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October 2022

January 6th Versus the Durham Revelations. Victor Davis Hanson

https://victorhanson.com/january-6th-versus-the-durham-revelations-part-one/

There are now two concurrent Washington, D.C.-area dramas.

One is the last gasp of the politically motivated January 6th Committee hearings.

The proceedings have been restarted to coincide with the final stretch of the midterms and to give Rep. Lynn Cheney a last appearance of political legitimacy, before in defeat she loses public attention.

She will be soon orphaned from her current leftwing aficionados who (only) temporarily appreciate her useful idiocy. And her former conservative loyalists see her apostasy as self-obsessed narcissism and teeth-gnashing for naively betting on the complete and lasting disgrace of Donald Trump, the supposedly successful, bipartisan “healing” administration of Joe Biden, and the “return of sanity” of the Republican Party to presentable and nobly losing Washington-centric Romneyism and McCainism. She lost in a landslide in Wyoming, but had she been running for a national office, she would have lost any such effort by a comparable margin.

For all its pathetic virtue signaling, the committee could never get around the fact that Speaker Pelosi, by vetoing Republican appointees, had turned the proceedings into a Soviet-style show trial.

Why Democrats Are Losing The Midterms With Trump out of the spotlight, voters are focusing on how far left the Democratic Party has turned.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-democrats-are-losing-john-fetterman-mehmet-oz-fracking-pennsylvania-far-left-u-s-senate-11666821289?mod=opinion_lead_pos1

Commentary on Tuesday night’s Pennsylvania Senate debate is mostly about Democrat John Fetterman’s unfortunate struggles communicating in the wake of his May stroke. But for our money the most telling moment was Mr. Fetterman’s response to a question about his previous opposition to fracking for natural gas. It sums up why the election tide is moving against Democrats and may cost them the House and Senate.

“I’ve always supported fracking,” Mr. Fetterman said when pressed by a moderator. He later added that, “I do support fracking and I don’t, I don’t—I support fracking, and I stand, and I do support fracking.”

His stumbles over his real position is understandable because his pro-fracking conversion, if that’s what it is, is recent. “I don’t support fracking at all and I never have,” Mr. Fetterman told a YouTube channel in 2018 when running for lieutenant governor. “And I’ve, I’ve signed the no fossil fuels money pledge. I have never received a dime from any natural gas or oil company whatsoever.”

In 2016 Mr. Fetterman said in a comment on Reddit that “I am not pro-fracking and have stated that if we did things right in this state, we wouldn’t have fracking.” He added that he had “signed the Food and Water Watch’s pledge to end fracking.” Republican Mehmet Oz hammered Mr. Fetterman on the old quotes in Tuesday’s debate.

The Media’s Cover-Up of John Fetterman No amount of spin can undo what voters witnessed on the debate stage last night in Pennsylvania. Peter Savodnik

https://www.commonsense.news/p/the-medias-cover-up-of-john-fetterman?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

It should now be crystal clear why Democrat John Fetterman refused to take part in more than a single debate with his Republican Senate rival, Mehmet Oz, and why Fetterman insisted on pushing that debate to just two weeks before Election Day—after at least 500,000 Pennsylvania voters had already voted.

Last night’s debate was an unmitigated disaster. 

A disaster for Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor—who appeared confused and could barely manage a coherent sentence, let alone a complete paragraph.

And a disaster for Pennsylvania voters, who didn’t get the tough, substantive debate they deserved, one that would have pushed Oz to explain, among other things, why he was distancing himself from Donald Trump (without whom he wouldn’t be the nominee); his position on abortion; China; and how he plans to bring down gas prices.

Oz had some solid talking points, but they were just that—talking points. But Fetterman lacked even those.

You can watch the whole debate here:

CRISIS IN PENNSYLVANIA – 255,000 UNVERIFIED NEW VOTERS SENT BALLOTS – CANDIDATES BETTER CONTACT THEIR LAWYERS By Jim Hoft

https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/new-numbers-released-pennsylvania-indicate-massive-ballot-fraud-255000-unverified-voters-candidates-demand-decertification-immediately/

Pennsylvania Democrat officials sent out 240,000 255,000 ballots to people they could not verify either by their Social Security or Driver’s License numbers.

The ballots should NEVER have been sent out to these voters.

Fifteen Republican State Representatives sent a letter to Acting Secretary of the Commonwealth Leigh Chapman after they discovered that over 240,000 illicit ballots were sent out in the state prior to the 2022 midterm elections.

Deputy Secretary Jonathan Marks testified in September before the Pennsylvania House that counties are responsible to verify the voter ID when a completed ballot arrive to the county. The counties argued that this was nonsense. The ID must be verified before a ballot is even sent out.

According to Pennsylvania law, these ballots must now be set aside. They can’t be counted in the November 8th election until the voter produces an identification.

You can bet that very few of these counties will set these ballots aside. This is how Democrats cheat.

These ballots must be set aside before election day.

This report was released on Wednesday by Verity Vote, an election integrity investigative organization.

You can review and download a copy of the report here.

From the report — At least 243,000 unverified votes were sent out in Pennsylvania — NEARLY A QUARTER OF A MILLION ILLEGAL BALLOTS!

DeSantis Leads Democratic Challenger Among Hispanic Voters By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/25/desantis-leads-democratic-challenger-among-hispanic-voters/

With two weeks left to go until the 2022 midterms, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) is currently leading Democratic challenger Charlie Crist (D-Fla.) with Hispanic voters in the state.

As reported by The New York Post, the latest poll from Telemundo and LX News shows that 51 percent of Floridian Hispanics would vote for DeSantis, while 44 percent support Crist. Only 4 percent remain undecided, with another 1 percent opting to support someone else in the race.

The poll’s findings further indicate that DeSantis will likely win re-election comfortably this year. By contrast, exit polling from the 2018 gubernatorial election showed DeSantis losing the Hispanic vote by 10 points to his Democratic rival in that election, former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum.

Along more specific lines, DeSantis leads Crist by 50 points among Cuban voters, a significant voter bloc in Florida, with 72 percent to Crist’s 22 percent; Crist, by contrast, leads by a smaller margin among Puerto Ricans, with 59 percent to DeSantis’ 37 percent.

The two candidates are tied among female voters, at 48 percent each, and among voters aged 49 and younger, at 47 percent each. DeSantis leads among Floridians who were born in America, with 48 percent to Crist’s 47 percent, while maintaining a much more commanding lead among Floridians who were not born in America, with 56 percent to Crist’s 40 percent.

America’s ‘Acute’ Foreign Policy Disarray by Pete Hoekstra

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19034/america-foreign-policy-disarray

Saudi Arabia is deeply concerned… that the Iran agreement will soon be back on the table…. The Saudis quite correctly believe that that the new Iran deal, rather than stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons, would actually pave the way to nuclear weapons, in addition to giving Iran’s despotic regime up to a trillion dollars — if the mullahs would please just not use the nuclear weapons on the Biden administration’s watch.

While the grisly murder of Osama bin Laden’s close friend Jamal Khashoggi was far from acceptable, the sad reality is that the Kingdom is no more guilty of unspeakable behavior than are Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, Turkey Venezuela, Qatar or a number of other nations that the Biden administration and the international community are cozying up to.

Many onlookers believe that the Saudi move is a direct signal to Biden about Saudi Arabia’s concerns over the “stalled” but apparently not-quite-ended-yet nuclear deal with Iran.

Although Biden supposedly will examine all aspects of the U.S.-Saudi relationship, he threatened the kingdom with “consequences” — reportedly by suspending arms sales — all because Saudi Arabia is trying to defend itself from being potentially obliterated by an openly hostile Iran.

The U.S. seeks to harshly punish any country opposed to U.S. efforts for a questionable nuclear agreement that would empower Iran, and vastly enrich it and its numerous terrorist proxies, including the Houthis, Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Through them, Iran is already effectively in charge of four countries in addition to its own: Lebanon, Syria, Yemen and Iraq.

If the U.S. really believes Russia is an acute threat, the U.S. should act as if it is and stop propping up Russia’s allies, such as Iran.

The U.S. should be working with countries in the Middle East to support efforts against Russia and Iran’s regime.

No wonder questions are being raised as to just how “compromised” Biden might actually be.

The U.S. would do well to stop this foolish obsession with getting a new Iran nuclear deal. It is inconsistent with the rest of America’s values, foreign policy and national security interests. Send a clear message to Russia, Iran’s mullahs, Europe, the Middle East — and, most importantly, to Iranian and American citizens — that the Iran nuclear deal, finally, is dead.

The confusion and lack of clarity in the current administration’s foreign policies are growing ever more dangerous for US national security.

Political Mislabeling: Violating the Public Trust by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19036/political-mislabeling

Buried within the volumes of federal statues is a regulation that allows the Department of Justice to pursue those who mislabel a food product with a penalty provision that warns the guilty party “shall be imprisoned for not more than one year or fined not more than $1,000, or both.”

Federal prosecutors will surely go after you if you mislabel fruit as organic when it is not.

In fact, state and federal law enforcement agencies have a blizzard of regulations they can harness when a manufacturer, company or individual engages in what can be described as deceptive consumer practices.

It would appear, however, that the one area not particularly well policed is Washington’s fondness for labeling things as they would like you to believe as opposed to what they are.

Take the president’s “Inflation Reduction Act.”

His plan allocates approximately $300 billion in “Deficit Reduction” and $369 billion in “Energy Security and Climate Change” programs over the next decade. It is a plan that will inundate the economy, already wracked with record inflation, with money still wet from federal printing presses. It is a plan that has no more connection to reducing inflation than the oil companies have in reducing their pump profits. It is a not so polite fiction and it begs the question: If we can go after someone who mislabels organic carrots, why can’t we pursue the type of political mislabeling that puts the nation’s economy at risk?

Equally questionable is how, where and by whom the billions inside the “Energy Security and Climate Change” program will be administered. Consider the credentials of President Joe Biden’s pick to direct this program, John Podesta.

If honesty in labeling was applied to Podesta’s resumé, it would be noted that he was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager and founder of what The New York Times describes as a left-wing think tank. How is this political operative America’s choice to distribute what a cynic might describe as, potentially, one of the nation’s largest political slush funds in history? Were that the case, the idea of labeling it as a “climate change” fund would certainly be reason to open a file to investigate the suggestion of “consumer fraud.”

Special Counsel John Durham Discredits the Press The way back to sanity for America is for the media to rediscover its interest in truth. Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/durham-discredits-the-press-fbi-investigation-media-lying-trump-falsified-evidence-collusion-leak-illegal-informant-11666729641?mod=opinion_featst_pos1

“The collapse in societal trust that some perceive is, first and last, a collapse in trust in the media that creates the environment in which elites either get away with their lies or don’t. This has been a hell of a moment for our major press institutions to be overrun by epistemological chaos, to be tangled up in a foolish quest for “post-objectivity” that predictably (as with Trumpism) delivers the opposite of the desired result precisely because it discredits the media. It’s a hell of a time, while almost everybody worth reading heads to Substack, for our remaining news-reporting elites to be hiding behind “without fear or favor” when it’s the opposite of how they do business.”

Only John Durham can say why he proceeded as he did. The 45-year veteran prosecutor was assigned to examine the FBI’s decisions related to the Trump collusion investigation. Aside from an early guilty plea from an FBI lawyer who falsified evidence, he pursued only two outside informants for allegedly lying to the agency.

Some on the right blame him for not going after FBI officials directly, though it’s not clear what these officials might be charged with. Incompetence is not a crime. Illegal leaks are a crime but notoriously hard to prove in court.

The dumbest journalism, though, reasons (without saying so) that Mr. Durham is a colossal failure because he was somehow assigned, or assigned himself, to fulfill the fantasies of Donald Trump. An adjective-overloaded piece by Margaret Carlson in the Washington Monthly dissolves into nothingness when you realize how completely she relies on this premise without betraying any awareness that she’s relying on it.

My own guess is Mr. Durham viewed his informant indictments as merited but orthogonal to his larger purpose. He was counting on civil society, i.e., the press, to lead a necessary conversation about the FBI’s role in 2016 and after.

No, Professors, White Students Are NOT Inherently Racist Confronting the Left’s maze of linguistic distortions. by Rob Jenkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/no-professors-white-students-are-not-inherently-racist/

One of the Left’s favorite tactics is to define or redefine a word to suit their purposes, then act as though that’s the only possible definition and the rest of us must simply go along.

Take “racism,” for example, or better yet “racist,” an epithet leftists love to hurl at anyone who disagrees with them or even at people they simply don’t like.

Indeed, Campus Reform and other conservative outlets have been reporting for years on university professors and administrators who insist that “all white people are racist.” The latest example comes to us from Dominican University in Illinois, which this fall will host a “White Accountability Group.”

There, white students will “explore how to recognize…white privilege [and] identify and interrupt internalized dominance”—because, you know, they’re all a bunch of racists.

But it’s true that all white people are racists ONLY if we accept the Left’s perverse definition. Otherwise, it’s pure nonsense.

Before we examine what leftists mean by “racism” and why they’re wrong, I’d like to look briefly at a few words they often use more or less interchangeably with “racism” but which don’t actually mean the same thing.

Netflix Obama Propaganda A close look at what Netflix is paying Barack and Michelle millions of dollars for. by John Stossel

https://www.frontpagemag.com/netflix-obama-propaganda/

Netflix is paying Barack and Michelle Obama millions of dollars to produce shows for them.

The latest Obama documentary series is “The G Word.” “G” for government.

As Netflix documentaries go, this one is remarkably stupid. It’s big-government propaganda.

Obama begins by claiming that he does his own income taxes, saying, “It’s actually easy.”

I think he’s joking, but it’s not clear.

“I’m amazing at them,” Obama continues hours later. “You can be, too, if you use the helpful tools found at IRS.gov.”

But that’s just silly. It’s so complex that millions of us pay to get help.

Obama’s series is hosted by silly comedian Adam Conover. Conover, correctly, calls himself “an idiot.”

He uses his time with the former president of the United States to make lame jokes and, at one point, to make sandwiches. He compliments Obama on how well he cuts the bread. It’s not funny.