Make no mistake, this has always been the end game. Let them invade, then get them voting. Grateful illegal invaders are sure to vote Democrat.
.@NYCMayor says “let them work” but if granted work authorization, migrants could ALSO vote in NYC elections under city’s new non-citizen voting law. We sued. Court struck down law. @NYCMayorsOffice appealed.
This is so bad that it can’t possibly be real, right? If she were not lying about this, what would it mean to you? Would it change your mind about your vote in the next coming election? https://t.co/SgXryqhV1Hpic.twitter.com/VWjiuuYJrN
I understand the rationale to allow employment for those migrants seeking asylum who were legally processed by @CBP; however, migrants who illegally entered must be detained & deported.
VOTING is a sacred right and must be reserved for citizens only!@NewYorkGOP@nydems
This ‘Wheel of Privilege’ is being used in schools.
It splits everyone into buckets of ‘power’ or ‘marginalised’.
It tells children that if they are white or male or ‘cis’ or Christian or European or they speak English or live in an urban city, that they are ‘privileged’. pic.twitter.com/Lio1uIjnnt
Puberty is an essential bodily phase. It is NEVER a disease and this doesn’t change because a child doesn’t fit perfectly into 1950’s gender stereotypes. This is medical malpractice and needs to stop! Children cannot consent to puberty blockers!! https://t.co/wvHKoh2koz
A trial run for the giggling fool to replace the senile fool at the top of the ticket?
According to the article, they're having VPOTUS & her husband take center stage. IMO they're testing the waters for a Harris administration (either b/c Biden steps down or just doesn't run for 2024).
Times Square is looking a lot like its bad old self, with vagrants, boozy migrants, junkies, and scofflaws making the Crossroads of the World look more like the third world, infuriating those who played an important role in its cleanup.
On three separate days over the past week, The Post saw junkies brazenly smoking crack pipes on West 43rd Street, drug dealers peddling their wares within eyeshot of cops, hobos conked out wherever they can find a spot, and scores of aimless migrants loitering the day away.
“A lot of people are worried about [Times Square] collapsing. And unless they start getting it together for a rebuild, it might actually collapse,” said William Bratton, the NYPD commissioner who helped then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani clean up the area in the 1990s.
“We had a lot more to work with than the current commissioner and the mayor have in 2023,” Bratton added. “There was a lot more of a criminal justice system back then. The courts, district attorneys, and the police were pretty much united about doing something about crime in Times Square. So you had a collaboration that is not in place today.”
By contrast, “we [now] have a number of district attorneys not wanting to deal with a lot of … the so-called ‘broken windows’,” signs of social disorganization and lead to crime, he explained — referring to the far-left, soft-on-crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who critics say is pushing “reforms” which favor criminals instead of victims.
“Until we get better collaboration between various elements of government, we’re not going to see it improve dramatically,” Bratton warned.
The lawlessness, vice, and depravity that ruled Times Square since the 1960s came to a screeching halt in the mid-90s, when Giuliani cracked down on crime and closed down the area’s notorious sex shops and peep shows.
The redevelopment plan then accelerated in the 2000s under billionaire former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who helped lure national store and restaurant chains to the new-look area and complete its “Disneyfication,” as some critics whined at the time.
Since the pandemic, there’s been “a lot of change for the worse,” in Times Square, said Raymond Kelly, the city’s police commissioner from 1992 to 1994 under then-Mayor David Dinkins, and again from 2002 to 2013 under Bloomberg.
“You can feel it when you walk through there.”
New Yorkers and tourists alike said they were mortified the city’s brand has turned into something out of “Taxi Driver.”
“It’s so bad around here. There are homeless and crazy [people] and [they’re] doing drugs and everything,” said Sidek Mohammad, 55, who has sold nuts at a kiosk on the corner of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue for 16 years.
“It’s not safe here,” agreed Syed Hossain, the owner of a newsstand on 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, who recently watched a disheveled man aggressively shove a small child “very hard” in broad daylight.
“Anytime, that kind of thing can happen here,” Hossain, 53, said. “I feel bad because I know it’s not supposed to be that way.””
—-
Keep pulling that D lever and wonder why things are only getting worse. Enjoy! This is what you voted for.
It's been three years since Kenosha police shot and paralyzed Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old Black father, seven times in the back while his children watched.
Police violence is gun violence, and it's disproportionately killing and traumatizing too many Black men and boys. pic.twitter.com/D29hWg8yDe
1. The police were justified in shooting this rapist and child abductor, who was resisting arrest and reaching into his vehicle for a weapon.
2. As a percentage of those who commit violent crime, police shootings and killings disproportionately affect whites, not blacks. https://t.co/KnQwmLHIa6
— Eighth Century Woodchipper 🌳🪓 (@BonifaceOption) August 24, 2023
Blake was wanted for sexual assault of the woman who’s house he had just barged into and stole her keys from. He was armed with a knife which he pointed at an officer who was inches away from him.
His false narratives led to the Kenosha riot which led to two deaths. https://t.co/HfiAoxHci4
— Montana Department of Organic Flammability (@MontanaDOOF) August 24, 2023
It’s OK though, none of those rioters were held to account for their crimes…..
This isn’t going away, no matter how hard Dems and the media try to bury it.
Maui residents say they’re being evicted so landlords can cash in and they’re highly suspicious of the Democrat governor of Hawaii signing an emergency housing proclamation 3 weeks before the fires. They say rich developers are the ones winning here, not them..
Is anyone surprised that the Judge set Trumps trial date for the day before Super Tuesday? This is the same Judge who over-sentenced J6 people and worked at the same firm as Hunter Biden.
The newest favorite tool of authoritarian stooges.
Exclusion from the financial system as punishment for dissent has become one of the most insidious and unjust forms of dissent-suppression in the West, but it's one that is being weaponized with greater and greater aggression: https://t.co/KvmHmUxt3y
The reason those financial firms banned WikiLeaks was because senior national security officials, led by then-Chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee Joe Lieberman, demanded they do as punishment for WikiLeaks' reporting.
This just goes to show that in truth there were so many red flags about the 2020 election. Sadly, the courts refused to even look at any of the evidence.
Lady Justice is supposed to be blind, but she’s not supposed to be that blind. It’s certainly clear who the real racketeers are…
There have always been unanswered statistical irregularities about absentee ballots from the 2020 election. These irregularities suggest massive, systemic, voter fraud among absentee ballots.
Stolen elections in the USA have consequences around the world. What has happened since November, 2020? Russia invaded Ukraine. China began preparing for invasion of Taiwan. N. Korea started lobbing missiles again. The US southern border has been invaded. The world needs for the USA to have secure elections. We need to return to in-person paper ballots.
“Two weeks before the 2020 election, a woman dropped off more than 10,000 voter registration forms with a city clerk in Muskegon, Michigan.
The number of forms was a red flag for the city clerk, Ann Meisch. Less than 4,000 of the city’s voting-age residents weren’t registered to vote.
Ms. Meisch called the police, triggering an investigation by the Michigan State Police. An Oct. 26, 2020, police report from that probe recently surfaced after Michigan state lawmakers obtained it through a Freedom of Information request.
At the time, Brianna Hawkins, the woman who delivered the forms, was employed by GBI Strategies, an out-of-state firm working to boost Democrat voter turnout in urban centers in key swing states to help then-candidate Joe Biden defeat President Donald Trump. According to the police report, when questioned by Muskegon Police Department investigators, Ms. Hawkins said her job was to register voters and help them obtain absentee ballots.
In 2020, the population of the City of Muskegon was 38,309, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Of these, 29,800 people were of voting age.
Ms. Meisch told The Epoch Times in an August 10 email that in 2019, there were 25,957 registered voters in the city. In 2020, the number of people registered to vote increased by 2,077 to 28,034.
That means the pool of voting-age people not registered to vote that Ms. Hawkins had to work with was only 3,843.
Ms. Hawkins dropped off more than 10,000 voter registration forms in incremental batches, suggesting that thousands of the forms never made it onto the city’s registered voter roll.
“Even a casual observer can readily see that something is wrong. The numbers do not add up. The number of registration forms turned in by one person represents a third of the population of the city,” Mr. O’Halloran told The Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times later contacted the city clerk with two more questions: Where did the completed voter registration forms filed by Ms. Hawkins come from, and are those extra voter registration forms that were rejected by her office in her custody?
In other words, what happened to the 10,423 voter registration forms that didn’t result in a person being added to the city’s voter roll?
Ms. Meisch replied in an Aug. 13 email: “I cannot speak to the facts of the case at this time. I am sorry that I cannot be of more help.”
According to the 2020 police report, Ms. Meisch told authorities that some of the irregularities found on the voter registration forms submitted by Ms. Hawkins included invalid and nonexistent addresses, erroneous phone numbers, signatures that didn’t match those on existing records, and numerous forms that appeared to be filled out and signed by the same hand.”
“Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. It’s rather like the old “military industrial complex,” which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.
But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.
When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for “democracy” and exercising their own First Amendment rights.
However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).
But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committee’s Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesn’t have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.
What were they working on? CISA’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian “social listening” and “monitoring,” and considered the government’s best censorship “success metrics.” Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldn’t “solely focus on addressing foreign threats … [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations.” So CISA should combat “high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat” and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.
More telling is the group’s attitude toward what it called “mal-information” – typically information that is true, but contrary to the preferred narratives of the censor. Dr. Starbird wrote in an email, “Unfortunately current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms …” Therein lies a dilemma for the censors, as Starbird wrote: “So, do we bend into a pretzel to counter bad faith efforts to undermine CISA’s mission? Or do we put down roots and own the ground that says this tactic is part of the suite of techniques used to undermine democracy?”
It is chilling that there is no consideration of whether the information is true or of the public’s right to know it. “Democracy” in this formulation is whatever maintains the government’s narrative.”
“As the latest special counsel files new charges against former president Donald Trump, it’s beginning to look like legal crusades in America are more important than political ones. Locking up one’s political opponents is the sort of thing they used to do in Ukraine, after all, or the totalitarian state of which Arthur Koestler wrote in Darkness at Noon. Just a few years after claims of Russian collusion with the winning candidate of America’s 2016 presidential election were debunked, it is ironic that a Russian’s critique of our political culture nearly half a century ago captures our current predicament so clearly.
Addressing Harvard’s graduating class in 1978, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned: “I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed,” quickly adding “But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man.” America’s excessive legalism, the ingrate continued, would eventually be our undoing. “Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”
In mid-July 2016, I spent the wee hours of one sleepless morning in St. Petersburg on my laptop in an otherwise silent hotel lobby watching retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn’s speech to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland get drowned out by chants of “Lock her up!” There I was, in the former capital of what Russian president Vladimir Putin once proudly called a “dictatorship of law,” yet now it was my compatriots who were demanding a politician be imprisoned.
After Trump won, the shoe was on the other foot and the chant — from that moment to the present — became “Lock him up!”
During the febrile peak of Russiagate, now two special counsels ago, I was the one facing a chance of getting locked up. My crime was a fairly arcane one: I failed to register as a foreign agent when my work for a Ukrainian politician triggered that requirement. According to the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 (FARA, passed to root out Nazi propagandists operating covertly in the US), when you represent the interests of a foreign government or political figure, you must declare it.
Imagine, for instance, your father were vice president of the United States just put in charge of Ukraine policy when an exiled Ukrainian oligarch hires you to advise his gas company. Would you have to register? What if he were a secretive Chinese billionaire who was later disappeared when news of your arrangement surfaced, or the wife of a notoriously corrupt ex-Moscow mayor? As the recent unraveling of Hunter Biden’s plea deal suggests, how one interprets or applies FARA is, well, fungible.
My own Ukrainian client had a longstanding relationship with Paul Manafort, until, that is, the storied Republican operative landed a big piece of domestic work, which created an opening for me in Kyiv. I’d been working as an international political consultant since helping midwife Iraq’s first free election in half a century in 2005. Mana- fort’s Russian-Ukrainian sidekick, Konstantin Kilimnik, had been my deputy in Moscow when I was promoting democracy abroad and ran the International Republican Institute (IRI) office in Russia during the early Putin years.
If the Russians really engineered the election of Donald Trump — as many were suggesting in all seriousness from the summer of 2016 until Robert Mueller testified before Congress in summer 2019 — someone must have helped them, right? If you were casting “likely suspects” for a B-movie, then, I suppose, Paul, Konstantin and I just about fit the bill — but you’d still have to be squinting.
This is where my exposure to the American criminal justice system began. From the time the FBI arrived on my doorstep, it took about six months to plead guilty, and a little over a year to be sentenced (many, arguably most, wait much longer). That plea cost me a quarter of a million dollars. Had I gone to trial, I would have sunk millions of dollars into debt for the privilege of facing a DC jury while prosecutors reminded them that I was a Republican.
As I explain in my forthcoming memoir, Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a “Foreign Agent,” surrender and cooperation were the logical choice, especially as I didn’t have much to hide.
“First of all, this has nothing to do with the president,” then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told the Washington Post when they for some odd reason contacted him about my arraignment, “and secondly, the next thing you know, Bob Mueller is going to be handing out parking tickets in Russia.”
Giuliani’s off-hand remark cut to the core: was Russiagate the investigation of an actual crime, or was it an investigation in search of a crime?
Regardless, because the political outcome of Trump’s victory was so riven with discord, a legal approach had become necessary. Sixteen years earlier, it took the US Supreme Court to validate George W. Bush’s victory, and forty years before that, a case originating in the US District Court for the District of Columbia (where I was convicted) led to the downfall of the Nixon administration. The legal review of political issues is nothing new in America.
But we’ve recently seen much evidence of the legal system being abused to paper over political disputes and weaponize the administration of justice.
Politically speaking, the problem with the New York case against Donald Trump, involving hush money to a porn star violating FEC rules, as well as the Mar-a-Lago classified documents-handling case, filed in state and federal jurisdictions respectively, is that, in both instances, the other side is far from innocent. Hillary for America did not disclose the money it spent generating and ginning up the Russiagate probe with the “Steele dossier”; the FEC fined her campaign and the DNC about $100,000, case closed. The current president had plenty of classified documents scattered willy-nilly around his various properties — even if he was more cooperative when asked to return them. So why do we have a nuclear-level prosecution of one side and a kid-glove treatment of the other?
The only way to accept glaring contradictions like these is by practicing the same defense as those who lived under the Soviet regime: cognitive dissonance. When I was pleading guilty, a Russian friend counseled me: “just pretend it isn’t happening to you.” That is what Soviet citizens had to do every day in order to psychologically survive under a government they knew lied to them morning, noon and night.
As Americans we’ve adopted our own cognitive dissonance that allows Democrats to look past the troubling symbol Hunter Biden represents, and Republicans to dismiss Trump’s vulgarity.
Yet this separation, this bifurcation, this split is inherently unstable. In warning us about it, Solzhenitsyn evoked the line from Lincoln — “a house divided against itself cannot stand” — in titling his Harvard speech “A world split apart.” He had escaped a very different world — the gulag and repressive state — and having found sanctuary in the woods of Vermont, discovered he could not be silent about the trends he observed in this new land.”
Wandering Views 
Make no mistake, this has always been the end game. Let them invade, then get them voting. Grateful illegal invaders are sure to vote Democrat.
LikeLiked by 3 people
More like The Wheel of Idiotic Pigeonholing.
Bingo.
https://twitter.com/Kamistand/status/1696131279886913894?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1696131279886913894%7Ctwgr%5E588d4e8e13c65d0730049999a7094da964912256%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fbrettt%2F2023%2F08%2F28%2Fheres-the-wheel-of-privilege-theyre-using-in-schools-to-identify-the-marginalized-n2386667
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Nailed it.
LikeLiked by 3 people
A trial run for the giggling fool to replace the senile fool at the top of the ticket?
But… but….
Think of all the extra global warming all this extra air travel will give off, not to mention costs to taxpayers….
LikeLiked by 2 people
Dems built this.
“Times Square back to the bad old days: ‘It’s a sh-thole’”
Yay! 🙄
https://nypost.com/2023/08/26/times-square-overrun-by-squalor-crime-its-a-sh-thole/
“You’re not in Disney anymore.
Times Square is looking a lot like its bad old self, with vagrants, boozy migrants, junkies, and scofflaws making the Crossroads of the World look more like the third world, infuriating those who played an important role in its cleanup.
On three separate days over the past week, The Post saw junkies brazenly smoking crack pipes on West 43rd Street, drug dealers peddling their wares within eyeshot of cops, hobos conked out wherever they can find a spot, and scores of aimless migrants loitering the day away.
“A lot of people are worried about [Times Square] collapsing. And unless they start getting it together for a rebuild, it might actually collapse,” said William Bratton, the NYPD commissioner who helped then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani clean up the area in the 1990s.
“We had a lot more to work with than the current commissioner and the mayor have in 2023,” Bratton added. “There was a lot more of a criminal justice system back then. The courts, district attorneys, and the police were pretty much united about doing something about crime in Times Square. So you had a collaboration that is not in place today.”
By contrast, “we [now] have a number of district attorneys not wanting to deal with a lot of … the so-called ‘broken windows’,” signs of social disorganization and lead to crime, he explained — referring to the far-left, soft-on-crime Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who critics say is pushing “reforms” which favor criminals instead of victims.
“Until we get better collaboration between various elements of government, we’re not going to see it improve dramatically,” Bratton warned.
The lawlessness, vice, and depravity that ruled Times Square since the 1960s came to a screeching halt in the mid-90s, when Giuliani cracked down on crime and closed down the area’s notorious sex shops and peep shows.
The redevelopment plan then accelerated in the 2000s under billionaire former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who helped lure national store and restaurant chains to the new-look area and complete its “Disneyfication,” as some critics whined at the time.
Since the pandemic, there’s been “a lot of change for the worse,” in Times Square, said Raymond Kelly, the city’s police commissioner from 1992 to 1994 under then-Mayor David Dinkins, and again from 2002 to 2013 under Bloomberg.
“You can feel it when you walk through there.”
New Yorkers and tourists alike said they were mortified the city’s brand has turned into something out of “Taxi Driver.”
“It’s so bad around here. There are homeless and crazy [people] and [they’re] doing drugs and everything,” said Sidek Mohammad, 55, who has sold nuts at a kiosk on the corner of 42nd Street and Eighth Avenue for 16 years.
“It’s not safe here,” agreed Syed Hossain, the owner of a newsstand on 42nd Street and Seventh Avenue, who recently watched a disheveled man aggressively shove a small child “very hard” in broad daylight.
“Anytime, that kind of thing can happen here,” Hossain, 53, said. “I feel bad because I know it’s not supposed to be that way.””
—-
Keep pulling that D lever and wonder why things are only getting worse. Enjoy! This is what you voted for.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Once again, Community Notes for the win…..
Another false narrative dies a deserved death.
Indeed they are.
https://twitter.com/the1351project/status/1695247684297445856?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1695247684297445856%7Ctwgr%5E26886bb36e3575821706272b508c94975f714a02%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Ftwitchy.com%2Fbrettt%2F2023%2F08%2F26%2Feverytown-stands-up-for-jacob-blake-earns-a-community-note-n2386612
It’s OK though, none of those rioters were held to account for their crimes…..
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Maybe sit this one out Joe…..
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This isn’t going away, no matter how hard Dems and the media try to bury it.
LikeLiked by 2 people
It’s all just a coincidence I’m sure…..
Not.
This is election interference.
This is corrupt.
LikeLiked by 2 people
The latest “white supremacist” shooter….
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The newest favorite tool of authoritarian stooges.
LikeLiked by 2 people
This just goes to show that in truth there were so many red flags about the 2020 election. Sadly, the courts refused to even look at any of the evidence.
Lady Justice is supposed to be blind, but she’s not supposed to be that blind. It’s certainly clear who the real racketeers are…
There have always been unanswered statistical irregularities about absentee ballots from the 2020 election. These irregularities suggest massive, systemic, voter fraud among absentee ballots.
Stolen elections in the USA have consequences around the world. What has happened since November, 2020? Russia invaded Ukraine. China began preparing for invasion of Taiwan. N. Korea started lobbing missiles again. The US southern border has been invaded. The world needs for the USA to have secure elections. We need to return to in-person paper ballots.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/mystery-swirls-over-batch-of-thousands-of-2020-voter-registration-forms-in-michigan-5465266
“Two weeks before the 2020 election, a woman dropped off more than 10,000 voter registration forms with a city clerk in Muskegon, Michigan.
The number of forms was a red flag for the city clerk, Ann Meisch. Less than 4,000 of the city’s voting-age residents weren’t registered to vote.
Ms. Meisch called the police, triggering an investigation by the Michigan State Police. An Oct. 26, 2020, police report from that probe recently surfaced after Michigan state lawmakers obtained it through a Freedom of Information request.
At the time, Brianna Hawkins, the woman who delivered the forms, was employed by GBI Strategies, an out-of-state firm working to boost Democrat voter turnout in urban centers in key swing states to help then-candidate Joe Biden defeat President Donald Trump. According to the police report, when questioned by Muskegon Police Department investigators, Ms. Hawkins said her job was to register voters and help them obtain absentee ballots.
In 2020, the population of the City of Muskegon was 38,309, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Of these, 29,800 people were of voting age.
Ms. Meisch told The Epoch Times in an August 10 email that in 2019, there were 25,957 registered voters in the city. In 2020, the number of people registered to vote increased by 2,077 to 28,034.
That means the pool of voting-age people not registered to vote that Ms. Hawkins had to work with was only 3,843.
Ms. Hawkins dropped off more than 10,000 voter registration forms in incremental batches, suggesting that thousands of the forms never made it onto the city’s registered voter roll.
“Even a casual observer can readily see that something is wrong. The numbers do not add up. The number of registration forms turned in by one person represents a third of the population of the city,” Mr. O’Halloran told The Epoch Times.
The Epoch Times later contacted the city clerk with two more questions: Where did the completed voter registration forms filed by Ms. Hawkins come from, and are those extra voter registration forms that were rejected by her office in her custody?
In other words, what happened to the 10,423 voter registration forms that didn’t result in a person being added to the city’s voter roll?
Ms. Meisch replied in an Aug. 13 email: “I cannot speak to the facts of the case at this time. I am sorry that I cannot be of more help.”
According to the 2020 police report, Ms. Meisch told authorities that some of the irregularities found on the voter registration forms submitted by Ms. Hawkins included invalid and nonexistent addresses, erroneous phone numbers, signatures that didn’t match those on existing records, and numerous forms that appeared to be filled out and signed by the same hand.”
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“Police break up melee involving 1,000 juveniles at Del Amo mall in Torrance”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Some actual comedy from SNL.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“Docs Offer Glimpse Inside Censorship Industrial Complex”
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2023/08/29/docs_offer_glimpse_inside_censorship_industrial_complex_149684.html
“Welcome to the Censorship Industrial Complex. It’s rather like the old “military industrial complex,” which was shorthand for the military, private companies, and academia working together to achieve U.S. battlefield dominance, with the R&D funded by the government that buys the final product.
But the censorship industrial complex builds algorithms, not bombers. The players aren’t Raytheon and Boeing, but social media companies, tech startups, and universities and their institutes. The foes to be dominated are American citizens whose opinions diverge from government narratives on issues ranging from COVID-19 responses to electoral fraud to transgenderism.
When first exposed a few months ago, many of the actors and their media defenders perversely claimed that they, as private entities, were acting out of concern for “democracy” and exercising their own First Amendment rights.
However, the records and correspondence of an advisory committee to an obscure government agency tell a different story. The Functional Government Initiative (FGI) has obtained through a public records request documents of the Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). The committee was composed of academics and tech company officials working with government personnel in a much closer relationship than either they or the media want to admit. Several advisory committee members who appear throughout the documents as quasi-federal actors are among those loudly protesting that they were private actors when censoring lawful American speech (e.g., Kate Starbird, Vijaya Gadde, Alex Stamos).
But the advisory committee members met often and worked so closely with their government handlers that the federal liaison to the committee regularly offered members his personal cell phone and even reminded them to use the committee’s Slack channel. Your average concerned citizen doesn’t have a Homeland Security bureaucrat on speed dial.
What were they working on? CISA’s “Mis-, Dis-, and Mal-information” (MDM) subcommittee discussed Orwellian “social listening” and “monitoring,” and considered the government’s best censorship “success metrics.” Who was to be censored? CISA was formed in response to misinformation campaigns from foreign actors, but it evolved toward domestic “threats.” Meeting notes record that Suzanne Spaulding of the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they shouldn’t “solely focus on addressing foreign threats … [but] to emphasize that domestic threats remain and while attribution is sometimes unclear, CISA should be sensitive to domestic distinctions, but cannot focus too heavily on such limitations.” So CISA should combat “high-volume disinformation purveyors before the purveyor is attributed to a domestic or foreign threat” and not worry so much about First Amendment niceties.
More telling is the group’s attitude toward what it called “mal-information” – typically information that is true, but contrary to the preferred narratives of the censor. Dr. Starbird wrote in an email, “Unfortunately current public discourse (in part a result of information operations) seems to accept malinformation as ‘speech’ and within democratic norms …” Therein lies a dilemma for the censors, as Starbird wrote: “So, do we bend into a pretzel to counter bad faith efforts to undermine CISA’s mission? Or do we put down roots and own the ground that says this tactic is part of the suite of techniques used to undermine democracy?”
It is chilling that there is no consideration of whether the information is true or of the public’s right to know it. “Democracy” in this formulation is whatever maintains the government’s narrative.”
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“Confessions of a Russiagate survivor
During the febrile peak, now two special counsels ago, I was the one facing a chance of getting locked up”
https://thespectator.com/topic/confessions-russiagate-survivor-sam-patten/
“As the latest special counsel files new charges against former president Donald Trump, it’s beginning to look like legal crusades in America are more important than political ones. Locking up one’s political opponents is the sort of thing they used to do in Ukraine, after all, or the totalitarian state of which Arthur Koestler wrote in Darkness at Noon. Just a few years after claims of Russian collusion with the winning candidate of America’s 2016 presidential election were debunked, it is ironic that a Russian’s critique of our political culture nearly half a century ago captures our current predicament so clearly.
Addressing Harvard’s graduating class in 1978, Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn warned: “I have spent all my life under a communist regime and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed,” quickly adding “But a society with no other scale but the legal one is also less than worthy of man.” America’s excessive legalism, the ingrate continued, would eventually be our undoing. “Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.”
In mid-July 2016, I spent the wee hours of one sleepless morning in St. Petersburg on my laptop in an otherwise silent hotel lobby watching retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn’s speech to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland get drowned out by chants of “Lock her up!” There I was, in the former capital of what Russian president Vladimir Putin once proudly called a “dictatorship of law,” yet now it was my compatriots who were demanding a politician be imprisoned.
After Trump won, the shoe was on the other foot and the chant — from that moment to the present — became “Lock him up!”
During the febrile peak of Russiagate, now two special counsels ago, I was the one facing a chance of getting locked up. My crime was a fairly arcane one: I failed to register as a foreign agent when my work for a Ukrainian politician triggered that requirement. According to the Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938 (FARA, passed to root out Nazi propagandists operating covertly in the US), when you represent the interests of a foreign government or political figure, you must declare it.
Imagine, for instance, your father were vice president of the United States just put in charge of Ukraine policy when an exiled Ukrainian oligarch hires you to advise his gas company. Would you have to register? What if he were a secretive Chinese billionaire who was later disappeared when news of your arrangement surfaced, or the wife of a notoriously corrupt ex-Moscow mayor? As the recent unraveling of Hunter Biden’s plea deal suggests, how one interprets or applies FARA is, well, fungible.
My own Ukrainian client had a longstanding relationship with Paul Manafort, until, that is, the storied Republican operative landed a big piece of domestic work, which created an opening for me in Kyiv. I’d been working as an international political consultant since helping midwife Iraq’s first free election in half a century in 2005. Mana- fort’s Russian-Ukrainian sidekick, Konstantin Kilimnik, had been my deputy in Moscow when I was promoting democracy abroad and ran the International Republican Institute (IRI) office in Russia during the early Putin years.
If the Russians really engineered the election of Donald Trump — as many were suggesting in all seriousness from the summer of 2016 until Robert Mueller testified before Congress in summer 2019 — someone must have helped them, right? If you were casting “likely suspects” for a B-movie, then, I suppose, Paul, Konstantin and I just about fit the bill — but you’d still have to be squinting.
This is where my exposure to the American criminal justice system began. From the time the FBI arrived on my doorstep, it took about six months to plead guilty, and a little over a year to be sentenced (many, arguably most, wait much longer). That plea cost me a quarter of a million dollars. Had I gone to trial, I would have sunk millions of dollars into debt for the privilege of facing a DC jury while prosecutors reminded them that I was a Republican.
As I explain in my forthcoming memoir, Dangerous Company: The Misadventures of a “Foreign Agent,” surrender and cooperation were the logical choice, especially as I didn’t have much to hide.
“First of all, this has nothing to do with the president,” then-Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani told the Washington Post when they for some odd reason contacted him about my arraignment, “and secondly, the next thing you know, Bob Mueller is going to be handing out parking tickets in Russia.”
Giuliani’s off-hand remark cut to the core: was Russiagate the investigation of an actual crime, or was it an investigation in search of a crime?
Regardless, because the political outcome of Trump’s victory was so riven with discord, a legal approach had become necessary. Sixteen years earlier, it took the US Supreme Court to validate George W. Bush’s victory, and forty years before that, a case originating in the US District Court for the District of Columbia (where I was convicted) led to the downfall of the Nixon administration. The legal review of political issues is nothing new in America.
But we’ve recently seen much evidence of the legal system being abused to paper over political disputes and weaponize the administration of justice.
Politically speaking, the problem with the New York case against Donald Trump, involving hush money to a porn star violating FEC rules, as well as the Mar-a-Lago classified documents-handling case, filed in state and federal jurisdictions respectively, is that, in both instances, the other side is far from innocent. Hillary for America did not disclose the money it spent generating and ginning up the Russiagate probe with the “Steele dossier”; the FEC fined her campaign and the DNC about $100,000, case closed. The current president had plenty of classified documents scattered willy-nilly around his various properties — even if he was more cooperative when asked to return them. So why do we have a nuclear-level prosecution of one side and a kid-glove treatment of the other?
The only way to accept glaring contradictions like these is by practicing the same defense as those who lived under the Soviet regime: cognitive dissonance. When I was pleading guilty, a Russian friend counseled me: “just pretend it isn’t happening to you.” That is what Soviet citizens had to do every day in order to psychologically survive under a government they knew lied to them morning, noon and night.
As Americans we’ve adopted our own cognitive dissonance that allows Democrats to look past the troubling symbol Hunter Biden represents, and Republicans to dismiss Trump’s vulgarity.
Yet this separation, this bifurcation, this split is inherently unstable. In warning us about it, Solzhenitsyn evoked the line from Lincoln — “a house divided against itself cannot stand” — in titling his Harvard speech “A world split apart.” He had escaped a very different world — the gulag and repressive state — and having found sanctuary in the woods of Vermont, discovered he could not be silent about the trends he observed in this new land.”
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