Displaying posts categorized under

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

NJ Councilman, Three Others Charged with Voter Fraud as Democrats Continue to Push for Voting by Mail Ellie Bufkin

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/elliebufkin/2020/06/30/four-men-charged-with-voter-fraud-in-new-jersey-n2571445

Democrats and their media surrogates have uniformly chosen to reject any notion that voting by mail could result in fraudulent results, despite ample evidence to the contrary. But against their narrative, four men in New Jersey were indicted last week for committing voter fraud related to mail-in ballots. 

Attorney General Gurbir S. Grewal announced on Thursday that current Paterson City Council Vice President Michael Jackson along with Councilman-elect Alex Mendez were being charged along with two others in fraud related to the May 12 election. According to the charges, all four men are facing multiple counts of ballot tampering and incorrect ballot handling related to the election. 

Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Paterson election for city council members faced the unique obstacle of being relegated only to vote-by-mail, something President Trump has lambasted throughout the national crisis. On election day, Jackson and Mendez, along with Shelim Khalique, brother of councilman Shahin Khalique, and Abu Razyen allegedly violated several election laws by collecting said mail-in ballots from voters’s homes and incorrectly delivering them to the Board of Elections. 

Jackson is further charged with possessing ballots that were not his nor was he assigned the bearer. One of those ballots was reportedly unsealed and unmarked by a voter but was later turned in to the Board of Elections sealed. Mendez is also charged with registering voters he knew to be ineligible to vote in the municipal election. 

The reported actions of these four men caused one in five ballots cast on the May 12 election to be removed as ineligible. More than 3,000 ballots were ruled by the Board of Election to be unqualified for counting. 

1 Week After Mayor Promises To Close CHAZ, Councilwoman Blames CHAZ Shootings On ‘Capitalism’s Brutality’ By Tristan Justice

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/30/1-week-after-mayor-promises-to-close-chaz-councilwoman-blames-chaz-shootings-on-capitalisms-brutality/

Socialist Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant blamed “capitalism” for yet another shooting in the city’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” (CHAZ), also known as the “Capitol Hill Occupied Protest,” (CHOP) Monday.

Sawant, a member of the left-wing group “Socialist Alternative,” which advocates for a $15 minimum wage and free college among a litany of other far-left fantasy items, said Monday’s shootings in the anarchist utopia that left a 16-year-old dead and a 14-year-old critically injured “highlights capitalism’s brutality & endemic violence.”

“Our movement rejects insinuations & falsehoods perpetuated by corporate & conservative media that this violence is outcome of CHOP or of our movement,” Sawant wrote. Except that this is at least the area’s fourth shooting within two weeks, and the second to become fatal, according to Seattle’s King5 News.

Media Are Playing Games Yet Again With Anonymous Russia Leaks

https://thefederalist.com/2020/06/30/media-are-playing-games-yet-again-with-anonymous-russia-leaks/

Watch nearly the entire corporate media establishment run wild with claims from completely anonymous sources in the intelligence community this week.

Much of the case for the Iraq War was based on the Bush administration’s claim that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. When the United States declared an end to the war late in 2011, more than 4,400 American military members had been killed and nearly 32,000 wounded. No weapons of mass destruction had been found.

It’s one of the most significant and catastrophic intelligence errors in U.S. history. A bipartisan commission found that U.S. intelligence “seriously misjudged” Iraq’s weapons program because of their “heavy reliance on a human source–codenamed ‘Curveball’–whose information later proved to be unreliable.” The commission wrote, “Even more misleading was the river of intelligence that flowed from the CIA to top policymakers over long periods of time–in the President’s Daily Brief (PDB)” and other reports that were “more alarmist” and “less nuanced.”

Curveball was Germany’s codename for Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, an Iraqi defector who claimed to have built mobile weapons laboratories. President George W. Bush highlighted the claims in his 2003 State of the Union address.

Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations on February 5, 2003, relied heavily on Curveball’s claims. “My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence. I will cite some examples, and these are from human sources.”

Powell went on to describe Janabi’s claims at length, concluding, “This defector is currently hiding in another country with the certain knowledge that Saddam Hussein will kill him if he finds him. His eyewitness account of these mobile production facilities has been corroborated by other sources.”

Years later, Curveball admitted he had completely fabricated his claims out of a desire to oust Saddam Hussein from power.

Kneeling in the Church of Social Justice America certainly has work to do on race, but ritual and symbolic acts aren’t the way forward. John McWhorter

Over the past several years, a social justice philosophy has arisen that is less a political program than a religion in all but name. Where Christianity calls for people to display their moral worth through faith in Jesus, modern Third-Wave Antiracism (henceforth TWA) calls for people to display their moral worth through opposition to racism. In the wake of the murder of George Floyd, this vision has increasingly been expressed through procedures, routines, and phraseology directly patterned on Abrahamic religion.

America certainly has work to do on race. For one, while racism does not explain why cops kill more black than white people—poverty makes all people more likely to be killed by the cops, hundreds of poor whites are killed annually, but more black people are poor—they harass and abuse black people more than white people, and the real-life impact of this is in its way just as pernicious as the disparity in killings would be. If the tension between black people and the cops were resolved, America’s race problem would quickly begin dissolving faster than it ever has. But making this happen will require work, as will ending the war on drugs, improving educational opportunities for all disadvantaged black children, and other efforts such as steering more black teenagers to vocational programs training them for solid careers without four years of college. 

These are real things, upon which we must behold scenes like in Bethesda, where protesters kneeled on the pavement in droves, chanting allegiance with upraised hands to a series of anti-white privilege tenets incanted by what a naïve anthropologist would recognize as a flock’s pastor. On a similar occasion, white protesters bowed down in front of black people standing in attendance. In Cary, North Carolina, whites washed black protesters’ feet as a symbol of subservience and sympathy. Elsewhere, when a group of white activists painted whip scars upon themselves in sympathy with black America’s past, many black protesters found it a bit much.

America’s current straits represent the victory of 1960s radicals Roger Kimball

https://nypost.com/2020/06/29/americas-current-straits-represent-the-victory-of-1960s-radicals/

Many people think the chance to say “I told you so” is a source of pleasure. This isn’t necessarily the case. Sometimes one’s insight is more mournful than gratifying.

A case in point: Back in September 1982, in a note on the inaugural issue of The New Criterion, the late Hilton Kramer, the founding ­editor of the magazine I lead, wrote: “We are still living in the aftermath of the insidious assault on the mind that was one of the most repulsive features of the radical movement of the 1960s. The cultural consequences of this leftward turn in our political life have been far graver than is commonly supposed.”

Indeed. A good index of the success of a cultural revolution is the ­extent to which it manages to render the ideas and values it set out to subvert not merely “problematic” but inert. A counterculture has really triumphed when it ceases to ­encounter significant resistance, when its values seem not merely victorious but inevitable.

That is where we are today.

America’s cultural revolution, launched in the late 1960s and never quite stopped, has always been a Janus-faced phenomenon. One face was the Boomers’ euphoric hedonism and disregard for the moral guardrails of tradition and authority — the “revolution” of easy sex and relentlessly bad taste that now defines our aesthetics and cultural arrangements.

Andy Ngo: Do Politicians Really Want Police to ‘Let the Rioters Destroy and Kill’ With Impunity? By Tyler O’Neil

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/06/29/andy-ngo-eviscerates-nadlers-claim-that-antifas-role-in-riots-is-imaginary-n586315

On Monday, Andy Ngo, editor-at-large at The Post Millennial, testified before the House Oversight Committee, powerfully rebutting Rep. Jerry Nadler’s (D-N.Y.) insistence that when it comes to the protests and riots spreading across America after the horrific police killing of George Floyd, the presence of antifa instigators is “imaginary.” Ngo, who has suffered serious injury from antifa attacks, is a living rebuke to such claims.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) noted that Ngo’s name did not appear on the Democrats’ web page for the hearing. “Mr. Ngo, why do Democrats try to ignore you?” Jordan asked.

“I don’t know if it’s intentional,” Ngo responded. “I’ve written for very major publications about this very violent threat.” He noted that Portland has experienced “thirty-straight days of violent rioting downtown” following protests over the death of George Floyd.

Jordan asked Ngo to respond to the claim that antifa is “imaginary.”

“Yes, it’s real,” the journalist responded. “When I heard that, I was quite surprised.” He held up police affidavits in criminal cases against self-described members of antifa.

Will Governors Make The Same Mistake Twice With Lockdowns?

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/06/29/will-governors-make-the-same-mistake-twice-with-lockdowns/

With a recent spike in coronavirus infections, no doubt due to the nationwide riots and demonstrations whipped up by the Democrats since late May, some governors are reversing their earlier easing of economic restrictions. It’s a huge and costly mistake.

At least 10 states and cities are either putting their reopenings on hold or actually imposing new lockdown rules.

Arkansas, Delaware, Idaho, Louisiana, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington have hit the “pause” button, according to recent press reports. Meanwhile, the U.S.’ three most populous states, California, Florida and Texas, have reversed their reopenings, in essence reimposing a lockdown.

Supposedly it’s a response to 27 states reporting big rises in new coronavirus cases.

But those spikes have two main causes: One, more testing finds more infections. So cases are naturally “spiking”. Two, recent demonstrations, riots and other non-socially distanced activities led to an increase — with nary a peep from the Democratic “progressive” left, which cynically hopes to ride the wave of coronavirus cases into the White House and a congressional majority.

In fact, the data are clear. The lockdowns had no real impact on the virus’ spread. But they did have a devastating impact on the economies where they were introduced.

“Residents and business owners in states under a COVID shutdown mandate from their governors are suffering far more job loss,” according to data crunched by the Kansas Policy Institute. “May private-sector employment in those 43 states was 13.1% lower than a year ago, but the states not shut down by their governors only lost 7.7% of their private job base.”

So, if politicians do their citizens the non-favor of re-closing parts of their economies in the mistaken belief that doing so will halt the spread of coronavirus, they will be making a major error, one that will cost us dearly as a nation.

“Even if lockdowns were the best strategy, the authorities, espousing and imposing them repeatedly, undermined their legitimacy,” wrote former U.S. Treasury official (and Issues & Insights contributor) J.T. Young on The Hill web site. “Authorities have so discredited the lockdowns that there is little chance lockdowns can be reimposed at their prior level — even if they are needed.” 

The Reparations Fallacy 1619 Project author demands America pay up. Joseph Klein

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/reparations-fallacy-joseph-klein/

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) said during a speech on the floor of the House of Representatives last week that “Black Lives Matter is a mandate from the people. It’s time. Pay us what you owe us.” Pressley is a demagogue. We are not living in a mob-run democracy of the “people.” We live in a constitutional republic. Americans don’t owe Pressley (speaking for “us”) anything except her salary – even that’s a stretch given her performance.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the leader of the New York Times’ historically flawed 1619 Project on black slavery as the central theme of America’s identity, at least tried, albeit unsuccessfully, to present persuasive arguments and selective bits of history in support of her call for reparations. She wrote an extensive cover story for the June 28th edition of The New York Times Magazine, entitled “What is Owed.”

Nikole Hannah-Jones demands recompense in the form of an unspecified amount of reparations for the “centuries of meticulously orchestrated inequities” that she says still persist. She claims that these inequities give white Americans a “centuries-long economic head start that most effectively maintains racial caste today.” Hannah-Jones further argues that “the lack of wealth has been a defining feature of black life since the end of slavery,” which has been caused by “400 years of racialized plundering.” She plays down the significance of legal progress on civil rights during the last 70 years, beginning with the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation decision and including legislation prohibiting discrimination in housing, employment and voting rights.

Remdesivir Gets a Price Tag of $3,210 Despite Showing No Evidence of Decreasing COVID-19 Deaths By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/columns/stacey-lennox/2020/06/29/remdesivir-gets-a-price-tag-of-3210-despite-showing-no-evidence-of-decreasing-covid-19-deaths-n586084

EXCERPT:

Hydroxychloroquine

Another drug that costs a fraction of what remdesivir does is hydroxychloroquine. It is used in combination with azithromycin and zinc. This drug was highly politicized early in the pandemic because the president expressed hope that it could be effective.

At that time, doctors in the United States who were using the drug combination were clear. It should be used early in the infection, especially in those in high-risk groups. However, the emergency use authorization given by the FDA provided the drug to individuals suffering from severe disease. As discussed above, many of these patients are suffering from a complex, multi-system illness that requires more than a drug combination that slows viral replication.

However, Yale researcher Harvey Risch, M.D., Ph.D., has done a review of studies where the drug combination was used in an outpatient setting. Five studies, including two controlled clinical trials in process, convinced him to conclude in his abstract (emphasis mine):

Hydroxychloroquine+azithromycin has been used as standard-of-care in more than 300,000 older adults with multicomorbidities, with estimated proportion diagnosed with cardiac arrhythmias attributable to the medications 47/100,000 users, of which estimated mortality is <20%, 9/100,000 users, compared to the 10,000 Americans now dying each week. These medications need to be widely available and promoted immediately for physicians to prescribe.

Sidney Powell Drops a Bomb or Two on the Glaring Problems With the Flynn Case By Stacey Lennox

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/stacey-lennox/2020/06/29/sidney-powell-drops-a-bomb-or-two-on-the-glaring-problems-with-the-flynn-case-n588095

Sidney Powell won a significant victory when her writ of mandamus was granted by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals requiring Judge Sullivan to dismiss the case against General Michael Flynn. At this time, Judge Sullivan has not entered the dismissal. Powell sat down with Jan Jakielek for an extended interview about the case and dropped a few bombs in the process.

Powell began by saying it is extraordinary that Judge Sullivan has not complied with the order. In her experience, this would typically occur within 24-48 hours. The briefing and hearing schedule have both been canceled, but the case has not been formally dismissed. She added the full court could review the case, but in this circumstance, it would be unprecedented.

Her interest in the case was ongoing before she signed on the replace General Flynn’s prior defense team. Powell reports having ongoing concerns about the case, especially related to Andrew Weismann. Referring to him as the “lead villain” in her book “License to Lie,” she explained the prosecutor had a long history of making up crimes, hiding exculpatory evidence, and railroading people with the enormous power of the federal government.