Are the Reagan Democrats back? The Rise of the DeSantis Democrats. It’s been a while since Democrats have really rallied around a Republican movement. But the DeSantis movement looks real. Sure Trump brought in more Blacks and Latinos, but when Biden upped the freebies, many may have run back. But this Florida election was something.
It’s unclear how many DeSantis Democrats there are: DeSantis’ vote count jumped from roughly 4 million in 2018 to 4.6 million in 2022. Lots of those voters are presumably independents or Republicans who didn’t vote last time.
Some are disaffected Democrats alienated from the party they once belonged to. That’s evident from the longtime Democratic strongholds that DeSantis flipped, including Hillsborough, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade, where DeSantis skyrocketed from a 21-point loss in 2018 to an 11-point win in 2022—a net gain of more than 30 percentage points.
On top of the malfunctioning machines and 4-hour-long waiting lines in Maricopa County, we now have this startling confession:
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer testified Wednesday during GOP gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake’s election challenge trial that the individual polling locations did not tally the total number of votes cast in the midterm elections, a violation of Arizona state law.
One of the allegations in Lake’s lawsuit is that the total number of ballots the county reported in the election increased by nearly 25,000 from Nov. 9, the day after the contest, to Nov. 11.
That number is significant because it exceeds Katie Hobbs’ approximately 17,000-vote margin of victory over Lake.
“They’re not counted at the individual loading locations.”
“On Election Day it would’ve been easy for you to figure out how many ballots you received,” Blehm said to Richer.
He responded, “Well, we had to get them all in and it was quite a process throughout the night.”
Blehm interjected, “You can look at the forms and add the numbers. Correct?”
“They’re not counted at the individual loading locations,” Richer said. “They are counted when they get back to MCTEC and then they are recounted at Runbeck.”
“Does anybody know when those ballots leave the voting centers how many are in the bins?” Blehm asked.
“When the early ballots leave the voting centers, no, they are not counted at the voting centers,” Richer answered.
Blehm followed up, “Nobody knows how many [ballots] are in the bins when they arrive at MCTEC. Correct?”
“Correct,” Richer said.
The 2019 Arizona elections procedures manual, which cites state law, requires an audit at each voting location of the total number of ballots cast. The results must be recorded in an official ballot report.
The audit even requires accounting for the total amount of ballot stock paper on-site. The ballots cast must then be placed in sealed boxes.
According to former Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett, Maricopa County should have known the total number of ballots on Election Day or certainly by the day after.
Each voting center, he explained, should have reported the exact number of voters and the number of early ballots that were dropped off.
The county must be able to answer the question, “How many ballots are we responsible for?” Bennett said.
“And it should match up with the number of people who signed in on the voting list or envelopes of the people that mailed theirs in or … dropped them off at voting centers on Election Day.”
WASHINGTON, DC – Senate Judiciary Ranking Member Chuck Grassley (R-IA). (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has neglected to provide in full certain disclosures requested by members of the U.S. Senate relating to the department’s growing role in “counter-disinformation” activities, and this failure is particularly egregious in light of the co-equal roles of the executive and legislative branches of the government, two senators have charged in a Dec. 15 letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) charge the DHS with ignoring or downplaying their “serious concerns” about the DHS’s “growing counter-disinformation efforts” as conveyed previously in a letter of June 7, which formally requested “information necessary to inform our congressional oversight of DHS activities.”
Partly or completely redacted
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has neglected to provide in full certain disclosures requested by members of the U.S. Senate relating to the department’s growing role in “counter-disinformation” activities, and this failure is particularly egregious in light of the co-equal roles of the executive and legislative branches of the government, two senators have charged in a Dec. 15 letter to DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) charge the DHS with ignoring or downplaying their “serious concerns” about the DHS’s “growing counter-disinformation efforts” as conveyed previously in a letter of June 7, which formally requested “information necessary to inform our congressional oversight of DHS activities.”
The senators are deeply concerned about the DHS’s admitted plans to ramp up its efforts to play a role in monitoring and mediating MDM, a common acronym for “mis-, dis-, and mal-information,” disseminated through social media, on topics as varied as the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, race relations in America, and the hasty U.S. pullout from Afghanistan in August 2021.
According to the senators, the DHS’s response to their June 7 letter, which was dated June 29, did not answer any of the ten questions they had posed in their June 7 communication.
Even more seriously, the DHS included with its June 29 letter three “document productions” supposedly intended to allay the senators’ concerns, but the first of these contained documents already in the public domain, and the third featured some 500 pages of information, half of which was partly or completely redacted.
“Based on our review of this material, it appears that many of the redactions are applied to pre-decisional and deliberative process material,” the senators write, before going on to remind Mayorkas that they have advanced their requests as sitting members of Congress whom DHS cannot legally ignore or blow off, given the separate and co-equal character of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches comprising the U.S. federal government.
The Freedom of Information Act applies neither to the requests nor to DHS’s procedures in protocols in responding to them, and the redaction of content—as DHS might do in response to a journalist’s request for information—is not appropriate here, the senators contend.
The senators also take DHS to task for complaining, in its letter of June 29, about Congress’s having made documents available to the senators without getting approval from DHS.
Here, too, Grassley and Hawley charge DHS with having misconstrued the nature of its relationship to other branches and having falsely assumed that DHS enjoys the right to apply executive branch designations such as “Predecisional,” “Deliberative,” and “For Official Use Only,” and thereby limit what documents and materials the senators may obtain by means of lawful whistleblower disclosures and oversight requests. In the case referenced in DHS’s June 29 letter, the senators state they did not unconditionally release all the material provided to them and included limited redactions of their own where appropriate.
“We make such decisions independently, based on our assessment of what will be in the best interest of transparency and the public interest. Moreover, DHS should learn a lesson in accountability and transparency when patriotic whistleblowers provide full and complete records in contrast to DHS failing to follow that standard and instead providing improperly redacted records,” Grassley and Hawley write.
Overstepping Bounds
The senators convey their considerable “alarm” at public reports that illuminate DHS’s growing role in “counter-disinformation activities.”
“These efforts stretch well beyond DHS’s seriously misguided effort to establish a Disinformation Governance Board (DGB),” they write, pointing to a document prepared by Cybersecurity Advisory Committee of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and released by The Intercept, which states that “CISA has a burgeoning MDM effort” that includes “directly engaging with social media companies to flag MDM.”
The same Intercept article also quotes a draft copy of DHS’s Quadrennial Homeland Security Review stating that in coming years DHS will aggressively combat what it sees as bogus information on a range of topics including “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.”
The senators conclude by making two formal requests to Mayorkas, namely, full and complete answers to all questions raised in the senators’ June 7 letter, along with unredacted copies of the documents provided in DHS’s initial response; and a detailed account of DHS’s policy for replying to congressional oversight requests, specifying how DHS makes decisions about redacting material that members of Congress have asked for.
Breitbart says that Joe was lost on ten different occasions. I’m thinking it’s much higher, but let’s go with 10 for now.
President Joe Biden has appeared lost in public view at least ten times since taking office.
Eight of the moments have come after Biden has completed a speech.
The president’s appearance of being disoriented has raised concerns that Biden, 80, is too old to run for a second term. If Biden won reelection in 2024, he would be 86 years old, the oldest president in U.S. history.
Polling reveals 58 percent of Americans believe Biden should receive at least a cognitive test. Less than 25 percent of voters strongly believe Biden is mentally fit, healthy, and stable.
1) December 12, 2022
At a Monday Toys for Tots event with the United States Marine Corps Reserve in Arlington, Virginia, Biden asked a child which way he should exit the stage after completing his speech:
2) September 21, 2022
After speaking at the Global Fund Conference in New York, Biden walk to one side of the stage, uncertain if he should exit left or right:
3) October 20, 2022
At a Pittsburgh rally, Biden first looked to exit left before quickly walking to the right after performing a spin around:
4) April 5, 2022
President Joe Biden welcomed former President Barack Obama to the White House to celebrate the Affordable Care Act. After the event, Biden appears lost and frustrated on stage that nobody was speaking to him. The attendees gathered around Obama:
5) October 24, 2022
On the White House grounds, Biden appears to not know which way he should walk to enter the building. He first walked one way before turning around to follow first lady Jill Biden in the opposite direction:
6) September 11, 2021
Video footage shows Biden attending an event at Brookland Middle School in Washington, DC, with Jill Biden. During Jill Biden’s remarks, Biden wonders off to the right and out of the frame:
7) September 28, 2022
After a White House event in the Rose Garden, Biden appears to ask Jill Biden which way he should walk upon the completion of the event:
8) February 2, 2022:
After a relaunch of the “Cancer Moonshot” initiative, Joe Biden appears confused about which way he should exit the stage. He first walked to the right side near Jill Biden before quickly turning around to exit left:
9) September 29, 2022
After speaking at FEMA’s headquarters, Joe Biden appears to aimlessly walk off while FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell appears to reach out, failing to gain his attention:
White House
10) July 2022
After arriving in Israel, Biden appears lost on the tarmac with reporters looking to take a photo of the receptive delegation:
The new Independent.
Krysten Sinema Wins AZ
Christian Petersen/Getty Images
Sinema going Independent splits the Arizona party. Sure she’s not very popular there now, but say the Republican candidate does poorly and only gets 40%. That leaves Sinema and the endorsed Democrat to split the other 60%.
Also that hurts the Democrat Presidential candidate in 2024. Here’s what the outgoing vice chair of the Arizona party has to say. Her decision could also make it harder for Democrats to carry Arizona on the presidential level again in two years, if she spends two years attacking her party and splintering its successful coalition.
“It does make things more difficult for Joe Biden, but I don’t think she cares at all.”
A top federal judge denied a request from the justice department to hold Donald Trump’s office in contempt of court for failing to fully comply with a subpoena demanding the return of all documents bearing classified markings, according to sources familiar with proceedings.
The chief US judge for the District of Columbia Beryl Howell told the department during a closed-door hearing on Friday to resolve the matter with the Trump legal team itself because a contempt ruling would not hold, the sources said.
The precise details about the hearing were not clear with the case under seal. But the judge’s move amounts to a victory for Trump as he contends with a criminal investigation into unauthorized retention of national security information at his Mar-a-Lago resort and obstruction of justice.
Federal prosecutors had sought to force Trump to name a custodian of records and certify under oath that all documents with classified markings had been returned to the government – as demanded by the grand jury subpoena issued in May – or otherwise find Trump’s office in contempt.
The contempt action is understood to be focused on Trump’s political office because the subpoena sought the return of all documents and writings “in the custody of Donald J Trump and / or the Office of Donald J Trump” bearing classification markings.
In response to the subpoena, Trump’s lawyer Evan Corcoran turned over a folder of documents to the justice department and asked another Trump lawyer Christina Bobb to sign a certification that she heavily caveated because she had not done the search, the Guardian previously reported.
The letter ultimately said that Bobb was making the attestation “based on the information provided to me” and “to the best of my knowledge”, a fact that she emphasized to the department around the time that prosecutors collected the folder and the certification letter, a person familiar with the matter said.
But after the FBI searched Mar-a-Lago on 8 August and found 103 documents marked classified – leading prosecutors to believe the subpoena had not been complied with – the department sought Trump’s lawyers to again certify that no further materials remained.
The Trump legal team has resisted designating a custodian of records and providing a sworn statement, despite repeated requests. That deeply frustrated prosecutors who told the legal team that if they did not provide a second attestation, they would seek judicial enforcement.
Part of the Trump legal team’s reluctance comes because neither they nor any other member of the former president’s office have had custody of all documents marked classified and do not think they could comprehensively answer every question about them, the sources said.
In a statement, a Trump spokesman said the former president and his lawyers would “continue to be transparent and cooperative even in the face of the highly weaponized and corrupt witch-hunt from the Department of ‘Justice’.”
The closed-door court battle between the justice department and Trump’s lawyers comes after it emerged that a search of a storage unit in Florida holding boxes of material belonging to Trump turned up two more documents marked classified, in addition to the 103 found at Mar-a-Lago by the FBI.
It was not clear whether the department initiated the contempt proceeding before or after the two additional documents were found, though the Trump legal team is understood to have turned over the two new documents as soon as they were discovered, the sources said.
FILE PHOTO: A view shows U.S. postal service mail boxes at a post office in Encinitas, California in this February 6, 2013, file photo. . REUTERS/Mike Blake
Authorities say a Philadelphia man found with about 15 mail-in ballots that had been stolen from U.S. Postal Service collection boxes faces numerous postal-related charges.
Zachkey James, 27, was charged with impersonation of a U.S. Postal Service (USPS) Mail Carrier, unlawful possession of three USPS arrow keys, mail theft, and possession of stolen mail, U.S. Attorney Jacqueline C. Romero said in a statement.
The arrow key is a universal master key that opens USPS mail boxes and the master door panel for clusters of mail boxes such as those found in apartments.
A July 2022 indictment alleges that while pretending to be a USPS mail carrier, James stole undelivered mail from a collection box near the Kingsessing Post Office in Philadelphia.
In October 2022, while again allegedly pretending to be a mail carrier, James is accused of stealing undelivered mail from a collection box near the East Germantown Post Office in Philadelphia.
And in November 2022, James possessed three arrow keys and approximately 15 mail-in ballots that had been taken from USPS collection boxes, the indictment said.
If convicted, James faces a maximum of 31 years in prison and a $1.5 million fine.
The case was investigated by the U.S. Postal Inspection Service and is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Brown.
Arrow Key Theft
In October, Romero reported the indictment of three men who allegedly robbed a USPS letter carrier of his arrow key on Dec. 22, 2021, and used the key repeatedly to steal mail from collection boxes in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania.
The indictment said they found and altered checks in the mail to make them payable to third parties, often in amounts greater than the checks’ original value, then deposited the washed and altered checks into third-party accounts.
Money orders, gift cards, and cash are other possible finds in the mail.
Across the internet there are multiple examples of arrow key thefts—so called because they are imprinted with an arrow.
Over the summer at least 13 arrow keys were stolen during assaults on letter carriers in the Washington D.C. area, according to news reports.
“In recent months, there has been a rise in crimes involving the mail, including mail theft, check washing and robberies of postal carriers,” Romero said in a Twitter video. “Make no mistake, mail theft is a serious federal offense. If you steal mail, you are going to prison.”
PSA:
John Walker, assistant inspector in charge for the Philadelphia Division of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, spoke in the same video and advised mail consumers to notice the last pickup time posted on every blue collection box. If consumers are there after that time, they should consider holding their items until the following day.
Customers can also mail their items inside any post office.
Guess this crook forgot to give “the big guy” his cut.
Another reason Republicans red wave was a small one. We saw how the Black and Latino vote increased for Republicans this past election. And we saw how 5 million more people voted for Republicans in the Congressional races but outside the red districts that didn’t help much. Why?
Midterm election turnout among black voters appears to be 25 percent lower than white turnout, marking the lowest share of the black electorate since 2006, a New York Times analysis revealed Wednesday.
Granted the large majority would have voted Democrat but if the Republicans got 10% of that 25, you would have seen some big changes in the house, Arizona, and NY governors races.
But the whites who voted in those blue areas were happy with the status quo. So wnen Republicans get back that white vote and continue to grow the black and brown vote, then you will see more Republican office holders in blue districts
We see that CNN is continuing to get rid of the rubbish or move them to time slots to where only their family members will watch. Now if only MSNBC gets the hint and does likewise. One affirmative action babe who had zero audience does not count.
Raphael Warnock’s campaign called US Veteran and homeless advocate Dom Lucre this weekend and asked him to vote for far left Senator Warnock in the December runoff election. Dom Lucre lives in Tennessee.
And Dom recorded the entire call. The caller had the nerve to feed Dom the liberal lies about Republicans and their power and dark money, blah-blah-blah… Dom shot back that Democrats control everything. They control Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, the media and all Republicans have is FOX News.
In a country where the authorities valued integrity, honesty, and fairness, this call would immediately be investigated and Warnock’s campaign would be punished. But we don’t have that today in the United States. You can commit any criminal act of voter fraud if you are a Democrat and it will not even be investigated.
So Senator Warnock’s campaign called me, A TN Resident to Vote in his GA election. Everyone has asked me to upload the full video. Here it is pic.twitter.com/nz5R4I0mWt
