feel Biden, Harris and the Democrats have a lot to do with the failure with 2020 election security.

A.F. Branco Cartoon – Trust But Don’t Verify

Democrats fighting against only legal votes being counted in the 2020 election.

Share this:

A.F. Branco Cartoon – The Other Red Wave

If Joe Biden takes over there will be a huge red wave of the communist kind coming.

Share this:

1. 80 Million Votes

2. Winning Despite Losing Most Bellwether Counties

3. Biden Trailed Clinton Except in a Select Few Cities

4. Biden Won Despite Democrat Losses Everywhere Else

5. Biden Overcame Trump’s Commanding Primary Vote

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Reported by John Daniel Davidson | NOVEMBER 18, 2020

The GOTV Effort In Nevada Was Blatantly Criminal

Following The (Taxpayer) Money

This Is Widespread, And Corporate Media Won’t Report It

Share this:

1. 10 Million More Votes

2. 56 Percent of Americans Better Off Than in 2016

3. Nearly 30 Percent Enthusiasm Gap Favoring Trump

4. More People Thought Neighbors Were Voting for Trump

Just as in 2016, polling this election cycle proved decisively wrong. Republicans in the House, Senate, and state legislatures across the country all out-performed polling estimates. Pollsters consistently predicted a Biden blowout, but instead, the race is one of the closest in American history.

5. Trump Still Has 53 Percent Approval

Share this:

Election Code Violations Might as Well Be ‘Fraud’

Ignoring the Election Code Denies Equal Protection

Share this:

Bush v. Gore Already Wrestled with These Concerns

A significant departure from the legislative scheme for appointing Presidential electors presents a federal constitutional question.

If we are to respect the legislature’s Article II powers, therefore, we must ensure that postelection state-court actions do not frustrate the legislative desire to attain the ‘safe harbor’ provided by §5. (Rehnquist concurring, but writing separately; Citations and dicta omitted)

The Changes Disproportionately Helped Biden

What if the Supreme Court Invalidates a State’s Election