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A Justice Speaks Out: Justice Samuel Alito warns that our most fundamental rights are under siege.

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://patriotpost.us/articles/74934-a-justice-speaks-out-2020-11-16

It’s no surprise that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s speech last week to The Federalist Society’s National Lawyers Convention received little coverage in the popular press. Why would it? Alito lacks the rhetorical flourish and the mischief-making wit of his late Supreme Court colleague Antonin Scalia, and he was speaking a language — the language of Liberty — that those in the Leftmedia neither understand nor appreciate.

Nor, it seems, are a majority of Justice Alito’s colleagues on the High Court fluent in that language.

In this respect, Alito seems like a quietly but firmly conservative version of the late Democrat Senator Paul Wellstone, who often took a friendly swipe at his consensus-seeking colleagues. “I’m from the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party!” he’d roar. Similarly, it seems, Justice Alito is from the conservative wing of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

“The pandemic has obviously taken a heavy human toll,” Alito began. “Thousands dead, many more hospitalized, millions on employed the dreams of many small business owners dashed. But what has it meant for the rule of law? I’m now going to say something that I hope will not be twisted or misunderstood. But I have spent more than 20 years in Washington, so I’m not overly optimistic. In any event, here goes. The pandemic has resulted in previously unimaginable restrictions on individual liberty. Now, notice what I am not saying or even implying: I am not diminishing the severity of the virus’s threat to public health. And putting aside what I will say shortly about a few Supreme Court cases, I’m not saying anything about the legality of COVID restrictions. Nor am I saying anything about whether any of these restrictions represent good public policy. I’m a judge, not a policymaker. All that I’m saying is this, and I think it is an indisputable statement of fact: We have never before seen restrictions as severe, extensive, and prolonged as those experienced for most of 2020.”

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

The Twin Paths to Socialism: ‘Equity’ and ‘Climate Change’ Alarmism By Edward Ring

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/15/the-twin-paths-to-socialism-equity-and-climate-change-alarmism/

America’s socialists, backed by corporations that profit from central planning and mandated markets, claim racism and fossil fuel are existential threats. They’re not

Supporters of President Trump’s bid for reelection accurately depicted his agenda as one of America’s last chances to stop—or at least slow down—the nation’s drift toward socialism. Joe Biden’s candidacy has been depicted as the attempt by globalist corporations to reassert their control over American politics, wherein they will impose socialist redistribution schemes that devastate the middle- and working classes, making them dependent on government and rendering their citizenship irrelevant. This, too, is mostly accurate, although slowly-boil-the-frog protocols shall be followed to obscure the transition.

When roughly half the electorate recently chose Biden to be the next U.S. president, however, they weren’t consciously endorsing corporate socialism. Biden voters, to the extent they believe in socialism, haven’t yet figured out that the socialist movement in the United States is largely controlled by corporations. What they believe, thanks to relentless propaganda and censorship of dissenting viewpoints, is that President Trump is a racist and a “denier” of climate change. As such, President Trump is perceived as a menace, an object of hatred and fear, and anyone would be a better choice for president.

President Trump is not a racist, and he cares about the environment as much as any reasonable person ought to, but these two issues are much bigger than Trump. The issues of racial equity and environmental protection are marketed as the existential challenges of our time. In response to these challenges, we are told the only effective answer is socialism, whether in the form of the Green New Deal, deference to international organizations and treaties, or submission to critical racial theory retraining. 

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Arizona Congressmen Want a Vote Audit in a Major County Katie Pavlich

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2020/11/16/arizona-congressman-request-official-audit-of-votes-n2580168

Arizona Congressmen Paul Gosar, Andy Biggs and David Schweikert are officially requesting a vote audit in Maricopa County. 

Last week Maricopa County GOP Chairwoman Rae Chornenky resigned after failing to inspect voting machines prior to Election Day. 

Rae Chornenky, the chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party, has resigned from her position after Democrats called her out for skipping a meeting ahead of the election where the county’s ballot tabulation machines were tested. 

Calls for her to step down started after Maricopa County Democratic Party chair Stephen Slugocki reminded the public in a Twitter post that in October she had not attended a logic and accuracy test of election equipment. 

That equipment — new ballot tabulators from Dominion Voting Systems — are at the center of claims about software glitches that some Republicans have asserted changed votes from President Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden. 

Arizona Republican Party Chairwoman Kelly Ward gave an update on the situation and ongoing vote counts Monday morning. 

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Beijing Sees Biden as Someone Susceptible to Its Influence: Victor Davis Hanson By Jan Jekielek and Frank Fang

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/beijing-sees-biden-as-someone-susceptible-to-chinese-influence-expert_3580446.html

The Chinese regime would be happy to see a new U.S. administration without President Donald Trump, according to historian Victor Davis Hanson.

If Democratic Party candidate Joe Biden wins the election, Beijing would also press harder on its U.S. allies in the Asia-Pacific region, said Hanson, who is a senior fellow at the Stanford University-based think tank Hoover Institution.

On The Epoch Times’ “American Thought Leaders” program, Hanson said that Beijing sees Biden as someone that would work with the communist regime—“a sign of weakness to be exploited.”

While many media outlets have declared Biden the winner of the presidential election, The Epoch Times will not call the race until all results are certified and any legal challenges are resolved.

Hanson analyzed Beijing’s view of the election: “I think they’re gonna be much more confident now because of the Biden victory, because I think their chief nemesis and biggest worry is gone, if Trump loses.”

The Trump administration has confronted the Chinese Communist Party on a range of issues, including unfair trade practices, espionage, malign influence in the United States, security threats posed by Chinese technology, and human rights abuses in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Trump Campaign Lawyer Says She Was Harassed, Threatened by Attorney at Opposing Firm Campaign spokesman says she received ‘physical and economic threats’ By Jack Phillips

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://www.theepochtimes.com/trump-lawyer-says-she-was-harassed-threatened-by-attorney-at-opposing-firm_3581061.html

A spokesman for President Donald Trump’s campaign and legal team said a lawyer working on their behalf in Pennsylvania has received threats and harassment.

According to Tim Murtagh on Nov. 16, the lawyer received “abusive emails” and calls, as well as “physical [and] economic threats.”

“One voicemail was from a lawyer at the firm representing the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, running far afoul of standards of professional conduct,” he said. “It has been turned over to the court.”

Philadelphia attorney Linda Kerns wrote on Nov. 15 in a court filing that an attorney with Kirkland & Ellis in the District of Columbia left her a one-minute-long voicemail that “falls afoul of the standards of professional conduct.”

Kirkland & Ellis represents Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, the state’s top election officer. Kerns didn’t identify the lawyer in question in the filing.

BOOKS, EDUCATION Comments turned off

A Book for Our Times: Peter Wood’s 1620 Skewers 1619 Project By Stanley Kurtz

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/a-book-for-our-times-peter-woods-1620-skewers-1619-project/

I can think of no book more deserving of a review in The New York Times—or less likely to receive one—than Peter Wood’s just-published 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project. More than a powerful refutation, Wood’s 1620 is a withering appraisal and deadpan skewering of the 1619 Project as a cultural phenomenon. That ill-starred journalistic project is the purest and most perfect example of woke. The cultural revolution of 2020 will always rightly be associated with the 1619 Project of The New York Times. Not for nothing did project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones cheerfully embrace the term “1619 riots.”

Many young Americans believe that slavery was a novelty in world history—an exclusively American innovation. That misapprehension is abetted by the 1619 Project. Wood thus begins with a quick tour of New World slavery prior to 1619. Among the indigenous peoples of the Americas, captive enemies were kept for their labor, for the sport of torture, and in a few cases for what Wood calls “almost industrial level” human sacrifice, not to mention cannibalism.

Long before 1619, the Spanish and Portuguese used slavery to extract forced labor from native peoples. Eventually, they abolished the enslavement of native Americans in favor of something closer to serf-like dependence. Certainly, the Spanish and Portuguese imported slaves from Africa (where slavery was also common), sometimes putting them in charge of indigenous slaves. Those African overseers often discharged their task with brutality. When a party of Spanish conquistadors out to subdue what is now Florida were shipwrecked, they themselves were enslaved by the indigenes. Most died in short order. Slavery was a world-wide human norm.

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

3 Fishy Things In Pennsylvania Voter Data The State Has Yet To Explain By Jordan Davidson

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/3-fishy-things-in-pennsylvania-voter-data-the-state-has-yet-to-explain/

Pennsylvania, arguably the most important swing state in the 2020 general election, has some irregularities in its mail-in ballot voting records contributing to public unease over its election results.

While the media has called the Coal State for former Vice President Joe Biden, President Donald J. Trump and his campaign have pursued legal action in the state over alleged election violations and potential voter fraud that could have changed the vote totals.

The campaign also has a lawsuit pending petition in the U.S. Supreme Court. It challenges the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision to allow mail-in ballots that arrived after Election Day to be counted, despite state laws that say the opposite.

The Pennsylvania Department of State has 3,098,705 people listed in its “General Election Mail Ballot Requests,” which records who requested a certain type of ballot, when that request was received by election officials, and when an official ballot was cast.

The data, which was last updated on Nov. 10 and is supposed to encompass all of the state’s mail-in ballot and absentee ballot requests, include irregularities that raise questions about the remote voting process in Pennsylvania. Not only do the records show that numerous voters older than the eldest-recorded person living in the United States requested and cast ballots in the Nov. 3 election, but several ballots were processed by the state’s election systems as received before they were even sent out.

Despite such suspicious and eyebrow-raising records, the Pennsylvania Department of State did not respond to The Federalist’s multiple requests for comment, leaving important questions left unanswered.

Why Are People Older Than 120 Years Old Voting?

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Elizabeth Bauer: Biden COVID Advisor: Those Older Than 75 Should Get Vaccines Last !!!!!????

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/biden-covid-advisor-those-older-than-75-should-get-vaccines-last/

American’s should be deeply troubled that a man Biden is looking to for advice on COVID is someone who hopes to die at 75 and has publicly supported rationing care for the elderly.

One of Joe Biden’s early actions after corporate media claimed he was president-elect was to name members of a task force to recommend actions about COVID-19. Most of the names were neither famous nor infamous, but for one: Ezekiel “Zeke” Emanuel, whose fame comes from family connections (he’s the brother of former Obama chief-of-staff and former Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel) and the infamy gained from a 2014 Atlantic article, “Why I Hope to Die at 75.”

Now, to be clear, Zeke did not argue for a “Giver”-style “release to elsewhere” of all 75-year-olds. He explicitly states opposition to legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. And the initial paragraphs of his article emphasize that this is what he wants for himself: “I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75.”

But he should have stopped there. Instead, in that article, he expounds on the vastly-reduced ability of older people to “contribute” or to be “productive.”

What’s more, he writes that “Our living too long places real emotional weights on our progeny” — not merely in terms of caregiving needs, but because “there is much less pressure to conform to parental expectations and demands after they are gone” and because “living parents also occupy the role of head of the family [and] they make it hard for grown children to become the patriarch or matriarch.”

MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Christopher Bedford: The Media Are Covering Up Left-Wing Violence Because They Agree With The Mission  

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/16/christopher-bedford-the-media-are-covering-up-left-wing-violence-because-they-agree-with-the-mission/

Federalist Senior Editor Christopher Bedford condemned the media’s deliberate attempts to either ignore or justify the left’s explosion of violence in the nation’s capital over the weekend as a symptom of press bias fomenting the chaos.

“The media absolutely ought to be covering it more, but they’re covering up more in a lot of cases because they agree with the mission and they think that they’re part of the Resistance as well,” Bedford said on Fox News Monday. “They think that Republicans or conservatives or people who are marching in the street are bad, basically right-arm-bearing Nazis, and at that point you can really justify a huge amount of action.”

Black Lives Matter and Antifa, Bedford added, imagine themselves as righteous activists operating under the curtain of historic struggles from fighting Nazism to the mid-20th century civil rights movement.

“What level wouldn’t you go to to try to stop Hitler,” Bedford said. “If you call your opponents Hitler, it can justify a lot of action … both of them are just setting up camps in Washington D.C. Downtown’s an absolute mess.”

ELECTIONS Comments turned off

Obama Calls for More Big Tech ‘Fact-Checking’ in Wake of Trump Getting 71M Votes By Tyler O’Neil

Posted By on November 16th, 2020

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2020/11/16/obama-calls-for-more-big-tech-fact-checking-in-wake-of-trump-getting-71m-votes-n1150338

Former President Barack Obama lamented the fact that President Donald Trump won 71 million votes in the 2020 election, blaming the “current media environment” for a supposed lack of an “informed citizenry.” He called for “the media” and “the tech companies” to “inform the public better” and “separate truth from fiction.” Obama said this just as Facebook, Twitter, and legacy media outlets have worked to bury or undermine important stories like the Hunter Biden emails and the irregularities in the 2020 election.

In an interview aired on 60 Minutes on Sunday, CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley lamented that the 2020 election (the results of which are still disputed) wasn’t a clear repudiation of Trump.

“President-Elect Biden won in this election more votes than anyone in history,” Pelley noted. “And yet, the 2020 vote wasn’t a repudiation of Donald Trump; it was more like an affirmation. He received 71 million votes, eight million more than he did in 2016. What does that tell you about our country today?”

Obama said the results show that America is “very divided,” even down to the level of the voters. “It has now become a contest where issues, facts, policies per se don’t matter, as much as identity and wanting to beat the other guy. You know, that’s taken priority. I do think the current media environment adds to that greatly. This democracy doesn’t work if we don’t have an informed citizenry,” he argued.