Reject Federal Takeover of Elections—Again Nancy Pelosi wants to force California’s absurd and corrupt voting system on the rest of the nation. By Rick Manning

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/22/reject-federal-takeover-of-elections-again/

Yogi Berra once said, “It’s déjà vu all over again.”

That is exactly how Americans must feel as they learn that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is trying to ram through another bill orchestrating a federal takeover of elections, despite the previous failed attempt in the Senate.

The bill, H.R. 4, is expected to come up in the House of Representatives this week, and it is stunning in its breadth. In short, Pelosi would give broad, sweeping powers to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division to rewrite every state and local election law in the country.

This desperate attempt to preserve Pelosi’s razor-thin congressional majority became even more frenzied after the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 30 ruling in Brnovich v. DNC. In Brnovich, the court decided 6-3 that Arizona did not have discriminatory intent, nor did its policy of disqualifying votes cast outside of a person’s precinct and the prohibition on ballot harvesting have a disproportionate impact on racial minorities.

The court tapped the brakes on Democrats’ attempts to institutionalize ballot harvesting, a corrupt voting process that allows nongovernmental officials to collect and turn in ballots. The court’s limited ruling did not overturn California’s Wild West voting system, where ballots are collected on street corners by political operatives who may or may not submit them to county officials for counting, but only affirmed that other states are not required to to permit this dubious practice in their states.

And that has Pelosi’s Democrats steaming mad.

Their response is H.R. 4, which sets up a convoluted and very easy to reach set of criteria for the U.S. Justice Department to take over state and local elections.

This is not a passive review of local laws, but quite literally a takeover. It would end simple reforms like commonsense voter identification laws under the guise that they are somehow racist. Among other absurdities, Justice Department attorneys would also be able to move the locations of every polling place and dictate locations for nonsecure ballot drop boxes.

It’s easy to imagine California’s system of mailing ballots to every registered voter would be pressed on the rest of the nation. Remember, a 2019 Judicial Watch lawsuit compelled Los Angeles County to purge 1.5 million inactive voters from the voting roster after the completion of two federal elections. Before that purge could occur, these inactive voters received 1.5 million ballots mailed to apartment complexes and other locations where many of these inactive voters no longer lived.

What could go wrong?

Well, the 2020 presidential General Election in Los Angeles County produced a miracle.

Nearly 15 Million Mail-in-Ballots Unaccounted for in 2020 Election, Report Says By Matthew Vadum

https://www.theepochtimes.com/nearly-15-million-ballots-unaccounted-for-in-2020-election-report-says_3955184.html

In the November 2020 general election, whose chaotic results have been vigorously disputed, almost 15 million mail-in ballots went unaccounted for, according to a good-government group that focuses on electoral integrity.

The research brief by the Indianapolis-based Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) notes that as the nation dealt last year with the CCP virus (which causes COVID-19), various U.S. states “hastily pushed traditionally in-person voters to mail ballots while, at the same time, trying to learn how to even administer such a scenario.”

PILF describes itself as “the nation’s only public interest law firm dedicated wholly to election integrity,” existing “to assist states and others to aid the cause of election integrity and fight against lawlessness in American elections.”

Former Justice Department civil rights attorney J. Christian Adams, now president of PILF, said the results don’t bode well for mail-in voting.

“These figures detail how the 2020 push to mail voting needs to be a one-year experiment,” Adams said in a statement.

Bills pending in Congress such as H.R. 1, the proposed “For The People Act,” “risk inflating these numbers even further, pushing our election system toward error, disenfranchisement, and ultimately widespread doubt about election outcomes,” Adams said.

“Some of the counties with the least experience in administering mail voting rejected the most ballots nationwide. If continued, 2020-style chaos will become the norm.”

PILF says it had warned that lost ballots would be an even bigger problem in 2020 compared to previous years. In total, elections in 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 saw more than 43.1 million unaccounted for mail-in ballots.

Federal data compilations show that during the 2020 election, there were 14.7 million ballots whose whereabouts were deemed “unknown” by election officials, according to the brief.

To gather the data, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission asked local officials how many ballots were not returned as voted, were undeliverable, or were otherwise “unable to be tracked.”

The Drossy Touch of Joe Biden A cognitively challenged Biden is pulled in every direction, by left-wing politicos collecting their debts, by his own spite, by his trademark narcissism, and by his hatred of all things Trump. By Victor Davis Hanson

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/22/the-drossy-touch-of-joe-biden/

Almost everything Joe Biden has touched since entering office has turned to dross. None of his blame-gaming, none of his distortions, none of his fantasies and unreality can mask that truth.

The Afghan Catastrophe

 Seven months ago, Afghanistan was relatively quiet—with about 10,000 vestigial NATO troops, including 2,500 Americans, anchored by the Bagram Airfield. They were able to provide air superiority for the coalition and Afghan national army. With air power, NATO forces, if and when they so wished, could have very slowly and gradually withdrawn all its remnant troops—but only after a prior departure of all American and European civilians, coalition contractors, and allied Afghans. 

The transient calm abruptly imploded as soon as Joe Biden recklessly yanked all U.S. troops out in a matter of days. Many left in the dead of night, leaving no one to protect contractors, dependents, diplomats, and Afghan allies. In Biden’s world, civilians protect the last Western enclave while soldiers flee.

Three weeks ago, Joe Biden and a woke and politicized Pentagon were assuring us that Afghanistan was “stable.” Now the country is reverting to its accustomed premodern, theocratic, and medieval chaos. It will likely soon reopen as the world’s pre-9/11-style terrorist haven—an arms mart of over $50 billion in abandoned U.S. military equipment. Thanks to the president of the United States, terrorists and nation-state enemies can now shop for arms and train there without hindrance. 

The NATO coalition-builder Biden also dry-gulched his European allies, whose soldiers outnumbered our own. The humanitarian “good ole Joe from Scranton” deprecated the thousands of Afghan military dead who had helped the Americans. The families of the American fallen and wounded of two decades were all but told by Biden that the catastrophe in Kabul was inevitable—no other way out but chaos and dishonor. Why did he not tell us that earlier, when he was vice president, so many dead and wounded ago?

“Get over it,” was Biden’s messaging subtext. If Americans want to hear the blame game, he told us to scapegoat Barack Obama, or all prior presidents, or especially Donald Trump, or the intelligence services and military, or the Afghan army, or we naïfs who somehow think things are a mess right now in Kabul—or anything and everyone but Joe Biden.

Was Biden’s idea simply to get the United States “officially” out of Afghanistan and let the abandoned 10,000-plus Americans manage as they can? 

Was Biden angry over our 20-year presence and thinking the Afghans would deserve what followed? Was he so delusional that he really believed the NATO forces could easily deter the Taliban with sanctimonious lectures from National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Deputy Secretary of State Wendy R. Sherman? The latter is a former head of EMILY’s List and an architect of the Iran Deal, so were she and others especially scarifying to naughty theocrats when they warned they might lose their slot in the “rules-based world order”? Or did Biden believe the Taliban would be deterred by Sherman’s exclamations, such as her ominous warning, “This is personal for me!” 

The Inflation Fiasco

In January, Biden inherited a rebounding economy that was fueled by $1 trillion in stimulatory federal red ink. Given natural pent-up consumer demand, why did Biden need to print yet another $1 trillion, seek to green-light another $2 trillion for “infrastructure,” and raise even higher unemployment compensation to the point of discouraging employees from returning to work?

France Deploying Special Forces to Evacuate French Civilians From Afghanistan By Eric Lendrum

https://amgreatness.com/2021/08/20/france-deploying-special-forces-to-evacuate-french-civilians-from-afghanistan/

The French military has deployed their special forces to the crumbling nation of Afghanistan to evacuate their citizens, even as the leadership of the American military claims that they are incapable of doing the same, according to the Washington Free Beacon.

French special forces have already succeeded in evacuating at least 400 civilians from the capital city of Kabul, including both French citizens and Afghan civilians who aided French forces in the war. The successful rescue efforts took place just outside the Hamid Karzai International Airport, the city’s main airport which has been secured by the Taliban, and thus has become a scene of pure chaos after the fall of the nation’s Western-backed government.

In addition to French efforts, British special forces have been similarly evacuating their citizens from the besieged capital city in the days since Sunday, when Kabul fell to the Taliban.

These successful European efforts have been carried out even as American military leaders have claimed that the United States is incapable of conducting such operations. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said at a press conference on Wednesday that “the forces that we have are focused on the security of the airfield…we don’t have the capability to go out and collect up large numbers of people.”

There are currently thousands of American citizens still trapped in the Taliban-controlled nation, in addition to thousands of Afghan civilians who assisted the American military over the course of the 20-year war. The sudden collapse of the nation to Taliban forces directly contradicted Joe Biden’s prediction back in July that it was “highly unlikely” that the Taliban would overrun the country prior to the final departure of American forces, which was set for August 31st.

Following the fall of Kabul on Sunday, which led to Afghan President Ashraf Ghani fleeing the country, thousands of Afghan civilians stormed the airport in a desperate attempt to escape Taliban rule. Stunning videos showed hundreds of Afghanis surrounding an American Air Force jet as it was taxiing on the runway, with several men clinging to the landing gear. Shortly after the aircraft took off and reached an altitude hundreds of feet in the air, some of the men who still held on could be seen falling to their deaths.

The chaos has led to universal condemnation of the Biden Administration, from across the political spectrum in the United States as well as within the international community. Many have likened the disaster to the Fall of Saigon in 1975, which marked the end of the Vietnam War, with some even declaring the Fall of Kabul to be even worse.

The Dreadful Consequences of the Biden Disaster in Afghanistan by Guy Millière

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17673/afghanistan-dreadful-consequences

Most of the Afghan army, after they saw the American military pulling out of the Bagram air base, might understandably have decided not even to try to fight. The “trillion dollars spent training and equipping hundreds of thousands of Afghan National Security and Defense Forces” with “advanced weaponry” has led to that US-provided “advanced weaponry” falling into the hands of terrorists it was meant to fight — a donation from US taxpayers to what is now the world’s best-armed terrorist state.

[T]he US has had troops in Germany and South Korea for about 70 years – a relatively modest “insurance policy” that never seemed “forever.” Ironically, by handing over Afghanistan to the same Taliban that hosted Al Qaeda, which murdered nearly 3,000 people on 9/11, the US is not only making a mockery of these victims; it will soon find itself having to fight at an even greater cost in life and treasure as countries trying to eliminate America can now do it without American troops nearby, and with America’s military equipment.

The French, British, Germans, Australians and Czechs have been venturing behind enemy lines to rescue their stranded citizens hiding there; Americans have not. The Pentagon and the State Department have admitted that they do not even know how many Americans are in the country; how could they know where they are?

Trump reportedly expected to leave a residual troop force in place, and apparently had a plan for an orderly military withdrawal — based strictly on conditions on the ground. These presumably included not departing in the middle of the Taliban’s summer fighting season, but in winter, when they shelter in Pakistan; not neglecting to consult with America’s European allies, and not surrendering the main US air base, Bagram, before evacuating Americans and their allies, whom they had promised to rescue should plans not work out.

Trump seems to have understood what the Biden administration ignores: that terrorists are probably not all that susceptible to diplomacy, but to strength — as Osama bin Laden put it… to “the strong horse”.

After days of silence, Biden read a 19-minute speech saying that he stood behind his decision to leave Afghanistan, and even accused he Afghan security forces, which had sacrificed an estimated 66,000 men. Biden left the press conference without answering questions and returned to Camp David where he resumed his vacation”. Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi praised his “strong leadership”.

Pakistan is more deeply linked to the Taliban’s victory than the United States might care to admit.

“Of all the foreign powers involved in efforts to sustain and manipulate the ongoing fighting, Pakistan is distinguished both by the sweep of its objectives and the scale of its efforts, which include…. soliciting funding for the Taliban, bankrolling Taliban operations, providing diplomatic support…, arranging training for Taliban fighters…, planning and directing offensives, providing and facilitating shipments of ammunition and fuel, and on several occasions apparently directly providing combat support.” — Human Rights Watch.

China, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, and the Taliban have different worldviews, but do possess three things in common: they are enemies of the United States and the Western world, they want to see the United States humiliated and defeated, and they want to eliminate the United States from the region. The United States has been humiliated, defeated and eliminated from the region. Its enemies have won.

Those who love the United States, however, believe that without its strength and power, American liberty and freedom would quickly vanish from creation. Seeing what the Biden administration has done in just seven months to weaken America and strengthen its enemies has been nothing short of shattering. One can only hope for a change of course, a return to real leadership, before more damage is done.

The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban is a debacle for the United States; the consequences will take shape fast. The Biden administration and President Joe Biden himself have an overwhelming responsibility for what is taking place and what will follow; they have shown a degree of incompetence unseen in the United States since the calamitous Carter years.

On July 8, President Biden said, “the Afghan troops have 300,000 well equipped — as well equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban”. A Taliban takeover of the country, he added, was “not inevitable”. He was wrong. Most of the Afghan army, probably after they saw the American military pulling out of the Bagram air base, understandably decided not even to try to fight.

The war with radical Islam is ongoing By Abraham H. Miller

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/08/the_war_with_radical_islam_is_ongoing.html

In the wake of Biden’s unmitigated catastrophe in Afghanistan, he has been attempting to assuage his incompetence by providing the public with the false choice between leaving and committing America to an endless war.

Even after we leave Afghanistan, we will still be engaged in an ongoing war, for the war with radical Islam does not take two parties. Radical Islam has been at continual war with the West since the hordes of Muslims emerged from the Arabian Peninsula and fought their way into Western Europe to be stopped in France by Charles Martel and centuries later by the Polish cavalry at the gates of Vienna.

Osama bin Laden demanded that Spain (Andalusia) be returned to Islam, for whatever is once Islam’s is always Islam’s, according to the terrorist who brought down the twin towers on September 11.

Even among Muslims who seek refuge in the West, there is a faction that seeks not to assimilate into Western culture but to replace Western democracy with a fundamentalist version of Islam. “To hell with your democracy,” reads signs that are held high by fundamentalist demonstrators on the streets of London.

Obviously, these people do not represent Islam in the West, but it only takes two or three radicalized people to foment a terrorist operation and cast a stain on an entire community.

Muslim communities, like all immigrant communities, are divided. The majority seek to go about their business and make a decent place for their families, but there is a segment that feels alienated from life in the old world and unable to surmount the cultural barriers to life in the new.  There is a reason that Muslim would-be terrorists are disproportionately not foreign but homegrown, many are American citizens.

As long as there are Muslim societies extolling the virtues of terrorism as Islamic virtues, there will be alienated Muslim youth in Western society that will heed the call. Therefore, beyond the strategic consequences of the fall of Afghanistan to the fundamentalist Taliban, Afghanistan will present a signal to those who are susceptible to mobilization by fundamentalist ideology. The Biden administration has been oblivious to both the obvious strategic consequences of its debacle in Afghanistan and the impact a Taliban-dominated Afghanistan will have on mobilizing terrorists in the West.

None Dare Call It Conspiracy By Janet Levy

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/none_dare_call_it_conspiracy.html

Fifty years ago, journalist Gary Allen set out to write a book to prove conservative anti-communists wrong.  But while researching, he realized he had not seen the “hidden picture.”  There indeed was a conspiracy, shielded by a narrative advanced by liberal academia and the mainstream media, both actually in the service of an elite cabal that included Rockefeller, Ford, Morgan, Rothschild, Loeb, Kennedy, and Carnegie.  No longer willing to dismiss “right-wing conspiracy theorists,” he titled his book, published in 1971, None Dare Call It Conspiracy.  It was a surprising bestseller: more than four million copies were sold during the 1972 presidential elections.  Many received it as gifts through an informal grassroots distribution system.

What Allen claimed to have discovered was that a plutocracy of 3% of the population covertly controlled the lives of the rest.  They had wrested control of the constitutional republic, with its separation of powers, limited government, and competitive free enterprise, and turned it into a system of centralized control by a few.  How was this achieved?  According to Allen, the conspiratorial clique was hidden and protected by a complicit media establishment they own and control.  Also, they are accomplished liars and farseeing planners.  Their subversive tour de force has been to advance the lies that a) communism is inevitable and b) communism is a movement of the downtrodden.  The first lie aims to destroy the will to fight, the second to gain support of the poor masses and justify the destruction of a vigorous, innovative middle class.

Allen offers an alternative, realistic definition of communism: an international conspiratorial drive for power on part of men in high places, who are willing to use any means for global conquest.  In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels said a proletarian revolution would necessitate a temporary socialist dictatorship, which would give way to full-on communism if three things were achieved: a) the elimination of private property rights, b) the dissolution of the family, and c) the replacement of religion with Marxist ideology.  These, in fact, are exactly what academia and left-wing groups in America are pushing for, today and when Allen wrote the book.

But all that, as Allen claims, is an elaborate ruse.  Behind it are the super-rich.  We are blinded to this because we believe they stand to lose the most in a socialistic set-up.  Allen backs his counterintuitive conclusion with the fact that communist countries are in fact always ruled by an oligarchical group — the nomenklatura — that controls wealth, production, and the lives of the rest of the population.  Thus, socialism is a movement to consolidate wealth in the hands of a few, creating not a classless society, but one with just two classes: an elite and a proletariat, with no middle class.

With the U.S. Out of Afghanistan, Will Iran Move In? What exactly do the Mullahs want from the Taliban? Hugh Fitzgerald

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/us-out-afghanistan-will-iran-move-hugh-fitzgerald/

Analysts now suggest that with the American forces completely out of Afghanistan, Iran’s forces may be tempted to move in. This was the subject of speculation several weeks ago, before anyone contemplated the magnitude of this weekend’s debacle in Afghanistan: “Experts fear Iran will move in after US leaves Afghanistan,” by Tara Kavaler, The Media Line, July 16, 2021:

With the US set to complete its troop withdrawal from Afghanistan by the end of August, regional analysts fear Iran will fill the void.

The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and its proxies already exercise a powerful influence in the region, be it in Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon or the Palestinian territories.

In all of those countries, however, the Shi’a are much more in evidence than they are In Iran. In Yemen, the Shi’a are 50% of the population; in Iraq they are 70%; in Lebanon they are 40% of the population; in Syria the Shi’a are close to 15% of the population, and in addition, they also control the Alawite-officered army. But in Afghanistan, the Shi’a are only 10% of the population and, unlike the Shi’a (Alawites, Ismailis, Twelvers) in Syria, do not control the military. The Shi’a in Afghanistan are ethnically distinct: almost all of them belong to the Hazara tribe, while the Sunni population consists of Pashtun, Tadjiks, and Uzbeks.

Iran is trying to use the situation in Afghanistan both to present itself as a mediator between the Afghan groups, and in the future, as Iran has always done, trying to turn every threat into opportunity,” Dr. Raz Zimmt, an Iran specialist at the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, told The Media Line.

“And if we see what happened in the Arab Middle East over the last decade, where the chaos and the civil wars actually provided Iran with opportunities to be more engaged and more involved, I can’t rule out the possibility that this will happen as well in Afghanistan,” Zimmt said.

The Taliban and the Iranian leadership are not obvious bedfellows, as the former are Sunni extremists, and the latter are radical Shi’ites.

After America Now that the US has pulled up its drawbridge, how will the Free World defend itself? Melanie Phillips

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/after-america-melanie-phillips/

Much deserved opprobrium has been heaped upon US President Joe Biden for his shameful recent remarks justifying his decision to cut and run from Afghanistan. He blamed everyone but himself for the Taliban’s expedited return to power, and accused the Afghan army — who have lost almost 70,000 soldiers fighting the Taliban — of having 

collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight… American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves… We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.

The Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat subsequently made an emotional and blistering speech in the House of Commons emergency debate. You can watch his speech here.

Tugendhat served in Afghanistan both as a soldier and as an adviser to the governor of Helmand province. He spoke about the soldiers who had died in Afghanistan, the good men he had watched going into the earth and who had taken with them “a part of all of us”. He said how proud he had been to be decorated by the American 82nd Airborne Division after the capture of Musa Qala in 2006. Making an effort to compose himself, he went on:

To see their Commander-in-Chief call into question the courage of men that I fought with, to claim that they ran; it’s shameful. Those who have never fought for the colours they fly should be careful about criticising those who have.

He went on to raise the issue that must now be preoccupying all who have depended upon the United States as the principal defender of the free world. For as I wrote here, the US has now shown itself to be a faithless ally and the weak link in that defence. 

As a result, said Tugendhat, there was now a need to 

reinvigorate our European NATO partners, to make sure we are not dependent on a single ally, on the decision of a single leader, but that we  can work together with with Japan and Australia, France and Germany, with partners large and small and make sure that we hold the line together.

Australia Begins Mass Vaccination of Children Parents’ presence not permitted. Katie Hopkins

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/08/australia-begins-mass-vaccination-children-katie-hopkins/

The video clip below is hard to watch. It is the Prime Minister of Australia giving a press statement regarding the ‘mass vaccination’ of 24,000 Australian children.

Scott Morrison is talking about children in Year 12 — usually aged 16 and 17.

You will hear him say they are planning to “get through” 24,000 kids “this week.”

You will hear him say that mums and dads are NOT permitted to be present.

You will hear him say the children will be ushered to their jabs by members of the Youth Command and Police.

And he goes on to liken this mass injection of children as an opportunity — an opportunity to be grasped with both hands. He even tries to draw a parallel with Olympic athletes (presumably because this mass event is happening at the Olympic Park), inferring that Olympic athletes would also tell parents to grab this opportunity, like their child might win a gold medal for compliance.