Fauci will be the 2023 commencement speaker at Yale’s School of medicine.
Fauci on Trial: retiring bureaucrat suddenly ‘can’t recall’ anything. Surprised?
We’ve reported this before, but someone did the legwork and read his deposition related to the govt/big tech collusion to censor those who opposed the vaccine mandates. They found a (not so) astonishing 174 times Tony the Fauch said “I don’t recall” — including when asked about emails that he sent, interviews that he gave, and other important information. Considering the 80-year-old con man could be looking forward to spending the rest of his life in jail if the censorship case and any sequelae ever go to trial, is anyone surprised?
COVID-19 vaccine maker AstraZeneca has revealed it made four billion dollars in sales from its coronavirus jab last year
Sixth Circuit Appeals Court Upholds Air Force Personnel’s Relief From COVID Vaccine Mandate
The U.S. Sixth Circuit Court ruled unanimously to uphold a class action injunction protecting Air Force personnel who declined the COVID vaccine from punitive measures.
In the ruling, Judge Murphy wrote, “Under RFRA, the Air Force wrongly relied on its ‘broadly formulated’ reasons for the vaccine mandate to deny specific exemptions to the Plaintiffs, especially since it has granted secular exemptions to their colleagues. We thus may uphold the Plaintiffs’ injunction based on RFRA alone. The Air Force’s treatment of their exemption requests also reveals common questions for the class: Does the Air Force have a uniform policy of relying on its generalized interests in the vaccine mandate to deny religious exemptions regardless of a service member’s individual circumstances? And does it have a discriminatory policy of broadly denying religious exemptions but broadly granting secular ones? A district court can answer these questions in a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ fashion for the entire class. It can answer whether these alleged policies violate RFRA and the First Amendment in the same way. A ruling for the class also would permit uniform injunctive relief against the allegedly illegal policies. We affirm.”
Defense for Jabs Gone: Pandemic of the Vaccinated, Increased Likelihood of C19 Death
For the first time, a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.
Fifty-eight percent of coronavirus deaths in August were people who were vaccinated or boosted, according to an analysis conducted for The Health 202 by Cynthia Cox, vice president at the Kaiser Family.
34% increase in Covid deaths in most vaxxed states vs least vaxxed.
We looked at the top ten most vaccinated states; they had an average uptake of 82%. And we looked at the bottom ten least vaccinated states, and [it] turns out there’s a 34% increase in deaths per 100,000 of COVID deaths in the top ten most vaccinated states.
Jeffrey Jaxen [of The Highwire]comments, “So there’s a data point that is actually really shocking, really should be alarming to a lot of people, really should be investigated.”
Agreed, Jeffrey. If the shots really were “safe and effective,” how is it possible that the top ten most vaccinated states are now seeing 34% MORE Covid-19 deaths than the top ten least vaccinated states? And why is it that programs like The Highwire and internet warriors that have to do CDC’s job for them? These things clearly aren’t working. There’s a negative efficacy signal, and nothing comes to chance when you compare ten states of data to another ten states. That’s essentially a mega meta-analysis.
Grand Prismatic Spring In Yellowstone National Park, which would likely disappear or be massively damaged byeven a mild eruption,
Yellowstone eruption, illustration. Yellowstone National Park is sitting above an underground magma chamber.
The supervolcano at Yellowstone National Park has a substantially larger magma reservoir under the caldera than scientists previously thought, according to new research.
In addition, the newly found lava is flowing at shallow depths that fueled prior eruptions, according to a paper published Thursday in Science.
Researchers mapped the seismic wave speed below the Yellowstone volcano using a technique called seismic tomography. This 3D modeling of seismic waveforms measures the volume of the melt and makes assumptions of the distribution of how the melt is spread in the subsurface in Yellowstone’s magma reservoir, Ross Maguire, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s department of geology and author of the study, told ABC News. [*”Melt” means liquid magma.]
“We found that it’s likely that Yellowstone’s crustal magma reservoir holds more melt than previously was thought,” Maguire said, adding that there is up to 20% melt at shallow depths.
Previous studies have suggested the partial melt fraction was between 5% and 15%, Maguire said.
The Yellowstone magma reservoir is not so much “a big tank of magma,” with accumulation all in one body, Maguire said, but rather, more like a “snow cone,” in which there is a solid component and a liquid component, Kari M. Cooper, professor and chair at the University of California Davis’s department of earth and planetary sciences, told ABC News.
The findings show it’s possible there are some relatively small to moderate-size bodies of magma that are below Yellowstone that could be mobilized and expelled, Cooper said. Yellowstone tends to garner a lot of attention because of the potential for “catastrophic, explosive eruptions,” Maguire said, but that’s not the most common type of eruption in the park.
“They would be of a similar size to what’s happened in the very recent Yellowstone history that’s produced a series of lava flows that filled the most recent caldera after the most recent really large eruption,” she said.
Despite the new discovery, the research does not indicate that an eruption will happen any time soon, the scientists said. There are no signs of “increased volcanic unrest” at Yellowstone, Maguire said.
“This really does not change the hazard assessment at all, because we already knew that. We already knew this was the recent activity,” Cooper said. “We already knew that was the most likely sort of activity to happen next.”
However, a key issue for assessing the hazards of volcanic eruption is to ascertain how much magma is below the surface and where, and continued monitoring of the subsurface is important to provide a clear picture if the situation begins to change dramatically, the researchers said.
In addition, Yellowstone is thoroughly monitored by the U.S. Geological Survey and the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, Cooper said.
Five more Antifa members have admitted to having a role in violent felonies in San Diego, Calif. in January 2021 where beachgoers, Trump supporters, and a dog were violently assaulted. At a court hearing on Nov. 18, five accepted plea deals instead of going to trial.
Their plea deals were made more than a month after trans Antifa member Erich Louis “Nikki” Yach, 38, made a plea deal in September. Yach was the first of 11 defendants to plead guilty, and pleaded guilty to three violent felonies, including conspiracy to riot, and was sentenced to four years and eight months in prison earlier this month. Yach has a prior violent criminal record that was a factor in the sentencing.
Prior convicted felon Erich Louis “Nikki” Yach was recently sentenced to nearly five years in prison.
In the five new plea deals, court paperwork reveals that Antifa members Christian Martinez, Bryan Rivera, Joseph Austin Gaskins, Samuel Howard Ogden, and Alexander Akridge-Jacobs all agreed to two years probation, a fourth amendment search waiver that includes electronic devices, and to not associate with any co-defendant. Any actual custody time will be determined by the judge at a sentencing hearing in three months. Until then, all five defendants will remain at liberty on their own recognizance.
Christian Martinez, 24, pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy to riot with his Antifa co-defendants, plus felony assault on victim 7, likely to produce great bodily injury. He also admitted to the special allegation that he was armed with a weapon, a full can of Twisted Tea. The prosecutor told the grand jury that he threw this beverage can so hard at the victim that the can actually broke open. Martinez’s maximum possible sentence is four years and eight months in state prison, plus 3 years parole. Martinez was arrested in December 2021 at his family’s home in Los Angeles, and police found Antifa symbols in his bedroom, according to testimony before a grand jury.
In June, a secret grand jury indicted 11 alleged Antifa members accused of being part of a network of violent cells in southern California that planned and carried out brutal assaults during a riot in Pacific Beach, Calif. on Jan. 9, 2021. Video recorded at the riot showed the mob in black bloc assaulting multiple victims with weapons. Trump supporters, minors, a photojournalist, and a man and his dog walking on the beach were all hurt during the attacks. Multiple weapons and firearms were seized from suspects during executed search warrants. This shocking conspiracy case involving Antifa has largely been ignored by establishment media which furthers the false claim that Antifa “doesn’t exist.”
Sentencing for the five who pleaded guilty is scheduled for March 1, 2023, at the central courthouse in downtown San Diego before Honorable judge Daniel Goldstein.
The five remaining defendants out of 11 have pleaded not guilty to all charges. Faraz Martin Talab has a trial date of March 1, 2023. Jesse Cannon, Brian Cortez Lightfoot Jr., Jeremy Jonathan White, and Luis Francisco Mora have the same trial date of April 3, 2023.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, speaks in Washington on May 11, 2022. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Dr. Anthony Fauci said he could not recall key details about his actions during the COVID-19 pandemic, according to one of the officials who questioned him on Nov. 23.
Fauci, the director National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) since 1984 and President Joe Biden’s chief medical adviser, was deposed by Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry and Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt, both Republicans.
“It was amazing, literally, that we spent seven hours with Dr. Fauci—this is a man who single-handedly wrecked the U.S. economy based upon ‘the science, follow the science.’—and over the course of seven hours, we discovered that he can’t recall practically anything dealing with his COVID response,” Landry told The Epoch Times after leaving the deposition. “He just said, ‘I can’t recall, I haven’t seen that. And I think we need to put these documents into context,’” Landry added.
“It was extremely troubling to realize that this is a man who advises presidents of the United States and yet couldn’t recall information he put out, information he discussed, press conferences he held dealing with the COVID-19 response,” Landry added later.
Fauci and NIAID did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Landry declined to provide specific details about the deposition until it is made public, which will happen at a future date. But he said officials would be able to take some of what they learned to advance their case.
Landry and Schmitt sued the U.S. government in May, alleging it violated people’s First Amendment rights by pressuring big tech companies to censor speech. Documents produced by the government in response bolstered the claims. U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, the Trump appointee overseeing the case, recently ordered Fauci and seven other officials to testify under oath about their knowledge of the censorship.
Doughty concluded that plaintiffs showed Fauci “has personal knowledge about the issue concerning censorship across social media as it related to COVID-19 and ancillary issues of COVID-19.”
While Fauci qualified as a high-ranking official, the burden of him being deposed was outweighed by the court’s need for information before ruling on a motion for a preliminary injunction, Doughty said.
Wednesday was the first time Fauci testified under oath about his interactions with big tech firms, including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Before the deposition, Landry said in a statement, “We all deserve to know how involved Dr. Fauci was in the censorship of the American people during the COVID pandemic; tomorrow, I hope to find out.”
“We’re going to follow the evidence everywhere it goes to get down to exactly what has happened, to get down to the fact that our government used private entities to suppress the speech of Americans,” Landry told The Epoch Times.
Other Depositions
The government moved to block some of the depositions, but not Fauci’s. It just won an order blocking the depositions of Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency Director Jen Easterly, and Rob Flaherty, a deputy assistant to Biden.
Similar efforts to block the depositions of former White House press secretary Jen Psaki and FBI official Elvis Chan have been unsuccessful.
Chan is scheduled to answer questions next week. Psaki is scheduled to be deposed on Dec. 8.
Chan was involved in communicating with Facebook, LinkedIn, and other big tech firms about content moderation, according to evidence developed in the case and public statements he’s made. Psaki publicly said while still in the White House that platforms should step up against alleged mis- and disinformation.
Plaintiffs have already deposed several officials including Daniel Kimmage, an official at the State Department’s Global Engagement Center.
That center worked with Easterly’s agency to create a coalition of nonprofits called the Election Integrity Partnership, which pushed social media companies to censor speech.
Kimmage was also responsible for meetings during which censorship was discussed, with State Department official Samaruddin Stewart acting on his orders, according to documents produced by LinkedIn.
Motion to Dismiss
Earlier Wednesday, the government asked Doughty to throw out the case, asserting that plaintiffs have not shown the government engaged in coercion against the companies.
Even if government officials “urged social media companies do more to contain misinformation, any content moderation decisions made by social media companies ultimately ‘rested with’ those companies,” U.S. lawyers said.
“Even emphatic requests or strongly worded urging, see … (President Biden saying failing to take action against misinformation results in ‘killing people’), do not plausibly amount to coercion,” the lawyers added.
Plaintiffs are crafting a response to the motion.
Both sides are also preparing briefs regarding the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit’s decision that blocked the Murthy, Easterly, and Flaherty depositions.
The appeals court said Doughty had not adequately considered whether alternative means of obtaining the information sought exist, such as deposing lower-level officials or seeking written answers from higher-level officials.
Doughty ordered plaintiffs to file a brief by Nov. 29. The government has until Dec. 2 to respond. Plaintiffs may reply to that response by Dec. 5.
Funny how he can’t recall things that are already documented as happening.
Attorney General and Governor-elect Josh Shapiro charged a Democrat campaign consultant with ‘wide scale’ voter fraud.
Here’s the pertinent information from the attorney general’s office:
Attorney General Josh Shapiro today announced the arrest of Rasheen Crews, a Philadelphia political consultant, for charges related to forging signatures on nomination petitions to get his clients on the ballot for the 2019 Democratic primary races in Philadelphia.
“In advance of the 2023 municipal elections, this arrest is an important reminder that interfering with the integrity of our elections is a serious crime,” said AG Shapiro. “By soliciting and organizing the wide scale forgery of signatures, the defendant undermined the democratic process and Philadelphians’ right to a free and fair election. My office is dedicated to upholding the integrity of the election process across the Commonwealth, to ensure everyone can participate in Pennsylvania’s future.”
Crews is charged with cheating in a Democrat primary. This means he cheated Democrats. If he had cheated Republicans, Shapiro wouldn’t do a thing.
Crews is alleged to have forged “thousands of signatures” to qualify his clients to have their names included on the ballot for some local 2019 Democrat primary races.
The petitions are said to have had over a thousand duplicate signatures. Some of the pages were photocopied and used again as separate pages. Some individuals whose names were on the petitions said they never signed.
And so, Crews is now charged with “criminal solicitation to commit forgery and theft by failure to make required disposition.”
What a stupid and lazy crime to commit.
Gathering signatures that qualify you (or your client) to appear on a ballot is not that difficult. I’ve done it, and almost no one says no if you ask. It’s only a matter of gathering supporters and going out to where the people are. If you’re going to pay people to forge a petition, why not pay them to gather legal signatures?
You see, it’s all about being a Democrat and believing you can be above the law because you’re a Democrat. The fact that you are a Democrat tells Democrats they can do whatever they want because they are virtuous, which means everything they do is virtuous simply because they do it.
And don’t get all happy that a Democrat politician is charging a Democrat here. Remember, this Crews guy is charged with cheating in a Democrat primary. This means he cheated Democrats. If he had cheated Republicans, Shapiro wouldn’t do a thing.
New Jersey’s teachers are now required to teach climate change beginning in kindergarten and across most subjects, including art, social studies, world languages, and PE. Supporters hope the lessons will spread.
This article appeared in both WaPo and The Hechinger Report.
PENNINGTON, N.J. — There was one minute left on Suzanne Horsley’s stopwatch and the atmosphere remained thick with carbon dioxide, despite the energetic efforts of her class of third graders to clear the air.
Horsley, a wellness teacher at Toll Gate Grammar School in Pennington, New Jersey, had tasked the kids with tossing balls of yarn representing carbon dioxide molecules to their peers stationed at plastic disks representing forests. The first round of the game was set in the 1700s, and the kids had cleared the field in under four minutes. But this third round took place in the present day, after the advent of cars, factories and electricity, and massive deforestation. With fewer forests to catch the balls, and longer distances to throw, the kids couldn’t keep up.
“That was hard,” said Horsley after the round ended. “In this time period versus the 1700s, way more challenging right?
“Yeah,” the students chimed in.
“In 2022, we got a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Horsley. “What’s the problem with it, what is it causing?”
“Global warming,” volunteered one girl.
Two years ago, New Jersey became the first state in the country to adopt learning standards obligating teachers to instruct kids about climate change across grade levels and subjects. The standards, which went into effect this fall, introduce students as young as kindergarteners to the subject, not just in science class but in the arts, world languages, social studies, and physical education. Supporters say the instruction is necessary to prepare younger generations for a world — and labor market — increasingly reshaped by climate change.
In Suzanne Horsley’s climate change lesson, yarn balls represent carbon dioxide molecules. Students try to clear the atmosphere — or playing field — of the balls. Credit: Caroline Preston/The Hechinger Report“There’s no way we can expect our children to have the solutions and the innovations to these challenges if we’re not giving them the tools and resources needed here and now,” said Tammy Murphy, the wife of New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy and a founding member of former Vice President Al Gore’s Climate Reality Action Fund, who pushed to get the standards into schools. Just as students must be able to add and subtract before learning calculus, she said, kids need to understand the basics of climate change — the vocabulary, the logic behind it — before they can tackle the climate crisis.Historically, climate change has not been comprehensively taught in U.S. schools, largely because of the partisanship surrounding climate change and many teachers’ limited grasp of the science behind it. That started to change in 2013, with the release of new national science standards, which instructed science teachers to introduce students to climate change and its human causes starting in middle school. Still, only 20 states have adopted the standards. A 2020 report from the National Center for Science Education and Texas Freedom Network Education Fund found that many states that didn’t follow the new guidance weren’t explicit in their standards about the human causes of climate change, and a few even promoted falsehoods about its causes and degree of seriousness. Meanwhile, discussion of climate change outside of science class remains relatively rare, educators and experts say.New Jersey is trying to change that, but it’s not a simple task. Like teachers around the country, educators here are exhausted after years of Covid disruptions, and, as elsewhere, some schools face dire teacher shortages. On top of this, many educators don’t feel prepared to teach climate change: A 2021 survey of 164 New Jersey teachers found that many lacked confidence in their knowledge of the subject, and some held misconceptions about it, confusing the problem with other environmental issues such as plastic pollution.
For now, the climate instruction requirements haven’t faced much pushback from climate deniers and conservatives, who’ve trained their attacks instead on the state’s new sex-education standards. But state officials anticipate some criticism as the lessons begin to roll out in classrooms.
A more pressing concern — and one that plagues any education initiative because of local control of schools — is that the lessons are rolling out unevenly across the state. Schools in affluent towns like Pennington tend to have more time and resources to introduce new instruction; schools in poorer communities like Camden, which are often the most vulnerable to climate disasters, may lack the resources to do so.
“I am happy to see New Jersey as a pioneer of climate change standards,” said Maria Santiago-Valentin, co-founder of the Atlantic Climate Justice Alliance, a group that works to mitigate the disproportionate harm of climate change on marginalized communities. But, she said, the standards will need to be revised if they fail to adequately emphasize the unequal impact of climate change on Black and Hispanic communities or ensure that students in those communities receive the instruction.
New Jersey is making some effort to help teachers adopt the standards, setting aside $5 million for lesson plans and professional development, and enlisting teachers like Horsley, who holds a master’s degree in outdoor education and has a passion for the environment, to develop model lessons.
Supporters are trying to ensure that teachers have plenty of examples for teaching the standards in age-appropriate ways, with racial and environmental justice as one of the key features of the instruction.
“It’s not like we’re asking kindergarteners to look at the Keeling Curve,” said Lauren Madden, a professor of education at the College of New Jersey who prepared a report on the standards, referring to a graph showing daily carbon dioxide concentrations. “We’re trying to point out areas where we can build some of those foundational blocks so that by the time students are in upper elementary or middle school, they really have that solid foundation.”
On a recent weekday, Cari Gallagher, a third grade teacher at Lawrenceville Elementary School in central New Jersey, was reading to her students the book “No Sand in the House!” which tells the story of a grandfather whose Jersey Shore home is devastated by Hurricane Sandy. Later, the students sat down to write about what they’d heard, drawing connections between the book and their own lives, world events or other books they’d read.
After the writing exercise, Gallagher directed the students to split into small groups to build structures that would help provide protection against climate change calamities. The kids used Legos, blocks, Play-Doh and straws to create carports, walls and other barriers.
That same morning, a kindergarten class at the elementary school listened as their teacher, Jeffrey Berry, held up a globe and discussed how different parts of the world have different climates.
At Hopewell Valley Central High School, in Pennington, art teacher Carolyn McGrath piloted a lesson on climate change this summer with a handful of students. The results of the class — four paintings featuring climate activists — sat on the windowsill of her classroom.
“It felt empowering to see people like me, who reflect me and my identities,” said Mackenzie Harsell, an 11th grader who’d created a portrait of 24-year-old climate activist Daphne Frias, who, like Mackenzie, is young, and is disabled. “This project told me I could do anything.”
Research suggests education does have an impact on how people understand climate change and their willingness to take action to stop it. One study found that college students who took a class that discussed reducing their carbon footprint tended to adopt environment-friendly practices and stick with them over many years. Another found that educating middle schoolers about climate change resulted in their parents expressing greater concern about the problem.
Jeffrey Berry, a kindergarten teacher at Lawrenceville Elementary School, encourages his students to care for plants and nature. Kindergarteners tend to the “garden of good manners,” pictured here. Credit: Caroline Preston/The Hechinger Report
“Education is certainly a way that we could have perhaps slowed down where we are right now in terms of the climate crisis,” said Margaret Wang, chief operating officer with SubjectToClimate, a nonprofit that is helping teachers develop and share climate lessons. More jobs related to climate change are already opening up, said Wang, and kids will need skills not just to discover scientific innovations but to tell stories, advocate, inspire and make public policy.
Back at Toll Gate elementary, Horsley, the wellness teacher, was getting ready to hand off the third graders to their classroom teacher. Before filing back into the school, a handsome brick building that suffered flooding last year during Hurricane Ida, students reflected on the lesson.
Ayla, a third grader dressed in jeans and tie-dye sneakers, said it made her want to “do something” about climate change because “I don’t want it to get so hot.”
Wes, another third grader, said adults could have done more to protect the environment. “I think they’ve done a medium job because they’re still producing a lot of carbon dioxide and a lot of people are littering still.”
“I feel bad for the other animals because they don’t know about it, so they don’t know what to do,” added his classmate, Hunter.
“We know about it,” said Abby, who was wearing a shirt emblazoned with the words “Girl Power.” She said it was up to humans to drive less and recycle and protect other species from climate disasters.
“When I first found out we were going to learn about climate change in gym, I was like, that’s surprising, because normally we learn that in class,” Abby added. “But I’m glad we did it in gym,” she continued. “It was really fun.”
Climate CHANGES. Your hubris that we cause it or that we can change it is — unprintable.
Winning combination: shaved head, hoodie, tattoos, jogging shorts, & closed captioning — while slurring his replies into unintelligibility. Seriously? What were people thinking?
As of this writing, both Fetterman and Shapiro have won their contests.
I live in Central PA and am an elected voting official for my county. As such, I can say some things that the average Pennsylvanian might not realize.
The presiding “Judge” for a given precinct is elected. The gotcha is that sometimes there is absolutely nobody running, and a single write-in vote can be enough to “win” the election. Guess how I know?
Even though someone is “elected,” someone else may perform those duties.
The “Judge” has to assemble their group of poll workers, contacting each of them themselves.
A poll worker may not live in the same precinct they are working in if the “Judge” can’t find anyone IN the precinct willing to work. The BOE only helps if the judge can’t find enough people to man the polling place on their own.
In my precinct, not enough Democrats are interestedin working, so Republicans fill slots theoretically for a Democrat.
Given all that, I can say that — in MY precinct at least — the tabulator was not connected to the internet — although everything is recorded on thumb drives that are kept separate from the tabulator during the return to the elections office. Also, there was no available wi-fi during polling, so that was moot in my precinct.
Training — in my county at least — is inadequate for the task at hand if one is a newbie. It also seems that each county must develop its own training materials.
Now, getting to the election itself.
Fetterman’s own Hometown Newspaper endorsed his opponent.
Why would anyone vote for a person who routinely dresses like a Hell’s Angels reject, who’s had a stroke (and who needed closed-captioning to debate), who slurred some statements into unintelligibility, and who was — time and again– the only person on the parole board to vote to let dangerous felons out of jail, and who chased and held an innocent, unarmed (black) jogger with a shotgun because he thought he heard gunfire (and has NEVER apologized for doing so) is beyond me.
He never called out Biden for saying he wanted to close all coal-powered electrical plants when PA is a coal-producing state.
Yet Fetterman seems to be winning as of this writing. The margin is slim, but…
The pandemic saw the destruction of a number of small businesses in the county. There is no more taxi service in State College (home to Penn State), where there were two companies in operation before it, plus Uber and Lyft drivers. Likewise, towing companies have diminished severely. Liberal paranoia about the Wuhan flu closed Penn State, killed a number of restaurants, and was generally an overblown PITA. Geisinger medical sites are STILL demanding masks to enter their kingdom, and Fetterman and Shapiro are okay with that. Should we look for more of the same?
I know that Pittsburgh, Philly, and Harrisburg are all liberal strongholds (along with State College, where students outnumber actual residents.) But has all common sense escaped these people?
Remember this headline from the acting (Democratic) Secy of State?
Why (how) was the race determined so quickly?
Is it simply more “orange man bad” TDS infecting their reason-deprived minds out there in the liberal enclaves?
The Democrat party has lost Hispanic and black voter support since the 2020 election, two essential demographics the party needs to retain its fragile, intersectional coalition, according to a Wall Street Journal (WSJ) poll released Monday.
In August, Hispanic voters favored Democrats by 11 points. That lead has been cut to five points in October.
In just four years, Democrats have lost Hispanic support by 26 points.
The margin of five points in October is far less than in 2020 when President Joe Biden was favored over former President Donald Trump by 28 points. In 2018, Hispanics favored Democrats by 31 points.
A similar exodus from the Democrat party is seen among black voters. The poll found 17 percent of black voters would vote for a Republican in 2022. In 2020, that number was only eight percent, a nine point swing in two years. Eight percent also supported Republicans in 2018.
Black voters strongly oppose the Democrats’ policy of chain migration that is helping to cut Americans’ wages and raise their rents, according to data provided by Rasmussen Reports. https://t.co/LdF0b3zCVF
The WSJpoll sampled 1,500 people from October 22-26, including 180 black voters with a 7.3 margin of error and 400 Hispanic voters with a 4.9 margin of error.
“It is wholly possible that Republicans reach a new high water mark among both African-Americans and Hispanic voters in this election,” Biden’s lead pollster, Tony Fabrizio, told the outlet.
The polling is notable because the Democrat Party has constantly won the black vote by huge margins since the 1960s when Democrat former President Lyndon Johnson from a southern state was able to solidify black support successfully. Modern-day Democrats have tried to bring Hispanic voters into their fold on the basis of forming an intersectional coalition among so-called marginalized groups.
But with the rise of crime, illegal immigration, and inflation, which disproportionally impacts less financially wealthy citizens, black and Hispanic voters have moved towards the Republicans.
The Democrats have launched two cringeworthy ads targeting Hispanic voters as the party continues to lose favor with that demographic. https://t.co/47pChS0LkB
Monday’s polling numbers suggest Republicans will have significant gains in the 2022 midterm elections. Many races will likely be decided by one percentage point. Black and Hispanic voters could play a huge role in which party controls Congress.
Women are also leaving the Democrat party. Polling revealed last week that white suburban women have moved 27 points away from Democrats since August and now favor Republicans by 15 points. The demographic of white suburban women represent 20 percent of the electorate.
Conservatives are the Biggest threat to Democracy, according to Biden.
“Dammit, vote Democrat or we’ll burn the country down!”
When CNN Fact checks Xiden and calls BS, you KNOW he’s in trouble.
President Joe Biden has been back on the campaign trail, traveling in October and early November to deliver his pitch for electing Democrats in the midterm elections on Tuesday.
Biden’s pitch has included claims that are false, misleading or lacking important context. (As always, we take no position on the accuracy of his subjective arguments.) Here is a fact-check look at nine of his recent statements.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Social Security, part 1
Biden said at a Democratic fundraiser in Pennsylvania last week: “On our watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are going to get the biggest increase in their Social Security checks they’ve gotten.” He has also touted the 2023 increase in Social Security payments at other recent events.
The White House deleted a Tuesday tweet that delivered an especially triumphant version of Biden’s boast, and press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre acknowledged Wednesday that the tweet was lacking “context.”
That now-deleted Tuesday tweet reads: “Seniors are getting the biggest increase in their Social Security checks in 10 years through President Biden’s leadership.”
Biden said at a Democratic rally in Florida on Tuesday: “And on my watch, for the first time in 10 years, seniors are getting an increase in their Social Security checks.”
The claim that the 2023 increase to Social Security payments is the first in 10 years is false. In reality, there has been a cost-of-living increase every year from 2017 onward. There was also an increase every year from 2012 through 2015 before the payment level was kept flat in 2016 because of a lack of inflation.
The context around this Biden remark in Florida suggests he might have botched his repeat campaign line about Social Security payments increasing at the same time asMedicare premiums are declining.
Regardless of his intentions, though, he was wrong.
A new corporate tax
Biden repeatedly suggested in speeches in October and early November that a new law he signed in August, the Inflation Reduction Act, will stop the practice of successful corporations paying no federal corporate income tax. Biden made the claim explicitly in a tweet last week: “Let me give you the facts. In 2020, 55 corporations made $40 billion. And they paid zero in federal taxes. My Inflation Reduction Act puts an end to this.”
But “puts an end to this” is an exaggeration. The Inflation Reduction Act will reduce the number of companies on the list of non-payers, but the law will not eliminate the list entirely.
That’s because the law’s new 15% alternative corporate minimum tax, on the “book income” companies report to investors, only applies to companies with at least $1 billion in average annual income. (There are lots of nuances; you can read more specifics here.) According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, the think tank that in 2021 published the list of 55 large and profitable companies that avoided paying any federal income tax in their previous fiscal year, only 14 of these 55 companies reported having US pre-tax income of at least $1 billion in that year.
In other words, there will clearly still be some large and profitable corporations paying no federal income tax even after the minimum tax takes effect in 2023. The exact number is not yet known.
Matthew Gardner, a senior fellow at the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, said in a Thursday email that the new tax is “an important step forward from the status quo” and that it will raise substantial revenue, but he also said: “I wouldn’t want to assert that the minimum tax will end the phenomenon of zero-tax profitable corporations. A more accurate phrasing would be to say that the minimum tax will *help* ensure that *the most profitable* corporations pay at least some federal income tax.”
The debt and the deficit
Biden said at the Tuesday rally in Florida: “Look, you know, you can hear it from Republicans, ‘My God, that big-spending Democrat Biden. Man, he’s taken us in debt.’ Well, guess what? I reduced the federal deficit this year by $1 trillion $400 billion. One trillion 400 billion dollars. The most in all American history. No one has ever reduced the debt that much. We cut the federal debt in half.”
Biden offered a similar narrative at a Thursday rally in New Mexico, this time saying, “We cut the federal debt in half. A fact.”
There are two significant problems here.
First: Biden conflated the debt and the deficit, which are two different things. It’s not true that Biden has “cut the federal debt in half”; the federal debt (total borrowing plus interest owed) has continued to rise under Biden, exceeding $31 trillion for the first time this October. Rather, it’s the federal deficit – the annual difference between spending and revenue – that was cut in half between fiscal 2021 and fiscal 2022.
Second, it’s highly questionable how much credit Biden deserves for even the reduction in the deficit. Biden doesn’t mention that the primary reason the deficit plummeted in fiscal years 2021 and 2022 was that it had skyrocketed to a record high in 2020 because of emergency pandemic relief spending. It then fell as expected as the spending expired as planned.
“On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.”
Dan White, senior director of economic research at Moody’s Analytics – an economics firm whose assessments Biden has repeatedly cited during his presidency – told CNN’s Matt Egan in October: “On net, the policies of the administration have increased the deficit, not reduced it.” The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, an advocacy group, says the administration’s own actions have significantly worsened the deficit picture. (David Kelly, chief global strategist at JPMorgan Funds, told Egan that the Biden administration does deserve credit for the economic recovery that has boosted tax revenues.)
The unemployment rate
Biden said at the Florida rally on Tuesday: “Unemployment is down from 6.5 to 3.5%, the lowest in 50 years.” He said at the New Mexico rally on Thursday: “Unemployment rate is 3.5% – the lowest it’s been in 50 years.”
But Biden didn’t acknowledge that September’s 3.5% unemployment rate was actually a tie for the lowest in 50 years – a tie, specifically, with three months of Trump’s administration, in late 2019 and early 2020. Since Biden uses these campaign speeches to favorably compare his own record to Trump’s record, that omission is significant.
The unemployment rate rose to 3.7% in October; that number was revealed on Friday, after these Biden comments. The rate was 6.4% in January 2021, the month Biden took office.
Biden’s student debt policy
During an on-camera discussion conducted by progressive organization NowThis News and published online in late October, Biden told young activists that they “probably are aware, I just signed a law” on student debt forgiveness that is being challenged by Republicans. He added: “It’s passed. I got it passed by a vote or two, and it’s in effect.”
Biden’s claims are false.
He created his student debt forgiveness initiative through executive action, not through legislation, so he didn’t sign a law and didn’t get it passed by any margin. Since Republicans opposed to the initiative, including those challenging the initiative in court, have called it unlawful precisely because it wasn’t passed by Congress, the distinction between a law and an executive action is a highly pertinent fact here.
A White House official told CNN that Biden was referring to the Inflation Reduction Act, the law narrowly passed by the Senate in August; the official said the Inflation Reduction Act created “room for other crucial programs” by bringing down the deficit. But Biden certainly did not make it clear that he was talking about anything other than the student debt initiative.
Gas prices
Biden correctly noted on various occasions in October that gas prices have declined substantially since their June 2022 peak – though, as always, it’s important to note that presidents have a limited impact on gas prices. But in an economic speech in New York last week, Biden said, “Today, the most common price of gas in America is $3.39 – down from over $5 when I took office.”
The most common price for a gallon of regular gas on the day Biden was inaugurated, January 20, 2021, was $2.39 — less than half the price Biden was claiming.
Biden’s claim that the most common gas price when he took office was more than $5 is not even close to accurate. The most common price for a gallon of regular gas on the day he was inaugurated, January 20, 2021, was $2.39, according to data provided to CNN by Patrick De Haan, head of petroleum analysis at GasBuddy. In other words, Biden made it sound like gas prices had fallen significantly during his presidency when they had actually increased significantly.
In other recent remarks, Biden has discussed the state of gas prices in relation to the summer peak of more than $5 per gallon, not in relation to when he took office. Regardless, the comment last week was the second this fall in which Biden inaccurately described the price of gas – both times in a way that made it sound more impressive.
Biden has revived a claim that was debunked more than 20 months ago by The Washington Post and then CNN. At least twice in October, he boasted that he traveled 17,000 miles with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
“I’ve spent more time with Xi Jinping of China than any world leader has, when I was Vice President all the way through to now. Over 78 hours with him alone. Eight – nine of those hours on the phone and the others in person, traveling 17,000 miles with him around the world, in China and the United States,” he told a Democratic gathering in Oregon in mid-October.
Biden made the number even bigger during a speech on student debt in New Mexico on Thursday, saying, “I traveled 17-, 18,000 miles with him.”
The claim is false. Biden has not traveled anywhere close to 17,000 miles with Xi, though they have indeed spent lots of time together. Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted in 2021 that the two men often did not even travel parallel routes to their gatherings, let alone physically travel together. The only apparent way to get Biden’s mileage past 17,000, Kessler found, is to add the length of his flight journeys between Washington and Beijing, during which, obviously, Xi was not with him.
A White House official told CNN in early 2021 that Biden was adding up his “total travel back and forth” for meetings with Xi. But that is very different than traveling “with” Xi as Biden keeps saying, especially in the context of a boast about how well he knows Xi – and Biden has had more than enough time to make his language more precise.
The Trump tax cuts
Biden claimed at the Thursday rally in New Mexico that under Trump, Republicans passed a $2 trillion tax cut that “affected only the top 1% of the American public.”
Biden correctly said in various October remarks that the Trump tax cut law was particularly beneficial to the wealthy, but he went too far here. It’s not true that the Trump policy “only” affected the top 1%.
The Tax Policy Center think tank found in early 2018 that Trump’s law “will reduce individual income taxes on average for all income groups and in all states.” The think tank estimated that “between 60 and 76 percent of taxpayers in every state will receive a tax cut.”
And in April 2019, tax-preparation company H&R Block said two-thirds of its returning customers had indeed paid less in tax that year than they did the year prior, The New York Times reported in an article headlined “Face It: You (Probably) Got a Tax Cut.”
The Tax Policy Center did find in early 2018 that people at the top would get by far the biggest benefits from Trump’s law. Specifically, the think tank found that the top 1% of earners would get an average 3.4% increase in after-tax 2018 income – versus an average 1.6% income increase for people in the middle quintile, an average 1.2% income increase for people in the quintile below that and just an average 0.4% income increase for people in the lowest quintile.
The think tank also found that the top 1% of earners would get more than 20% of the income benefits from the law, a bigger share than the bottom 60% of earners combined.
The distribution could get even more skewed after 2025, when the law’s individual tax cuts will expire if not extended by Congress and the president. If there is no extension – and, therefore, the law’s permanent corporate tax cut remains in place without the individual tax cuts – the Tax Policy Center has estimated that, in 2027, the top 1% will get 83% of the benefits from the law.
But that’s a possibility about the future. Biden claimed, in the past tense, that the law “affected” only the top 1%.
That’s inaccurate.
This wasn’t the first time Biden overstated his point about the Trump tax cuts. The Washington Post fact-checked him in 2019, for example, when he claimed “all of it” went to the ultra-rich and corporations.
Apparently the rank-and-file Democrats are realizing the Xiden regime is not doing them any favors, despite their promises.
Here’s a just-released addition that shows how deep in the doo-doo Biden and the Democratic Party are:
“Responding to misinformation is my day job. My night job is RUNNING ELECTIONS.” – CISA document 6/22/22. Name redacted, emphasis added.
Here is a disturbing story. It demonstrates intrigue, corruption, and disdain for American principles at the highest level.
Perhaps the saddest thing about this story is that you probably won’t be surprised. Especially if you’ve been paying attention for the past few years.
The story is this: Twitter and other social media platforms have been cozy with the Department of Homeland Security to squelch what DHS calls “misinformation,” “disinformation” and “malinformation,” or “MDM,” according to an investigative report published Monday by The Intercept.
Job one for Musk was to not only fire CEO Parag Agrawal but also Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s top lawyer and the individual responsible for booting former President Donald Trump off the platform and for censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story in the run-up to the 2020 election.
You probably remember a few months ago when DHS rolled out what it called its Disinformation Governance Board, designed to go after “MDM” on social media. A firestorm of bad publicity meant the Biden administration had to quickly yank it offstage.
But the concept is still around and Gadde has been part of it.
Gadde is a member of an advisory committee of the DHS Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). In June, the committee put out a report that essentially outlined a need to get around the First Amendment to stop “MDM” since it “poses a significant risk to critical functions like elections, public health, financial services and emergency response.”
Also, The Intercept reported on DHS documents saying the agency is going after “MDM” on “the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic and the efficacy of COVID-19 vaccines, racial justice, U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the nature of U.S. support to Ukraine.”
In other words, DHS wants to push the Biden administration’s line on many of the controversies Americans might be discussing on social media, and attack or suppress other views that oppose it.
And Twitter has been right there in the middle of it.
Lee Fang, one of the authors of The Intercept article, tweeted that Gadde had met monthly with DHS to discuss censorship and, along with Facebook, Twitter “created special portals for the government to rapidly request takedowns of content.”
The emails and documents show close collaboration b/w DHS & private sector. Twitter’s Vijaya Gadde (fired by @elonmusk last week) met monthly with DHS to discuss censorship plans. Microsoft exec texted DHS: “Platforms have got to get comfortable with gov’t”
In March, top officials of Twitter and JPMorgan Chase met with Laura Dehmlow, section chief of the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force. Dehmlow said subversive information on the internet could undercut support for the U.S. government, according to notes of the meeting reported by The Intercept.
In a statement for The Intercept report, a Twitter representative said the company does not “coordinate with other entities when making content moderation decisions,” following, rather, its own rules in such situations.
Still, Twitter joined other tech companies in monthly meetings with the FBI, CISA and other government agencies to determine how to handle misinformation leading up to the 2020 elections, according to NBC News.
In 2018, DHS began notifying social media companies of what it described as voting disinformation appearing on their platforms. The following year, DHS developed the Foreign Influence and Interference Branch which morphed in 2020 to track communication regarding COVID-19, The Intercept said.
Varied U.S. intelligence agencies moderated social media surrounding the 2020 election and leading up to the November voting there were regular emails among officials of Twitter, DHS and the Center for Internet Security regarding takedown procedures for social media postings.
And while the Disinformation Governance Board was scrapped, DHS in August published a document titled “DHS Needs a Unified Strategy to Counter Disinformation Campaigns.”
In it, DHS intones “such campaigns may aim to erode public trust in our government and the Nation’s critical infrastructure sectors, negatively affect public discourse, or even sway elections.”
Sway elections? You think? Hasn’t that been a major aim of Silicon Valley?
Of course, DHS does not address a key foundational principle which allows for pesky ideas that the Department of Homeland Security considers “MDM.”
It’s contained in the document that proclaims, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
The Founders, ever conscious of man’s corruption, knew what’s now called “MDM” would be protected by the First Amendment, but, as in other parts of the Bill of Rights, they also knew liberty was more important than government convenience.
Twitter, as The Intercept report shows, clearly has been involved in the federal government’s attempts to outsource censorship and suppression of dissent.
Musk, Twitter’s new owner, has publicly declared himself to be a “free speech absolutist.”
Clearly, something has to give.
There’s no telling where the company will go now that Musk is in charge, but he was right about one of his first major personnel moves.
