What happens when a respected Congressman is cleared by the Capitol Hill Police when he had a group of his constituents on tour the day before the To do about nothing protest?
They make up stuff and drag his good name threw the mud. Based on what? Who knows. But since that mud dragging we’ve seen that the Congressman has been receiving death threats. Please play the video below.
(Above Otero County Commission at the beginning of the day making the pledge of allegiance.)
The Otero County Commission had a long day of discussions and reports today and then they landed upon the issues with the 2020 Election. They voted to eliminate voting machines in the county!
TGP reported this morning on today’s petition to eliminate using voting machines in the county.
After a day of discussions, the Otero Commission voted on the three following items.
The commission voted to pass all three of the above motions.
These commissioners were fearless. The more flack they got the more they knew they were over the target. They wanted every legal vote to count.
“We do all want the same thing. We all want a fair election”
“If we don’t find out what’s going on, we’ll never know.”
Wow, these commissioners were great.
Here is the actual vote by the commissioners:
Major hat tips to Attorney David Clements and his wife Erin Clements and all those in New Mexico who helped make free and fair elections a thing of the future in this county.
Prior to COVID Mania, Novavax and its competitors had never brought a product to market
The rubber stamp.
On Tuesday, the FDA’s advisory committee — a concoction of massively corrupt individuals who entertain a plethora of conflicts of pharmaceutical interests — unanimously voted to clear Novavax’s COVID injection on the path to FDA emergency use authorization.
This “expert” panel, which again and again has presented a green light for mRNA injections for young children, has concluded that Novavax’s product is a worthy COVID vaccine. Why? Because they say so.
Should the Maryland-based company receive FDA clearance, they will become the 4th company in the U.S. — and the first since February 2021 — to enter the COVID vaccine government gravy train.
Don’t expect Novavax to be the cure for a coronavirus that you were looking for. There’s several reasons why you should expect this product to work as poorly as the rest of them.
Novavax was designed for the original COVID strain
The Novavax COVID-19 shot was designed in early 2020 and has not been updated to combat any current variants. This is also true for the Pfizer and Moderna shots, which were designed on an mRNA platform, and never updated.
Novavax is not a “traditional” vaccine
Perhaps the most prevalent marketing behind Novavax advances the claim that the product is a more traditional vaccine, akin to an inactivated vaccine that is associated with a Flu shot.
This idea is presented to the public with the hopes that “vaccine hesitant” individuals will take Novavax shots instead of the ostensible more edgy mRNA shots.
But in reality, the Novavax shot does not contain the traditional inactivated virus. It is usually defined as a subunit protein shot.
It’s not mRNA, but it’s also not traditional or “normal” in the sense that most understand.
Novavax has never brought a product to market
Similar to their competitors in Moderna and BioNTech, Novavax has never brought a product to market. That didn’t stop the government from investing $1.6 billion in taxpayer funds in the company.
In its 33 year history, Novavax has attempted to bring a handful of products to market, including Ebola and Flu vaccines, but the company never succeeded prior to COVID Mania. They have zero track record of success, safety, and/or efficacious products.
The Novavax shot, like mRNA COVID injections, has a demonstrated increased risk for heart inflammation
Myocarditis was observed in several of the trial participants within 2 weeks of injection.
Stat News reports: “Five of the cases of myocarditis and pericarditis in the Novavax trial were reported within two weeks of vaccination. One case may have been caused by Covid, not the vaccine, but there were no clear alternative explanations for the other cases. Four cases of heart inflammation occurred in young men.”
Myocarditis is not just a Novavax side effect. It remains a major issue among the experimental mRNA injections sold by Pfizer and Moderna.
Much to the delight of depraved Pfizer and Moderna executives, if the myocarditis narrative can stick to Novavax, it could sink their potential market share. After the FDA advisory committee published their concerns, the stock market reacted negatively to Novavax, despite the green light for an FDA emergency use authorization.
Novavax and the FDA panel has already acknowledged that two doses of the Novavax shot will not be enough to “protect” people from a coronavirus. Therefore, repeated boosting is already being discussed as a probable path forward for this latest pharmaceutical.
There is no trial data on Omicron variant
The shot was developed over two years ago, and it has not been tested for Omicron. The FDA said in a statement:
“Relevant data to assess effectiveness of NVX-CoV2373 (Novavax shot) against the Omicron variant and sublineages, including observational data from use in other countries where the vaccine has been deployed, are currently unavailable.”
And yet, the stellar advisory committee approved it anyway.
As Forbes reports, even Novavax has acknowledged that the shot may not work as well for the mutation that is actually present today in 2022. The report says:
“Novavax said its vaccine showed ‘cross-reactive immune response’ against omicron and other coronavirus variants, though it noted that the neutralizing response for the omicron variant was four times lower than for the original coronavirus.”
Not a cure.
The Novavax shot has been approved in several countries already and their inhabitants have not become immune from COVID-19 or cured of a disease.
Although there are dozens of different COVID “vaccines” available throughout the world, none have demonstrated a discernible difference in outcomes. In reality, this is just another questionable pharmaceutical product that joins the endless and continuing list of questionable pharmaceutical products on the market.
What a surprise: Rebekah Jones, once hailed as a “whistleblower” for claiming Florida GOP Gov. Ron DeSantis had fudged the state’s COVID-19 numbers, has been revealed as a complete fraud.
Rebekah Jones “data scientist” that WAS the left’s darling in FLA.
A report released last week by the Florida Department of Health Office of Inspector General exonerated DeSantis on the allegations and found nothing to back up Jones’ allegations that she’d been pressured to alter COVID-19 case and death counts. In fact, the people the inspector general’s office talked to couldn’t even make sense out of the allegations, considering Jones didn’t have access to the raw coronavirus data.
(In spite of this, the mainstream media is hardly handling the report with the same breathlessness they handled the accusations against DeSantis — and for obvious reasons.
According to an editorial published Friday by The Wall Street Journal, (!) the inspector general found no evidence to support Jones’ claims.
“Based upon an analysis of the available evidence, there is insufficient evidence to clearly support a violation of a law, rule, or policy, as described by the complainant,” the report stated.
The governor’s office argued that Jones was fired from her job for “insubordination” and “unilateral decisions to modify the Department’s COVID-19 dashboard without input or approval from the epidemiological team or her supervisors.”
Jones’ original allegations were that she had been ordered to tidy up COVID numbers to support the state’s reopening in the spring of 2020. In addition, she claimed the governor had retaliated against her by having the Florida Department of Law Enforcement execute a search warrant against her in December 2020, arguing DeSantis had “sent the Gestapo” to keep her quiet.
Police say the raid involved a data breach that was traced back to Jones’ home IP address. She’s been hit with a felony charge for downloading confidential health department data. She has pleaded innocent.
According to the Journal, the inspector general’s office talked to over a dozen individuals who worked with Jones as part of its investigation, including her superiors — and not a single one supported her allegations of fudged data.
While she told some of her co-workers that she was told to alter COVID data in the system, the report said they didn’t buy her allegations. That wasn’t just because of her inherent unreliability but because of the fact she didn’t have access to the pertinent data. Instead, she was in charge of handling the state’s online dashboard, not the raw data.
“If the complainant or other DOH staff were to have falsified COVID-19 data on the dashboard, the dashboard would then not have matched the data in the corresponding final daily report,” the report said.
“Such a discrepancy would have been detectable by [Bureau of Epidemiology] staff conducting data quality assurance, as well as other parties, both within and outside the DOH, including but not limited to [county health departments], local governments, researchers, the press/media, and the general public.”
Instead, the report stated the inspector general’s office “found no evidence that the DOH misrepresented or otherwise misled the public regarding how positivity rates were calculated,” according to the report.
“The definitions for overall and new case positivity were provided on the Data Definition sheet and Health Metrics Overview, which were both linked to the dashboard, and were consistent with testimonial evidence obtained by the OIG.”
The report appeared last week to nary a peep in the same media outlets that loved her back in the febrile days of the early pandemic.
As The Daily Caller noted, Jones was a frequent guest on Joy Reid’s MSNBC’s show and made at least five appearances on former CNN host Chris Cuomo’s old show. (No lack of sad irony there; Cuomo’s brother Andrew, the erstwhile governor of New York, was forced out of office over sexual harassment allegations, but also faced accusations of covering up COVID deaths in the state’s nursing homes.)
The headlines in liberal media outlets were similarly effusive — calling Jones a “scientist” to buttress her standing, like Jones was filling test tubes with potential coronavirus vaccines when she wasn’t trying to expose fraud in the Florida government. But even CNN has been honest enough to qualify that as “data scientist.”
NPR, May 19, 2020: “Florida Dismisses A Scientist For Her Refusal To Manipulate State’s Coronavirus Data.” South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Dec. 10, 2020: “FDLE raid dramatizes Florida’s COVID-19 coverup.” HuffPo, Dec. 17, 2020: “Florida Scientist Vows To Speak COVID-19 ‘Truth To Power’ Despite Police Raid.” Cosmopolitan, March 11, 2021: “Rebekah Jones Tried To Warn Us About COVID-19. How Her Freedom Is On The Line.”
No evidence for any of it. None. Goose egg. Zero-point-zero.
Rebekah Jones was a darling of the mainstream media if just because her wild-eyed conspiracy theories about covering up COVID data could be wielded as a cudgel against Ron DeSantis and others considered a threat to progressives.
As always, the allegations appear on page one; the truth on page 17 — if it appears at all. She’s served her purpose.
The left’s stupidity never ceases to amaze me. See below.
Rapper and Joe Biden supporter Cardi B took to Twitter on Sunday to ask when “they going to announce” that the United States is “going into a recession.”
“When y’all think they going to announce that we going into a recession?” Cardi B wrote Sunday in a tweet, which has since garnered more than 120,000 likes, and over 16,000 retweets.
Cardi B’s tweet also received thousands of replies, including many Twitter users who reminded the rapper that she had encouraged her fans to vote for President Joe Biden.
Weren’t you encouraging people to vote for Joe Biden?
Indeed, Joe Biden sat down for an Elle magazine interview with rap star Cardi B jut months before the 2020 presidential election.
Watch below:
“Thanks for helping elect Joe Biden,” another quipped.
Another Twitter user responded to those retorting, “But didn’t you vote for Biden?” saying, “Y’all realize literally MILLIONS of people regret voting for Biden right?”
“You don’t need ‘them’ to tell you anything you can see for yourself,” another tweeted.
A host of other Twitter users took to the comment section to claim that the U.S. is not in a recession.
“A recession is defined as 2 consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth, so we’d only know we are in a recession after it’s already started, and after the economic data comes in for those 2 quarters,” another tweeted.
A strong majority of Americans, however, believe that the U.S. economy is experiencing a recession, according to a recent poll from the Economist and YouGov.
This is bad news for Biden, who just last week declared that a record high number of Americans were comfortable. Moreover, the president’s approval ratings have tanked, as citizens have overwhelming rejected the Biden administration’s handling of gas prices, inflation, and the economy.
The baby formula plant whose February shutdown exacerbated a nationwide formula shortage resumed production over the weekend. “We will ramp production as quickly as we can while meeting all requirements,” Abbott Nutrition said in a Saturday statement.
Dr. Mehmet Oz secured his victory in Pennsylvania’s Republican Senate primary Friday after former hedge fund CEO David McCormick, who trailed Oz by less than 1,000 votes in the initial vote count, conceded that an in-progress recount would not eliminate that margin.
John Fetterman—Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor and Oz’s November opponent—is facing new questions about his health going into the general election, following a stroke last month that required hospitalization and the installation of a pacemaker. In a Friday statement, Fetterman, a Democrat, revealed he suffered from a heart condition and had “avoided going to the doctor,” and as a result he “almost died.”
Republicans and Democrats in the Senate say they’re making progress on gun legislation following a rash of mass shootings in recent weeks, although Sen. Pat Toomey said on Face the Nation Sunday that the discussions do not “guarantee any outcome.” The Washington Post reports that such legislation would potentially include encouraging states to implement red-flag laws that would allow courts to bar people thought to be a threat to themselves or others from accessing firearms.
Three people were killed and 11 more injured in a shooting in Philadelphia’s South Street nightlife corridor Saturday night. Police said two men got into a fight, then both produced guns and began firing at each other on the crowded street. One of the two shooters was killed in the initial confrontation; the other was wounded and fled the scene.
Former Trump adviser Peter Navarro was arrested on two misdemeanor charges of contempt of Congress Friday after Navarro refused to testify before or supply documents to the committee investigating the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Another former Trump associate, Steve Bannon, is scheduled to go on trial for comparable charges next month.
An attack on a Catholic church in southwest Nigeria has left more than 50 people feared dead, including many children, authorities said Sunday. It was not immediately clear who was behind the attack, which involved both firearms and explosives.
A Jobs Report from the Goldilocks Zone
(Photo by Culture Club / Getty Images.)
Once upon a time, there was a little girl named Goldilocks who really should’ve been booked for home invasion. Instead, she wound up granting her name to anything that’s “just right”—such as May’s job report.
We know that joke’s a stretch, but we’re running out of new ways to introduce solid jobs reports like the one the Labor Department released Friday. After nearly a year of the pandemic rebound with at least 400,000 new jobs per month, in May employers added 390,000 jobs—hardly cold, but not quite white-hot. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had predicted a slower uptick of 318,000 new jobs.
We’re still about 822,000 jobs short of pre-pandemic levels, but the gap could close by the end of summer. Meanwhile, labor force participation edged up 0.1 percent to 62.3 percent in May, still 1.1 percent below February 2020.
Unemployment stayed at its near fifty-year low of 3.6 percent, and there are still nearly two open jobs for every one job-seeker. Coupled with high inflation, that ridiculously tight labor market has driven strong wage growth in recent months, causing economists to fret rising wages would in turn force businesses to increase prices, creating a wage-price spiral.
But average hourly wages for private, non-farm employees rose 0.3 percent in May from the previous month, a smidge shy of the 0.4 percent economists expected. And the three-month average of year-over-year wage growth hit 4.6 percent—about 1.7 percent above the pre-pandemic average but well below the peak of 7 percent in mid-2021, according to the nonpartisan Peterson Institute for International Economics.
That’s a lot of numbers just to say: Employers are still raising pay to attract workers, but they’ve chilled out a bit. “Firms seem to be less willing to raise wages sharply in order to fill openings than they were last winter,” as Peterson analysts put it. That’s not pleasant for the individual worker looking for a boost to the old paycheck, but it’s a good sign that the economy overall remains robust but not berserk. Meanwhile, as we’ve written previously, inflation seems to have peaked, at least for now.
All in all, a solid jobs report—but the markets reacted like they’d been served a bowl of chilly, lumpy porridge. The S&P 500 dropped 1.7 percent Friday after the report’s release, while the Dow Jones Industrial average fell 1 percent and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite outdid them both by losing 2.6 percent. Meanwhile, Tesla owner and maybe someday Twitter owner Elon Musk declared he has a “super bad feeling” about the economy and needs to cut 10 percent of Tesla’s staff, Reutersreported.
We’re not sure what to tell you about Musk’s super bad feeling, but the market’s overall reaction is a perverse sign of the job report’s strength. “The economy’s doing quite well,” Brendan Walsh, co-founder of Markets Policy Partners, told The Dispatch. “The worry is that because the economy is doing well, the [Federal Reserve] will over-tighten and drive us into recession.”
In a bid to bring down inflation by taking its foot off the economy’s gas pedal, the central bank has already hiked interest rates twice this year, making loans to buy homes or expand businesses more expensive, discouraging demand. It’s signaling it plans a couple more hikes before September, and Fed vice chair Lael Brainard said Thursday the central bank would check its plan against the jobs report (among other markers). “We’ll be looking closely to the data to see that kind of cooling in demand, and moderation—better balance—in the labor market,” Brainard toldCNBC. “With our number one challenge being the need to get inflation down, we do expect to see some cooling of a very, very strong economy over time.” The solid jobs report is another indicator that the economy can handle the Fed’s cooling measures.
In remarks trumpeting the report, President Joe Biden said it was an indicator that the economy can handle the Fed’s cooling measures. “As we move to a new period of stable, steady growth, we should expect to see more moderation,” Biden told reporters Friday. “We aren’t likely to see the kind of blockbuster job reports month after month like we had over this past year, but that’s a good thing. … That stability puts us in a strong position to tackle what is clearly a problem: inflation.”
Which returns us to the market worry that after letting inflation shoot up the Fed will overcorrect and strangle U.S. economic growth into a recession. “Right now, it’s kind of sunny, things are doing fine,” JPMorgan Chase head Jamie Dimon warned Tuesday at an investors’ conference, arguing that the combination of pandemic stimulus, Fed policy, and the war in Ukraine are bearing down on the economy. “Everyone thinks the Fed can handle this. That hurricane is right out there, down the road, coming our way. We just don’t know if it’s a minor one or superstorm Sandy.”
But at least for the next few months, Walsh is sanguine. “The economy is too strong,” he said. “The risk is much more [for] 2023, that the Fed does over-tighten, we come off of this COVID rebound.” But, he predicted, “It’s a bit of a lull. It’s not like a crisis.”
So… a lukewarm economic porridge? We’ll see ourselves out.
Worth Your Time
So-called red-flag laws have emerged as a rare point of possible bipartisan agreement on gun issues in recent years, particularly following the crush of shootings this Spring. But they’ve also been criticized as a potentially spotty countermeasure, with several prominent mass shooters in states with red-flag laws having been able to obtain firearms despite making public threats of violence ahead of time. A New York Times feature over the weekend examines one county that has taken its red-flag ordinance seriously: Suffolk County in New York, where more than 160 guns have been removed by court order since 2019. “The filings are filled with people threatening to shoot up courthouses or schoolhouses, amped-up men in cars with weapons and ammunition, people behaving erratically at a gun shop or military-base checkpoint or firing randomly into a neighbor’s yard,” the reporters write. “People who text friends and loved ones ‘Goodbye forever’ or ‘I have a gun next to my bed bro’ or post, ‘When I kill everyone know it’s my dad’s fault.’”
Speaking of the Times, Maggie Haberman’s latest contains remarkable new reporting about former Vice President Mike Pence’s experience of the January 6 riot: “The day before a mob of President Donald J. Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol … Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff called Mr. Pence’s lead Secret Service agent to his West Wing office. The chief of staff, Marc Short, had a message for the agent, Tim Giebels: The president was going to turn publicly against the vice president, and there could be a security risk to Mr. Pence because of it.” Haberman goes on to detail the remarkable pressure Pence was put under by a rogue’s gallery of Trump supporters in the days leading up to his Jan. 6 decision not to obey Trump’s command to interfere with the counting of the electoral vote: “At the end of December, Mr. Pence traveled to Vail, Colo., for a family vacation. While he was there, his aides received a request for him to meet with Sidney Powell, a lawyer who promoted some of the more far-fetched conspiracy theories about flaws in voting machines, and whom Mr. Trump wanted to bring into the White House, ostensibly to investigate his false claims of widespread voter fraud.”
In his Sunday French Press, David draws a distinction between the healthy safety- and rights-focused gun culture that America has long enjoyed and the reactionary gun fetishism that has grown more ubiquitous in recent years. “The gun fetish rears its head when politicians pose with AR-15s in their campaign posters, or when a powerful senator makes ‘machine-gun bacon’ to demonstrate just how much he loves the Second Amendment,” he writes. “Spend much time at gun shows or at gun shops, and you’ll quickly become familiar with something called the ‘tactical’ or ‘black gun’ lifestyle, where civilians intentionally equip themselves in gear designed for the ‘daily gunfight.’ It’s often a form of elaborate special forces cosplay, except the weapons (and sometimes the body armor) are very real.”
In his Friday G-File, Jonah took aim at “the most fatal flaw of Democrats”: “that they take it as a given that government can do the normal stuff well.” “If progressives really wanted to restore faith in government, they’d concentrate all of their energies on tackling the stuff already on the government’s plate,” he writes. “Execute the job you’ve been given well, and then we’ll talk about giving you more responsibility. Walk, then run, and then we’ll get into a fun argument about whether it’s stupid you think you can fly.”
Don’t forget the podcasts: In Friday’s Remnant, Jonah dove solo into topics ranging from the somber to the downright bizarre: television, republicanism, superstition, and the like. In this week’s Good Faith, David and Curtis discuss the tensions between gun rights and gun control and the hyper-polarization that engulfs the issue. And on the Dispatch Podcast, the gang discusses the first 100 days of war in Ukraine, the gun question, and next week’s January 6 hearings on Capitol Hill.
Let Us Know
When you read the sentence “Republicans and Democrats in the Senate say they’re making progress on gun legislation following a rash of mass shootings in recent weeks,” what color did your mood ring turn?
The August 23, 2021 FDA approval of Pfizer’s Comirnaty vaccine was a cause for celebration. Marked as a turning point in the battle against COVID19, the announcement was highly publicized by the Biden Administration with the clear intention to extinguish “vaccine hesitancy” and boost uptake.
It was celebrated as a cause for national relief, and many Americans arrived at their local pharmacies under the impression, via government and pharmaceutical propaganda, that they were receiving an FDA-approved COVID vaccine. Yet that legally distinct product, as we know it, never existed. And now we know, via Pfizer, that it will never exist.
For the uninitiated:
Comirnaty is a legally distinct product from the emergency use authorization (EUA) shots, and It has never made its way to market. For months on end, no such vaccine has ever become available. Those who received the “Pfizer shot(s)” have been injected with the emergency use authorization (EUA) version of the shots. See my piece in The Dossier for more info:
Shell Game? There remains no FDA approved COVID vaccine in the United States
I fact checked the fact checkers and couldn’t believe what I found. Despite the corporate press, Big Pharma, and the federal government telling us otherwise, it is absolutely true that there is no FDA approved COVID-19 vaccine available in the United States today. And there are no plans to make one available any time soon…
5 months ago · 241 likes · 79 comments · Jordan Schachtel
The information operation succeeded. There was indeed an FDA approved vaccine, at least on paper, but you couldn’t get it.
When originally confronted with this ordeal, Pfizer labeled this issue an inventory question that had nothing to do with the legal distinction between an experimental EUA product and an FDA-approved vaccine. Up until just weeks ago, this was the statement up on the CDC website via Pfizer:
“Pfizer received FDA BLA license on 8/23/2021 for its COVID-19 vaccine for use in individuals 16 and older (COMIRNATY). At that time, the FDA published a BLA package insert that included the approved new COVID-19 vaccine tradename COMIRNATY and listed 2 new NDCs (0069-1000-03, 0069-1000-02) and images of labels with the new tradename.
At present, Pfizer does not plan to produce any product with these new NDCs and labels over the next few months while EUA authorized product is still available and being made available for U.S. distribution. As such, the CDC, AMA, and drug compendia may not publish these new codes until Pfizer has determined when the product will be produced with the BLA labels.”
In May, Pfizer updated its statement to mention a December 2021 licensed Comirnaty product, which was granted a license four months after the highly-publicized August FDA press release.
And just last week, Pfizer finally acknowledged that its original licensed product will never be distributed. In an unreported update on the CDC website, Pfizer told the agency:
“Pfizer received initial FDA BLA license on 8/23/2021 for its COVID-19 vaccine for use in individuals 16 and older (COMIRNATY). At that time, the FDA published a BLA package insert that included the approved new COVID-19 vaccine tradename COMIRNATY and listed 2 new NDCs (0069-1000-03, 0069-1000-02) and images of labels with the new tradename. These NDCs will not be manufactured. Only NDCs for the subsequently BLA approved tris-sucrose formulation will be produced.”
The key distinction between the originally approved formulation and the tris-sucrose formulation is that — according to manufacturers — the latter can be held for a much longer period of time outside of an ultra cold freezer. These freezers cost over $10,000 a piece and each unit uses as much energy per day as an average American household. Improper storage can render the mRNA unstable.
Notably, the clinical trials for the Pfizer shot were conducted without the modified tris-sucrose ingredient. Given the partisan nature of Pfizer, the corporate media, government health bureaucracies, and your correspondent’s lack of expertise in this area, it is unclear whether this is significant.
Another notable thing to look out for in the coming days and weeks is the possibility that the subsequently FDA approved product finally becomes available in the United States. In recent days, the CDC removed the language of “not orderable at this time” above the description of both Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax.
Additionally, as reported by Uncover DC, the Defense Department appears to be in the early stages of ordering what it has interpreted as a legally required minimum of Comirnaty in order to continue its mRNA mandate of American service members.
If there is this big a discrepancy in a single county’s votes, is it emblematic of the entire state’s voting records problems?
DeKalb County, GA — The DeKalb County Voter Registration and Elections Office on June 1 released the results of a hand count in the District 2 DeKalb County Commission race.
The results should be considered preliminary.
VRE originally reported the June 21 runoff was between Orson and Alexander. After a week of review, Lauren Alexander and Michelle Long Spears will go head-to-head in the runoff on June 21.
District 2 results of hand count reported on June 1
District 2 results reported on May 24
Note – five additional precincts impacted by a redistricting error are reflected on a second report, which is below and should be added with the first set of votes reported on May 24.
In a press release, DeKalb VRE Executive Director Keisha Smith said she felt the hand count produced an accurate result.
“The goal of the hand count was to obtain accurate results of the County Commission District 2 race, and I am confident we have achieved that objective thanks largely in part to the diligence of our staff who worked extended hours across the holiday weekend,” Smith said. We are committed to getting these tabulations right, but wanted to ensure that preliminary and unofficial results were posted as soon as practicable.”
The press release does not explain the large discrepancy between the machine count on Election Night and the subsequent hand count. It also doesn’t explain the appearance of 2,810 more votes cast than were initially reported. Spears’ total increased by 3,620. Orson’s total decreased by 1,298. Alexander’s total increased by 355.
Spears said she is turning her attention to the runoff.
“Thank you to the DeKalb Elections Board and Director Smith for revealing the corrected unofficial results of the DeKalb County Commission District 2 race,” Spears said. “I am thrilled to be in the runoff and my team is gearing up immediately. Since my opponent has been in the runoff for over a week now, we are already at a critical disadvantage in informing voters that I led the race in the Democratic Primary with over 43% of the vote — and now it is important for our team to focus on getting voters back to the polls to elect me as their next D2 Commissioner.”
Alexander said she’s also focusing on the runoff but wondered about the shifts in the vote totals.
“This is my first time experiencing an election as a candidate. Like I’m sure many other people are, I am surprised by the significant change in the reported totals from the hand count in comparison to what had previously been published by DeKalb Elections,” she said. “I am continuing to monitor the situation and will await further news about this election. It remains important to me that every vote is counted with accuracy and reflects the voters will. Due to the limited time between now and the runoff election date, I need to continue to be prepared for the runoff as we await certification, I continue to support full transparency about this election and the ensuing tabulation of results.”
Orson said his campaign is “reviewing the latest information” provided by DeKalb VRE, and he is considering his options.
“There are serious questions as to the administration of the election and computation of the results,” he said. “The idea that problems related to the programming of the voting machines and the calculation of votes could not ultimately taint every aspect of the process, including the production of the paper ballots, defies belief. We will continue to review our options, keeping at the forefront that any decision should work to foster the integrity and trustworthiness of our electoral process.”
DeKalb VRE at first declined to release results of the hand count of paper ballots, which election workers finished at 12:30 a.m. on May 31, citing questions about the accuracy of the count.
Decaturish filed a formal records request for the immediate release of this information with an explanation about why election officials feel the hand tally count is inaccurate, or provide a legal justification for withholding the information.
The DeKalb County Elections Board on Tuesday, May 31, declined to certify the results of the May 24 primary. Certification could occur as early as Friday at 5 p.m.
Initially, it was expected that the board would certify the results of the May 24 primary on May 31. But the board decided to delay certification until this Friday.
Had Spears not raised questions on Election Night, it’s unclear whether the result would be in doubt at all. Some precincts were reporting she received zero votes – including her own precinct. Spears took pictures of the precinct-level results and showed them to Decaturish on Monday during day two of the hand count. Her supporters, including commissioners Jeff Rader and Ted Terry, began publicly raising questions about what happened.
Here’s what known so far about the circumstances that caused the incorrect result on election night:
Don Broussard dropped out of the race for the DeKalb Commission District 2 seat. That withdrawal caused a mistake in the programming of the precinct scanner and led to inaccurate vote counts for two candidates. The SOS office also said the text of one Republican Party question was not properly appearing during early voting, and five precincts in DeKalb were redistricted into the county commission District 2 race, but those precincts had not been updated to reflect that change.
Those issues resulted in the creation of new databases for the May 24 election. The databases map out ballot styles and precincts for voters.
It’s not clear whether the county conducted all the proper logic and accuracy testing necessary once those new databases were created. It’s also unclear whether other elections were affected by the creation of the new databases.
Elections Board Vice Chair Nancy Jester asked for the results of all the logic and accuracy tests of machines after changes were made.
“My concern when asked as a board member to certify this election: I should feel confident about the District 2 election because we’re doing this hand count,” Jester said during a May 31 Elections Board meeting. “What I don’t know is the … unknowns in any other race.”
Jester said on June 1 that she is awaiting more data and she still has questions.
“I have no disagreement with anybody who says let’s take a harder look at any of these races,” she said. “I needed to be provided with more precinct by precinct data. What are the implications of any of the issues we’ve been looking at for any other races? I don’t know.:
“For what it’s worth, I have no specific reason to doubt the results of the BOE 2 race,” she wrote on Facebook. “I have reviewed who was strongest in each precinct, and the geographic patterns mostly match what you would expect. I also believe it was always the case that Candice McKinley and I were the strongest two candidates. So, a runoff between the two of us is not surprising. However, I would not object to a recount of our race, if that is what is needed to restore confidence in our elections process.”
Here is the full press release from DeKalb Voter Registration and Elections:
After multiple days of hand counting of ballots, DeKalb County Voter Registration and Elections (DeKalb VRE) has completed initial efforts to count the ballots cast in the DeKalb County District 2 Commission race.
Issues related to initial election results prompted DeKalb VRE, in coordination with the Georgia Secretary of State, to take necessary steps to identify accurate results of the Commission District 2 contest.
These unofficial results preliminarily show that Lauren Alexander received 4,737 votes, Marshall Orson received 3,928 votes, and Michelle Long Spears received 6,651 votes. Donald Broussard, who officially withdrew from the contest, received 133 votes.
Final results are being tabulated and reconciled, and will be announced when that process is completed.
These unofficial and incomplete results were announced on June 1, 2022 following hand counting efforts. All District 2 candidates were emailed preliminary tabulations from the hand count and unofficial and preliminary precinct-specific data will be uploaded to the State’s election system promptly.
During the DeKalb Board of Registration and Election’s (BRE) Specially Called meeting on May 31, the appointed body voted to postpone certifying the complete election results. DeKalb BRE set a Specially Called Meeting for Friday, June 3, 2022, at 5 p.m. to consider certifying the May 24 election results.
During the hand counting of ballots, three-person teams visually and verbally confirmed the candidate choice on the ballots cast in the District 2 Democratic primary contest.
“The goal of the hand count was to obtain accurate results of the County Commission District 2 race and I am confident we have achieved that objective thanks largely in part to the diligence of our staff who worked extended hours across the holiday weekend,” DeKalb VRE Executive Director Keisha Smith said. We are committed to getting these tabulations right, but wanted to ensure that preliminary and unofficial results were posted as soon as practicable.”
One has to wonder why this got by the officials on election night. A candidate getting ZERO VOTES in her own precinct? Not even she voted for herself?
As the article indicates, had not Spears not questioned the tallies from election night, would they have ever done a hand count?
For those who don’t know: Atlanta sits partly in DeKalb county.
DeKalb County -where Atlanta is the most populous city, despite being mostly in Fulton County. DeKalb contains roughly 10% of the city of Atlanta. DeKalb is primarily a suburban county.
It’s a well known fact that the corporate news industry attracts dumb people who want to be on television in the same way the porn industry attracts troubled kids from broken homes. This is especially true at Fox News — where the talent contracts seem to come, these days, with a full-frontal lobotomy.
Just consider Sandra Smith.
Smith is not a journalist —she’s pretending to be one on TV. She’s never done any investigative reporting in her life. She was a stock trader who briefly worked at Bloomberg News before moving to the Fox Business channel — and she did not distinguish herself in any of these roles. This was self-evident when Fox’s top airhead conducted an interview with Rep. Mo Brooks this weekend that went viral on Twitter because Mo Brooks essentially ended her career on air.
Sandra Smith felt the need to make one of those idiotic “there was no cheating in the 2020 election” statements probably written by Paul Ryan himself. She then pushed back on Mo Brooks because she “had been reading the Wall Street Journal” — another Rupert Murdoch media property! — which she wanted to be very clear she was quoting from verbate!
That really sums up the TV career of Sandra Smith in one word: verbate!
She means verbatim, of course, but what do you want from a woman whose reporting experience in the world of politics is so thin that it might as well be a starving model? (Could she pass a 5th grade civics exam? I have my doubts. Mo Brooks has to explain to her that Congress is in charge of federal election law!) Sandra is also the only human being who thinks that the old British propaganda outfit Reuters is some kind of international fact-checking NGO! She’s a wacky liberal who probably declined to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 because, at the last minute, she filled out her ballot with the name of the more deserving candidate: her hairdresser.
This leads to my final point: the only reason to watch Sandra Smith is because you want to get your information from someone who knows less than you do.
The rest of the interview was just as disgraceful: Smith harassed Brooks about so-called “red flag” gun laws, about the NRA’s endorsement of Brooks, and about calling for a return to traditional moral values.
Now you would think that a call for returning to traditional moral values would be uncontroversial at Fox News — but you would be wrong. You forgot that you’re dealing with Sandra Smith who manages to twists the words of Mo Brooks into an insult of single parents!
Just watch the entire interview.
Notice that Sandra Smith is trying to talk over Mo Brooks throughout the interview. She thinks it’s her job to get the last word on everything. When he brings up various facts about election fraud, she interrupts him to bring up whether he’s been “subpoenaed about January 6th.” It’s a hostile hit-and-run interview conducted by a Murdoch bimbo.
This is the smirking face of neo-liberalism haunting America. “How can anyone bring up election fraud on our channel? We’re Fox News! And we called it early for Biden!”
The good news is that Sandra Smith will soon join her discredited Fox News colleagues Chris Wallace (“Jen Psaki is the greatest press secretary in history!”) and Melissa Francis (“Don’t bring up George Soros!’) and Jedediah Bila (“Who cares if Josh Hawley’s book gets canceled!”) in the dustbin of history where they belong. There was a time when closet liberals could work at Fox News in plain sight without annoying their core audience — but those days are long gone. There’s no middle ground left in American politics (or in American society) in the post-Trump wasteland created by the Biden regime.
We’re all living in the nightmare created by the frauds who called Arizona early. Pissed off doesn’t even begin to describe the mood of the GOP electorate. There’s no time slot in existence where Fox News can hide Sandra Smith from the wrath of its viewers until the whole thing blows over — because it’s never going to blow over.
“Never underestimate Joe’s ability to f*ck things up.”
Former President Barack Obama shakes hands with Joe Biden after Biden spoke about the Affordable Care Act, in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday, April 5, 2022. (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)
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Left critics and self-hating Democrats believe that Obama was a Republican-indulging compromiser. So did Biden and his appointees, who were determined to outdo Obama using narrow Democratic control of Congress. Why they blew it.
This is a piece from a new source for me called the Washington Monthly. Many of the articles are left leaning, but this one does make some sense. I’ll highlight some of the comments I agree with. Most of this article is Bullshit. But I felt all should see how the left thinks.
In July 2010, President Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank banking bill. Its passage marked his administration’s third major legislative accomplishment, joining the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and the Affordable Care Act. The former, known as “the stimulus,” helped cut short the Great Recession. It also powered a clean energy revolution. From the beginning to the end of the Obama administration, wind power capacity tripled and solar power capacity increased by an astonishing 2,500 percent. The ACA, or “Obamacare,” expanded health insurance coverage, helping to reduce the percentage of uninsured Americans from 14.7 in 2008 to 9.2 in 2021. To fund expanded coverage, the ACA imposed new taxes on the wealthy, which, in concert with subsequent tax code changes, subjected the richest 1 percent of households to their highest tax burden since 1979. And Dodd-Frank’s reorganization of the financial regulatory system, according to the financial reformers at Better Markets, succeeded in “making a financial crash much less likely.”
At the same point, 486 days into his administration, Joe Biden’s scorecard is not as full. His biggest victory is the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Biden signed was significant as well, but his failure to extend the law’s poverty-fighting child tax credit expansion beyond December 2021 mars its legacy.
From the new book This Will Not Pass by the New York Times reporters Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin, we know that Biden had hoped to surpass Obama’s legislative output and impact. The president is quoted as saying to an adviser, “I am confident that Barack is not happy with the coverage of this administration as more transformative than his.” (And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is quoted as having told a friend, “Obama is jealous of Biden.”)
But 16 months into Biden’s presidency, it seems unlikely to be as transformative as Obama’s. It may succeed in many respects; great foreign policy achievements may be in store; a burst of bipartisanship could dampen our polarization. But the window for sweeping progressive legislation appears to be closed. Any last-ditch “reconciliation” bill this year, somehow earning Senator Joe Manchin’s approval and a barely sufficient 50 Senate votes, will have to be much smaller than the Build Back Better bill, meant to be Biden’s crowning legislative achievement. Truly ambitious party line legislation beyond this year would necessitate a Republican collapse, allowing Democrats to control Congress despite high inflation and Biden’s poor approval ratings.
The value of comparing these two administrations is not to settle some presidential pissing contest but to determine how best to enact progressive change.
We learn from This Will Not Pass that the Biden administration was heavily influenced by critics of Obama’s conciliatory approach, some of whom came from within that administration itself. According to Burns and Martin,
The people [Biden] had put in place at the highest levels of the White House largely aligned with [Senate Majority Leader Chuck] Schumer and Pelosi in their view of congressional Republicans. Mostly veterans of the Obama administration, they were haunted by their party’s last experience governing in an economic crisis, in 2009, when a newly inaugurated Democratic president and his top staff had spent months pleading and horse-trading for Republican support on various essential priorities and come away with little to show for it. [White House Chief of Staff] Ron Klain was among the Biden aides who [were] clear-eyed about the early missteps of the Obama administration …
The Obama administration, Klain believed, had moved too slowly in its early days to address the recession, and it had done too little to explain to the public what it was doing … Klain fretted that there was a risk Democrats would make the same mistakes again: allowing a drawn-out negotiation over dollar figures and time-tables to overshadow the real benefits the administration wanted to give voters.
Such a narrative became popular in progressive circles, driven by pundits like the New York Times columnist and economist Paul Krugman. In January 2009, Krugman deemed Obama’s $775 billion stimulus proposal “not enough” to deal with an estimated $2.1 trillion of lost production in the Great Recession. Five years later, Krugman called the stimulus, despite its positive policy elements, a “political disaster” that ended up “discrediting the very idea of stimulus.” Krugman also criticized Obama in August 2009 in response to reports that he was “backing away” from a “public option” during health care negotiations: “It’s hard to avoid the sense that Mr. Obama has wasted months trying to appease people who can’t be appeased.”
Obama revealed his real-time response to such complaints in his memoir, A Promised Land. Attempts to include a public option were dropped toward the end of the process at the behest of moderates in the Democratic caucus, enraging many progressives. Obama wrote,
I found the whole brouhaha exasperating. “What is it about sixty votes these folks don’t understand?” I groused to my staff. “Should I tell the thirty million people who can’t get covered that they’re going to have to wait another ten years because we can’t get them a public option?” It wasn’t just that criticism from friends always stung the most. The carping carried immediate political consequences for Democrats … all the great social-welfare advances in American history, including Social Security and Medicare, had started off incomplete and had been built upon gradually, over time. By preemptively spinning what could be a monumental, if imperfect, victory into a bitter defeat, the criticism contributed to a potential long-term demoralization of Democratic voters—otherwise known as the “What’s the point of voting if nothing ever changes?” syndrome—making it even harder for us to win elections and move progressive legislation forward in the future.
I find Obama’s explanation sensible. Yet inexplicably to me, many Obama administration veterans favor the Krugman view. Even more bizarre, Biden, after pushing back on progressive Obama critics in the 2020 primaries, surrounded himself with such critics once in office. The result was a Biden administration less attuned than his Democratic predecessor’s at determining what could be achieved with the Senate votes available.
Yes, Obama had more Senate Democrats to work with than Biden’s 50. Obama began his presidency with 58 Democrats. In late April 2009, Senator Arlen Specter switched parties to make it 59. In early July 2009, Al Franken was sworn in as the 60th Democratic senator following a grueling recount. Then the number was knocked back to 59 in February 2010 after Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown won the special election to succeed the deceased Senator Ted Kennedy.
With such a big majority, you might think that Obama could have plucked just about anything off the progressive wish list and made it law, using budget reconciliation—the procedurally complex filibuster-proof process Biden used last year to pass the American Rescue Plan with just 50 Senate Democrats. But Obama’s big majority included a sizable and stingy moderate faction, and not just in the Senate. In 2009, the House had 255 Democrats, but 49 were moderate Blue Dogs, more than enough to deny Pelosi a majority.
As Michael Grunwald explained in his history of the 2009 stimulus, The New New Deal, Obama “had to make sure Blue Dogs in the House and centrist Democrats in the Senate didn’t jump ship,” because even before the inauguration, “they were already sounding alarms about runaway spending.” In December 2008, then Vice President–elect Biden was compelled to publicly state that the emerging package “will not become a Democratic Christmas tree.” That effectively cut off any talk about using reconciliation for the first major bill of the Obama administration. And when a Senate version of the stimulus grew to $930 billion, a group of moderate Republicans and Democrats came together to scale it back to $780 billion.
Following the February 2009 passage of the Recovery Act, Democratic leaders wanted reconciliation available for the rest of Obama’s agenda, but fellow Democrats stymied them. When putting together the budget resolution—the parliamentary precursor to a budget reconciliation bill—Democrats agreed to include health care and education as eligible for the reconciliation process. But a Republican motion explicitly denying the same privilege for any climate change bill was embraced by 26 Senate Democrats and passed overwhelmingly—an omen that the Senate was not going to be hospitable to any ambitious climate change bill.
Even though health care made the cut, Democrats said at the time that the reconciliation option was a last resort. Reconciliation bills can only include budget-related provisions, and many health care reform proposals wouldn’t qualify (a procedural obstacle that fatally compromised Republican efforts to repeal Obamacare using reconciliation in 2017). Then Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad said, “Virtually everyone who has been part of these discussions recognizes that reconciliation is not the preferred way to write this legislation. But the administration wants to have a reconciliation instruction as an insurance policy.”
In turn, Obama calibrated his legislative agenda to meet the limits of what the 60th vote would allow. For the Recovery Act, after helping to limit the price tag, the 58th, 59th, and 60th Senate votes came from Maine Republicans Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, and—before his switch—Specter. (Senate Democrats were united in support, though eight House Democrats broke ranks.) For Obamacare, the 60th vote came from Democrat-turned-independent moderate Joe Lieberman, who refused both the public option as well as a Medicare buy-in option for those turning 55. For Dodd-Frank, it came from Scott Brown (offsetting the loss of progressive Democrat Russ Feingold), who demanded that a proposed tax on banks be stricken from the bill. It was.
Student loan reform did piggyback on a reconciliation package used to finish up the Obamacare process, accommodating changes sought by the House weeks after Senate Democrats lost their 60th seat. Fifty-six Senate Democrats passed that follow-up bill, with three Democrats joining Republicans in opposition.
Some progressives never cottoned to the horse trades required to win those votes and partly blamed watered-down legislation for the poor Democratic performances in the 2010 and 2014 midterms and even Donald Trump’s 2016 victory. The Biden presidency offered the opportunity to prove the alternate theory of the case. Don’t strain for the 60th vote. Use the reconciliation process. Go big with 50 votes. Don’t even bother with Republicans.
But whatever the merits of reconciliation, basic legislative competence still requires accommodating the determining vote, be it the 60th vote in regular order or the 50th vote in reconciliation.
Biden simply did not do that in his pursuit of a wide-ranging Build Back Better bill. In December, he didn’t rush to take Manchin’s $1.8 trillion offer, apparently because it left out an extension of the expanded child tax credit. As Biden hesitated, Manchin announced his opposition to the entire bill and revoked the offer. Biden was understandably reluctant to give up on a program that had successfully slashed child poverty and had the makings of a signature policy achievement. But it was politically foolish to presume that the one-year expansion of the credit—slipped into the American Rescue Plan reconciliation measure—would be extended indefinitely without first securing Manchin’s support.
Krugman and others charged Obama with having “wasted time” by trying for months to win Republican support for the Affordable Care Act, support that never materialized. But Obama wasn’t just chasing Republicans; he was also chasing Senate Democrat moderates. However long it took, he found the votes he needed. Notably, Obamacare (and the student loan reform that rode along with it) was an anomaly. Every other bill Obama signed into law was passed thanks to mathematically necessary Republican support. It’s far more accurate to charge Biden with having wasted time on Build Back Better, as he spent months trying to wear down Manchin and ended up with nothing. Biden took less time getting the 60 Senate votes needed to pass an infrastructure bill precisely because he let those moderates who held the determining votes take the lead on negotiations.
Getting the historical narrative correct matters. Democrats should have been telling a positive story of Obama’s presidency, one where landmark laws made America better, and he became the first Democratic president to win reelection with more than 50 percent of the popular vote since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Instead, Democrats told a narrative that lacked historical perspective, blaming an inevitably imperfect legislative record for midterm losses, even though such defeats are common for the president’s party. Amazingly, Joe Biden, of all politicians, a figure who has lived through decades of Washington history, got suckered into accepting a flawed narrative. No wonder his legislative strategy was similarly flawed.
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