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You got to be kidding me. After a crushing defeat, Lee is running for her Congressional seat. Just a few weeks back, Lee got her butt whipped in the mayoral race. Now she’s running for her old seat again.
She will be running against a former employee of hers. I guess some folks just can’t walk away.
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Is it really one down two to go? House approves resolution demanding MIT; Harvard presidents resign after antisemitism testimony.
Is it really one down two to go? Yesterday we saw a bipartisan resolution condemning antisemitism and asking two college presidents to resign. But, does anyone think that there’s only two college Presidents who feel like the ones who testified?
So, who’s next with these radical groups? Will they take their protests to the homes of the Jews, Christians, and any other group or religious organization they have issues with? And when do the Democrat politicians stand up and say enough is enough?
Looking across the country, I’m willing to bet the number is huge,10,20, maybe close to 100? This is a sickness, and I don’t know how you fix it. If anyone has the answer or answers, I’m all ears.
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Reported by THE EPOCH TIMES
The special counsel’s office is preempting former President Donald Trump’s appeal of his case to the U.S. Supreme Court by petitioning the high court for a writ certiorari before judgment—an immediate ruling—of whether the former president can rely on his presidential immunity defense.
President Trump had asked the district court to pause proceedings pending appeal, noting that he would seek that pause from the appeals court if the district court didn’t grant it. If granted in either court, the legal strategy would certainly throw off the trial schedule.
Prosecutors are now asking the Supreme Court to issue judgment before the appeals court makes a decision.
“This case presents a fundamental question at the heart of our democracy,” the special counsel’s team argued in the new filing. “The district court rejected respondent’s claims, correctly recognizing that former Presidents are not above the law and are accountable for their violations of federal criminal law while in office.”
They argue that President Trump’s legal strategy in the appellate court now jeopardizes the March 4, 2024, trial date.
“It is of imperative public importance that respondent’s claims of immunity be resolved by this Court and that respondent’s trial proceed as promptly as possible if his claim of immunity is rejected,” the prosecutors argued.
They claimed that President Trump is “profoundly mistaken” on the law and only the Supreme Court can “definitively resolve” the issues at hand. The court’s granting the writ of certiorari before judgment would “provide the expeditious resolution that this case warrants.”
he former president issued a statement describing the move as a “Hail Mary” on the prosecutor’s part, “by racing to the Supreme Court and attempting to bypass the appellate process.”
He also noted Mr. Smith’s poor record at the high court, which he stated “has not been kind to him, including by handing down a rare unanimous rebuke when the Court overturned him 8-0 in the McDonnell case,” in which Mr. Smith prosecuted former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell.
President Trump reiterated his belief that the prosecution is politically motivated.
The trial on March 4, one day before Super Tuesday Republican primary elections in more than a dozen states, would be the first of the four criminal cases against President Trump.
The 45th president, who has pleaded not guilty to 91 criminal counts, was also facing a May trial date in a federal criminal case in the Southern District of Florida, which is almost certainly going to be postponed as the judge is set to revisit the trial schedule in January.
In Georgia, prosecutors have pushed for an August 2024 trial start, which President Trump’s attorney has argued falls too close to the general election, likely putting jurors in the position of voting for or against him while they attempt to try the case objectively.
President Trump is also facing criminal charges in Manhattan; prosecutors originally set a March 2024 trial date, but the court is set to postpone the case around the schedules of these other criminal cases.
On top of that, President Trump faces several civil lawsuits, one with trial ongoing in New York and another two set to go to trial in mid-January.
On Dec. 1, a federal appeals court ruled that presidential immunity doesn’t shield President Trump from lawsuits regarding the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol breach and noted that the court wouldn’t be the final authority on the issue.
In November 2022, Mr. Smith was appointed special counsel on issues related to the Capitol breach, just days after President Trump announced his candidacy. This summer, he unsealed the indictment against President Trump alleging criminal conspiracy in his actions to challenge the 2020 results, tying much of the case to Jan. 6, 2021.
U.S. Circuit Judge Sri Srinivasan ruled that President Trump was acting as candidate Trump in much of what he is being sued for and that his actions weren’t official acts of a president.
“When a sitting president running for re-election speaks in a campaign ad or in accepting his political party’s nomination at the party convention, he typically speaks on matters of public concern. Yet he does so in an unofficial, private capacity as office-seeker, not an official capacity as office-holder. And actions taken in an unofficial capacity cannot qualify for official-act immunity,” he wrote, rejecting an appeal filed by President Trump, who is also facing civil lawsuits related to Jan. 6, 2021.
The judge added that the rejection of presidential immunity in this case assumes truth in the plaintiffs’ allegations against him, which will need to play out in district court.
“When these cases move forward in the district court, [President Trump] must be afforded the opportunity to develop his own facts on the immunity question if he desires to show that he took the actions alleged in the complaints in his official capacity as President rather than in his unofficial capacity as a candidate,” he wrote. “At the appropriate time, he can move for summary judgment on his claim of official-act immunity.”
The special counsel’s office argues that President Trump sought to “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud” and that he conspired with several people outside of office to do so.
They rebutted President Trump’s presidential immunity defense by arguing that a former president doesn’t have the same immunity and that if he did, it “would be narrower than the ‘outer perimeter’ standard” afforded a sitting president.
The defense argued that President Trump has a history of taking allegations of election fraud seriously, pointing to several investigations he approved while in office, and argued that the speech about election fraud during the end of his term fell squarely within the duties of a president. The special counsel frames the situation quite differently, arguing that President Trump was aware of having legitimately lost the election when he made allegedly false claims about election fraud and “stolen” votes.
In the petition to the Supreme Court, they are also arguing that President Trump has been impeached on similar issues and that the immunity argument is “undercut” by the impeachment clause.
The special counsel has argued, and the district court affirmed, that to grant President Trump presidential immunity here would be to put him “above the law.”
If the Supreme Court agrees to issue judgment before the appeals court rules, it may throw off President Trump’s plans to stall the case past the general election.
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CDC director issues false alarm. Mask up. Yes, my friends mask up or you’re going to get sick or die. At least that’s what the CDC DIRECTOR IS SPEWING. But here’s what’s on the CDC website.
At this time, there is no evidence that JN.1 presents an increased risk to public health relative to other currently circulating variants, and CDC is closely monitoring COVID-19 activity and JN.1 spread. The increase of this variant does not alter CDC’s
Mandy Cohen advised people to wear masks.
“And use additional layers of protection like avoiding people who are sick. Washing your hands, improving ventilation, and wearing a mask,” she said.
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More proof that masks don’t work. Especially on children. How many times do we have to show proof? I guess some folks will never believe and they will continue to follow the Faucci school of lies.
A new systematic review by Sandlund et al published in BMJ’s Archives of Diseases in Childhood shows that public health officials were wrong to mandate masks for children due to an absence of high quality evidence.
Here’s just a bit of that report.
Results We screened 597 studies and included 22 in the final analysis. There were no randomised controlled trials in children assessing the benefits of mask wearing to reduce SARS-CoV-2 infection or transmission. The six observational studies reporting an association between child masking and lower infection rate or antibody seropositivity had critical (n=5) or serious (n=1) risk of bias; all six were potentially confounded by important differences between masked and unmasked groups and two were shown to have non-significant results when reanalysed. Sixteen other observational studies found no association between mask wearing and infection or transmission.
Conclusions Real-world effectiveness of child mask mandates against SARS-CoV-2 transmission or infection has not been demonstrated with high-quality evidence. The current body of scientific data does not support masking children for protection against COVID-19.
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Jack Smith request to hide evidence from Trump legal team is denied. Last month Jack Smith’s lawyers asked Judge Cannon to keep documents under seal because it is considered “highly sensitive classified information.”
Excerpt from Newsweek:
Aileen Cannon, the judge presiding over former President Donald Trump’s classified documents case, on Monday ordered the unsealing of documents filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith, who had asked that they be kept under wraps because they could reveal his trial strategy.
On Monday, Cannon ordered the unsealing of documents filed by Smith in the case, making them public, adding that she was “mindful of the strong presumption in favor of public access to judicial documents.”
On November 22, Smith asked that the filing be kept under seal because it contained government plans to delete “highly sensitive classified information” from sharable discovery.
Cannon said that Smith had not provided “sufficient justification” for his filing because the motions did not “contain or otherwise reveal classified information.”
Additionally, a Friday court document revealed the response to the initial order of unsealing in which Smith’s team agreed to unseal the documents, as requested by the defense, though prosecutors insisted on some redactions.
“The defendants did not oppose the Government’s request, but reserved the right to challenge them later,” Smith wrote, adding that a full unsealing could disclose classified defense counsel information about how government’s CIPA motion.
“This is the same information that the Government proposed redacting. Because the Court rejected that position and ordered the Government to provide unredacted versions of the two docket entries to defense counsel, there is no justification for keeping them from the public.”
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For time reasons, I had to cut my actual address a bit short Thursday. This statement, which began with a nod to Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, is what was entered into the congressional record:
November 30, 2023
Chairman Jordan, ranking member Plaskett, members of the Committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak.
Exactly one year ago today I had my first look at the documents that came to be known as the Twitter Files. One of the first things Michael, Bari Weiss and I found was this image, showing that Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya had been placed on a “trends blacklist”:
This was not because he was suspected of terrorism or incitement or of being a Russian spy or a bad citizen in any way. Dr. Bhattacharya’s crime was doing a peer-reviewed study that became the 55th-most read scientific paper of all time, which showed the WHO initially overstated Covid-19 infection fatality rates by a factor of 17. This was legitimate scientific opinion and should have been an important part of the public debate, but Bhattacharya and several of his colleagues instead became some of the most suppressed people in America in 2020 and 2021.
That’s because by then, even true speech that undermined confidence in government policies had begun to be considered a form of disinformation, precisely the situation the First Amendment was designed to avoid.
When Michael and I testified before the good people of this Committee in March we mentioned this classically Orwellian concept of “malinformation” — material that is somehow both true and wrong — as one of many reasons everyone should be concerned about these digital censorship programs.
But there’s a more subtle reason people across the spectrum should care about this issue.
Former Executive Director of the ACLU Ira Glasser once explained to a group of students why he didn’t support hate speech codes on campuses. The problem, he said, was “who gets to decide what’s hateful… who gets to decide what to ban,” because “most of the time, it ain’t you.”
The story that came out in the Twitter Files, and for which more evidence surfaced in both the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit and this Committee’s Facebook Files releases, speaks directly to Glasser’s concerns.
There’s been a dramatic shift in attitudes about speech, and many politicians now clearly believe the bulk of Americans can’t be trusted to digest information. This mindset imagines that if we see one clip from RT we’ll stop being patriots, that once exposed to hate speech we’ll become bigots ourselves, that if we read even one Donald Trump tweet we’ll become insurrectionists.
Having come to this conclusion, the kind of people who do “anti-disinformation” work have taken upon themselves the paternalistic responsibility to sort out for us what is and is not safe. While they see great danger in allowing anyone else to read controversial material, it’s taken for granted that they’ll be immune to the dangers of speech.
This leads to the one inescapable question about new “anti-disinformation” programs that is never discussed, but must be: who does this work? Stanford’s Election Integrity Project helpfully made a graphic showing the “external stakeholders” in their content review operation. It showed four columns: government, civil society, platforms, media:
One group is conspicuously absent from that list: people. Ordinary people! Whether America continues the informal sub rosa censorship system seen in the Twitter Files or formally adopts something like Europe’s draconian new Digital Services Act, it’s already clear who won’t be involved. There’ll be no dockworkers doing content flagging, no poor people from inner city neighborhoods, no single moms pulling multiple waitressing jobs, no immigrant store owners or Uber drivers, etc. These programs will always feature a tiny, rarefied sliver of affluent professional-class America censoring a huge and ever-expanding pool of everyone else.
Take away the high-fallutin’ talk about “countering hate” and “reducing harm” and “anti-disinformation” is just a bluntly elitist gatekeeping exercise. If you prefer to think in progressive terms, it’s class war. The math is simple. If one small demographic over here has broad control over the speech landscape, and a great big one over there does not, it follows that one group will end up with more political power than the other. Which one is the winner? To paraphrase Glasser, it probably ain’t you.
It isn’t just one side or the other that will lose if these programs are allowed to continue. It’s pretty much everyone, which is why these programs must be defunded before it’s too late.
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Cuomo Aide: How We Killed New York.
Madame Lockdown Speaks!. By Ann Coulter.
I’ve just finished reading the hilariously terrible book “What’s Left Unsaid” by Melissa DeRosa, secretary to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (New York) that is so unself-aware, so arrogant, so embarrassing that I have to review it.
I only read it in the first place because I wanted to interview Cuomo on my Substack, figuring that after his defenestration, he’d be a fun interview. But I’m willing to sacrifice that possibility just to wallow in the awfulness of this book. (Plus, recent press reports say he’s thinking of running for mayor of New York, so it’s topical.)
Most dumbfounding, DeRosa brags about Cuomo bullying everyone into implementing his tyrannical COVID policies — all of which, as we now know, accomplished absolutely nothing (other than causing half a million New Yorkers to flee the state, making 2020-2021 New York’s largest single-year population loss in history).
— First, Cuomo bulldozed the legislature into giving him emergency powers to “institute mass quarantines, order businesses to close, suspend laws and issue sweeping directives.”
His COVID diktats did squat to slow the spread of COVID, but they did destroy businesses, annihilate cultural institutions, kill budding careers, stunt children’s educational development and delay urgent medical care, among other things. (What’s the word for that, again? It begins with an “A” … describes a strongman …)
— Next, Cuomo closed all public colleges in the state and browbeat private universities into doing the same.
In the first year of the pandemic, there were a grand total 648 deaths among 15-to-24-year-olds in the entire country — and we don’t know what other health problems those kids had. Cuomo ruined hundreds of thousands of young lives for no reason.
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— Then, he badgered Mayor Bill de Blasio into shutting down public schools in New York City — over the objections of the (wildly left-wing) mayor and the teachers union. As DeRosa puts it, both “were adamantly opposed to closing schools in the city, no ifs, ands or buts about it.”
One week after the governor had demanded that de Blasio close the schools, DeRosa writes, “the governor was done waiting.” He peremptorily called into a local TV station and simply announced that the city’s public schools were closed.
This was the single worst decision made during COVID, as even The New York Times has admitted. The little tykes were at essentially zero risk from COVID. But shutting down schools did irreparable harm to their cognitive and psychological development.
— Next, Cuomo bullied President Trump into sending the military to convert the Javits Center and the USS Comfort into field hospitals for New York City.
“’This will get Trump’s attention,’” Cuomo predicted of his op-ed. “The piece ran [in the Times] the next day under the headline: ‘ANDREW CUOMO TO PRESIDENT TRUMP: MOBILIZE THE MILITARY TO HELP FIGHT CORONAVIRUS.’”
A kazillion dollars later, it turned out these temporary hospitals were completely unnecessary. They were shuttered after about a month, at which time the Javits Center had a grand total of 72 patients for its 2,500 beds.
— Finally, Cuomo demanded that upstate hospitals send all their ventilators to New York City, leaving upstate residents high and dry. He even forced recalcitrant private hospitals to relinquish their ventilators by calling the CEOs and threatening: “I will personally pull your operating license.”
Everyone now knows that ventilators were wildly overused and killed a lot of patients because COVID confused the oxygen readings, meaning the mechanical breathing tubes were unnecessary.
It could be argued that some of these policies were not known to be utterly catastrophic when Cuomo imposed them. But 1) That’s why it’s not a good idea to give one man the authority to “institute mass quarantines, order businesses to close, suspend laws and issue sweeping directives”; and 2) Now that we do know, why would you write a book reminding everyone that it was your boss who forced these policies on the public? It’s like bragging that he was the guy who made doctors give Thalidomide to pregnant women.
DeRosa seems quite pleased with herself for her own contribution to New York’s ludicrous COVID rules. She was the one, for example, who pushed for a quarantine on travelers from states like Texas, Florida and Arizona.
To his credit, Cuomo initially rejected the idea, saying, “Isn’t that exactly what we opposed back in March when Rhode Island threatened to quarantine New Yorkers?” To his discredit, he then acceded to Madam Ceausescu.
DeRosa was also the one whose bright idea it was to wreck New Yorkers’ 2020 Christmas holidays by insisting on a 10 p.m. curfew on bars and restaurants. She says she’d have preferred to “unilaterally close all bars, restaurants and other State Liquor Authority–licensed establishments” but was worried that “there would be no public buy-in.” (You think?)
To really nail down the nuking of everyone’s holidays, she also “advocated that we limit indoor and outdoor gatherings at private residences to no more than 10 people.”
Again, at first, Cuomo objected, on the grounds that the idea was insane, but quickly deferred to his drunk-with-power assistant.
Amazingly, DeRosa still doesn’t understand the virus she dedicated a year of her life to suppressing. In humble-brag fashion, she recounts her conversation with a senior health official early in the pandemic:
Health official: “'[A]ccording to top medical professionals at the CDC and WHO, by all accounts, this virus acts like, well, the flu,’ he said.
“’The flu?’ I asked, honestly confused.
“’Yes, the flu; that’s what the federal government is saying.’
“’Okay, accepting that premise, can I ask you a stupid question?’ I went on. [This is always the tip-off that sheer brilliance is coming.]
“’Of course.’
“’Isn’t the major difference between this and the flu that the flu has a vaccine?’”
Although the “health official” agreed (naturally), that was a stupid question. A vaccine is not the main difference at all. The difference is: Our immune systems were familiar with the flu but had never encountered anything like COVID before.
The 1918 flu virus is still in circulation, and yet 50 million people don’t die of it every year because our immune systems recognize it. Now that we’ve all been exposed to COVID, it is just like the flu. (Also, FYI, only about half of adults in America get the flu shot anyway, and its effectiveness, year to year, is a crapshoot.)
Finally, it’s nice that DeRosa’s COVID lockdown was a blast, but kind of annoying to have her tell us about it. While poor families were jammed like sardines into tiny living quarters for a year, DeRosa spent her lockdown living like a queen.
She moved into the “Princess Beatrix suite” at the governor’s mansion, which, she says, had “a large bedroom and a separate sitting room with its own fireplace. There was an en suite bathroom, multiple closets to hang my perpetually wrinkled clothing in and an antique vanity.”
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While gyms were closed throughout the state, she worked out in the mansion’s gym every day. While pools were closed and gatherings of more than 10 people banned, she regularly worked, dined and hung out by the mansion’s pool.
Once a week, DeRosa helicoptered with the governor to New York City. Whizzing through the city in the governor’s car one day, she describes the deserted streets of the once-bustling metropolis as “haunting and yet somehow beautiful.”
I’m sure little Pedro, who spent his lockdown in a one-bedroom apartment with his abusive father, drunk mother and seven siblings, appreciates these poetic reflections on the empty city created by you, Melissa. It makes you sound like a really swell person.
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Progressive writer attacks a child in the name of WOKE. Yes the left has no shame a no name writer tweeted part of a childs face showing what this writer called racism and somehow connected it as derrogatory towards Native Americans and Blacks. Because of that child the KC Chiefs must stop using an Indian name.
Deadspin writer Carron Phillips smeared an innocent child who attended Sunday’s Kansas City vs Las Vegas game by posting a deceptive photo of only one side of his face.
“It takes a lot to disrespect two groups of people at once. But on Sunday afternoon in Las Vegas, a Kansas City Chiefs fan found a way to hate Black people and the Native Americans at the same time.” Carron Phillips wrote.
deceptive photo used by Carron Phillips
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Winning. Only 14% of Americans get the latest jab. If you want or did get the latest jab, that’s fine. But don’t come crying when you get side effects, hospitalization, and of course death (of course it’s too late then).
The loons over at VOX call it a miracle drug. But what they and the CDC leave out is that since the so called miracle drugs arrived, more Vaccinated folks are getting COVID, Hospitalized, and dying.
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