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Ruth King

Wait a Second—Who is That With Dan Crenshaw in His Georgia Runoff Ad? By Bryan Preston

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/12/14/wait-a-second-who-is-that-with-dan-crenshaw-in-his-georgia-runoff-ad-n1211008

I had to do a double-take: Who is that alongside Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-Texas) in his “Georgia Reloaded” ad? Is that who I think it is?

Here’s a closer look.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw’s “Georgia Reloaded” video. Screenshot from YouTube.

Guys…guys.That’s Marcus freakin’ Luttrell.

The Lone Survivor. The former SEAL. The man who literally never quits.

Dan Crenshaw and Marcus Luttrell, both Texans, are banding together to save Republican control of the Senate in the upcoming Georgia runoffs. It means something, or at least it should, to have two young, bona fide American war heroes and Purple Heart recipients stepping up to campaign despite not being on the ballot.

Republican Mackenzie Kelly Wins Austin City Council Runoff. Local Paper Declines to Cover It By Bryan Preston

https://pjmedia.com/election/bryan-preston/2020/12/16/republican-mackenzie-kelly-wins-austin-city-council-runoff-local-paper-declines-to-cover-it-n1215133

In a stunning upset, Republican Mackenzie Kelly defeated Democrat incumbent Jimmy Flannigan in Austin’s District 6 runoff Tuesday. Kelly ran on a platform that includes restoring police department funding and ending the city’s permissive homeless camping ordinance. She won with 52% to Flannigan’s 48%, a margin of just about 700 votes overall.

Kelly’s win, and Republican Jennifer Virden’s near-win in District 10, may signal a major shift in Austin voters’ thinking. The Democrat-dominated city was already up in arms over the homeless camping ordinance, which allows homeless people to camp just about anywhere they want all over the city (except city hall) since the council passed it unanimously in the summer of 2019. That has led to encampments under overpasses and even on the fringes of neighborhoods all over Austin. Those camps are unsanitary and unsafe; one of them recently burned.

Then the pandemic struck, and Mayor Steve Adler took an authoritarian approach that has, among other things, badly damaged the city’s once-vibrant live music scene (and his own credibility). #SaveOurStages became a force in the city because Adler and the city council’s policies are harming one of Austin’s trademarks, destroying many residents’ ability to make a living at all.

Jill Biden’s Doctorate Is Garbage Because Her Dissertation Is Garbage By Kyle Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/jill-bidens-doctorate-is-garbage-because-her-dissertation-is-garbage/

Her dissertation is not an addition to the sum total of human knowledge.

You can tell someone is smarting from an inferiority complex when he insists on being addressed as “Dr.” on the basis of holding an academic doctorate rather than being a physician. Ph.D. holders who have genuine accomplishments don’t make you call them “Doctor,” which is why you never hear about “Dr. Paul Krugman” and “Dr. George Will.” None of the professors I knew at Yale, even the ones who were eminent in their fields, insisted on the title, and I think most of them would have scoffed if someone had addressed them as “Dr.” The only reason you ever hear the phrase “Dr. Henry Kissinger” is that Kissy grew up in title-mad, airs-and-graces Germany, where people are awed rather than dismissive even if you insist on a triple-serving title (“Herr Professor Doktor”).

Insisting on being called “Doctor” when you don’t heal people is, among most holders of doctorates, seen as a gauche, silly, cringey ego trip. Consider “Dr.” Jill Biden, who doesn’t even hold a Ph.D. but rather a lesser Ed.D., something of a joke in the academic world. President-elect Joe Biden once explained that his wife sought the degree purely for status reasons: “She said, “I was so sick of the mail coming to Sen. and Mrs. Biden. I wanted to get mail addressed to Dr. and Sen. Biden.” That’s the real reason she got her doctorate,’” Joe Biden has said.

Mrs. Biden wanted the credential for its own sake. As for its quality, well. She got it from the University of Delaware, whose ties to her husband, its most illustrious alumnus if you don’t count Joe Flacco, run so deep that it has a school of public policy named after him. That the University of Delaware would have rejected her 2006 dissertation as sloppy, poorly written, non-academic, and barely fit for a middle-school Social Studies classroom (all of which it is) when her husband had been representing its state in the U.S. Senate for more than three decades was about as likely as Tom Hagen telling Vito Corleone that his wife is a fat sow on payday. The only risk to the University of Delaware was that it might strain its collective wrist in its rush to rubber-stamp her doctoral paper.

Andrew Cuomo Continues His Assault on the First Amendment By David Harsanyi

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/andrew-cuomo-continues-his-assault-on-the-first-amendment/

If he had his way, New York governor Andrew Cuomo would do to the Constitution what he’s already done to the elderly of his state. This week, he signed a bill banning the sale of “hate symbols” such as the Confederate flag, swastikas, and “white supremacist” imagery on state property. Of course, neither Cuomo nor the state legislature is empowered to decide what constitutes “hate symbols,” much less selectively ban them — even if New Yorkers had any interested in selling these symbols on state property, which doesn’t seem to be the case. But all of this is just virtue-signaling, as the kids say: a way to get people who still believe in liberal values to sound like they’re defending ugly things like the Confederate flag rather than a neutral principle.

Then again, perhaps there’s familial confusion over the issue of speech rights among the Cuomos. You may remember Chris, who earned his law degree at Fordham, informing his followers that “hate speech is excluded from protection” in the Constitution. (It isn’t.) Now Andrew Cuomo, who earned his law degree at Albany Law School, argued that his ban would “safeguard New Yorkers from the fear-installing effects of these abhorrent symbols,” as if his bailiwick or anyone’s else’s in government is to protect you from seeing things you don’t like. If it were, nursing-home residents would be throwing copies of Cuomo’s book American Crisis into a raging bonfire.

“This country faces a pervasive, growing attitude of intolerance and hate — what I have referred to in the body politic as an American cancer,” Emmy-award winning Cuomo, quoting himself, says in his approval message. This is a wholly paranoid — or crassly cynical — view of American life, but also irrelevant. There is no “hate” exception to the Constitution just as there is no coronavirus exception.

Cuomo, whose great tolerance once led him to say that conservatives weren’t welcome in New York, was recently rebuffed by the Supreme Court for targeting the free religious expression of New York’s orthodox Catholics and Jews with his COVID diktats (the governor called the Supreme Court’s decision “irrelevant.”) Cuomo is a perfect illustration of why the state should never be empowered to adjudicate the limits of free expression. It is not difficult to imagine what an aspiring authoritarian like Cuomo, who regularly smears his political opponents as hatemongers, would do with such power.

New Documents Show Hunter Biden Requesting $10 Million From Chinese On Behalf Of ‘Entire Biden Family’ By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/16/new-documents-show-hunter-biden-requesting-10-million-from-chinese-on-behalf-of-entire-biden-family/

New documents reported by Fox News Wednesday offer more details into a $10 million deal outlined between Hunter Biden and Chinese businessmen with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party, adding fuel to ongoing scandals plaguing President-elect Joe Biden, big tech, and big media.

According to correspondence obtained by Fox, Hunter Biden reportedly offered his “best wishes from the entire Biden family” to CEFC Chairman Ye Jianming in 2017 and urged the Chinese business partner with deep ties to the Chinese Communist Party to wire over $10 million to “properly fund and operate” a joint Biden venture.

“I hope my letter finds you well. I regret missing you on your last visit to the United States,” Hunter Biden wrote in a June letter. “Please accept the best wishes from the entire Biden family as well as my partners.”

In the same letter, Biden continued to note Tony Bobulinski, a Biden business partner-turned whistleblower this year, requested the $10 million dollar transfer from Ye’s associates.

“I would appreciate if you will send that quickly,” Biden wrote, to fund the Biden-led firm Sinohawk in partnership with Bobulinski who would serve as CEO.

Joe Biden Doubles Down On Hunter’s Innocence As New Reporting Emerges By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/16/joe-biden-doubles-down-on-hunters-innocence-as-new-reporting-emerges/

President-elect Joe Biden doubled down on his son’s innocence Wednesday as new reporting emerges with more insight into Hunter Biden’s overseas business ventures while also being the subject of two FBI probes examining the family finances.

“Are you confident that Hunter Biden did nothing wrong?” a Fox News reporter asked President-elect Joe Biden during a Wednesday press conference.

“I’m confident,” Biden said simply and moved on to the next question.

The show of certainty comes one week after the Biden-Harris transition team released a statement reiterating the president-elect’s support for his son along with a note from Hunter Biden himself acknowledging the existence of a Justice Department investigation examining Hunter’s taxes.

“President-elect Biden is deeply proud of his son, who has fought through difficult challenges, including the vicious personal attacks of recent months, only to emerge stronger,” the team said.

Florida Is Open, New York Is Closed: The Weaponization Of Covid By Christopher Bedford

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/16/florida-is-open-new-york-is-closed-and-the-latter-has-more-covid-deaths/

Despite larger populations, currently freer peoples, and a media narrative that screams otherwise, there are far, far fewer deaths in Texas and in Florida than in New York.

Thus far in Florida, approximately 20,000 people have died of COVID-19. In Texas, the number stands around 24,000, and in New York, about 35,000.

New York is the smallest of the three, with 19.54 million residents. Then comes Florida, with 21.67 million, before Texas, with 28.7 million residents.

COVID numbers are difficult to trust. Cases are often counted more than once as patients go in and out of the hospital, and some deaths are attributed to COVID that are barely related, if at all.

There’s a perverse incentive to write down “COVID” and get state and federal money, no doubt, but one thing rings clear through all the din: Despite larger populations, currently freer peoples, and a media narrative that screams otherwise, there are far, far fewer deaths in Texas and in Florida than in New York.

For months, American media consumers have been treated to news of Florida and Texas’s incoming death spirals. For months after, we were promised those death spirals were just around the bend. The funny thing with COVID, though, is unlike global warming doom science — always 3-12 years away and “too complex” to explain when it inevitably doesn’t happen — COVID doom predictions are checkable in just a few weeks. And COVID doom didn’t happen.

‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country’ By Patricia McCarthy

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/12/now_is_the_time_for_all_good_men_to_come_to_the_aid_of_their_country.html

‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country’

The above sentence was devised by Charles E. Weller as a typing drill.  Originally the last two words were “the party” but typing books long ago changed that to “their country.”  Suddenly it seems a very important call to arms, so to speak.  The United States as founded is certainly under attack; that has been true almost from the beginning.  It began in earnest with the election of Abraham Lincoln and his intent to end slavery.  The racists hated Lincoln easily as much as our left hates Trump and for pretty much all the same reasons.  Clearly it is the left today that values skin color and sexual orientation over any and all other human characteristics.  

That Lincoln prevailed until he didn’t was a miracle.  Trump’s 2016 victory was an unexpected lightning bolt for left that assumed a Clinton victory was in the bag.  

Then there was the Woodrow Wilson administration and his “progressive” (racist) agenda.  His crowd too wanted to diminish the profundity of the Constitution.  In short, there have always been anti-freedom anarchists among our population thanks in part to the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution they want to shred because “it was written by old white men.”   They could not care less about the fact of those men’s brilliance, courage, dedication and loss that went into the writing of that singular document.

They Stole It Fair And Square: Steven Hayward

• The Democrats stole the election fair and square. Of course I don’t mean that literally; what I mean is that the election was effectively stolen months ago before any ballots were cast when legislatures (and sometimes governors and state courts such Pennsylvania) changed the voting rules to allow expanded mail-in voting, and the cascade of related vulnerabilities that followed. Republican legislatures that went along with these COVID-induced panic changes were foolish if not derelict in their duty. And the Trump campaign was negligent in not fighting against this months ago. President Trump was correct to warn about this outcome. Why wasn’t his campaign better organized to resist this months ago? (I know they did file a few lawsuits, a few of which had some effect, but it wasn’t enough.) I suspect the long-rumored campaign infighting and attention to other things distracted Trump’s senior campaign managers from paying sufficient attention to this.

• Fraud is very easy in our election system. Remember that our elections are run by part-timers, amateurs, and volunteers on the county level in America—and we have over 3,000 counties. In such a diffuse system it is easy to conjure up a few dozen votes here, a few hundred votes there. Or worse. It is at once a glory of self-government in America that we actually conduct our elections in this decentralized way involving tens of thousands of citizen volunteers. It is also astounding that we use such a vulnerable and chaotic system to choose our president.

• So the problem with vote fraud is that a remedy is difficult to apply. There aren’t good remedies. If a race is within a few hundred votes or less, a recount or ballot challenges can work to reverse the outcome, though not often. The plain fact is that once a fraudulent ballot is inside the ballot box and counted, it is very hard to get it back out of the box and un-counted. Fraudulent ballots need to be intercepted before they reach the ballot box. It is likely not possible to disqualify enough ballots to change the outcome in three states, which is what Trump would need. The statistical anomalies of this election are good circumstantial evidence of vote fraud, but exactly which ballots, or which vote totals, do you change, and how?

No court is going to overturn an election result on circumstantial evidence and affidavits of incorrect polling place procedure alone. (I reserve judgment for the time being about the Dominion computer system question.) And the thorough fact-finding necessary for judicial intervention would take time that we haven’t got. This is why both the Constitution and most state election statutes make the legislatures the arbiters of presidential election results.

Wisconsin Supreme Court rules state erred by giving blanket exemption to voter ID rules during COVID Ruling opens door to challenge potentially tens of thousands of ballots in state where difference between Biden, Trump is just about 20,000 votes.

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/wisconsin-supreme-court-rules-state-erred-giving-blanket-exemption-voter

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled Monday that state and local election officials erred when they gave blanket permission allowing voters to declare themselves homebound and skip voter ID requirements in the 2020 election, potentially opening the door for Republicans to challenge tens of thousand of ballots.

In a case challenging the practice in Dane County, one of Wisconsin’s large urban center around the city of Madison, the state’s highest court ruled only those voters whose “own age, physical illness or infirmity” makes them homebound could declare themselves “indefinitely confined” and avoid complying with a requirement for photo ID.

The mere existence of a COVID-19 pandemic and shutdown orders was not sufficient under Wisconsin law for all persons to skip the voter ID requirements to seek to vote absentee, the justices ruled.

“We conclude that both the contention that electors qualify as indefinitely confined solely as the result of the COVID19 pandemic and the declared public health emergency and the contention that Wis. Stat. § 6.86(2)(a) could be used for those who ‘have trouble presenting a valid ID’ are erroneous because those reasons do not come within the statutory criteria,” the court ruled.