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December 2020

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Is America’s Fourth Estate (Free Press) in Foreclosure? by Leni Friedman Valenta with Jiri Valenta

By on December 16th, 2020

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16863/free-press-foreclosure

The modern meaning [of the fourth estate]… refers to the press as a fourth and free power — as even a “watchdog” — over the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. Today, however, it is the watchdog that needs watching.

It was all right for the New York Times, as its editor-in-chief, Dean Baquet, admitted, to have “built our newsroom” around the fake Russia Hoax for two years, but substantiated facts concerning the Biden family’s influence peddling were apparently “not fit to print.”

So far, still to be answered, is the question: If elections can ignore legalities with impunity, how, going forward, can there be trustworthy elections?

The “fourth estate” refers to freedom of the press. The term may have first been used by the philosopher-statesman Edmund Burke, who in 1787 highlighted the press as free and apart from the other three British “estates” — clergy, royalty and commoners.

The modern meaning, however, refers to the press as a fourth and free power — as even a “watchdog” — over the executive, legislative and judicial branches of our government. Today, however, it is the watchdog that needs watching.

The foundation on which the United States is built, freedom of speech and freedom of the press, is enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

Before our eyes, however, this freedom is being distorted, strangled and withheld.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Here’s What Was Discovered About Dominion Machines Used in a Swing State Beth Baumann

By on December 16th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/12/15/new-report-says-dominion-voting-systems-has-a-remarkably-high-error-rate-n2581624

Judge Kevin Elsenheimer of the 13th Circuit Court on Monday ordered a “forensic imaging” of the Dominion Voting Systems machines and software used in Antrim County, Michigan, where 6,000 votes for President Trump were incorrectly attributed to former Vice President Joe Biden. The Michigan Secretary of State stated the error took place because of “human error” not a software “glitch.”

The order was made after Antrim County resident William Bailey filed a lawsuit challenging the integrity of the election results. Specifically, he brought up concerns about how county election officials originally reported their unofficial results. The focus of the election results weren’t on the outcome of the presidential contest but rather on a local proposal to allow a marijuana dispensary in town, the Detroit Free Press reported.

Earlier this month Allied Security Operations Group (ASOG) in Dallas inspected the election equipment. Originally the report wasn’t going to be made public without receiving approval from the judge first. Elsenheimer came back and said a report can be released as long as the software’s coding are redacted. In the newly-released report, ASOG stated Dominion’s software has a 68 percent chance of errors.

“The allowable election error rate established by the Federal Election Commission guidelines is of 1 in 250,000 ballots (.0008%). We observed an error rate of 68.05%. This demonstrated a significant and fatal error in security and election integrity,” the report states. “The results of the Antrim County 2020 election are not certifiable. This is a result of machine and/or software error, not human error.”

“It is critical to understand that the Dominion system classifies ballots into two categories, 1) normal ballots and 2) adjudicated ballots. Ballots sent to adjudication can be altered by administrators, and adjudication files can be moved between different Results Tally and Reporting (RTR) terminals with no audit trail of which administrator actually adjudicates (i.e. votes) the ballot batch,” the report states.

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Michigan Legislative Committees Slap Multiple Cities with Election-Related Subpoenas Beth Baumann

By on December 16th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bethbaumann/2020/12/15/michigan-legislative-committees-issue-election-related-subpoenas-n2581632

The Michigan Legislature’s House and Senate oversight committees on Tuesday voted to subpoena election materials from Detroit and its suburb, Livonia. 

The cities have been instructed to turn over all hard drives, communications with poll workers, absentee counting boards and any other election-related materials. 

The joint committee is also interested in reviewing documentation about voting machines, including when they were purchased, what previous elections the machines were used in, and the accuracy tests that were conducted on the machines. 

Detroit and Livonia were asked to turn over policies relating to the Wuhan coronavirus, including instructions given to poll workers and the rules guiding ballot challengers. 

From Just the News:

A Nov. 28 order memo from the State Bureau of Elections had followed the same protocol as prior elections and ordered the deletion by November 30 of “E-Pollbook laptops and flash drives … unless a petition for recount has been filed and the recount has not been completed, a post-election audit is planned but has not yet been completed, or the deletion of the data has been stayed by an order of the court or the Secretary of State.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Sean Davis: Media And Big Tech Rigged Election By Suppressing Biden Family Crime News By Tristan Justice

By on December 16th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/15/sean-davis-media-and-big-tech-rigged-election-by-suppressing-biden-family-crime-news/

Federalist Co-Founder Sean charged big tech and big media of rigging the November election through their conspired suppression of blockbuster stories exposing incriminating information on their preferred presidential candidate, Joe Biden.

“There’s been a lot of talk about election rigging and vote counts and all that, but I think the election rigging that we haven’t given nearly enough attention to was the rigging done by corrupt media and big tech to suppress this story,” Davis said of the Hunter Biden scandals plaguing the Biden administration, which “undoubtedly changed the election… That’s a huge scandal.”

Data from the Media Research Center (MRC) lends credence to Davis’s claim. According to an MRC-commissioned survey conducted in the days following the election, nearly 20 percent of Biden voters interviewed across eight key battleground states, seven of which the former vice president carried, reported they would have changed their decision at the ballot box had the media properly covered several key stories offering more information about Biden.

Davis took particular aim at legacy outlets still ignoring the Hunter scandal even after being forced to offer coverage following a statement from Hunter Biden himself admitting the existence of an FBI investigation that had been reported in October.

“We have a pretty incurious media, especially when it comes to the White House press corps where they’re just simply not even interested in the answers so they don’t even bother asking the questions, so we’re left with other outlets who don’t have the access and the bandwidth that the big ones have,” Davis said. “The other issue is, unlike the Russia investigation… there’s nothing coming out in the government. So when you have Republicans that are being investigated, it’s leaks galore. When it’s Democrats like Hunter Biden and the Biden family and James Biden being investigated, we don’t know anything.”

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ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Mitch, Mitt And Never-Trumpers Have It All Wrong: Trump Should Fight On, Not ‘Move On’

By on December 16th, 2020

https://issuesinsights.com/2020/12/16/mitch-mitt-and-never-trumpers-have-it-all-wrong-trump-should-fight-on-not-move-on/

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell created a stir by calling Joe Biden “president-elect” following Monday’s Electoral College vote. Meanwhile, senator and former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney urged President Donald Trump to “move on.” Sorry, but there are still serious issues of fraud related to this election. To abandon the quest for the truth would be a disservice to the American people.

Of course, it’s understandable that people are tired of arguing whether a national election was fraudulent or not. We’d only note that the modern use of voting machines and vote-by-mail that make election fraud far easier is largely a “progressive” project, created to make voting less secure and less transparent, not more.

Even so, and apart from the crucial upcoming U.S. Senate runoff election in Georgia, there’s good reason not to listen to either McConnell or Romney or, for that matter, any of the many “Never-Trumpers” in the GOP who seem eager, anxious even, to get rid of Trump. They want him to fold his tent and walk away.

We can only guess why. But what’s most important now is that we determine the scale and scope of the electoral fraud and whether it truly handed the election to Biden. If so, Trump becomes president.

And, in truth, no matter what the Electoral College said on Monday, if massive fraud is in evidence in the states, the election results cannot stand. And there’s plenty of evidence of that tumbling out by the day.

By now we’ve all heard the stories of vote counts being suspended in the middle of the night, with Trump having a massive lead, only to be continued in the early morning with a shocking and statistically near-impossible number of votes being dumped into the hopper for Biden.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

UPDATED: The Tragic Failure of William Barr Roger L. Simon

By on December 16th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-tragic-failure-of-william-barr_3617008.html?utm_source=partner

I used to be a big fan of Attorney General William Barr.Now, as of Dec. 14, 2020, he’s gone, effective Dec. 23, almost a month before the actual end of a Trump administration, assuming that happens.Technically, Barr resigned, accompanied by the usual complimentary letter to the president, but something obviously went wrong in his relationship with Donald Trump.

What was it?

William Barr certainly knew how to talk the talk. His October 2019 speech on religious liberty at the Notre Dame Law School is particularly eloquent and meaningful. If you haven’t heard it, maybe you should as a reminder of the person he could be.

That was the same AG who promised, what seems like decades ago, he would get to the bottom of the reprehensible, treasonous to many, origin of the Trump-Russia investigation, known hereabouts as Spygate.He assigned John Durham, a reputedly hard-nosed U.S. attorney from Connecticut, to uncover the sources of this outrage and bring the miscreants to justice.

Unfortunately, within that promise soon emerged a hint of trouble to come. Barr informed us that higher officials—meaning, of course, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden—were not in Durham’s brief to investigate, although they had attended a fateful meeting in January 2016 from whence much may have flowed.

Some people were evidently above the law.

As justification for this, Barr made it seem he was trying to put an end to the politicization of the Department of Justice and the FBI—and maybe he was … in his own eyes.

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HOMELAND SECURITY Comments turned off

‘Soft Targets’: Chinese Spies Have Been Exploiting US Politicians for Decades, Says Expert By Cathy He

By on December 16th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/soft-targets-chinese-spies-have-been-targeting-us-

A report that a suspected Chinese spy spent years cozying up to local and national-level politicians reveals that Beijing is investing significantly in long-term espionage operations to infiltrate U.S. politics, an expert said.

From 2011 to 2015, Christina Fang, a Chinese student at California State University–East Bay, cultivated extensive ties with local politicians in the Bay Area by volunteering in fundraising campaigns and attending political events. U.S. intelligence officials believe she was working under the direction of China’s top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security (MSS), according to a recent investigation by Axios.

Fang developed close ties to Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who in early 2015 became a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. She first knew Swalwell when he was a local city council member. Fang later fundraised for the congressman’s 2014 reelection campaign, and facilitated the placement of an intern in his office, the outlet reported.

She also had romantic or sexual relationships with two unnamed mayors of Midwestern cities, Axios said.

The operation was “beautifully handled” in the way it combined both intelligence gathering and political influence, said Nicholas Eftimiades, a former senior U.S. intelligence official and author of the book “Chinese Intelligence Operations,” in an interview with The Epoch Times.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Charles Lipson :Dr. No: Northwestern’s Unwise Rebuke of Epstein’s Op-Ed

By on December 16th, 2020

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/12/15/dr_no_northwesterns_unwise_r

Joseph Epstein wrote a controversial column last week saying Jill Biden should stop using the courtesy title “Dr.,” despite her doctorate in education. Leave that title for physicians, Epstein said on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion page.

The column set off fireworks among academics and intellectuals. The epicenter was Northwestern University, where Epstein, a prolific and erudite essayist, has long been listed as a “lecturer” in the English Department. No more. His name disappeared immediately from the department website. Ditching him quietly wasn’t enough for university administrators, who issued a blistering official condemnation of Epstein’s views. They added that he hadn’t really been a lecturer since 2003, without mentioning his many years of teaching there.

In a news release, Northwestern offered 10 pro forma words of support for academic freedom before turning to the real goal: lacerating Epstein.

While we firmly support academic freedom and freedom of expression, we do not agree with Mr. Epstein’s opinion and believe the designation of doctor is well deserved by anyone who has earned a Ph.D., an Ed.D. or an M.D.

Northwestern is firmly committed to equity, diversity and inclusion, and strongly disagrees with Mr. Epstein’s misogynistic views.

What’s the problem with Northwestern’s statement? It is not their defense of using “Dr.” for Ph.D.s or Ed.Ds. Jill Biden earned the latter degree, and she has every right to use the title, if she wishes. Henry Kissinger used it after he joined the Nixon administration, believing it carried more weight than “professor” with journalists, policymakers, and the general public. At Harvard, where he had been teaching, “Dr.” is reserved for physicians. But he wasn’t on campus, and neither is Jill Biden. Neither are thousands of psychologists and educators who use the term regularly.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Where Is The Criticism Of China From Environmentalists? Francis Menton

By on December 16th, 2020

https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2020-12-14-where-is-the-criticism-of-chi

You undoubtedly are aware that the international environmental movement has almost entirely been taken over and consumed by the climate change scare; and you also cannot help but be aware of the constant drumbeat of attacks by environmentalists on the U.S. government, particularly under President Trump, for its failure to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to “save the planet.” At the same time, you are a reader of the Manhattan Contrarian. Therefore, you know that China is not only not reducing its own carbon emissions, but instead has well more than tripled them over the past twenty years (during which period U.S. emissions have declined modestly by about 15%); and today China is in the midst of a new round of massive expansion of its fossil fuel energy generation capacity, particularly with respect to the most carbon-intensive fuel, coal.

As quoted by me in a post just a couple of days ago, from the Global Energy Monitor, June 2020:

China currently has 249.6 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired capacity under development (97.8 GW under construction and 151.8 GW in planning), a 21% increase over end-2019 (205.9 GW). The amount of capacity under development (249.6 GW) is larger than the [entire] coal fleets of the United States (246.2 GW) or India (229.0 GW).

So then surely the major environmental organizations must be coming down hard on China? Wrong. Indeed, many of them are full of praise for China for its “climate leadership.” Sure, China gives plenty of empty lip service to Western climate orthodoxy; but could these environmentalists really be so dense as to be fooled by that, even as information as to China’s soaring emissions and hundreds of new coal plants is readily available (if not widely publicized by the CCP)?

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CHARLOTTE'S NEWS WEB, HISTORY Comments turned off

Darkest Hour By: Judd Garrett

By on December 16th, 2020

‘For those who reject the “America First” approach to international relations that Trump has promoted, answer this, does China put China first? Yes. Does Russia put Russia first? Yes. Does Germany put Germany first? Yes. Does (fill in the blank) country put their country’s interests first? Yes. Why is it only evil when America puts American interests first? And since America, the greatest force of good in the world, a strong America, America as the world’s superpower, is unequivocally what’s in the best interest of the world.”

I was re-watching the movie, Darkest Hour, the other day, about the weeks leading up to Great Britain’s entrance into World War II, and I was struck by the similarities between the political dynamics of their country during that time to the United States, today. England was facing an existential threat from an evil totalitarian regime of Nazi Germany, and England’s Prime Minister was a loud, outspoken, rude, politically incorrect man named Winston Churchill. Churchill believed the best course of action was to stand up to the evil Nazi regime, and if they were to negotiate, they could then do so from a position of strength. He understood that the most dangerous course of action for the country would be not to fight.

Churchill was not well received by the elites or the political class of England. He was brash and outspoken, saying unpopular things. The King told Churchill once, “you scare people. One never knows what’s going to come out of your mouth next. Something that will flatter. Something that will wound.”

One does not have to be perfect to be a great leader, in fact, many times, their flaws are what makes them great. Churchill’s wife told him, “you are strong because you are imperfect. You are wise because you have doubts.”

A contingent of career politicians worked behind the scenes, colluding together to oust Churchill because they believed their positions and their special interests were best served not to fight. They were willing to achieve a peace treaty with the Nazis at-all-cost even if it meant negotiating from a position of weakness. It was highly unlikely that Germany would have abided by the terms of the agreement forged under those circumstances. The treaty would only have been used by Germany to exploit England’s weaker position.

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