Tuesday, December 8, 2020

The Many Layers of the Deep State

 

Article by Jeff Davidson in Townhall
 

The Many Layers of the Deep State

In my recent Townhall article, "What if the Deep State Has No Bottom?" one of the commenters issued a brief roster of 12 deep state layers and below is my take on each of them. 

1. Ignorant Youth – A blameless group indoctrinated to either hate America or over-focus on her faults. Students rarely hear about the greatness of America and what we've done for the world, let alone our own citizens. These youth eventually join the Democrat/progressive machine that seeks to rewrite our history and to make our populace subjects of the state and not much more.

2. Brainwashed Teachers – Today, teachers from kindergarten to grade 12, invariably lean left. Those who graduated college in the last 20 years were indoctrinated by activist professors. Veteran teachers have had to endure ‘white fragility’ re-education lectures, hear that they are guilty by virtue of their physiology, and learn that sucking up  to the cause leads to redemption. Yay, BLM and Antifa!

3. College Professors – Above 90% of college professors vote Democrat year after year. No good comes from this level of conformity; diversity of political thought on campus is not tolerated. The few professors who lean right keep a low profile, as to not make waves, and do not discuss issues with their indoctrinated academic peers.

4. University Committees – Individual professors could be autonomous if not for the academic committees and higher ups: deans, provosts, chancellors, department heads, directors, regents, etc. Group think infects campuses everywhere; bone-headed resolutions appear everywhere, from Berkeley to Cambridge. Students and the larger community are told, say, that Israel is evil and, "We must divest from Israel." "Republicans are evil," part of the great unwashed. We tolerate them, but not for long.

5. Rank and File Government Workers – At the local, state, or federal level, those entering government learn that surviving requires towing the line. Merely walking the halls, standing in elevators, and being in earshot of their peers reinforces the Democrat/progressive/liberal/socialist party line. The rank and file on all levels overwhelmingly vote and donate to Democrats. 

6. Agency Heads – Cabinet secretaries, under secretaries, deputy directors, legal counsel, and other long-term, high-ranking GS level bureaucrats rule Washington. These people, primarily Democrats, but Republicans, have been in office for too long and represent the essence of the swamp. Beyond the administrative, judicial, and legislative branches of government, they know that the ‘fourth branch’ is their own bureaucracy. Agencies can slow walk any program, document, or mandated action for months or years, for what should have taken days or weeks.

7. Lobbyists – These swamp creatures aren't officially part of government; they are paid by advocacy groups to influence elected officials. Lobbyists from the left, right, and middle are highly compensated to advocate for a cause, often contrary to the effective functioning of democracy.

8. The Court System – Judges in America wield great power. While the Trump Administration placed 300+ district-level judges, there are over 370 more judgeships across America. Judges are not supposed to legislate from the bench, yet they do. Impacted by the mainstream media, even conservatives judges are coaxed into the middle, if not the left (See Justice John Roberts). 

9. Politicians – From senators, to representatives, to governors, all the way down, even many in the GOP, embrace socialist doctrine in one form or another. Dislodging 20 to 30 year swamp creatures, or in the case of Joe Biden, 47 years, is a huge task. They feed from the gravy train of inside information. No one wants to depart because the rewards are lucrative. Their loyalty isn't to any president or party, but to what keeps them in office and feeling ultra-important while doing so (see Mitt Romney).

10. Three Letter Agencies – The alphabet soup group includes the FBI, NSA, CIA, IRS, DoJ, EPA, SBA, etc. The infiltration of swamp creatures within them is vast and deep. These agencies are often headed by two-faced leaders who are corrupt in private and virtuous in public. Their deputies and staff are often far worse.

11. Technocrat Kings – The billionaire boys club seeks to rule the world. Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, etc. each believe that they’re God’s moral gifts to humanity. They lean left because embracing socialism helps decimate America and supposedly leads to a “one-world global government,” led by enlightened leaders, (such as billionaires) who become the elite ruling class while everyone else becomes a serf.

12. Globalist Visionaries – You could hardly call George Soros a visionary, he's more demented than anything. He is among the global scoundrels who fervently believe in dissolving all nations and all borders. Then, one grand “Central Authority” will prevail with themselves at the very top. This vision fuels the American Left, including the dimwits in BLM, and Antifa, who barely know why they riot, but figure it's got something to do with a ‘global vision.’

Swamp Fans

Other entities and groups keep the swamp in place – unions that benefit from Democrat capitulation, recipients of government largesse including welfare, non-profit associations, quasi-government groups, community groups, and all others who believe that government ought to take care of everything, including themselves.

 

https://townhall.com/columnists/jeffdavidson/2020/12/08/the-many-layers-of-the-deep-state-n2581189 


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Family, White House team offer well wishes for Rudy Giuliani

 

OAN Newsroom

UPDATED 10:47 AM PT – Tuesday, December 8, 2020

Well wishes have poured in for Rudy Giuliani after he tested positive for the coronavirus. President Trump confirmed his lawyer’s diagnosis on Sunday.

Giuliani was immediately taken to Georgetown University Medical Center with his son Andrew being one of the first people to offer support. Andrew Giuliani, who serves as an Assistant to the President and also tested positive himself in late November, stated that his father was “getting great care and feeling well.”

 

 Natalie Harp, an advisor for the Trump campaign, also took to Twitter to wish him well during his recovery.

 

 Trump legal advisor Jenna Ellis, who’s worked closely with Giuliani in his fight to expose voter fraud, tweeted “prayers for Mayor Giuliani” and called him a warrior.

 

 

The President himself took a moment during Monday’s Medal of Freedom ceremony at the White House to praise Giuliani as “a champion” and “the greatest mayor of New York City.”

Meanwhile, it appears Giuliani has temporarily passed the batton to his team as they work to expose rampant fraud in the last election.

 

https://www.oann.com/family-white-house-team-offer-well-wishes-for-rudy-giuliani/ 

 


 

 

 

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First Lady Melania Trump Participates in a Toys for Tots Event 12/8/20


 

 

 

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It’s Time For Mass Civil Disobedience Against Lawless Lockdown Orders

 

Article by John Daniel Davidson, political editor for The Federalist
 

It’s Time For Mass Civil Disobedience Against Lawless Lockdown Orders

For too long, mayors and governors and health officials across the country have overstepped their authority. Time to ignore them.
 

By now it should be obvious that elected state and local officials issuing COVID-19 lockdown and stay-at-home orders are just making things up as they go along.

Too often, their edicts aren’t based on science or data, but on a grotesque understanding of their own authority and infallibility. In the face of a worsening pandemic, they want to be seen doing something, taking bold action to stop the spread of the virus—that is, so long as it doesn’t hurt certain favored special interests.

That’s why Americans living under arbitrary and unconstitutional lockdown orders should simply ignore them, en masse, as an act of civil disobedience.

How else are ordinary people to push back against the capricious rules of politicians like Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti? On November 25, the day before Thanksgiving, Garcetti and county health officials banned outdoor dining at bars and restaurants for three weeks. Because of the spread of the virus, they said, it’s just too dangerous, so we all have to do our part and make sacrifices.

But then they gave a carve-out for certain kinds of outdoor dining, like film and television crew’s catering sites. In Garcetti’s town, a massive film crew eating outside is safe but a small restaurant or bar with outdoor, socially distanced seating is too dangerous to remain open. Got it?

Then last week, L.A. County Superior Court Judge James Chalfant called out the mayor and county health officials on this arbitrary exercise of power, ordering them to produce scientific evidence to justify the outdoor dining ban. “You have to do a risk-benefit analysis for public health. You don’t just talk about the risk of spreading disease. You have to talk about the benefit of keeping restaurants open,” Chalfant said.

Exactly right. Chalfant is also requiring the county to provide data on hospital and ICU capacity to justify the claim that the health-care system would be overwhelmed without the outdoor dining ban. County health officials are scheduled to appear in Chalfant’s courtroom Tuesday to give whatever evidence they were able to cobble together since last week.

The lawsuit, brought by an attorney who also owns a downtown L.A. restaurant, captures the dynamic of pandemic governance in a microcosm. Health officials, based on nothing but their opinions about what might be safe or not, have put tens of thousands of people in America’s second-largest city out of work right before the holiday season.

This pattern has played out all across the country this year. Elected officials, often Democratic mayors or governors, promulgate rules, curfews, capacity limits, and outright shutdowns that betray either animosity or indifference toward certain groups while protecting other, favored groups.

That’s how we got a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s order singling out churches and other houses of worship for special restrictions was unconstitutional, a ruling that was affirmed a week later when the Supreme Court sent a similar case back to a federal district court in California for reconsideration in light of its ruling in the New York case.

At issue in both cases was the arbitrariness of the restrictions on places of worship. As Justice Neil Gorsuch noted in the New York case, “It is time—past time—to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques.”

It shouldn’t take an appeal to the First Amendment’s protection of the free exercise of religion to stay the hand of would-be municipal and county tyrants across the country. While perhaps laughably cartoonish in its bald-faced cronyism and sheer cruelty, the outdoor dining ban in L.A. is nothing to take lightly. It’s taking a terrible toll on real people, most of them people who can’t go weeks or months without working.

Last week, a viral video of a distraught L.A. restaurant owner brought home not just the arbitrariness and unfairness of the outdoor dining ban, but the cost in livelihoods and jobs destroyed. The woman was Angela Marsden, owner of the Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill in Sherman Oaks, a Los Angeles neighborhood. Marsden issued a tearful plea for help and a call to protest after her restaurant’s outdoor dining area, which she had spent tens of thousands of dollars carefully adapting to comply with county pandemic rules, was shut down along with every other outdoor dining area in the city.

Her video went viral because not 50 feet away from her restaurant was a much larger outdoor dining area that was allowed to stay open because it was for a comedy television show on NBC. The entertainment industry, you see, had been deemed essential by California Gov. Gavin Newsom, which meant actors and film crews were exempt from the governor’s stay-at-home order issued last month, which applied to nearly the entire state.

 

Later, Marsden said in a Fox News interview that people in her city are suffering from pandemic restrictions and that small business owners and employees are “going to die” from poverty, depression, and suicide.

It’s hard to watch Marsden point out the hypocrisy and unfairness of L.A.’s outdoor dining ban without feeling a kind of rage. A terrible injustice is being perpetrated against ordinary working people by elected officials who believe they can shutter entire industries and destroy people’s livelihoods with the stroke of a pen.

These often are the same leaders who don’t follow their own pandemic rules and guidelines, who believe that lockdowns and curfews and restrictions are for poor people and the working class, not elites like them. These are the same leaders who tacitly or openly approved of massive Black Lives Matter protests over the summer and fall, in some cases participating themselves in violation of Centers for Disease Control guidelines about gathering sizes. Such protests were okay, in their view, because they agreed with the politics at issue. But we all know what would happen if crowds gathered to protest, say, draconian lockdown orders.

Fortunately for us, because we are Americans and we live in a free country—a place governed by laws and not by men—we have a constructive way to express our rage and outrage: we can simply stop obeying these lawless edicts.

We can safely open our businesses and places of worship, and in so doing dare the tiny despots in the local health department or the mayor’s office to stop us. If enough of us take a stand, as a free people should do, the Garcettis and Newsoms and Cuomos will back down—and if they don’t, they can face mass protests, public outrage, and eventually the rebuke of the Supreme Court.

If ever there were a time for mass civil disobedience, it’s now.

 

https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/08/its-time-for-mass-civil-disobedience-against-lawless-lockdown-orders/ 


 


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After the Republic

The ruling class knows that whether Donald Trump succeeds or fails to overturn the course of this election is irrelevant to the seeds that have been planted in the psyche of millions of Americans.


Pondering the Israel-Lebanon conflict in 2006, neoconservative armchair general John Podhoretz wondered if the tactical mistake Americans made in Iraq “was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything?” 

“Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?” he asked.

Of course, it never occurred to Podhoretz that our biggest mistake was to set foot in Iraq at all, that America should have remained, as much as yet possible, a republic not an empire.

The problem with empires is that they all eventually come home. The logical conclusion of empire is that the instruments of force and fraud used to subdue and pacify foreign populations are applied to citizens. 

“When this nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It would erase Trump’s lies,” former labor secretary Robert Reich huffed, “comfort those who have been harmed by his hatefulness, and name every official, politician, executive, and media mogul whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe.” 

“The most humane and reasonable way to deal with all these people,” MSNBC host Chris Hayes wrote of Trump supporters, “if we survive this, is some kind of truth and reconciliation commission.” Archneoconservative Bill Kristol responded with a contemptuous quip: “How about truth and no reconciliation?”

“Michael Anton is the Robert Brasillach of our times and deserves the same fate,” Nils Gilman tweeted. Brasillach was a French author and journalist executed for “intellectual crimes” during World War II. In other words, Gilman, the vice president of programs at the left-wing Berggruen Institute, thinks it’s fair to incite the execution of political opponents for their intellectual crimes. Predictably, Gilman also advocates a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission, something South Africa used to confront the legacy of Apartheid in a way that enabled restorative justice.”

Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s court “conservative,” insists Republicans entertaining the investigation of electoral fraud “should never serve in office, join a corporate board, find a faculty position or be accepted into ‘polite’ society. We have a list.” It’s not enough, she said, for Joe Biden to overtake Donald Trump as president, but Trump’s “enablers have to lose. We have to collectively burn down the Republican Party. We have to level them. Because if there are survivors . . . they will do it again.” 

Unhinged psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee fondly retold a story she claims a reporter whose grandparents were refugees from Nazi Germany related to her “I cannot help but remember a conversation I had with my grandfather,” she wrote, “about the firebombing of Dresden, whether he thought the Allies should be reproached for targeting civilians . . . .” The moral of the story, according to Lee: “He said—I remember this well—that it was a necessity, because nothing short of the sight of SEEING THEIR CITIES LEVELED would have broken the spell. The German public, he said, was not open to reason. They could not be persuaded to abandon Hitler.”

“No seriously . . . how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook?” asked David Atkins, an elected member of the Democratic National Committee from California. “We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.”

“Republicanism is no longer a political problem,” tweeted Jerry Saltz, senior art critic of New York magazine. “Republicanism is a social problem. It must be treated in the same way coronavirus is treated: it has to be isolated and snuffed-out by repressing it in about 70% of the general population.” Saltz assures “the ‘ism’ not the people,” but bombs and bullets have never discriminated between people and the “-isms” they hold. (Saltz subsequently deleted the tweets.)

It should be clear by now that as far as the establishment and its ideological deputies are concerned, every single American who voted for Trump in either election is to them what Sunni men were to Podhoretz. “Democracy-building,” once the main item on the foreign policy menu, will now become domestic policy priority number one as it is shoved down Americans’ throats. The establishment and its proxies now claim just cause for their efforts to consolidate control over democratic institutions, courts, law enforcement apparatuses, and information flow. 

Regardless of Trump’s competency or his fidelity to the mandate, 2016 was a referendum against American empire at home and abroad. The illusion of republicanism was tenable until a mass of Americans decided it wasn’t. Now the mask is off, the contradictions of empire will be resolved. 

Regardless of what comes of the fraud investigations in the aftermath of the presidential election, it is true enough that a mass of Americans feel that they are no longer in control of their national destiny, that their voices either don’t matter or are suppressed by the powers that be. The democratic processes and institutions of this country have become so Byzantine that they are no longer democratic at all and require experts—a technically trained class of priests—to discern the omens and auguries of managerial democracy as they have done around the globe. 

It matters just as much whether fraud actually happened as it does that people believe the system is illegitimate, which is something we might be overlooking. “Faith” in the system has eroded. Establishmentarians, whether they identify as liberal or conservative, tacitly acknowledge this every time they propose illiberal means supposedly to conserve liberal institutions. They do not believe that liberal democracy is enough, that it is possible or desirable to keep the apparatuses of the state neutral.

Millions of Americans find themselves in the shoes of Sherman McCoy, the protagonist of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Deprived of his freedom, his wealth, his status, his children, his wife, his mistress, his friends, his social standing, his dignity, McCoy at last sheds the skin of a wimpy yuppy and bears his teeth. 

“They don’t alter that dog’s personality with dog biscuits or pills,” McCoy says of his transformation. “They chain it up, and they beat it, and they bait it, and they taunt it, and they beat it some more, until it turns and bares its fangs and is ready for the final fight every time it hears a sound. . . . The dog doesn’t cling to the notion that he’s a fabulous house pet in some terrific dog show, the way the man does. The dog gets the idea. The dog knows when it’s time to turn into an animal and fight.”

The ruling class knows that whether Trump succeeds or fails to overturn the course of this election is irrelevant to the seeds that have been planted in the psyche of these Americans.


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Prager U's New Video Expertly Breaks Down the Left's Bizarre View of the World



The left has a view of the world that is, for the most part, pretty bizarre. For all intents and purposes, it should be a fringe lens through which to see people but it’s become trendy in today’s western world to do so.

But while it is trendy, it can be confusing. Even to the people who see things the way they’ve been taught to by leftist pop-culture and internet mobs. Luckily, Prager U is here to really show you how the left views the world and does so in a way that’s easy to understand.

As it turns out, the left sees things in terms of three different categories, and those are power, race, and class.

In order to better explain this, Dennis Prager himself uses Israel as an example and tells you why the left despises the country despite the fact that they should love it according to their own professed belief systems.

Prager first begins by explaining the “power compass” which guides the left.

“Instead of evaluating people and nations on the basis of right and wrong or good and evil, the left evaluates them on the basis of weak and strong,” said Prager. “If you’re weak, you’re good. If you’re strong, you’re bad. Israel is strong. Therefore, it is bad. America is strong. Therefore it is bad. The Palestinians are regarded as weak. Therefore, they are good.”

Normally, we see things through a moral lens. A person who is weaker may be morally wrong and thus, we consider that person the bad guy in the situation. The left’s power compass makes them see strength as an evil period, no matter who is actually wrong in the situation.

The next compass is race, and as Prager explains, the left views skin color as good and evil, not the character of a person:

Just as it substitutes weak and strong for good and evil, the left substitutes non-white and white for good and evil. The left doesn’t judge people by their actions, but by their race. That’s why, for example, the left asserts that a black person cannot be a racist, only a white person can be a racist.

And that provides the second reason Israel is labeled evil: Israelis are considered white and Palestinians are not white. Never mind that more than half of Israel’s population is not white.

The result: the left essentially ignores Palestinian terror and loudly condemns Israel’s responses to terror.



The last compass, and likely the most significant of the three, is the left’s navigation by the “class compass.”

In the same way the left views strength as evil and weakness as good, the left views wealth as evil and poorness as good. Harkening back to Karl Marx, Prager noted that the communists taught that only the workers were good while the owners were actually bad.

The left hates America and Israel for being wealthy, especially compared to the nations they are surrounded by.

These three moral compasses form a very off-kilter world view that blinds a person to the actual moral problems the world is suffering by and instead gets them to see things in ways that will only cause more problems down the road. It forces you to ignore actual evil in order to enforce a fantasy based on ideology.

The left likes to believe that it is the true morality on the planet, but in truth, their ideology is the greatest cancer on it.


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An Interim Report From Special Counsel Durham Will Cause Heartburn for Biden



Last week Benjamin Wittes published a very long story at Lawfareblog concerning what he described as the “problem” represented by the now “Special Counsel” status of John Durham.

Among the issues highlighted by Wittes in his piece was the fact that the Order by Attorney General appointing Durham was drafted in a way to be nearly identical to the Order that appointed Robert Mueller, so any calls now by the Democrats to end the Durham investigation would directly contradict the demands made by many of those Democrats that the Mueller investigation be allowed to reach its own conclusion without interference from Barr as Attorney General.

In addition, Wittes calls “clever” the fact that Barr’s Order directs Durham to prepare a report to the Attorney General on his investigation, either final or interim, in such a format that it can be released to the public.  Such a public report is not called for under the Special Counsel regulations — which actually call for a “confidential” report to be prepared for the Attorney General.  But it was the Democrats who demanded that the Mueller Report be published.  It was the partisan Democrats in Mueller’s SCO who — without being asked to do so — wrote “Executive Summaries” at the start of each chapter of the Report which they expected would be released to the public while the balance of the report underwent review for purposes of redacting classified and other confidential material used in the Report.  Those summaries were intended to set the press “narrative” and become the “talking points” for everyone claiming Pres. Trump conspired with the Russians or obstructed the investigation.  AG Barr opted to not release the summaries until the entire Report was released.

Sunday Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe commented publicly that he thinks Durham should provide an Interim Report in a format that may be publicly disclosed as a way to educate the public on the substance and severity of what he has uncovered so far — which Ratcliffe claims is substantial — and to provide some insulation for the investigation against demands by Democrats that the investigation be shut down. Demands by Democrats to shut the investigation would look all the more like an effort to cover-up Obama Administration wrongdoing if the substance of the investigation was known and judged to be significant.

If the Republicans control the Senate for the purposes of confirming nominations, the Republicans can enforce their demand that Biden’s Attorney General not interfere and that Durham’s Final Report be publicly released.

If the Democrats control the Senate, and Biden is able to shove through nominees regardless of what is said about protecting Durham’s investigation, the GOP leverage is severely reduced.  But the Democrats would still be forced to pay a price in terms of public perception.  They are already likely to lose the House in 2022.  If they have only a 50-50 hold on the Senate, and Biden’s AG fires Durham and closes the investigation, the ability of the Democrats to hold the Senate likely evaporates as well.

Wittes’ expression of concern in his article should be read as an encapsulation of the concerns of the left-wing liberal lawyer class in DC. Wittes is a longstanding close friend and admirer of Jim Comey, and pretty much everything published in Lawfareblog is a reflection of the thinking of the leftwing legal cognoscenti.  From the article, it is clear that Wittes’ friends are worried about how the presence of a Durham investigation looking back at the activities of a lot of Democrat partisans in the Obama DOJ might impact the activities of a Biden DOJ going forward — especially if any significant actors from the Obama years want to return to a Biden DOJ.

Primary among those concerned would be Sally Yates, rumored to be Biden’s choice for Attorney General. The problem for Yates is that she’s a potential witness in Durham’s investigation.  As Deputy Attorney General during the first six months of the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, and later acting Attorney General for the first few days of the Trump Administration, she had primary operational oversight over all DOJ components, including the FBI.  She had interactions with Comey and McCabe, and others in the White House before and after the 2016 election, as well as subordinates at the Justice Department, all of whom could be material to Durham’s inquiry.  She cannot “supervise” Durham’s investigation in the manner intended by the regulations under which he will operate because of her conflict  If she is Attorney General, it is likely that someone in the Justice Department other than her would actually be responsible for that task.  Who would be Joe Biden’s “Rod Rosenstein”?

I suspect where the battle will really be joined is the degree to which — if at all — Durham has extended his investigation to members of the Mueller Special Counsel’s Office — many of whom are serious Democrat partisans with ties to Obama and Clinton.  The Order appointing Durham made specific reference to the Mueller investigation being within the scope of Durham’s authority, but an unnamed DOJ official stated that the SCO investigation is only relevant with regard to actions by FBI personnel that extended over the timeline between when the FBI was handling the matter, and when it was transferred to the SCO after Mueller was named.

That might very well be true — now — but there have been issues raised about the actions and decision-making of SCO attorneys, including the disclosures about steps taken by them that could be viewed as “obstructive” behavior when they understood that there would likely be an investigation of them after their work with the SCO was completed.  Andrew Weissmann was kind enough to set forth in his book explicitly that they understood such an investigation was likely.  All their actions are then going to be evaluated against that backdrop — like wiping the data off their SCO phones, sometimes more than once.

An Interim Report published sometime in the next six weeks would be a huge factor in how the confirmation hearings for many Biden Administration nominees would proceed.

It would be out of character for John Durham to act in that manner rather than via indictments returned which make the factual findings of his investigation public in the form of a document he stands prepared to prove in a courtroom.

But, in this particular circumstance, if he is not prepared to move forward with such a case in the next six weeks, he may come to see that an Interim Report is the only way to safeguard his ability to finish what he has started.


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Every business is essential

The powerful and the famous are lining up against everyday people losing their livelihoods



Governors across the country are deploying their unilateral power to institute draconian measures which close small businesses, mostly those in the service industry. They use outright Orwellian language to justify doing so, all in the name of the greater good of halting COVID-19 cases. But it’s not working anymore.

Total cases are higher now than they’ve been since the spring and people are losing their livelihoods. No federal relief has come and there is a nationwide feeling that the dam is about to break. When people were told they had ‘15 days to slow the spread’, they listened. While they obliged, they watched crowds gather in protest of their personal causes and politicians ignore their own rules.

As Gavin Newsom dines at French Laundry and Andrew Cuomo collects Emmy Awards, small-business owners in their states are going viral for fighting back against the orders rendering their businesses not essential. That’s how the governors have justified the shuttering of thousands of businesses since March: you are not essential. As it turns out, the least essential workers happen to be the mayors of Denver, Austin, Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington DC, New York City, San Jose and San Francisco, all of whom violated the COVID restrictions they had imposed on their own constituents. When members of our media flatter the likes of Cuomo with giant cotton swabs and late-night appearances, here’s what they should be asking: what is not an essential business?

Which businesses are not essential to people? What defines a non-essential business? Every business that employs someone is essential. Every business owned by a private citizen on personal capital is essential to that person. In Los Angeles, a woman named Angela Marsden recorded a video of her bar, Pineapple Hill Saloon and Grill shut down, including outside dining, which she had paid to have installed in the parking lot. In the video she shows a catering set-up for a movie production, showing the distance to be about 50 feet away. The clip went viral, garnering over five million views in two days. Rich and powerful celebrities (or podcasters) have been deemed essential workers in Los Angeles, but a small-business owner and her employees are not. 

In Staten Island, Danny Presti, who owns Mac’s Public House, is defying shutdown orders and the city’s absurd coloring system for neighborhoods and continuing to operate in the face of losing his entire business to health code violations. Presti’s bar sits on the border of an ‘orange zone’, meaning anyone can walk two blocks to another bar that is not shut down. It’s madness. A few miles away in Manhattan, the late-night ‘comedy’ show Saturday Night Live is allowed to operate indoors. This past Saturday, Staten Islander Pete Davidson lampooned the people defying government shutdown orders as ‘babies’.

The powerful and the famous are lining up against everyday people losing their livelihoods without any assistance or incentive. That’s how social revolutions and populist backlashes happen — and Donald Trump won’t be to blame for it anymore. Small-business owners who have been deemed non-essential are waking up to the fact that there is no help coming — and that people forcing them to lose everything are not there to assist. The message is clear: you are on your own. 

Eventually governors like Gavin Newsom and Andrew Cuomo will learn that of all the people they are deeming non-essential, they might be the least essential of them all. 


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Russian 'doomsday' plane's radio equipment stolen by thieves

 

Thieves have stolen radio equipment from a Russian military plane known as the "doomsday aircraft" for its role in the country's nuclear arsenal, state media report.

The reports say unknown thieves broke into the Ilyushin Il-80 plane at an airfield in the southern Rostov region.

They reportedly opened the cargo hatch and stole 39 pieces of radio equipment.

The local government's transport ministry said an investigation into the break-in was under way.

Military experts say the aircraft is one of four Il-80s designed to be used as airborne command posts for Russian officials, including the president, in the event of a nuclear conflict.

 

 

In a report on Monday, state news agency Interfax said the aircraft had been undergoing scheduled repairs at an airfield in the port city of Taganrog since the beginning of 2019.

Officials from the Taganrog Aviation Scientific and Technical Complex reported the theft to local police on 4 December, the agency said.

 

 

Citing an unnamed Russian police source, the agency said a cargo-hatch breach was discovered during an inspection of the aircraft. It added that authorities were considering opening a criminal investigation.

All equipment had been intact at the last inspection on 26 November, said the Ren-TV broadcaster, which first reported the break-in. Investigators took fingerprints and shoeprints from inside the aircraft, the broadcaster added.

The aircraft is one of four Il-80s currently in service with the Russian Air Force, though only three are operational. Interfax described them as among the force's most classified aircraft.

Should a nuclear war break out, the Russian president would board the aircraft, where he or she could potentially order the launch of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and make other strategic decisions.

With no external windows except in the cockpit, the aircraft are designed to have some protection from the effects of a nuclear blast. The US operates a similar fleet of airborne command posts, called E-4B Nightwatch.

In May last year, Russia's Deputy Defence Minister Alexei Krivoruchko said work was under way to upgrade and re-equip the country's Il-80s.

A new generation of airborne command posts are reported to be in development as well.

Russia's Tass news agency reported in October that the Il-80s are scheduled to be replaced by a new model, the Il-96-400M, but did not give a timeframe.

 

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55229438?xtor=AL-72-%5Bpartner%5D-%5Bbbc.news.twitter%5D-%5Bheadline%5D-%5Bnews%5D-%5Bbizdev%5D-%5Bisapi%5D&at_medium=custom7&at_custom2=twitter&at_custom4=E703B646-3951-11EB-B2DF-85F34744363C&at_custom3=%40BBCWorld&at_campaign=64&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D 

 

 


 

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What Is Mark Zuckerberg’s Election Money Doing In Georgia?

The big question Georgia should ask is whether a California billionaire should be allowed to waltz into their state and finance aspects of their elections.



Imagine if a billionaire of conservative or libertarian leanings—Charles Koch, say—had given $350 million to a nonprofit run by Republican operatives who previously worked at a “dark money” outfit tied to Karl Rove where they trained digital activists and campaign workers.

Then imagine this nonprofit group re-granted the millions of dollars to local election officials to “help” them carry out the 2020 election—buying drop boxes for ballots, hiring temporary staff, conducting “voter education,” and the like. 

Finally, imagine that in 2020, a state that usually voted for the other party in presidential elections narrowly flipped to the donor’s preferred party, and counties receiving “help” were disproportionately ones that helped the Republican win the state, with many counties shifting dramatically from their historical patterns in a red-ward direction.

Even supposing there were perfectly ethical and legal reasons for all this, because of the appearance of election influence from private parties with deep pockets, it would be front-page news. The New York Times would be outraged a nonprofit gave the appearance of acting in a partisan basis in an electoral process. Elected officials in the disfavored party would be loudly objecting, threatening lawsuits, demanding investigations of the election officials who accepted the funds, and insisting election laws be changed to prevent any such effort in the future.

As head of Capital Research Center, a watchdog on the use and abuse of nonprofits, I would sympathize with the angry politicians and happily critique the scheme publicly. But I know of no such effort by right-leaning donors or nonprofits.

I do know, however, of a scheme by left-leaning out-of-state donors Mark Zuckerberg and wife Priscilla Chan to give $350 million to an allegedly “nonpartisan” nonprofit, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (CTCL), which in turn re-granted the funds to thousands of governmental election officials around the country. CRC has begun state-by-state studies of how these funds were used, beginning with Georgia (Pennsylvania is next). As I testified Friday to the Georgia state Senate, the Georgia data are startling. 

We can’t specify all funding CTCL gave to Georgia counties, because the Center isn’t disclosing that information to the Associated Press or anyone else, even though they’re required to reveal it in their next IRS filing (which conveniently won’t appear until a year from now). But using local government records and news accounts, we’ve uncovered many of the largest grants, mostly given to the largest urban areas, and CTCL has disclosed which counties received grants, though not the amounts. Notably, CTCL funded less than one-third of all counties.

We’ve correlated the grants with the official vote totals for the counties involved. Here are some notable discoveries we’ve found:

  • Nine out of ten of CTCL’s largest known grants went to counties Joe Biden won.
  • Of the ten counties with the greatest shifts to the Democratic presidential candidate (comparing 2016 to 2020 votes), nine received CTCL grants.
  • These nine grantees averaged a 13.7 percent shift toward the Democrat. Two, Cobb and Gwinnett, were among the four counties that delivered Biden the most votes.
  • Although CTCL funded more counties won by Donald Trump than by Biden in raw numbers, it only funded 21 percent of all Trump counties versus 55 percent of Biden counties. So a Biden county was more than two-and-a-half times more likely to receive funding.
  • CTCL funded all four counties that provided Biden 100,000 or more votes.
  • And CTCL funded those four counties lavishly. Per capita, they received between $4.38 and $10.47 for every man, woman, and child.
  • By contrast, so far as we currently know, only one county won by Trump was funded above one dollar per capita (Cherokee), and that county’s Democratic vote leapt up 70 percent, compared to a 24 percent rise in its Republican vote. Trump counties like Carroll, Camden, and Lumpkin received about a half-dollar or less.
  • Biden carried 33 counties that delivered him 10,000 or more votes. CTCL funded 70 percent of them. By contrast, Trump carried 46 counties that gave him 10,000 or more votes, but CTCL funded only 20 percent of them. So the most vote-rich counties for Biden were three-and-a-half times more likely to be funded than Trump’s most vote-rich counties.
  • Totaling votes in all 44 counties CTCL funded, the Republican presidential vote rose 207,000 over the last election. The Democratic presidential vote jumped by 530,000, or more than two-and-a-half times the Republican rise.

Do these numbers sound nonpartisan? If not, shouldn’t the authorities in Georgia and other battleground states, and authorities in Washington, start investigating what happened, and whether CTCL, which is legally forbidden to act as a partisan in elections, overstepped the law? There may be perfectly ethical explanations for all this that involve zero electoral influence by outside parties, but public trust in elections requires avoiding even the appearance of conflicts of interest.

I gave the Georgia senators some obvious questions to ask: How did these relationships between CTCL and counties in Georgia begin? Did CTCL reach out first? What preconditions did the Center put on its funds? Did the counties fulfill their budgetary and other obligations under Georgia state law when using these funds? Who designed voter “education” materials and advertisements? 

Here’s an especially obvious question: Was any money spent on training to deter vote fraud, such as how to match signatures?

The biggest question the Georgia legislature should ask is whether a California billionaire should be allowed to waltz into the Peach State and finance aspects of their elections? Do they want billionaires in the future to steer election resources so unequally and inequitably?

That’s still a live question for Georgia and her voters, because CTCL is already offering more grants to county offices for the U.S. Senate runoff elections in January. As I told the Peach State senators, some states forbid this kind of funding. Georgia can too.


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