Monthly Archives: September 2020

Good News

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Yesterday One America News posted an article about progress toward a coronavirus vaccine.

The article reports:

According to the CEO of Pfizer, the company’s coronavirus vaccine is likely to get approved before 2021. On Sunday, Albert Bourla announced the pharmaceutical company will probably know whether their vaccine works or not by October of this year.

“I don’t know if they have to wait until 2021,” he said.

In the meantime, Bourla confirmed Pfizer has manufactured hundreds of thousands of doses to distribute and is still preparing more.

“We started already manufacturing and have manufactured hundreds of thousands of doses,” he explained. “So just in case we have a good study read out, conclusive and FDA plus the advisory committee feels comfortable, that we will be ready.”

Hopefully, we will have the vaccine quickly.

 

Waiting To See The Impact Of This

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For years Americans have subsidized research by pharmaceutical companies by paying higher prices for drugs than other countries. Yesterday The Epoch Times reported that President Trump has signed an Executive Order that requires drug companies to charge Americans the same price for druges that the companies charge other countries.

The article reports:

The latest step would replace a July 24 Trump executive order.

It extends the mandate to prescription drugs available at a pharmacy, which are covered under Medicare Part D. The July version focused on drugs typically administered in doctors’ offices and health clinics, covered by Medicare Part B.

Specifically, it would pay a price for a drug that matches the lowest price paid among wealthy foreign governments. Medicare, the government healthcare program for seniors, is currently prohibited from negotiating prices it pays to drugmakers.

…Trump took executive action in late July on drug prices, which included discounts on insulin and EpiPens for hospitals, which would be passed down to patients, allowing the United States to allow the legal importation of prescription drugs from Canada and other countries where prices are lower, and a Medicare program will be required to purchase drugs at the same price that other countries pay.

The article notes:

The orders received swift pushback from the pharmaceutical industry. Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America said in a statement that the move was “a reckless distraction that impedes our ability to respond to the current pandemic—and those we could face in the future.”

The pushback is not a surprise. The pharmaceutical industry pays very well.

For example according to Fierce Pharma:

Len Schleifer, Regeneron has a salary package of $41.97 million

Jeffrey Leiden, Vertex Pharmaceuticals has a salary package of $36.64 million

Brent Saunders, Allergan (formerly Actavis) has a salary package of $36.61 million

You get the picture. While I believe in the Free Market and don’t want to see the government interfere in anyone’s salary, I also believe that there is something askew here. It seems to me that as the President moves to bring drug prices into the rhelm of reality, the pharmaceutical companies might want to re-evaluate what they are paying their CEO’s. I am sure the President’s Executive Orders will impact the bottom line of the pharmaceutical companies. The question will be how they choose to handle the revenue cuts.$

7 illion $41.million

 

 

In A Sane World, This Would Be Automatic

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Yesterday Just the News posted an article about the saga of the wiped cell phones given to the inspector general by associates of Robert Mueller involved in the Mueller investigation.

The article reports:

Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson on Friday asked Department of Justice Inspector General Michael Horowitz to open an investigation into the dozen-plus phones belonging to associates of the Robert Mueller special counsel that had been wiped of data prior to being surrendered to investigators. 

Government documents released this week listed multiple phones belonging to members of Mueller’s Russia collusion probe as having been cleared of all data before they were handed over to Horowitz’s office. Many of the phones, according to the documents, were purged of data after the users entered incorrect passwords too many times. 

In his letter, Johnson—the chairman of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs—said the missing data  “raise[s] concerns about record retention and transparency.”

The article concludes:

Johnson also asked Horowitz to explain “when and how [his] office was made aware of this matter,” what steps the office took to “confirm whether information on these phones had been wiped,” whether or not the phones in question had “text message capabilities,” and if Horowtiz’s office has “the capability to retrieve the information from these phones?”

The letter asks for a response “no later than September 18, 2020.”

Stay tuned.

He Really Said This

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On Friday, The Daily Wire posted an article about some recent comments by former Vice-President Biden.

The article reports:

On Thursday, while speaking at an event organized by the rabidly anti-Israel group J Street, former Vice President Joe Biden snapped that President Donald Trump had “put Israel in danger” by withdrawing from the Iran nuclear deal. He also insinuated that Trump has put American Jews in danger because he has “embraced” conspiracy theories.

Biden’s timing was hilarious considering that on Friday, Trump announced that Bahrain became the latest Arab country to normalize relations with Israel, following the United Arab Emirates having done so in August.

It is also a totally ridiculous statement considering how the Obama administration treated Israel.

The article notes some previous interactions between then Senator Joe Biden and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin:

Biden opposing Israeli settlements is no shock at all; in 1982 Biden reportedly banged on a desk and berated Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin that if Israel continued building settlements in Judea and Samaria, the U.S. would cut off financial aid. Begin fired back:

Don’t threaten us with cutting off your aid. It will not work. I am not a Jew with trembling knees. I am a proud Jew with 3,700 years of civilized history. Nobody came to our aid when we were dying in the gas chambers and ovens. Nobody came to our aid when we were striving to create our country. We paid for it. We fought for it. We died for it. We will stand by our principles. We will defend them. And, when necessary, we will die for them again, with or without your aid.

Begin added:

This desk is designed for writing, not for fists. Don’t threaten us with slashing aid. Do you think that because the U.S. lends us money it is entitled to impose on us what we must do? We are grateful for the assistance we have received, but we are not to be threatened. I am a proud Jew. Three thousand years of culture are behind me, and you will not frighten me with threats. Take note: we do not want a single soldier of yours to die for us.

If you have any doubts about how the Obama-Biden administration dealt with the Middle East, please see the article here about how the administration manipulated the media to get favorable press on the Iran deal.

Former Vice-President Biden’s statement about putting Israel in danger is pure garbage. The peace treaties recently put in effect in the Middle East would not have been possible had America remained in the Iran deal. These treaties have more to do with fear of Iran than they do with either America or Israel.

The Push Toward Mail-In Voting

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As has been said multiple times before, mail-in voting is different from absentee voting. Mail-in voting generally does not have the controls that absentee voting has to prevent voter fraud. There are court cases in various states right now to push for mail-in voting. One of those states is Texas.

On Friday, Hot Air reported the following:

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a lower court’s preliminary ruling that would have required the State of Texas to expand mail-in voting to all eligible registered voters. The Texas Democrat Party claimed that denying universal mail-in voting in Texas is age discrimination.

Texas allows mail-in voting for voters who are age 65 or older, voters who will be out of the county during the voting period, disabled or ill voters, and people incarcerated but eligible to vote. Absentee voting is allowed, as in other states. For absentee voting, a voter has to request a ballot. Democrats want to move to universal voting by mail, with registered voters receiving a ballot by mail automatically, without the step of requesting one.

The 5th U.S. Circuit Court didn’t agree with the Democrats:

The 5th Circuit’s majority said the state’s law did not violate the U.S. Constitution’s prohibition on age discrimination because it merely conferred an extra benefit on older residents, rather than limiting the right to vote for younger Texans.

“A law that makes it easier for others to vote does not abridge any person’s right to vote,” the majority wrote.

The article concludes:

The age discrimination part of this lawsuit is clearly malarkey. Democrats are just throwing everything against the wall in hopes that something will stick so that universal mail-in voting will come into play in Texas. The court rightly points out that no such argument can be made. If people can go shop at Walmart or a grocery store, they can go vote in person.

The lawsuit now goes back to the court of U.S. District Judge Fred Biery. In May, he ruled that all Texans can vote by mail because of the coronavirus pandemic. In June, however, the 5th Circuit blasted his ruling and blocked it. Biery is a Clinton appointee. It will fall upon Biery now to rule on the remaining issues in the lawsuit, including whether or not the Texas restrictions on mail-in voting violate equal protection guarantees.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton released a brief statement – “I am pleased that the 5th Circuit correctly upheld Texas’s vote-by-mail laws, and I commend the court for concluding that Texas’s decision to allow elderly voters to vote by mail does not violate the 26th Amendment.”

Stay tuned. This fight is ongoing in many states.

The Dog Ate My Cell Phone

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On Thursday Just the News reported that a number of high-ranking members of Robert Mueller’s team investigating Russian collusion wiped their phones before handing them over to the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General.

The article reports:

The documents, obtained via lawsuit by the watchdog group Judicial Watch, show that more than two dozen phones were apparently purged of information before being handed over to the inspector general, some having been allegedly mistakenly wiped and others having been “reassigned” prior to the inspector general’s review.

Numerous phones were “accidentally” wiped of data because the phone’s owner allegedly tried to enter the wrong password multiple times, the documents indicate. Many consumer phones manufactured today include features in which too many incorrect password attempts result in a wholesale data wipe. 

The article notes:

At least one phone — that belonging to FBI lawyer Lisa Page — had simply been “restored to factory settings” upon receipt by the inspector general.

Among the special counsel members whose phones were wiped was Andrew Weissmann, one of the probe’s chief investigators. Weissmann “entered [the phone’s] password too many times and wiped the phone,” the documents state.

The contents of those two phones might have been very interesting to the inspector general.

This story and others like it illustrate the importance of another term for President Trump. There are no guarantees that if President Trump is elected, the people who used our government for political purposes will be brought to justice. However, I can guarantee that if Joe Biden is elected, all of the abuses of intelligence agencies we saw during the Obama administration will be hidden from sight never to be seen again and the same tactics will be used against the next Republican candidate for President.

Climate Change Does Not Start Fires

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This has been a warm year everywhere. However, in places where good forest management has been the rule, forest fires haven’t been a problem. I live in an area where the forests are routinely cleared of underbrush and controlled burns are used to keep any fuel that would feed a massive wildfire at a minimum. That doesn’t mean there will never be a fire here, but it does lessen the chances of an out-of-control event.

There are some opportunists who have jumped on the opportunity to claim that the fires burning up our western states are the result of climate change. Somehow they have chosen to overlook the fact that environmentalists in California have blocked the clearing of the underbrush that feeds these massive fires. In Washington, it has become obvious that climate change is not responsible for the first.

The Gateway Pundit is reporting today:

Spokane police arrested serial arsonist Christine Comello for starting fires in East Spokane last week. Comello was arrested on Monday. She was also accuse(d) of burglary and arson at a local business in Spokane.

The article notes:

Spokane Police arrested a woman for allegedly starting fires in East Spokane while crews were trying to fix fallen power lines and put out electrical fires on Monday.

An officer was responding to a fire call by Magnolia and Riverside; there had been several fallen power lines that day, so he went to investigate.

Instead, he found grass and a pallet on fire outside of a business, with no way it could have started outside of arson, according to Police. A few blocks away, the same officer spotted another fire in an alleyway, next to an old oil drum by a garage and some trees…

…Officers eventually identified 36-year-old Christine Comello, who lied to police about her name. Comello had a felony warrant for burglary and reckless burning, tied to another incident a few weeks prior where she reportedly started fires at a Spokane Valley business.

Comello appeared on the surveillance video and was identified by witnesses. I guess the fires were not started by climate change.

We Remember

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As we approach the anniversary of September 11, 2001, I wanted to remember that day with something positive. There was a time in 2006 when America and Russia were at least acting like friends. The story below reflects that time.

Remembering 911

aaaaasespt11This is a picture of the Teardrop Memorial, Russia’s gift to the United States in memory of 911. The monument To the Struggle Against World Terrorism was dedicated on September 11, 2006, by President Clinton.   It is located in Bayonne, New Jersey, at a place where the twin towers were visible.   To read the entire story of the monument and how it came to rest there, please follow the link to 911monument.com.    The website tells the story of what inspired the monument and how it came to be. This is another picture of the monument.    I stumbled on this monument in an article at the American Thinker. I visited the monument a few years ago. It is a sobering sight. You stand at the foot of the monument and look across the river at lower Manhattan to where the twin towers once stood.

911 Monument Dedication Ceremony, Sept. 11, 2006

A Positive Tool In The Fight Against Crime

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Yesterday The Epoch Times posted an article about Operation Legend.

The article reports:

Operation Legend, the federal initiative to drive down violent crime in major inner cities, has had a positive effect on fighting violent crime, with cities seeing falling rates of homicide and shooting incidents in recent weeks, Attorney General William Barr said.

“I am pleased to report that Operation Legend is working, crime is down, and order is being restored,” Barr said during a Sept. 9 press conference in Chicago.

The crime-fighting initiative is credited with more than 2,500 arrests, including 592 individuals who were charged with federal crimes, the Justice Department (DOJ) said in an update. Federal authorities have also seized 1,024 firearms, 241 other weapons, more than 17 kilograms (37 pounds) of heroin, more than 75 kilograms (165 pounds) of methamphetamine, more than 7 kilograms (15 pounds) of fentanyl, more than 12 kilograms (26 pounds) of cocaine, and about $5.19 million in drug proceeds.

Operation Legend is the latest major law enforcement program by the DOJ to crack down on violent crime across the country. It began to combat a surge in crime rates in major metropolitan cities.

This is a successful program, but the article points out that some of the Democrats whose cities are positively impacted by the program are very reluctant to give any credit to the program for reductions in crime.

The article notes:

We are absolutely making progress, we are absolutely leaning into those federal relationships, but the cause and effect that Attorney General Barr tried to make today, I don’t think the facts bear that, not yet,” Lightfoot (Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot) said. “I’m hopeful that these relationships and these additional resources would really bear fruit, but we’re still in the early stages.”

Similarly, Kansas City saw similar drops in violent crime following the launch of the program. The city’s police department stated on Aug. 25 that overall violent crime had decreased by 30 percent when comparing six weeks of crime statistics prior to the operation with current data. Homicides went from 33 cases between May 6 and July 7 to 28 cases between July 8 and Aug. 23—a 15 percent decrease.

Non-fatal shootings also fell to 84 incidents from 112 over the same comparable period—a 25 percent fall.

“While we can’t say Operation LeGend is the cause of this decrease, there’s certainly a correlation,” Kansas City Police Chief Richard Smith said in a statement.

The article concludes:

“The increase in violence that has plagued Chicago and other cities is what prompted the department to launch Operation Legend two months ago in Kansas City, Missouri,” the attorney general said. “The Operation is named for LeGend Taliferro, a 4-year-old Kansas City boy shot and killed.

“The purpose of the operation was to make clear that his life mattered, his name should be remembered and other innocent victims like him, including the 8-year-old girl killed in Chicago on Labor Day, should not suffer such senseless death.”

In Chicago, authorities have charged 124 individuals with federal crimes. Other cities have also seen a similar trend: 113 federal arrests in Kansas City; 45 in Albuquerque; 66 in Cleveland; 58 in Detroit; 16 in Milwaukee; 123 in St. Louis; 16 in Memphis; and 31 in Indianapolis.

The fact that the program is working is good news. This program is another reason we need four more years of President Trump.

Wait! What?

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Assuming that Bob Woodward has written something that is true, there are some real questions about the actions of some of the people with important government positions.

Yesterday The Washington Post reported:

Mattis (General James Mattis) quietly went to Washington National Cathedral to pray about his concern for the nation’s fate under Trump’s command and, according to Woodward, told Coats (Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats), “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.”

That conversation was totally inappropriate and could easily be looked at as sedition.

The Conservative Treehouse points out a few things that add weight to the idea that there were people within the Trump administration working against the administration:

NOVEMBER 2019 – […] For emphasis let me repeat a current fact that is being entirely overlooked.  Despite his admitted usurpation of President Trump policy, Vindman was sent back to his post in the NSC with the full support of the United States Department of Defense.

The onus of action to remove Vindman from the NSC does not just lay simply at the feet of the White House and National Security advisor Robert O’Brien; and upon whose action the removal of Vindman could be positioned as political; the necessary, albeit difficult or perhaps challenging, obligation to remove Lt. Col Vindman also resides purposefully with the Dept. of Defense.

The Pentagon could easily withdraw Vindman from his position at the National Security Council; yet, it does not…. and it has not.   WHY?

There is a code within the military whereby you never put your leadership into a position of compromise; ie. “never compromise your leadership”.  In this example, President Trump cannot remove Vindman from the White House NSC advisory group due to political ramifications and appearances…

The Joint Chiefs certainly recognize this issue; it is the very type of compromise they are trained to remove.  Yet they do nothing to remove the compromise.  They do nothing to assist.

Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was the majority (#1) source for the material CIA operative Eric Ciaramella used in a collaborative effort to remove President Trump from office.  Let me make this implication crystal clear:

The United States Military is collaborating with the CIA to remove a U.S. President from office.

Do you see the issue now?

The Pentagon has done nothing, absolutely nothing, to countermand this implication/reality.

The Joint Chiefs of Staff have done nothing, absolutely nothing, to diminish the appearance of, nor deconstruct the agenda toward, the removal of President Trump.

Mr. President, do I have your attention?

The actions of the people mentioned above should result in legal consequences. Where are Attorney General Barr and John Durham?

Actions Have Consequences

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Yesterday The Daily Wire reported that as many as 1,000 Georgians voted twice in the state’s June 9 primary.

The article reports:

As many as 1,000 Georgians voted twice in the state’s June 9 primary, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger announced on Tuesday, which is a felony that he vowed to prosecute.

“A double voter knows exactly what they’re doing, diluting the votes of each and every voter that follows the law,” Raffensperger said during a press conference at the state Capitol, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported. “Those that make the choice to game the system are breaking the law. And as secretary of state, I will not tolerate it.” Double voting is punishable by one to 10 years in prison and a fine up to $100,000.

Raffensperger said the voters sent in absentee ballots, but then also voted in person. In a post-primary examination, the double votes were detected. About 150,000 people “who requested absentee ballots showed up at polling places on election day, often because they never received their absentee ballots in the mail or decided to instead vote in person,” AJC reported. “Of those, 1,000 of those voters had returned their absentee ballots to county election offices, and poll workers also allowed them to vote in-person.”

The article notes:

With Democrats pushing for nationwide vote-by-mail, where ballots are mailed to every registered voter, more reports are emerging about problems with the system. For instance, a man in California last month pleaded guilty to charges that he fraudulently cast his dead mother’s ballots in three different elections.

Caesar Peter Abutin was charged in July with one felony count of fraud and one count of fraudulent voting. He pleaded guilty to committing mail-in voting fraud three times from 2012 to 2014 using the ballots of his late mother, who died in July 2006, the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office announced. The DA’s office said he signed the name of his mother when applying for vote-by-mail ballots.

Illegal voting will continue until the penalties are enforced. Actions need to have consequences.

I Suspect Some People Are Very Upset About This

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Just the News is reporting today that Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian Parliament and chairman of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, has nominated President Trump for the Nobel Peace Prize. Considering some of the recent recipients, that nomination may get Mr. Tybring-Gjedde thrown off the committee.

The article reports:

President Trump has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize following his efforts to broker a peace deal between Israel and the United Arab Emirates.

Trump was nominated by Christian Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian Parliament and chairman of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, according to Fox News.

He was also one of two Norwegian lawmakers to nominate Trump in 2018 for the peace prize for his efforts to bring together North and South Korea.   

The article concludes:

Tybring-Gjedde, in his letter to the committee, wrote that the Trump administration played a key role in establishing relations between the two countries.

“As it is expected other Middle Eastern countries will follow in the footsteps of the UAE, this agreement could be a game-changer that will turn the Middle East into a region of cooperation and prosperity,” he wrote, according to Fox.

Tybring-Gjedde, a member of the Norwegian Parliament’s far-right Progress Party, also told the cable TV news channel: “I think he has done more trying to create peace between nations than most other Peace Prize nominees.”

This nomination is deserved, but it will be interesting to see how the American media handles it.

One Small Step Toward Election Integrity In North Carolina

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On September 4, 2020, The Carolina Journal reported the following:

A three-judge panel has rejected a plea to block absentee ballot witness requirements for North Carolina’s fall election. The decision in N.C. Superior Court generated praise from the state Senate’s leader on election issues.

“The judges were right to reject this dangerous attempt to eliminate basic protections against fraudulent activity that took place in the most recent federal election, and I hope they do the same with the multiple other lawsuits filed by Washington Democrats this year,” said Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, in a news release. Hise co-chairs the General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Elections Oversight Committee. He also leads a Senate committee on election and redistricting issues.

The judges agreed not to grant a preliminary injunction in the case of Chambers v. State of North Carolina. Filed July 10 by four individual plaintiffs working with the American Civil Liberties Union, the case challenges an absentee ballot witness requirement in state law. The law requires one adult to witness an absentee ballot. It places limits on who can serve as a ballot witness.

The lawsuit alleges violations of four sections of the N.C. Constitution. But Judges Alma Hinton, Robert Bell, and Thomas Lock disagreed with the plaintiffs’ arguments. The judges found that “there is not a substantial likelihood” that the plaintiffs would win the case.

The article concludes:

“Washington Democrats sued to overturn an election security law passed with bipartisan support in the wake of widespread absentee ballot fraud uncovered in the 2018 Congressional election for North Carolina’s Ninth Congressional District,” according to Hise’s news release.

“Witness signatures on absentee ballots helped uncover the fraudulent activity that took place in the 2018 Congressional election and is suspected to have taken place for many other elections before 2018,” the release continued.

“The court upheld the election integrity law that passed with broad bipartisan support after the NC-9 absentee ballot fraud,” Hise said.

Both state and federal courts have upheld the witness requirement, according to Hise’s release.

On September 1, I posted an article detailing some of the methods of voter fraud. Two of the targets of those who engage in voter fraud are absentee ballots and mail-in ballots. We do not need to do anything to make those ballots less secure, in fact, we need to do anything we can to make them more secure.

This Is Not The Path To An Honest Election

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On Friday, Civitas Institute posted an article about some recent changes in the North Carolina voting laws.

The article reports:

I wrote last week about how NC State Board of Elections (SBE) Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell had ordered county election officials to accept absentee ballots that they know were transmitted illegally.

In that same memo, Brinson Bell struck another blow against absentee ballot security when she told county election officials to not verify that the signature on the absentee ballot envelope was that of the voter:

1.No Signature Verification

County boards shall accept the voter’s signature on the container-return envelope if it appears to be made by the voter, meaning the signature on the envelope appears to be the name of the voter and not some other person. Absent clear evidence to the contrary, the county board shall presume that the voter’s signature is that of the voter, even if the signature is illegible. A voter may sign their signature or make their mark.

The law does not require that the voter’s signature on the envelope be compared with the voter’s signature in their registration record. Verification of the voter’s identity is completed through the witness requirement. See also Numbered Memo 2020-15, which explains that signature comparison is not permissible for absentee request forms.

Brinson Bell offers no example of what might constitute “clear evidence” that a signature is not that of the voter and she does not want election officials to use is the one thing they have on hand that to confirm that the signature on the ballot envelope is that of the voter: the signature on the registration record.

Brinson Bell justifies stripping away signature verification by stating that “voter’s identity is completed through the witness requirement.” While the witness requirement is an important tool in helping to prevent or investigate absentee ballot fraud, recent legislation reducing the witness requirement to one for the 2020 general election means that a single political operative who gains possession of a ballot is free to complete the ballot container envelope, complete the witness section, and forge the voter’s signature. Thanks to Brinson Bell’s order, the forged signature does not even have to be a reasonable approximation of that of the voter.

This is not a move toward an honest election.

If The Shoe Fits

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Before I write this article, I want to share a little history about Al Sharpton. Some people may be too young to remember this or may have simply forgotten.

In July 2019 Newsweek reported the following:

Al Sharpton’s controversial support of a woman who lied about being raped by a gang of white men in the 1980s has resurfaced amid the civil rights activist’s ongoing feud with President Donald Trump.

In 1987, 15-year-old Tawana Brawley claimed she’d been abducted and raped by a group of white men in Dutchess County, New York. Brawley, who is African American, was found by police with the letters “KKK” written on her chest and a racial epithet written on her stomach. She told her lawyers that two of the assailants were law enforcement officials.

Reverend Sharpton took up Brawley’s case early on, and became one of her most outspoken supporters. Sharpton called then-Governor Mario Cuomo a racist and accused state officials of being complicit in the crime.

But the incident turned out to be a hoax: After seven months of investigation, including over 6,000 pages of testimony by 180 witnesses, a grand jury found that Brawley had lied about the attack. Six months after the trial, he former boyfriend told reporters she invented the allegations to avoid being punished for running away from home.

After the scandal died down, Sharpton reinvented himself as a more mainstream civil rights activist. He founded the National Action Network, which is a civil rights organization in New York.

Asked about the Brawley incident in 2011, Sharpton told 60 Minutes, “whatever happened, you’re dealing with a minor who was missing four days. So it’s clear that something wrong happened.”

It amazes me that Al Sharpton still has any credibility at all. He now hosts MSNBC’s PoliticsNation.

The U.S. Sun recently reported:

LONGTIME civil rights activist Al Sharpton has accused President Donald Trump of “trying to make Black Lives Matter look like ‘hoodlums and thugs.'”

The 65-year-old host of MSNBC’s PoliticsNation denounced the president on Thursday afternoon as he pointed out the differences between Joe Biden and Trump’s visits to Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The article notes:

Sharpton slammed the president for “projecting those that are violent” and said “he tries to act like Black Lives Matter and Antifa is the same thing.”

Antifa is the left-wing political protest movement that gained prominence after the white supremacist Unite the Right rally that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017.

The Black Lives Matter movement is the civil rights group that came about in response to extreme police brutality.

“We had this big March on Saturday, tens of thousands of people, not one arrest, no violence, all of the families there, you didn’t hear one tweet from the president,” Sharpton said on MSNBC.

“[Trump] never mentioned it. Because he cannot afford to deal with it when he can’t make you look like hoodlums and thugs.

“How do you have a mass march of that size, less than a mile from where he was at and he never tweets one thing about it.

“Because he wants to project us as violent and out of control when we’re not that and that’s what Joe Biden showed today by going to a family and going to church, talking to people. That’s who we are.”

Black Lives Matter has a website. This is the link to what they believe.

Included in their beliefs:

We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

The nuclear family is the foundation of western civilization. This is not a peaceful group. President Trump’s description of Black Lives Matter is much more accurate than Al Sharpton’s.

The Cover-Up Continues

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John Solomon has been one of the most reliable voices reporting on the misuse of federal government agencies to spy on the Trump campaign and transition teams. He now writes at  “Just the News” because his reporting did not fit the political narrative at “The Hill.”

Yesterday John Solomon posted an article at Just the News detailing the ongoing cover-up of the spying on President Trump.

The article reports:

Earlier this year, the infamous dossier author Christopher Steele revealed he had destroyed nearly all the records detailing his dirt-digging on Donald Trump and Russia.

“They no longer exist,” Steele told a British court.

Now comes word that Steele’s primary and longtime contact inside the Obama State Department, Jonathan Winer, also destroyed records of the former British MI6 agent’s contacts inside that federal agency, including many of the 100-plus unsolicited intelligence reports Steele provided the Obama administration.

…Winer apparently destroyed the records at Steele’s request, the report said.

“After Steele’s memos were published in the press in January 2017, Steele asked Winer to make note of having them, then either destroy all the earlier reports Steele had sent the Department of State or return them to Steele, out of concern that someone would be able to reconstruct his source network,” the committee’s report released last month stated.

The consequence of the document destruction appears to have been real. “Department of State was able to produce for the Committee, from their archives, many Steele memos from 2015 and some from 2016, but most of his reports from 2014 are missing,” the committee noted.

Please follow the link to read the entire article. The question that comes to mind is, “Why did they destroy the records if they weren’t doing anything wrong?”

The article concludes:

Destroyed documents. Faulty memories. Foreign influence. The State Department continues to grow as a more important part of the investigation into the Russia investigators.

You can read Steele’s British testimony here.

You can read the Senate intelligence report account on Winer here.

This entire operation makes Watergate look like kindergarten.

Although I Understand The Sentiment, This Is A Bad Idea

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Yesterday The Epoch Times posted an article about a recent statement by President Trump.

The article reports:

President Donald Trump on Sunday warned the Department of Education is investigating the use of the New York Times’ “1619 Project” in schools, saying that institutions that use the alternative narrative of U.S. history could lose federal funding.

The “1619 Project,” created by Nikole Hannah-Jones and widely panned by historians and political scientists, attempts to cast the Atlantic slave trade as the dominant factor in the founding of America instead of ideals such as individual liberty and natural rights. Some critics have said that it is an attempt to rewrite U.S. history through a left-wing lens. Some historians have criticized the project over inaccuracies such as the American Revolution having been fought to preserve the institution of slavery rather than for seeking independence from Britain.

“Department of Education is looking at this. If so, they will not be funded!” Trump wrote on Twitter Sunday, responding to a post that said California has “implemented the 1619 project into the public schools,” and that “soon you won’t recognize [A]merica.” California’s Department of Education came up with a draft model last month to include some of the project in history classes.

It echoes the sentiment of a bill that was proposed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) introduced in July that proposes denying funds to a school that uses the 1619 Project. Schools in places like Washington D.C. and Chicago have modified their curriculum for the project.

The Federal Government has no business influencing school curriculum. That was one of the major problems with Common Core (other than the fact that it didn’t work). Education is supposed to be a matter left to the states–it is not listed in the Tenth Amendment. I would like to point out that teaching the 1619 Project is not good for America–it trains black children to be perpetual victims and creates anger. Local governments would do well to withhold funds to schools that use this curriculum, but it is not the job of the Federal Government. The Department of Education needs to be disbanded and the money funding it returned to the taxpayers. The taxpayers could then use the money to send their children to a school that actually taught reading, writing and arithmetic. What a novel idea.

Curt Schilling Posted This On Facebook Yesterday. I Am Still Laughing.

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Had my first “Covid” experience tonight. Guess I’m curious about how people look at it.
Drove 3 hours to see garrison play hockey in Connecticut today. The rink is on full terror infused Covid lockdown.
So I arrive and they ask me to sign a waiver, fine. I get it, don’t agree with it but it’s a private business and they make the rules.
There are 4-5 “managing” the entry and you can see and hear the power trip. I can’t get in for a bit because his game is pushed back so I have to wait outside. Fine.
I walk to the street corner which is about 50feet from the front door.
I knew, I absolutely knew what was going to happen.
I don’t wear a mask in public, outside. I have one but I don’t wear it. Mainly because I don’t need it but also because my “radiation” mask I wore for treatments made it very difficult for me to have my mouth and nose covered and breathe.
So I am standing on the corner leaning against a lamp post when a young lady from the front door approaches me.
“Sir I’m gonna have to ask you to put a mask on”
“Excuse me?”
“I need you to put your mask on”
“Sweetheart please let me say something before this goes any farther. I totally get the rules for the building, agree with them or not once I enter the building I will follow your rules and wear my mask, but you have absolutely no authority to make me do anything standing in public on public property.”
“Yes I can, you have to wear your mask”
“Darling that’s not going to happen”
“Ok”
She turns away and starts talking to someone on a walkie talkie.
I knew exactly how this was going to play out.
About 5 minutes later I see a man in my peripheral slowly approaching to my right.
After a quick and very courteous hello…
“I’m going to need you to put your mask on”
“Sir, I’ve signed the waiver and once I enter the building I will put mine on and wear it. But You have no legal right or authority to order me to do anything off your property.”
“The department of health told us we had to make people within 6 feet of the building wear a mask”
“That’s actually not legal, the department of health doesn’t have that authority in any capacity nor do you”
His response?
“Ok then, I’m not letting you in the building”
“Wait what? What reason could you possibly have to deny me entry?”
“You’re not coming in”
Ok, I have two choices. I can leave , or I can choose to walk in and guarantee a confrontation.
Any, and I mean any confrontation ends with me being in the news no matter the outcome.
So I decide to put a plan in place to make sure A) I don’t get in a fight trying to get in the building and B I don’t allow “eyewitnesses” to lie about any potential confrontation.
So I call the Local police (and I apologized 55 times for the call but I had to make sure no one could make something from nothing)
Now I know the law, this guy can stop me from going in for absolutely no reason what so ever because in this capitalist nation private business owners get to make their own rules up to the point the law can stop them.
The officers arrive, and after I apologized again 12 times for wasting their time they were exactly like 99% of the officers I’ve met, cordial, kind, respectful.
I explained what was happening and they intervened.
(BTW two were Yankee fans and one was a Met fan)
I should also mention the man denying me access had no idea who I was and I sure as hell wasnt going to tell him. I preferred he did not know.
What was even better was the first officer on the scene had no idea until he came back from the original discussion he asked me my full name, does a double take
“Holy shit!” He says, laughing.
“Does he know?” He asks me
“Nope and I don’t name drop nor do I want him to know, this state is liberal as shit and full of yankee fans, people here hate me”
I ended up getting in and watching the game.
The officers were all awesome and kind.
This is our country.

Economic Growth In America

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Yesterday Just the News posted an article about some recent comments by economist Stephen Moore.

The article reports:

As the U.S. economy rebounds following the coronavirus crisis, the last four months have produced historic levels of job creation for the U.S., economist Stephen Moore said Sunday. 

“May, June, July and August have been the four biggest months of job creation in the history of the United States. We’ve regained over 10 million jobs in four months,” Moore told John Catsimatidis’s radio program on WABC 770 AM, according to The Hill. 

The outlet noted that despite recent reporting that the unemployment rate has further declined it still remains much higher than it was in January.

It is going to take a while for the economy to recover from the coronavirus lockdown. It is also going to take a while to figure out whether or not the lockdown was actually effective or other actions would have been more appropriate. However, the economy is growing, and will continue to grow if President Trump is reelected. If former Vice-President Joe Biden is elected, taxes will go up, tariffs on China will go down, and economic growth will either stall or stop.

It Has Happened Before, It Will Happen Again Unless It Is Stopped

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Yesterday The Washington Times posted an article about double voting that occurred in
Georgia and North Carolina 2016-2018.

The article reports:

Anti-universal mail ballot activists say the two states are a tip-off for what will happen in the Nov. 3 election.

Liberal journalists demand that the Trump administration, which opposes mass-mailed ballots in most states, provide evidence of fraud. The counterargument is that it is difficult to cite such examples when only a handful of states before 2020 adopted remote voting.

Those unique balloting procedures painstakingly took years to perfect the checks and balances needed to avoid doubling voting. Today, because of the coronavirus pandemic, 22 states are fast-tracking the shift from in-person voting and toward the U.S. Postal Service, according to Ballotpedia.

Experts estimate that 80 million Americans will vote by mail in the 2020 general elections, about double those in 2016, when a total of 138 million people cast ballots for president in person or from afar.

The article explains:

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) has investigated instances in which fraud already may have occurred.

Clark County, Nevada’s largest, decided to switch to mail-in ballots just two months before its June primary. The result: nearly 225,000 of 1.3 million mailed ballots (17.3%) were sent back by the Postal Service as undeliverable. Only 305,000 mail-in ballots (23.5%) were accepted and counted, according to numbers provided to PILF.

In this year’s primary seasons alone, election boards across the country have rejected 534,000 ballots, compared with 318,716 in the 2016 election.

“American voters have a variety of warning signs demonstrating why voting in person in 2020 is the safest option to ensure their vote counts,” PILF spokesman Logan Churchwell told The Washington Times. “Even if they trust the postal system enough to get their votes handled on time, they still risk historic amounts of rejected ballots.”

Federal law prohibits voting more than once in the same election. From press reports, it appears that most mailed ballots are rejected because the voter’s signature does not match the one on file.

The article also notes:

PILF picked North Carolina and Georgia, where lawsuits are pending, to request a huge amount of voter data and then file two court briefs.

In North Carolina, auditors found nearly 20,000 voters who appeared to have voted twice in the 2016 and 2018 elections.

“This is a widespread concern in North Carolina,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said after filing a court brief in July. “We should be talking about how to strengthen our systems against misdeeds done out of the sight of election officials in 2020 instead of defending an imperfect system from total ruin. The plaintiffs are only raising the threat of worsening the settled fact that voter fraud is most common in the mail.”

In Georgia, PILF not only found more than 4,000 dead people on the rolls but also calculated that about 10,000 registrants voted twice in 2016 and 2018.

Obviously, this is an important election. We need to make sure that every legal vote is counted and the no legal votes are canceled by an illegal vote.

Where Do Our Taxpayer Dollars Go?

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Citizens Against Government Waste defines baseline budgeting as follows:

“Baseline budgeting” is one of those Washington terms that sounds very dry and boring. In reality, baseline budgeting is one of the most sinister ways that politicians claim to cut spending when they are actually increasing spending. The Congressional Budget Office defines the baseline as a benchmark for measuring the budgetary effects of proposed changes in federal revenue or spending, with the assumption that current budgetary policies or current services are continued without change. The baseline includes automatic adjustments for inflation and anticipated increases in program participation. Baseline, or current services, budgeting, therefore builds automatic, future spending increases into Congress’s budgetary forecasts.

Baseline budgeting tilts the budget process in favor of increased spending and taxes. For example, if an agency’s budget is projected to grow by $100 million, but only grows by $75 million, according to baseline budgeting, that agency sustained a $25 million cut. That is analogous to a person who expects to gain 100 pounds only gaining 75 pounds, and taking credit for losing 25 pounds. The federal government is the only place this absurd logic is employed.

Just the News posted an article (updated today) about one result of this practice.

The article reports:

The Golden Horseshoe is a weekly designation from Just the News intended to highlight egregious examples of wasteful taxpayer spending by the government. The award is named for the horseshoe-shaped toilet seats for military airplanes that cost the Pentagon a whopping $640 each back in the 1980s. 

This week, in honor of pending federal budget negotiations, our award is going to the entire U.S. government for spending a total of $91 billion taxpayer dollars this month last year, in order to ensure their individual agency and organization budgets would not shrink, as Congress negotiated a new deal.

Every year, in corporate offices around the country, departments coming up on the end of their fiscal term rush to spend any additional funds that might be left on hand, lest they be left with a surplus of cash that would lead their corporate overlords to believe they could do just as much work during the next year, with fewer dollars. Parts of the federal government face the same problem every year, as Congress spends each September renegotiating the federal budget to keep the government funded.

The article concludes with some specifics:

While all parts of the government should assume appropriate responsibility for their year-ending spending sprees, it is worth noting that in 2019, 81% of all contract spending occurred across just five departments of government. Of the $91 billion spree, the Pentagon spent $57.5 billion, Health and Human Services spent $5.7 billion, Veterans Affairs spent $3.8 billion, the General Services Administration spent $3.6 billion, and Homeland Security spend $3.5 billion.

In 2019, the federal government spent $575 billion in total on contracts. So, about one sixth, or just under 16%, of those dollars were spent during the last month of the fiscal calendar. By a long shot, September typically sees the highest annual monthly rate of spending from the federal government.

The federal government is once again entering the period of the year when, despite massive coronavirus relief spending, agencies will throw caution to the wind and spend like there’s no fiscal tomorrow.

And that, my friends, is why the deficit is growing and the value of our money is shrinking.

Where Did The Jobs Go?

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Today Fox Business posted an article that included some comments White House trade adviser Peter Navarro made on “Sunday Morning Futures.”

The article reports:

“We lost over 70,000 factories, over 5 million manufacturing jobs, and it was because Joe Biden likes made in China,” Navarro said. “Donald Trump came along. … He said, ‘Hey, that’s not good. That’s not right. I’m going to fix that.’ And so what President Trump has been carefully doing is putting in place a wide range of policies, whether it’s lowering the corporate income tax to bring investment on-shore, steel and aluminum tariffs, or buy American.”

The U.S. lost 5 million manufacturing jobs between January 2000 and December 2014 because of “growing trade deficits in manufacturing products prior to the Great Recession and then the massive output collapse during the Great Recession,” according to a 2015 report from the Economic Policy Institute.

The article notes:

China’s state-run tabloid Global Times deemed Biden “smoother to deal with” than President Trump in August.

I don’t doubt that!

The article concludes:

“Economic security is national security. That’s one of the principles of the Trump Administration and what we learned from this China virus pandemic,” Navarro said. “If we bring those jobs back onshore as we have been doing, we will create great jobs at great wages but also protect the American people from the Chinese communist party.”

Navarro touted Trump’s stance on U.S. manufacturing, but the president has repeatedly taken criticism for manufacturing his branded products in other countries, including China.

The goal should be to make it cheaper and more practical to manufacture things in America. That goal can be achieved through lower corporate taxes, tariffs on foreign goods, and reliable and inexpensive energy. President Trump has worked in all three of these areas to bring manufacturing back to America. Because of Hunter Biden’s continuing investments in China, it is unlikely that Joe Biden would continue policies that would move jobs away from China.

Some Perspective On A Recent News Article

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This article is based on three articles. The Daily Wire posted an Article yesterday, The American Thinker posted an article yesterday, and Breitbart posted an article on Friday. All three articles refute the claim currently being made by the political left that President Trump called dead soldiers “losers” and “suckers.”

The Daily Wire reports:

Four more witnesses have gone on the record to say that The Atlantic’s anonymously-sourced report claiming President Donald Trump called dead soldiers “losers” and “suckers” is false, bringing the total to 10.

Mick Mulvaney, former acting White House Chief of Staff, shot down The Atlantic’s report, saying, “As you all can probably imagine, I have seen more than my share of outrageous (and false) attacks on the President over the last few years. But this whole injured soldiers thing really, really pushes the envelope.”

“So, just to be clear: These claims are simply outrageous. I never heard the President disparage our war dead or wounded. In fact, the exact opposite is true. I was with him at the 75th Anniversary of the D-Day invasion in Normandy. As we flew over the beaches by helicopter he was outwardly in awe of the accomplishments of the Allied Forces, and the sacrifices they paid.”

Johnny DeStefano, former counselor to the president, also disputed the report, saying: “I was on this trip. The Atlantic bit is not true. Period.”

The article in The Daily Wire concludes:

Fox News correspondent John Roberts further added: “. @AmbJohnBolton told me today that if @realDonaldTrump had said he didn’t want to visit Aisne-Marne because the interred heroes were “losers” and “suckers”, he would have written an entire chapter about it in his book #TheRoomWhereItHappened.”

The Daily Caller News Foundation also reported late this week that the owner of The Atlantic is a Biden megadonor who is in frequent contact with the person who authored the report.

The American Thinker reports:

The evidence is piling up that the easily refutable, anonymously sourced so-called story, claiming that President Trump disparaged veterans, wasn’t really an Atlantic news story at all; it was a coordinated hit job involving the press, Democratic operatives, and associated leftist groups connected to the military, executed with impeccable timing.  The Atlantic is building a name for itself for its uncorrected false stories, and this one’s not at all different.

First, Jeffrey Goldberg’s Atlantic story came out Thursday, claiming that four anonymous sources had told him that Trump, on a visit to France a few years ago, didn’t want to go to a U.S. military cemetery there to honor fallen U.S. troops, because they were all “losers” and “suckers.”  It was raining, see, and he didn’t want to get his hair mussed up. 

This is solid crap,  The official email records, exposed at the time when the media tried to make a flap about it even then, showed that it was indeed bad weather that prevented the trip.

There was a motive, though: to distract attention from Joe Biden’s actual bad record with the military.  Andrea Widburg has an excellent must-read analysis here. 

Breitbart reported:

In an open letter obtained exclusively by Breitbart News, about 674 veterans wrote that their support for Trump, against attacks by the establishment media, remains unwavering because of his record of supporting the United States military and ending foreign wars.

“Recent baseless media attacks against President Trump from anonymous sources are just another example of the depths to which the President’s opponents are willing to descend to divide the nation and meddle in this election,” the veterans write.

Breitbart reminds us why this story was put together:

The story came as Trump has promised to bring thousands of American troops home from Afghanistan.

Unlike Trump, who has long opposed the Iraq War and the invasion of Afghanistan, Biden has supported a long list of foreign interventions by the U.S. that have sent American troops overseas without a timeline of when they will return home.

Former President George W. Bush led the U.S. into war in Afghanistan and Iraq, with more than 4,500 Americans dying in Iraq — including more than 3,500 killed in combat — and up to 205,000 Iraqi citizens dying in the war since March 2003.

In total, Bush’s post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and intervention in Pakistan have resulted in the deaths of between 480,000 and 507,000 people — including nearly 7,000 American soldiers who had deployed to the regions.

Biden voted for the Iraq War and supported U.S. nation-building in Afghanistan. Biden also opposed the U.S. raid that killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, claiming that the risks were “too high.”

I am sure this is only the first of many hit pieces that will emerge about President Trump in the coming days. I am also sure that my liberal friends on Facebook will not bother to look at the evidence that the story is false. That is where we are. Fake news is one of the major causes of division in America. It would be nice if we could get rid of anonymous sources.