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November 2020

Sidney Powell explains some of the evidence she has, says it would be criminal for her not to come forward with it – The Right Scoop

https://therightscoop.com/listen-sidney-powell-explains-some-of-the-evidence-she-has-says-it-would-be-criminal-for-her-not-to-come-forward-with-it

US Urgently Needs to Challenge China’s Chokehold on Rare Earth Materials by Lawrence A. Franklin

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16754/china-rare-earth-materials

The Chinese Communist Party’s near monopoly on most of these 17 rare earth materials (REM) is by now a US national security vulnerability of enormous strategic importance…. China’s October 13 decision to curtail the export of these vitally needed rare earth materials should serve as an urgent warning to the U.S. to begin developing an independent supply chain of these materials.

The Defense Department has not acted with the sense of urgency demanded by the president…. Consequently, if US-China relations plummet to the point where conflict appears imminent, America’s military would be disadvantaged should the Chinese decide to sever exports of REM to the US market.

The US would do well… by quickly decoupling its economy from dependency on China for rare earth materials — and if possible, from everything else.

One of China’s most significant advantages in the race to dominate future hi-tech industrial production, among just about everything else, is its chokehold on “rare earth materials” (REM). These are materials — and the raw minerals from which they are extracted and processed — vital to the manufacture, for instance, of advanced weapons, fossil-free alternative energy systems, communication devices, computer products, and microelectronic networks.

It is an area in which China has already established dominance . The Chinese Communist Party’s near monopoly on most of these 17 rare earth materials is by now a US national security vulnerability of enormous strategic importance. China’s October 13 decision to curtail the export of these vitally needed rare earth materials should serve as an urgent warning to the US to seriously begin developing an independent supply chain of these materials.

Pragmatic Arabs to Biden: Don’t Do an ‘Obama’ and Coddle the Middle East’s Worst Actors By P. David Hornik

https://pjmedia.com/columns/p-david-hornik/2020/11/20/pragmatic-arabs-to-biden-dont-do-an-obama-and-coddle-the-middle-easts-worst-actors-n1161433

The prospect of a Biden presidency worries not only Israel but also its declared and more tacit allies among Arab states.

And the worries don’t only concern Biden taking a soft line toward Iran like his old boss Barack Obama, but also toward the Muslim Brotherhood — the Egyptian-based Islamist outfit whose fortunately brief takeover of Egypt (2012-2013) the Obama administration encouraged and empowered.

“In a clear message…to a possible US administration under Joe Biden,” Israeli Arab journalist Khaled Abu Toameh reports, “Saudi Arabia and Egypt have warned against supporting the Muslim Brotherhood organization.”

Saudi Arabia’s Council of Religious Scholars, its highest religious body, issued a statement — widely seen as a message to Biden — in which it described the Brotherhood as

a deviant group that undermines coexistence within nations, stirs up sedition, violence and terrorism and pursues its partisan goals in an attempt to seize more power for itself under the cover of religion. The history of the organization is one of evil, strife, extremism and terrorism.

That appeal to Biden was echoed by Egypt’s Dar al-Ifta, a religious advisory body, which called the Brotherhood a “terrorist” organization that “seeks to divide societies and spread chaos and incite citizens to riot and engage in violence.”

The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, has been the breeding ground for Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hamas, and a host of other Islamist terror groups. It favors the overthrow of pragmatic Arab regimes and, ultimately, a worldwide caliphate imposing sharia law on hapless humanity.

The Arab Weekly reports that the Brotherhood is “hopeful” and “very enthused” about a Biden presidency, while also citing analysts who see that reaction as overblown.

In 2012, as Brotherhood-led sedition jeopardized Egypt’s pragmatic Mubarak government, Obama called for an “orderly transition” to “democracy” in Egypt — a statement widely viewed as a demand for Mubarak’s overthrow by the Brotherhood, which was indeed what transpired. After it transpired, the Obama administration boosted Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi’s regime by selling

Biden Ain’t for the Kids On education issues, trouble looms if Biden becomes president. by Larry Sand

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/biden-aint-for-the-kids/

At the risk of stating the obvious, the country’s political future is murky. If Joe Biden withstands the onslaught of ballot fraud challenges and becomes POTUS 46, it’s anyone’s guess as to how he will govern. Or for how long. As a dementia-riddled man with no cures for the ailment on the horizon, his decisions will most likely be made by a cadre of handlers, advisors and cabinet members. And in the not-too-distant future, he will likely cede the reins to Vice-President Kamala Harris. But for now, I will briefly examine the educational direction Biden plans to take, and it ain’t pretty.

The first troubling sign came when the Biden-Sanders Task Force was created before Biden became the Democrats’ candidate. This motley crew included former National Education Association president Lily Eskelsen García, American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a proud socialist. This spend-happy, anti-school choice group advised Democrats to triple current Title I funding for disadvantaged students, “fully fund” the federal law for students with disabilities and kill the popular D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program.

All the above and so much more is now on the table. His Secretary of Education could very well be one of the aforementioned union leaders, replacing Betsy DeVos, who bore no love for the unions and top-down D.C. decision making. I doubt Weingarten will be the one, as she would have to give up two-thirds of her $600,000 a year salary, and what amounts to a job for life to accept the position. Eskelsen García, on the other hand, was termed out as NEA boss earlier this year and is now a free agent. The position could also to go Elizabeth Warren, who as a former Harvard professor with progressive cred, would fit the bill as the anti-Betsy. But any of the three candidates (and anyone else) would have to get the blessing of the (probably Republican) Senate.

Elite Schools Are the Most Problematic on Speech:By Samuel J. Abrams

https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/elite-schools-are-the-most-problematic-on-speech/

Northwestern University is in the midst of significant protests and violence surrounding the “NU Community Not Cops” movement, which intends to march every day until the school abolishes its university police. University president Morton Schapiro has condemned the violent student activity, which has disrupted businesses and local neighborhoods, defaced property, and violated laws and university standards. Students have “moved well past legitimate forms of free speech,” Schapiro says, rightly.

This is no isolated incident, however. Disruptions and violent incidents often appear to be more common at elite schools – not just Northwestern but others such as USC, UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, and Claremont McKenna College, to name a few.

Thanks to the new 2020 College Free Speech Rankings from RealClearEducation, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), and research firm College Pulse, empirical evidence confirms this suspicion. The rankings are based on the largest study of student attitudes about speech to date, sampling some 20,000 students. It turns out that students enrolled in the country’s most elite schools are appreciably more willing to shut down speech and expression with which they disagree than the overwhelming majority of college students at non-elite schools.

These tendencies appear to have some correlation with general political views. Almost three-quarters (71%) of those students in the most prestigious universities (the top ten schools, based on U.S. News rankings) identify as liberal, with only 15% calling themselves conservative. The numbers look notably different as school ranking levels decline.

At schools ranked between 50 and 99 on the U.S. News scale, 51% of students are liberal, compared to 26% conservative. Conservative students are much harder to find at Harvard, in other words, than at the University of Minnesota. Forcomparison, 28% of Americans in general presently identify as conservative.

Sidney Powell claps back at Tucker Carlson By Andrea Widburg

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2020/11/sidney_powell_claps_back_at_tucker_carlson.html

You have to decide whether to believe the Fox News personality or the lawyer who fought the federal government on General Flynn’s behalf — and won.

After Trump’s legal dream team held a press conference to give an overview of the allegations about massive election fraud, the media, from CNN down to Fox went on the attack. Even Tucker Carlson attacked Sidney Powell for allegedly failing to produce evidence supporting her claims against Dominion. By Friday, Powell explained why she didn’t appear on Tucker’s show — and what she said didn’t reflect well on everyone’s favorite conservative analyst.

As always with all the news nowadays, there’s a back story here: Ever since Rupert Murdoch retired, and his left-leaning sons took over, Fox News has systematically and incrementally been recasting itself as CNN-lite. It kept the big-name conservatives front and center but, in the background, it began to tweak here and there.

Quisling Paul Ryan, a NeverTrumper, joined the Board. Donna Brazile, who helped Hillary cheat during the 2016 campaign, got added to the line-up. Newt Gingrich was censored when he tried to mention how George Soros buys left-wing prosecutors.

And then, on election night, Fox announced, all evidence to the contrary, the Biden had won Arizona. At the same time, it refused to call Florida, Ohio, and Texas for Trump, even though there was no way Biden could win in those states.

Within days, roughly 40% of Fox News’s conservative audience had abandoned it. However, the audience remained loyal to Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham, all three of whom seemed to retain their position as conservative stalwarts who were not accepting the Associated Press’s claim that Biden had won. (The entire Democrat infrastructure, from the party itself to Big Tech to the media, seems under the impression that the Founders inserted a clause in the Constitution holding that, when AP calls the election, it’s a done deal.)

Democrats And Media Are Reaping Fruit Of 4 Years Of Anti-Trump Conspiracy Theories By Mollie Hemingway

https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/19/democrats-and-media-are-reaping-fruit-of-4-years-of-anti-trump-conspiracy-theories/

If taking claims to court undermines democracy, how to defend Democrats’ vociferous and repeated claims that Donald Trump stole the election in 2016 with the help of Russia?
A prominent liberal legal academic who spent the last four years pushing outrageous, discredited, and debunked conspiracy theories about Donald Trump stealing the 2016 election said on Fox News Sunday that refusal to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election threatens the country.

“He is undermining democracy because there are millions of people who will believe him even though there is nothing to his arguments and no evidence to back them,” Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe said of President Trump’s litigation regarding the November election.

As Trump and many of his 74 million voters express concern about the security of the 2020 election, in which many states rushed to expand mail-in balloting while dramatically lowering scrutiny of mail-in ballots, many media figures have condemned their efforts to litigate the results. The Washington Examiner’s executive editor Philip Klein wrote:

FEC Chairman: Trump campaign bringing ‘legitimate accusations’ of election fraud to court The “massive amounts of affidavits that we see in these cases show that there was in fact fraud that took place,” said FEC Chairman Trey Trainor. “And the other side really needs to answer these questions.”

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/federal-election-commission-chairman-trump-campaign-bringing-legitimate

The Trump campaign is bringing “legitimate accusations” to court through affidavits of credible witnesses and other evidence used in its challenges to electoral outcomes in various states, Federal Election Commission Chairman Trey Trainor said.

Trainor said his review of evidence, including numerous affidavits claiming voter fraud and a sworn statement by a prominent mathematician flagging up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots, met the first level of legal scrutiny under what’s known as motion to dismiss or “Rule 12(b)(6)” of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, which would dismiss less credible claims.

Noting the subsequent legal threshold beyond a “motion to dismiss” is the “summary judgment phase,” Trainor said that under this phase, the credibility of witnesses is presumed to be accurate, especially given the caliber of the testimonies Trainor has observed to date.

“When considering a motion for summary judgment, a judge will view all evidence in the light most favorable to the movant’s opponent,” explains Cornell University Law School’s Legal Information Institute website.

“What I would be concerned with, if I were on the other side of these election contests that are going on around the country, is that if you look at the level of evidence that has been provided by these affidavits — hundreds of affidavits that corroborate events that have happened on the ground — in a summary judgment phase of these cases, you have to take the evidence of the plaintiff as being true,” Trainor told “Just the News AM” television show Friday morning.

In sworn statement, prominent mathematician flags up to 100,000 Pennsylvania ballots Federal Elections Commission Chairman Trey Trainor says new analysis by professor Steven Miller “adds to the conclusions that some level of voter fraud took place in this year’s election.”

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/mathematics-prof-says-sworn-statement-many-56000-gop-ballots-pa-may-be

In a sworn declaration, a respected mathematician says his analysis of election data and phone interviews with Pennsylvania voters raises questions about as many as 100,000 absentee ballots requested in the key battleground state where President Trump and Joe Biden are separated by just about 82,000 votes.

Williams College Professor Steven Miller, a Yale and Princeton trained math expert, said he analyzed Pennsylvania ballot data collected by former Trump campaign data chief Matt Braynard as well as 2,684 voter interviews conducted by a phone bank and found two concerning patterns. One involved possible votes that were not counted, the other ballots that appeared to be requested by someone other than a registered voter.

“I estimate that the number of ballots that were either requested by someone other than the registered Republican or requested and returned but not counted range from 89,397 to 98,801,” Miller said in the sworn statement provided to Just the News. 

File
Miller_DeclarationAndAnalyisPA_GOP_BallotRequestData_2020_Final.pdf

According to Pennsylvania state data for early and absentee ballot requests, there are roughly 165,000 ballots requested in the names of registered GOP voters that had not been counted as of Nov. 16.

Intimidation Tactics Against Trump Lawyers Undermine Justice By Joel M. Zinberg

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/intimidation-tactics-against-trump-lawyers-undermine-justice/?utm_source=

Two-hundred and fifty years ago, a young lawyer named John Adams risked professional and economic ruin when he defended British soldiers who were accused of firing into a crowd of protesters, killing five of them, in the Boston Massacre. Adams’ representation saved all nine soldiers from murder convictions and execution.

Today, both conservatives and progressives are disregarding Adams’ example and organizing campaigns to intimidate law firms who work for the Trump election effort. These efforts ignore lawyers’ role in our legal system as advocates for clients, including those who espouse unpopular positions, and confuse representation with approval of the clients’ actions or views. Regardless of how one views the Trump lawsuits, bullying the lawyers undermines the fair administration of justice.

The Lincoln Project – a group of Republican Never-Trumpers who campaigned against Trump and other Republican candidates this past election – has been urging lawyers at two firms representing Trump in election challenges (Jones Day and Porter Wright Morris & Arthur) to resign and has been calling on the firms’ clients to change their representation if the firms continue working on the lawsuits. At the other end of the political spectrum, ShutDownDC has organized protests outside offices of Jones Day, Porter Wright and a third firm, King & Spalding, and circulated the names, phone numbers, and email addresses of lawyers at the firms so they can be harassed.

The efforts appear to be succeeding. Late last week, Porter Wright announced it is withdrawing from a lawsuit it filed in federal court in Pennsylvania on behalf of Trump just a few days before, and a Jones Day partner was quoted as saying the firm would refrain from taking on additional election litigation.