Wednesday, June 2, 2021

Blumenthal Issues Warning To Conservative Justices Of “Seismic” Changes If They Rule The Wrong Way



I have previously criticized Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., for his almost unrivaled advocacy of censorship and speech controls. Blumenthal previously threatened social media companies not to “backslide” in censoring opposing views.  Now, Blumenthal is taking up the cudgel of court packing with not so subtle threats to conservative justices that, if they do not vote with their liberal colleagues, the Court may be fundamentally altered.  He is not alone in such reckless and coercive rhetoric.

Blumenthal told The Hill:

“It will inevitably fuel and drive an effort to expand the Supreme Court if this activist majority betrays fundamental constitutional principles. It’s already driving that movement. Chipping away at Roe v. Wade will precipitate a seismic movement to reform the Supreme Court. It may not be expanding the Supreme Court, it may be making changes to its jurisdiction, or requiring a certain numbers of votes to strike down certain past precedents.”

The statement is reminiscent of Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer declaring in front of the Supreme Court “I want to tell you, Gorsuch, I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price.”

Democratic leaders not only have embraced court packing but now openly threaten the Court to vote with the liberal justices or face dire consequences for the Court. The effort seems to be a play for the change in voting on the Court the followed prior threats for court packing in the 1930s. Faced with a conservative majority ruling against his New Deal legislation, Roosevelt called for up to six additional justices, one for every justice older than 70. That was basically the profile of the “four horsemen” blocking his measures.

Like the latest calls, the FDR plan was based on politics rather than principle. When the politics changed, the plan died. FDR dropped his plan as soon as he got what he wanted with a favorable majority. That is why the switch of Justice Owen Roberts in favor of a New Deal case became known as a “switch in time that saved nine.”

The Democrats are pushing to engage in court packing despite polls showing heavy opposition to the move from voters as well as opposition from the justices themselves. Before Ginsburg died, nine nominations had occurred in election years since 1900, and Ginsburg herself said in 2016 that the Senate had to do its “job” and vote on such nominations because “there’s nothing in the Constitution that says the president stops being president in his last year.” Moreover, Ginsburg also opposed expanding the Court, but she is not being cited by liberals as the reason to doing precisely what she opposed as inimical to the functioning of the Court.  Justice Steven Breyer has also denounced the move to pack the court.

None of that matters to Democratic members who know that court packing is popular with the most extreme elements of their party.

Many of us have discussed the expansion of the Supreme Court through the years. Over 20 years ago, I recommended the expansion of the Court to 17 or 19 members. However, that recommendation would occur over many years and would not give advocates the short-term majority that they are seeking. That is the difference between reforming and packing the Court.

It is particularly chilling to see United States senators openly pressuring justices to vote with their side or face severe consequences.  Blumenthal went as far as to mention specific cases and the expected rulings. This follows raw demands in the confirmation hearing of now Justice Amy Coney Barrett that she promise to rule on particular cases “correctly” as a condition for her confirmation.

The question is whether the Democrats are overplaying their hand. Recently, a Democratic “dark money” group called Demand Justice, had a billboard truck in Washington the next day in the streets of Washington warning “Breyer, retire. Don’t risk your legacy.” The group is calling for open court packing to force a liberal majority. (Demand Justice once employed White House press secretary Jen Psaki as a communications consultant, and Psaki was on the advisory board of one of its voting projects.)  The question is whether Breyer will accommodate such demands from the left or feel conversely that he should remain on the bench to show that such tactics do not influence members.

These not-so-veiled threats could have the same inverse impact on members like Chief Justice John Roberts, who could view the attempt to influence the justices as a far greater threat than any court-packing scheme.


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Fauci Emails



The Emails



 



Senator Rand Paul

Representative Matt Gaetz 

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Condoleezza Rice: Trump 'Touched the Nerve' of Americans Feeling Left Out

 


Article by Charlie McCarthy in NewsMax

 

Condoleezza Rice: Trump 'Touched the Nerve' of Americans Feeling Left Out

Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says she understands yhy former President Donald Trump has been a successful populist politician.

"What really struck me, and maybe it's because I'm a political scientist, is that the conditions that produced a populist leader, who had never been in government before, was something I think a lot of us had not paid much attention to, frankly," Rice said, The Hill reported.

"He touched the nerve of people who felt left out by globalization, who felt diminished by elites. That just assumed that the conversation was the conversation they were having, not the conversation that people who’d been left behind were having."

Speaking on "The Carlos Watson Show" this week, Rice said Trump reached voters by telling them "you contribute too, and they’ve forgotten you. They look down on you."

"That’s something that we probably still really need to pay attention to," she said. "As a political scientist, I guess I was more interested in what produced this in our society."

Rice, who served in the George W. Bush administration, previously had been critical of Trump. After George Floyd’s death while in police custody last summer, Rice said the former president should try to understand the plight of all Americans.

Trump was critical of the Black Lives Matter protests after Floyd's death.

"I would ask the president to first and foremost speak in the language of unity, the language of empathy. Not everyone is going to agree with any president, with this president, but you have to speak to every American, not just to those who might agree with you," Rice said then, according to The Hill. "When the president speaks, it needs to be from a place of thoughtfulness, from a place of having really honed the message so that it reaches all Americans."

Rice, a Stanford University professor, was asked by Watson if she had known Trump before he ran for president.

"I had met him a couple of times, but never in the context of politics," she said. "I remember thinking at the time, 'Well, this is going to be an interesting experiment.' We’re about to elect somebody whose first job in government is going to be president of the United States, and that was new."

Rice said Trump’s populism was not "anti-democratic."

"[British Prime Minister] Boris Johnson is a little bit this way, and it's not anti-democratic. People are wrong to say it’s anti-democratic," she said. "These are people who believe that the institutions are not really the way you reach people.

"If you think about the use of Twitter by populists, it goes around the media, it goes around the institutions. It’s a direct appeal to the people, and we’ve seen that before in history."

Rice, who has said she didn’t vote for Trump in 2016, also said she supported Trump’s right to question the election results, to a point.

"It was completely appropriate for President Trump to go to the courts about the election and all of that. We did have Bush v. Gore, which ended up in the Supreme Court," she said.

"But it was not appropriate to question, past a certain point, the legitimacy of those elections."

Trump has said he's mulling another run for president in 2024. In April, he said he thought a campaign would be "very successful."

"The polls show it and everybody wants me to do it," Trump said. "One hundred percent, I'm thinking about running and we will I think be very successful. We were very successful."

https://www.newsmax.com/politics/condoleeza-rice-trump-populist-americans/2021/06/02/id/1023586/ 



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The Worst-Kept Secret in America:..

 The Worst-Kept Secret in America: 

High Inflation Is Back



 for Mises.org

Tags Money and Banks

To most people, “inflation” signifies widespread rising prices. Economists have long argued, as a matter of technical accuracy, that “inflation” denotes an increasing money supply. Frankly, though, most people don’t care what happens to the supply of money, but they care a lot about the prices they pay, so I’ll focus primarily on the numerous rapidly rising prices Americans are paying today.

Following are several examples of the current inflation.

Corn, soybeans, and wheat have been trading at multiyear highs, with corn having risen from around $3.80 per bushel in January 2020 to approximately $6.75 now. Chicken wings are at all-time record highs. It is getting more expensive to eat.

Copper prices have risen to an all-time high. Steel, too, recently traded at prices 35 percent above the previous all-time high set in 2008. Perhaps most famously, the price of lumber has nearly quadrupled since the beginning of 2020 and has nearly doubled just since January.

Naturally, with raw materials prices soaring, prices of manufactured goods are jumping, too. That is especially noticeable in the housing market, where the median price of existing homes rose to $329,100 in March—a whopping 17.2 percent increase from a year earlier.

The cost of driving is soaring, too. According to J.D. Power, cited in the Wall Street Journal, the average used car price has risen 16.7 percent and new car prices have risen 9.6 percent since January.

So, are you depressed yet? Perhaps you can take some comfort in Uncle Sam’s official price indexes where the price increases seem (at least at first glance) less jarring. But remember that the most commonly cited inflation indicator, the Consumer Price Index (CPI), is computed on the basis of a mythical “urban basket of goods” that often bears little relation to what you and I actually buy. The CPI, excluding food and energy, rose “only” 0.9 percent in March. That doesn’t sound like much, but it was the biggest one-month increase since 1981, when, for those of you too young to remember, annual inflation was 10.32 percent. As for the Producer Price Index (PPI), which generally precedes increases in consumer prices, it is increasing at the highest rate since 2010, according to the Department of Labor.

The Federal Reserve (Fed) has assured the public that the current inflation is transitory and that they have it under control. I don’t know the future any more than Fed officials do, but I do not share their confidence. I am skeptical because: first, the Fed since its inception has had a terrible track record of accomplishing any of the tasks assigned to it by Congress; second, it’s impossible for the Fed or any other entity to control millions of prices and therefore to control the rate of inflation (to believe otherwise is a central planner’s conceit).

Tragically, the Fed has been trying for years to boost inflation to 2 percent annually. How bizarre that our central bank would deliberately strive to reduce the value of our money. At 2 percent per year, money loses half its purchasing power in thirty-five years. That would be half of your nest egg, millennials!

Today’s inflation is already problematical. A higher cost of living falls hardest on the poorest Americans. Given the present uncertainty about future prices, numerous businesses are struggling to determine how much to produce, and thus are more likely to overproduce or underproduce. Furthermore, if inflation causes foreigners to lose confidence in the dollar, there could be an exodus from the dollar that could end its status as the principal global reserve currency, thereby triggering an even steeper decline in the dollar’s purchasing power.

The quantity of dollars already has risen 32.9 percent in the last seventeen months (mostly due to the federal government’s mind-boggling spending binge). It’s possible that we have passed a tipping point where prolonged inflation higher than the hoped-for and already objectionable 2 percent is unavoidable.

Hang on tight, folks. We could be in for a rough ride in the months ahead.

Author: 

Mark Hendrickson

Mark Hendrickson is adjunct professor of economics at Grove City College. 


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Biden Reads DNC Election Narrative: “According to The Intelligence Community ....”

Biden Reads DNC Election Narrative: 

“According to The Intelligence Community Terrorism from White Supremacy Is The Most Lethal Threat to The Homeland Today”


Once you see the strings on the Marionettes it is impossible to watch the pantomime and not see them.  The leftist narrative for the 2022 election is based on racism and the false construct of white violent extremists.  That’s the entire purpose of the January 6th commission effort.  All of these manipulative soundbites are fuel for the MSM propaganda machine to churn out.

Yesterday, exactly as expected, Biden read the script typed into his teleprompter by the Obama network.  The Potemkin political village that Biden represents has no clue what is going on around him… he doesn’t need to.  The toxic Biden Inc family network is in it for money, self indulgence, elitist credibility and self-interest; they don’t care what words are needed, they will say/support any political narrative they are told to.

For Biden Inc this is a business decision; for Obama Inc this is an ideological effort.


“According to the intelligence community”…  (READ HERE)


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“According to The Intelligence Community ....” -The Whole Story-



1.) When I was in DC, doing deep research on the issues around spygate and trying to understand the depth of corruption within the legislative and judicial branches, I ran into a guy...
2.) DC was locked down at the time (May/June 2020), so there were very few people around. However, this guy's credentials within the DC system were impeccable.
I checked him out afterward & was stunned at how he spent his entire career in/around the IC and related apparatus 
3.) After a lengthy and casual introduction and discussion, I was genuinely shocked at the severity of his warnings about the FBI, DOJ and various other agencies.
However, in hindsight, after checking him out, I realized he was certainly a person to understand. 
4.) His warning was direct, devoid of emotion, very deliberate and very cold. But behind his eyes and words was a guy telling the truth; the quiet part that no-one inside the bubble says openly. 
5.) What he said was that not a single person of honor or integrity can survive inside the DC institutions we were discussing. The system itself is designed to remove them... All of them... every-single-one. 
6.) He laughed at the term "honorable" rank and file. But it wasn't a snarky laugh; it was almost like a resignation laugh... a genuine look toward the sky and compassion for a view I held that his honesty would destroy. 
7.) He wasn't bitter, angry or jaded; and I would not call him cynical. He was very genuine, very wise, held decades of knowledge.... and was a "just the facts" kinda Joe Friday guy. 
8.) I found out a few days later his job within the system was sending him overseas again. Perhaps that's why he apparently wanted to tell the genuine side of his story and experience. Dunno, but I will never forget it. 
9.) I still held the belief there were three branches of government.... and there were "checks and balances"... and there had to be some way for a good person to expose corruption.
He quickly dispatched those beliefs (with examples). 
10.) He explained the "checks and balances" I spoke of did exist at a time when there were three branches of government. However, that time has long passed.
There is only one overarching DC eco-system now. The three branch concept is gone. Doesn't exist. 
11.) As he explained, the levers of power are all controlled by the same system, and behind that system are positions - not people. "Positions" 
12.) People are evaluated based on their ability to support and protect the system. Their skill level is what moves them into position.
Position. Evaluation. Next Position. Evaluation. Etc. 
13.) The system more like an institution. Within the institution there are divisions. The divisions are what we used to call "branches".

The divisions (branches) are not independent from the institution of DC. The divisions are operated by people in power who hold positions. 
14.) He identified the timeline of this institutional creation as a slow build (over decades), but most visibly increasing in publicity after 9/11/01 and the patriot act. 
15.) Once the patriot act made the government responsible for total safety; the previously embedded bad actors took full control. One office of particular note was the creation of the ODNI.
As he noted the amassing of surveillance power. 
16.) once that Rubicon was crossed, everything after was downstream and unstoppable. The institution of the total intelligence apparatus now had full control.... over every branch (which again, he said is more like 'divisions').
17.) When he explained about the Inspector General part, I understood why the IG's offices (all of them) are compromised.... and why there can never be a whistleblower against the system.
Remember the "positions" part. Yeah, the IG's are key on that aspect. 
18.) When he explained the legislative committee heads, he also explained how 'advise and consent' is used to keep the (executive) positions staffed only with particular people who have passed the institutional evaluation. 
19.) He would know... his experience was deep in the part of the system that does the evaluation.
Think about what is needed to move into a position. A background check right? A clearance right?
Control of the people in the system, is done from the place where checks are done 
20.) This is the place where people of honor and integrity are weeded out. They are a threat; or really not so much a threat, but just the "wrong type" of people. Said with a very matter-of-fact acceptance. 
21.) One of the key institutions who do the background checks is The FBI.
That is why the FBI had to be compromised first in the structure of the new (post 9/11) system.
Visual Aid Below:Image
22.) Once you realize there is only one party, the UniParty, the next step is to recognize there are no longer three branches within government.

Then everything that has previously created frustration starts to make sense. 
23) The discussion about there no longer being three branches of government was an eye-opening part of the talk... But if you think about it, it makes sense.

The executive, the legislative and the judicial branches all defer to the Intelligence Community.Image
24) Here's the exercise he sent me away with. If you doubt this thread, apply the scientific method to the hypothesis.

Show me a single example where they don't. 
/ENDImage


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America the Outlier

Voter photo IDs are the rule in Europe and elsewhere.


Democrats and much of the media are pushing to make permanent the extraordinary, pandemic-driven measures to relax voting rules during the 2020 elections—warning anew of racist voter “suppression” otherwise. Yet democracies in Europe and elsewhere tell a different story—of the benefits of stricter voter ID requirements after hard lessons learned.

A database on voting rules worldwide compiled by the Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, shows that election integrity measures are widely accepted globally, and have often been adopted by countries after they’ve experienced fraud under looser voting regimes.

Of 47 nations surveyed in Europe—a place where, on other matters, American progressives often look to with envy—all but one country requires a government-issued photo voter ID to vote. The exception is the U.K., and even there voter IDs are mandatory in Northern Ireland for all elections and in parts of England for local elections. Moreover, Boris Johnson’s government recently introduced legislation to have the rest of the country follow suit.

Criticisms of the British leader’s voter ID push are similar to those heard in the United States. The Scottish National Party claims his voter ID push targets “lower income, ethnic minority and younger people” who are less likely to vote for Johnson’s conservatives and therefore represents “Trump-like voter suppression.”

Yet despite such pushback, Britain looks set to follow countries in Europe and elsewhere with stricter voting regimes, few of which temporarily relaxed any of their voting rules during the pandemic.

Seventy-four percent of European countries entirely ban absentee voting for citizens who reside domestically. Another six percent limit it to those hospitalized or in the military, and they require third-party verification and a photo voter ID. Another 15 percent require a photo ID for absentee voting.

Similarly, government-issued photo IDs are required to vote by 33 nations in the 37-member Organistion for Economic Co-operation and Development (which has considerable European overlap). Only the U.K., Japan, New Zealand, and Australia currently do not require IDs. Of those outliers:

  • Japan provides each voter with tickets that bear unique bar codes. If the voter loses the ticket or accidentally brings the ticket for another family member, polling staff verifies the voter’s name and address using a computer with access to the city’s database. The voter may have to present government-issued photo identification.
  • New Zealand technically requires an ID with a unique code, but while it will take longer to look up identifying information, it is still possible to vote without the ID.
  • Australia has by far the loosest rules, and while a photo ID is required to register to vote, once at a polling station, voters need simply report their names, addresses, and whether they have voted in a previous election.

There were a few exceptions to developed countries’ general avoidance of emergency voting measures during the pandemic. Poland allowed mail-in ballots for everyone last year as a one-time measure, as did two cities in Russia, but Poland’s rushed plan played out so poorly it dissuaded other countries from following suit. France made more limited exceptions, temporarily allowing sick or at-risk individuals to vote absentee.

In some countries, even driver’s licenses aren’t considered authoritative enough forms of voter identity verification. The Czech Republic and Russia require passports or military-issued IDs and others use national identity cards. Others go even further: Colombia and Mexico each require a biometric ID to cast a ballot.


Many countries in Europe and beyond have learned the hard way that fraud can result from looser voting regimes—and they have instituted stricter voting measures in direct response to it.

In Northern Ireland, where a bitter sectarian conflict extends to hardball electoral machinations, voter fraud has been described as “widespread and systemic” on all sides. Both Conservative and Labour governments instituted reforms to quell it. In 1985, the U.K. started requiring identification before ballots could be issued. This proved insufficient. A 1998 Select Committee on Northern Ireland report found that medical cards used as IDs after the 1985 law could be “easily forged or applied for fraudulently,” thus allowing non-existent people to vote. By 2002, the Labour government made voter identification cards much more difficult to forge, and used the more secure ID and other rules to prevent people from registering to vote multiple times. These anti-fraud provisions led to an immediate 11 percent reduction in total registrations—a suggestion to Labour of the extent of earlier fraud.

One study of vote fraud in Northern Ireland before the 2002 reforms interviewed Brendan Hughes, the former IRA Belfast commander. Hughes explained that he had a fleet of taxis to ferry fraudulent voters from one polling station to another and that they “dressed up volunteers with wigs, clothes, and glasses, and said this practice continued for decades.” Young women were usually “used for voter impersonation because they were more likely to be let off if there was any doubt.”

A 2002 survey of Northern Ireland by the U.K. Electoral Commission, conducted after the rules passed but before they went into effect, found that by a 64 percent to 10 percent margin, voters thought that vote “fraud in some areas is enough to change the election results.”

Elsewhere in Britain, there have been notable fraud cases involving absentee ballots. In 2004, before recent photo ID requirements, six Labour Party councilors in Birmingham won office in what a judge later described as a “massive, systematic and organized” postal voting fraud campaign. The fraud was apparently carried out with the full knowledge and cooperation of the local Labour party, and involved “widespread theft” of absentee ballots (possibly around 40,000) in areas with large Muslim populations. The fraud reflected some Labour members’ worries that the areas’ Muslims could no longer be trusted to vote for the party because of unhappiness over the Iraq War.

On the mainland, France banned mail-in voting in 1975 because of massive fraud in the island region of Corsica, where postal ballots were stolen or bought and others were cast in the names of dead people.

In Hungary, which has the most lenient mail-in voting regulations in Europe, including no ID requirement, the government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, criticized for authoritarian tendencies, won 96 percent of the mail votes in the 2018 election, thus giving itself a supermajority in parliament by a very slim margin. Concerns are that fraud is possible because “there is little scope for verification of identities, or to check that people are still alive.”

When there are no tamper-resistant photo IDs, fraud is difficult to prove. If hundreds or thousands of people vote at a polling place, how do you verify if someone voted by pretending to be someone else? Criminal convictions tend to occur only when people try voting in the same polling station multiple times instead of visiting multiple stations. But, with poll workers often working different shifts, even the same polling station can be compromised.

Take a case from the U.K. in 2016. As the Electoral Commission describes it: “Later in the day the same voter attended again and sought to vote again, this time in his own name. Due to certain physical characteristics of the voter (he was very tall and wore distinctive clothing) and the vigilance of the presiding officer he was suspected of having already voted earlier and formally challenged.”

In another case in the U.K. from 2017, police caught a person voting multiple times only because he openly bragged about it on Twitter. By far the most common consequence for those caught voting multiple times is a “caution” notice from the police.

American progressives might take heed of a Mexican election stolen from voters on the Left in part due to lax voting requirements facilitating fraud. The 1988 loss of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the leading leftist presidential candidate, to Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the long-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party has long been considered a result of electoral chicanery, later even acknowledged by the president at the time, Miguel de la Madrid.

And as a result of that fraud, Mexico in 1991 mandated voter photo IDs with biometric information, banned absentee ballots, and required in-person voter registration. Despite making registration much more difficult and banning absentee ballots, voter participation rates rose after Mexico implemented the new rules. In the three presidential elections following the 1991 reforms, an average of 68 percent of the eligible citizens voted, compared with only 59 percent in the three elections prior to the rule changes. Seemingly, as people gained faith in the electoral process, they became more likely to vote.

Ultimately, Mexico in 2006 would revert to permitting absentee voting, but limited it to those living abroad who requested a ballot at least six months in advance. Claims of voting irregularities have occasionally arisen in later years, but they focus on vote buying, not impersonating others, or having nonexistent people voting.

Despite the record of Europe and the vast majority of the rest of the developed world, congressional Democrats are pushing to remove identification requirements for voting. The House recently passed the For the People Act of 2021, which replaces state voter ID rules with a signed statement from the voter, and makes permanent the pandemic’s mail-in ballot voting. The mailing out of blank absentee ballots en masse would become a fixture of American elections. The Senate Committee on Rules and Administration marked up the bill, but failed to pass it with a 9-to-9 pure party-line tie vote. However, Democrats have recently changed Senate rules, so they can still bring the bill to the Senate floor for a vote.

Meanwhile, efforts in Republican states to require voter IDs for in-person voting and absentee ballots have triggered boycotts from Major League Baseball and other corporations. Georgia’s new absentee provisions raised a ruckus despite being much less restrictive than much of the rest of the world. Anyone who wants an absentee ballot can obtain one. A reason need not be given, such as being out of town, but one must have an ID to get an absentee ballot. The pattern is similar for developed countries around the world.

The case of Mexico undermines the idea that stricter voting rules lead to vote suppression, and so does some of the evidence from America. A number of states have in recent years instituted photo and non-photo ID measures, and found no statistically significant change in voter participation rates. Other evidence suggests that black and minority voter registration rates increased faster than whites after states implemented voter ID requirements for registration.

RealClearInvestigations contacted both the Brennan Center for Justice and the ACLU, two organizations that have been at the forefront of the ballot access/voting integrity debate, to ask them what they made of the more restrictive voting rules implemented elsewhere. The ACLU did not respond, and a Brennan Center spokesman said: “As a rule, we don’t comment on other countries’ voting systems because that’s not our area of expertise.”


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