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December 2020

Michigan lawmakers issue subpoenas to Detroit, Livonia clerks Craig Mauger

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/politics/2020/12/15/michigan-lawmakers-issue-subpoenas-detroit-livonia-clerks/3912147001/

Lansing — The Michigan House and Senate oversight committees voted Tuesday to issue subpoenas to clerks in Livonia and Detroit as Republican lawmakers bolstered their push to investigate the Nov. 3 election. 

Under the subpoenas, Detroit Clerk Janice Winfrey and Livonia Clerk Susan Nash will have to produce a trove of documents about how they ran their elections by 5 p.m. Jan. 12.

Detroit has been the focus of the attempt by President Donald Trump’s campaign to discredit Michigan’s election with unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud. Livonia, which is also in Wayne County, had similar rates of out-of-balance precincts compared to Detroit.

That means the number of voters tracked in poll books didn’t match the number of ballots cast in precincts. The imbalances are usually due to human errors, voters moving and other administration problems.

“We’re continuing our due diligence to determine if allegations that were made are true or not,” Senate Oversight Chairman Ed McBroom, R-Vulcan, said after the meeting.

“We’ve heard a lot of explanation for how poll books get out of balance,” he added. “This level is something that we want to check into.”

GOP Sen. Ron Johnson Blasts Dem Sen. Ralph Peters: “You Lied Repeatedly In The Press That I Was Spreading Russian Disinformation” By Tim Hains

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/12/16/johnson_vs_peters_this_is_terrible_what_youre_doing_to_this_committee_it_is_what_you_have_done.html

Republican Sen. Ron Johnson blasted Democratic Sen. Gary Peters during a hearing Wednesday for claiming he was pushing Russian disinformation about Hunter Biden and Ukraine.

“You lied repeatedly. You lied repeatedly in the press. That I was spreading Russian disinformation. That was an outright lie and I told you to stop lying and you continued to do it,” Johnson said.

“The people peddling Russian disinformation are not on my side of the aisle. Senior Democrat leaders, including ranking member Peters, were involved in a process of creating a false intelligence product that they leaked to the media that accused Sen. Grassley, the President Pro-Temp of the Senate, and myself, of accepting and disseminating Russian misinformation,” Johnson said. “Sen. Peters introduced that false information, Russian disinformation into our investigation record. 50 members of the intelligence community, after our Hunter Biden investigation, and the revelation of his computer say it is Russian disinformation, now we find out, it is a real investigation by the Justice Department.”

“So, it’s just galling and I just have to point out that the purveyors of Russian disinformation – Hillary Clinton’s campaign, the DNC, the Steele Dossier, the Ranking Member Peters accusing Sen. Grassley and I of disseminating Russian disinformation, that’s where the disinformation is coming. That’s where the false information, the lies, the false allegations,” Johnson said.

Palestinian Track Record Ambassador (Ret.) Yoram Ettinger

December 16, 2020, https://bit.ly/3njMqXI

The Palestinian conflict did not erupt in 1967, nor in 1948.

In November 1917, the Balfour Declaration called for the establishment of “a national home for the Jewish People” in Palestine, which was the accepted international name of the Land of Israel since the 5th century BCE. The declaration, by the British Foreign Minister, stated that “nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities [Arabs] in Palestine.” The declaration acknowledged the ancient national Jewish roots in the Land of Israel (Palestine), and that Jews were indigenous in Palestine, returning to – not colonizing – their homeland.

In April 1920, the post-World War I San Remo Conference reaffirmed the Balfour Declaration and laid the legal foundation for the creation of 22 Arab states and one Jewish state. It was signed by all 51 members of the League of Nations in the August 1920 Treaty of Sevres between the Allied Powers and the Ottoman Empire.

Arab terrorism erupted in Jerusalem, Jaffa and the Galilee in response to the emerging reestablishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East, which is considered by Muslims as the abode of Islam, “divinely-ordained to believers” and off limits to “infidel” sovereignty.

In July 1922, the League of Nations entrusted Britain with the Mandate for Palestine, which was authored by the San Remo Conference. The Mandate highlighted “the historical connection of the Jewish people to Palestine, and the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country.” The sole purpose of the Mandate was to establish a Jewish national home in Palestine, referring to the Land of Israel. The Mandate for Palestine has been included, since 1945, in Article 80 of the UN Charter, which preserves the inherent Jewish national rights in the Land of Israel.

In September 1922, the League of Nations and Britain transferred 3/4 of Palestine to the Hashemite Emirate of Transjordan, which gained independence in 1946.

Why Black conservatives in academia have supported Israel for decades Contrasting Dr. Walter E. Williams with Israel-hater Dr. Lamont Hill is a stark reminder of what so much of academia has become. Moshe Phillips

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/292867

The death of Dr. Walter E. Williams (1936-2020) at age 84 in early December presents an opportunity to examine why so many Black conservatives in academia and media have supported Israel for decades compared to Israel-haters like Marc Lamont Hill.

Williams was Professor of Economics at George Mason University, as well as a syndicated columnist.
From 1973 to 1980 Williams was an economics professor at Temple University. He promoted free market ideas and in its December 2 obituary, the Wall Street Journal noted that “America has lost one of its greatest economists and public intellectuals.”

By contrast Lamont Hill, age 41, says he is “Present Assistant Professor of Urban Education & American Studies (at) Temple University (Affiliated Professor of Anthropology) (Affiliated Professor of American Studies)” on the CV on his website.

That is a stark reminder of what Temple and so much of academia has become. A change from Economics taught to understand the destructive nature of socialism has become to. “Urban Education & American Studies” taught to denigrate America at every turn.

But, there is more. Much more.

THE AUDACITY OF THIS MAN TRUMP

https://abyssum.org/2020/12/13/how-dare-donald-trump-turn-out-to-be-one-of-the-best-presidents-the-united-states-of-america-has-ever-had-in-spite-of-his-personal-flaws-which-he-never-tried-to-hide-

I’m still trying to understand what 80 million voters disliked about President Trump so much that they decided to cast their votes for a man who served forty-seven years in government and has done absolutely nothing for the American people. And, I’m still flabbergasted that those same people would vote for a woman to serve as Vice President, a heartbeat away from the Presidency, with a rather checkered and not so moral past. I wondered why they despised and hated President Trump so much.

And so, I have many questions:

Did you dislike that Trump made cruelty to animals a felony?

Did you dislike he raised billions to stop the opioid crisis? 

Perhaps you feel that he destroyed ISIS, killed terrorists, including the leader of ISIS and the Iranian General responsible for thousands of American deaths, all without going to war? 

Did you dislike the fact that the media and democrats, Joy Behar and Whoopi Goldberg, Chris Cuomo, and Jim Acosta said we’d be in World War III by now with North Korea, and their prophecies did not come to pass?

Did you dislike Trump because under his leadership we became energy-independent and an exporter rather than an importer of oil, no longer relying on the Middle East for our petroleum needs? 

Did you dislike him because he wanted to build a wall to keep criminals and drugs from coming into our country?

Did you dislike him because he just slashed the price for medications in some cases by 50%, which is driving big Pharma nuts?

Perhaps you dislike that he signed a law ending the gag-order on pharmacists that prevented them from sharing money-saving options on prescriptions? 

Is your dislike for President Trump based on the fact that he signed the Save Our Seas Act, which funds $10 million per year to clean tons of plastic and garbage from the ocean?  

Senator Ron Johnson to Hold Election Irregularities Hearing Today By Liz Sheld

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/16/morning-greatness-senator-ronjohn-to-hold-election-irregularities-hearing-today/

EXCERPT:

Today, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs will hold a hearing, “Examining Election Irregularities in the 2020 Election.” (Here is a link to C-SPAN.) The Committee is chaired by Senator Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican. As I’m sure you know, Wisconsin is one of the states where serious fraud allegations have been alleged so RonJohn is doing his job and holding a hearing to air out the fraud and corruption. Ken Starr will be testifying as will Trump lawyers James R. Troupis and Jessie R. Binnall. Pennsylvania State Representative Francis X. Ryan is on the panel along with Commissioner Donald Palmer of the Election Assistance Commission. We can also look forward to Former Director (2018-2020) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Chris Krebs.

Perhaps you remember the fired Krebs when he was belching out claims that the 2020 election was the most secure election ever in the history of the world. “The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes or changed votes or was in any way compromised.” Really? What is remarkable about this statement is that it was made without examining any equipment, records or reading sworn statements from observers and participants. Krebs must have magical powers to make such categorical statements. The Cathedral is obsessed with Krebs as CNN, ABC, and Politico have manufactured shiny puff pieces on him in preparation for the narrative they are going to advertise to you once the hearing his over. Politico wins a Scooby snack with a hit piece on RonJohn. Politico writes, Senator Johnson is “linking himself to President Donald Trump’s election challenge” or put in a better way, he is linking himself to the voters who are furious that their election was a hot mess.

It’s a risky political gamble for Johnson, who is betting that his embrace of Trump through his prior probes and his upcoming election hearing will energize the president’s base, which remains strong in Wisconsin despite Democratic wins statewide in 2018 and 2020. Still, Johnson’s decision to hold Wednesday’s hearing is drawing bipartisan ire as Trump’s allegations of voter fraud continue to crumble in federal court. It also comes two days after the Electoral College sealed Biden’s victory.

Is it a risky political gamble? Johnson doesn’t represent the snots writing copy for the anti-Trump advertisement published in Politico, he represents the people of Wisconsin. They are angry about their election and the fact that Politico wants to turn this into a Trump issue shows how divorced they are from the concerns of regular people. The election “irregularities” are not about Trump, they are about people who want to trust their voting process, a process they use to make their interests known to their representatives.

“So now you’ve got President Trump’s supporters seeing some real problems. There are some irregularities here that need to be explained,” said Johnson. “These issues have to be highlighted and hopefully corrected so that, in the next election, people have, just going into it, greater assurances.”

One has to wonder, why on earth would there be a controversy about examining election integrity? At the very least it looks like media advertorials such as Politico are supporting a coverup and at worse, endorsing the fraud.

Back to the Democrats’ star witness Krebs, this guy was head of the Homeland’s cybersecurity and we had a massive, serious hack across multiple government computer systems when he was on duty. “This is probably going to be one of the most consequential cyberattacks in U.S. history,” one U.S. official said, after the National Security Council held its second meeting in three days about the attacks, which security experts have linked to Russian intelligence. “That’s the view from inside government — that we’re dealing with something of a scale that I don’t think we’ve had to deal with before.”

So how capable and competent is Krebs? Not very, it seems.

Reckless Courts Codify Chaos Republican cowardice, a missing Justice Department, and feckless judges—not a few lawsuits—are the true dangers to our democracy. By Julie Kelly

https://amgreatness.com/2020/12/15/reckless-courts-codify-chaos/

Flagrant election cheating in several swing states, it seems, is of no interest to the self-appointed watchdogs of American democracy or even to those specifically tasked with investigating such unlawfulness.

The U.S. Department of Justice, despite its preachy corporate motto, is thus far blind to it. Journalists and professional pundits on both sides of the aisle downplay talk of what has happened as “baseless conspiracy theories” pushed by cult-like Trump loyalists. Most Senate Republicans are eager to move on while ignoring provable instances of voting fraud in their own states and urging the president to concede “for the good of the country.”

Even with a potentially power-shifting Senate election on January 5, no one seems particularly motivated to quickly remedy how absentee ballots have been mishandled, manipulated, and doctored in the 2020 presidential election.

And the entity usually considered the final and most impartial arbiter of injustice in the country—the court system—now, too, is in on the election fix.

Dangerous Precedents

Using COVID-19 panic as the pretext, election officials across the country turned a once-venerated quadrennial tradition into a rogue farce. Nearly 66 million mail-in votes were cast in the 2020 presidential election, double the number from 2016; the overwhelming majority were for Joe Biden.

Numerous lawsuits have detailed how state election laws, particularly those related to mail-in ballots, were broken. One would think that given Biden’s slim margin of victory in three states—only about 250,000 votes separate Biden from President Trump in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania—judges sworn to uphold the rule of law might exhibit at least a passing interest in exhausting all the evidence.

After all, if Americans can’t depend on the Justice Department or their state attorneys general, Democrats in those three states, or even local Republican leaders to come to the rescue, surely the black-robed referees perched on the bench will step up, right?

Wrong. Not only are the courts dismissing lawsuits, judges are setting dangerous precedents that will have more election-eroding consequences later.

DECEMBER 16, 2016-FROM JAMES FREEMAN

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-will-we-do-without-trump-11608073543?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

EXCERPT:

This Day in Political History

Four years may seem like a long time ago, and perhaps it was given the changes since then in American politics. By mid-December of 2016 Hillary Clinton and her supporters had accepted the results of the November presidential election and were treating America’s president-elect with graciousness and respect.

Just kidding. On this day in 2016, the FBI secretly recorded a conversation between a bureau source and Trump associate Carter Page. Two months earlier, the FBI had used a bogus Clinton-funded dossier of Russian collusion claims and misled the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court into approving the first of several warrant applications focusing on Mr. Page.

Mrs. Clinton would continue for years promoting fact-free Russia conspiracy theories about her political rivals. And back on Dec. 15, 2016, many of her supporters were still seeking to prevent the winner of the November election from taking office. Calvin Woodward and Rachel La Corte of the Associated Press reported on an effort among Democrats to derail Donald Trump’s victory at the Electoral College. According to the AP report:

Republican electors are being swamped with pleas to buck tradition and cast ballots for someone else at meetings across the country Monday that are on course to ratify Trump as the winner. AP interviews with more than 330 electors from both parties found little appetite for a revolt…

The interviews found widespread Democratic aggravation with the electoral process but little expectation that the rush of anti-Trump maneuvering can stop him. For that to happen, Republican-appointed electors would have to stage an unprecedented defection.

The Embarrassing Russian Disinformation Canard By Rich Lowry

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/the-embarrassing-russian-disinformation-canard/

To help Biden win, former top intelligence officials, aided by a derelict media, deliberately misled the public.

If there’s one thing that the Hunter Biden laptop episode has proven, it is that former directors of the Central Intelligence Agency aren’t as adept at evaluating evidence as advertised.

Five former directors or acting directors of the CIA signed a letter asserting that the laptop, first reported by the New York Post in the weeks before the election, “has all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation.”

More than 50 former senior intelligence officials, including former director of national intelligence James Clapper, endorsed the letter, which was used by the Biden campaign and the press to discredit the damning emails about Hunter Biden’s business dealings.

The signatories should have thought better of their missive when they felt compelled to include the line, “We want to emphasize that we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

That also should have tipped reporters off to the fact that the letter was rank speculation masquerading as informed analysis. But true to form, they happily ran with it instead.

Where Did the New Mad Left Come From? By Victor Davis Hanson

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/12/where-did-the-new-mad-left-come-from/

Utopianism is age-old, as are its tragic consequences — and we haven’t seen the worst yet.

B outs of extreme leftism are frequent in history. Plato’s Apology, Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, and Vladimir Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? — all offer us insight into the mind and methods of the hard Left.

America has experienced surges of mainstream anarchism, socialism, and communism, most profoundly during the late 19th century, amid the Great Depression, during the Soviet-American alliance of World War II and afterward, and in the 1960s. But rarely have these radical movements openly and without apologies made such inroads into and inside government and the establishment as during the past decade.We had earlier seen massive rioting, looting, and iconoclasm, similar to the chaos of summer 2020. But seldom did they continue with the de facto approval of mayors who restrained the police and turned their downtowns over to virtual occupiers setting up “autonomous” zones. Nor had we see seen city councils defund police operations. New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio and Seattle’s mayor Jenny Durkan were not so much hard-Left Democrats or socialists as they were anarchists who ceded control of parts of American cities to other anarchists.

We cannot recall any district attorney in memory who simply declared that an entire array of crimes no longer existed, and that those convicted of them would be let loose on the public. Yet Los Angeles County district attorney George Gascón recently announced that his office will not be charging anyone arrested for making criminal threats, possessing drugs and drug paraphernalia possession, being publicly intoxicated or under the influence of a controlled substance, loitering to commit prostitution, resisting arrest, or a host of other crimes.

In essence, Gascón simply overrode the California legislature and his own county statutes. He has made up his own laws in his own private fiefdom of Los Angeles County — a jurisdiction of over 10 million, larger than 40 states.