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Ruth King

Oh, Well: Nancy Pelosi Reelected as Speaker

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/01/03/oh-well-nancy-pelosi-reelected-as-speaker-n1301342

Nancy Pelosi secured another term as Speaker of the House of Sunday. This will be the fourth (albeit nonconsecutive) term for the controversial San Francisco Democrat.

“As we go into session today, I do so full of pride to be nominated by our Democratic Caucus to be Speaker of the House,” Pelosi said in a letter released prior to the vote. “I am enormously grateful for the trust that Members have placed in me. I am confident that the Speaker’s election today will show a united Democratic Caucus ready to meet the challenges ahead, and that we are prepared to set our country on a new course, starting with the Electoral College meeting on Wednesday.”

Some had suggested that a surprise upset by a Republican could have happened.

While House members could vote by proxy due to emergency rules adopted in May to protect members from getting and spreading COVID-19, those rules expired with the new Congress. Since new rules governing the 117th Congress happen after the vote for speaker, members were required to be physically present to vote for speaker

People of the Lie Journalism dies in the darkness of collusion. Joseph Hippolito *****

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/people-lie-joseph-hippolito/

Many Americans know about the New York Post’s exclusive reporting on Hunter Biden’s questionable foreign business deals that implicated his father: Joe Biden, the ostensible President-elect. Many Americans know Hunter Biden’s laptop provided the information. But most Americans have no idea what else that laptop contained:

— Joe Biden’s private e-mails and cellphone numbers.

— The names and contact information for the former vice president’s Secret Service agents.

— Cellphone numbers for such figures as Rep. Nancy Pelosi, Sen. Harry Reid, Sen. Mitch McConnell, members of President Barack Obama’s Cabinet, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.

— Information identifying Hunter Biden’s passport, driver’s license, Social Security card, credit cards and bank statements.

— Bills for thousands of dollars Hunter Biden spent on pornography and escorts.

No American outlet reported those facts. They came from Britain’s Daily Mail, in another exclusive published Oct. 30, two weeks after the Post’s articles.

“Strangely, the story got little traction in the US media,” the Mail’s Caroline Graham and Ian Gallagher wrote. “Stranger still, Twitter blocked the New York Post’s account while Facebook and Google censored any mention of the article. Under pressure, they relented.”

Stifling that news provides the most dramatic evidence of this disturbing fact: media corporations collude with foreign governments, federal agencies, big business and private foundations to mold public opinion and hide embarrassing facts, often to protect financial interests.

“We are in a scary place right now in the United States,” said Amber Lyon, who won two Emmy Awards for investigative journalism with CNN. “The American public — the poor, trusting American public — are being lied to.”

Lyon saw that collusion at CNN. In March 2011, she covered Bahrain’s brutal response to protesters demanding greater freedom as part of the Arab Spring. Lyon said she was “violently detained” by security.

The 2021 Project ‘Woke’ college students benefit from the slavery of millions of people. Daniel Greenfield

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/2020-project-daniel-greenfield/

In just one month, Obama’s former acting solicitor general argued in defense of Nestle in a child slave labor case before the Supreme Court, Apple and Nike lobbied against a slave labor bill, Apple and Amazon were caught using slave labor, and Nestle, Pepsi, Unilever, and even the Girl Scouts were discovered to be using palm oil harvested by children as young as 10 years old in Indonesia.

Outsourcing American jobs saves money, not just because the cost of living in lower in Third World countries, but because the use of slave labor and child labor is routine in those parts of the world. The ‘wokest’ companies and conglomerates cheer Black Lives Matter while edging out their competitors by using Third World resources harvested by children, by slaves, and, in some cases, by child slaves.

The ‘woke’ mobs are toppling statues of Washington and Jefferson, and then taking videos of their exploits with phones whose components are produced by slave labor, before binging on snacks produced by child labor, while fiercely denouncing 18th century slavery in the 21st century.

That’s the hypocrisy of the 2021 Project.

The ‘woke’ scrutinize 18th century slavery while paying little attention to 21st century slavery. If they want to understand slavery, they don’t need to waste their time with the revisionist history of the 1619 Project, or the ravings of critical race theory, when all they have to do is check their pockets. Literally.

Clothing made in the Third World is usually made in sweatshops. Even if it’s not, the cotton for it is harvested by child and slave labor in China, which doesn’t see the need to invest in expensive farming equipment when it has a surplus of cheap labor, including its own minority population.

The 1619 Project recirculated the old false claims that slavery was America’s original sin. There was nothing original or American about slavery. And the easiest way to understand that is not just to look at slavery thousands of years ago, but to examine the evil persistence of slavery in the present day.

Our Racialist Follies If you really want to stop racism, stop talking like racists. Bruce Thornton

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/01/our-racialist-follies-bruce-thornton/

The latest act in our racialist follies featured Hilaria, née Hillary, Baldwin, the wife of boorish B-movie star Alec Baldwin, being outed for allegedly pretending to be a Spaniard. It seems her Spanish accent and claims to be from Mallorca are fabrications. In fact, according to prep school and university colleagues, she’s an “archetypal northeastern prep schooler,” which is about as “white” as one can get. Twitter rants from Alec Baldwin in his usual semi-literate blustering style ensued, and professional race-hacks leveled the “cultural appropriation” charge.

As usual, what is significant about this charge, whether true or not, is what it tells us about our dysfunctional, incoherent racialist sensibilities, which would be amusing if not for the malign effects on our political and social institutions.

Indeed, in a society claimed to be saturated with “white privilege,” it’s curious that so many “white” people try to link themselves to some ethnic minority or other. Citizens with European roots understand that a touch of the exotic, particularly the varieties designated as “protected classes” like black or “Hispanic,” to be more useful for one’s career than the taint of oppression and privilege that comes from being “white.”

Similarly, mixed-race, light-skinned blacks who once tried to cross the “color-line” by self-identifying as “white”–– especially those today who have been raised in middle-class comfort or upper-class affluence–– now are anxious to affirm their black bona fides no matter how far removed they are from the actual lives of working-class or ghetto-dwelling blacks whose dysfunctions and misery can be appropriated and exploited for political and social leverage.

Even more incoherent are the labels we’re accustomed to use when speaking of ethnic diversity. Overbroad terms like “white” or “black” are holdovers from the age of “scientific racism,” the misguided attempt to impose the Darwinian theory of the “survival of the fittest” on the astonishing diversity, complexity, and variety of human beings across the globe. These categories keep alive the dubious notion that “race,” a pseudo-scientific concept founded on superficial physical differences, tells us more about human identities than do culture, language, customs, class, mores, and religion. As such, racial identity, the rationale for slavery and segregation, is kept alive at the expense of the actual, complex diversity of unique individuals.

THE NRO GOES FULL ANTI-TRUMP

https://www.nationalreview.com/
The Folly of the Cruz Eleven

By The Editors

Eleven GOP senators propose to trample federal law and state sovereignty — and blow a hole in the hull of American democracy.

Trump’s Allies Become the Swamp: The ‘Electoral Commission’ Gambit

By Andrew C. McCarthy

Hawley and Cruz are engaged in a flagrant Washington power grab. If these are the Republicans, who needs Democrats?

Liz Cheney: Objecting to Electoral College Votes Sets ‘Exceptionally Dangerous Precedent’

By John McCormack

The Risky Wager of Betting on Trump

By Andrew C. McCarthy

It was always a dice-roll. But in this moment, the case for having supported the president’s reelection bid is harder to make.

Rural Georgians Believe Trump Was Robbed — It Won’t Stop Them from Turning Out for Loeffler and Perdue By Ryan Mills

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rural-georgians-believe-trump-was-robbed-but-it-wont-stop-them-from-turning-out-for-loeffler-and-perdue/

Atlanta — Michael Edens can see it in his mind: tractors, cattle trailers, Harley Davidsons and hot rods – really, any wheeled vehicle he can tie an American flag to – parading across the Interstate 85 overpass on Sunday afternoon, a show of force in his rural Georgia town.

It will be a parade, he said, to celebrate America, “the greatest nation that’s ever existed.”

Edens, 53, a heavy machinery mechanic who wears a big, black cowboy hat and quotes liberally from the Bible, believes that now is the time for Republicans like him in rural Georgia to stand up and fight. With the rally and parade he’s organizing on Sunday afternoon in his hometown of Carnesville, Edens hopes to encourage his neighbors to speak up for President Donald Trump, and to go out to vote for Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in Tuesday’s runoff elections.

And with the parade of farm vehicles stretching across the interstate, he wants to “catch the attention of everybody from California to New York State, right here in Carnesville, Georgia, so they know when they come into the rural areas how the rural people feel.”

If they want to win on Tuesday – and if Republicans want any chance of maintaining control of the Senate –  Loeffler and Perdue need passionate supporters like Edens to help them get out the vote in places like Carnesville, a blue-collar town of about 600 people at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Carnesville is the kind of place where tractor dealers outnumber big-box stores, and where truckers hauling lumber or crates of chickens rumble through don’t-blink-or-you’ll-miss-it downtowns.

The Trump-Hating Media Prepare For A Long Nap Under Biden

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/31/mad-at-2020-dont-be-it-was-the-far-left-trump-hating-media-who-made-it-such-an-awful-year/

Nearly all would agree that 2020 has been a miserable year. A major reason for that misery, apart from the Chinese COVID-19 pandemic, was the utter failure of the American media. Our information purveyors no longer tell the truth or deal in facts, but rather trade in bankrupt far-left theories of wokeness, political correctness and cancel culture.

And now that Joe Biden could be our next president, the big media’s soft gloves will go back on. No more tough questions, according to The Atlantic.

“As the White House beat became the biggest story in the world, once-obscure correspondents were recast in the popular imagination as resistance heroes fighting for truth, justice, and the American way. They were showered with book deals, speaking gigs, and hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers,” wrote McKay Coppins in a piece titled: “The Resistance’s Breakup With the Media Is at Hand.” He goes on to wonder what those who “got famous fighting with (President Donald) Trump” will do next?

The answer appears to be “coast.”

“I don’t think the press should be trying to whip up the Biden presidency and turn it into must-see TV in a contrived way,” CNN White House reporter Jim Acosta told The Atlantic.

Biden Then: Trump Is Rushing COVID Vaccine; Biden Now: Trump Is Going Too Slow

https://issuesinsights.com/2021/01/04/biden-then-trump-is-rushing-covid-vaccine-biden-now-trump-is-going-to-slow/

Joe Biden has started attacking the Trump administration for not getting the COVID vaccines distributed fast enough. It’s the exact opposite of what Biden was saying before the election.

“As I long feared and warned, the effort to distribute and administer the vaccine is not progressing as it should,” Biden said last week.

As he “long feared and warned”? Who is he kidding?

Before the election, the only fear Biden expressed was that Trump was making wildly unrealistic claims about how quickly a vaccine could be developed, and that Trump was putting pressure on regulators to rush approval. “I trust scientists,” Biden said in September, “But I don’t trust Donald Trump, and at this moment, the American people can’t either.”  He added that “The idea that there’s going to be a vaccine and everything’s gonna be fine tomorrow – it’s just not rational.”

Biden also said that even if a vaccine did miraculously emerge by Election Day, it wouldn’t be available to most Americans until “well into 2021.”

Meanwhile, the only warning Biden issued was that the country faced “a dark winter ahead.”

So what actually happened? Two vaccines were developed by Election Day, and both were quickly approved by federal regulators on an emergency basis.

What Happens if No One Wins? John Yoo and Robert Delahunty (10.19.2020)

https://americanmind.org/salvo/what-happens-if-no-one-wins/

*This article was co-written with Robert J. Delahunty, a law professor at St. Thomas University.

The Constitution provides for election crises—and its provisions favor Trump.
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Welcome, and thanks for subscribing to the Roundup, where you’ll receive our summary of The American Mind every week in your inbox. We’re looking forward to bringing you the best writing and commentary on the ideas that drive the debate in this pivotal time for our nation.

Conservatives and liberals agree on few things, but one of them is that the country may well see an election crisis this year. All of the ingredients seem to be present: a closely and bitterly divided electorate; the threat of violence and disruption on Election Day or after; and the unusual circumstances of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In this essay we provide a short roadmap through the main legal and constitutional issues that could arise if Election Day fails to result in a clear winner of the presidency, identify opportunities for political mischief, and explain why the weight of the constitutional structure favors President Donald Trump in a contested election.

Unusual Circumstances

A crucial fact in this year’s election is that, largely because of COVID, an unprecedented number of voters will vote by mail. According to the Washington Post, 84% of the electorate, or 198 million eligible voters, will be able to vote by mail this year. In the 2016 election, roughly 25% of the votes were cast by mail. This year, as many of half the ballots may be mailed in.

Republicans tend to prefer voting in person while Democrats tend to prefer absentee balloting. In the swing state of North Carolina, Democrats requested 53% of the absentee ballots and Republicans 15%. A July poll reported that 60% of the Democrats in Georgia, but only 28% of the Republicans, are likely to vote by mail.

Charles Lipson :Inauguration Day Symbolizes Our Enduring Constitution We must restore a sense of legitimate elections & “loyal opposition”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/01/03/inauguration_day_symbolizes_
SORRY BUT THIS IS LIKE ASKING A VICTIM TO CELEBRATE HIS ATTACKERS ACQUITTAL….RSK

Recent political talk has focused almost entirely on Jan. 5 (the Georgia Senate runoffs) and Jan. 6 (congressional certification of the Electoral College results). Important as they are, we also should remember Jan. 20. On that day Americans will witness a truly remarkable tradition: the peaceful transfer of power between opposing parties. Such handovers are extremely rare in history and a towering, hard-won achievement. Our next one is worth celebrating, regardless of how you voted.

It is especially important for Donald Trump to attend this one since he has contested the November outcome so aggressively. Those challenges have gone well beyond formal legal contests. He has rallied supporters to challenge the legitimacy of the election outcome. That rallying cry needs to end, even as legal battles continue. It is time for President Trump to signal his public recognition that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and that he and the Republican Party are now the “loyal opposition.”

The losers’ presence at the inauguration serves two crucial functions. First, it makes clear that they accept the winner as legitimate. Like the swearing-in of members of Congress and Supreme Court justices, it tells all Americans that our top officials hold their positions rightfully.

Second, it shows that defeated candidates and their party are integral features of our ongoing constitutional process. Their presence says they will continue to seek election and work within that framework.

The losing side has every right to challenge the election’s integrity in court. Trump has done so repeatedly and failed each time. That’s partly because it is nearly impossible to swiftly prove “fact claims,” such as voter fraud. Still, Trump’s legal team has held numerous press conferences and public hearings to assert they have incontrovertible proof. Their claims have convinced die-hard believers but not trial judges, appellate courts, or state legislatures. Repeating these claims of a “stolen election,” without convincing the courts, rends the country’s already-fraying political fabric.