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50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

January 6 Committee Doubles as November 8 Committee Even after the Capitol riot show’s season finale, partisan programming may continue. James Freeman

https://www.wsj.com/articles/january-6-committee-doubles-as-november-8-committee-11666297630?mod=opinion_lead_pos11

If the average American voter cared about the Capitol riot committee, she might wonder whether the committee’s members or its targets are more loathsome. All along, citizens have had to either laugh or cry at the spectacle of federal election deniers leading an investigation of federal election denial. But is the partisan congressional committee now interfering in a state campaign?

As for the deniers conducting these proceedings, committee Chairman Bennie Thompson (D., Miss.) was among the 31 Democrats who sought to prevent the certification of the re-election of President George W. Bush in 2005.

Committee stalwart Rep. Jamie Raskin (D., Md.) has a long history of refusing to accept Republican wins. He recommended dismantling the Electoral College after the 2000 election and after the 2016 election he attempted to prevent the certification of Donald Trump’s victory and then boycotted the inauguration.

And who could forget Rep. Adam Schiff (D., Calif.), who helped poison our politics by spending years falsely claiming to have “more than circumstantial evidence” of Trump campaign collusion with Russia?

After this season’s final hearing was rescheduled to avoid competing for television viewers with hurricane coverage, one might have thought the partisan shenanigans were finally drawing to a close for this oddball committee comprised exclusively of Democrats and Democrat-approved Republicans. But now there’s a question involving the surprisingly tight gubernatorial race in New York.

Victor Sharpe: As Time Goes By

https://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/221019

By one of life’s odd coincidences, I recently finished watching Clint Eastwood’s movie on the rise to power of J. Edgar Hoover when I came across a commentary written by J. R. Nyquist in his blog titled, The Time Traveler’s Lesson. It was of an imaginary interrogation by Hoover himself of a man taken into custody by the FBI claiming to be from the future and describing America in the year 2016.

Back in 1964 and upon hearing the time traveler’s description, Hoover exploded in outrage finding the account the most egregious nonsense he had ever heard. No doubt, Hoover concluded, the man’s description of life in the United States 52 years hence was an unmitigated hoax or the man was certifiably insane. But what was it that the time traveler described which so shocked J. Edgar Hoover?

America in the future would be led for eight years by a man with the partly Arabic name of Barack Hussein Obama who was mentored as a youth by a suspected Communist named Frank Marshall Davis.

The time traveler went on to explain that the leading social question of 2016 would be gay marriage. Hoover angrily asked if it was thought by some to be funny to play such a practical joke on the FBI?

Nor did Hoover credit the time traveler’s absurd claim that the national debt was more than $17 trillion in 2016, or that Venezuela and Nicaragua had been quietly taken over by Fidel Castro’s friends, that Zimbabwe, Angola, South Africa along with the Congo were now in the hands of African Communists, or that North Korea possessed nuclear weapons. None of this was believable. None of it made any sense to someone living in 1964 during the Cold War.

When the time traveler finally reported that the United States was reduced to a state of manufacturing inferiority to Red China, there was an abrupt end to the interview. Hoover angrily exclaimed, ”What self-respecting American official in 1964 could possibly allow himself to be so insolently abused?”

HISTORIC RELEASE: Dr. Anthony Fauci’s Official Work Calendar (November 2019 – March 2020) An hour-by-hour timeline of who Dr. Fauci was talking to, what he was doing, and where his meetings were in the months before and after the public disclosure of the pandemic. Adam Andrzejewski

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/historic-release-dr-anthony-faucis

On Tuesday, January 14, 2020 at 9am, Dr. Anthony Fauci joined staff at the National Security Council (NSC) — the President’s national security and foreign policy advisory shop — for a meeting in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building about the novel coronavirus. Fauci would continue to have meetings in classified settings throughout the month.

Fauci’s calendar entries included NSC meetings, White House Situation Room meetings, and meetings in other classified settings, as Covid-19 was breaking in China. (To our knowledge, the existence of these meetings before January 28, 2020 were not previously disclosed.)

On Friday, January 24th, four days after China admitted human-to-human transmission of the virus, Fauci started attending a small group Covid discussion that first took place in “Anthony’s Office” in a building next to the White House. Anthony, in this case, appears to be an NSC employee and an expert in biodefense and China.

Flashing back to December 2019, when patients in Wuhan were showing up at hospitals with unidentified pneumonia cases, Fauci attended the National Institutes of Health — Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation dinner and workshops on December 19 and 20th – the sixth annual event for NIH staff and Gates Foundation executives.

On the morning of the 19th, billionaire Bill Gates tweeted out his own hopes for the coming year and his now prescient prediction: “one of the best buys in global health: vaccines.”

Today, we only know about these meetings, because our organization at OpenTheBooks.com, in partnership with the public-interest law firm Judicial Watch, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in federal court. NIH had refused to even acknowledge our Freedom of Information Act request.

So, for the first time, here is our exclusive release of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s official calendar:

Awakening from the “Defund” Nightmare Progressive commentators are beginning to notice the damage their criminal-justice policies have wrought in America’s most vulnerable communities. Rav Arora

https://www.city-journal.org/progressives-awakening-from-defund-the-police-nightmare?wallit_nosession=1

Over the past few weeks, several top progressive commentators have completely reversed their views on “defunding police” and adopted a more tough-on-crime approach. Most notably, Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian—key figures of the premier progressive outlet The Young Turks—have awakened to the grim consequences of the policies they initially supported.

Uygur recently posted a viral tweet lambasting the “defund the police” movement as “wildly counterproductive framing” and asking progressives when they will “admit they were wrong?” These statements contrast starkly with Uygur’s tweets during the nationwide George Floyd protests: “I’m done. I’m now supporting #DefundThePolice 100%. I already agreed with the substance of the argument & now I’m down for the framing, too.”

The irony of Uygur’s recent statement is that he fails to answer the very question he poses to the Left: he has not acknowledged that he was wrong. In fact, prominent liberal commentators on platforms from The Young Turks to CNN helped popularize the movement that led to massive cuts to police department budgets in 2020. Major cities such as New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, Austin, and San Francisco slashed funding for their departments amid an unprecedented rise in officer retirements and low officer morale. The financial, cultural, legal, and psychological ramifications of the Black Lives Matter-fueled defund-police movement correlated with record-breaking 30 percent rise in homicides in 2020, followed by another 6 percent rise last year.

Meantime, Uygur’s fellow Young Turks commentator Ana Kasparian has generated a progressive social media backlash for criticizing soft-on-crime prosecution in California. In a clip that went viral on Twitter, Kasparian decries the events leading up to 20-year-old Carlos Delcid’s alleged killing of an off-duty Monterey Park police officer last month. Before the shooting, Delcid had been sentenced to 180 days in prison, but L.A. district attorney George Gascón dropped three of the five felony charges (including witness intimidation, false imprisonment, and assault with a deadly weapon), resulting in his release the next day.

Biden’s Lies About Energy Can No Longer Be Ignored

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/10/21/bidens-lies-about-energy-can-no-longer-be-ignored/

It’s stunning to hear President Biden (and the rest of the Democrats) spin our growing energy crisis. Like a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar, Biden continually tells the American people, “I didn’t do it!” In fact, yes he did. And he still is.

“Let’s debunk some myths: My administration has not stopped or slowed U.S. oil production,” Biden said on Wednesday, adding that he’s “doing everything in my power to reduce gasoline prices.”

Is that true? In fact, the entire energy policy of the Biden administration has been directed at not just slowing, but stopping U.S. oil production. The intended result: Higher gasoline prices for consumers, yet another Bidenflation tax on American families that is already pushing many to the brink of financial insolvency.

That’s not a partisan talking point, by the way. Even his own administration’s energy officials admit that the goal of the administration is to get rid of fossil fuels by raising prices. They just don’t want it now, before the 2022 midterm elections.

Oil output must be limited in order to “make sure that we’re in a better footing to accelerate the transition,” said Amos Hochstein, Biden’s Special Presidential Coordinator for International Energy Affairs.

By the way, we wrote about this back in March of this year, when Biden was fixated on blaming Russia’s dictator Vladimir Putin for our self-inflicted energy woes.

“Putin’s war is already hurting American families at the gas pump . . . I’m going to do everything I can to minimize Putin’s price hike here at home,” Biden said, as he banned Russian oil imports.

Just as he did back then, Biden this week blamed U.S. oil companies for the energy mess.

“You’re sitting on record profits and we’re giving you more certainty so you can act now to increase oil production now,” Biden said.

More certainty? Record profits? Sure enough, as energy prices soared recently, quarterly oil company profits jumped along with them. But that’s only part of the story.

Is the Red Wave Back? The question for Republicans is what will they do if—perhaps when—they reacquire congressional power. The question is doubly relevant with two more years of guaranteed Democratic White House control. By Josh Hammer

https://amgreatness.com/2022/10/20/is-the-red-wave-back/

In the dog days of summer, as Joe Biden’s average approval rating plummeted to historic lows amid an intense flurry of national setbacks, policy blunders, and rhetorical “gaffes” (otherwise known as palpable senility), most in the punditry class began to predict an imminent “red wave” of Republican electoral dominance in November’s midterm elections.

The midterms that take place two years after a new presidency typically favor the opposition party, after all, and certain data—such as the four-decade-high inflation rate that was, and still is, raging like wildfire—pointed in the direction of a strong ballot-box backlash to one-party Democratic rule. At that time, we could also add in an “eyeball test” of sorts: Uncle Joe was (and still is), quite simply, way too old and way too bad at this.

Then, from late July through Labor Day weekend in early September, the momentum seemed to shift a bit toward the incumbent party. Democrats largely outperformed expectations in special elections in Nebraska, Minnesota and New York, and the culturally conservative state of Kansas resoundingly rejected a pro-life attempt to amend the state’s constitution to democratize the abortion issue and let the state legislature decide Kansas abortion policy.

In general, for about four to six weeks, we began to see enough data trickle in to suggest that a “Dobbs backlash”—whereby the U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade would have the effect of energizing and mobilizing progressive voters—might really be in the offing. Some promising Republican Senate candidates in reliably Trumpy states, such as J. D. Vance in Ohio, seemed to be failing to gain polling traction. The punditocracy switched gears: The “red wave” might simply be a shapeless “purple drip.” (Some of us, it must be said, suggested that little had actually changed.)

The Green Energy Profiteering Scam “Green” Profits Can Only Rise if Citizens’ Freedoms Fall by J.B. Shurk

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19008/green-energy-profiteering

When governments limit drilling and mining for hydrocarbons in the ground, they manufacture scarcity.

When only certain wealthy individuals and companies can afford artificially expensive hydrocarbon energies as regular business costs, then budding entrepreneurs and small firms can no longer compete. Those at the peak of society’s wealth pyramid have a much easier time staying on top when the same natural sources of hydrocarbon energy once used to amass fortunes are now denied to those who would do the same.

A war on “fossil” fuels is a superb tactic for protecting private market share. It is a profitable ideological cause for fattening government revenues. And it is a constant source of income for environmental “nonprofits” and other special interests….

Can plastics, heating oil, and most synthetic materials found around a home be magically manufactured without petroleum?

Can the global population stave off famine and starvation if farmers are forced to overhaul agricultural and livestock production methods in order to abide by “green” laws limiting the use or release of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen, and phosphate — molecules and compounds essential to basic farming and high crop yield fertilizers?

Ideology hijacks the market’s natural direction toward an objective and transparent “meeting of the minds.” There is an unspoken but unmistakable fraud. Until governments, including hostile adversaries such as Russia and the United States, conspired to limit the use of hydrocarbon energy and “go green,” the idea that anybody could turn a profit from the wind or sun would have seemed as absurd as a vendor selling rocks freely available all around us.

Are electric vehicles as powerful as their internal combustion engine counterparts? Can wind and solar energies really provide nations with reliable power grids robust enough to avoid rolling blackouts? Can plastics, heating oil, and most synthetic materials found around a home be magically manufactured without petroleum?

Can the global population stave off famine and starvation if farmers are forced to overhaul agricultural and livestock production methods in order to abide by “green” laws limiting the use or release of carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen, and phosphate — molecules and compounds essential to basic farming and high crop yield fertilizers?

In free markets, commodities bought and sold possess perceived value. When a buyer and seller reach an agreed upon price for any product, there is a “meeting of the minds.” The value of any natural raw material is proportional to its scarcity. The more of it there is, and the more easily it can be obtained, the less value it holds. A vendor who sells ordinary rocks cannot make a living when his product is found freely all over the ground. If he transacts in gold or silver, diamonds or rubies, however, his hard-to-find “rocks” are worth a small fortune. If only there were a way to turn ordinary rocks into valuable commodities!

There are, in fact, two well-known ways to do so. An unscrupulous vendor could simply paint ordinary rocks gold and pretend that common minerals are rare, and an unsuspecting customer might never be the wiser. Through fraud, the seller can hijack the perceived value of his goods and undermine the agreed “meeting of the minds” between himself and any deceived customer. His “precious” rocks actually hold no value but provide him with ill-gotten gains. Over time, however, this type of fraud does not last. More discerning customers eventually catch on to the ruse, and that information is shared among prospective buyers. And unless he is quick to move on to a new town with new buyers yet to be deceived, old swindled customers are likely to end his livelihood or much worse. Engaging in illicit fraud comes with serious personal risks.

November-like chill places 100 million people under frost and freeze alerts KATHRYN PROCIV

https://www.aol.com/news/november-chill-places-100-million-142415893.html

More than 100 million people woke up Wednesday under frost advisories, freeze watches and warnings on what was expected to be the coldest morning of the week for the South and the coldest temperatures for most since the spring.

Due to the cold air mass plunging south before expanding east, southern cities actually woke up colder than northern cities. Dallas was colder than Boston, and Atlanta was colder than Cleveland.

For the first time on record, Birmingham, Alabama, hit 32 degrees before Billings, Montana, beating that notoriously cold city to the first official freeze of the season.

New York City’s Central Park dipped to 42 degrees, the coldest temperature since April 29, and Charlotte’s 30-degree reading set its fifth earliest freeze on record.

Most of the cold alerts expire by midmorning Wednesday, but some will linger through Thursday morning, especially across the Ohio Valley, the Gulf Coast and the Southeast coast.

D.C. Set to Allow Illegal Immigrants to Vote in Local Elections By Ari Blaff

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/d-c-set-to-allow-illegal-immigrants-to-vote-in-local-elections/?utm_source=

The D.C. Council, the legislative body representing Washington, D.C., sent a set of bills to Mayor Muriel Bowser’s desk on Tuesday, one of which will allow illegal immigrants to vote in local elections.

The bill allowing illegal immigrants to vote passed on a near-unanimous 12-1 vote following its first reading earlier this week, after languishing in the city council for a decade. It expands previous legislation which allowed green-card holders to vote.

Councilman Charles Allen, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said he sponsored the bill because the issue of representation is “personal” to D.C. residents.

“In the District [of Columbia], we understand disenfranchisement,” Allen said during the committee vote.

“We know what it feels like to be taxed without representation. That people we didn’t elect make decisions that deeply affect our lives,” he said.

Local activist groups such as DC Latino Caucus as well as D.C. for Democracy were active in pushing for the issue. “Passage of this bill means that, for the first time in our lives, I and thousands of D.C. residents—immigrants who live, work, and pay taxes in the District—will be able to vote,” a local organizer and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, Abel Amene, said.

The only dissenting opinion upon first reading was councilwoman Mary Cheh, who understood it was an uphill battle. “Futility is not my goal here,” Cheh told the DCist. “Could someone who was put on a bus from Texas and dropped off at the vice president’s property … then vote in our local elections?” Cheh reportedly asked.

“Cheh’s ‘questions’ are rooted in age-old xenophobia and racism,” Amene wrote to the Washington Post following the vote. “Immigrants are not ‘complete strangers.’ They are our neighbors, family and friends.”

Maryland has been one of the states leading the charge to expand the vote to illegal migrants. If the bill is ratified, Washington D.C. will join neighboring Hyattsville and Takoma Park in having laws in place that will allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. New York City passed similar legislation to allow illegal immigrants to vote last year but it was struck down as unconstitutional by a state Supreme Court judge in June.

Texas Republican representative August Pfluger denounced the development. “If you’re in the United States illegally, you don’t have the right to vote—period. Liberals in Washington, D.C. who want to allow noncitizens to vote are putting the integrity of our election system at risk. My bill will put a stop to it. Americans deserve confidence in our elections and to know that only legal citizens are voting in the United States of America.” Pfluger introduced a bill last week to block the motion.

There are believed to be over 50,000 illegals in the District of Columbia. The bill was passed alongside another initiative that would make mail-in voting a permanent feature of elections.

As Michigan Dems Plot To Take Over Elections And Trans The Kids, Grassroots Activists ‘Stand Up’ To Fight By: Shawn Fleetwood

https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/19/as-michigan-dems-plot-to-take-over-elections-and-trans-the-kids-grassroots-activists-stand-up-to-fight/

‘If we don’t protect our children and our Constitution, then we have utterly failed,’ said Stand Up Michigan President Ron Armstrong.

With Election Day rapidly approaching, the fight for the soul of one of the country’s most contested battleground states is just starting to heat up. In Michigan, where Democrat Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is facing a tough general election challenge from Republican gubernatorial candidate Tudor Dixon, residents will be voting on two leftist-backed ballot amendments that carry serious ramifications — and one grassroots group is standing up to make sure they don’t pass.

The amendments seek to overhaul the state’s election systems and codify unlimited access to abortion into Michigan’s constitution, with the latter amendment covertly including a right for transgender-identifying minors to undergo sterilization without parental consent.

Known as “Proposal 2,” the first of the two initiatives would essentially legalize Democrats’ election-takeover policies throughout the state. If passed, the amendment would allow for “state-funded ‘absentee ballot drop boxes’ and ‘postage for applications and ballots,’” as well as allowances for private “donations to fund elections,” such as the “Zuckbucks” that were used to alter operations in state and local government election offices during the 2020 contest. Moreover, Proposal 2 would also “provide voters with a ‘right’ to fill out a single absentee ballot application ‘to vote absentee in all [future] elections,’” which would “keep mass mail-in balloting, the least secure form of elections, in place after such measures caused a chaotic 2020 election.”