Tag Archives: The Western Journal

Will There Ever Be Accountability?

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On Thursday, The Western Journal posted an article about Hunter Biden’s laptop. I realize that many of us are tired of hearing about Hunter Biden’s laptop, but what about the national security issues involved and the obvious issue of child pornography that is allegedly on the laptop?

The article notes:

Following an exhaustive investigation led by Republican Sens. Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a report titled “Hunter Biden, Burisma, and Corruption: The Impact on U.S. Government Policy and Related Concerns” was released in September 2020. A second report with additional findings followed two months later.

Because in today’s new world, information is only accepted to be true if Democrats, the legacy media and Big Tech say it is, the report was declared to be Russian disinformation and was immediately discredited.

One of the most glaring dismissals of the report came from the liberal Lawfare blog, whose assessment read: “Seven months into a crippling pandemic and with wildfires ablaze across the West Coast, the majority of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Commitee (HSGAC) has its attention focused squarely on the most pressing issues: five-year-old financial transactions by Joe Biden’s son and stray WhatsApp messages from Democratic lobbyists.”

Ridiculous?

Unlike the Biden administration’s focus on a bill to make lynching a federal hate crime in the midst of domestic and foreign turmoil when the last lynching in the U.S. occurred over 40 years ago, fair coverage of the Grassley-Johnson report and the New York Post’s censored reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop would have provided voters with relevant information that might have prevented President Joe Biden’s “victory” and the damage it has visited upon the country. But I digress.

The article notes:

Grassley displayed a portion of an August 2017 receipt for a $100,000 payment from CEFC to Wells Fargo Clearing Services. He emphasized the notation near the bottom of the page that read “further credit to OWASCO PC” and informed his fellow senators that Owasco was one of Hunter Biden’s companies.

This particular transaction was being made public for the first time. (Grassley said he and Johnson would release the full document.)

“There’s no middle man in this transaction,” the senator said. “This is $100,000 from what is effectively an arm of the communist Chinese government direct to Hunter Biden.”

Please follow the link to the article for further details. Evidently a large part of the American government is bought and paid for by the Chinese Communist Party.

Rewriting History–One Confirmation Hearing At A Time

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On Wednesday, The Washington Post reported that Republicans have treated Biden SCOTUS nominee ‘worse’ than Democrats treated Kavanaugh. Wow. I guess I must have missed the women in their handmaiden costumes and the people screaming in the hearing room. On Friday, The Western Journal posted an article about the claim.

The Western Journal notes:

In an editorial published Wednesday, The Washington Post editorial board claimed that Republicans have treated current Supreme Court nominee Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson “worse” in her confirmation hearing than Democrats treated Brett Kavanaugh.

The editorial said Republicans “have smeared Judge Jackson based on obvious distortions of her record and the law” in what it described as “clownish performances.”

Meanwhile, in the previous hearings, “it was Mr. Kavanaugh who behaved intemperately, personally attacking Democratic senators and revealing partisan instincts that raised questions about his commitment to impartiality,” the board said.

The article then goes on to compare the two hearings:

In 2018, then-President Donald Trump nominated Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. Kavanaugh was an established judge who had undergone six FBI background checks in the previous 25 years without any serious allegations against him, according to the Heritage Foundation.

Nonetheless, Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California received an unsubstantiated allegation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh from a woman named Christine Blasey Ford.

She hid the letter for over six weeks until just before Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing, and then she briefed only her Democratic colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee about the letter.

By the time the hearings started, many Senate Democrats had already decided Kavanaugh was guilty. They spent most of their questioning time trying to force him to admit guilt despite his insistence that he was innocent.

Some Democrats went as far as to bring out calendars from 30-some years prior, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota even questioned Kavanaugh about his college drinking habits.

…In its opinion article, the Post’s editorial board said Ford “credibly accused Mr. Kavanaugh of sexual assault.” In reality, her allegations were proven to have no credibility at all.

According to the Heritage Foundation, the Senate Judiciary Committee said after its investigation in 2019 that it “found no witness who could provide any verifiable evidence to support any of the allegations brought against.”

The article cites the way Judge Jackson is being treated:

Compare that to the supposedly horrible treatment Jackson has been subjected to this week.

Republican Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri were among those who questioned the nominee about her record of sentencing child pornography offenders to less time than the guidelines recommended.

“Every single case, 100 percent of them, when prosecutors came before you with child pornography cases, you sentenced the defenders to substantially below not just the guidelines, which are way higher, but what the prosecutor asked for on average of these cases, 47.2 percent less,” Cruz said.

Somehow I think how a judge has ruled on cases in the past is much more relevant than a judge’s college drinking habits. This is a smokescreen designed to distract the Washington Post’s readers from the problems with the nominee. The nominee will probably be confirmed, but that doesn’t mean that she should be.

Still Searching For The Truth

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On Tuesday, The Western Journal reported that the Arizona Attorney General’s Office sent a letter to the Maricopa County recorder and the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors requesting the voter signature files along with other information.

The article reports:

The Election Systems Integrity Institute (ESII) released a report this month concluding that the Maricopa County, Arizona, mail-in ballot signature verification process used during the 2020 general election was deeply flawed.

The study, overseen by systems engineer Shiva Ayyadurai, found that the county allowed approximately 200,000 ballot envelopes with mismatched signatures to be forwarded for counting without further review.

Ayyadurai, who has multiple degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, testified last fall before the Arizona Senate regarding the findings of the Maricopa County 2020 general election audit.

That study resulted in the request. The article notes:

“In the study, it is alleged that over 250 of those sampled ballot affidavits on the envelopes to did not appear to match the voter’s signatures,” Assistant Attorney General Jennifer Wright, with the office’s Elections Integrity Unit, wrote in the letter.

The article also reports:

ESII researchers reported that 11.3 percent of the approximately 1.9 million mail-in ballots should have gone through the curing process, rather than the 1.31 percent that did.

That translates to more than 215,000 needing to be cured versus the “upwards of 25,000” identified by Maricopa County.

“I found it fascinating that they didn’t give us an exact number. They just said up to 25,000,” Ayyadurai told The Western Journal, noting the county called it a “rigorous signature verification process.”

The bottom line here is simple–we will never truly know who won the election. However, we need to do everything we can to protect election integrity in future elections.

 

Does Breaking The Law Actually Have Consequences?

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On Friday, The Western Journal posted an article confirming something almost all of us already knew.

The article reports:

Former acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell said the FBI absolutely broke the law with its surveillance of Donald Trump both when he was a candidate and after he became president.

In an interview with Just the News’ John Solomon published on Wednesday, Grenell agreed that leadership at the bureau and the Department of Justice must have known ahead of time that evidence that Trump somehow “colluded” with Russia to affect the outcome of the 2016 election was false.

“Political appointees and the leaders of the FBI and DOJ purposefully manipulated the truth,” he told Solomon.

Grenell also said he has spoken with FBI operatives who knew the investigation into Trump was faulty.

“The people in the middle management, I’ve talked to them. I’ve talked to FBI agents. They knew that this was a phony exercise,” he said.

The people who chose to break the law to further a political agenda need to be in jail. They lied to the courts to get permission to spy on the Trump campaign and later on the President. If this is the kind of activity the FBI and the DOJ choose to engage in, they we either need to eliminate these departments totally or fire everyone in them and start from scratch.

Please read the entire article for details on who has been indicted so far and what the consequences have been for those people.

The Real Numbers On Electric Cars

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On Wednesday, The Western Journal posted an article about the actual cost of purchasing, driving, and maintaining an electric car.

The article notes:

As the average cost per gallon of gas has soared past $4.20, and with no end in sight, many of our leaders — including Joe Biden — are pushing EVs as a cost-effective replacement for gas-powered cars.

As Fox Business recently noted, a one-to-one comparison of the cost of charging an EV versus filling a regular auto with gas showed that EV charging appeared cheaper. But many other factors need to be included in the math to make a true analysis — factors that many EV advocates are desperate to ignore.

“According to the EPA, the national average for a kilowatt-hour of electricity is 13 cents, including at homes where most electric car owners charge their vehicles with 240-volt Level 2 chargers that typically take eight hours or more to fill them up,” Fox reported on Wednesday. “Many of these are also available in public settings like office and shopping center parking lots, where they are known as destination chargers.”

The article also points out:

But charging your EV comes with its own set of pricey problems. As noted above, costs are rising per kilowatt-hour when using public stations, and using a home charger offers the biggest savings. However, owners also have to shell out between $700 and $2,000 to install a Level 2 home charging unit, Carvana reported. This might tend to make the first year’s savings for not buying gasoline a wash.

Worse, if you want to install a Level 3 charger in your home, you’ll be hit with costs of up to $50,000 or more — including upgrading the electrical system in your house to power the thing.

The article also notes:

Also, a major source of expense for EVs is battery pack replacement. Depending on the car, battery packs can last between 5 and 20 years, but the replacement costs might make keeping the car prohibitive. Some experts say that the average battery life is eight years or 100,000 miles, and depending on the model, battery packs cost between $5,000 and $20,000 to replace — not including labor.

This high cost is also a warning to anyone buying a used EV. After all, if you buy a 10-year-old EV that still has its original battery, you might be forced to fork out another $10,000 to replace a dead battery pack shortly after putting as much as $25,000 to purchase the used vehicle. This is a cost that few average Americans can afford.

Another issue is a geopolitical concern.

Many of the rare earth minerals — such as lithium — and the manufactured batteries and parts are made in China, and the costs for these materials are also skyrocketing.

Indeed, in December it was found that the cost of lithium had surged more than 250 percent over the year. Not only are these materials rising in expense, but we are enriching China in the process.

Meanwhile, where is the electricity to power these electric vehicles coming from? If 20 percent of Americans owned electric cars, could the power grid handle the load?

Please follow the link above to read the entire article. It provides much food for thought.

Working Hard To Make A Bad Situation Worse

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On Thursday, The Western Journal posted an article about the Biden administration’s energy policy.

The article reports:

While oil prices rise due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration is delaying new federal oil and gas leases.

This comes in the midst of rising frustration from Americans over increasing gas prices. In the U.S., gas prices are averaging more than $3.50 per gallon, NPR reported. These are the highest averages seen since 2014.

The halt in federal oil and gas leases is Biden’s response to a court ruling that blocked the administration’s attempt to emphasize potential damage from greenhouse gas emissions when creating rules for polluting industries, the Associated Press reported.

I don’t claim to have inside information, but I can tell you what is going to happen next (actually, it’s already happening). President Biden will blame the rapidly rising gasoline prices on the war in Ukraine. While that is partially true, it does not take into account the fact that if America were still energy independent, the price of oil would not be as volatile as it is. Also, the amount of money coming into the U.S. Treasury due to the increased price of oil and increased American drilling would be helpful to the American economy. The President’s policy of limiting American oil production during a time of international uncertainty hurts all Americans.

The article concludes:

It’s predictable that Biden would want to halt domestic drilling on federal lands, since he promised to fight climate change and leasing federal lands for fossil fuel development would conflict with that policy.

“These fossil fuel projects are incompatible with Biden’s goal of avoiding 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming and they need to be canceled, as Biden promised to do,” Taylor McKinnon from the Center for Biological Diversity said, the AP reported.

However, Biden is also fully aware of how the Russia-Ukraine crisis is hurting oil prices.

In the midst of a fluctuating oil market that is directly hurting American pockets, Biden is halting federal drilling leases, which hurts American energy independence and keeps our gas prices tied to international tensions.

A Constitutional Republic Will Only Stand As Long As Its Citizens And Voters Are Able To Stay Informed

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On Tuesday, The Western Journal posted an article about the lack of transparency and misinformation coming out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the past two years or so.

The article notes:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is being called out for not sharing the vast quantities of data it had been gathering during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Some medical experts are speculating that the reason why is the fear the data will be “misinterpreted” and used as justification not to follow the agency’s guidelines regarding vaccination and other matters.

“Tell the truth, present the data,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and adviser to the Food and Drug Administration, The New York Times reported.

…Kristen Nordlund, a spokeswoman for the CDC, told the news outlet the reason much of the data has been withheld is “because basically, at the end of the day, it’s not yet ready for prime time.”

Bureaucracy is another reason.

The CDC is weighed down by multiple layers of bureaucracy, including a requirement to first run information to be released through the Department Health and Human Services and the White House.

“The CDC is a political organization as much as it is a public health organization,” said Samuel Scarpino, managing director of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute, the Times reported.

“The steps that it takes to get something like this [covid data] released are often well outside of the control of many of the scientists that work at the CDC.”

The article concludes:

In an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal last month, Makary (Dr. Marty Makary, a professor and researcher at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine) contended that another topic the CDC has been reluctant to address is natural immunity.

“For most of last year, many of us called for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to release its data on reinfection rates, but the agency refused,” he wrote.

“Finally last week, the CDC released data from New York and California, which demonstrated natural immunity was 2.8 times as effective in preventing hospitalization and 3.3 to 4.7 times as effective in preventing Covid infection compared with vaccination,” he continued.

Makary further noted the National Institutes of Health resisted acknowledging natural immunity.

“Because of the NIH’s inaction, my Johns Hopkins colleagues and I conducted the study. We found that among 295 unvaccinated people who previously had Covid, antibodies were present in 99 percent of them up to nearly two years after infection,” he wrote.

Makary argued the failure of the CDC to release the data sooner meant many who had previously recovered from COVID and had better immunity than those were just vaccinated needlessly lost their jobs.

He concluded that they should be hired back.

There was a political agenda here and a monetary agenda here. The CDC is too closely tied financially to the drug companies. There was more money in vaccines than there ever was in ivermectin!

Ending Mask Mandates

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On Tuesday, The Western Journal posted an article about a recent recommendation from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

The article reports:

With mask mandates for students and teachers increasingly under fire, one of the major children’s hospitals in the country is recommending that facial coverings no longer be required.

Dr. David Rubin, director of the PolicyLab at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said masks should not be considered necessary, WCAU-TV reported Monday.

“We are in a very different moment in this pandemic,” Rubin told the station.

Rubin suggested that it is finally time to start getting back to normal in the school setting, particularly since cases of COVID-19 omicron variant among children are more on the level of other seasonal viruses.

…In January, Rubin also advocated for fully re-opening schools and getting kids back into normal school settings, NPR reported.

He pointed to the fact that children are not as susceptible to the virus and that for the sake of mental health and normality, they should be in regular school settings.

“The spectrum of illness is very consistent with what we take care of each year, and we’re actually seeing fewer kids in the ICU proportionally this phase,” Rubin told NPR.

He also argued that the harm being done from keeping kids at home or in abnormal settings is now outweighing the good of keeping them from getting COVID.

As expected, he has gotten pushback from the teacher’s unions.

The article notes:

The school district also just introduced a stricter mask policy than it had. According to KYW-TV, the district announced last week that cloth masks, which had previously been acceptable, would no longer be enough. Students and staff would now be required to wear N95, KN95 or KF94 surgical masks.

Since children are not at high risk for complications from Covid, why are they the ones being required to wear masks? Is the masking of children nothing more than a security blanket for teachers who fear the disease?

The article concludes:

Philadelphia Health Commissioner Dr. Cheryl Bettigole defended the policy by citing the fact that many adults across the city have not yet been vaccinated and said children are doing fine with masks.

“With children of all ages…they’re quite resilient. They do very well with masking. Of course, we would all love to get rid of those masks,” Bettigole said.

“I understand the CHOP PolicyLab perspective, but when we look across the city, we still see, we have 250,000 adults who are still unvaccinated,” she added.

We know that children are not the ones in danger from the disease and are not the spreaders of the disease, so why are we masking them?

When Life Gives You Lemons…

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The idea that GoFundMe would take the money donated to the Canadian truckers and distribute it elsewhere is disturbing. However, good things are happening because of GoFundMe’s bad decision.

On Sunday, The Western Journal reported:

Last week, the website GoFundMe decided it would no longer support the Canadian Freedom Convoy, which meant $9 million in donations would never reach the Canadian truckers whose convoy transfixed freedom-lovers everywhere.

By Sunday morning, it no longer seemed to matter.

A page on the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo dedicated to the Freedom Convoy had surpassed $2.5 million in donations Sunday morning. The page said all money raised would go to the Incorporated Freedom 2022 Human Rights And Freedom Association.

The page contained a clarion call for freedom.

…The site said that donations will be used for fuel, lodgings and food to support truckers as they put pressure on Canadian leaders in Ottawa to hear the voices of the people.

“It’s a small price to pay for our freedoms.  We thank you all for your Donations and know that you are helping reshape this once beautiful country back to the way it was,” the site said.

On Friday, GoFundMe decided the protest was beyond the pale and said it would no longer send donations to the purpose for which they were intended. In it’s initial statement, the company suggested any unrefunded donor money could be spread around to GoFundMe’s chosen recipients.

In the end, after a vast outcry, GoFundMe went into reverse and decided to simply refund everyone’s donations.

There will be hardships as a result of the Canadian truckers’ strike and of the similar strikes around the world, but hopefully there will also be a breakout of freedom. Truckers move our food and other goods. We desperately need them. We don’t need them to be subject to regulations that make their job even harder than it is.

Robin Sage

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On Saturday, The Western Journal posted an article about a military training exercise planned for later this month in North and South Carolina. There are some aspects of this exercise that are troubling to me and possibly troubling to other Americans.

The article reports:

Residents of 28 counties in North and South Carolina will be hearing a lot of gunfire later this month as the army plans a major training exercise.

The Robin Sage training exercise is a final test for those wanting to join America’s Special Forces, according to a report by the Charlotte Observer published online by MSN.

From Jan. 22 through Feb. 4, the soldiers wanting to join the Special Forces will be fighting against so-called freedom fighters.

The exercise covers privately owned land in the North Carolina counties of Alamance, Anson, Bladen, Brunswick, Cabarrus, Chatham, Columbus, Cumberland, Davidson, Guilford, Harnett, Hoke, Lee, Montgomery, Moore, New Hanover, Randolph, Richmond, Robeson, Rowan, Sampson, Scotland, Stanly, Union, and Wake. Chesterfield, Dillon, and Marlboro counties in South Carolina are also part of the battle for control of a fictional place called Pineland.

…“These military members act as realistic opposing forces and guerrilla freedom fighters, also known as Pineland resistance movement,” the center (the Army’s John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School, based at Fort Bragg) said.

“To add realism … civilian volunteers throughout the state act as role players. Participation by these volunteers is crucial to the success of this training, and past trainees attest to the realism they add to the exercise,” the center said.

Our military is training on American soil to interact with American freedom fighters. There are a lot of things wrong with this picture.

A Definite Step In The Wrong Direction

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New York City has a new mayor. It was hoped that Mayor Eric Adams would change the direction of the city–the city is not the safe, wonderful tourist attraction it has been in the past. Unfortunately, one of Mayor Adams’ first steps is in the wrong direction. The Western Journal posted an article on Sunday about a recent decision by Mayor Adams.

The article reports:

American citizenship is no longer required to vote in New York City’s local elections.

Mayor Eric Adams said Saturday he supports a plan to allow non-citizens to vote in Big Apple municipal contests, saying it was the “best choice,” according to the New York Post.

The bill was passed by the City Council last month and took effect Sunday because neither Adams nor former Mayor Bill DeBlasio vetoed it, according to The New York Times.

About 800,000 people who are not U.S. citizens can now vote for New York City mayor, council races, and local ballot propositions. Although the law is aimed at legal citizens, it also allows gives the vote to participants in the Deferred Action for Childhoods Arrivals program — who were brought to the U.S. illegally as young children.

At the moment, the law does not apply to state and local elections.

The article notes:

New York City’s board of elections must develop rules to implement the plan by July, with it taking effect in the 2023 round of local elections, the Guardian reported.

There is a lawsuit that has been filed. I believe this law is unconstitutional. Hopefully, the judges who hear the case will follow the constitution in making their decision.

Politicizing What Shouldn’t Be Political

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What happened on January 6th last year was wrong. It wasn’t an insurrection by any stretch of the imagination and it wasn’t a threat to our democracy (we are not a democracy–we are a representative republic), but it was wrong. We don’t know if there were government instigators in the crowd (it seems very possible that there were), and we don’t really know a lot of the details of what happened. Much of the video from that day is still being kept from the public. We do know that the House Democrats are planning to turn the day into something reminiscent of the Paul Wellstone funeral. They do this at their own risk. The public is growing weary of the double standard on protests, and it appears that the Republicans plan on fighting back.

On Tuesday, The Western Journal reported the following:

As Democrats and their mainstream media allies lather up to commemorate Thursday’s anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion like it was the firing on Fort Sumter, House Republicans this week are accusing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of deliberately stonewalling the release of information about her own role in the events of the day.

And with the Democrats’ hold on power in the House looking shaky ahead of this year’s midterm elections, Pelosi’s partisans should be getting nervous.

While the committee’s clear purpose is to smear former President Donald Trump and his supporters, the country might be getting a different view of how Pelosi and her party are actually operating.

In a letter released Monday, Illinois Republican Rep. Rodney Davis, the ranking minority member of the House Administration Committee, called out Pelosi for refusing repeatedly over the past year to cooperate with their requests for information from House officers who answer directly to the speaker’s office.

…“There is irony in the fact that at the same time House Democrats are holding witnesses in criminal contempt of Congress for raising genuine questions of legal privilege, you continue to obstruct Republican access to House records relating to the security preparedness of the Capitol complex,” Davis wrote.

“Irony” doesn’t seem to be quite the right word here, though Davis might have been trying to maintain a veneer of civility in the correspondence. “Arrogance” describes it much better. “Dishonesty,” “cynicism,” and “naked abuse of power” fit the bill as well.

It would have been nice if there had been a bi-partisan investigation into Capitol security. However, at this point that is probably impossible.

 

Good News From Haiti

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On Friday, The Western Journal reported that the missionaries kidnapped in Haiti on October 16 have escaped and been reunited with their families.

The article reports:

The entire ordeal began when a group with Christian Aid Ministries was returning from a visit to an orphanage. They were intercepted by a well-known gang, 400 Mawozo, and were kidnapped. The gang demanded $1 million apiece for their release.

According to a statement released by CAM, the missionaries were bold witnesses for their faith even as they were captured and kept in captivity. They sang hymns, recited scripture and encouraged one another as well as tried to convince their captors to repent and believe.

In November, the gang released two of the missionaries. In December, they released three more.

But on Dec. 15, after feeling “nudged” to make a break, the remaining 12 missionaries — including children and an infant — solidified a plan.

They walked for miles over the rough terrain, in gang territory, filled with brambles, with nothing to guide them but the light of the moon and their faith. It was enough.

…“After much discussion and prayer, they became solidly united that God seemed to be leading them this way. When they sensed the timing was right, they found a way to open the door that was closed and blocked, filed silently to the path that they had chosen to follow, and quickly left the place that they were held despite the fact that numerous guards were close by.

This is wonderful news.

An Ordinary Citizen Would Be Arrested For This

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Falsifying evidence is a criminal offense. We are about to find out whether the laws actually do apply to the people in Congress.

On Wednesday, The Western Journal reported the following:

It’s amazing to me that California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff is not in jail. This lawmaker has played it fast and loose, first during the Trump/Russia collusion investigation, which put him on the map, and next in the House impeachment inquiry of former President Donald Trump. There is no line this unethical, truth-challenged, repellent snake won’t cross in the name of politics.

The Federalist’s Sean Davis reported on Wednesday that Schiff was up to his old tricks at Monday night’s hearing of the Jan. 6 Committee. According to Davis, Schiff “claimed to have proof” that Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican, texted then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows “to instruct former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”

Davis claims that Schiff misrepresented “the substance of the text message and its source.” Schiff “even doctored original text messages, which were obtained and reviewed by The Federalist in their entirety.”

The article explains the changes Representative Schiff made to the text messages:

Davis (The Federalist’s Sean Davis) explains that in addition to lying about “substance” and the “source” of the text, Schiff “even doctored the message and graphic that he displayed on screen during his statement. The full text message, which was forwarded to Meadows from Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, on the evening of Monday, Jan. 5, was significantly longer than what Schiff read and put on screen, but Schiff erased significant portions of the text and added punctuation where there was none to give the impression that Jordan himself was tersely directing Meadows to give orders to Pence on how to handle the electoral vote certification.”

Davis continues: “The original text was written by Washington attorney and former Department of Defense Inspector General Joseph Schmitz and included an attachment of a four-page draft Word document drafted by Schmitz that detailed Schmitz’s legal reasoning for suggesting that Pence had the constitutional authority to object to the certification of electoral votes submitted by a handful of states. The piece that Schmitz had sent to Jordan was published at the website everylegal.vote the next day and even included the same ‘DISCUSSION DRAFT’ heading and timestamp on the document that Schmitz sent to Jordan.”

He explains that Schmitz sent this text to Jordan “on the evening of Jan. 5, including the Word document as an attachment. Schmitz then texted to Jordan a three-paragraph summary of his Word document, which Schiff sliced and diced and then attributed to Jordan.”

Would anyone like to wager on how much of the above chicanery will be reported by the mainstream media?

Poetic Justice

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On Monday, The Western Journal posted an article about the Jussie Smollett case. It seems that one of the really critical mistakes Mr. Smollett made in staging his fake hate crime was one that as an actor he should have easily avoided.

The article reports:

It’s surprising, even for a man who’s spent so much of his career in front of a camera, that Jussie Smollett was upset the most infamous moment in his life wasn’t caught on camera.

Was it his undoing? Would it have led to his downfall sooner? It’s unclear, but prosecutors say one thing foiled Smollett’s original plan to create the perfect “hate crime” — the direction of a camera on the street.

(The Western Journal was one of the first outlets to point out the holes of the Smollett case in 2019 — and we kept fighting the system after he received little more than a slap on the wrist from prosecutors who wanted the case to go away.

In testimony last week, Chicago police Detective Kimberly Murray told the court the former “Empire” actor seemed to be “upset” when he was told the attack hadn’t been recorded on camera, according to WMAQ-TV.

Smollett, who had been questioned by Murray on the morning he reported the January 2019 incident, said two men had beat him up in a racist, homophobic attack while he was returning from a sandwich run. He’s now standing trial for six counts of felony disorderly conduct after reporting what’s alleged to be a hate crime hoax — one he orchestrated thinking there would be a camera there to record it.

Murray, according to WMAQ, “said Smollett was ‘upset’ when she told him a surveillance camera in the area didn’t capture the alleged attack because it was pointed away from the scene. Murray said she explained to the actor that the cover on the pod camera makes it impossible to know which way it is pointing.”

The real clue that the attack was staged was Mr. Smollett’s claim that his attackers yelled, “This is MAGA country!” No one in Chicago who values his life is going to yell that–even if he believes it!

Much Ado About Nothing?

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Big media is panicked over the new variant of Covid coming out of Africa. There seems to be some question as to whether or not they should be. Yesterday The Western Journal posted an article about the Omicron variant of the virus. I will mention at this point that someone on Facebook this morning pointed out that omicron is an anagram for moronic.

The article reports:

As panic circles the globe over a new coronavirus variant first reported in South Africa, the doctor who first noticed the variant is asking for a dose of calm.

Dr. Angelique Coetzee said that the unusual infections she was seeing in her private practice in Pretoria earlier this month presented “unusual but mild” symptoms, according to the Telegraph.

Coetzee, chair of the South African Medical Association, said it was “premature” to say the virus was going to mushroom into a global health crisis, according to the Guardian. On Friday, the World Health Association dubbed the Omicron variant a variant of concern. President Joe Biden then slapped travel restrictions on multiple African countries.

The article notes the unusual symptoms:

Coetzee said she would like more people to get vaccinated.

“Unfortunately, it’s not only the responsibility of the government; it’s the responsibility of the public as well … You can only ask people so many times to go and get vaccinated, and if you don’t listen, then there’s consequences, and then you have to take the consequences,” she said.

She said that the patients she treated came from very different backgrounds and had intense fatigue. None had a loss of test or smell. A 6-year-old child she treated had a high pulse rate.

“Their symptoms were so different and so mild from those I had treated before,” she said, according to the Telegraph.

Coetzee said that after she treated a family of four who tested positive for the virus and had complete exhaustion, she alerted South Africa’s vaccine advisory committee.

As someone who has recovered from the original coronavirus, I can state that exhaustion was part of the the original virus. It took my husband and I almost two months to get our energy back. Exhaustion is not fun, but if that is the major sympton of the virus, we should be okay. Everyday living in today’s world is exhausting!

Shenanigans In New Jersey

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New Jersey elections have never been known for their integrity, but sometimes it defies the imagination. Yesterday The Western Journal posted an article about some recent election shenanigans in New Jersey.

The article reports:

After the chaos of the 2020 election and subsequent months of controversy and scrutiny over election integrity, you would think every local election office in the nation would be doing its best to maintain full transparency and conduct elections without error.

Apparently, officials in Essex County, New Jersey, didn’t seem to think so.

Currently, an investigation is ongoing to determine why a “poll worker error” led to 56 districts within the county not counting their votes on time after poll workers in several cities shut down 56 voting machines without them first being counted, according to News 12 The Bronx.

Essex County Clerk Christopher Durkin has made it clear that the machines are currently locked safely away.

Sure they are.

The article continues:

“Those machines are at the polling places right now,” Durkin said according to News 12 The Bronx.

“Those machines have to be brought back to the warehouse. A judge will issue an order for us to open those machines, retrieve the results and post those results.”

“We need to compile a list of the results that are missing, then need to schedule a hearing in front of a judge and then the judge issued the order and then we’re able to go and retrieve those results.”

Now, we should make this clear up front: None of this will change the results of the New Jersey gubernatorial race.

However, the truck drive set to become Senate President might do well to be worried.

The article states that there is no evidence to prove that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. The fact is that there is evidence. To say otherwise is fake news. However, the conclusion of the article below is correct.

The article concludes:

That being said, we saw numerous smaller, localized examples of election fraud and various irregularities in the vote.

There is no doubt that American elections could and should be more secure. Don’t let Democrats or leftists tell you any different.

If the counties that have been called into question in both the 2020 election and elections since then had simply been transparent with the public and taken the time and effort to shore up their processes, there wouldn’t be a problem.

Unfortunately, too many county election officials can’t be counted on to actually do their jobs.

Check With The Experts Before You Change Your Name

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Some of us are old enough to remember when Chevrolet introduced its new “Nova.” It was a cute, compact car that was marketed to compete with the Ford Falcon. However, there was a small problem marketing the Nova in Spanish-speaking countries. “No va” in Spanish translates loosely to “it doesn’t go.” Not a great name for a car. Well, it seems as if Mark Zuckerberg has made a similar mistake renaming Facebook.

The Western Journal reported the following today:

Giggles, snickers and some awkwardness greeted Facebook’s decision to change its corporate name to Meta.

Jokesters poked fun at Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who is Jewish, because “meta” is pronounced like the feminine form of the Hebrew word for “dead,”, according to the Times of Israel.

“In Hebrew, *Meta* means *Dead*,” Dr. Nirit Weiss-Blatt, a tech expert, tweeted on Thursday. “The Jewish community will ridicule this name for years to come.”

…Zuckerberg said the name Facebook does not cover “everything we do” at a time when his empire includes Instagram, Messenger, WhatsApp, its Quest VR headset, its Horizon VR platform and more. Zuckerberg explained that the metaverse is a form of the virtual world where everyone is connected by virtual reality headsets, augmented reality glasses and phone apps.

The article also notes:

In Portuguese and Spanish, the word is not so troubling because it means “goal.” In Brazil, however, the word has a sexual connotation, according to Bloomberg.

Zuckerberg’s announcement was a boon for Nova Scotia-based Meta Materials. The company’s stock rose 26 percent in after-hours trading on Thursday, when Zuckerberg made his announcement, and another 6 percent on Friday, according to Reuters.

The article concludes:

Name changes can often fail in translation.

Kentucky Fried Chicken learned that when it entered the Chinese market in the 1980s, according to the BBC.

The restaurant’s “finger lickin’ good” motto, when translated into Mandarin, came out “eat your fingers off.”

It’s probably a good idea to use a translation application of some sort before you make a significant name change. Sometimes mistakes can be very misleading!

 

Amazing Weather

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The Western Journal posted an article today about a solar flare forecasted for this weekend.

The article reports:

“Auroral activity will be high(++). Weather permitting, highly active auroral displays will be visible overhead from Inuvik, Yellowknife, Rankin and Iqaluit, to Portland OR, Cheyenne, Lincoln, Springfield, and New York City, and visible low on the horizon as far south as Carson City, Oklahoma City, and Raleigh,” according to the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

The auroras at the poles occur when charged particles from the sun interact with Earth’s upper atmosphere, according to Space.com.

…The same solar flare that will spark the light show in the skies is expected to cause what the NOAA has classified as a strong geomagnetic storm on Saturday and Sunday, according to CNN. The storm is rated at a three on a five-point scale.

The impact of the storm could cause voltage irregularities and false alarms on some devices, NOAA warns. High-frequency radio blackouts and loss of radio contact on the side of the Earth facing the sun are also possible.

A strong solar flare can cause the same type of disruptions that would be caused by an Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) attack.

The article notes:

“Solar flares are powerful bursts of radiation. Harmful radiation from a flare cannot pass through Earth’s atmosphere to physically affect humans on the ground, however — when intense enough — they can disturb the atmosphere in the layer where GPS and communications signals travel,” NASA wrote.

“This flare was classified as an X1-class flare. X-class denotes the most intense flares, while the number provides more information about its strength. An X2 is twice as intense as an X1, an X3 is three times as intense, and so on,” NASA wrote. “This was the second X-class flare of Solar Cycle 25, which began in Dec. 2019. A new solar cycle comes roughly every 11 years.”

The solar flare will allow much of the United States to see the Aurora Borealis (Northern Lights) at some point during the weekend. I am hoping the Lights will be visible this far south as they are beautiful.

Big Tech Is Watching You

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The Western Journal posted an article today about privacy in America.

The article reports:

Those who are wary of smartphones, smart devices and virtual assistants generally cite concerns over their information being recorded and shared without their knowledge.

Only fueling those concerns, one woman recently shared that she had found over 3,000 recordings of herself taken by her various Amazon devices.

The woman, who goes by the username “my.data.not.yours” on TikTok, posts lots of videos on the topics of privacy, reviews privacy policies and gives people tips on how to limit (or at least be aware of) their digital footprint.

She started by informing viewers that she owns two Amazon Dots and an Echo device, and her house uses some smart bulbs.

“I requested all the data Amazon has on me and here’s what I found,” she said. “So when I downloaded the ZIP file these are all the folders it came with.”

In the video, she clicks on the “audio” file and says that it contains 3,534 short clips that her devices recorded, which she tells viewers is “so scary.”

She explained that one recording was of her asking Alexa to turn the lights on — nothing too surprising there. What she was more concerned about was that there was a file on her contacts, too.

“It turns out they have a full list of my contacts from my phone and I never remember syncing that,” she said.

That wasn’t the end of it.

“The very last thing that I didn’t know that they had — I could have assumed that they have but I don’t love that they have — is my location,” she continued, admitting that she’s “not totally comfortable with everything they have.”

The article also explains how you can delete things from Alexa:

In February, an article by CNBC stated that the Amazon Echo “saves a copy of everything you ask Alexa,” which makes sense. You can also delete these recordings — ironically — by asking Alexa to delete them.

You can also change the settings so that recordings are automatically deleted after a set amount of time.

According to the New York Post, an Amazon spokesperson acknowledged the voice recording feature and said that the recordings can be deleted at any time or you can change the settings so they aren’t saved in the first place.

“We give customers transparency and control over their Alexa experience,” the spokesperson said. “Customers can easily review and delete their voice recordings, or choose not to have them saved at all, at any time.

“Customers can import their mobile phone contacts to the Alexa app so they can use features like hands-free calling and messaging; this optional feature, which customers need to set up, can be disabled at any time.

“Finally, you can grant permissions for the Alexa app to use certain data, such as your mobile device’s geolocation, to provide relevant results (e.g., weather, traffic, restaurant recommendations), and you can manage these permissions in the app.”

Did you know about these features?

Wow.

The Next Step

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On September 30, The Western Journal posted a commentary on the next overreach planned by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They have already attempted to interject themselves between landlords and renters, doctors and patients, employers and employees, and now they are going after gun owners.

The commentary notes:

Walensky (CDC Director Rochelle Walensky) now has our Second Amendment rights in her crosshairs. She will tackle gun violence in America, which she considers to be an epidemic.

The CDC director signaled her intentions during a late August interview with CNN, when she labeled gun violence a “serious public health threat.”

“Something has to be done about this,” she told CNN. “Now is the time — it’s pedal to the metal time.”

“The scope of the problem is just bigger than we’re even hearing about, and when your heart wrenches every day you turn on the news, you’re only hearing the tip of the iceberg,” Walensky said. “We haven’t spent the time, energy, and frankly the resources to understand this problem because it’s been so divided.”

On Wednesday, NPR reported that “the CDC is now hoping to get a fuller picture of the data and long-neglected details on the impact of daily gun violence. The CDC and the National Institutes of Health, for the first time in nearly a quarter-century, are funding new research on guns to help reduce firearm-related injuries, deaths, crime and suicides.”

“Among several other gun research projects, the CDC is now providing funding to 10 state health departments so they can start collecting data in near-real time on emergency room nonfatal firearm injuries. This will allow doctors and epidemiologists to potentially identify trends and craft swift interventions, as they have done to contain the coronavirus pandemic and other national health emergencies.”

We should all worry when the government begins to collect data. It rarely leads to good things. Rather than looking at the injuries, maybe they should look at the places that have the highest amount of gun violence and note that gun control is part of the problem, not the solution.

The commentary concludes:

The last eight months have shown us that the Democrats seek total control over America. Our right to bear arms has never been more essential to our freedom.

Americans will never give up their guns. The explosion in gun sales over the past several years shows that Americans are cognizant of our government’s slow drift into socialism.

History has proven what happens when citizens surrender their guns to a nefarious ruling class.

In the 1990s, Australians handed over their guns to the government.

Look how well that’s worked out for them.

Our Constitution and Bill of Rights are the only things standing between us and tyranny. We need to work hard to protect both.

The Hidden Taxes In The Bill

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The Western Journal posted an article today about the tax-and-spend bill the Biden administration is trying to push through Congress.

The article reports:

According to a media release from the Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee on Tuesday, the Joint Committee on Taxation — a non-partisan congressional tax scorekeeper — found that almost every income level below the threshold the Biden administration said would be immune would take a hit.

Furthermore, the committee’s analysis found the vast majority of taxpayers would see no benefit from the plan in its current form.

According to the analysis, by the calendar year 2023, nearly 5 percent of those making between $40,000 and $50,000 would see a tax increase. Nine percent of those making between $50,000 and $75,000 would see an increase, 18 percent earning between $75,000 and $100,000 would see their taxes go up and 35 percent of those earning between $100,000 and $200,000 would be subject to a hike.

The media release also noted that the benefit most people see will pretty much be nil.

In 2023, two-thirds of all taxpayers won’t get see any kind of real benefit from the legislation, either seeing their tax bill changed by less than $100 or getting a tax increase.

By 2027, this number would balloon to 85.5 percent, with huge swaths of the middle class seeing a sizable tax increase; these numbers are projected to stay mostly steady until 2031.

The article concludes:

And yet, in March of 2020, MarketWatch reported that “Americans paid almost $64 billion less in federal income taxes during the first year under the Republican tax overhaul signed into law in late 2017 by President Donald Trump, with some of the sharpest drops clustered among taxpayers earning between $25,000 and $100,000 a year, even as the overall number of refunds dropped during a turbulent tax season” in 2019.

Biden plans on taking that away. In return, he’s offered nothing of substance — except, as promised, he’s soaking the rich. And the upper-middle class. And some people in the middle class, too. But mainly the rich. See, priorities!

Biden may not be giving people in towns like Scranton — the folks he grew up with — a break the same way Trump did. But at least they can watch as his administration takes (and then squanders) Park Avenue’s money. He’ll be squandering Scranton’s money, too, but at least they get the joy of class-based schadenfreude out of the deal.

Any Congressman who votes for President Biden’s economic proposals needs to be voted out of office as quickly as possible. I am not sure we can afford the current President.

In What World Does This Make Sense?

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The Western Journal posted an article today about the Biden administration’s energy policy. About the kindest adjective for the policy I can come up with is illogical.

The article reports:

The Biden administration, which began its reign by turning off the spigot of oil flowing from North American sources, is now begging Middle Eastern nations for anything they can spare.

The White House on Wednesday released a statement by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan in which Sullivan said the United States needs foreign nations to bail it out.

“Higher gasoline costs, if left unchecked, risk harming the ongoing global recovery. The price of crude oil has been higher than it was at the end of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic,” the statement said.

The American Automobile Association on Wednesday said the average price of gasoline in the United States is $3.185 per gallon. That’s more than $1 higher than the average price of $2.183 from a year ago.

“While OPEC+ recently agreed to production increases, these increases will not fully offset previous production cuts that OPEC+ imposed during the pandemic until well into 2022. At a critical moment in the global recovery, this is simply not enough,” the statement continued.

“President [Joe] Biden has made clear that he wants Americans to have access to affordable and reliable energy, including at the pump.”

“Although we are not a party to OPEC, the United States will always speak to international partners regarding issues of significance that affect our national economic and security affairs, in public and private. We are engaging with relevant OPEC+ members on the importance of competitive markets in setting prices. Competitive energy markets will ensure reliable and stable energy supplies, and OPEC+ must do more to support the recovery,” the statement said.

I don’t mean to be cynical, but you could fertilize your garden with the above statement. The statement was made as a diversion from the policies of the administration that caused the price of gasoline at the pump to rise.

Some of us remember the gasoline lines of the 1970’s because we depended on Middle East oil rather than developing our own resources. The dependency influenced American foreign policy in a negative way. President Trump freed us from that dependency. President Biden is bringing us back to that dependency.

Has Anyone In Washington Read The U.S. Constitution?

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On Sunday, The Western Journal reported the following:

Attorneys for individuals facing charges for their alleged involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol incursion say their clients are being kept in solitary confinement and subjected to third-world conditions while detained ahead of trial.

Lawyers John Pierce and Steven Metcalf II say that at least one of the people arrested on charges related to the events of that day is being held in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day and has inadequate access to clean water and legal counsel.

The attorneys told the EpochTV program “The Nation Speaks” that these conditions are “blatantly unconstitutional” and “violate every single basic human right.”

Of the nearly 500 people who have been arrested on charges relating to the Capitol incursion, Pierce said there “are about 50, plus or minus, that are being detained, that have been in prison for months and will likely remain in prison for many more months until their day in court.”

He explained that these accused individuals are being held under the pretense of the 1984 Bail Reform Act, which authorizes the pretrial detention of those deemed a flight risk or threat to the public.

…“The conditions in the D.C. jail in particular are getting to a point of not only being unconstitutional and violating every single basic human right, but they’re getting to a point where people have to speak out, and they have to know about what’s going on,” Metcalf said, adding that prisoners are being instilled with a “level of fear.”

“They are being retaliated against for various different reasons. … Anything that they do, or if anybody speaks up on their behalf, all of a sudden they get targeted even further and then get put into a dangerous, unsanitary condition,” Metcalf said.

The article concludes:

It goes without saying that while those accused of participating in the Jan. 6 incursion have been doggedly pursued by law enforcement and reportedly subjected to inhumane conditions in prison, those involved in the 2020 riots have been handled with kid gloves and even glorified by the left.

The overwhelming majority of Americans denounced the actions of the rioters who breached the Capitol on Jan. 6. But the George Floyd “protests” of last summer were widely supported and the violence and destruction defended by left-wing politicians — to the extent that now-Vice President Kamala Harris promoted a fund to bail “protesters” out of jail.

A Republican would no doubt be crucified were he to promote any legal efforts to free Jake Lang or protect his constitutional rights.

Yet can you even imagine the outrage if a single one of the Black Lives Matter or antifa contingent was kept in the same conditions as the Jan. 6 “insurrectionists”?

The hypocrisy is sickening. It seems we can no longer expect the equal legal treatment of people on either end of the political spectrum.

This is frightening.

Can My Pencil Be Held Responsible For Failing A Math Test?

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On Wednesday, The Western Journal reported that New York Governor Cuomo has signed into law a measure that allows guns to be considered a public nuisance and opens the floodgates for lawsuits against gun manufacturers. Holding gun manufacturers responsible for gun violence makes about as much sense as holding car manufacturers responsible for drunk driving.

The article reports:

“The only industry in the United States of America immune from lawsuits are the gun manufacturers, but we will not stand for that any longer, Cuomo said in a news release.

According to NBC News, the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act of 2005 carved out immunity for gun manufacturers if individuals misuse their products in a criminal manner.

Governor Cuomo issued a press release about the bill:

…“Under this new legislation, gun manufacturers cannot endanger the safety and health of the public through the sale, manufacturing, importing or marketing of the products they sell. The products can be considered a public nuisance even if the gun manufacturer did not purposely cause harm to the public,” the release said.

The release explained that anyone, from members of the public to corporations to the state attorney general, can now fire away at “bad actor gun manufacturers.”

Cuomo’s release said federal protection of the firearms sector “has created a perfect storm of lax controls and inability to hold bad actors to account.”

This is beyond ridiculous. The problem is not the guns–the problem is criminals. Suing every gun manufacturer you can think of won’t do any good as long as your no-bail laws keep letting criminals out of jail to commit more crimes.