The Destruction of Election Integrity: Your City Could Be Next by Lawrence Kadish

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18498/destruction-of-election-integrity

The language could not be any clearer. You can participate as a voter in our American democracy if you are a citizen, over 18 years of age on Election Day, and meet certain state requirements regarding residency and registration – except in some areas of our nation which, inexplicably, now “allow non-citizens to vote in local elections only.”

What still stands unchallenged is that in all federal elections you must be a citizen of our nation where our leaders are chosen by individuals who are either born into that solemn responsibility or have sworn:

“I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America …”

Unless of course if you are living within the five boroughs of the City of New York, where the criteria for voting in local elections has been redefined to meet a Progressive political agenda while broadening the potential for ballot harvesting.

In the closing days of 2021, the New York City Council approved legislation that will allow nearly one million documented non-citizens to vote in local elections. For people seeking to displace our Constitution and alter the very fabric of our nation, this action, coupled with open borders, essentially loads the dice for their candidates, their manifesto, and for non-citizens having an increasingly large say in how America’s cities are run.

In an NPR interview, San Francisco State University political science professor Ron Hayduk suggests that because securing citizenship is a long and challenging task, immigrants should be given the right to vote regardless of their status. But that, Professor Hayduk, is the whole point. One should need to work hard to achieve the priceless gift of deciding how the most populous parts of our country are governed. Allowing non-citizens to vote creates an overwhelming voter advantage on any given Election Day for people who are not American citizens.

Given President Biden’s current dismal showing in the polls, and that last year alone, more than two million new arrivals poured across our southern border — many of whom are being secretly spirited in the dead of night by our government to cities throughout America and with millions more on the way — significant number of Americans are indicating that they are losing confidence in how major issues facing our nation are being managed. The idea of non-citizens lining up to vote will surely have much appeal to those who feel that they cannot win elections if only American citizens are allowed to vote.

“Hypocrisy of the Left”- Sydney Williams

http://swtotd.blogspot.com

If what we are hearing about Roe v. Wade is true, perhaps Congress will do what it should have done forty-nine years ago – pass a law that reflects the will of the people, rather than depend on the opinions of nine Supreme Court Justices.

“The best defense is a good offense,” is an adage that has been used by many, from George Washington to Mao Zedong. It has been adopted by the Democrat Party. Elon Musk’s bid for Twitter has Democrats atwitter. Columnist Leonard Pitt wrote that the purchase “will turn one of the world’s leading social-media platforms into an even greater transmitter of disinformation and hate…” Keep in mind, Mr. Pitt’s definition of disinformation includes only that uttered by conservatives.

Barack Obama, speaking at a conference organized by The Atlantic called “Disinformation and the Erosion of Democracy,” opined: “It’s very difficult to get out of the reality that is constructed for us.” Constructed by whom, one might ask? As the New York Sun editorialized, Obama’s words were an “apt description of what Mr. Obama and the Democrat Press have built. Forget the metaverse. This is an alternative reality.” Speaking at Stanford University, a few days later Mr. Obama added that social media censors don’t go far enough, suggesting the government must step in. Six days later, the Biden Administration announced the establishment of a Disinformation Governance Board (DGB), an Orwellian-like “Ministry of Truth.” Coincidence? The DGB’s mission is to separate fact from fiction for the American people. Its real purpose, I feel certain, is to censor information that does not accord with the Administration’s narrative. The Board will be chaired by Nina Jankowicz who will report to Alejandro Mayorkas, U.S. Secretary for Homeland Security. Ms. Jankowicz seems an odd choice, as she disbelieved the truth of Hunter Biden’s laptop, claiming it was Trump “disinformation.” On the other hand, she did believe Christopher Steele, the discredited purveyor of disinformation about the fake Russian collusion story.

Antisemitism Comes to Harvard, in Both Intent and Effect Apart from raw animus against the Jewish State, how could any thoughtful person today regard Russia and Israel on the same plane when Russia is waging a war of aggression?

https://www.nysun.com/article/antisemitism-comes-to-harvard-in-both-intent-and-effect?utm_content=The%20Evening%20Sun

During my presidency of Harvard 20 years ago I warned that “serious and thoughtful people are advocating measures that would be antisemitic in their effect if not their intent.” 

In light of the recent exhibition by the Palestinian Solidarity Committee in Harvard Yard and the resounding endorsement of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions by the Harvard Crimson, it is clear to me that antisemitism is being practiced in both intent and effect.

To be clear at the outset, free expression must be sacrosanct in an academic community. The PSC and the Crimson have every right to express their view no matter how upsetting it may be to others. Academic freedom, though, does not mean freedom from criticism or the right to have contemptible views treated with respect. It is no shield against moral bankruptcy.  

This has long been recognized at Harvard as, say, when Drew Faust was president and deemed a student-led Black Mass — a ritual performed by satanic cults to parody the Catholic Church — to be abhorrent and a fundamental affront to academic values of inclusion even as she ruled out any suggestion that event be banned. 

Likewise when controversial conservative scholar Charles Murray was invited to speak at Harvard, a variety of communications were sent to students labeling him a practitioner of racist pseudoscience.

So there is nothing “anti-First Amendment” about calling out antisemitism. Indeed not identifying and attacking antisemitism in our midst would be a major moral failing, especially when it comes in conjunction with proposals to instrumentalize the university by having it engage in antisemitism.

The question that remains is whether the BDS agenda enthusiastically embraced by the PSC and the Crimson is in fact antisemitic. The Crimson and other BDS proponents ​​condemn antisemitism and note that there are people of Jewish descent who support BDS. That is true.

It’s also true that President Trump asserts firmly that he is not racist and can point to prominent African-American supporters and to having received more than a million votes from African Americans. At Harvard we don’t consider such assertions “arguments.”

There is no valid defense of Roe. That’s why that side resorts to threats By  Timothy P. Carney

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/restoring-america/equality-not-elitism/there-is-no-valid-defense-of-roe-thats-why-that-side-resorts-to-threats

Roe v. Wade “is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be.” That was the conclusion in the Yale Law Journal of pro-choice legal scholar John Hart Ely.

“One of the most curious things about Roe is that, behind its own verbal smokescreen, the substantive judgment on which it rests is nowhere to be found.” That’s liberal legal scholar Laurence Tribe.

It’s near-consensus among legal scholars, even those who believe abortion should be legal, that Roe was a shoddy decision, not grounded in the Constitution.

“You will be hard-pressed to find a constitutional law professor, even among those who support the idea of constitutional protection for the right to choose, who will embrace the opinion itself rather than the result,” wrote pro-choice scholar Kermit Roosevelt in the Washington Post.

“This is not surprising,” Roosevelt continued. “As constitutional argument, Roe is barely coherent.”

The Constitution quite obviously does not protect abortion as a fundamental right. Roe relied on a “right of privacy” “emanating” from a “penumbra” cast by actually enumerated rights. It was clearly motivated reasoning.

Abortion has thus been protected from democracy by a ruling that everyone knows is garbage, motivated reasoning . I’ve collected here many pro-choice legal scholars saying how bad Roe was.

Subject to scrutiny, Roe falls, and abortion defenders need to convince politicians to vote in order to strip unborn babies of any legal protections.

This is why the pro-Roe side is relying on threats to protect Roe. Democrats promise that they will declare the Supreme Court illegitimate if it doesn’t uphold their decision. That directly implies that they believe the federal government and state courts should disregard any subsequent rulings from the court.

Glenn Greenwald:The Irrational, Misguided Discourse Surrounding Supreme Court Controversies Such as Roe v. Wade The Court, like the U.S. Constitution, was designed to be a limit on the excesses of democracy. Roe denied, not upheld, the rights of citizens to decide democratically.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-irrational-misguided-discourse?token=

Politico on Monday night published what certainly appears to be a genuine draft decision by Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito that would overturn the Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. Alito’s draft ruling would decide the pending case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which concerns the constitutionality of a 2018 Mississippi law that bans abortions after fifteen weeks of pregnancy except in the case of medical emergency or severe fetal abnormalities. Given existing Supreme Court precedent that abortion can only be restricted after fetal viability, Mississippi’s ban on abortions after the 15th week — at a point when the fetus is not yet deemed viable — is constitutionally dubious. To uphold Mississippi’s law — as six of the nine Justices reportedly wish to do — the Court must either find that the law is consistent with existing abortion precedent, or acknowledge that it conflicts with existing precedent and then overrule that precedent on the ground that it was wrongly decided.

Alito’s draft is written as a majority opinion, suggesting that at least five of the Court’s justices — a majority — voted after oral argument in Dobbs to overrule Roe on the ground that it was “egregiously wrong from the start” and “deeply damaging.” In an extremely rare event for the Court, an unknown person with unknown motives leaked the draft opinion to Politico, which justifiably published it. A subsequent leak to CNN on Monday night claimed that the five justices in favor of overruling Roe were Bush 43 appointee Alito, Bush 41 appointee Clarence Thomas, and three Trump appointees (Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett), while Chief Justice Roberts, appointed by Bush 43, is prepared to uphold the constitutionality of Mississippi’s abortion law without overruling Roe.

Draft rulings and even justices’ votes sometimes change in the period between the initial vote after oral argument and the issuance of the final decision. Depending on whom you choose to believe, this leak is either the work of a liberal justice or clerk designed to engender political pressure on the justices so that at least one abandons their intention to overrule Roe, or it came from a conservative justice or clerk, designed to make it very difficult for one of the justices in the majority to switch sides. Whatever the leaker’s motives, a decision to overrule this 49-year-old precedent, one of the most controversial in the Court’s history, would be one of the most significant judicial decisions issued in decades. The reaction to this leak — like the reaction to the initial ruling in Roe back in 1973 — was intense and strident, and will likely only escalate once the ruling is formally issued.

European Union’s Border-Protection System Now A Tourism Agency for Migrants by Yves Mamou

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18493/european-union-border-protection

This accusation is at the heart of the conflict in the European Union: should EU member states keep their borders open at all times? And is it Frontex’s job to ensure that the borders of EU member states remain always open?

Whenever the European Union talks about “fundamental rights”, it is the right of migrants to move freely that is being discussed. Never the rights of the host populations. In this context, a “pushback” is perceived as a capital crime.

Frontex alone illustrates the European Union dilemma: to welcome refugees and turn back illegal migrants looking for economic opportunity, or to welcome all migrants for fear of turning back genuine refugees ?

In his resignation letter, Leggeri wrote, “It seems that the mandate of Frontex on which I was elected and renewed in June 2019 has silently but effectively been modified.” It was a way of saying that the mission of Frontex is no longer the protection of borders but only the protection of the right of migrants to settle wherever they want.

With the departure of Leggeri, Frontex officially becomes a tourism agency for migrants, not an agency to protect Europe’s borders.

The pro-migrants lobby inside the European Union has won: Fabrice Leggeri, director-general of Frontex, the European agency tasked with guarding the EU’s borders, was forced to send a letter of resignation on April 28, 2022. His resignation was accepted by the board.

Election Integrity Dead: Killed in Court by J. Christian Adams

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/18475/election-integrity-dead

Many election operatives know that elections are won or lost because of process. For decades, one side has been focused on policy, big ideas, and winning debates. Meanwhile, the other side has been focused on process and the rules of the elections game.

[A] war is taking place around elections that has nothing to do with voting machines being controlled by Italian satellites or Internet hackers. They don’t need to be.

Election process fights have become a Darwinian “survival of the fittest.” Whichever side can effectively adapt to a new technological or cultural environment often determines who wins and who loses.

In 2020, an unprecedented burst of mail ballots swamped election offices because of the fright of COVID. All over the country, judges struck down or suspended laws that would have ensured those mail ballots were processed according to the law. At the same time, hundreds of millions of dollars in private money poured into election offices to change the way the elections were run.

It is a dangerous place we find ourselves, where citizens through the legislative process are enacting safeguards to keep our elections clean and manageable, yet a hyper-funded onslaught has mastered the art of killing real, verifiable, integrity in elections.

First, do not assume there will be a “red wave” this November. Many election operatives have demonstrated a fierce ability to adapt and leverage cultural and technological awareness into electoral wins.

Second, a “red wave” cannot overcome the “blue wave” tactics of 2020 seen in urban areas flush with outside cash.

Third, the Biden administration is already turning the battleship of the entire federal government toward turnout in 2022. Institutions have mobilized every single agency into a weapon to increase voter turnout among “historically marginalized communities.” Decoded, that means racial groups. This is all happening with little fanfare, and little means to stop it.

It also means that every federal agency has had a year-long head start into morphing into a get-out-the-vote tool. It means housing, welfare, and education offices will be turned into turnout machines. Institutions have adapted and created an architecture using the powers of the state to target certain voters and get them to the polls.

For good measure, the Biden administration proposed a $10 billion federal fund available for the next decade to replicate and expand the cash injections to election offices like those seen in 2020. Another $5 billion is requested for the U.S. Postal Service so it can expand its role in voting-by-mail. Even if the administration gets a fraction of that request, it will make the $500 million spent in 2020 from private groups to increase urban turnout look like small potatoes.

Perhaps most of all, we can start to pay close attention to the fights going on behind the scenes — the process fights. For so long, we have rightfully cared about policies such as taxes, government spending, education, and energy. We try to move heart and minds. But others put policy second: they are worried about whether process helps or hurts their ability to move bodies and ballots. Process is driving the outcomes of policies; it is time to fully engage before our ability to engage at all is extinguished.

In the wake of the 2020 election, states across the country enacted laws to try to prevent a repeat of the chaos from that election. In some states such as Arizona, Texas, and Florida, laws were passed to prohibit the private funding of election offices. In others, ballot custody vulnerabilities were addressed, such as limits on harvesting and drop-boxes.

Clean Energy Has a Dirty Little Secret By Stephen Green

https://pjmedia.com/vodkapundit/2022/05/02/clean-energy-has-a-dirty-little-secret-n1593821

Clean energy has a dirty little secret, just revealed by MIT science writing student Shel Evergreen: Its “unsustainable” appetite for minerals and the dirty ways they’re obtained.

From Evergreen’s report for Ars Technica:

In South America’s Atacama Desert, salt flats are dotted with shallow, turquoise-colored lithium brine pools. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, children chip at the ground for cobalt. In China, toxic chemicals leach neodymium from the earth.

All that extraction “presents humanitarian, environmental, and logistical challenges,” she writes.

Scenes like those might already be familiar ground for those who aren’t wedded to the green fantasy of clean energy. But what you might not know is just how much worse things are going to have to get for Mother Earth if the Greens (no relation) are going to “save” her.

The International Energy Agency warned last year that “to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, overall mineral requirements would need to increase six-fold.”

“Those minerals have to come from somewhere, and that often involves harmful sourcing, increased greenhouse gas emissions, and limits on the mineral supply.”

It’s somehow news that we can’t put minerals that we don’t have into solar panels, electric car batteries, or wind turbines. It ought to be news — GIANT BOLD-TYPE HEADLINE news — that clean energy means increased carbon emissions.

January 6 Committee Targets GOP Donors Ahead of 2022 Elections They can’t beat Republicans at the ballot box so Democrats are using every governmental, legislative, and legal weapon at their disposal to destroy them in court and in the court of public opinion.  By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/02/january-6-committee-targets-gop-donors-ahead-of-2022-elections/

Judge Timothy J. Kelly and his colleagues on the D.C. District Court have acted as little more than rubber stamps for the Justice Department’s abusive prosecution of January 6 defendants. As I reported last month, Kelly, a Trump appointee, continues to hold six nonviolent Capitol protesters behind bars while allowing the Biden regime to delay trial dates and skirt its discovery obligations.

After months of tolerating the government’s broken promises related to sharing evidence with defense attorneys, Kelly finally issued a toothless order to compel prosecutors in one major case to finally produce Brady material or face consequences. (He won’t do anything.)

But Kelly isn’t just helping Joe Biden’s Justice Department punish Americans who dared to protest Joe Biden’s election that day. In a shocking ruling issued Sunday night, Kelly gave his imprimatur to the House Democrats’ January 6 select committee, paving the way for hyperpartisan, vengeful lawmakers such as Representatives Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) to potentially access the private information of Republican campaign contributors.

In February, the select committee subpoenaed Salesforce, a data and digital communications vendor for the Republican National Committee, demanding all records associated with fundraising efforts between Election Day and January 6, 2021—an event the committee’s lawyers refer to in court filings as an attack by “domestic terrorists.” The subpoena covered outreach conducted by the RNC, the Trump reelection campaign, and the Trump Make America Great Again Committee—a breathtaking trove of internal records and documents were requested including all communications between the company and the political organizations as well as any data reports generated by Salesforce.

The committee claims emails with hyperbolic language intended to raise money before Congress’ joint session on January 6 were culpable for inciting violence. 

India State High Court Rules That Nature Is a ‘Living Being’ with ‘Rights’:By Wesley J. Smith

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/india-state-high-court-rules-that-nature-is-a-living-being-with-rights/

The Madras High Court in India, which has jurisdiction over the state of Tamil Nadu, has declared that nature is a living being with rights. From the Hindustan Times story:

“Mother Nature” as a “Living Being” having legal entity/legal person/juristic person/juridical person/moral person/artificial person having the status of a legal person, with all corresponding rights, duties and liabilities of a living person, in order to preserve and conserve them.”

What a farce. Nature is not moral. It cannot have duties or liabilities. While being made up of sentient beings — as well as insentient life-forms, geological features, and atmospheric phenomena — it is not itself rational or sentient. I mean, if the monsoons flood a city, can the city sue “nature” for damages? Please.

But in parts of India, it now has rights that are, it would appear, going to be at least coequal to those of humans:

“They are also accorded the rights akin to fundamental rights/legal rights/constitutional rights for their survival, safety, sustenance and resurgence in order to maintain its status and also to promote their health and wellbeing. The State Government and the Central Government are directed to protect the “Mother Nature” and take appropriate steps to protect Mother Nature in all possible ways,” the court said.

Nature-rights laws generally allow anyone who believes that nature’s “rights” are being violated to sue to prevent the violation and to seek redress. That gives even the most extreme crank the ability to exercise a litigation veto over development, or a powerful club to use for “greenmail” extortion.